THE ONSET OF WINTER

Beneath a sour milk sky the rain makes rivers of the tram lines cut into the street outside our hostel. The door clicks behind us and, with collars upturned against the lazy wind, we plunge into the grey light of Prague’s late autumn dawn. Weighed down with heavy packs we trudge through the marshland of puddles in the uneven sidewalk, our feet soaking and drizzle in our eyes. Cold rain runs down the inside of my shirt, trickling down my back. At the tram stop we shelter in the doorway of an apartment building and wait for the Number 5 to come and take us to the bus terminal. The unrelenting gloom of this dismal morning is compounded by the grim faced facades of the cold war era low-rise tenements standing across the road from where we wait. Winter is closing in. It’s time to go.

The persistent northward trajectory of our travels hastened winter’s onset; every new city providing more evidence that the year is dieing away beneath us. It seemed like every time we stepped off a train it was two points colder than it had been when we boarded and the welcome mat of autumn leaves became thicker and thicker with each fresh slog to a new hostel. Final confirmation came the night we arrived in Budapest and the clocks went back an hour. By the time we reached Prague an unrelenting drizzle had set in and night was falling at 5pm.

I flew back into London yesterday to find the old girl in the same state in which I’d left her; crowded, grim and over priced. I love this city. I dropped off my bags at my old home and went for a run along the rain-swollen Thames. In a few spots the river had broken its banks and at one point I had to wade through the freezing, knee-deep water lapping against the garden walls of the riverfront homes along Chiswick Walk. On the south side, on the muddy track that runs between the river and the wetlands, a following breeze picked up the loose leaves blanketing the path and whisked them along at my feet. For about 100 metres I ran with a black and yellow escort tumbling and swirling around me. The only sound to be heard was the rustle of leaves and the rhythmic squelch and crunch of my soggy running shoes slapping on the gravel. And I had that feeling you sometimes get when running of absolute elation. I don’t know if it’s the result of endorphins exploding in your head or brain cells dying from lack of oxygen but it’s an incredible sensation – something like invincibility – and without effort your pace quickens and the ground passes beneath you as if it were moving in the opposite direction. There’s nothing but you, the air you’re breathing and the track in front of you. And the static lifts and, fleetingly, you’re left with nothing but total mental silence; a complete absence of any conscious thought at all. I’d be willing to run every day of the year if it guaranteed just two seconds of that feeling.

Not happy with spending the past eight weeks living out of each other’s pockets Joe and I celebrated the termination of the tour last night by heading out to a concert. We went to see Seu Jorge at the Round House in Camden. He’s an awesome Brazilian musician who’s probably best known here as the man who did acoustic covers of Dave Bowie songs in Portuguese for the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The soundtrack to that film is a bit of a favourite of mine but the quality of that album doesn’t reveal even a tiny portion of how dazzling Jorge is live. I’ve been to better concerts but I don’t think I’ve ever been to one where I’ve had more fun. The energy of his music and the enthusiasm of his twelve-piece samba band – not to mention the dancing of the pretty Brazilian girls – made it a pretty damn good night out. If you get a chance to see this dude play live take it.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

In the cabin next door they’re drunkenly singing Soviet working hymns like peasants being watched by the secret police. Actually, the songs are probably just football chants but the underlying qualities of blind patriotism and implied menace are there. I’d go find out more but it’s early and I’m not much in the mood to approach a group of lads wearing matching black shirts with the word “ULTRAS” embroidered in large white letters across their backs, even if they are only playacting at being football hooligans. The odds of having a sensible conversation with anyone drunk enough to sing on public transport are pretty long and at any rate these lads might think I’m trying to have them sent to the gulag so I can take possession of their best cow. Things could get tricky.

Still, football hooligans or no, the train from Budapest to Vienna knocks spots off the bus I’m now sitting on bound for Prague. Sorry about the Kaufmanesque jump in time line but it can’t be helped. Two days have passed between the previous paragraph and this and Vienna fell in between. The trip’s starting to take on an “it’s Monday so this must be Prague” feel. The overnight trains and dawn arrivals have taken the liquidity out of my sleep bank and the cheques are starting to come back bounced.

I went to the opera last night and learned that contrary to traditional depictions the devil is actually a Chinese man with hairy red hands and a nice suit. Watch out for this rooster and whatever you do don’t sign anything he gives you, you’ll only end up killing a man after impregnating his sister who in turn will kill your infant child in a fit of anguish at having slept with you in the first place. Then you’ll have to spend eternity in hell where you’ll be required to writhe about on the floor while wearing ladies undergarments. I know what you’re thinking – so where’s the downside? – but that fate fares pretty poorly compared to that of your baby killing paramour who gets spirited to heaven after a last minute reprieve from the almighty. The lesson from this little tale is clearly that it’s better to kill your own bastard child in cold blood than defend yourself against the moral outrage of some pompous bloke who’s obviously got a few issues regarding his sister that he desperately needs to work through.

Going to the opera in Vienna is probably Europe’s best value cultural night out. Provided you’re willing to stand in line for a couple of hours you can get a standing ticket to any production running at the state opera house for three Euros. Tickets go on sale about eighty minutes before the curtain goes up, so if you get there a couple of hours before kick-off you’ve got a decent chance of getting a spot. It also gives you plenty of time to size up the people sharing the wait. There seem to be three types of opera-goers chasing the cheap seats. The first lot are genuine opera enthusiasts who failed to get a seat to a sold out show, they’re mainly men who are either approaching retirement age or past it and for the most part they’re wearing bowties, tweed jackets and a look of pompous solemnity that says; “culture is wonderful and I’m wonderful too because I regularly enjoy culture through the medium of opera. You can tell I regularly attend the opera because I’m wearing a bow tie and don’t talk to anyone”. The second lot are genuine opera enthusiasts who can’t afford proper seats. In the main part these fall into two categories; students and travellers. Of this lot, well-groomed middle class English girls with nice hair and Home Counties accents and Asians make up the majority. The last group is made up of rubber-neckers like me. We’re underdressed, we’ve got no idea what’s going on and we’re standing in line listening to pop music on our iPods. The Bowties despise us for what we are, which is blow-ins who have only come down because we’re in Vienna and when you’re in Vienna you’re kind of supposed to go to the opera, aren’t you? And it’s Sunday night so there’s not going to be anything else going on anyway, so what the hell. They particularly hate it that you’re in front of them in the line.

So after listening to the Kings of Leon’s Aha Shake Heartbreak and an album of Cold Chisel songs covered by contemporary artists you go up to the window and get a ticket. According to the sign over the box there are three different varieties of ticket available. The first I didn’t understand and the third I couldn’t pronounce so I went for the second. It turns out I went for balcony tickets which was unintentionally a brilliant decision. The tickets to the other two areas are more desirable but only if you get in early. If you don’t you end up in an almighty scrap with The Bowties for a slice of space you’re never going to annex from them because they know all the tricks and they want it more. The balcony tickets, being initially less desirable than other two options, sell more slowly, so if you’re 70th in line it’s often a good shout to go for the balcony ticket as you’re likely to be able to claim the best of the balcony spots, which are much better than getting to the scrum on the floor late in the game. I fluked this and only found out while standing on the stairs waiting to be let into the theatre. An Austrian woman also explained that it was good practice to get into the theatre as soon as possible and tie a scarf, handkerchief or tie around the railing in front of where you would like to stand. That secures your spot from interlopers and means you can head out to grab a glass of wine before the bell rings for curtain. I didn’t have a scarf, hanky or tie so I tore up my programme and wrapped that around the banister and went for a walk. Such is the respect for the scarf wrapping convention that when I got back a sliver of space remained on the rail just where my loosely wrapped programme was placed, despite the fact a minor mêlée had developed on either side.

The balcony is a pretty good vantage point from which to draw a decent bead on both the stage and the broader show that is the general viewing public. You also get a great view down into the orchestra pit, which is pretty entertaining. Just as I got to my vantage point I looked down at the dress circle and saw a woman in a wheelchair freewheeling from the back of the theatre toward the pit. Despite only travelling a short distance she picked up a fair bit of pace and for a second I thought the jolt when she stopped was going to catapult her out of her chair and over the barrier into one of the timpani drums below. Sadly that didn’t happen. She just came to a rest with a solid bump. Disappointing result.

Up in the Gods, six seats back from the rail, a Japanese man looking almost exactly like Micky Rourke’s character in Breakfast at Tiffanies, shadow conducted most of the opera to himself, his hands flitting backwards and forwards like finches in a cage. He was mouthing the words to himself and every time he reached for the high notes he’d lift his face to the ceiling, close his eyes and open his mouth like a man with no arms trying to get his teeth into a delicious, chocolate covered profiterole cruelly suspended by a single thread of cotton just out of reach above his head. He looked so stupidly happy to be watching the opera that it made me feel good just to be in the same theatre as someone with that kind of unrestrained passion.

Midway through the third act the percussionist on the timpani grew dissatisfied with the tone of one of his drums. I watched him lower his ear to the skin, flick it gently and give the tuning screw a half turn to the right. After that he flicked the drum one more time to check the outcome of his intervention and, happy with the result, gave the skin a gentle clockwise caress with the fingertips of his right hand to dampen the vibrations. He managed to execute this task with the noise of the orchestra pulsating around him and the soprano’s solo cascading over his shoulder. I had a little moment of sadness when I realised that I’ll probably never be as competent at anything as he is at whacking a bucket with a stick.

An added advantage of getting a spot on the rail is that it comes with a tickertape translation screen to help the monolingual decipher the dialogue. That was lucky for me as my French is pretty much confined to saying yes, no and “Don’t leave me my little cabbage”. That last one didn’t come up much. That said the first two got a hell of a run with some of the numbers made up entirely of two of the characters arguing like toddlers. Songs went on for minutes with the only thing appearing on screen being; “No”, “Yes”, “No”, “Yes”, “No, no, no”, “yes, yes, yes”. To be honest I’m not sure if the translations were all that faithful anyway. There were times when the actors would sing for an immensely long period of time with several octave changes, a desperate look from the heroin in the general direction of the male lead, a triumphant but menacing fist pump from the bad buy and a six minute orchestral solo and all that would flash up on screen was “no”. Of course it could be that the composer, while pretty hot at putting together a melody, was actually a functioning illiterate, which would go some of the way toward explaining lyrics like; “we drink, we drink, we like to drink, we’ll drink anything but water” and “lets us spin and dance, this makes us feel good.” Who knows?

Anyway, in another Kauffmanesque timeline jump, I'm finishing this blog in the bar of the Prague hostel in dossing down in. Right now I’m hungry and just a little hopped up from drinking too much coffee during the day. Tonight could get interesting.

I’m back in London in two days. I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully I’ll see those of you based in the UK on Saturday. The rest of you I’ll see in the next couple of months.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

TONIGHT'S FORECAST FOR BUDAPEST; COLD AND CLEAR WITH A 70% CHANCE OF TEAR GAS

The riot police are getting bigger and more Robocop-like the further into the old Eastern Block we go. The lads lounging over their riot shields in Athens were a snack compared to the massive rigs bristling about on the streets of Budapest tonight. The dudes here are sporting exoskeletons and, according to the guy who works at our hostel; “don’t fuck about”.

My colleague over at The Roast Dinner Letters will go into a bit more detail as soon as I stop Bogarting the laptop but we’ve ended up in the Hungarian capital on the 52nd anniversary of the anti-soviet uprising that saw the locals briefly snatch autonomy from the Stalinists. Self rule lasted about a week and didn’t return until 1991. According to the girl in the hostel a lot of Hungarians like to celebrate their national holidays by attending political demonstrations. I can’t see it catching on back home unless Kevin Rudd makes a move to crack down on BBQs, party ice and drive through liquor stores. Actually, from what I’ve picked up in the papers, he’s probably only a two point drop in the polls away from doing something drastic like fazing out cans of Woodstock Bourbon and UDLs in a smoke and mirrors attempt to divert the public from the failing economy, so we’re half a chance of seeing a widespread bogan uprising coinciding with the next Bathurst 1000.

Our hostel is surrounded by protest hot spots like the Hungarian Parliament House, Liberty Square, the former headquarters of the secret police and a bunch of other generous and leafy spots tailor made for rabble rousing and soapboxing. The streets around us are practically festooned with heavily armed and well armoured police and large sections of the city have been cordoned off with barricades in what we think is probably an attempt to keep rival factions separated. We went out last night drinking in the bars and clubs around the Opera House. This afternoon most were shut. The owner of our billet rates the chances of the police deploying teargas at some point during the night at about 70%. It might be a good evening to grab a quiet dinner in the restaurant around the corner before heading back to the hostel for a cup of tea and a DVD.

I’m looking forward to reading the papers tomorrow.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

Ps. Just because I like you, there are two fresh blogs below this one.

HOW MUCH?

We ended up on the wrong side of Istanbul late last Sunday night, stuck in the tourist traps around the Blue Mosque where the city is long on top end hotels and short on cheap booze joints and live music. We wandered the streets aimlessly, dodging the restaurant touts offering meals at venues more grownup than those we were hoping to come across. An hour of fruitlessly searching the alleyways that crosshatch the area between the old city’s central square and the Grand Bizarre brought nothing and in desperation we plunged down a well lit avenue of alfresco eateries and there, guarded by a phallynx of restaurants populated by chubby fingered Texans and matrons in dress jewellery, we found it. It wasn’t much but the music was loud and the man at the door was ushering us in like he had something to offer. We’d been disappointed by other venues in the area which from the outside offered so much but ultimately failed to deliver. Idaho’s Most Potent, wary of another false start, inquired cheerfully of the door attendant whether there were any hot women inside. A flicker of concern crossed the man’s face. He looked over at his partner and gabbled something in Turkish. Idaho’s Most Potent, in the mistaken belief the first man could not speak English redirected the question to the second; “Are there any hot women inside?” Concern turned to consternation as the face of the second man flushed with anger. “Women!” he said, “We do not sell women!”

The next morning I awoke refreshed from an early night and a good sleep.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

TO THE GLORIOUS DEAD

They died, like most things, by small degrees, their use gradually restricted by the decay accrued over months of faithful service. An irony that the more diligent the service rendered the more rapidly the point reached at which service can no longer be satisfactorily given. They served faithfully and long, carrying me over molten car park tarmac and scorching beach sands. They were dusted by the terra rossa of my home and the golden sands of Coogee. The volcanic grit of Piha Beach and the hard packed dirt from the trails of Queen Charlotte Sound fell beneath them. They were tested on the filthy grey streets of London and the desert sands of Wadi Rum. They passed. They were not so much my possessions as a part of me, an extension of myself, like an arm or a leg, doing my bidding and asking nothing in return. I danced in them, I ran for busses, I climbed mountains, I stepped out in the rain to scamper for milk and wine. They were always there. Now they are gone.

The forward plug on my right thong pulled free on the first day of the trip and the left shuddered. His fate inextricably tied to his brother’s he knew what was to come. But after some cursory repairs the right fought gamely on across the weeks and I, as they had been faithful servants, forgave the failures, even when their frequency made others wince. Their end came in much the same way as it had for my dog Pongo ten years earlier. Nearly 14 years old at the time and increasingly rheumatic Pongo’s rear hipbone would occasionally pull free from its socket, leaving him painfully and debiletatingly lame. At first the dislocations were infrequent and short lived, his hip would somehow work its way back into the socket of its own accord and for weeks on end Pongo would become his usual effervescent self again, refusing to obey commands, digging up the garden and sneaking onto the tennis court to take a crap any time the opportunity presented itself. We took him to the vet but there was nothing to be done. The degeneration of his aging sinews could not be reversed. We just had to take good care of him and hope his condition didn’t deteriorate too quickly.

Pongo’s illness coincided with me spending increasingly less time at home. I’d received my driving license the year before and I had graduated from highschool and bought a car. The idea of doing any activity that didn’t involve me driving there lacked appeal, so I spent most of my time anywhere but home. Also, due to Pongo’s general disobedience, his predilection for running off any time you took him out of the backyard and his monumental output of crap my dog didn’t figure much in my social plans that Summer. We drifted apart like primary school friends who end up at different high schools; still pals but the next time you see each other the dynamic has shifted. Then one hot day in January I arrived back home after a heavy night to find the old boy stranded in the middle of the back lawn, his useless hind quarters pathetically folded beneath him and his parched tongue lolling from the side of his mouth. As I walked through the back door he let out a faint whimper and gave me an almost human look of helplessness. I picked him up, carried him to the kennel he never used and lay him down in the shade next to his water bowl. Two days later we put him down. The decision was mine.

Reading that back I’m not sure retiring a pair of flip-flops really is that much like putting your dog down, even if they were bloody good thongs. That said, it was a sad moment for me when I finally succumbed to the inevitable and forked over three dollars for a new set of jandals. But the number of strap breaches eventually reached a frequency that even I could not ignore and when my bare right foot was exposed to the damp floor of a particularly unpleasant Turkish commode I knew the time had come to do the humane thing. Still, they’d managed to fight on for three weeks longer than I had expected and, even if they did malfunction any time I walked on a damp surface, veered to the left or lifted them more than six inches off the ground I miss them. And even thought I had to develop a new, round legged walking technique in order to avoid blowouts they’ll always hold a special place in my heart. But there you go. I still have much to be thankful for and, in the spirit of funeral cliché, I’ll celebrate the good times rather than mourn the passing of what was a magnificent pair of footwear. They died as they lived - like princes – and it was fitting that when their end did come it came on the same stretch of land where Hector and Archillies so valiantly perished. My thongs shared their fate, commended to the Gods on a pyre of flames. The brightest always burn fastest. It has been a few days since I wrote the above and my feelings toward my old thongs have not yet diminished. My new thongs just aren’t the same. They don’t conform to the contours of my feet and they make an unfeasibly loud squeaking noise with each step when they get wet. In stark contrast, my old thongs had virtual stealth mode. Also the new ones just don’t look as good. The old pair were white and had an outline of a surfer stencilled onto the base in dark blue. On account of the fact that Turkish men don’t wear flip-flops I’ve been forced to select a pair that are decorated with pictures of flowers. The straps are iridescent green. It was the most manly pair I could find and the only in my size.

There is however hope. I purchased my recently deceased favourites from the Bondi Junction Target in the January sales for $5. They came with a free second pair, identical to the first except the colour of the thong and the artwork had been reversed. Due to a shortage of packing space I left that pair at home. I can only hope they are still there.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

BELGREAT

On the street corner hookers are turning tricks in the rain. Riot police, slumped over their shields, are sheltering under the awnings of the building over the road. They show no interest in the girls or the curb crawlers who ease up now and then to lower their windows and negotiate terms. On the table in front of me sits a large empty polystyrene cup and the gardening pages of The Daily Telegraph. The rest of the paper sits on the seat of the chair to my right. The gardening section is the only to remain untouched. It is four in the morning. There are only three hours left until the first train to Thessaloniki pulls out of Athens. I look at the pages on the table in front of me. The section lead is an article on Autumn perennials. There's no way I can possibly get that bored.

We left the Greek Island of Santorini on the slow ferry back to Athens at three pm the day before. The previous four days had been languid, sunny and relaxing. I swam every morning, explored the island a little, cooked good meals, played cards and read on the beach. Four days of that was enough.

There are no flights from Athens to Croatia and just about any flight out of the Greek capital seems to come at a premium. After three hours looking at different options we abandoned the search and decided to catch a train to Belgrade instead. We didn't make any plans beyond that. We just returned the car we'd rented to get us around the island and hopped on the ferry. As a result I ended up sitting outside a cafe in Athens at four in the morning, drinking coffee, watching hookers and reading conservative publications.

Not only is Athens a prohibitively expensive place to leave by air it is quite literally the end of the line when it comes to rail too. For some reason there are no trains west through Albania, so in order to get anywhere you have to head about four or five hours north east to Thessaloniki. Our ferry didn't get back to Athens until well past 11pm and we missed the overnighter. That wasn't really a problem as the next train to Belgrade didn't leave Thessaloniki until four pm the next day anyway and that was more than three hours after the first train from Athens arrived. The only decision to make was between scrambling about looking for a place to sleep for a few short hours before catching our connection or pulling an all nighter. We already had a deck of cards and the weekend Daily Telegraph. All we really needed was coffee.

Anyway, I'm in Belgrade now and this entry is starting to bore the b'jesus out of me so I'm going to cut it off there. Congratuations if you reached this far. Belgrade's a great city. Overnight trains are pretty damn great. I'm going out tonight to drink unfeasibly cheap beer and eat dinner plate sized hamburgers. Life is good.

More mildly amusing stories to come shortly when I've had more sleep.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

AN OPEN LETTER TO MY PARENTS

Thanks for the upbringing Mum and Dad. All that schooling and university has come in handy. Education I think they call it. Good stuff it is too. And good work on the whole social and cultural rounding thing you always insisted on. You know, teaching me that it’s not okay to eat soup with my hands or take my pants off in a supermarket. Making sure I could throw a ball and swing a golf club was good. So was teaching me about stuff like Bob Dylan and giving me the tools to recognise Dan Brown as an author of such scrotum tearing mediocrity that he should have all his fingers removed by a government agency in order to make it more difficult for him to type. All those art gallery visits and the swimming coaching and the music lessons and the theatre nights and the three hour round trips to Eudunda for cricket and that whole not taking a hard line view of under-aged drinking - provided I didn’t get black-out pissed or behind the wheel of a car - all of that was good stuff. And thanks for taking me to dinner at nice restaurants and for teaching me how to light a fire and make a decent potato salad. And massive props for taking me to Footy Park and flying me to Europe when I was 13 to see the Sistine Chapel and eat fondue. I was a lucky boy to get a taste of all those different flavours. If nothing else it gave me a little piece of common ground with a wide variety of people from a wide variety of different backgrounds and from that developed a bit of social confidence born from the feeling that I could cope in pretty much any social situation that might be packaged up and thrown at me. In fact, up until last week, if you’d been able to catch me at the right point during one of those sometimes Saturday nights when my taste is up, just before the five pint surge of invincibility peters out into sleep, shouting or white boy dancing, and asked me who I was, I’m pretty sure I’d have described myself as the bastard love child of Clive James and James Bond.

So there I am, wrapped in a cotton towel in the steam room of a Turkish bath with four of the hottest women I’ve seen in weeks. They’re tanned. They’re topless. Their toned young bodies are glistening with sweat and condensation, damp hair falling over delicate feminine shoulders. One of them has soapsuds dripping from her perky naked breasts. A middle aged Turkish man sporting one of the most extravagant moustaches the world has ever seen is giving another a tummy rub. Nipples surround me like snipers – really poorly concealed snipers – and they’ve all got me fixed in their sights. Everywhere I turn I’m shot down by a perky little pink nub. It’s like I’ve wandered into the shower scene in Porky’s and I go into sensory overload, my mind stuck like a record needle in a scratch. All I can think is; “thisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreat”.
Over and over in my mind it goes. And then everything goes black.

That last bit didn’t actually happen but that was only because my roulette ball eyes bounced from a sudsy nipple onto The Amateur Dentist’s bare naked arse which snapped me back into coherence like a shot of smelling salts. It was a pretty close run thing though.

Fortunately the first stage of any Turkish bath is a swift cold shower. Smart people these Turks. I stepped into the shower cubicle and, in accordance with widely accepted Western shower etiquette, removed my towel. Faux pas. The Moustache responded with a bucket of icy water and a disapproving clucking noise, which seemed entirely disproportionate considering the filthy old bastard was giving the breasts of a nubile young college student a sudsy fondle at the time. I recovered my towel and walked to the heated marble plinth located in the middle of the domed room, lay down on my tummy and started to perspire. I’m sure some of that sweat was the result of the heated tiles beneath me but I’m also sure some of it had something to do with the three semi-naked girls arranged around the pentagon slab. There we lay, sheepishly facing each other; Joe, Graham Dixon, Phil, topless college girl, topless college girl, topless college girl and me. “This is great,” I though to myself, “now say something smooth and winning”.

So there I lay, leafing through the files of my mind – my head whirring and my ocular muscles aching from the effort of keeping my eyes fixed above the plimsoll line – searching the archives for something to say to these achingly beautiful, half naked girls. Back through the years of schooling I went, around University parties, into locker room banter and over dinner party repartee. I scanned the dialogue from the movies I’ve seen and the books I’ve read and scrambled after zephyrs of drunken conversations which even when fresh were clouded in the fog of alcoholic haze. Saturday afternoons playing cricket, the nights at the Festival theatre, the concerts at the Thebie Theatre and the student union, the Wednesday nights in the Planet Nightclub drinking 50 cent beers and the rainy Saturdays at the Occidental Hotel – I searched them all. They produced nothing. Five years of living in London were assessed and evaluated but to no avail. All that bloody schooling and university, the thousands of dollars and hours invested in my upbringing and the decade of experience since I left home were all for naught. I felt lost. In desperation I reached down one last time, rummaging around for a piece of stolen wit. James Bond would be good, Clive James better, even a recycled quip from my ex housemate James Greenwood would do. Nothing. The only James I could conjure up was bloody Sid.

So there I lay, with Sid James’ lascivious little chuckle tap, tap, tapping at the walls of my nipple-dazed perception like a bee at a car window. And there they lay, all topless and attractive looking. And all I could manage was a shy little “hi” and a weak joke about my rapidly fading tan lines.

Mum, Dad, I went to the wrong school.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

IN FLAGRANTE DELECTO

I promised reveal the identity of the Thumper the Buttock Kneeing Dance Enthusiast at some point during this entry but the swelling has subsided over the last few days and my enthusiasm for naming the party responsible subsided with it. I was also going to launch into an invective filled rant against the operators of the Goreme Turkish Night but days have passed and I just can’t be shagged mustering the righteous indignation required to put down a really decent bit of venom. Writing bitter tirades is like forging iron, you’ve got to work the material while its white hot. Plus, I just snapped the shower-head clean off the wall in the bathroom of my guesthouse so I figure me and the Turkish tourism industry are all square. I’m not going to go into how it happened. It just did. Let’s leave it at that.

Instead you’re going to get a few pictures from the previous few weeks. Enjoy.

Aboard the truck - the wind blowing in my hair

Detour anyone?

Here Joe and I demonstrate the correct way to celebrate a successful climb; a rousing rendition of “I’m a little teapot” in g minor. Note our vehicle way, way, waaaaaay in the background

Foreign travel… it elevates the spirit and broadens the mind

Turkey’s most effective nut cracker. She’s the one in the back. Here I enjoy my first hit of opium in one of Syria’s notorious Poppy Dens.
Just kidding mum, I’m smoking harmless tobacco.

I am all that is man!

Album release date to be announced

It could happen to YOU! Conjunctivitis. Be aware. Be safe. Joe Wallace, shockingly caught in flagrante with well known Wellington socialite James “Jock” Westlake and an unidentified gentleman.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

HOLY CRAP! THAT LOOKS LIKE A GIANT...

I’m in Goreme, the city of the caves. Since we left Palmyra we’ve been following the old silk route up around the eastern end of the Med. We arrived here the day before yesterday and were immediately ushered into a carpet store for dinner and a show. The show was Turkish lads rolling out different varieties of carpets while reciting plausible but dubious stories about their provenance. Dinner was good. The show was unnecessary. I bought a carpet. More on that later.

It’s cold today. It rained solidly for about four hours earlier this afternoon. I sat in a café watching DVDs and playing pool while waiting for the weather to break. In the morning I had a futile thirty-minute conversation with a HSBC call-centre employee who was clearly empowered to do no more than read from whatever script was blinking up on the screen in front of her. Reason is futile in these circumstances. The logic of the ancient Greeks would come to nothing. All you can do is keep your temper and pray for grace. Grace came in the form of a £100 per day withdrawal limit. HSBC has turned me into a child.

Goreme is an interesting place with underground cities and homes carved into the sandstone and basalt outcrops of the wind and water shaped landscape. I’d be more favourably disposed toward the region if I hadn’t spent yesterday on the world’s most pointless and over priced tour. As one of the lads grunted to me on the bus as we wound our way back from the pottery store, which formed an integral part of the “tour experience”, you know you’re going to get violated now and then when you’re travelling but those doing the violating should at least have the decency not to smile at you while doing you over.

On the plus side there are a number of what the locals call fairy chimneys. The volcanic ash base of the Cappadocian mountains erodes quicker than the layer of basalt that formed at the top when the larva and ash cooled. Since then centuries of wind and water erosion has created hundreds of tapered sand coloured rock tubes, most of them crowned with dark brown boulders much larger than the tip of the ash columns on which they rest. Joe stepped off the truck, took one look at them and said: “I don’t know about anyone else, but all I can think of when I look at these things is penis, penis, penis.”

He’s right actually. More than that it’s a geological phenomenon that inspires creativity. Perhaps not divine inspiration but many of the images we were able to get on pixels wouldn’t look out of place in the early folios of a young Helmut Newton. At least one silver-haired Italian gentleman thought so. He ran half way up a hill to offer us a hearty “Bravo” following the capture of this award winner:
Obviously taking suggestive photos of phallic rock formations is a little gay. Fortunately I was able to recover a little bit of bloke credibility as soon as we got back into town by going carpet shopping with Joe. Fabulous!

Shopping for a Turkish carpet is the world’s most difficult activity, particularly when you’re trying to buy a wedding present for a Kiwi bloke (who quite frankly would be happy with a new socket set and some salted peanuts) and a French chick with much better taste than you. The bloody things come in a range of different sizes, they’re made from a bunch of different materials and there are about twelve different weaving techniques. And then they start talking about patterns and giving you a story about a family of carpet weaving Kurdish tribes-people from the Mount Ararat region who can only be reached by camel and only if you have the permission of the Iranian and Turkish military authorities and only if you know someone in their family and can bring them good quality dope. It’s very confusing. Fortunately they have booze on hand to help you make a sound INVESTMENT decision, because that’s what it is, an INVESTMENT. Anyway, Joe and I spent about an hour and twenty minutes looking at rugs and carpets and something else called killum, as well as something else starting with an s, and then, possibly on account of the local fire-water we’d just finished drinking, we purchased a carpet we’d been shown the night before during the dinner demonstration. Next time I go to a wedding I’m getting something off the gift registry.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the Turkish Night and reveal the identify of the tourist whose dance move is to shuffle up behind an unsuspecting dance enthusiast and knee them really quite hard in the buttocks. It hurts.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

MID-TOUR DRIVEL

More of the usual mid-tour drivel. I'll get back onto the fun stuff in a bit.

Images of Syrian President Al-Assad and his father, who was Syria’s previous president some 30 odd years ago, are on just about every shop and private vehicle on the road. It’s a fascinating thing to observe in a country where the religious doctrine forbids the representation of humans in visual form. I don’t know enough about Syria’s history or Islam to draw any conclusions from that but I think it’s interesting all the same.

What I can say is that the people are friendly and polite, possibly more so than just about any country I’ve been to. There’s absolutely no hard sell in the souks, which comes as a massive shock after Egypt and the streets are clean and well laid-out, the road rules pretty well respected and there aren’t huge numbers of heavily armed police or soldiers on the streets. There are no checkpoints between Syria’s towns or in its cities that I have come across. Begging and homelessness seem almost nonexistent. I haven’t come across one conman, blatant rip-off merchant or petty crook yet and I wonder why that is. I don’t know. And there in lies the frustration of group travel. Two nights in Damascus, two nights in Aleppo and a string of desert campouts don’t give you enough opportunities to gain an insight into the political and social weather of a country.

What I do know is that on the top layer society seems to be relatively open and free but there are indications that that might not be the case once you’ve cut through the icing. Facebook is banned for one thing and I can’t access the public facing side of my blog. Phil was told to minimise the skype window he was using to call his folks back in Idaho with the words “not in Syria my friend”. So there are undercurrents of something here.

Despite being painted in some quarters as fanatics – fundraisers for terrorists, sponsors of the nuclear ambitions of southern neighbours etc – there has been no animosity from either the Syrian officials or people toward any of the western tourists I’ve spent time with. That may be because many of the Syrians I have met rely directly on the tourist trade for a living but one of my travel companions is from the US and he hasn’t been bothered or harassed by anyone and he’s been quite open about his nationality. Damascus has a huge number of Iraqi refugees and perhaps, had we met one or two of them, or some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, we would have received a different response. I don’t know. Again, time has been too short to find out.

I have seen no overt sings of religious fanaticism. Possibly Ramadan has had some influence over this but there are large and seemingly well integrated Christian communities in Damascus and Aleppo. And the Christian community has the freedom, even during Ramadan, to serve alcohol to willing tourists who will probably drink too much and subsequently pay too much for taxis back to their campsites. At the very least that shows a level of tolerance for certain aspects of western culture that I did not really expect to see. And the six shelves of condoms prominently displayed in the grooming and toiletries isle of supermarket in Jordan showed a sexual liberalism I wasn’t really prepared for in an Islamic country.

So two days away from Turkey what have I learnt? Not much really. Places surprise. People are individuals and countries can’t be summed up in two-minute newsreels or by governmental travel advice. And that people aren’t their governments or their leaders and that just because different people want different things out of life is no cause for friction. There is no best country, no better way of living. Just people. When I was wondering around the ruins of Palmyra a tour guide approached offering his services. When he found out I was from Australia he immediately told me that he once guided former Australian Senator Nick Bolkus around the ruins. At the end of that tour Senator Bolkus told the guide he could help him get to Australia if he were interested. The guide turned him down without a second thought; “Australia! Why would I want to go to Australia? All you have is kangaroos and the world’s biggest rock. You have no culture! 200 years. You are a baby. We have smaller rocks but we have six thousand years in ours.” And then he told me I had many freckles on my arms. You had to admire his honesty. I didn’t take the tour.