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.

MONDAY'S MANY GIFTS

Dodging work? Good stuff. There's about a week's worth of blogs below this one which should keep you occupied for the next fifteen mintues or so. After that you can go get yourself a cup of tea and maybe ask your department's administrator what they did over the weekend. I'll bet it was pretty dull. Not like your weekend, but then you're a dynamic social animal. You should feel good about that. Well done.

Have a good week, enjoy the blog and for God's sake avoid booze for the next couple of days. Your body will thank you for it.

Dale Atkinson

HOW MUCH CAN A PANDA BEAR?

I’ve discovered the world’s worst beer. Panda Beer – which presumably gets its name from the fact that if you have more than one you wake up the next morning with two black eyes – has 11 percent alcohol content and leaves an aftertaste not unlike that created by the liquor distilled from used tyre rubber. I doubt that last tyre-rubber-liquor drink actually exists but if it did I would suggest that a ready market for it is available in Syria, although the life expectancy of its enthusiasts can’t be guaranteed. Holy hell, what a truly awful beer. I’ve consumed a fair number of the world’s endangered animals in beer form (Elephants, Tigers, Lions) but the Panda is the first to actually make me want to purchase a large calibre rifle and shoot its namesake. In fact, if I were a Panda, I’d get some legal representation and sue the manufacturers for undermining the good name of Pandas everywhere.

Avoid this beer at all costs.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

SWINGING TIMES IN DAMASCUS

As I write this I’m sitting under the porch of the registration house of our campsite in the outskirts of Damascus surrounded by elderly German and Italian tourists. Half of them are stripped to the waist and the other half are wandering about aimlessly in bathrobes. One man has a whistle hung around his neck, I can’t imagine why. Joe thinks we’ve stumbled on some kind of travelling sex club, the members of which caravan to exotic destinations for a bit of key party action before rumbling back home to pamper their grandkids and complain bitterly about the quality of the fruit in the supermarket. I guess we’ll find out if that’s true when the lights go out later tonight. Phil says he’s worried that he’ll be woken in the early hours by the gentle caress of an old man’s testicles being placed gently on his forehead. I think it’s a legitimate concern.

Most of them keep staring at us like they just got eyes for Christmas but one man, in a wilted legionnaire’s cap, keeps wandering up behind the truck, sucking his teeth, stroking his wild, grey goatee beard and patting his enormous belly, which is barely constrained beneath a spinnaker-like t-shirt. A short while ago, after a thorough inspection of the vehicle and its occupants, he looked over at the five men seated in the annex of a large blue tent on the far side of the camping ground and, with a lascivious looking grin, gave them the thumbs up. Mum, if you don’t hear from me soon, I’ve been kidnapped by German perverts and I’m probably on my way to some new and exotic location in the back of their bus which, and I kid you not, is called Das Rollendar Hotel. Send help immediately, they may be headed for the Dead Sea.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

OH GOD IT BURNS

I swam in the Dead Sea yesterday. It’s a bit like wallowing in warm KY Jelly if warm KY Jelly had the ability to sting the open end of your urethra with its massively high salt content. It’s actually quite painful and I now have an even greater enthusiasm for safe sexual practices. If a dose of the clap burns with anything like the intensity of high salinity water on the eye of your penis it’s something to be avoided at all costs. I must admit thought that I may invest in a few hundred litres of KY and an urn. The lukewarm lubricating slick which settles on your body while you’re in the water feels pretty damn good, particularly if you gently stroke your belly. Sadly, as soon as you step out of the water, in which you can actually see floating salt crystals, what was once a pleasingly sensuous meniscus instantly dries and you’re left covered in a salty crust with a genuine fear of dessication rising in your mind.

The sea’s water, which at 440m below sea level is the lowest point on the surface of the planet, contains 20 per cent salt and is four times saltier than the ocean. It has incredible buoyancy. If you stand upright you bob around like, well like a cork in the ocean. I’ve been suffering a bit of a head cold in the last couple of days but after the swim in the sea I’m miraculously mucus free courtesy of an ill advised bit of aquatic callisthenics which saw me face plant into the water’s surface exactly as I was inhaling through my nose. It was like breathing fire and I’m not ashamed to say I shed tears. At the time I had serious concerns that I might never inhale through my nostrils without pain again. Fortunately that fear has not been realised.

After our dip in the Dead Sea we headed to a fresh water canyon and plunged in. Sadly the water from the canyon is being diverted away from the sea, which is a shame as increased irrigation has dramatically reduced the amount of fresh water making its way into the basin, increasing the salt content of the water and disturbing the ecological balance between the only two living things that can stand the salinity; a specific type of algy and the bacteria which offsets it. Since the 60s the algal blooms, which once gave the body of water a sporadic but relatively frequent purple sheen, have been almost non-existent as the algie has struggled to survive the rising salt content. Still, on the plus side, at least tourists get to wash the salt off their bodies for a reasonable price.

We walked up the canyon for about thirty minutes, clambering up the small rapids to the final waterfall; a thundering cascade that pummelled and churned the water below. It was great fun and drifting back through the canyon made me feel like a little kid, just exploring and kicking around. Actually Petra was a bit like that too. It’s a good feeling.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE ARSECLOWNS AT HSBC,

I am going to be rich. I have a plan. When I return to the UK I am going to employ about a dozen out of work actors and dress them up in the uniforms of so-called service providing institutions like banks, telephone companies and the operators of utilities; pretty much any company that boasts a call centre. Then I’m going to take out an advertisement. It will read as follows:

Have you been frustrated by your bank’s inability to offer a satisfactory service? Tired of being kept on hold? Has your usually calm demeanour been ruffled by bank staff who are insufficiently qualified to deal with your quite reasonable requests? Does this make you really, really, ball-achingly aggravated? Does it make you so angry that you feel the only way to relieve that anger is by throwing warm porridge at a bank employee from a distance of no less than 10 feet?

Well help is at hand. Here at World’s Local Bank My Arse we offer just such a service. For just £50 an hour we’ll send over a fully trained actor dressed in the uniform of the financial institution of your choice. Our actors are just like real bank employees, the only difference being you’re allowed to pummel them with breakfast cereal every time they utter those tick box phrases real bank employees are so fond of farting out their mouths.

Imagine responding to classics like; “I’m afraid this department can’t deal with that request” with a steaming volley of soggy Quaker Oats. Satisfying and nutritious! Call today and for no extra charge you will receive our free introductory offer and watch as your “bank employee” pours tuna and sweet corn sandwich mix and rubbing alcohol into their underpants.

So, as you may have picked up, I’m having some banking difficulties. Despite informing HSBC that I would be in Egypt, Syria and Jordan during the month of September some overly officious little back room bastard has frozen my ATM card and I can’t withdraw a brass razoo. Fortunately, as always, I brought along some travellers cheques, a massively unfashionable currency according to the woman in the bank who sold them to me while trying to up-sell my account to something called HSBC Premium Traveller, which provides all sorts of useless services for £20 a month. Well, unfashionable they may be, but at least they fucking work. HSBC? World’s Local Bank my arse.

The Coolest Thing I Saw Today!

The coolest thing I saw today is on haiatus. HSBC has made me too grumpy to think of something cool. Bastards.

(Since writing this post I have started to have difficulties exchanging travellers cheques for hard cash. This is extremely frustrating. I have yet to devise a money making scheme from this situation. In time I will)

NOW THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT

When we were back in Dahab Joe was walking past the beachfront restaurants on his way back from the dive centre when a restaurant tout came rushing out from his bar offering him cheap dinner. Joe politely declined having already made dinner plans elsewhere. I don’t know if Joe just looks seedy or if the tout was experiencing some low-season desperation but the way Joe tells it the shifty bloke swiftly followed up with; “No dinner? Well how about some push push in the bush?” while swiping his hand to and fro and vigorously thrusting his pelvis.

Since then we have developed what we like to call the “Push Push In The Bush” Dance. It’s a one step dance that basically involves clasping your hands into fists, raising your forearms perpendicular to your body and then executing a number of swift pelvic thrusts. It’s a dance that was first demonstrated in about 2002 by former Indian pace man Agit Agaka following the dismissal of Michael Slater and it’s a beauty.

After walking more than a kilometre through a winding fault in the sandstone mountain to the east of the ancient city of Petra you reach the Treasury Building. Forty five metres high and more than thirty metres wide it was carved directly out of the rock face by the Nabeans more than 2,000 years ago. To reach the peak of the outcrop on which the building is carved you have to circumnavigate the rock and literally take the back stairs up. After about twenty minutes of climbing you leave the path and make out for the summit. Once there you gather your bearings, estimate the location of the Treasury and start picking your way down the far side of the peak, across the slopes of loose rubble, between the water forged cracks in the rock, past the desiccated carcass of an unfortunate goat and down onto the broad flat ledges directly above the building which has become the emblem for what is now one of the seven wonders of the world. Then you remove your shirt, place your camera on a rocky ledge, set the timer, walk toward the edge and do this:

By far the coolest thing I saw or did today. We’re taking the Push Push in Bush Dance global baby!

MONKEY TICKLE RUM PUNCH

Jordan is like a cleaner, more efficiently run Egypt, with town planning, a well respected traffic code and less aggressive touts. Sure, it’s a time consuming place to enter but once you’re here it’s tops.

I’ve spent the last couple of days getting my shoes dusty climbing the rocky outcrops in the desert at Wadi Rum and exploring the sandstone city of Petra. Both places are incredible in their own way. The scale of Wadi Rum is what makes it so striking; the monolithic sandstone outcrops, the cascading red-sand dunes, the vast and dusty valley floor and the endless blue sky above, which darkens at night to reveal almost as many stars as Idaho’s Phil Daum has bedbug bites on his welted body. The aspiring amateur dentist’s sleeping bag seems to have become infested with the vicious little bastards after a night on some Bedouin cushions in Luxor. Solutions are being sought.

In Egypt they do a roaring trade in dubious booze. It’s the kind of stuff that more than likely gets brewed up in illegal stills and emits the ferociously medicinal odour of the truly dangerous spirit. In order to give this rampant death juice the veneer of respectability it is packaged up to resemble products of less dubious provenance. Gordoon’s Gin is probably the most authentic of the rip-offs available – in appearance at any rate – and for less than eighteen Egyptian pounds provides enough liquor to get the homeless alcoholic who lives around the corner from my old house drunk enough to take a shit in the middle of the street. Again.

I mention Gordoon’s because it goes some of the way toward explaining why about twenty adults were sitting around a fire in the middle of the Jordanian desert playing Chinese Whispers. And it partially explains how the phrase “monkey tickle rum punch” turned into “Mark touches wrong parts” within the space of six whispers. Sadly everyone went to bed before I could suggest a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. In hindsight, given the amount of Gordoon’s consumed, that was probably for the best. We were a long way from medical help and third degree burns are difficult to treat.

Most of the time so far on this trip we’ve stayed in guesthouses, campsites and hotels but at Wadi Rum we pitched camp in the desert and slept under the stars. There are tents available on the truck but the nights are so mild and threat of rain so slim it’s less hassle and more fun to peg down a tarp and sleep in the open. As an added benefit you also get to wake up in the open too and at four am, just as the first light was beginning to show in the eastern sky, I was woken by the flick-flack of flip-flops on feet as someone padded off to take an early morning pee. I cursed them, until through squinted, sleep-heavy eyes, I caught sight of the sunrise. The sky above was a deep, starless blue and the desert valley a dirty, heavy grey but the tips of the sandstone outcrops on the eastern horizon were a blaze of school-bus yellow. A strip of orange hovered below an ochre red and the sky graded back down the colour scale through lavender and purple, all the way to the inky midnight blue of western sky. It was worth the lost sleep and was far and away The Coolest Thing I Saw Today! Well, a bunch of days ago now.

There were a few dubious and off colour jokes kicking around the truck the other day. Some of them are probably too blue to repeat in a forum which is most regularly read by my mum (although the title of the previous blog probably undermines that assertion a little) but you can have the following;

How did Helen Keller’s parents punish her? They rearranged the furniture.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

IBRAHIM HASSAN IS A C*NT

Sorry mum, but he really is. It's a long story, so you'd better start reading now.

Getting into Jordan was a predictable shit storm. I suspect Moses had less trouble crossing the Red Sea. In fact I’m starting to believe the only reason he parted the waters at all was in order to avoid the inevitable six-day wait for the Judean People’s Ferry Service.

We set off for the ferry at 4am in the hope that if we made it to the terminal before everyone else it would be harder for the operators to overlook our claims to passage. The ferry from Noueibah to Aquaba is the safest and most direct route from the African continent to the Middle East that doesn’t involve getting on a plane. It’s also one of the cheapest and thus the tightest bottleneck on the pilgrimage trail for those travelling from the Islamic states of Northern African to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The day of our travel, September 19, was also the twentieth day of Ramadan and peak season for Muslims making a journey that, according to their faith, they must complete at least once in their lifetime.

The northern most wedge of Red Sea coast belongs to Israel, which is somewhat reluctant to let Islamic pilgrims use its resort town of Ehliad as a thoroughfare. On top of that Saudi Arabia frequently refuses entry to anyone whose passport is stamped by Israel. That effectively closes the overland route, which means that for those who can’t afford to fly, their only remaining option is to take a ferry and, as Saudi Arabia has no open port on the Western finger of the Red Sea, the only feasible destination from Egypt is Aquaba in Jordan.

This geopolitical fence watching has created an effective monopoly for the operators of the Red Sea ferries and, as with all monopolies, customer service has inevitably suffered. Ticketing is somewhat haphazard and it is traditional during the busy times to sell tickets with little regard for the number of births actually available on the ferries. They don’t overcrowd the vessels – that’s a lesson they learned the hard way a few years ago when one of the ferries sank – they just sell the tickets and let mayhem ensue. If you can’t get a seat on your ferry, you just have to wait for the next one to come along and if you miss that one, then you have to wait for the next. And so on.

Fortunately, due to our early arrival and a few white lies directed toward the Egyptian tourist police we were not only the first in line but among the first on the boat. I picked my way over and around the faithful, past those in the white flowing robes of Egypt and the more exotic looking Black galebeiahs of Libya, Morocco and Sudan. They had arrived in overburdened Japanese sedans and air-conditioned coaches and now sat in clusters in the hallways and the cabins of the ferry. A friend had saved a seat in an air-conditioned compartment near the stern. Exhausted from the early start I curled up in my chair and after a few minutes drifted off to sleep. I dozed on and off for about three hours, occasionally woken by the guttural sound of pilgrims animatedly talking to each other in Arabic and the sporadic nudge and bump of a hip on my shoulder as someone lost their balance while wading past the other passengers who had taken up residence on the floor around my seat. Every now and again an announcement over the public address system would penetrate my slumber. They seemed to be demanding something of a man named Ibrahim Hassan. He must have been as disinterested in these demands as I as the request was repeated often. On one occasion I was bludgeoned awake by the sound of a fat middle-aged women, standing less than a metre from where I was sitting, screaming into a mobile phone, her volume so magnificently loud I began to wonder if there was any need for the phone at all. It seemed to me it would have been both cheaper and more effective is she’d just opened up one of the port side windows and directed her enormous voice back across the Sinai, toward home. Satellite technology just couldn’t compete.

I felt slightly aggrieved by this woman’s intrusion on my sleep but comforted myself with the thought that at least I was on the ferry and on my way to Jordan. I can generally forgive anyone anything when I’m travelling provided I’m making ground toward my goal. But her conversation was long and loud so I gave up on sleep and got up to check on our progress through the window. I expecting to gaze out across the deep blue of the Red Sea, perhaps catching sight of the glistening body of a bottle nosed dolphin as it played gracefully on the powerful surge of water curling off the ferry’s bow. I peered out in expectation. My expectation was not fulfilled. We were still in port. Not only that but there was no signs of progress at all. The ropes were still tied and there was no throb coming from the engines. We were in exactly the same position as we had been when I first boarded the vessel three hours before.

The only sign of activity from the crew was the sound of the tannoy crackling into life. I couldn’t understand a word but a name rung out with bell like clarity; Ibrahim Hassan. He was still absent without leave and apparently we weren’t going anywhere without him. After another forty minutes languishing in the Noueibah port doldrums two bursars appeared in our cabin, screaming in Arabic for Ibrahim Hassan. “Ibrahim Hassan” they yelled, follwed by “Ibrahim Hassan” again. Some pilgrims down the front of our birth responded with a quizzical “Ibrahim Hassan?” of their own. The bursars nodded and yelled “Ibrahim Hassan” back. Every soul in the room leaned forward in expectation. “Ibrahim Hassan? La” the passengers yelled back. He wasn’t there. The whole room, which had been seriously excited by the prospect of the discovery of this mysterious man, was visibly deflated. The bursars moved on. I began to despair.

They say it’s always darkest just before dawn and after another thirty minutes Ibrahim Hassan was either located or abandoned and the vessel weighed anchor for Aquabar. But the dawn offered by our departure proved false. The distance across the Red Sea from Dahab to the Saudi coast is only 17 kilometres. The ferry trip to Aquabar is no more than 60; a journey that should take no more than an hour and a half. It shouldn’t, but it did. At 9pm, after nearly seven hours on the boat we were still at sea. We reached port about thirty minutes later, where we were held for another hour and a half. It took us another hour to alight from the boat and clear customs, by which time it was almost midnight.

We made camp, made dinner and I made to get some much needed sleep on a chez lounge by the pool. It seemed a good place to sleep; cool, elevated, sheltered from the morning sun. After a vigorous spray of insect repellent all seemed in readiness for a well deserved night’s sleep. It didn’t come. Just as I was dozing off to sleep the camp attendants switched on the television situated in the café just metres from where I was sleeping and started to flick aimlessly through the channels, alighting here and there for thirty seconds or so before they lost interest and moved on in search of more captivating offerings. The constant change of background noise had a startling effect on my restful state. I would just begin to doze off when a channel change and the sudden shift in sonic scenery would jolt me awake again. After about the sixth time this happened I started to hallucinate and a familiar voice began to echo through the fog of my weariness. It was a voice from somewhere in my teenage past, familiar and warm but for some unfathomable reason short and irritated too. “Just pick a channel and stay on it, or off it goes!” I heard. Where had I heard that before, I thought, and why did it resonate so strongly now? Before I could come up with a satisfactory answer the camp attendants went to bed and I fell into peaceful slumber. The next morning I woke up and hadn’t learnt a thing.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

SHAVED AND THEN FLEECED

Last Thursday I finally decided to tackle my receding hairline front on and as a result I now look like Stirling Mortlock’s undernourished little brother. Well, maybe not, but I certainly appear to have stolen his hair. I had my first ever cut-throat razor shave too and, unsolicited, an eyebrow trim. After that the barber plucked the remaining hairs on my face and ears by running two strands of cotton across the unshaven parts. It’s painful but I do have a new-found appreciation of what girls have to go through in order to get those shiny, shiny legs I like so much. At the end of the process the barber sprayed alcohol on my face. It hurt but not as much as being charged seventy Egyptian pounds for the privilege. Lesson learnt. It’s very difficult to negotiate price with a man holding a cut throat razor

That is all,

Dale Atkinson.

ARE YOU SYRIAS?

I'm in Damascus. No apiphanies yet.

PETRA FRIED

I'm in Jordan today, in a town called Petra. I haven't fried anything. I'm not burnt. I just couldn't think of a better pun for the title. I'm tired.

Anyway, the internet's slow and I don't have my lap top with me, so the two blogs I've scribbled up describing my Red Sea Crossing and camping in Wadi Rum will get uploaded later on.

Things are good.

The Coolest Thing I Saw Today!

The Coolest Thing I Saw Today was a watermelon the size of a bar fridge. Well, maybe not, but it was pretty damn big.

THE RED SEA IS RUBBISH

Forty-five minutes into yesterday’s dive and I’m floating on my back, blowing bubble rings to the surface. To my left Joe has both his arms outstretched. He’s pretending to be an aeroplane. We are surrounded by some of the most diverse aquatic life on the planet. Islands of coral the size of three story buildings rise out of the sea bed beneath us. Each outcrop is smothered in brightly coloured coral. Over, around and in it float thousands – probably hundreds of thousands – of the most brightly coloured and beautiful creatures on the planet. A school of barracuda circles above, clown fish peak out at us from between the toxic fronds of their protective sea anemonies, cornetfish – close enough to touch – play in the bubbles that percolate from our regulators and a giant puffer fish, as bit as a kettle BBQ, sizes us up with its grapefruit eyes. We are 15 metres underwater, breathing air from a tank on our backs. We are experiencing something which sixty years ago would have been almost inconceivable. A hundred years ago it would have been impossible. Few have ever seen what we are seeing now. Few will ever get to see it. We are incredibly fortunate and we are incredibly bored. Then Joe swims over, taps me on the shoulder and executes half a dozen vigorous pelvic thrusts in the direction of a lionfish.

You know you’ve become spoilt when your predominant thought as you negotiate the submerged islands to the south of Dahab is; “I wonder what you taste like”. But that’s the way things are, familiarity going hand in hand, as it does, with contempt. I guess that’s a good thing, otherwise you’d just end up doing the same thing over and over again, like an imbecile or a child gymnast.

Anyway, I think I’ve solved the formatting issues which blighted yesterday’s posting. I’ve uploaded a few more images from the days when diving still held my interest.

We’re scheduled to take the ferry to Jordan tomorrow. It could prove an interesting experience as we’re in the middle of Ramadan. The Red Sea crossing is the main gateway from Egypt into Jordan, the first stepping-stone on the pilgrims’ road to Saudi Arabia and, ultimately, Mecca. Apparently they sell 2,000 unreserved tickets but only let 600 on the vessel. So, sharp elbows time.

I might be out of contact for a few days.

That is all,

The Coolest Thing I Saw Today!

The coolest thing I saw today I actually saw last night; my freshly laundered t-shirts. Omo-cool.

PICTURE THIS

Here's a few images from yesterday's dives for you to enjoy.

Here's me with my dive buddy Phil Daum, amateur dentist and reputedly the most potent man in Idaho.

Here I demonstrate the correct technique for avoiding shark attack; run.


The most potent man in Idaho demonstrates the benefits of hair replacement therapy

Notoriously self satisfied bastard, Joe Wallace, prepares to go for a dive.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

CLASSIC WALLACE, EPISODE ONE

From today I’m adding a new segment to my blog. I’m calling it “Classic Wallace”. Calamitous things happen to my mate Joe Wallace when he’s abroad; he’s been surrounded by wild dogs while taking a bush poo, he’s had his passport stolen in Africa, he’s been fleeced by gypsies in Berlin and detained at the Botswana airport for three hours for quite correctly calling an overly officious airport bureaucrat a “bastard”. You can read all about that last incident in Joe’s excellent blog, The Roast Dinner Letters.

Anyway, last night, while playing a bit of barefoot beach volleyball in the largest sand pit in a town full of cats, Joe stepped in something sticky. Classic Wallace.

DRUNK DIVING

I’m finding it difficult to concentrate this afternoon. Goldfish brain brought on from spending so much time under water I’d say. And what a lot of water it was. Thirty odd metres of it. One hundred feet. The kind of depth that brings on brain bubbles if you don’t handle it correctly. The pressure of all that water over and around you constricts the oxygen in your body. That, and breathing bottled air, spikes the nitrogen levels in your cells. The nitrogen attaches itself to fatty tissues in your brain disrupting the synapses. For some people this brings on nitrogen narcosis, a semi-euphoric feeling a bit like being three beers into a lazy Sunday afternoon. At least that’s what it felt like to me as I settled on the silt at the bottom of The Cavern and watched wide eyed as the bubbles from my regulator burbled and danced toward the ceiling of the underwater cave. It’s a nice feeling and a dangerous one too. Judgement is impaired and poor decisions made. For some people, like my dive partner Phil, activities that would be simple on land become impossibly difficult to manage when you’re “narced out”. In one exercise the dive master held up both his hands, with three fingers extended on each. Using both his hands, Phil had to signal how many extra fingers the dive master would have to raise in order to bring the total tally of fingers extended between them to ten. Three times Akmed raised six fingers and three times Phil raised six fingers in return, each time becoming more insistent that he was responding correctly. He was adamant. In my own half-cut state I found it quite funny. I had an under water giggle at his expense and then failed the test myself.

Feeling drunk thirty metres below sea level wasn’t the only good thing about today’s dives. Diving the Bells to Blue Hole route is an amazing experience. It’s lazy writing but the feeling is indescribable in any satisfactory way. At twenty five metres you look around and see nothing but fish swarming over a coral reef that starts at the surface and literally disappears into the blue beneath you; eight-hundred metres of it. Today was a good day.

The Coolest Thing I Saw Today!

The coolest thing I saw today was a sea turtle effortlessly cruising past me. He didn't want to play. Still super cool.

OKAY, I MIGHT HAVE BEEN A BIT HASTY

So it turns out I was wrong about Mohsen. The constant interaction with an ever-refreshed pool of bikini clad women isn’t the reason he’s so relaxed. They complicate his life in ways I can’t even begin to fully comprehend, coming as I do from a country where girls in bikinis are a societal cornerstone. It turns out the reason he’s such a laid back cat isn’t his environment at all. If he were a neonatal surgeon specialising in sewing up life threatening holes in tiny little hearts he’d still be the most tranquil dude in his NHS district. The reason he’s so relaxed is simply that he was born placid.

I was having a chat with him last night over Egyptian tea and apple tobacco. As the fragrant smoke mixing on the breeze with the scent of salt water and desert sand the conversation gradually drifted onto girls. Mohsen is 23 years old, a Christian and the oldest son in his family. His sister is 19 years old and is considering becoming engaged to a young man she goes to university with. As the oldest son he has some say in whether the engagement should proceed. Earlier in the day, while taking a break between dives to let the nitrogen levels in our bodies fall, his mother rang him to ask his advice on the matter. He told her to invite the young man to dinner to assess his suitability but added that ultimately the decision had to rest with his sister. If she wanted to go ahead then unless the family had any major reservations it should be allowed to proceed. Privately he thinks she is too young to get married.

I asked him about his situation. He said living in Dahab made it tough. He goes home a few times a year and every time he goes back his sister introduces him to her university friends. I image he’s quite a hit. He’s a good looking guy, with a cool job and he has a natural, easy charm that women instantly respond to. He says that many of his sister’s friends are “slender”, a word he accompanies with a slight intake of breath and a long, double handed gesture upward in a narrow v shape. But he can’t see himself ending up with one of his sister’s slender friends. He says an Egyptian woman would find it hard to be with a man who does what he does for a living. The differing attitude toward standards of modesty and acceptable forms of male/female interaction would be difficult for an Egyptian woman to come to terms with; even a Christian Egyptian. He says an Egyptian wife would find it difficult to contemplate her husband spending 16 hours a day with scantily clad Western women and would be very upset to find that occasionally he receives a hug from a client or accept a kiss on the cheek.

Complicating his situation is the fact that there are no Egyptian women in Dahab. None. Partly that’s geographical. Dahab is situated on the barren eastern coast of a desolate peninsula, less than two hours drive from the Israeli border. Up until 20 years ago Dahab didn’t exist. The only reason it exists at all is to service the diving industry that has sprung up as a result of the Red Sea’s spectacular marine offering. There are no other industries. Every worker here earns their living from the diving industry and the jobs are almost universally of a variety that, here in Egypt, only men perform. There’s also an element of culture clash. Dahab represents Gomorrah to the religious elements of this country; a kind of morally dubious Western playground that Egyptian women should be protected from. So the kind of life Mohsan could offer to an Egyptian woman here in Dahab is quite limited. He is fortunate in that his father is happy for Mohsan to pursue a relationship with a Western women but, being quite devout in his Christianity, is at pains to stress that he will have to chose his wife carefully, as there are no second chances. So he ends up with a significant dilemma, created in large part by his own moral code. The kind of relationship he is seeking; monogamous, long term, fundamentally Egyptian in construction does not necessarily match the aims of the women he interacts with on a daily basis. By the same token, the women who would most readily offer this kind of relationship – Egyptian – would not necessarily be able to understand or accept his lifestyle. It’s a problem.

I still say flirting with chicks in bikinis on a daily basis is a good thing.

The Coolest Thing I Saw Today!

The coolest thing I saw today was the brand name of Egypt's leading distributors of pistaccios, cashews and almonds. It is "World of Nuts". Childish? Yes. Cool? Also yes.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

WHAT IS SOLENT GREEN?

So, I think I’ve found the most paranoid animal in the world, poor bastard that he is. It’s the glassfish, a tiny little thing no longer than a bride’s ring finger, with opaque flesh, so you can faintly see the outline of its skeleton and the tiny little pulsating organs within. They mass in enormous shoals around a specific variety of coral, their movements synchronised with one another. They drift gently in formation, moving as one, and then, without warning, they will rapidly change direction, all at the same time, sending a dazzling flash of silver pulsating across the reef. And then it’s back to the whole opaque drifting malarkey for a few more tranquil minutes. It’s a defence mechanism; camouflage and a warning all in one. A kind of; “you can’t quite work out what we are but we’re big and ready to take names”, which serves to protect them from marauding mackerel, for whom, when isolated from the gang, these little fish represent a tasty snack. The only flaw to this effective little defence system is that in order to stay safe they have to stay with the group. And the group never leaves the safety of its coral fortress, a spindly bit of aquatic life that looks something like a defoliated thorn bush and apparently provides excellent protection from hit and run predators. What this means is that there are no opportunities to head off to forage for food, which in turn means they have to make use of the only food source that’s readily available to them. Each other.

Like I said earlier, poor paranoid bastards.

“Holy crap, look out, a mackerel. Quick, lets all do that impressive flicker thing we’ve been practicing. Everyone hard left on my signal. And GO!”

“Nice work fellers, neat lines. Well synchronised; a super display of strength in unity. Some of our best work don’t you think Dave? Dave? Why are you all looking at me like that?”

The Coolest Thing I Saw Today!

The coolest thing I saw today was the glassfish. Animals you can see through? Awesome cool.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson

SEAHORSEWEED?

There are two posts today. Read yesterday's first. It's the one with the blasphemous title. It's better.

The reason you get two gifts today is that now I'm traveling with a laptop I'm no longer restricted to writing updates only when I'm in an internet cafe. It's a good thing. Well, it is if you like my posts. Otherwise the extra post probably makes your tummy hurt, in which case grab yourself a ginger tea and for God's sake have a good lie down.

Anyway... get ready for today's post (also posted today). Here it comes...

There are two things I know for certain; Pringles are a tasty snack no matter where you are in the world and the best jobs in the history of employment involve flirting with endless streams of holidaying women in bikinis. I’m telling you lads, drop everything and nail down some surf school qualifications or a diving instructors ticket. It’s the future.

Let me just clarify here that I’m not advocating that anyone leave their wife or girlfriend to take up this brilliant opportunity; just their job.

My diving instructor Mohsen is probably the most relaxed cat since Miles Davis popped his clogs, which in itself is incredible considering he knocks back 20 cups of coffee a day. Just imagine how catatonically laid back that makes him.

Mohsen is clearly a dude who loves what he does, even though, like the rest of us, he does pretty much the same thing day in, day out. The main difference between his job and yours isn’t that he’s outside in a beautiful, sun-kissed environment – although I’m sure the environmental differences do boost his job satisfaction levels – the main difference between his job and yours is that he gets to flirt with an ever refreshing pool of chicks in bikinis, where as you have to spend your days interacting with besuited middle management types. Check and mate.

Anyway, today I spent a fair proportion of my time under 18 metres of water and I’m happy to report that diving is super fun. I am also happy, and in some respects slightly disturbed, to report that the open water diving course that I completed ten years ago has been recorded on the leading diving accreditation organisation's central database of qualifications, which can be brought up and verified pretty much anywhere in the world where there's an internet link. This is good. It saved me £100. It’s also bad, because now I’m starting to wonder how many organisations out there have my personal details on file. Lots is the only conclusion I can come to. So that's something to ponder.

But put that our of your minds for the time being and get ready for the first ever instalment of; The Coolest Think I Saw Today!

The coolest thing I saw today was a fish chewing on what was either a seahorse that looked like a piece of weed (way cool) or a piece of weed that looked like a seahorse (super lame).

That is all.

Dale Atkinson

GOD LOVES YOU - SEND MONEY

The unchanging nature of progress is still evident on the Red Sea, where the steady march of the tourism rouble has continued unabated since I was here eleven months ago. Back then I didn’t get to experience the twin terminals of the Sharm El Sheikh airport. From the outside they look like the kind of cathedrals to greed that charismatic preachers build in order to get extra bums on seats on Sundays from which to Hoover up even more of those readily available Jesus-dollars (I just read that sentence back and it sounds a bit like I’m inferring that the evangelical churches extract cash directly from the backsides of their parishioners. For the record I do not actually believe this to be the case).

In may ways though the Sharm terminals are shrines to the same God as the Southern Baptist Ministers and it has to be said the cheap airlines and package tour operators which fund these impressive structures are as ruthlessly adept at extracting alms from the touring hoards as any hot-stepping, devil casting, testifying – I SAID THANK YA JEEESUSS! – Minister of the Lord is at emptying the pockets of his gullible flock. The only difference really is that here in Sharm we don’t get the impossibly upbeat songs, the laying on of hands or the speaking in tongues. Actually, come to think of it, that’s not strictly true as there were a couple of Geordies on the aircraft. At least none of my fellow passengers felt the need to close their eyes, raise their arms as if doing the Y in the YMCA dance or adopt that ridiculous look of ecstatic joy adopted by those who want to demonstrate to their fellow parishioners that yes, they really, truly are feeling the awesome power of the Holy Spirit flowing through them and it feels AWESOME! AWESOME!!!!!!

Actually this afternoon was an interesting study in group psychology. On entering the arrivals hall passengers were ushered into three lines. No one was really sure what was going on but a man with a clipboard and a badge was issuing the instructions, so everyone unquestioningly obeyed. Our three lines snaked toward three windows. Over each of the three windows was the branding of the airline on which we had just arrived. To the right of our airline’s windows were another twenty windows, all branded differently but each with a sign offering the same service; Egyptian Visas for $15US. Those windows were empty of customers. The staff behind our three windows were processing a Boeing 777’s worth of weary travelers. Our lines were moving slowly. The other 20 windows had no lines at all. Yet none of us made a break for the unoccupied windows. Partly I think this was because no one seemed sure what we were queuing up for and partly I think it was because any time some curious soul tried to wander over to a different window they’d be rounded up by the clipboard and ushered back into line. To be fair half the English passengers were clearly drunk and a pretty heavy proportion looked like they’d been taught the hard way how to toe the line during a 10 to 18 month stretch in Wormwood. But the rest of us really had no excuse at all. We were like a bunch of queuing enthusiasts on a social outing. It wasn’t until I got to the line and discovered that my airline was charging £11 for the same visa others were offering for $15US that I snapped out of my ovine obedience and headed over to one of the other windows. Evidently I value money over my own precious – or not so precious as it turns out – time.

Interestingly, just as I was heading through customs a bunch of passengers from a rival airline arrived and a new man with a clipboard and badge emerged to usher them toward his company’s windows. This went unchallenged by the original clipboard, which I guess means there are enough cash-cows out there for everyone to fill a pail.

So, like I said, tourism companies are good at extracting cash for services that can be more cheaply and easily obtained independently. Listen carefully to the sound of the hills collapsing into the sea as a result of that earth shattering revelation.

I wrote last year of the Red Sea that the Russian’s were coming. I was actually wrong. They’re already here and, in a large part, it is their money which has paid for the magnificent new air terminals and the fresh, hard-topped roads which connect it to the cities that have burgeoned as a result of the growing tourism industry. Since last year a row of supersized power pylons have sprung up on the road between Sharm El Sheikh and Dahab and construction has started on what will one day be the northbound carriage of a shining dual lane highway. That this newly laid tarmac wasn’t already a fully-fledged part of a dual lane highway wasn’t apparent to me until about 30 minutes into my journey to the Sphinx Hotel, by which time I’d been travelling on it for about 25 minutes. It was only when I looked over at the other carriage and saw traffic on that stretch traveling in both directions that I realised that my driver was a massive Robert Frost fan. He’d been driving on an unopened, unmarked and possibly unsafe road, with no hard shoulder, no soft shoulder at something approaching 140kph. In fact, in many places, no shoulder existed at all bar clean oxygen and a two foot drop. Having bussed about India I was quite relaxed about this really, until we started to go around some blind corners. It was then that I started to calculate that if the road wasn’t yet opened, there was also chance that it wasn’t yet finished, and if it wasn’t yet finished then there was a chance that we’d hook around one of these blind turns only to find ourselves on a suddenly nonexistent stretch of road, with nothing beneath us but the shifting sands of the Sinai Desert and nothing ahead of us but the broken tooth outcrops of rock which rise from its surface. Disturbing thoughts. Needless to say my concerns came to nothing and I made it safely to the hotel, where everything’s pretty good.

Have you noticed how most of these bloody things are about the inherent terror of motorised transport? I’m starting to think that maybe I’m holidaying wrong.

That is all.
Dale Atkinson

THE BUCKET

How long can I keep my hand in a champagne bucket filled with ice water? Not as long as Leigh Angel is the answer to that question. More specifically though the answer is about 22 minutes, give or take, after which time my thumb starts to cramp and I have to withdraw. But let's be honest; the only thing that really matters is the winning and losing. No one really cares if the kid who ran second came in under the old world record mark too. And no one wants to hear him talk about it in the vapid sentences of the babbling vanquished. The winners can smile and the losers can please themselves and the only thing I can really do is suck it up and leave the country with my cold, cold hand grasping numbly at whatever imaginary straws of comfort I can find. Which is what I'll do. Tomorrow. At 9:55am.

Due to the fact I managed to misplace my handover note shortly before lunch and only located it - hidden down the back of the metaphorical cyber couch, ie the temporary file - some time in the mid-afternoon, this message isn't going to contain those nourishing words of love and gratitude that you needy, needy people always demand of my departure missives. If you're lucky I might have a couple of beers in the departure lounge tomorrow morning, get a bit gushy and smash out some hallmark sentiment while, between desperate, tearfilled sobs of anguish, I loudly singing songs from Frank Sinatra's; Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Or not.

As I've only got 20 short minutes of gainful employment standing between me and The Leasure, I better fill a few of those minutes with an activity which could, at least loosely, be described as work. I gotta go. More soon.

That is all.