ANNE & GARY ANDREWS - AUGUST/OCTOBER 2000
TRANSCRIPT
OF GARY'S TAPE-RECORDED DIARY
PART 1 of 8
For some years I carried a small recorder while
travelling on vacation, and dictated a diary of the trip. The diary was typically recorded on a
catch-up basis every few days or so. The
tapes were transcribed by my long-suffering secretary and later, often much
later, I added page-by-page footnotes to fill in gaps in the oral material, and
for elaboration. Given the continuous
nature of the Blog format I have now integrated the footnotes into the text. The diary runs to more than 38000 words, and
will likely be of interest only to indulgent family members, and to readers
with a vicarious interest in other peoples’ travel experiences. But then perhaps........
Tape 1
Tuesday morning 5th September, about
six-fifteen a.m., and I'm walking the streets of Ludlow. Ludlow in Shropshire2 where
our friend Joan Graetz lives. Anne had
been staying with Joan for a couple of days before I arrived on Saturday, and
since my arrival we have been staying at a bed and breakfast establishment of
Mr and Mrs Ross. It's really like a
small hotel. The Rosses for some years
ran a hotel in central Wales - no precise details given - and after Mr Ross was
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis they sold up, and somewhat by chance moved to
Ludlow. It was meant to be
semi-retirement, I think, but after a short time they did some renovations on
their place and turned it into a B&B and now, despite their advancing
years, they own three houses in the street and can accommodate a total of
twelve guests; and they've just bought another place and will be renovating
that in the months ahead! Their
headquarters, where they live and where breakfast is served, is at number 6
Lower Broad Street, and we're staying at number 8.3 A little walk down the hill for a very
complete breakfast indeed - for some
1. Anne left for London on 22nd August,
to stay with our friend Judy Rowe. After
a week she moved on, to stay with another friend Joan Gractz, at Ludlow. Gary departed Melbourne on 1st September. We arrived home 14th October.
2. Ludlow is south of Shrewsbury and
north of Hereford, and about 16 kilometres from the Welsh border. Population according to one website is
"just under 10000", but another says 7500! It is described as "one of the finest
small towns in England". There are
over 500 "listed" buildings in the town.
3. I was confused. The headquarters are at number 28, and we
were staying at number 4. How did I find
my way back?! The Rosses have a web site
styled "Number Twenty Eight"; and they boast that "we have more
Michelin restaurants within walking distance than anywhere else on earth!"
cereals and fruit, and the full cooked
breakfast if required. Very hospitable
and charming people. Oh, so
English! Despite his affliction, Mr Ross
does very well. He waits on table - has
a slight limp and shaking hand - but the disease doesn't seem to be too far
advanced. He has a motorised wheelchair
and takes the dog for a walk every morning.
We are staying with the Rosses, and with Joan, for four nights.
I had an excellent flight, leaving Tullamarine
around five o'clock on Friday afternoon, one stop- over at Singapore for a
little over an hour, then arriving at Heathrow around five o'clock on Saturday
morning. My companions on the Singapore
leg were an extended Italian/Australian family - my guess a brother, sister and
their respective spouses - who were on their way to Calabria to visit the
parents. The parents had migrated to
Australia many years earlier, but about twelve years back had returned to
Italy, and the children hadn't seen them since.
My neighbour said that he'd saved up some money and had the choice of
buying himself a new car or of spending the money on this trip - but it was no
contest, really.
I had bought myself about $20 worth of
Singapore currency in anticipation that I'd be calling home from
Singapore. Tom4 has
sprained his neck earlier in the week, and on the Monday night - or was it
Tuesday, the week is something of a blur - he'd gone to bed, only to jump up
five minutes later with excruciating pain in the back of his head. He had been to the chiropractor earlier that
day and what we'll never know is whether the manipulation that
eased his discomfort at the time in fact produced a longer-term
aggravation. Anyway, at eleven-thirty on
the night we were off to casualty at Box Hill Hospital. Nine x-rays later, and no confirmed
diagnosis, we were home and to bed about two-fifteen a.m. And then on the Friday morning a
recurrence. Tom took himself off to
hospital at five in the morning, and through the course of the day was given a
number of tests to eliminate the possibility of a brain aneurism. I called on him at casualty at about seven
o'clock on my way to the office, at which stage he was still under
observation. I called back on my way
home at around one o'clock, by which time he'd had a CAT scan and was lined up
to have an MRI and then later a spinal tap.
All very gruesome, and all very worrying; and should I or should I not
cancel the flight to London. I guess I
took a chance that the test results would not be alarming, and bade Tom an
anxious farewell. Tom had intended to be
my chauffeur to the airport but in the event Justin Fitzsimmons, our friend
from England who's been staying with us, took me out. A fairly rushed hour at home - I hadn't yet
packed my bag, so things were thrown in.
Quick call to Laura5 to let her know Tom's
situation. She was horrified; and all of
this made more complicated by the fact that Dan6 was away
skiing at Buller and not due home until later that day, after I had gone. So I hated being out of touch for ten hours
and was particularly thoughtful about the possibility that, if anything serious
was wrong with Tom, Anne would get a message in England before I'd had the
chance to forewarn her. So I had
to call from Singapore; and in the event I was able to call from the plane
using a credit card7.
It was about nine o'clock, I think, Melbourne time, nine p.m. Dan
4. Older son Tom.
5. Daughter,
Laura.
6. Younger son, Dan.
7. The Singapore Airlines plane had an
individual TV screen in the back of each seat; and the control unit in the
armrest was also a telephone, with a credit card swipe.
answered the phone and I asked him how Tom
was. He said, "I'll put him
on". All tests had proved negative,
and the kids had collected him from the hospital. And also collected his car, which had been sitting
in the street all day and not surprisingly had a parking ticket.
So the hospital had been able to determine
what it wasn't, but still weren't clear on what it was -
presumably a pinched nerve. Some
after-effect anyway of the twisted neck and - given the reaction of the doctor
when I'd been there a few nights earlier - likely to have been caused by the
chiropractor's manipulation. Anyway, the
question now was whether Tom would be fit to travel and make use of his
Tullamarine/London ticket the following Wednesday. He's having three weeks holiday, using up a
poultice of frequent flyer points, and intending to spend some time with us in
Paris and to drive with us to Perugia and spend a few days there before returning
to Paris or London. He's a free agent at
that point. So it's all fingers crossed
that he doesn't have a recurrence, and that he'll be able to travel.
There is a lot of traffic noise at the
moment. It's now seven o'clock and
Ludlow is stirring - or, more precisely, this is traffic that seems to be
(commercial traffic) coming into the town. Our B&B is more or less at one end of
Ludlow, and I've skirted along the river Teme - T.E.M.E. - I suppose it's
nothing to do with teeming fish.8 A very pleasant stream, not much flow at the
moment, but quite wide in parts. Not navigable.
Very rocky, and rapids; and a little way upstream a couple of weirs
built at an acute angle across the river.
But Joan tells us that this used to be a centre for the treatment of
wool, sheep being a major industry in the county of Shropshire - where we are -
and nearby Herefordshire; and of course Wales is nearby in the westerly
direction. (But I'm not sure whether,
given the insularity of the British, it would have been appropriate to have
Welsh wool treated at an English works.)
So as I passed out of town I was going through
the light industrial area, very light, and some estate housing. Very uniform, very drab, probably this
century,9 although to an untrained eye it's not really
8. My Children's Encyclopaedia, circa
1940s, in its "most comprehensive list of English rivers in
existence", describes the River Teme:
"A 60-mile river rising on the boundary between Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire
and flowing through Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, past
Knighton, Ludlow, and Tenbury, to flow into the Severn below Worcester. Still doubtless true.
9. 20th century, that is.
clear.
We of course have the same problem at the other end of the time scale -
no way of guessing whether an old black-strapped white-painted building is
fifteenth century or seventeenth century.
They do have some helpful signs and historic markers - it's that sort of
a town - but this estate housing is pretty drab; a lot of it what we call
maisonette - I think they call semi-detached - and sometimes more than
two in a unit. Nearly always two-storey.
It wasn't long before I passed right out of
settlement and was in a narrow lane - not a lane but a road to another
town. But with the hedgerows either side
- I suppose the gap was three to four metres - very difficult indeed for two
vehicles to pass, certainly two farm vehicles could not do so. It's the hay cutting season, as was obvious
on my journey across from Heathrow.
Field after field of hay bales, sometimes rectangular but typically in
the big rolls; so they've been cut in the last week or two of summer - an indication
of the entirely different climate from back home, where the grass hay cutters
have generally done their job early in December in the first week of summer,
certainly hoping to finish the task before Christmas. And as we've been travelling around in the
last couple of days, there've been many farmers on their ungainly road tractors
towing trailer-loads of hay bales. Which
brings me back to the narrow lane just out of Ludlow. On the edges of the road, just under the
hedgerows, there's a light carpet of straw.
It took me a while to figure that this had been brushed off the bales of
the passing trailers.
The hedgerows vary a lot in height but they're
usually about four feet, and they're made up of closely planted trees and
shrubs, of a wide variety of plants. And
because of their height they virtually obscure the countryside from people
driving in a conventional sedan, so you have to wait till there's a small
opening, or a crossroad, or a driveway, or a gate, to have a look inside; and
of course travelling along you don't get much opportunity to get an idea of
what's behind the hedge. And it seems to
be this time of year that the farmers trim them. Some are already neat, bristling like a crew
cut, and others are quite unkempt with new growth maybe three to four metres
high. We haven't actually seen a
hedgerow being cut, but I presume some sort of rotary mower mechanism attached
to an arm from the tractor, and they just drive along and mow the vertical face
and then mow the top. The interesting question
is how do they ..... [St. Laurence's church, church clock that is, ringing
seven-fifteen] ..... an interesting question for the farmers is how do they
trim the inside. From what I can see the
inside has been trimmed, so they need to have fairly firm ground in the
field before they can drive their tractor along. The problem of the obscured view is relieved,
I guess, if you're in a 4-wheel drive, and certainly if you're in a tour bus.
My little country road lasted for no more than
a kilometre and opened into the main road into Ludlow on the north side.
I've just been through the main square. I guess they call it a market square, and in
fact there is a street-side market three days a week and at weekends. At the moment there is a lot of noise and
interruption because the council are installing new gutters and flagstones
around the square and in the surrounding streets. So the shopkeepers and the stall-holders are
very annoyed and concerned that all of this has turned away business. "Why do they have to do it in
summer?", is the universal cry.
But, from the standpoint of the council, and the council workers, why
the heck would you want to do it in winter?
Anyway, today is not market day, and construction workers have the
square to themselves.
I'm now sitting in the churchyard of St. Laurence's
church. Very much a landmark
building. The country around here is
undulating to hilly. Very attractive
indeed and, as you'd expect, St. Laurence is on the top of the hill where the
town reposes; and it's a huge church for a parish church. I gather that the Churches of England are
somehow classified according to their size or status, and inside St. Laurence's
there's a sign describing it as one of the twenty greater parish churches of
England. So I'm presuming that it's next
down the scale of physical size - and maybe importance - below the cathedrals10;
and it wouldn't be much smaller than St. Paul's cathedral in Melbourne. It doesn't have spires, it's not in that
style, but it does have an imposing square tower; and it's built from lovely
pink stone, and it's right in the heart of the community. Joan Graetz was for many years one of the
volunteers who talks to visitors and explains the history of the church. As you walk through the church you'll find on
display the mechanism for the carillon11 that for some
hundreds of years rang the five bells, and you'll find the mechanism for the
clock - both of them now disused and replaced in the 1980s by electronic
versions.
10. The 43 dioceses of the Church of England
in England, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and the Isles of Scilly (and a
small part of Wales!) comprise 13000 parishes.
There are approximately 16000 churches, 42 of which are cathedrals. (The diocese of Sodor and Man has no
cathedral.) About the 20 greater parish
churches I can find nothing.
11. Wrong choice of word. Not a carillon, but a spiked barrel a la
music box that caused the bells to be rung in succession. A carillon is "a set of from 25 to 72 belts,
tuned at chromatic intervals, and hung in a tower".
On Sunday there was a street market, not the
usual fruit and veg and bits and pieces market that's there four days a week,
but this time antiques and trash and treasure.
First and third Sundays of each month, so we were lucky that it
coincided with our stay here. The
standard of the trash and treasure and items for sale is extraordinarily good,
so far superior to the sort of stuff you see in Australian trash and treasure
markets as to be non-comparable. And
there were literally dozens of things we would have been happy to have bought
if we'd been closer to home. As it was,
we were very naughty and Gary bought two albums of Player's cigarette cards
from the 1930s. Very reasonably priced I
thought at five pounds each, approximately ten dollars. I'd certainly pay that at home. And Anne, after a great deal of hard
thinking, bought three beautiful green-bordered floral-patterned dinner
plates. Two pounds each, so
approximately five dollars. Very cheap
we thought, and now the task ahead is to get them home safely and within our
load limits.
I am standing watching a pigeon at the back of
the church - just flown off - but quite a different variety than the city-life
pigeons we have at home. Would be about
half as big again, with a white collar.
Interesting feature of the area to the back of the church, within the
churchyard, is that it's merely lawn and that there are no gravestones to be
seen. I wonder whether at some stage
they were removed and taken to the municipal cemetery, if there is such a
thing. [There we are, we have just
chimed seven-thirty.] There is a small
spot that's been turned into a lawn cemetery, a couple of hundred small plaques
just squeezed into a patch of the yard close to the rear of the church. Almost every one has a bowl of flowers on it,
so this is a community living and dying in a very special way. I'm looking very closely and hardly any of
the flowers are plastic. So the graves
are visited very frequently.
The Singapore to London leg of the trip was
again uneventful. This time I was on an
aisle seat - centre aisle - and my neighbour was a young chap, and then
stretching across his whole family, mum, dad, three kids. Clearly returning home to England, they were
English people. But not much
conversation; and actually not much sleep, although I suppose no one else will
believe that! An enormous amount of
stuff available on the twenty-odd channels of personalised entertainment. Screen on the back of the seat in front. But nothing much appealed, and all I saw in my
nearly twenty-two hours of travel was a documentary on last year's Wimbledon,
one on last year's British Open, and one on last year's Le Mans motor race; and
one nostalgia movie, Pride of the Yankees, with Gary Cooper and Teresa
Wright. I think 1937.12 A biopic about American baseballer Lou
Gehrig, who these days is more famous for having given his name to a
debilitating and fatal disease13. Not a bad film really; and I hadn't seen Gary
Cooper in a film for years, and was surprised to see that he's quite a
reasonable actor. Certainly a pleasant
personality as portrayed in this movie.
Typical for Hollywood of the times - references to the man's condition
were veiled and no real description was given except that one was led to
believe that he was going to die.
That rather unnecessary detail was left out of the film; and we can be
sure that there was definitely no sequel that went into all the gruesome
details.
12. Actually 1942. Both Cooper and Wright were Academy Award
nominees for their roles.
13. Gehrig was diagnosed in 1939, and died
in 1941, aged 38. The proper name for
the disease (first identified in 1869) is Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, known
also as motor neurone disease. 50% of
ALS sufferers die within 18 months of diagnosis; 10% live longer than 10
years. Today's most famous sufferer is
British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking .... who has lived with ALS
for more than 35 years! Actor David
Niven also had ALS.
I'm now walking through the graveyard of
another church down on the flat below St. Laurence's, and it may be that this
is where everybody was buried and that St. Laurence, as the parish church, was
kept rather more pristine. I walked through
this churchyard three years ago when we visited Joan, and was both impressed
and concerned. Impressed at the old
gravestones and the wonderful trees and the fact that it had been turned over
to a nature preserve, but concerned at what a jungle it had become. Blackberries and weeds and flowers two metres
tall, with the occasional gravestone visible in the thicket. A bit more work has been done since I was
here last. There are now some defined
paths through the jungle, and information signs telling about the place and the
special plants and animals and birds. In
fact some of the description is interesting.
"St. Leonard's burial ground, Ludlow's parish cemetery [so I might
have been right about St. Laurence's not being used as a cemetery] was first
opened
in August 1824 when it
was clear that the old medieval churchyard was completely full. St. Leonard's at first occupied just over an
acre. Space finally ran out during the
first world war at which point the new borough cemetery on Henley Road was
opened and burial continued there."
St. Leonard's is no longer used as a church, it's in fact a printery,
but according to this information board its history dates back to 1349 when a
Carmelite friary was set up. There are
one thousand four hundred gravestones, all of them faithfully recorded - I
suspect by volunteers. This is
interesting: "The recording process
not only recovered the texts of the inscriptions but also, although few
original records survived, demonstrated the order in which the graves were laid
out and revealed how local social hierarchy, and the ability to pay, determined
where graves were placed." Whoever
said that death was the great leveller?14
14. Actually, Edward
Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), MP and author of plays and historical novels,
including "The Last Days of Pompeii":
Love, like
death
Levels all
ranks, and lays the shepherd's crook
Beside the
sceptre.
He also wrote
"the pen is mightier than the sword".
And I'm told I can see grey squirrels, badgers
and hedgehogs snuffling around - ah, at dusk!
We'll I won't be here at dusk.
Just saw a rabbit. [There's St.
Laurence's in the distance, now a quarter to eight.] Of course when played back this won't take
nearly so long as the church clock indicates, because I frequently have to
switch off, not only to collect my thoughts, but to let a passing truck - I beg
your pardon, lorry - noisily go by. And
in the churchyard it's peace perfect peace, and the sounds of the town in the
distance, but in the foreground the birds.
The birds includes the sparrows - and there's big public debate going on
at the moment, or at least a debate courtesy of the Independent
newspaper, on where have all the sparrows gone; and the bird watchers and
letters to the editor are saying that the population of sparrows seems to have
diminished to about 40% of what it used to be, and the hunt is on to see why
this is so. In yesterday's Independent
they'd had the good fortune of being able to get hold of a learned paper
produced in Germany where they've been doing the same sort of thinking, in Hamburg;
and the theory it is that although sparrows are seed eaters, while the young
are in the nest they're fed insects by the mum and dad, and in the first few
days they're fed aphid. Later, I forget
now, some sort of grub I think; and then a little later again they're fed on
flies. And its the first period of life,
the aphid-eating stage, where if they don't get that aphid they simply
die. So the theory is that if there's a
decrease in the population of aphids then clearly the sparrow population must
suffer. They have three settings a year,
and given that sparrows seem to live for only about two- and-a-half years, then
clearly if on a couple of times a year the chicks die, then the population must
decrease dramatically. Anyway, as I say,
the letters to the editor are full of various theories - including the
undeniable logic of one bright spark who says that since all the English
migrate to Europe during the summer, why shouldn't the sparrows!
Three years ago my hire car was from a lesser
known organisation and I had quite a walk from the Heathrow terminal to the car
depot. This time the travel agent has
organised us into Avis, and I was able to do all the paperwork in the terminal
itself and then take the Avis courtesy bus to the car depot which was about
three kilometres away; but all very easily handled. So unless you can get an arrangement with a
courtesy car or bus to pick up your hire car then the message is "go with
one of the
major companies". I was listed to have a Vauxhall, a small
Vauxhall, but in the event was given a small Fiat - same category, but all the
controls back to front. Maybe the Vauxhall
is too, but it took a little getting used to having the indicators on the left
of the steering column and the windscreen wipers on the right. I did many left and right hand turns with the
only signal being my windscreen wipers waving away at the oncoming
traffic. I think I have the hang of it
now. Let's hope so!
Very pleasant journey across. Remember I was on the road about six a.m.,
Saturday morning, got to Ludlow about eleven-thirty. The distance is not great, I think about 120
miles, but unless you're on the freeways - the motorways - it's not possible to
cover the distances in quick time. And,
in any event, as the inveterate traveller I stopped frequently to see the
sights and, in truth, to check the map to make sure I was on the right
road. Last time I travelled from
Heathrow towards the south going out through Reading, circling around up
through Cheltenham to Ludlow; this time I went more to the north, circled
around Oxford before heading west. I was
looking for a place to have a coffee, for although I'd been well fed on the
plane I was, surprise, surprise, a little peckish. But even in the smallest of towns there's a
critical problem with parking, and I was most reluctant to leave the car and my
baggage in a carpark near 200 metres from the centre of town. Not that at that precise moment there was any
more or less danger of the car being stolen or broken into, but psychologically
it would have been devastating to have had that happen on the very first day of
the trip. So while I stopped two or
three times at places looking for a coffee shop I changed my mind and drove
on. Eventually found a spot at Chipping
Norton, where I left the car just outside the local bakery.
I've just now climbed the hill, back to the
main square of Ludlow, gone to the paper shop, and I've bought The Guardian. The Guardian used to be the Manchester
Guardian of long repute but quite a number of years ago now, I think, it
moved its headquarters to London and dropped its parochial name15. Has it dropped its standards? Yesterday I bought the Independent. I don't know the history of the Independent16. I'm sure it wasn't around 50 years ago, but
it's described as one of the quality papers as distinct from the Daily Mail
and the Daily Mirror which thrive on tit and bum trash. But on a scale of ten, I wouldn't rank the Independent
more than six. Certainly, not as good as
The Age. So today The Guardian
is being given the once-over.
15. The Guardian, first published in 1821,
moved its editorial headquarters to London in 1964.
16. The Independent commenced on 7 October
1986 - "the first quality newspaper to be launched in Britain for 131
years"!
Now walking down Broad Street. Broad Street is a really beautiful
thoroughfare. Unlike what we would call
beautiful at home, where we'd expect to see trees on either side, this has no
sign of vegetation, and every house is on the street. So there are no front gardens, and they're
all built side by side, so there is no gap; and access to the rear is just not
possible from the street frontage - hence the streets are crowded with cars -
and I'm sure it's a bit of a struggle to find a spot in front of your own home
each night to place your car. But every
building is different. (Sure they're
uniformly three storeys.) I can't tell -
they to me could be early eighteen hundreds, then there's the occasional one
with the black strapping which might be two hundred years earlier.
The garbage man is doing
his work. The wheelie bin has not
arrived and, indeed, they don't use garbage bins either. They put their rubbish out in plastic bags,
which requires the garbage man, who works alone with a sort of an open top
truck, to walk along, pick up the bags and throw them in. So it certainly doesn't cope with noxious
waste or garden waste or heavy waste.
Joan says that sometimes the bags are attacked by a fox and the trash is
strewn all over the place. So there's
scope for Australian wheelie bin manufacturers to make a real killing in the
U.K. In fact, as I walk down the street
I see that there's another garbage man whose job it is to go to pick up all the
bags from in front of people's doorsteps and to throw them into the
gutter. I guess the man with the truck
comes along, merely picks them up from the piles already made for him. Very unsatisfactory system. Mind you the manufacturers of black garbage
bags would be doing quite well. Most of
the bags I see are only half filled anyway.
Here I am, back at No. 4. Let's see if Annie's awake. It's just after eight, and our punctilious
hosts expect us no later than eight-thirty.
Gary Andrews
ANNE & GARY ANDREWS - AUGUST/OCTOBER 2000
TRANSCRIPT OF GARY'S TAPE-RECORDED DIARY
PART 2 of 8
It is now twenty-four hours later, Wednesday
morning, and I'm again walking the streets of Ludlow. It's now about twenty-to-eight and I've been
walking for well over an hour and checking out suburbia in a different
direction. Not much stirs at
six-thirty. The shops selling newspapers
are open; the supermarket was restocking its shelves, and was open for
business; the milkman had been - they still have pint bottles with silver tops,
and these are left on the doorstep, the other interesting feature being that
the milkman also delivers bottled water.
Good marketing I suppose, that capitalises on a modern affectation. Certainly the Ludlow water is heavily
chlorinated but it's not impossible to drink.
The other early morning stirrer is the postman. We've seen in the movies that people open
their mail at breakfast, well it's true.
The post has been delivered before people get up; and I think there's a
further delivery in the afternoon.
Now to get some peace from the commercial
traffic - which is unduly noisy, I think, because I sense that all the small
vans through to the large lorries are diesel powered, so they have that sort of
motor mower clank about them. I'm here
in the churchyard again at St. Laurence's, and I have to report that where
yesterday I was describing this rather large but beautiful pigeon I now see a
very large pile of feathers. No sign of
a carcass or corpse but I suppose that has become the evening meal of the
fox. On the roadside we've seen a few
dead animals, not many, no more than you'd see on an Australian country
road. One badger, fox, squirrel.
I was tired after arriving on Saturday but not
jetlagged, simply lacking in sleep; and, as directed by the tour guides, I
didn't immediately go to sleep, and indeed stayed up until that evening. We went for lunch to one of the local pubs,
one that was on the River Teme looking back towards the town. Rather good food and a pleasant
atmosphere. I think there's a difference
between pubs and hotels - they're both licensed but hotels have accommodation,
pubs do not. Before lunch Anne and I
visited the Saturday street market, one that really replicates the market
through the week. Same
stallholders. So Anne was familiar with
the merchandise.
Sunday we were off on the first of our
trips. Some years ago we'd been given a
copy of the Automobile Association Touring Guide to Britain Volume 2 [the St.
Laurence clock, dead on cue, quarter-to-eight] and rather than list points of
interest alphabetically as Volume 1 of their touring guide does, Volume 2 has a
series of short day tours, and half-day tours; and I'd before leaving
photographed half a dozen of these that were reasonably close to Ludlow. Indeed, a couple of them went through Ludlow
as part of their circular route. So we
were off heading south and west and through Shropshire and into Wales, and had
a lovely day. Very leisurely. Long lunch break at Leominster. A town I would guess somewhat larger than
Ludlow17. Certainly a
bigger shopping precinct, and claiming twenty-eight antique shops. So a slightly different style of town, not
depending on its ancient history so much to draw the tourists. Roast beef at the Royal Talbot was splendid,
surpassed only by the Yorkshire pudding.
Monday we were due to meet up with our holiday
friends from Comillas in Spain three years ago, Janis and Graham Lander. We'd kept in touch with these folks simply
through Christmas cards, and after Anne had arrived in England she rang me to
see whether I could look out their address - she'd forgotten to bring it with
her. But I couldn't find it; and by the
most extraordinary coincidence a couple of days later there was a phone message
from Graham left on the answering machine.
He indicated his telephone and his email address. So I sent him off a note and told him how to
get in touch with Anne - and the rest, as they say, is history.18 So we were meeting them on Monday; but before
that we journeyed out of town a few miles to a fabric shop located in a barn of
a country estate at Shipton.
"Country estate", wrong words.
Doesn't give the right impression at all. The Shipton Manor House is huge. Open to the public on Thursdays only, so we
weren't going to see inside. The fabric
barn itself is an extraordinary business.
Marvellous display of curtain and furnishing fabrics as well as fabric
for quilting. Anne had been taken by
their temporary display in the window of the Ludlow tourist centre, in
particular some green curtaining fabric, very soft; and it turned out to be
chenille. So we have obtained a sample,
and if it doesn't clash with the green wallpaper in our bedroom we'll be able
to send off for enough to make curtains and hope that in the interim they
haven't sold out of stock.19
17. Leominster's population is 10100. See footnote 2 - Ludlow is certainly smaller.
18. "They" all say it, but I
haven't been able to track down the originator of the expression.
19. This all came to pass, and the soft
green curtains are lovely.
So we duly met up with the Landers at around
eleven o'clock, and had a very pleasant day with them. They have three married daughters, one of
whom is at Malvern, not so very far from Ludlow, so they'd spent the previous
night with that daughter and her husband and had an easy run up to Ludlow. So the full day spent mooching around Ludlow,
and then, after the Landers left us, back for an evening meal with Joan.
Tuesday, yesterday, after my long walk and
reviving breakfast we were off again, but this time with a mission. During our walk around Ludlow on Monday we'd
noticed in a cottage window reference to the annual quilt show at Llandlios,
and it was on right at the moment. Now
three years ago we'd come upon this town and their quilt show when touring
through Wales with Joan, and it had been a lovely
experience, and Anne had
exchanged names and felt very welcome.
So here, by a fluke really, we were being fated to return. And it's not very far from Ludlow - as it
turned out about an hour-and-a-half's drive, more or less to the west. The show was wonderful, all Welsh quilts,
mostly about a hundred years old, frequently with striking bold colours and
simple patterns. On the way home we had
time to go back to the fabric barn. In
addition to buying the sample of the curtain fabric, Anne had bought a length
of French toile, the intention being to cut sections from it, and make those
sections into a quilt. But on reflection
she didn't have quite enough, so we were able to go back and buy some more.
That rather feeble chiming is from the clock
in the buttercross. Buttercross is a
building - I guess it once stood in the heart of town just at the edge of the
market square. If the name means
anything [ah, there goes St. Laurence now, just a shade later], if the name
means anything it must have been a place where farm produce was sold,
presumably milk, butter and cheese.20 At the moment there's a bookseller setting up
his stall. I think each day there's a
different type of stallholder there. I
realise I've loitered a bit - it's eight o'clock, I should be home.
20. Numerous English towns have a buttercross. Originally a place where the women gathered
(around a Christian cross, I guess) to sell their butter and eggs. Later substantial shelter sheds were erected
in some places, although not all buttercrosses have shelter.
-
- - o O o - - -
Tape 2
It's Sunday morning, a clear bright sunny
Sunday morning in Paris. About
nine-thirty a.m., and although this is not the first opportunity I've had in
the last week to speak the diary, it's the first time I've - in a sense - had
nothing to do. Nothing to do because
we're at the laundromat and it will be half an hour before our clothes are
washed and dried. Without the language
even a simple thing like reading all the instructions - the difference between
soap, and wash, and dry, the size of load, and how to put the coins in the slot
- all very difficult, but as has always been our case in Paris, someone was on
hand and the whole process a delightful experience of communicating with
fractured language, lots of gesture, and much goodwill.
We bade farewell to our B&B hosts on
Wednesday morning and then later a fond farewell to Joan21,
and were on our way to Stratford.
Stratford-upon-Avon. The plan was
to meet up there with Judy Rowe at the home of her friends Liz and Ian, parents
of Tim who'd stayed with us some years ago while on a backpacking trip around
Australia with his two mates, Phil and Mike.
So we had a leisurely cross-country trip from Ludlow to Stratford - I
must say somewhat confusing. The
enormous network of roads and roundabouts and numbered signs - extraordinarily
detailed - but we still found it possible to get a little lost. Some would say what would be the point of a
trip with Gary unless you got a little lost!
Our undoing in a sense was spending some time in Kidderminster, not I
suppose a place well recognised outside Britain, but a very large centre.22 We roamed around the centre of the town, had
some lunch, and then on our way, arriving at Stratford at around four. Liz and Ian were both at work and we had
21. This was the last time we were to see
dear Joan. She died on 4th February
2001.
22. Population 56600.
instructions on how to
let ourselves into the house, but son - youngest son - Mike was at home and we
had a long chat with him before the others arrived, and Judy arrived from
London. Mike is doing casual work on the
boats along the river Avon, tourist boats, but the morning had threatened rain
and the boss had rung to put him off for the day. He's filling in time until he starts his
business studies course at Portsmouth University, but clearly his main love is
fencing. He's won a lot of contests as a
junior and done a lot of travelling with his sport, and has got to the point
where in the recent Olympic trials he scored as number three in Britain. No Olympic selection, however, because only
number one, the best fencer in the land, was of sufficient standard to be
allowed to compete in Sydney; but with such skill and at an age of twenty-one,
it was obvious to us (as it was important to Mike) that he continue with his
sport at all costs. This won't be easy
to do because the competition is so sparse and training facilities are not
widely available. He'll have to travel
to London two or three times a week to give himself the best opportunity. So he'll have a difficult job keeping on top
of his studies.
We'd booked ahead for seats at the Royal
Shakespeare Theatre to see As You Like It. Certainly there was the thrill of seeing
Shakespeare performed in the home of Shakespeare, but the impetus came from the
fact that the sets and costumes for this production were designed by Kaffe
Fassett, the English craftsman whose work Anne has long admired, and so have
I. Liz and Ian, who typically go to the
productions at Stratford, hadn't seen As You Like It, so they took the
opportunity also to book some seats. So
the five of us went along; and it was a very fine production. A somewhat difficult play I thought. The second half seems much longer than the
first; and the first was so fast-moving and buoyant it had the effect of making
the second half somewhat laboured. Very
wordy - no surprise for Shakespeare - and rather static. But the setting made up for all of that. Quite brilliant, and moving from sombre
blacks and greys in the first scenes to brilliantly colourful, and more so, as
the play progressed. See-through drop
curtain covered in huge embroidered flowers.
A number of huge cushions, a metre-and-a-half square, covered in coarse
woven tapestry. Everything to hit the
eye but not to detract from the play.
The intriguing thing to me is that not one of
the cast members was a name known to us, even from British television, and the
performances universally good. The
leading actress who played Rosalind was nothing short of brilliant, and the
leading part of Orlando, not quite so good; but it wasn't until having a drink
afterwards at "the pub where the actors drink" - and indeed they did
- we realised that he was a substitute on the night, not the actor who was
listed in the program but one who is listed for one of the minor roles. So not bad when the stand-in is word perfect
and convincing. And there was one scene
in the first act where there was a serious wrestling bout between Orlando and a
villain of the piece, which could not have been done without a lot of
rehearsal. So the stand-in is as well
trained as the principal.
Away next morning to London, Judy's place at
Surbiton. We had instructions in case we
got separated, but not necessary - we were able to follow close behind all the
way. And thank goodness, because the
route to Surbiton requires getting on to the ring road around London and then
turning off at a certain
point, and even though you have your
instructions the traffic does move extremely quickly and it's not helpful to
overshoot your exit point.
I'd been up early in the morning and done an
hour-and-a-half walk around Stratford. I
guess it's a place that's been totally transformed by tourists. There are three or four main attractions -
the house where Shakespeare was born, the church where he's supposedly buried23,
Anne Hathaway's cottage, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, my guess the river Avon
itself - which is very interesting at this point because it's joined by a
canal, and there's a lock and there are lots of river boats moored in the Avon
and in the canal; and it must be one of those places that's high on the list of
spots to visit in the UK. So one of the
streets, the street where the Shakespeare House stands, is converted to a mall
and the whole centre of the town is very attractive. And the Royal Shakespeare Theatre itself is
right on the river bank and there's a lot of parkland and a memorial to
Shakespeare. A good walking town. An indication of the amount of tourist
traffic is the fact that they have the open-topped double-decker city tour
buses.
By the time we got to Surbiton it was
afternoon and our plan then was to take our hire car into the city, and then to
get on the London Eye. Anne had
pre-arranged tickets, we had to collect them, and our time of departure was
five o'clock. The London Eye, this huge
ferris wheel, was erected in the year 2000.
It stands on the bank of the Thames, at Southbank, just near the
Festival Hall and not far from Waterloo Station. Our drop off point for the Avis car was at
Waterloo Station, so all very convenient.
So we dropped Judy's car at Surbiton station and then into the
city. Someone ought to be hung, drawn
and quartered for the lack of signage24. Certainly no way could we easily find where
the Avis depot was, or
23. And in which, inscribed on the flagstone
that is said to cover Shakespeare's burial site, is the famous epitaph:
Good friends, for
Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust
enclosed here;
Blest be the man that
spares these stones,
And curst be he that
moves my bones.
24. A little extreme perhaps. A simple flogging would do.
the depot for any other hire car firm. It was down in a car park, underneath the
station, but no signage up top and none in the station itself. Eventually we asked a courier driver and
found our way down below where we simply left the car with keys in it. It wasn't a manned cubicle or anything of
that sort and one presumes that the car park has security people to see that
someone else doesn't drive the car away.
Anyway, up top, down to the river (right by the London Eye), pick up our
tickets, and then half an hour or so to kill.
I went for a walk "across the bridges", that is across
Westminster Bridge to the corner where the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben
are, and then along the Thames Embankment to the next bridge, I think the
Hungerford Bridge - a railway bridge but with a pedestrian walkway - and then
back the other side to meet up with Anne and Judy. On to the big Eye. Enormous queues of people, but moved very
quickly. The Eye's about 135 metres high
and there are I think about forty pods, carriages that hold twenty-five people
each and lots of space; and of course the views are incomparable. You only go one revolution, but that gives an
opportunity for a lot of profit to Mr. Kodak, and views in all directions
including interesting views through the superstructure of the wheel itself -
looking down on it, looking across through it, looking up to the carriage above
you.
After the Eye - lasted a
little under half an hour - we were to meet up with James and Antony Rowe,
Judy's sons. James manages a bar, one of
a chain, but had suggested it was not smart to come to his place because very
crowded and very noisy, but there was another one of the chain quite close to
the Eye where he'd meet us. When we got
there it was jam-packed and almost impossible, so after James arrived we went
to a different spot. Antony, who only
two weeks ago started with a London law firm, was held up and indeed didn't
arrive for another hour; and all this time we were waiting for news of Tom's
arrival from Australia. We'd had a
message on the phone from Dan on the day before, saying Tom had gotten away,
but we weren't on the air when Tom would have been in Singapore, and had been
hoping to hear from him from the plane to get an indication of his
arrival. He had arrived on time,
around five o'clock when we were getting on to the Eye, but hadn't been able to
contact us. He'd been on the phone to
British Telecom and had received half a dozen different instructions on how to prefix
our handphone number, and eventually got through to us by dialling a prefix for
Australia - Melbourne. All very
complicated and something wrong somewhere.
We'd intended to tell Tom to catch the fast train from Heathrow to its
terminus in the city, then by underground to Waterloo where we'd meet him. Our concern at this late stage was that we'd
miss him entirely and he'd simply have to find his way to Judy's place at
Surbiton; and if he wasn't there we'd have no indication of whether the plane
had been delayed or whatever. Anyway, the phone rings and ....... the noise
you hear is the Paris garbage collector.
Brand new, beautiful green white and grey truck with the driver and two
collectors dressed in BP-green uniforms and caps, and jackets a lime green with
grey stripes - all very efficient, emptying the wheelie bins with the lifting
apparatus. The wheelie bins are about
half as big again as the ones we have in Melbourne; and they're throwing the
black bags into the back as well. This
is a commercial district, but several street cafes as well, and people living
upstairs. So I guess the waste is a
combination of household and commercial.
And I see further down the street the wheelie bin that's being lifted in
is a double- or triple-sized one, a sort of hopper like a skip; and it's all adapted
to the lifting device on the back of the truck.
The streets of Paris, as we noticed yesterday
evening, are very dirty and full of a lot of trash, but I'm sure this is a
function of two things. First the huge
number of people who use the streets - locals and tourists - and second,
there's a certain lack of concern about tidiness and rubbish. We found up at Montmartre that the street
rubbish bins were just simply unable to cope with the amount of trash that was
around and they were piled high, and then piles on the ground beside them. So a lot of the problem could be solved
simply by doubling or trebling the size of the pavement rubbish tins. The amount of trash we saw was, I think,
simply the trash of the day and overnight or next morning it's all going to be
swept up and the cycle starts again. We
walked through several streets of fabric shops and stalls. Anne was lucky enough to be able to buy some
French toile, both fabrics of identical colour.
Anne already has a quilt in mind.
The mess outside those shops was awful.
But even as we left the shops the street sweepers were at work - maybe
on Montmartre they do it twice a day.
Unfortunately a lot of dog turds, so it is important to watch your step
since it's obviously a feature of a city where so many people live in the city
and live in apartments and have no backyards, and they have small dogs. We haven't yet seen any dog walker with a
plastic bag in hand, so either it's not custom, or there are no fines, or
nobody gives a damn. Back in Ludlow
there were signs indicating a five hundred pounds fine. But the more interesting signs
were those that had a small dog pictured with the words "no
fouling". And the mind begins to
race at the thought of dogs that can read, or dogs that not only can read but
can control their bowel motions.
So there we were having a quiet drink in a
London bar, and the phone rings and it's Tom .... and not stranded somewhere
along the way, not still at Heathrow, not at Judy's place at Surbiton, but at
Waterloo Station two hundred metres away.
So "stand under the clock, don't move, and I'll be there in five
minutes". Great to see him. He had had no recurrence of the headache or
neck pain and, as should be the case, was about six inches off the ground with
excitement at being in London. James had
to head off for another engagement.
Antony arrived. Home on the train
to Surbiton. Brilliant meal put together
by Judy; and so to bed25.
Tom on the floor, but grateful to have a place as his London base for
the next few days.
25. A phrase I happily steal
from Samuel Pepys, who had the same inclination in 1660.
Next morning, Thursday, farewell to Judy at
the station and then back to Waterloo for a ten-thirty departure on the
Eurostar through the Chunnel to Paris.
Tom came with us, intending to spend a day walking the streets of London
- the main problem, I think, to choose from the many options that we'd talked
about. We heard from him that night, and
he'd spent the day walking, but as soon as we'd left it had started to rain and
in shorts and tee-shirt and without umbrella he'd been drenched the whole day,
but having a great time. One of his
tasks was to figure out when to come to Paris and whether to come on the
Eurostar or on a cross-Channel ferry and, while making enquiries, he'd been
approached by a French lass who gave, underline gave!, him a ticket on the
Eurostar. She'd been unexpectedly called
home on the Thursday but her ticket was for Sunday, not transferrable; so Tom
had had a spot of good luck again.
Our trip on the train was uneventful. Once again the signage difficult. Not because everything's in French and
English, but because it's not clearly enough explained. Every Eurostar traveller has a numbered seat
in a numbered carriage, and it's a very long train - so coming from the waiting
lounge to the platform there are a number of ramps bearing different numbers;
and a number of different platforms. And
the numbers on the ticket don't correspond with the numbers overhead, and A and
C go one way and B goes another. But we
got there, and I was surprised to see that the train was only about half
full. The trip from Waterloo to the
tunnel itself is at standard British Rail speed and it's not until you're
through the tunnel that the train hits its stride. By that time you are going through the French
countryside and you don't really get an impression of how fast you're
travelling.26
Arrival in Paris was somewhat stressful -
arriving at the main station of the north, Gare du Nord, and then by Metro to
the station nearest to our hotel.
Difficult because enormous number of people arriving and passing through
this station, and the automatic vending machines too difficult for us, and only
two windows selling tickets and providing information, and very long queues. Anyway, about half an hour all told before we
were in the Metro and on our way, not very far, to our hotel near the Opera in
a small street off Boulevard Haussmann. The name Haussmann appears quite a lot, Baron
Haussmann being the man who was commissioned by Napoleon III to
rejuvenate Paris, and responsible for knocking down a large part of the city
and creating the avenues and the boulevards and the squares and all the three
to four storey architecture which is now so part of Paris. The Baron is also commemorated by our hotel
The Grand Haussmann. Not really grand,
three stars going on two. Looks as
though they've acquired an adjacent building because some of the hotel is at a
half floor lower than the rest. Very
modern ensuite though. Everything very
clean. Just disappointing to find that
our window looks not on to a street, or into a courtyard, but into a lightwell.
The weather has been superb. Overcast until today (but today bright
sunshine), but temperatures around twenty degrees. Shorts and sandals, and no sign of the rain
that Tom encountered in London on Thursday.
No time for unpacking. Straight out into the streets, and we passed
by the Opera. Continuous process of
restoration I think. The building is not
particularly old27 but the stonework is crumbling badly, and
in a number of places the statues and plinths around the outside are being
supported by scaffolding, and the restoration of the stonework is
proceeding. Past the Opera into a very
large church, St. Augustin's. A wedding
in progress, and we lingered to see the procession down the aisle. A very fashionably-dressed band of family and
friends. A long walk then through the
afternoon to the Arc de Triomphe. All of
this on the north side of the Seine, the so-called right bank. Down the subway and up under the arch itself
and, unlike three years ago, this time Anne full of vigour and tackled the
stairs to the top. The monument a little
tired in spots but not surprising considering its age,28 and
considering the enormous
26. Maximum speed 300 kph.
27. The Opera de Paris
Garnier, commissioned by Napoleon III, designed 1862, opened 1875.
28. Completed 1836. 50 metres high.
numbers of tourists and feet that tread the
stairs. In many ways the stairs were the
best part, the brass edgings on the steps seemingly untroubled by the millions
of feet that must have touched them. And
from the Arc de Triomphe the long procession down the Champs Elysses where we
were tempted not by the fashionable outdoor cafes but by the gloomy indoor
MacDonalds. French fries of course; and
then down to the Place de la Concorde.
Something new this time - there's a very large ferris wheel and, being
the complete tourists, we climbed aboard.
Good view, but not as good as from the top of the Arc de Triomphe. The view from there is unimpeded and it's
just the right height. The people below
don't look like ants, and you can get a proper perspective of the city.
From the ferris wheel through the Tuileries
Gardens. By this time getting dark; and
then a little bit lost on our way back to the Opera district and our hotel.
One of the intended highlights of our trip was
to visit Monet's house and garden at Giverny, and on enquiry we learnt that it
was not open on Sunday or Monday so it had to be tomorrow, Saturday. A number of ways of getting there including a
train and bus, or large bus tour; and in the end for a little
extra we booked ourselves
into a mini-bus tour. It turned out to
be first prize, driver and six people, personalised tour and commentary. That was leaving one-thirty on Saturday and
we still had the morning, so off to the department store Galeries
Lafayette. We'd been there before but
continue to be amazed by the tracery and colours of the glass dome and art
nouveau windows. Anne had wanted to get
some French linen, sheets or some such, but wasn't particularly taken with any
of the designs, or the prices, and settled for a couple of pillow slips. On to another large Parisian church, Trinity
Church, under major restoration inside, and exclusively for the tourists at the
moment. The whole nave off limits, and
if there are services of worship they must be in the side chapels. The park in front of the church very
pleasant, however, and there we lunched.
Gary Andrews
ANNE & GARY ANDREWS - AUGUST/OCTOBER 2000
TRANSCRIPT OF GARY'S TAPE-RECORDED DIARY
PART 3 of 8
What you've just heard were two street
singers. Anne called them buskers, but
that really is not an appropriate term.
They were singing at the Palais Royal late on Sunday afternoon. They'd set up with their portable cassette
player. They had a number of tapes of
opera without words, and were entertaining quite a large crowd of Sunday
strollers. As Anne says, only in Paris
could you encounter such a thing. But
the real surprise was not that we'd encountered a couple of street singers but
that they were of such extraordinary talent.
We stayed for about half an hour, but Anne could have stayed all night I
think.
I'll take you back to Saturday afternoon. We were picked up at our hotel by the
mini-bus. A French driver named
Jeff. A little incongruous we thought,
but delightful man. Two other couples
were picked up, one couple from Israel, and the other from Atlanta. They were a mixed bag. She was Swedish and he was English, although
clearly they'd lived in the United States for many years. So the seven of us happily set off for
Giverny outside Paris, and Monet's house and garden. On the way we were shown the house in a
village that was occupied at an earlier stage by Monet, his wife, his mistress,
and the mistress' five children - and very cramped it must have been. But the house at Giverny was a spacious
country house. Two storeys, long facade,
uncomplicated - and the remarkable garden.
It seems that Monet was not really prosperous at the time he built the
house, but certainly became so later and was able to put a lot of effort into
the design and maintenance of the garden, and the famous lily ponds. One extraordinary aspect of the whole story
is that he persuaded the municipal authorities to allow him to divert the local
river so as to create the lily ponds, and the proper flow of fresh water - but
not a strong flow - and then to introduce into the water varieties of water
lilies that had been hybridised by a French botanist.
The gardens are closed for some months of the
year and, if our day was any indication, there are so many tourists at any one
time that it would be impossible for gardeners to work at other times.29 Nevertheless everything seems very well
kept. This may simply be that the
plantings are so profuse that there's no room for the weeds to grow. We were very surprised to see the height of a
number of the flowers that in Australia might grow to say two feet, but here
they were four and five feet tall.
Tape 3
One of the interesting aspects is that Monet's
garden has been re-created. It was not
kept up after he died in the 1920s30 and it wasn't until many
years later that a group of Americans put the time and the money into restoring
it to its original splendour. Must be
one of the great tourist attractions of France.
29. That
is, impossible to work when the gardens are open to the public.
30. Monet
lived from 1840 to 1926.
The house itself was thoroughly charming. We were enchanted by the bright colours, the
kitchen in bright yellows, and the dining room in brilliant monochrome; and
throughout the house hundreds of Japanese prints. These were collected by Monet and to some
extent were his inspiration and the inspiration of the French Impressionist
movement itself. Beside the house a
separate building, with a very high ceiling and roofline, that was Monet's
studio. Apparently built especially so
he could paint the huge water lily paintings that he then gave to France, and
which hang in the Orangerie in the Tuileries Gardens near the Champs
Elysees. These days the building itself
is given over to the visitor centre and shop, and our friend from Atlanta - who
said that she was herself a painter - was somewhat upset that she couldn't see
Monet's studio in its original form; but with the vast numbers of people buying
souvenirs it was clear that this amount of space is necessary so that the trust
that looks after the Monet house and garden can maximise its revenue. There was, down the street, a gallery of
American Impressionist works but we simply didn't have time to take that in.
On the mini-bus and back to Paris. On the way out of town we'd picked up the
Americans at their hotel which was in the Montmartre district, and we'd noticed
a lot of merchandising in the streets, including fabric stalls. So on the way back we asked to be dropped off
there rather than back at our hotel, and we spent some time going through the
fabric shops. We'd been dropped off
about five-thirty and the shops were mostly closing up, and indeed were all closed
by six, so it was a pretty rushed expedition.
Still time enough though for Anne to buy some fabric; and then we were
off up the hill to Sacre Coeur.
Extraordinary church, high on the hill, and built in shining white stone
which, according to the guide books, becomes harder with age (in stark contrast
to the rest of the Paris white stone that seems to crumble with age), and has a
number of high pointed domes that accentuate the height of the building.
Weather still very hot, and we had had a long
day. Montmartre not so very far away
from the Opera district, directly behind.
So we made our way down the hill and to our hotel. By this time we'd heard from Tom and knew
that he was arriving the next day.
And the next day, the Sunday morning, our
first stop was at the laundromat. Anne
did the washing, and I recorded some diary, and then a special trip to a
cemetery on the outskirts of Paris. The
village named Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.
First by Metro and then on to the
aboveground railway system, the RER, to Sainte-Genevieve; and then by
taxi for about two kilometres from the station - in search of the grave of Rudolf
Nureyev. The cemetery has a very large
section for Russians. We couldn't
ascertain whether this was the only Russian Orthodox cemetery in Paris, but
certainly it was the main one to the south of the city. There must have been an enormous number of
Russians who came to Paris after the Russian Revolution. Certainly there was an aristocracy in exile,
and no doubt they brought their religion with them as well as their
belongings. So in the process of finding
Nureyev’s grave we realised that all
around there would have been many famous
twentieth century Russians - but sadly there was no pamphlet, and no sign
board. We did see the grave of Serge
Lifar, the choreographer; but it was Nureyev's grave that was our goal. Anne had in Melbourne last year heard a talk
by Kaffe Fassett - yes, the man who designed the sets for As You Like It
- and Fassett, in more recent times, has become very interested in mosaic; and
in his illustrated address refers to Nureyev's tomb as a prime example of
modern mosaic art - and indeed it is.
The tombstone is about a metre high, not box- like, but rising to a sort
of hump. Black marble base, with this
ornate rug thrown over the top, the rug being in glorious golds and reds and
mosaic. An extraordinary work of art,
and certainly worth the visit.
Unfortunately there were trees that were keeping the direct sunlight off
the tomb, and we don't think that our photographs will do full justice to the
brilliance of the colour.
Knowing that we were so far from the station
we'd arranged for the taxi to call back for us, but the driver had
miscalculated and suggested that we would need an hour-and-a-half, whereas we
were through in about half-an-hour. So
we cooled our heels waiting for our return trip. And then back to the station we went through
the centre of town where they were in the process of dismantling the morning
street market. If we'd only known we
could have come via the market, then on to the cemetery. Anyway c'est la vie.
Anne was a little tired by this so she went
back to the hotel, and I continued on the Metro to have a look at the Marais
district. This is part of Paris neither
of us had previously visited. It's the
old Jewish quarter, although I'm told that no Parisian Jews survived the Second
World War, and any Jews that are now in residence have migrated there
since. To me just another vibrant
quarter of the city with the usual cheek by jowl street cafes. I surfaced just outside the Bastille
Opera. This is the new opera theatre
that has replaced the Paris Opera Garnier (the one near where we're staying -
the old Paris Opera). The Bastille itself
long torn down. In the centre of the
Place de la Bastille a huge column commemorating the Fourth of July.31 On through the Marais district to the
Pompidou Centre. Huge building. Modern architecture. Famous for having its inside on the
outside. But the building with enormous
panache and the sort of structure that Paris in its typical over-the-top
fashion has no trouble accommodating.
Then the long walk back to the Grand Haussmann, mainly along the Rue
Rivoli; and by this time Tom had arrived and Tom and Anne were ready to hit the
streets.
31. I don't know where I got
4th July from. The column is called the
Column of July and commemorates the revolution of 27th to 30th July 1830 that
overthrew King Charles X - commonly known as the Second French Revolution.
The first place on the agenda was the Palais
Royal where we heard the two singers of opera, and then circle around the
Louvre museum, through the Tuileries Gardens and up the Champs Elysees, the
opposite direction from which Anne and I had travelled two days earlier. Dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Champs
Elysees. We'd been a little thoughtful
about the likely prices, the Champs Elysees being renowned as the highest rent
street in the world, but our plates of pasta were a shade under twenty dollars
each, not much more than we'd be paying in Lygon Street, Melbourne.
Wandering the streets in
the previous couple of days we'd noticed these signs indicating a three day
festival, including fireworks at ten o'clock each night. We'd certainly heard the fireworks on the
Friday night and the Saturday night, and we decided that it would be great to
see the Sunday night fireworks from the Eiffel Tower. So it was after nine o'clock before we made
our way across the Seine to the Tower.
Not a long queue, but we were a bit anxious that the top deck would be
closed before we managed to get up there, so we didn't linger on the first and
second levels, straight to the top, and duly waited for the fireworks. Very disappointing - there weren't any. We had our binoculars with us and we could
see down across the river in front of the Trocadero - a platform seemed to have
been built in the middle of the large pond.
The fountains that usually shoot great streams of water the length of
the pond were not working, and there seemed to be a lot of activity on this
small platform, indicating that they were setting up the fireworks. But after watching for nearly an hour it was
clear that things weren't happening the way we expected. And the breeze had gotten up and it was
really quite chilly, and we were dressed in shorts and short sleeves. I was the first to depart. Took the lift down to the second level and
then, as I'd been promising Anne and Tom, I walked from there to the
ground. The reason for this was not to
prove that I could do it but because I'd previously noticed that down the stairway
there are occasional posters that tell about the Tower, or interesting things
that have happened to it, or people who've been associated with it. And the signs are in French and English so it
was possible to pick up the information quite readily. I spent some time looking around the
observation platform at the first level, and then down to the ground and sat on
the seat by the small merry-go-round waiting for Tom and Anne. They really did wait until it was clearly
obvious that there would be no fireworks, and it was quite some time before
they joined me. Then down into the Metro
for a quick trip home. It was about
midnight but to our consternation the next train didn't leave until about
five-to-one. So up to street level again
and home by taxi.
Earlier in the day Tom had visited
half-a-dozen hotels nearby to the Grand Haussmann and had found that most of
them were fully booked. The one he got
into was called the Hotel London, and it was really just around the corner, so
we were all able to alight together.
Anne thought Tom's hotel was much better than ours - same star rating,
three star, but the room a little more spacious. The bath had a spa, and the decoration in what
Anne called "typical French style" - white decor with vertical pink
or green lines - both on the walls and on the furniture.
-
- - o O o - - -
You've just heard two sound clips. The first was a fierce electrical storm in
Perugia on the night of Sunday, 17 September.
The second was music we'd heard at a wedding in Gropina in Tuscany just
near where we're staying. Today is
Wednesday, 27 September, and those who are counting - I am not - will realise
that it's more than two weeks since I put recorder to lips. No apology for this, but I do have a lot of
catching up to do. A number of reasons
for my delinquency, but mainly because I'm not driven to record some
diary every day; and we have been busy.
And also because I've been sleeping late - I don't have available to me
a couple of hours each morning before the house stirs. Anne can't believe how relaxed I am; and, by
the way, so is she. She's never before,
she says, seen me read three novels in a week.
Having travelled before with half a dozen books in my luggage returned
home unread, this time I merely packed a book of short stories. But in Perugia I found a street bookseller
with some English language books. Tom
had tried everywhere in the new book shops to find some English language
science fiction, but with no luck. So
first I read a green Penguin Maigret thriller.
Not very thrilling, and on the detective mystery scale I gave it two out
of ten; and then Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I have never seen the film, or certainly not
all of it, but had an idea of the story, and am quite relaxed about a story of
extra-terrestrials making contact with earthlings, and contact which is more
elevating than set on conquest. My guess is that Spielberg wrote the book
after the film. My further guess is that
today he'd be rather ashamed at the book.
It's a real dog.
The third book I found in the house here at
Loro Cuiffenna. The house is in the
hands of English travel agents and their Australian contacts through whom Anne
made the booking. But all its visitors
seem to be English speakers and many of them have left behind their holiday
reading. So there's a long shelf of
popular fiction. And the first one I
grabbed was The English Patient.
Again, I've not seen the film, but the book is really very good. It won the Booker Prize a few years ago, and
it's the sort of book I suspect that appeals to prize juries. Pacifist, and plenty of the horrors of war
but without blood and guts; passionate without being raunchy; mysterious
without being contrived. There were some
spots in it that I found a bit cute or unresolved and wouldn't myself award it
a ten out of ten. Anne is reading it at
the moment and enjoying it - not only the book itself but comparing it with the
film that she enjoyed so much.
-
- - o O o - - -
When last I left you it was Sunday night in
Paris. The three of us had returned to
our respective hotels from a lovely night up the Eiffel Tower, and we were
preparing for the next day, Tom's first day in Paris, and Anne and I were
trying to decide on his behalf what were his essential "must
sees". One had to be Notre Dame,
although when Anne and I had previously visited we had for some reason been
underwhelmed and were more impressed with Sainte Chapelle, the personal church
of the monarch, a hundred yards or so away from Notre Dame - both on the Ile de
la Cite, the island in the Seine River.
So via Metro. At this point we
respectively produced our three-day passes.
These proved to be a wonderful asset and enabled us to go up and down
the underground for unlimited journeys, as well as providing other benefits
that we didn't use. On street level,
first stop Sainte Chapelle. Truly
beautiful, and with its slender stained windows - the upper chapel one of the
few places that I know where it might be possible to have a personal spiritual
experience. Most of the churches we've
seen over the last fortnight - and there have been many - can be grand and can
be beautiful, can be stunning, but really do they speak to the individual? At a mass for a thousand people, maybe. Sainte Chapelle did, it seems to me, have a
personal voice.
On from there to Notre Dame, and this time
Anne and I were very impressed. I think
the exterior may have been cleaned in recent times. It fairly gleams. There were huge crowds and we decided not to
climb the tower and walk on the parapet, although it would have been fun, I
suppose, to imagine ourselves the hunchback and to imagine pouring
boiling oil32 on to the crowds below. Instead we walked around the Ile St. Louis,
the other island in the Seine, mainly looking for the Hotel Henry IV. We'd noted the existence of this hotel during
our last trip and thought that it would be stunning to stay in a hotel on an
island in the river. But we hadn't been
able to find any recent reference to it, and during our walk around likewise -
no sign indicating its existence. Or was
it a dream? Of course not33.
32. On sober reflection I
realise it was molten lead, not boiling oil.
33. And I can't find the
Hotel Henri IV in any internet directory - maybe it has closed since 1997. But, on Ile de la Cite there is a statue of
Henri IV ..... which overlooks the Taverne Henri IV - a wine bar, not a hotel!
Tom left us at this point, and Anne and I
walked through the Marais district as I had done on the previous day. Apart from Anne seeing what to her was a new
part of Paris there were two reasons for this particular excursion. First, there was an exhibition in the Place
de le Bastille of an artist's work comprising multiple mobiles. Electrically driven. Some figures, some shapes, all painted in
bright harlequin colours and accompanied by different types of etherial music
as you walked through the display. The
other specific reason for being in this part of the city was to visit the Bank
of France. I had brought with me from
Melbourne three old French banknotes.
One for a thousand francs and two of a hundred francs each. In today's currency that would have amounted
to about one hundred and twenty-five dollars, some very nice pin money. I'd showed these to the desk clerk at the
hotel and he said he'd been living in France for over twenty years and that
he'd never seen anything like it, and they must be very valuable. He encouraged me to go to a dealer, but
easier said and done. And then later I'd
showed them to the cashier at the post office, who gave me the address of the
Bank of France branch at the Place de la Bastille. It turns out that this branch of the Bank is
the place where they deal with foreign currency and with old currency. I had a recollection that some years ago the
French had adjusted their currency, and I'm sure that more than a decade back
when we were travelling the French was very like the Italian, that is,
something like a thousand to the dollar, or a thousand to the pound - but lots
of zeros. And that wasn't the case with
the French any longer, approximately four francs to the Australian dollar. So I should have realised; and it was with
some disappointment and a degree amusement that I heard the bank teller offer me
twelve francs for my old notes. So I
kept them.
The whole experience at the bank was quite
extraordinary. First, we'd arrived at
lunch time and the bank was closed. So
much of France (and of course Italy) closes for an extended lunch break. But you really wouldn't expect the Bank of France
to be adhering to such a custom. So we
walked around, and then came back after opening time only to find a large queue
in the street. And the process is that
there are two lots of doors, a sort of a submarine airlock, and people are
admitted two and three at a time as two or three previous customers
depart. So you wait outside in the rain
- rather than inside - when it's raining.
Dare I say only the French would dream up something like this. But it gets worse. Once inside we were greeted by a young man at
a counter wearing open-necked shirt and jeans, and then allotted a number
depending on whether we were intending to transact in a foreign currency or in
French currency. The French currency
teller was out of sight around the corner, but I got to see him fairly
quickly. But those wanting to exchange
foreign currencies were in for a long wait indeed. When we went in there were two
tellers, but one immediately disappeared, so it was a slow grind for those who
were wanting to cash travellers cheques, etc.
Really quite an appalling performance, and one totally oblivious to the
needs of customers. So no richer but a
little wiser we took the Metro back to the Champs Elysses.
On our first day in Paris Anne had seen a red
handbag and had foolishly dithered over whether to buy it, and then two days
later had decided she really would like to, but then couldn't remember where
she'd seen it in the shop window. She
thought it was the Champs Elysses, hence that became our destination. So after a frustrating walk, and a more
frustrating search for a lavatory, it was back to the Grand Haussmann. Given that the places we go to are tourist
centres, the lavatory situation is really quite appalling. This is not a new problem - I for one have
been ranting about it for years. It's
not just that they don't exist, where they do exist they're not necessarily
marked. In Italy they use the letters
WC, so that at least is helpful, but in many instances the letters are simply
beside the door of a lavatory hidden in a side street or under an archway, and
not displayed in the main street or on any signpost. And add to this the fact that many of them
are squats, those that have bowls frequently don't have seats, there's hardly
ever any paper, and often you have to
hand over money to some aged crone sitting outside the door ..... I'm being
very unkind of course, they're not all aged crones - sometimes even the male
counterpart - and no doubt they provide a useful service in keeping things
orderly; but there has to be something a little odd about someone who makes a
living from listening to other people's bodies function ..... which brings me
back to the Champs Elysses and to MacDonalds and – thank you MacDonalds - to
their lavatories. But sadly the amount
of traffic seems to be more than the staff can cope with. They were quite off, and a surprising
departure from the meticulous attention to cleanliness that is, so far as I'm
aware, part of the MacDonalds ethos world wide.
Back at the hotel it was getting quite late in
the afternoon and Anne had had enough for one day, but I wanted to take up the
suggestion of Judy Russell to search out the Pere Lachaise cemetery. The Russell family had found this place and
found the burial spot of a great number of French celebrities. So I was back into the underground and to the
cemetery in about ten minutes. Bit of a
walk, and then the cemetery on the side of a hill. Extremely steep, quite large, and how was I
going to find any of the graves? At the
gate there was a list of celebrities interred within, with an indication of the
location, but I couldn't memorise more than two or three and was in a quandary;
and the cemetery was due to close in a little over half an hour. Not surprisingly there were others who were
doing the same thing, and so wherever there were two or three people looking at
a tombstone it proved to be someone famous.
And I did see Chopin's grave courtesy of a group of Germans who were
having an instructed tour. It was only
then that I noticed that lots of people were carrying small pamphlets and, upon
enquiry, found that these were available from the main gate (I'd come in
through a side entrance) inside the office where an attendant was on duty - but
no external indication that such a map was available. So I headed downhill to the office, asked for
a map, was duly given it, asked whether I should pay, got a shrug of the
shoulders, and handed over a coin knowing that this was not going to
find its way into the public coffers.
And then barely time to chase uphill to find a couple more graves - only
to be asked by some other mapless tourist to be directed to the grave of Oscar
Wilde. Sadly for me and for Oscar he's
buried right at the top of the hill, and I showed them
where on the map, told them to run, and cautioned them against heart
seizure. It was all good fun and
certainly an interesting place to visit next time for a leisurely morning and a
picnic lunch.
This was Monday evening, and the next day we
were due to collect our car and head on our way to Italy. We had to pick it up from the Avis depot and I
was a bit thoughtful about the difficulty we might have in finding the place,
accompanied by the fact that we'd be lugging cases and carrying backpacks. So on my way back to the hotel I detoured to
find the Avis office. It was in Rue
Bixio fairly close to the Invalides - that mammoth building that's on the list
of every visitor to Paris, but not for us this time - and it took me some time
to find. I did so courtesy of a very old
lady who, beautifully dressed, was out walking her small dog. All Paris dogs, by the way, are small. Their turds are not necessarily. Having found Avis I retraced my steps to the
nearest Metro noting that we would have about three hundred metres to walk the
next morning.
Next morning the long haul seemed all a bit
silly, so having collected Tom we grabbed a taxi - only to find that the
charming French female driver had no idea at all how to find Rue Bixio, and no
knowledge of English. So having made the
right sort of noises and actions she understood - and took us to the office of
Air France! So at this point we had to
resort to the street directory and, although I'm sure she'd never heard of the
street, once she turned the corner and saw the Avis sign, it all became
clear. So the next Avis customer she
carries will have the benefit of our geography lesson.
On the Monday night Anne was still a bit
flagged, and Tom and I went out for a Mexican dinner. No more incongruous I suppose than having a
Lebanese meal in Melbourne (which I've never done) or having a Chinese meal in
Perugia (which we resisted). We were
leaving Paris on the Tuesday morning and had until the late Saturday afternoon
to check into our accommodation in Perugia.
Our route was undecided but there were two points of contact. First, Anne's friend Rita from Byron Bay
happens at the moment to be on an extended visit with her mother in Basle,
Switzerland, and there was some possibility that Rita might be able to journey
south and perhaps meet up with us near Lake Como in northern Italy. But Anne had spoken to Rita and no car was
available so the idea was shelved; and in any event the girls will catch up
with each other later in the year when Rita returns to Australia. Our other contact was with Monique Dagnaud, a
French lady with whom Anne had struck up a very close friendship when Monique
came into the shop in Maling Road.
Monique and her husband Alain had been staying in Melbourne because of
Alain's work and Monique, a patchworker, had been doing the rounds of the
patchwork shops. On the day they first
met Alain was accompanying as the interested husband. On a later occasion, after Monique had
visited the shop Anne had driven her home to their South Yarra apartment. Anyway there'd been an exchange of names and
the suggestion of contact when we came to France. The Dagnaud's have a daughter living in Lyon
and this place, being more or less on a direct run to Italy, was where Anne had
expected to meet up with Monique. In the
event there was some lack of communication and Monique had not intended to go
to Lyon, but was quite happy to see us at their home in Toulouse - somewhat
sceptical though because Toulouse is a fair way south and Monique thought too
far out of our way. But not to be
deterred, and hardened by years of travelling long distances in Australia, we set out from Avis
at about ten o'clock on the Tuesday morning, Toulouse our goal. Well had no trouble at all. It was about eight hundred kilometres34
34. 831
kilometres, according to the "Road Distances in France" website.
Tape 4
but freeways all the way. And we had a delightful day driving through
the changing patterns of the French countryside. The Peripherique is a huge ring road that
circles Paris, and if you're on the opposite side of the city from the way you
wish to travel, it can be a long business getting around to your side before
peeling off on to the appropriate highway.
We were lucky that our starting point was to the south of the city and
were soon able to get on to the Peripherique and then soon off it on the road
to Toulouse. The left-hand drive car
hasn't really been a problem. I've done a few silly things but most of these
have been courtesy of confusing signage; and never once have I committed the
cardinal sin of doing a left-hand turn into the oncoming traffic lane. Our French car is a Renault. It's automatic, whereas the Fiat in England
was manual; and it's more powerful, 1.6 litres, but on balance I'd rather have
the Fiat. The Renault is very pleasant
around cities, and fine on the highway until there's any gradient - at which
point it becomes quite gutless. But it's
four door. The Fiat was only two door,
and a bit awkward - when we were with Joan - for Anne to be clambering in and
out of the back seat. And we needed the
four door because we knew that most of our journey Tom would be with us.
Anne rang the Dagnauds at lunch time when we'd
stopped for a break near Limoges and they were a little surprised, I think, to
know that we were on our way and likely to be there by nightfall. Up till then there were no arrangements, but
it became clear that we had to stay with them - which we did. Alain works in the telecommunications
industry and his company has been launching satellites from various places
around the globe. He worked for some
years in Africa, and was in Melbourne for a couple of years on a project that
will be completed in about another year, and there is some prospect that he'll
have to go to Trinidad for an extended period.
His company is based in Toulouse but the Dagnauds don't regard Toulouse
as their home. They're from Apt in
Provence and the house in Tuscany35 is their second
35. Slip
of the tongue - I meant Toulouse.
home, necessitated by his employment. Well, as second homes go, its a doozy. It's a two-hundred-year-old farm house
completely renovated where it matters, kitchen and bathroom, but wonderfully
provincial in the bedrooms and living rooms.
The Dagnauds were embarrassingly apologetic about the fact that there
was one bathroom only, although a second lavatory under the stairs, but to us
everything was simply perfect. Monique
was also apologetic - continually so - about her lack of English. Her English is really quite good and there
was no lack of ability to communicate.
She compares herself unfavourably with Alain, who speaks English like a
native, but with of course a charming French accent. Her hospitality was boundless. We had an extended evening and meal on the
Tuesday night, with the promise of a "real meal" the following
evening. We opted for the proffered BBQ
rather than the restaurant in town, and could have stayed for a lot longer,
although it was pretty clear to us that two nights was all we could spare.
On the Wednesday, that's
the 13th September, Monique took us into Toulouse and we had a good look around
the area of the Capitole, a large and historic public building. It was something of a day out for Monique
herself because even though she lives a couple of kilometres out of town for
extended periods of the year, she doesn't frequently go into the city. All their major shopping is done at some
regional shopping centre.
The port area was interesting. Toulouse is not on the sea but has in the
past had river trade, although there's now a spillway across the river and it
can't be navigable upstream from that point.
The old port area has been polished up and is an interesting place to
visit. There are river cruises
available, although our time of arrival at the docks didn't coincide with any
boat's departure time. We were inspired
to telephone Judy Russell, not only to indicate that we were in Toulouse - the
place where the Russells had stayed a couple of years earlier - but to inquire
the name of the nearby village where they'd also stayed. Although I was carrying the phone, I wasn't
carrying my diary with phone numbers, so the opportunity was missed. That night, an elaborate BBQ organised by
Alain with a magnificent flan organised by Monique; and a fourth guest, Stefan
Uchetto, one of Alain's workmates who's about to be posted to Melbourne. We exchanged particulars and will no doubt be
able to catch up with Stefan later in the year.
Gary Andrews
ANNE & GARY ANDREWS - AUGUST/OCTOBER 2000
TRANSCRIPT OF GARY'S TAPE-RECORDED DIARY
PART 4 of 8
Thursday morning, 14 September, and after two
nights and an idyllic day in Toulouse we're on our way again, and took Tom to
see the historic walled city of Carcassonne.
Carcassonne had been a special point of destination for Anne and me when
we travelled to Europe in 1989. On that
trip we'd had virtually weeks of inclement weather and we got to Carcassonne
after our longest day's drive. The hotel
we found was not pleasant and on our walk around the old city the wind blew,
and it was freezing. So our memories
were somewhat jaundiced. But this time,
the sun shone and the city shone. Our
only complaint - too many tourists. Too
hard to park. But sadly this is an
inevitable complaint and has dogged us almost everywhere we've been. The night before Alain had spent hours
showing us maps and indicating places of interest and, in particular, extolling
the charms the French Riviera. I'd
indicated that years before, indeed the time we'd visited Carcassonne, we'd
travelled from Alassio in Italy all the way across to Carcassonne - over six
hundred kilometres - on freeways at the back and up the mountains behind the
Riviera, totally bypassing the resort areas.
There was no need to do that this time, but some judicious selection was
necessary. Alain indicated that there
were three roads through the Riviera, one at sea level and one high in the
hills and one in between. They're called
corniches,36 and at one point during our conversation he was
even suggesting that we go along one, come back along the second, then go along
the third towards Italy. In the event we
only went one way and we only went once.
But sometimes we seemed to be high up and sometimes we were at sea
level. It was a fascinating area and in
many ways quite beautiful. Certainly the
coast and foreshore and the cliffs are spectacular. But in many ways it was also ghastly. So much building; so much makeover of nature
by people that, for us, it had little charm.
Not at all the style of Queensland's Gold Coast, but the same
effect. Mile upon mile of tourist
accommodation; and we couldn't begin to imagine what it must be like in high
season when half of northern Europe is there.
Traffic was bad enough as it was, but in the height of the season it
must be total gridlock.
Despite our lack of a schedule, there was one
objective. Over thirty years ago, I had
seen at the Melbourne Film Festival a documentary on the French painter Fernand
Leger,37 and I was much impressed with his art and his
style. And in planning for this present
trip I'd been thumbing through the Eyewitness Guide and noticed that the
Fernand Leger Museum, the gallery built after his death and devoted to his
works, is located in Biot, a town just inland from the Riviera. So Biot was in my mind and the timing was
perfect, and having driven through Cannes and through Monaco and stopped to buy
some supplies in Antibes, it was only a few kilometres to Biot - where we
readily found accommodation at the Hacienda Hotel. A strange place, really a bed and breakfast
hotel, built on quite a slope. Long walk
up the steps from the carpark to the entrance and the vestibule and the
breakfast terrace, and then a long walk down the other side to where the rooms
are located on a series of terraces. We
were at the bottom - a self contained unit, as they all seem to be. Very comfortable. I suppose a family unit with a double and two
single beds, and small kitchen and a bathroom.
36. Dictionary definition of
corniche: a road running along the edge
of a mountainside.
37. Leger's dates: 1881 - 1955.
Up next morning, Gary and Tom to the Leger
Museum. Somewhat disappointing because
so few of his works are on display. A
couple of the galleries were made over to a special exhibition of the
photography of a Russian photographer from the thirties, and very interesting,
but I'd rather have seen more of the Master's works. The ones we did see, the huge canvasses in
the main gallery, were as good as I'd hoped.
There is, incidentally, a very large Leger in the National Gallery in
Canberra.
While we were at the gallery Anne was back in
the room watching the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games. This was, remember, Friday morning in France
and Friday night in eastern Australia.
Check-out time wasn't until twelve - somewhat unusual, it's nearly
always ten. So we lingered until about
twelve watching more of the Opening Ceremony before getting on our way. So far as the Olympics are concerned we've
seen little and heard less. Judy Rowe
brought to us in Perugia the British Saturday papers which covered the Opening
Ceremony, but after that time we have not read any English language papers; and
in Perugia saw a couple of the cycling and swimming events but, surprise,
surprise, they seemed to be focused almost entirely on the endeavours and the
successes of the Italian team. So as I
speak the Games are over and we have no idea how the Australian athletes
fared. Or, indeed, how Sydney fared -
whether there were the predicted traffic snarls, whether there was any
disturbance.
After Biot down the slopes again to the coast,
and we did some shopping at Menton, which is the last settlement in France
before crossing into Italy; which we soon did and there bought a tank of petrol
which I suspected was cheaper than if I'd bought it in France, but I'm not
really counting. All I know is that each
time I've filled up the approximately forty litres that the tank holds has cost
between eighty and ninety dollars Australian.
The early afternoon, on the Italian side, was
spent travelling on the extraordinary freeway which is little more than a
series of tunnels and bridges. It's an
extraordinary engineering feat of cutting a road through the air, although I
must say that it's easier to admire in retrospect that at the time because the
traffic moves along at a great pace and it's a little bit unnerving to have cars
whizzing past you in the narrow tunnels.
And even more unnerving to yourself have to pass an assortment of trucks
in the underground gloom.
Now again we were rather aimless. We had more than twenty-four hours to get to
Perugia, which wasn't all that far away, and we could have overnighted anywhere
along the way. But, on the map we'd
highlighted the town of Lucca. This is a
place we'd heard Beverley Burnside praise highly, and so it became our focus38. It's an ancient walled city and modern life
goes on inside the walls but, as is invariably the case, there's a sprawling
modern town around it; and arriving at dusk we had the problem of finding
accommodation and not knowing whether it was smart or foolish to find that
accommodation within the walled precinct.
So, no prize for the fainthearted!
We drove into the centre of town and were confronted by appallingly
narrow streets and signage difficult to follow, and after circling around for
some time decided to head for the outskirts - only to find ourselves in a
terrible traffic jam bound for the Friday night football match. It took us quite some time to extricate
ourselves from the procession, and then Anne making enquiries through the
keeper of a small bar. Phone calls
turning up nothing. Discussion with some
English tourists who admit that they'd been staying in Lucca for a week and
still couldn't understand the road system; and finally the Hotel Napoleon, and
luckily room for the three of us. The
hotel seemed very grand, at least it thought itself to be grand. It is a four star but turned out to be
cheaper than the three star we'd stayed in the night before.
38. Lucca is the birthplace
of composer Giacomo Puccini.
This trip is quite different. It was planned that way from our two previous
European trips in that, although we're travelling by car, virtually all our
accommodation is pre-arranged. So last
night in Biot and this night in Lucca were the only two nights where we were on
the road and having at dusk to find ourselves a place to stay. There's no doubt that this considerably
diminishes the stress factor of travelling in foreign parts.
Saturday morning. We checked out of the hotel. Parked the car outside the city wall and
spent the morning exploring Lucca. A
little apprehensive about leaving the car, as this was the first time we'd done
so with our luggage in the boot, but no choice.
And we'd have to say that Lucca on foot is quite as confusing as Lucca in
the car. Nevertheless a most pleasant
morning including an excursion up the highest tower in town for a commanding
view of the town and surrounding countryside; and then on our way to Perugia. The deal was that we would be met at our city
apartment by the manager any time between five and eight p.m. The deal also was that we were meeting Judy
Rowe who was arriving in Perugia by train from Rome, at five p.m. So it seemed sensible first to collect Judy
and then all together to find our digs.
So a leisurely afternoon drive. A
look around the town of Passignano on Lake Trasimeno, and a bit of lunch there,
and then Perugia.
The travel people in their literature had made
a big point of saying that Perugia with its one-way streets is very
confusing. And over the next week we
were able to confirm that statement in spades.
But as evening approached our good luck held. It started early in the day when Anne had
left her camera on the parapet of the tower39, and it wasn't
until we'd walked a way down the street that she realised what she'd done; so
Tom climbed to the top again, and the camera was still there. And then an hour later, after we'd returned
to the car and I'd moved off a hundred metres or so down the road, a
motorcyclist pulled up beside me and called out that there was a camera on the
roof! Well I'd done the same thing as
Anne - in putting our backpack into the car I'd left my camera sitting on the
roof, right in the middle so that it wouldn't slip-off - and indeed I'd been
driving so carefully that it hadn't slipped off. So two strokes of good fortune ..... and
driving into Perugia, getting thoroughly confused by the contradictions between
the road signs and our written instructions, and we rounded a corner and there
was the station. And the fourth bit of
good luck was not so much ours but Judy's.
The indicator board showed that there were two trains arriving from Rome
about five minutes apart. They had
different symbols beside them which meant nothing to me, but didn't matter, one
was arriving on platform two and one on platform three - adjacent platforms. The first one arrives and no sign of
Judy. I return to the concourse and see
that the names of both trains have been removed from the board and later trains
from different destinations40 are being shown. The only possible explanation, it seemed to
me, was that the two trains had been combined, one of them had been cancelled,
and that Judy had simply missed the train.
Her journey from Surbiton was a complicated one, we knew that. She had to leave home in the early hours and
drive quite a distance to a regional airport, and fly from there to Rome, and
then a long delay before catching the train.
And in the event she'd had car trouble.
Antony had gone along with her to take it back home but the car had
failed to start and Antony had had to get in touch with Judy in the departure
lounge to get from her her Auto Club membership details so that he could get
roadside assistance; and even as Judy arrived in Perugia she had no idea
whether Antony had been able to get home earlier that morning. Here we were with the only train having
departed - no sign of Judy. So we were
just on the point of going back to our car when a train pulls in from the opposite
direction and Judy steps off right beside us.
If the train had been one minute later we'd have been gone and Judy
would have had to find her way by taxi.
39. This is the tall tower
in Lucca, the Torre Guinigi
40. Not destinations you
fool, Gary - departure points.
The literature indicated that there was no
parking outside the apartment, or at least none that was safe to use for a
whole week, and showed a number of car parks, recommending those that were
furthest from the apartment; but having dropped off the girls Tom and I
continued on to a car park much closer to where we were staying, and we were
able to get in, and that's where the car was based for the rest of the week. Steep slope down to the car park, which
translates into a very steep slope up from the carpark, especially
when you’re laden with shopping.
The caretakers don't live
on the premises. They have a place out
of Perugia, and I guess Saturday is work day for them. They see off one week's occupants at around
ten and the next lot come in at five. So
they spend the whole day cleaning and getting things in order. They were charm personified. Good English.
Made us very welcome and then left us.
Absolute first prize to Anne for finding this place. It's right in the heart of the old town on
the top of the hill, just at the back of the cathedral, and there couldn't be a
better location. The street Via Bartolo
is a reasonably busy one-way street but quietens down at night, and if noise is
a problem you can always shut the windows and the outer and inner shutters. But noise wasn't really a problem and the
windows remained open. Weather remained
superb, and even at night it was, and still is, shorts weather.
Sunday, 17 September, we simply walked around
Perugia and visited prominent places of interest. That night dinner at the restaurant attached
to one of the larger hotels, but no better than a thousand Italian meals you'd
have in Melbourne, and the service was appalling. The head waiter, very much in charge of the
scene, was considerably up himself and preferred not to understand our
English. A rather uncomfortable meal
made a little more uncomfortable by the fact that around ten p.m. it turned
cold and we were in a courtyard and we didn't have jackets. On the way back to our apartment there was a
spot of rain and then later that night the thunderstorm, bits of which I
recorded.
Next morning Monday, quite dry, sun shining,
and off to Assisi. Assisi is across the
valley from Perugia, no more than twenty miles away and - certainly from
Perugia - Assisi can be seen quite clearly.
It's a much smaller place today, but in earlier times the two cities
must have been somewhat comparable because they waged continual wars and
skirmishes against each other. Assisi is
famous as the place of St. Francis and we found it a particularly attractive
town, and especially the Basilica of the St. Francis church41. A most extraordinary structure clinging to
the side of the hill. Built at the
express direction of one of the Popes to commemorate St. Francis,42 and built together with enormous monastic
accommodation all in the one huge structure.
The church itself has upper and lower churches. It has an enormous throughput of tourists
and, not surprisingly, the biggest tourist shop of any we've seen. Not just the usual postcards and guide books
but a great range of religious art and artefacts from fridge magnets through to
elaborate crosses far too big to pack into any suitcase. But the splendour of the building and the
grandeur of the setting is almost impossible to match; and we were seeing it,
in a sense, at its best because during the earthquake of a few years ago there
was very considerable damage to the town and surrounding towns and to the
Basilica itself. The roof of the upper
church fell in, killing two priests and two journalists who were there
surveying damage from the first shock.
And in recent years there's been a race against time to complete the
restoration in time for ..... I think its the two hundredth anniversary of St.
Francis.43 All the
structural restoration seems to have been done, although the frescoes are said
to have crumbled to dust, and if they're being replaced then they're not so
much being restored as re-created.
41. Shock, horror! I've committed a tautology - a basilica is
a church. According to the dictionary
basilica was originally the name applied by the Romans to their public halls,
usually of rectangular form with a middle and two side aisles. This ground plan was followed in the early
Christian Churches, and the name is now applied to one of the seven main
churches in Rome and to other Catholic churches accorded the same religious
privileges.
42. Gregory IX laid the
first stone on 17 July 1228.
43. Wrong! Wrong!
Wrong! Francis died in 1226. The race to complete the restoration was for
the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Christ.
The year 2000 was a big year for Christendom.
Later in our walk around the town we were
charmed by a shopkeeper speaking fluent English who was from Boston, USA, and
had returned to Italy some years earlier to be with his dying mother, and had
not found employment but he'd instead bought this shop. He specialises in locally-grown and pressed
olive oil, and locally-made balsamic vinegar; also local wines. All of which he will ship anywhere in the
world and apparently does so. Great
personality, and we bought some of his products. Had some food with us but didn't leave Assisi
until around three. Roadside picnic
spots are impossible to find in Italy.
Maybe this is a product of the culture whereby everybody goes home for
lunch, but you'd think over the centuries there must have been some travellers
on the roads at meal time and some provision made for them. But not so.
Not even a place to pull off to the side of the road. So eventually we found a spot on a side track
by a stream - overgrown bushland and not very inviting, but we made do. And then back to Perugia for the evening.
Another day's outing on the Tuesday, this time
to Cortona. Whereas Assisi is south-east
of Perugia, Cortona is north-west and about twice the distance. We were retracing some of our steps around
the north of Lake Trasimeno from Saturday, but after Cortona we returned home
by a wide circle through Montepulciano and then south of the Lake. Whereas Perugia and Assisi are in Umbria,
Cortona and Montepulciano are in Tuscany.
Late the previous day, after Assisi, we'd visited Deruta, the home of majolica
ware. There were very few tourists, but a
great number of shops selling this gaudy ceramic, and quite a number where we
could see the artisans at work.
In Montepulciano the typical product was
Tuscan wine, and in doorway after doorway, cave after cave, there was an
invitation to try and to buy.
On arrival at Cortona we found that the
cathedral was closed, but directly opposite we were able to go into the
diocesan museum. For us this was the
highlight of our trip to Cortona. A
modest collection of medieval paintings - principally by the local artist
Signorelli, but also Fra Angelico - and other works of art. A lot to see, beautifully displayed, and very
few tourists. We headed right up the
hill to another large church, St. Margherita's, only to find it was closed
until three - so a relaxing cooling of our heels, sitting on the walls, looking
down at the town; and so to the church, and then down again to the cathedral,
and then away to the car. This time,
again very late in the day, a picnic lunch on the bit of wall beside the
car. These churches are beginning to
blend into each other. And without guide
books (which we haven't bought) or photographs (of which we've taken many) it
will with hindsight be impossible to tell one from the other.
The next day the car was
left in the garage. We spent it around
Perugia. First Anne and Gary finding a
laundromat and coping with the instructions, and coping with the fact that
there seemed to be very little water in the wash; and then, to a degree, going
our separate ways. Tom was off to a
travel agent to arrange a trip to Venice, thence to London to pick up his
return flight home. Anne and Judy
prowling in one direction, and Gary off on one of the suggested walks shown in
the brochure provided to us back in Australia.
Starting in the main square, downhill through very fashionable shopping
area, into a tiny hexagonal church, on to St. Dominic's church - described as
the biggest church in Perugia, and a big barn of a place it is. Right beside St. Dominic's, the Etruscan
museum.44 This is
located in the former ecclesiastical buildings attached to the church. It is currently undergoing substantial
renovation and extension. But the
collection was to me a revelation. The
Etruscans occupied this part of the world from around seven hundred B.C. until
they were eventually conquered by the Romans in about three hundred B.C., but
their civilisation was so advanced! A
lot of stone work, including small coffins.
Sometimes only a sort of foot cubed, but other times coffin shaped but a
metre long. I don't know whether they
were for ashes or for bones or ground bones or none of the above, but they were
obviously important in the civilisation; and all beautifully carved. A lot of the carvings understandably worn
away, but some of them in very good condition; and there were a lot of statues
and small artefacts, a lot of jewellery.
And the things that really intrigued me were the pins and clips, hairpins
and combs, some of them made out of bone but most of them made out of
bronze. I guess we're talking about the bronze age.45 There were a number of pieces that were iron
but were completely rusted as though they'd been
44. Museo Archeologico
Nazionale.
45. From Columbia
Encyclopaedia: "Etruscan wealth and
power was in part based upon their knowledge of ironworking and their
exploitation of iron deposits that were abundant in Etruria. They brought the older art of bronze working
to a new level of achievement." And
from New Caxton Encyclopedia: "Bronze Age - A stage in the
development of civilisation when weapons or tools were made of bronze. Various cultures have passed through a Bronze
Age at different times in history, and some cultures have acquired the more
advanced knowledge of ironworking without having gone through a Bronze
Age. The use of bronze appears to have
developed first in the Middle East in about 3500 B.C. and then to have spread
westward as far as Europe and eastward as far as China. In the Middle East the introduction of bronze
accompanied a number of cultural advances, such as the adoption of the
principles of the arch and the wheel and the development of the first cities,
complex political organisation, and writing."
under the sea - you could
make out that they were daggers or small swords; but the bronze equivalents
were in many cases in perfect condition.
If it was very thin, wafer thin bronze as was used for some of the
ornaments and plates, then it had often worn through. But so much of it was intact and very beautiful
and artistic. And the displays were
good. If only I could have read the
Italian. But often there was a plate or
half a plate where you could discern that there was a pattern around the
outside and it was mounted in a display case, and beside it a drawing of that
precise pattern. So quite a find for me
and I think the most interesting thing that I saw in Perugia. Interesting isn't it that, despite the huge
churches and the beautiful frescoes, the things that made me most awestruck
were small bits of metal, two-and-a-half thousand years old.
After the Etruscan museum, further down the
slope to the church of San Pietro, St. Peter's church. Another huge place. This time not with frescoes, but with
enormous canvases attached to the walls, side and rear - the frames of each
picture touch each other so that in effect it's a fresco. An astonishing amount of painted
surface. And the ceiling, not this time
curved or vaulted or indeed with religious paintings, but entirely flat oblong
shaped with squares and roundels and beautiful colouring. A formal pattern and looking very colourful
and new and, in contrast to the blackened and old canvases, possibly having had
recent restoration or cleaning. This
church is easy to find but hard to get into because the former clerical
buildings attached to it now are occupied by the School of Agriculture of the
University.
Tape 5
Perugia is a university town and said to have
upwards of eighty thousand students46, many of them foreign,
and all around the place we see signs indicating the School of Philosophy or
the school of this or that; and in order to get into St. Peter's you actually
enter through the quadrangle of the Agriculture School - and over in the far
corner of it there's a doorway and that's the doorway to the church. So I'd had not only a fact-finding day but a
most pleasant and instructive one.
Gary Andrews
ANNE & GARY ANDREWS - AUGUST/OCTOBER 2000
TRANSCRIPT OF GARY'S TAPE-RECORDED DIARY
PART 5 of 8
The sounds that you hear are the street sounds
of Cairo and it's ten past six on Monday evening the second of October and I'm
walking back to our hotel from a disappointing walk to find some new batteries
for my camera, only to find that - as I'd feared - the seizing of the shutter
indicates some serious problem and not
just that the batteries were flat. It's
quite dark. The sun fell with a thud as
it does near the equator47, and we've gone straight from day
to night, but the traffic hasn't let up.
I presume this is the evening peak period but, as our tour guide has
been saying, the peak period runs all day.
The horns never stop blasting but there seems to be method in the
madness - in the sense that everybody rushes for spaces wide enough for their
vehicle to fit through. Usually not
wide enough, but with a process of organised tooting they somehow get
through. Sure there are lots of old cars,
and sure there are lots of scraped sides, but in our touring - today at least -
we haven't seen any collisions or nothing that caused the traffic to snarl any
worse. It's a hot night, I suppose about
thirty degrees, and I'm working up quite a sweat because I've changed into long
pants simply in response to the fact that the tour group is this evening having
a meal together, and having been in shorts all day and finished up quite
sweaty, long pants seemed appropriate, but now I'm not so sure. Needless to say the weather in Egypt is fine
- is it ever anything else?48 - and I'm able to report that
the fine weather continued to haunt us all our time in Italy except for the
last day. The last day, Saturday, we
quit our wonderful cottage in the hills of
46. An impossible figure - I
must have been wrong! A September 2001
travel article in The Age pointed out that Perugia has a language university
for foreigners - with 5000 foreign students.
47. Cairo is in fact 30
degrees north latitude - beyond the Tropic of Cancer - so I need a better
explanation for the short twilight.
Cairo is about the same distance north as Brisbane is south (27
degrees).
48. Cairo's
average annual rainfall is about 1 inch.
Tuscany and drove to Rome and, as our host had
indicated the evening before, it rained on the Saturday and, as we were able to
see by news reports that night, there was some serious flooding in the south of
Italy. We certainly went through some
torrential rain, almost to the point of having to pull over, and wherever we
went there was a lot of rain lying on the roadside and it was clear that many
of the drains were blocked and that it hadn't rained this heavily for quite
some time.
Our belief all along had
been that we had to vacate our place by ten on the Saturday morning, but that
we were due to fly from Rome at twelve-twenty.
So given that we had almost two hundred kilometres to navigate, starting
in the dark, getting down from the hill town on to the autostrade, find the
Avis depot and return the car, and allow two hours grace at the airport .....
we were not at all looking forward to the whole process, possibly getting up as
early as three-thirty to allow ourselves sufficient time to catch the plane for
Cairo. Just by chance Anne looked again
at the tickets and discovered that our Cairo flight wasn't until the
Sunday. So this was marvellous news from
the viewpoint of having a leisurely departure from the Tuscan hills, but it
meant that we had to organise some accommodation for the Saturday night. On a previous occasion, in somewhat similar
circumstances, we'd organised a hotel right at the airport at Paris; and so
determined that we'd try to do the same.
But how to organise a hotel at Rome airport when all we had in our
possession was the Arezzo region phone book and no Italian to speak of, indeed
no Italian at all? So the solution was to find a travel agent during our day in
Sienna; which we duly did. Nothing is
ever easy of course, and although the information centre in the heart of town
had marked on a map the location of three known travel agents, by the time we
got to the first it was beyond midday, and we saw the place was closed and we
knew that we had to cool our heels until after three. And the second one was likewise closed; so we
had something to eat. Anne did some
reading, I did some further exploring, and then back to the grand opening. Well we hung around for twenty minutes but it
became clear that the staff were having an optional afternoon off, so we headed
off to where we expected to find another agent, but by chance found a different
one en route - only to be greeted by a staff member who was English, an English
lady who it happens had lived in Sienna for twenty-five years. When we suggested a hotel right at the
airport she said "oh they're very expensive, I'll get you one in the
nearby town". The Rome airport, the
Leonardo Da Vinci Airport, is located at the sea town of Fiumicino about twenty
kilometres from Rome. So this was the
suggested location for our accommodation, but there was a degree of pessimism
because the year 2000 is a big celebration year in Rome itself and
accommodation has been very hard to find on a casual basis.
-
- - o O o - - -
So after quite a bit of phoning and holding on
we were fixed, and so could relax about the mode of our departure from Italy.
Sienna itself was one of the highlights of our
time in Italy, not because we visited all the sights and found them to be
superior - this was a Thursday and in reality by this time we'd become a little
tired of visiting every one of the proclaimed major venues - but it was a nice
town to be in, and it had a lot of fashionable shopping and a feel about it,
something like Perugia - not nearly so big but bigger than any of the other
places we'd visited in the previous two weeks49. It did have the same one-way street system
with which Perugia is blessed (I put blessed in quotation marks) and it was
this one-way system that had brought us undone, coupled with inadequate signage
-although, as I've said before, there's no shortage of signage.
But it was inadequate for our meagre understanding; and trying to park
as close to the centre of the old city as possible we'd found ourselves right
in the heart of town going up a one-way street50 and
49. Perugia's
population 157500; Sienna's population 54100.
50 .....
the wrong way.
having to back-up and, in the process of
turning from the street, which was really an alley, into another alley to do a
three point turn, I'd scraped the front fender of our hire car. So at this point Sienna was not our favourite
place; but it did redeem itself with the cathedral - the one building we
visited, and an astonishing edifice, an astonishing work of art. Interior totally decorated with frescoes and
pattern work, and huge in size, definitely high on the list of places that have
to be seen in an Italian sojourn.
So here we were leaving our hillside hideaway
on the Saturday morning, no hurry, spot of rain overnight, spot of rain as we
were packing, but clear as we loaded the car, and then away by about
eight-thirty. The plan had been to get
to the autostrade and then straight to Rome, but the arrangement with the hotel
at Fiumicino was for a late afternoon arrival and on reflection there seemed no
point in travelling the direct and fast route.
So, change of plans, we were going to go down the coast road, which
meant first crossing the hilly country towards Sienna again, as we'd done on
Thursday, before heading south. This is
the coast road on the west, Mediterranean, coast.
I must interrupt myself to say that for some
little while I've been recording on the Tuesday morning. Still walking the streets of Cairo, but the
Monday night record had finished with me arriving back at the hotel. I'd stopped at a small convenience store, a
mini supermarket, just a short distance from where we stay and bought a couple
of strength bars and a tin of apricots described as California apricots. All the signage, or most of the signage and
labelling in Cairo, seems to be in both Arabic and English, and here are these
California apricots ..... and if you look closely you'll see that they've been
processed by SPC of Shepparton, Australia.
At the close of yesterday's proceedings our
tour leader indicated that tomorrow, that's Tuesday, that's this morning, we'd
be doing some long driving and not having lunch until well into the afternoon,
and those who felt the need for mid-morning sustenance should get hold of
something. At this little supermarket
I'd not been able to find very much.
We're carrying the remains of a packet of Italian sweet biscuits, so
maybe we can handle some tinned apricots; and I bought some peanut and sesame
seed strength bars. We won't die of
starvation. So all of this organised,
back to the room, sharing a concern about the broken camera, and so to our
evening meal with the group.
Smorgasbord arrangement with the principal
courses being chicken legs, quite okay, some sort of vegetable stew, and
rice. The vegetable dish really good
indeed; and plates of fresh tomatoes, and other greens, more than enough to eat
and very good. The sweets comprised huge
trays of nicely arranged slices of fresh pear, some grapes, and pomegranate
seeds - or as our Swiss companion said "granet apple seeds". Oh, and a local sweet which our tour guide
thought was baklava but which was more than just the honeyed shredded, whatever
it is. It had a custard centre and very
nice. So here we are happily, well
not so happily, but purposefully eating fruit
that we can't peel, on the assurance that Cairo water is perfectly safe. But it seems perfectly okay. It's highly chlorinated but not, we hope,
full of bacteria that's going to cause problems for our unaccustomed stomachs. Having said all that our tour leader, Jim,
was late for the meal because his room-mate John had been vomiting violently
and needed some medication. John however
has arrived in Cairo after an earlier tour through Syria and other middle
eastern countries and we're all crossing our fingers hoping that his problem
was contracted elsewhere and that the rest of us are not going to follow suit.
So Monday night's recording interrupted by
domestic affairs, and it's now Tuesday morning, six-thirty a.m. Traffic sounds are a little different. I'm walking through the streets near the
hotel, which seems to be in a strictly residential area, although there are
busy shopping thoroughfares nearby as was evident on the previous night when I
hunted for the camera batteries. I've
walked past some long fences, and one particularly huge area which may well be
a sort of botanic gardens. There's no
signage, but quite a parkland setting.
And the streets are delightful in the sense of trees, not just in the
pavements themselves, but also in the surrounding gardens. Where the delight diminishes is on the
subject of trash. There's trash
everywhere - in the gutters, on the pavements, in the surrounds of
semi-completed buildings, on tops of sheds and single storey edifices; but I
guess it must be cleaned up sometimes.
It can't be an accumulation of years, but to someone with a Keep
Australia Beautiful mentality it's really an eyesore; and since the trash
frequently includes food and vegetable waste then you'd think it would also
pose a health hazard - in the height of summer with fifty degrees it must be
putrid. But as Jim says, "it's
their way, and visitors must accept that".
Cairo has sixteen to eighteen million people51
with a couple more each day coming into the city for business, and who knows
how many tourists, and put all that together one city has more people than all
of Australia. And given that it's a poor
country, what a massive problem it must be to prioritise
51. The World Gazetteer says
7595000 but that's not counting outlying areas.
Eighteen million is a tad exaggerated.
Government expenditure, especially against the
backdrop of a nation that is on a continual war footing. So the fact that they don't have an army of
green and white super-modern Paris-style garbage trucks, and daily hosing and
cleaning of the streets, is not surprising; but when you see as I see at the
moment a two foot high pile of crap in the street being foraged by two feral
cats, while it's colourful, it's not especially nice. Not that we've seen any grinding poverty or
what we would interpret as grinding poverty - nobody living on the pavement or
under a piece of cardboard; or a shanty town - and it may be, given its limited
resources, that Egypt does quite well for its people. We haven't yet been accosted by a beggar,
although the postcard and tourist trinket vendors are as good as beggars I
suppose; but even that, despite Anne's concerns from time to time, isn't too
bad. While they hassle and are hard to
shake off, they don't shove things directly in your face as we've had in some
other countries; and at some of the places we visited yesterday officialdom had
drawn a line in the sand, so to speak, beyond which the vendors are not allowed
to encroach, so the tourists are free to wander and photograph unaccosted. An excellent idea. But the centre of Cairo, if there is such a
thing, is enormous and on the bus yesterday we passed through mile after mile of areas
of shopping and commercial centres and public buildings and zoo and parkland
and public monuments, and all of this I must say something of a surprise.
One of the buildings that had a long wall I
now see is a school, and dozens of kids are arriving all dressed with white
shirts, girls in grey skirts and the boys in long pants. Some of the girls with the shawl over their
head but not many, and I guess there's some indication that Egypt is one of the
more liberal
Moslem countries.
Our tour guide, not the tour leader - the tour
leader, Jim, pointed out the difference between the two yesterday. The tour leader is someone responsible for
seeing that the tour happens, for organising our entry into various places, to
see that nothing goes wrong, to see that the buses are on time, to
mollycoddle us, to look after us if we're sick, to confirm our flights out of
Egypt, and so on. The tour guides, of
which there will be a number over the fortnight, are the guides to the tourist
sites, and they're the ones with the expertise in Egyptology and knowledge of
the local venues. So our tour guide for
Cairo is a charming lass - in her thirties, I suppose. Speaks fluent English. One of the group has already quizzed her and
established that she's lived in a number of countries including somewhere in
South America; and suspects that her father may have been a diplomat. But she certainly is liberated, and
during her commentaries yesterday made more than one observation about the
place of women in ancient times being subservient, and that things hadn't
really changed very much in modern times.
But I'm sure she would stand for no nonsense. As I'm standing outside the school it occurs
to me that the hours of the school day must be quite different here. It's quarter to seven and the gates have just
opened and the kids are streaming in, and I would hope for their sakes that
they don't have to stay at their desks until three-thirty.
One of the features we noticed yesterday from
the bus was dust. It was particularly
noticeable in areas of the city where there was a derelict building, or an area
under an elevated roadway, or somewhere where there's been no activity for some
time - and a thick layer of fallen dust; and it doesn't take much imagination
to realise that if there's ever wind from the west then the sand rolls across
Cairo and, just like at home, unless somebody sweeps it away it's going to stay
exactly where it lies52.
And I thought
52. The hot dry wind from
the Sahara, known as the Khamsin, blows northerly in April and May. But whatever the wind it will drop sand on
Cairo!
yesterday that this was the sort of place
where there is absolutely no point in washing your vehicle; and of the
thousands of cars we saw very few seemed to be shiny clean. But this morning as I walk the streets I've
seen a number of people washing their cars; or, as I speak, I've seen a chap
finish washing one car and then walk across the street to wash another, and I
wonder whether these might be people employed to wash other people's cars. Why not?
No wastage of water, however.
It's a cursory wash from a bucket, starting with the hand in the bucket
splashing the water over the car and then the cloth applied. Quite quick, quite effective. Especially if it's meant to last only for a
day or two.
One of the more
interesting features of the architecture is the newer housing towards the
outskirts of the city. It looks
something like a bomb site with all these houses slightly wrecked; but the tour
guide explained all of this. The typical
arrangement is for the older generation to live in the ground floor and the
next generation one floor above, and the next generation one floor above
that. So, while these houses look like
pill boxes, they are family units and, given that this is the arrangement, a
new house is often built with two storeys only or three storeys only, but
obviously with foundations to take an extra floor when there's an extra
generation. And this being so, the
upright pillars - we're talking about buildings that are clad in brick or stone
but with internals of concrete - the upright pillars often protrude from the
roof with the metal reinforcing rods sticking into the air like a forest of
lightning conductors. All, we presume,
are waiting for the grandkids to arrive, to get married, and to settle in the
air space above once that's constructed.53 The uniformity from the air as we were coming
in to land was amazing, with this same-coloured modern housing extending for
miles. Didn't catch a view of the city centre
where there's a lot more greenery, but out in these suburban areas there seems
to be very little in the way of household garden; and I suppose - as in new
suburbs in any Australian city - as yet no substantial trees. But frequently these places, as you get
further out, are isolated and around them are fields of crops and
vegetables. So the water supply does
exist, and one of the items on my list of things to find out is how is it
possible for the one water source, the Nile River, to provide sufficient water
for this huge city and indeed for the whole country, population nearly sixty
million people, and for all the agriculture that's necessary to feed them.54 I don't recall that Egypt is one of the
world's great oil-producing countries, and may not have any oil at all,
although Lybia next door does.55 So I don't have a sense of its economy and
what sustains it. If yesterday was any
indication it may simply be tourism.56
53. There
is also the story that there's some form of property tax that's payable only
when buildings are completed!
54. It just does!
55. Petroleum is
important for Egypt's balance of payments.
56. See footnote 61.
Yesterday, Monday, we started with Jim's
briefing just after breakfast, and then on to our tour bus at
eight-thirty. There are thirteen of us
in all - one Swiss lass, two Canadians (father and daughter, I think) and the
rest Australians. So we caught up a bit
of Olympic news, although I did at Rome airport get a copy of Saturday's Herald
Tribune and caught up with the Friday results. And while awaiting departure we watched about
half an hour of the Closing Ceremony.
We're not a very diverse group and all English
speaking, so Jim's briefing on the question of dress ..... there's no problem
with the men wearing shorts, although the Egyptians regard shorts as trousers
worn by little boys; but they're used to the strange ways of foreigners. With the women there will be one or two
places on tour where the local community is more conservative than Cairo and
where it's recommended that women have their bottom half fully covered. But for the sites around Cairo shorts are okay. Comments about health; some comments about
how to buy from the street vendors; and an explanation of the
tipping arrangement. It is part of the
system, part of the culture, that those who look after us along the way should
be tipped; and the way in which the Imaginative Traveller, the organisation
that's conducting our tour, handles this whole process is for Jim to put in
place a tipping kitty. So he's warned us
that on day two, that's this morning, he'll be collecting from each person one
hundred Egyptian pounds - about fifty-five Australian dollars - which he'll
administer and hand out to various drivers and tour guides, hotel staff, and so
on, on our tour around the country.
On the bus we were greeted by our tour guide
and the driver. A mini-bus, so ideal for
our complement and obviously more manoeuvrable than a full-scale bus, although
as the guide pointed out the bigger the bus the more care that the driver
takes. We certainly, through the course
of Monday, had plenty of evidence that if car drivers imagine they're driving
something as small as a motor scooter [which they do!], then certainly mini-bus
drivers imagine they're driving something as small as a sedan.
I've just seen a garbage truck pass by, a very
small vehicle, three quarters laden with bags of trash. Three chaps on the back, and going full
pelt. No effort to stop and pick up
anything that was in the street where I was standing, and I have a horrible feeling
that they were going to dump it somewhere rather than to collect any more.
I'm just arriving back at the hotel. It's ten past seven. Anne will have received the seven o'clock
early morning call for seven-thirty breakfast, but we're on the bus at eight;
so there's not much time to spare and I think we're planning to get down to the
breakfast room a tad before seven-thirty.
I see outside the hotel there's a big bus already pulled up and I wonder
whether this morning, for our trip into the desert, we're actually combining
forces with one of the other groups of Imaginative Traveller people who are
billeted at the same hotel.
Gary Andrews
ANNE & GARY ANDREWS - AUGUST/OCTOBER 2000
TRANSCRIPT OF GARY'S TAPE-RECORDED DIARY
PART 6 of 8
This is now later in the day around
three-thirty, and I'm on the bus and we're on our way back to Cairo. A couple of points of correction. First, the garbage does get collected. As we were driving out of the city this
morning I noticed a number of people sweeping the street refuse into large
piles; and then separately noticed a very large open-topped dump truck full of
garbage, and the street piles being collected.
Second, the big bus was for us alone, the thirteen of us, except it's
now twelve. I mentioned John as having
been unwell last night and vomiting, presumably some bug picked up in his
travels elsewhere in the Middle East.
Jim reported to us this morning that he [John] was really quite sick and
has been taken to hospital. So Jim, our
tour leader, is not with us today - his duties lie elsewhere in seeing that
John gets the best attention. So, Rassia,
our tour guide in Cairo, has the double duty today and has performed it with
ease. She has I gather a master's degree
in Egyptology, and another degree, and when she speaks of the pyramids and all
things Egyptian she speaks with considerable authority.
One of the hallmarks of Imaginative Traveller
is they take you to less well known places, and that's what today has been
about. But we don't miss out on the big
tourist traps either, and that was yesterday where we visited The Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of
Cheops.57 But more of
that later. This morning we travelled
some distance out of Cairo to the Dashur area where there are a number of
pyramids, but two of importance that we visited. The first known as the Red Pyramid, for the
slightly reddish-coloured limestone that once covered its exterior. Access was available to the interior, to the
Pharaoh's burial chamber, and through two ante-chambers with enormously high
ceilings, maybe sixty feet, coming to a point at the top with corbelled
sides. Long and narrow. Temperature not stifling, but rather an odd
smell and difficult access, bent half over to get through the low entrance
passageway.
57. Cheops also known as
Khufu (and sometimes spelt Kheops).
Then on to the Bent Pyramid. Famous because during the course of its
construction the architect changed the angle of the sides, from the initial
fifty-two degrees to forty-three-and-a-half degrees. The theory is that at the time that this
pyramid was being built two others were also under construction, and one of
them with fifty-two degree sides had collapsed, or at least the outer face
started to slip away. So we have the
Bent Pyramid, with a lot of its cladding still intact and the base blocks
exposed. Very photogenic. Very interesting, although no access to the
interior is available.
From Dashur then on to Maidum, where there's
the extremely photogenic pyramid bearing the same name. This is the second of the step pyramids. The first we saw yesterday. This one has three levels exposed above the
sand, but there are apparently more below.
Again very photogenic, especially from a distance. The entrance passageway to this pyramid is a
little easier to manage in that the ceiling is a bit higher, but it's far
steeper and longer than any of the others and quite hard on the legs and the
lungs. The legs get used both ways. The lungs get used on the way out, which is
upwards. The wonderful thing about both
of these sites, Dashur and Maidum, is that there were very few other people
present. One other bus, a couple of
taxis and private cars, and rather more attendants and guards than there were
tourists.
I'd started to tell about the big bus, but
sidetracked myself into talking about our tour leader Jim's own sidetracking on
account of his need to take John to hospital.
It was Jim who'd arranged the big bus in substitution for yesterday's
mini-bus. He was concerned that the
speaker system in the small bus was inadequate, which it was, and that it was a
bit smelly. So he demanded a substitute
and we've been given a fifty-seater. So
I'm able to sit down the back making this tape without interfering with the
others, some of whom are now drifting into sleep as we travel back across the
desert - travelling back from the Faiyum Oasis.
This is the nearest oasis to Cairo, and one of six in Egypt. Six in the Western Desert. Told not to call it the Sahara because the
word “sahara” means desert. We came to
Faiyum expressly to have lunch, and I guess to be duly surprised that an oasis
is not just a small depression in the sand, with a lot of grass surrounded by
palm trees.
This was an extensive
area including a huge lake forty kilometres wide by twenty-five kilometres
long, which is fed by a canal from the Nile.
So this whole oasis system is a function of the Nile as is so much of
Egypt. What I have yet to learn is the
history of the canal and of the Oasis itself.
When was it dug and to what purpose?58
58. The canal from the Nile
was dug under Amenemhet the Third, who died in 1801 B.C.
After leaving the Maidum area we had to
traverse through country that contained a military base, and to pass through a
check-point, and all the way from the check-point to Faiyum and back we were
escorted by a small truck-load of guards.
Rassia has no idea why. We came
into the restricted area from the other side without the need for any escort,
yet coming out further into the desert one was obligatory. Her explanation: "rules". Now the guards have dropped away and I see on
my left an enormous settlement, I presume reasonably new buildings, very
uniform, very red brick, two storey, maybe some three, a sort of satellite
community. Is it some strategic
positioning? Is it some developer's
dream subdivision?
At Faiyum there's a complete and bustling
community. Plenty of farmland; and
suburban-type living. We lunched at a
hotel. A grand resort hotel, but grand
from another era. I placed it in the
twenties or thirties, and could picture the rich and famous holidaying there on
the lake. But I learnt later that it was
built in 1950 and, sad to relate, doesn't seem to have had much in the way of
running maintenance since then. The
lunch was very good, and our whole journey into the desert has been a very
interesting experience. We're back in
Cairo with a bit of spare time this afternoon for wandering around, or
whatever, and then I think we all gather together for our evening meal again at
the hotel, The Hotel Salma.
I mentioned our Saturday trip from the Tuscan
hills down to Rome. I forgot to mention
one of the more uplifting parts of the day, and that was the sight of numerous
eucalypts as we got closer to Rome.
There had been none at all, no identifiable Australian plant species, in
Umbria or Tuscany, but here we were getting close to Rome with occasional gum
trees; and then rows of gum trees along waterways or even sometimes on
roadsides, and substantial specimens they were too. So a nostalgic reminder of home; and this has
been continued in Egypt. The eucalypt is
one of the preferred types of tree around Cairo streets, and around the
surrounding countryside. Frequently
along roadsides, edges of canals, and scattered throughout the city. Sometimes enormous specimens, but I'm not
sure what variety. They're all growing
very tall, but not necessarily straight, and Anne and I think they're river red
gums, but we may be wrong. It would be a
nice twist for Egypt if they were river reds because my recollection is that
the botanical name is camaldulensis.
Everything worked out well for us on the
Saturday. We arrived at the hotel in
Fiumicino about two hours before they had the room ready, so we walked around
the waterfront. Rather sad place. May well have been a watering hole for Romans
in an earlier generation. Not the
seaport of Rome from Roman
times, that's Ostia, but
this could well have been a close beach fifty years back. But today it's looking very tired, and
certainly the beach and the waterfront seems beyond repair. Quite disgraceful really that the
breakwaters, and the paving, and the old lighthouse have become so derelict and
so neglected; and the trash is unbelievable, surpassed only by the streets of
Cairo. But I have to say that among that
trash we picked up a few pieces of broken ceramic tile which found their way
into our luggage
Tape 6
and which one day may find their way into an
Annie mosaic.
-
- - o O o - - -
It's Wednesday morning and what you've just
heard is the early morning Moslem call to prayer. When I say early I mean early, because
during our stay here in Cairo the call has been at about four twenty-five each
morning. There are five of these calls
each day and while the faithful don't immediately have to drop to their knees,
they do have to pray towards Mecca before the next prayer call that day. We can hear it so well because right across
from our hotel, and indeed from the way our window faces, there is a small
mosque; and in keeping with modern times there are loud speakers on the minaret
and the call is broadcast electronically.
But at least there's a real person and not a recording.
So I'm out in the streets again, and I just
walked down a block from our hotel in the other direction from yesterday; and
quite a busy street this way, so I'll be turning back into the next side street
to escape these traffic sounds. I left
you yesterday wandering the streets of Fiumicino waiting for our hotel room to
be ready. It duly was, and we spent our
last night in Italy in a small hotel, room 306 - not of course on the third
floor (I wish there was one) but in the separate single-storey block in the
back yard. Out for a bite to eat. Met some friendly Americans; and again next
morning. They too were leaving via Rome
airport on the Sunday. Lots of water
lying around the streets of Fiumicino.
And both a local and a French channel showing parochial bits of the
Olympic Games.
So on the Sunday our departure time was twenty
past two. We had the whole morning, but
no inclination to do any more sightseeing, and certainly not sufficient time to
dash into Rome and back. So we were away
very early for the short drive to the airport; and right at the end of our
street there was an airport direction sign and we followed similar signs all
the way. Very easy. Except for the fact that there are three
airports - A, B and C, and B and C both handle international traffic. And where to leave the car? As it turned out there was a connecting train
between the two terminals - above ground, short trip, and we had no
trouble. But the first task was to find
the Avis depot; and our good luck had returned.
We saw a sign, and straight to the spot.
The rest, as they say, is history.59 A lot of time to kill at the airport. Flight of just under three hours; and safely
to Cairo.
59. But they shouldn't say it twice in the
one diary - see footnote 18.
Met by the representative of the Imaginative
Traveller who fussed over us, moved us from queue to queue at the immigration
desk. Made the wrong choice. Luggage collected, and mini-bus to our hotel,
The Salma. We chummed up to a New
Zealand couple, also doing the excursion through Egypt, and wasn't until next
morning that we found they were on a different one from us - but out paths have
been crossing and will finally separate today.
As I walk down this street I see a dozen or so cars with their
windscreen wipers standing up away from the windscreen, and the message is now
clear that these cars have been washed this morning. So I wonder whether the man with the bucket
leaves the wipers up to indicate that he's done the job, or is the whole
process done on spec with him coming around later expecting to be paid for a
job he wasn't asked to do?
Some of the statistics provided yesterday by
our tour guide Rassia are interesting.
The population of Egypt is not nearly sixty but more than sixty million.60 Schooling is compulsory for eleven years -
five years primary school, three years preparatory school, and three years high
school. But they're about to move to a
system of six years primary, total of twelve.
And when she talked of the country's major industries no mention was
made of the oil industry. The top income
earner for the country is the Suez Canal.
Second was always tourism until a large group of German and Swiss
tourists were killed by the Moslem fundamentalists at the Temple of Queen
Hatshepsut a few years ago. But then it
fell dramatically. Not clear whether
it's crept back to second position, but it's way down from previous
levels. Good for us, not so good for the
Egyptians. And agriculture.61 Rassia made a very interesting comment. Some years ago there'd been an all-out
attempt to foster manufacturing industry, and to move the emphasis away from
agriculture. But this, she says, has
failed and there's now a conscious move back to concentration on
agriculture. Some of the land is farmed
by owner/occupiers and other land is farmed by tenant farmers. Egypt produces all its food needs and exports
a lot of fruit and vegetables to Europe.
Not surprisingly the produce is classified, and all the A-grade quality
is exported - B and C grade for local consumption. There is importation of some rice but not
because of need but rather to provide different varieties from the
locally-produced. And most of the food
production comes from the Nile delta up north from Cairo, closer to
Alexandria. So the Nile River is an
extraordinary sustainer of this huge population. Apart from the six oases, one of which at
least is fed from the Nile, all of the water, agricultural and domestic - and I
expect all of the electricity - comes from the same source.
Today we're visiting the Egyptian museum, and
some free time - Anne and I intend to go to the bazaar - and gathering together
around six o'clock for an overnight sleeper train trip to Aswan down
south. We'll be vacating our rooms and
leaving our bags in safe custody at the hotel through the day, and Anne and I will
be leaving another bag here for the whole of our time on the road, collecting
it prior to our return home.
60. The
C.I.A. estimate at July 2001 was 69.5 million.
61. The
Egyptian Government web site gives the major sources of foreign earnings as:
Petroleum $US3054
Suez Canal 1323
Manufacturing and textiles 1258
Tourism 1170
Agriculture 433
Our tour on Monday
started with a short trip to Memphis - Memphis the old capital of Egypt just a
short distance from Cairo. None of the
old city remains but there are some relics of later ages including a large
prone statue of Ramses the Second,62 the most egocentric of
all pharaohs and, we're told, the one
62. Also known as Ramses the Great
whose image we'll see
wherever we go. Then on to Saqqara. Again not far, and a tour through a mastaba,
one of the low-level ancient tombs - this one of a high priest, and very finely
decorated in reliefs showing scenes of daily life. Unique in that it focuses on life rather than
on death. In other places, in the tombs,
the temples, the motif is always death.
(I just passed a building that has a couple of soldiers or guards out
the front. I'm not sure what their
official capacity is. They are sitting
in cane chairs, their automatic weapons are across their laps - and they're
both sound asleep.) And then at the same
site the Step Pyramid. This is the first
development of the pyramid from the flat mastaba tomb, and the precursor of the
pyramids with straight sides.
I've just become a little lost. Rather than retrace my steps as I did
yesterday I've been seeking to go round in a square, except an elbow-shaped
street brought me undone. But with an
unerring sense of direction, I've rounded a corner - no idea where I am -
looked up, and I'm right beside the hotel.
So before going inside to wake Anne and pack our bags before breakfast,
just a final word about Monday. After
Saqqara on a time scale was the further step pyramid of Maidum, and then the
pyramids of Dashur - that's the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid - and then
finally the final stage of pyramid building, the three pyramids at Giza, right
at Cairo, and the image that the world recognises as "The
Pyramids". Enormous crowds, but
manageable, and we were able to go inside the pyramid of Cheops. I had no idea that this was possible. I thought the pyramid had been closed years
ago. And I also thought that the
entrance tunnel was so narrow that it had to be traversed on hands and
knees. But not so, we were able to bend double,
get in, and return in the knowledge that we've been inside the Great Pyramid.
No decorations survive, just the massive walls
of limestone. But although I'd known of
the internal configuration for some time I had no conception of the size of the
long gallery. This ascends for quite a
distance, but it's not the length that's amazing it's the height - this huge
chamber left inside the pyramid on the way up to the King's Chamber. Not particularly wide, perhaps eight feet,
but this accentuates the height - I'm guessing, but I think more than thirty
feet.63
On the way back from the Giza plateau a short
visit to a modern-day papyrus shop. We
were told that the secret of making the papyrus parchment from the papyrus reed
had died with the ancient Egyptians,64 but that in quite
recent years an Egyptian scientist had rediscovered the process and it's now
possible to make genuine papyrus rather than the ersatz versions that have
heretofore been made from sugar cane and banana leaves. But while the papyrus is genuine it's a
little hard to describe the paintings on the papyrus as genuine. Certainly each one hand-painted, but merely
copies of ancient designs; and many modern designs to boot. Very colourful but not our thing, although a
number of the party did buy artworks as mementoes.
63. Known as the Grand Gallery, this massive
space is 153 feet long. It has a
corbelled ceiling and is (in fact) 28 feet high. It slopes at an angle of 20 degrees, and is 9
feet wide.
64. But Columbia Encyclopedia says papyrus
was made until the 8th Century A.D., until it was replaced by paper.
Gary Andrews
ANNE & GARY ANDREWS - AUGUST/OCTOBER 2000
TRANSCRIPT OF GARY'S TAPE-RECORDED DIARY
PART 7 of 8
It's now Sunday morning,
8th October, and I've been very remiss in not recording my impressions on a
daily basis. No excuse really. We have been busy. I have been lazy. And we are after all on holiday. Sitting on the upper deck of The Amy. The Amy is the small boat that is our home
for three days on the Nile River, and today is the second day of our cruise.
I was just now talking about the rediscovery
of the process for making papyrus, and while at the papyrus shop we were given
a small demonstration of how this is done.
Papyrus is a reed with a triangular-shaped stem and woody interior, and
the first process is to strip off the sides, cut these into the lengths
required for the size of the piece of papyrus that's being made. It's then left in water for six days, then
rolled very flat and woven into a matting, and so papyrus. It all seems very simple and it's amazing
that this particular methodology was lost for some two thousand years.64 The unique quality of the papyrus is that not
only does it survive for thousands of years, but that it's completely flexible
- like a piece of rubber or leather it can be screwed up or folded and then
returns to its original shape without creases.
And I forgot to mention that on the Giza
Plateau, while looking at the pyramids, we also looked at the Sphinx. The Sphinx, while very close to the Pyramid
of Cheops, is actually part of the temple complex spread out in front of the
neighbouring pyramid, the one built by King Chephren.
In modern times there's been a lot of
destruction of the Sphinx, and in quite recent times there's been a lot of
restoration, not of the face but of the arms and paws and other parts of the
structure; and a barrier wall has been built around it so that tourists can no
longer get close. But there is a very
good view all round.
Our visit to the Egyptian Museum on the
Wednesday morning was a highlight. The
treasures of Egypt have always been pillaged by visitors, and no doubt the
worst excesses occurred during the French colonial and later the English
colonial years. The Egyptians are very
grateful to a Frenchman who, in the eighteen-nineties, decided that there had
to be a museum to house the antiquities65. So you have a very grand building in the
French style66 filled to overflowing with statues and other
artefacts brought from all over Egypt.
Rassia our guide was quite excellent, and when talking of the fact that
so much Egyptian treasure rests in foreign museums ...... including the Rosetta
Stone - the stone that bore the same inscription in three languages including
the hieroglyphics enabled the Frenchman Champollion67
65. The Frenchman was
Auguste Mariette. He was an assistant
curator at the Louve, and went to Cairo in 1850 to acquire a collection of
coptic manuscripts. He failed, but
stayed on as an Egyptologist. In 1858 he
was appointed foundation head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Mariette was born 1821, and died 1881 - so
his decision to set up the Egyptian Museum was not "in the
eighteen-nineties". The original
museum was in fact set up in 1858.
66. The present Museum
building was designed by French architect Marcel Dourgnon and was opened on 15
November 1902.
67. Jean Francois Champollion
(1790-1832). The Rosetta Stone is a slab
of basalt dug up by Napoleon's troops in 1799.
It was inscribed in 196 B.C. and describes in three languages -
including Greek and Hieroglyphic - the ascension of Pharaoh Ptolemy V (who
ruled from 205 to 180 B.C.). It took 14
years, from 1808 to 1822, for Champollion to figure out the structure of the
Hieroglyphic language.
to translate the
hieroglyphics and thus open up all the knowledge we have about the ancient
Egyptians. While this Stone is in the
British Museum, and while the famous head of Nefertiti is in Berlin, as Rassia
pointed out: if all of the treasures were returned to Egypt there would be
nowhere to house them, and they are being well looked after in other
museums. But this building, this huge
building, built in the eighteen-nineties66 to house the then
collection has had another hundred years of material added to it; and the big
space problem occurred with the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in the
1920s. While aware of the opulence of
the sarcophagus and the golden face mask and much of the jewellery that was
found in the tomb, we had no conception of the vast amount of other material -
three beds, chariots, and the sarcophagus itself inside a series of seven other
coffins and boxes all tightly fitting, like a set of Russian dolls. The contents of Tutankhamun's tomb, very well
displayed, occupies several galleries within the Museum. So there's so much to take in and so many
hundreds of tourists - thousands - at any one time that it's a bit of an
ordeal, and you're tempted to think that you should come back another day to
see it properly; but I fear it doesn't work that way. While there's labelling in English it's often
very small, and without the assistance of an expert guide, and mindful of the
crowd which never diminishes - and, more importantly, mindful of the
tight-packed groups of people listening to their own guides - it would be a
hard day's work to do justice to the whole Museum.
In the afternoon: Anne and Gary with John, who
by this time was recovered. He'd been
taken to hospital then offered, in his words, "the obligatory drip" -
but declined. Had some medication
prescribed, some antibiotics. He'd
realised that the anti-diarrhoea medicine that he'd been taking for a number of
days had been disguising the existence of the bacteria and was pleased to have
treatment directed at the source of the problem; and he was fit to travel. The three of us in a taxi across town to the
main bazaar, and a pleasant time there.68 One of the more interesting sections is the
large area devoted to spice trading ..... and it's a bit of a cop out but it
was rather useful to be able to say to the vendors that their product was
something that we were forbidden to take back to Australia so we were merely
looking. A taxi back to the hotel again,
and later on the bus to the station.
68. The Khan el Khalili bazaar.
Jim had decided that we wouldn't leave from
the main Cairo station because there'd be too much traffic on the way there, so
we were headed for the closer Giza station.
He'd allowed for well over an hour for the short journey, but we soon
found ourselves in traffic gridlock. The
problem, we later learned, was that in response to the crisis that was
occurring in the Palestinian-occupied areas of Israel (with fifty or more
Palestinians being killed) there was some disturbance, some sympathetic
demonstration by the students of Cairo University; and our route to the station
passed right by there. Not that we felt
there was any danger to us, but the streets were closed for some time and the
traffic had banked up. This we found out
because, while at standstill, Jim and the guide had gotten off the bus and
moved around the streets to find out what was going on. There was a second bus involved - other
Imaginative Traveller tourists had also checked out of The Salma and were
heading for the train - so there was quite a bit of tick-tacking between the
two vehicles, although not so much in the latter stages because they became
separated.
Anyway, during this snail-like progress, Jim
had been in touch with the office in Cairo and representations had been made to
the railways to hold the departure of the train. It was due to leave at eight. We'd left the hotel at six-thirty. Jim had had some concern that there might be
army and other officials on the station who would be a bit of a nuisance and
hold us up, hence heaps of time was allowed.
And then the word came back that the railways were aware of the rioting
problem and had indeed agreed to hold up the train, although for not very
long. So it all happened with a
rush. We arrived at the station at about
five past eight, hoping that the train was still there. Instead of the usual slow process of porters
being involved in the unloading of the bus, and taking the cases on to the
train, we cut through all of that red tape.
We grabbed our own cases and ran like stink. The porters expecting some casual employment,
stood there open-mouthed. For some reason,
that was never explained, the train wasn't actually at the platform, but pulled
up just as we rushed through. We jumped
straight on the train and we were away within about three minutes. A somewhat worrying experience although we
figured that something would turn up.
The local motto is: "if it's
Allah's will". On this occasion it
was Allah's will that we catch the train; but the people under real pressure
were the tour leaders, Jim and his counterpart, who must have been imagining
the problems associated with finding us accommodation for the night in Cairo
and then re-scheduling the whole of the next week. Jim later indicated that his first
contingency plan had been to get us on to another train, but not a sleeper
train; and maybe spending another night in Cairo was never a serious option.
The train, a first class sleeper train and
quite okay. We were served a meal soon
after departure, and not long after that had the bunks made, and so to bed.69 A sleeper train is an isolating experience
with each compartment merely having its two people both to sit and to eat and
to sleep. The only social communication
with others is in the club car, which on this occasion we didn't frequent. The only complaint: the air-conditioning was really too cold, and
there was no way in which we could regulate it; so we finished up stuffing
clothing into the vents, but without much effect. Anne had started off bagsing the top bunk but
soon started to develop a headache with the cold air blowing on her head. So a quick rearrangement.
69. I've used the same expression twice
(see footnote 25), and it's fast becoming a cliche
Next morning I was up early and spent about
two hours, I think, standing in the space at the end of the carriage, near the
doors, watching the country pass by. The
railway line to Aswan follows the Nile all the way down (down south) or up
(upstream), and from the height of the train it's possible to get a very clear
picture of the dividing line between the greenery along the fringe of the Nile,
and the desert. And in many places there
is no settlement. There is no
agriculture. There's just sand up to the
water's edge and on both sides of the railway track.
Arrival in Aswan Thursday morning, 5th
October, and transfer to our hotel, rather exotically named Cleopatra Hotel,
but a much more substantial establishment than The Salma in Cairo, and a much
better hotel all round. The Salma always
seemed to have a clump of retainers hanging around the front door,
not just someone behind
the reception desk, but also someone at the porter's desk. And then there was another small table where
there was someone in some type of uniform; and out the front someone in a
different type of uniform looking like police or tourist police of which
there's a separate breed in this country.
Then there were uniformed porters; and there was a couple of people
involved in the very seedy little shop that opened off the foyer - the shop
with stock that looked as though it had been there for ten years or more. And nobody working very hard - all seemingly
waiting for something to happen. But at
the Cleopatra, a much brisker pace and not too much surplus in the way of
personnel.
Jim says we're now in Nubia. Nubia, an area at the south of Egypt. A former nation, indeed the Nubian
civilisation going back to times even before Pharaonic times of Egypt. Maybe as long ago as three thousand B.C. And the Nubian people, much more negroid in
their configuration, but after all those years of intermingling not all that
different from what I might call the typical Egyptian physiognomy.
As I speak you'll realise that the background
noise has diminished. The Amy has pulled
away from the quayside and we're on our way again downstream. It would be somewhat misleading to describe
The Amy, our boat, as a cruise ship, but that's what it is in miniature. It can carry thirty-two people. So, at the moment it carries our thirteen
plus Jim, and an equivalent sized Imaginative Traveller group, and half a dozen
others. A very cosy setup. We're surrounded by cruise ships, Nile cruise
ships, which carry hundreds of people.
Generally four decks. Strange
looking things because most of them don't have a prow. They all have a flat back, and of course
they're not sea-going ships so they don't need to have a shape for cutting
through waves. But it's staggering -
we're told there are a hundred-and-eighty of these. A hundred-and-eighty on the Nile, and I guess
they go all the way from Aswan down to the sea.
This was one of the surprises, one of the horror surprises, when we
arrived at Aswan to see the numbers of these ships docked there - and they dock
three and four abreast, so that if you're in the ship that's furthest out in
the river then you gain access by walking across the ships that are docked
closer in. This was happening to us last
night. The Amy was right on the edge,70
and one of the big ships anchored further out from us, and all of their people
walked through The Amy to get to the gangplank to get to the shore.
We were due to leave Aswan yesterday at around
two but The Amy didn't cast off until around four. As Jim points out, things in Egypt happen in
accordance with Egypt time, not in accordance with any other system of time. But the delay was not a problem, it just
meant relaxing. And the journey to last
night's stopping point was not very far; and that point was Kom Ombo. The remains of a temple, not particularly
ancient, going back to Ptolemaic times.71 Probably only about two thousand three
hundred years old! - but a very interesting place to visit. But when we arrived here there were about
twenty of these cruise ships, so multiply that by several hundred tourists each
and you get an idea of the numbers of people these historic sites are having to
deal with on a daily basis. And even as
we were in the docks,
70. That is, the quayside.
71. See footnote 72.
even after dark, the
ships were coming and going. The cruise
ships: many of them just stop, disgorge their tourists, do the sights, load
them up and then move on. Some did stay
the night like us, but not many. Most of
them seemed to be on the move; so it may well be that this is the quick seven
day Nile cruise covering hundreds of miles of water and an assortment of
temples. For us much more leisurely.
- - - o O o - - -
It's now Tuesday afternoon in Luxor and our
Amy cruise is over, and this diary has really fallen behind. An indication of how the cruise worked to its
own timetable is gained from two incidents.
The first was the mode of our departure.
We'd come on the boat expecting to leave Aswan at about two o'clock so
as to be at Kom Ombo by four and to visit the temple that evening, but come
four o'clock and we hadn't pulled away from the dock at Aswan. No explanation. But we didn't arrive at Kom Ombo until after
dark. The second was the situation the
second night where we'd docked at Edfu, and where we had to wait to pass
through the lock to the level below the old cataract. The queue of cruise boats coming both ways
was astonishing, and there seemed to be no logical explanation as to why we
simply couldn't all move en masse through the lock and go on our way. But nothing happened all evening, and then to
bed at eleven. Up again at twelve
o'clock when the boat moved away, but it was merely changing position at the
dock; and then more movement at four and at six, and we really didn't start
moving again until the sun was well into the sky - moving through a disused
lock, but one which imposes the width constraints on the river traffic, then
into a pondage area and finally into the present lock which was long enough to
accommodate three or four boats. Quickly
through and on our way. But none of this
according to any time schedule that the captain of our craft might have mapped
out before we left Aswan. Having said
all that we got to Luxor, our destination, ahead of time - so there's no point
in visitors to the country trying to out-guess the Egyptians or Egyptian time.
The temple at Kom Ombo was an impressive ruin,
but the one at Edfu was more impressive.
When we use the word "pylon" we're invariably talking
about the pylons of a bridge and talking of structures that have some engineering
significance. It's a Greek word, and a
number of the Egyptian temples have pylons, meaning the huge stone structures
that represent the outer gateways of the temple. The pylons at the temple of Edfu are the
biggest in Egypt, and big means really big!
-
- - o O o - - -
Luxor proved to be a very difficult place to
achieve any taping, and project abandoned.
Here I am Thursday morning, again walking the streets of Cairo, our last
full day in Egypt. Home tomorrow. This is a free day. We've travelled overnight from Luxor on the
train, arriving before seven o'clock.
Back to the Hotel Selma.
Fortunately rooms were available for all of us in the party. They must have had a few vacancies last
night. So everybody diving for the
showers and deciding what to do today.
Some are heading off to the Cairo Citadel which is a major complex of
buildings including Mohammed Ali Mosque, patterned on the Blue Mosque of Istanbul. Others, like us, just vegging out. In the last few days a bit of sickness has
caught up with us. In fact, all the time
away starting from the overnight train from Cairo to Aswan, I've had diarrhoea
- but not in any way been inconvenienced by it.
Anne has remained one hundred percent fit, till a
couple of days back when an aggravating cough set in. I've had the same thing too but not so
severe, and while we started with lozenges, we've now got hold of some
antibiotics - which you can buy at the pharmacy without prescription - and
hoping to forestall anything more serious.
Can't tell whether it's cold or the flu, but there's a strong
possibility that it may be simply induced by the inhaling of dust or the
mixture of dust and horse manure. Both
Aswan and Luxor have hundreds of horse-drawn carriages, part of the tourist
industry, and while a little trampoline-shaped arrangement is suspended in the
shafts under the horse's rear-end to catch the manure, nevertheless there's
still plenty in the streets, and people - the locals and visitors alike - are
invariably inhaling this mixture
Tape 7
as they travel around.
There were a number of highlights of our visit
to Aswan. One of these was the visit to
the temple of Philae. The temple in
Egyptian terms not particularly old - it dates back to what they call the
Ptolemaic times. These were the years
from about seven hundred B.C. when Egypt was conquered by the Greeks, and the
Greek Ptolemy set himself up as Pharaoh of Egypt; and his family, the Ptolemaic
dynasty, ruled Egypt for some hundreds of years.72 During that time one of the Ptolemaic rulers
was the famous Cleopatra. In fact there
were thirteen Cleopatras on the throne of Egypt at one time or another.73 This is the era of the temple of Philae at
Aswan. When the Aswan dam was built
across the Nile, back in the 1920s, I think,74 the temple
which had been on an island in the river was now on an island in the lake
behind the dam wall, and it was inundated, with about half of the height above
water level and half submerged. In the
1970s UNESCO, in co-operation with the Egypt government, initiated a scheme to
save the temple, so a new artificial island was constructed to replicate the
original island, and the water drained out, and the Philae temple removed to
its new site, stone by stone.75 A major piece of engineering, no doubt paid
for many times over by the tourist dollars.
Having relocated the temple on to an island it
means that all tourists have to travel by boat, and to get some of the feeling
of the Egyptians of earlier times; although I must say that everything I
learned about temples in the last week suggests that they were exclusively the
domain of the priests and the Pharaoh; and the common people, if allowed in at
all, would have been allowed in only to the outermost courtyards.
72. Not seven hundred
B.C. Ptolemy the First was one of
Alexander the Great's generals, and after Alexander's death he "got"
Egypt and ruled from 323 B.C. The Ptolemys
ruled Egypt till 30 B.C.
73. See footnote 78.
74. You think wrong! It was built by the British in 1902. It was enlarged in 1934.
75. The temple known as the
Temple of Isis, was built in early Ptolemaic times. The building of the Aswan High Dam between
1960 and 1970 would have completely inundated it. The UNESCO rescue plan was commenced in 1968.
Another highlight of
Aswan is the visit to Abu Simbel. When
the new Aswan dam was planned in the 1950s and 1960s it was clear that the
temple of Abu Simbel, which sat on the banks of the Nile upstream from the new
dam, and which had not been affected by the water level created by the old dam,
was going to be inundated; and UNESCO in its first venture of this kind
orchestrated the relocation of the temple. Massive engineering task but it had to be
done. The temple built by Ramses the
Second, and nearby temple built to his favourite wife Nefertari. I had always pictured the temple as being out
in the desert, all alone. Out in the
desert it certainly is, but nearby there's a town of Abu Simbel - and the
journey from Aswan south by air about forty-five minutes. This gives an indication of the size of the
dam behind the great wall, now named Lake Nasser, described as the biggest
manmade dam76 in the world - although the Chinese are
intending to eclipse that with their major project on the Yangtze.
76. How many natural dams are there,
I wonder?
The day we arrived at Luxor, it's Monday the
9th, Jim our tour leader took us for a short introductory walk around the town;
and then that evening we went to a sound and light show at Karnak Temple. The sound and light shows are now a feature
of the Egyptian landscape and there's one at the Giza pyramids, and there's one
at Abu Simbel, and there's one at Karnak.
Karnak and Luxor seem to be interchangeable names insofar as the
geographical location is concerned, and this settlement is located on what for
thousands of years was the ancient capital of Egypt, known to the Greeks as
Thebes; and because it was the centre of government and the centre of worship
for so many years, it is well endowed with monumental masonry, specifically the
two enormous temples of Karnak and Luxor.
So here we were on Monday night, in company
with some thousands - literally thousands - of other tourists, attending the
spectacular sound and light show.
Typically these shows involve the audience being seated and watching the
play of lights and listening to the commentary on the particular object. But at Karnak the show proceeds during a walk
through the Temple complex, and finishes with the audience sitting overlooking
the ornamental lake. Very spectacular
and most professionally done. The whole
show took well over an hour, and the commentary in English was informative and
really quite moving. The loud-speakers
placed throughout the complex had enormous power and volume and clarity, and
the many voice parts were taken by professional English actors. Our show was one of more than one that night,
I think about seventeen every week in an assortment of languages. So very big business, and a very impressive
way to introduce tourists to the mysteries of the Egyptian past.
Two days later, that's yesterday, Wednesday,
we had a daylight tour of the Karnak Temple, and then later of the Luxor Temple. The Karnak Temple is the bigger of the two
and the better preserved, although the word "preserved" is a bit
deceptive because in many instances there has been restoration, not just in
recent times, but from the time archaeologists started taking an interest in
Egypt. An instance of this is at the
Luxor Temple. A few years ago there was
some concern about underground water.
The Temple is quite close to the Nile, and some drillings were made to
test the water table in all four corners of one of the courtyards; and the
fourth drilling struck something hard and wouldn't penetrate. So they
proceeded to excavate at
the spot, and by degrees unearthed a cache of statues, numbering some thirty
pieces in all, of many Pharaohs and covering a large span of time. The find was so significant and so exciting
that they took the opportunity to remove twenty-two columns that had stood for
three-and-a-half thousand years, to excavate underneath them, to improve the
drainage, repack the soil, and reassemble them - the whole thing apparently
done with much national excitement and unveiled by President Mubarek just a
couple of years back. So what is old is
in a sense new.
The major religious festival of the ancient
Egyptians commenced on the 19th of July.
And on that day three ornamental boats containing the effigies of three
of their Gods, which reposed the year round in the Temple of Karnak, were
removed by the priests and the Pharaoh and carried on three separate boats
along the Nile to the Temple of Luxor, a little way upstream - about a
kilometre I suppose - and then processed from the waterfront up through the
causeways and forecourts into the Temple of Luxor where celebrations continued
for three weeks - the Pharaoh and family living in that temple until the festival
was over; and the three boats and their effigies were then carried
shoulder-high by priests back to the Temple of Karnak. And they were carried along a roadway lined
by hundreds of sphinxes, either side.
There's a small row of these sphinxes at the Temple of Luxor still, and
some at the Temple of Karnak still, but in between we have the modern
settlement of Luxor, and we're told that the stone sphinxes are likely still to
be under the ground.
The sheer size of the statues and the columns
and the temples is staggering, and the sheer scope of the temple complexes is
almost unbelievable. One of the areas of
the Temple of Karnak has one- hundred-and-thirty-four closely packed columns,
just like a forest. And our guide, one
of the senior members of the guiding fraternity, boasted of being a native of
Luxor and having played amongst the columns as a kid. At times through history the Karnak Temple
has been covered in sand, or partly covered, and has been built over; and when
it was rediscovered in the nineteenth century there was a major removal of
sand, and latter day structures to, in a sense, bring it back to life.
Gary Andrews
ANNE & GARY ANDREWS - AUGUST/OCTOBER 2000
TRANSCRIPT OF GARY'S TAPE-RECORDED DIARY
PART 8 of 8
I'm standing in the street near the hotel in
Cairo. You can hear the street noises
from time to time. There's some major
construction work going on across the road.
It's a mosque under refurbishment; but the most notable thing is that
it's a cool morning. Delightful shorts
weather but no more I guess than twenty-two or twenty-three degrees. It's a quarter-past-ten. Every day till now it's been hot. Aswan must be pretty close to the equator,
and our time there certainly suggested that.
It was not much cooler in Luxor.77 Our day at the Valley of the Kings was
blisteringly hot. The ancient Egyptian
religion associated the sun with life and death. The sunrise represented life, and so the
rising of the sun over the east side of the Nile meant that that's where living
took place - indeed the Greeks call it acropolis - and on the west side of the
Nile was where death took place - where the sun set - and the Greeks call that
necropolis; and it's on the west side where we find the Valley of the
Kings. The Valley is located in a
77. Not really close to the
Equator at all. Almost as far south as
you can go in Egypt, and about 200 kilometres from the Sudan border, Aswan is
at latitude 24 degrees north, and much closer to the Tropic of Cancer than to
the Equator.
range of hills that stand up starkly from the
flat desert plain, and in the hillsides around the Valley were buried more than
fifty Pharaohs. We're talking of a
period more than a thousand years after the Pharaohs who constructed the Great
pyramids, and it had become very clear that the erecting of a pyramid over the
body of the Pharaoh was no guarantee that the tomb wouldn't be desecrated and
pillaged by tomb robbers.
So in the period of a New Kingdom the Pharaohs
had the idea that their mummies would be safer if placed into tombs down long
shafts dug into the hillside. They were
wrong. They were wrong in every case
except the case of Tutankhamun.
Tutankhamun's tomb was in fact opened soon after his death, but the
thieves were after the precious oils not the precious jewels, and the priests
re-sealed the tomb - and thus it remained until the archaeologist Howard Carter
made the great discovery in 1923. The
Valley is a remorselessly hot place and despite our attempts to beat the heat -
very early start, boxed breakfast, try to beat the crowd - in fact it made
little difference. While the Valley is
directly opposite Luxor the strategy was not to cross the Nile by felucca or
ferry boat, but rather to go by bus, which entailed going downstream a few
miles to a bridge. But when we got to
the bridge there was some sort of security requirement that a group of tourist
buses must cross together. So even
though we were first in line, we finished up crossing with a dozen others, and
a number of them were bigger and faster than our bus, so arrived at the ticket
box before we did. Terribly crowded,
terribly hot day, and somewhat disappointing. Remember there's nothing aboveground to
see. Every one of the tombs has an
opening which, in modern times, has had a set of steps constructed, and a
retaining wall. Not all are open to the
public - there's no particular point in that - and as part of your entrance
ticket you get admission to three of the tombs - three that the tourist people
have picked out as being representative, or the most colourful. Certainly the decorations inside the tombs
are spectacular, and it's interesting that the degree of decoration is directly
proportionate to the length of the Pharaoh's reign. The tradition was that the moment the Pharaoh
came to power work commenced on the construction of his tomb. If he reigned for twenty years, at the point
of his death he was able to be placed in a perfectly-completed vault. But if he reigned for five or six years the
job was not completed ..... and the mummy had to be placed in the tomb within
seventy days of death. So there was
often a rush job to finish off as much as possible; but in many cases that job
was never completed. Tutenkhamun's tomb
requires an extra fee to visit. Not part
of our package tour; and given that the Pharaoh died unexpectedly after only
eight years of reign, the interior decoration of the tomb is not that
spectacular, although what there is of it is in pristine condition.
On the same day we went to the nearby temple
of Queen Hatshepsut, the only female Pharaoh.78 A powerful lady who reigned for more than
twenty years and seemed to bring a feminine touch to the job, and this despite
the fact that in order to gain acceptance she had to adopt mannish ways and
wear a false
78. I can't have it both
ways. I can't - as I have - say that
there were thirteen rulers named Cleopatra and also say that Hatshepsut was the
only female Pharaoh. Hatshepsut reigned
from 1472 to 1458 BC. Previously there
had been two female Pharaohs, but Hatshepsut was the first to assume the
godship with the kingship. The
Cleopatras came more than 1000 years later, during the Ptolemaic period (323 to
30 BC). The "famous" Cleopatra
was actually the seventh and last (there were not thirteen Pharaohs named Cleopatra). She reigned from 51 to 30 BC, and the dynasty
came to an end with her death, as legend has it, from an asp to the breast.
beard.
She seemed to prefer peace to war and is recorded as having initiated
trading expeditions to Nubia, the land to the south; and the walls of her
temple show scenes of these expeditions.
There's a lot of restoration work going on at this place. The temple backs up against the hillside and
is spread in wide panorama. There seem
to be two levels, and the upper level was not accessible to tourists. At the moment the huge forecourt is being
repaved, and there were dozens of workmen sawing blocks of limestone and doing
stonemasonry work in general. Limestone
is being sawn with handsaws, and one diamond-tipped circular saw with
petrol-engine would have put about twenty people out of work in an
instant. They are working away in the
blazing sun in their flowing robes and seemingly unaffected by the conditions.
There's also a Valley of the Queens,
nearby. And we stopped there, and there
were more tombs to enter, but I excused myself and sat in one of the few areas
of shade waiting for the others for return to the bus - only to find that its
air conditioning system had failed; so Jim instead organised us to travel back
to Luxor by Felucca, which we did - back to the hotel by lunchtime. So the
whole process over in the morning, and left us with a little bit of a
complaint. There really was a lot to see
there, certainly for those interested in going into all the available tombs,
and the travel brochure had said that we were free to explore further areas
within the Valley. But in the event
there wasn't time for this, and it would have been far smarter to do the Valley
of the Kings and the associated sites over two half days rather than over one.
In the afternoon Anne rested up at our hotel,
the Hotel Philippe - pool on the roof, so this was a bonus - but I went
exploring ...... or, more accurately, I walked the streets trying to find a
spot which was both cool and quiet in order to record some diary, but without
much success. In fact any tourist
walking alone is fair game for carriage drivers, for shoe-shine boys, for
felucca owners, and for people selling every manner of goods and tourist
ware. On the next day walking through
the bazaar, after I'd finished at the Luxor Temple, progress was much
easier. This was the bazaar where the
local people do their shopping. Very
much more picturesque with butcher stands (yuk), vegetable stands (pretty yuk),
clothing and footwear (typical), and spice stalls (brilliant). It's clear to the vendors that you're a
tourist and unlikely to be interested in what they have to offer. It's only when you're in the streets where
the emphasis is on tourism that you're continually greeted by "Where are
you from? You English? Only ten pounds" and so on. One of the little tricks they have in Luxor
is to wave a postcard at you and to ask for your help in reading the English
words that are on it, or to ask your help in addressing it to a friend overseas.
It's just a gambit to get your attention and to drag you into their shop. Particularly unpleasant one too, because we
found when we told them we weren't interested in helping them and tried to
brush them off, they sometimes quite angrily accused us of being unhelpful.
Our small group, our group of thirteen, proved
to be a very happy bunch. No
friction. We are living together quite
comfortably. Laurence and Valerie are
Canadian, father and daughter. Laurence
a widower in his late sixties, former professor of mathematics at the
University of Lethbridge in Alberta.
Valerie lives in Vancouver and I think has a clerical job. John is from Brisbane, also retired, also a
former academic. Had been a lecturer in
psychology at one of the Brisbane technical universities. Also from Brisbane are Peter and Brenda - Peter a
former butcher, now sells real estate; Brenda, former nurse, now works in the
area of equipment specialisation. I've
mentioned this before.79
Their daughter Claudia, and Claudia's friend Darren - they've been
together over three years. Steve and
Christie from Melbourne. Steve is a
mattress manufacturer and AFL umpire.
Christie a graphic designer.
Their friend Amanda. Poor Amanda
has been quite unwell for most of the trip, taking each day as it comes. Today she says she's pretty good. Finally Marianne from Switzerland, a much
travelled lady, schoolteacher; famous - with me at least - for always saying
"that's nice" or "I'd like some of that". Magnificent appetite and happy to eat everything
served up.
79. I have not!
Just been back into the noisy main street as
you can hear. The last half hour I've
been leaning on somebody's front fence watching the construction work at the
mosque as I speak, and I'd seen a man come and go from his house a couple of
times, and he'd said hello to me. Speaks
English. But his curiosity got the
better of him and he came up and asked me what was the machine I had in my
hands, and what was it I had in the plastic bag; and when I showed him it was a
tape recorder, and all that was in the bag was another cassette and a tour
brochure, he was most apologetic at having disturbed me. I suppose he'd picked me as a potential
terrorist, and my cassette recorder as some sort of new secret weapon.
I've just passed one of those dreadful cats
that I've spoken about before. This time
my reaction is a little different. The
poor thing has been hit by a car and it's lying in the gutter, one of its front
legs chopped off at the elbow, some of its intestine hanging out, and the poor
thing clearly dying. Just meowing
pitiably and waving its tail. And you'd
have heard a small voice a moment ago say "hello". That was Mustafa. Typically the kids say hello to you. Typically you don't know whether to be friendly
or whether to assume that they're in the process of some sales pitch, but I
pointed at the cat and he said "cat", and I said "been hit by
car", he said "yes" and then raised his thumb and drew it across
his neck! So Mustafa is aware that the
cat is for the long drop. But there's
nothing he can do about it, and nothing that anyone will do about
it. Such is life and death in the
streets of Cairo. It's more life and
death than you think. I thought I was in
a reasonably quiet side street. Just
been approached by a chap crying, saying that his father was in hospital and he
needed seven pounds for medicine. So
what could I say - except "no".
We left Cairo a week ago during student riots
and I've just stopped by a doorway and heard an English language news broadcast
telling me that things haven't really improved, and once again the United
Nations is posturing, and the people are still dying. Riots at Cairo's schools and universities;
and let's hope that tomorrow our departure is not delayed. Very peaceful around here. A little jewellery shop that specialises in
amber. Amber beads, amber pendants and
some huge amber rings, real knuckle dusters.
Really a very attractive display.
And next door to it an antique shop with what, I suppose, is a collection of Egyptian antiques, although many
items recognisable from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. With the antiques, at least, it's very
comforting to know that we have no space whatever for such items, even if we
had the inclination. With the jewellery:
well, Anne doesn't much care for it and certainly not for clunky items.
I'm standing on a corner in what I think is a
pretty well-to-do area. As I look around
me the pervading impression is motor cars.
Every available spot, not on the footpaths but up to the kerb, it's
occupied by a vehicle. In both streets
they've arranged it with parallel parking on one side and angle parking on the
other, so there's room for one vehicle only down the middle. So there's a lot of backing up, and this
generally occurs at corners. So people
flick into the available space at the crossroad and that's where the passing is
done. So a lot of backing up as two cars
approach each other in what's effectively a one way street. And if there are these many cars in the
street at eleven o'clock on a working day, what does it mean? If it means that the workers don't take their
car to work, then what do they have the car for? Do the Egyptians have such a thing as a
Sunday drive - in their case a Friday drive, that's the holiday day of the
week. Are all these "second"
cars of two car families and, if so, how the heck do they find space to put the
first car at the end of the working day?
So, as I've remarked before, the car is choking the modern city; and in
Cairo, at least, it's choking the city while standing still. The situation here is certainly worse than in
Italy but not hugely so, although I concede that in Italy my viewpoint would
have been coloured by the fact that as a driver I was part of the problem.
Which takes me back a long, long way to
Thursday the twenty-first of September.
The previous day we'd split up somewhat and I'd walked around Perugia
and found the Etruscan Museum and St. Peter's church. On the Thursday, by common accord we opted
for a day in the country. Not travelling
to another town to visit its churches but to visit a waterfall, the Marmore
Cascade. Described in the guide books as
Italy's Niagara but a glaring example of how Italians are prone to exaggerate. So unlike Niagara is it that that the
waterfall was killed some time ago by a dam constructed above it; but in order
to please the tourists - or maybe even the local farmers - the water is
released over the falls a couple of times a day.80 So a most pleasant day through the
countryside. I stopped the car at the
top of the falls, paid to use a gruesome toilet, and walked down to the bottom
- where there are free toilets! I
volunteered to walk back to the top to collect the car, and rejoined the others
for a picnic lunch. So taken had we been
by Assisi three days earlier that we returned home to Perugia via Assisi for
another look at the St. Francis complex.
This time we were able to gain access to the area to the sides and
behind the altar, and we felt that the return visit had been most worthwhile.
80. Despite its man-made
constraints, the Marmore Cascade remains the highest falls in Europe - 541
feet. The waters are diverted to
generate electricity. The falls were
"created" by the Romans to prevent flooding in the agricultural
plains.
This was a Thursday. Tom was booked to fly home from London on
Monday, and had arranged to spend a couple of nights in Venice, then to London,
with the Sunday night at Judy Rowe's before heading home. So on the Friday morning the task was to get
Tom to the Perugia station thence to Venice.
We knew how to get from the station to our apartment, and from our
apartment to the carpark, but much of that journey is via one way
streets. And on the day before, by
chance in leaving the carpark, we'd seen "station" signs and followed
them around quite a circuitous route down through the hilltop town and around
the base, ending up at the station; and had decided that this was the way for
us to travel - at least a way that we'd previously traversed. But on the Thursday night, just to be sure,
we did a dry run, Tom, Judy and myself - and got completely lost. So Gary and Tom to the station, hoping Friday
morning that we'd be a bit cleverer - and we were. This time we anticipated the one intersection
where there was no signage, and turned in the correct direction - and Tom on
the six-forty-five a.m. train and away to Venice.
Later that day I took Judy and Anne on the
same route I'd taken two days previously to St. Peter's church, only to find
something that I hadn't particularly noted on my solitary journey, that there
were some very fine shops on the way. I
think a bit of damage was done in the fabric arena; and we duly arrived at St.
Peter's only to find that it was closed for lunch. You'll remember that the religious cloisters
and other buildings attached to the cathedral81 are now
occupied by the School of Agriculture, and not only was there a campus
cafeteria where we were able to get some sustenance but we were able to wander
through, and gain admission, to the superb herb garden. So with two hours to kill this was a lovely
spot to kill them. A very pleasant
afternoon; and then later in the day Anne and Gary on another walk closer to
our apartment where Anne was able to buy a couple of pairs of shoes.
81. Not a cathedral. The Perugia cathedral is San Lorenzo's, right
by our lodgings.
Saturday morning, a repeat of the previous
day's trip to the station. Judy on the
six-forty-five to Rome in lieu of Tom on the six forty-five to Venice. This also was our day of departure
from the Perugia apartment, and Anne having come along to bid farewell to Judy
at the station, we were both wide awake and packed up and were on our way at
eight-thirty. It would have been nice to
stay and say farewell to the caretaker couple but we had no idea of when they'd
be coming into town, and we had a commitment to be at our Tuscan villa by five
in the afternoon. Despite this a
leisurely journey across country, not so far, but we stopped at a number of
towns. Lucignano. Monte Sansavino, where everybody in town,
everybody from quite a distance around I suspect, was waiting in the
square. Lots of police, the media
people, and apparently an anticipated visit from some local politician. Montevarcho, where it was a very dreamy
Saturday afternoon; and then having struck out for the town near our villa, we
discovered a large out-of-town supermarket.
A huge place - a sort of K-Mart/Safeway combined. Everything seemed to be in bulk and everybody
seemed to be doing their weekly shopping.
I don't know whether they have overnight shelf stackers like we do at
home, but in the midst of all the shoppers there were staff pushing their way
through with pallet trucks, and shelves being replenished as they were being
depleted. So we bought some supplies for
the ensuing days, including a bottle of very good brandy for the equivalent of
fourteen Australian dollars, and then on from Montevarcho the quite short
distance to our new home. Our very
detailed instructions started at Montevarcho, and we had to look for the Loro
Ciuffenna sign. We were lucky, and able
to follow it all the way, and all the way up the hill to the rear of the town
to our place known as "La Casalina".
We were greeted by the owners, Mr. & Mrs. Fabri, and their daughter
Nubia. Nubia spoke a little English
although the second language she's learning at school is French, but mother and
father spoke none whatever and we continued to be amazed, when we saw Franco
Fabri a couple of times through the week, that he knew no English
whatever. This against the backdrop of a
man who has two hillside apartments let continually to English-speaking
tenants. The track up the hillside was
precisely that, about two kilometres I guess from Loro Ciuffenna; and on
arrival we were gobsmacked. The site is
superb. The aspect from the house and
from the terrace is across the valley of the Arno and across the quite densely
populated areas below, but up on the hillside you might be in another world.
[So the mullah82 has started
again. What the significance of a
nine-minute-to-twelve call to prayers is I don't know. Merciful heaven, he stopped after two
minutes. So obviously the four-thirty
a.m. prayer call is much more important, if one is to judge by size.]
82. The call to prayer is by a muezzin, not
a mullah. A mullah is a teacher of
sacred law.
Now a quick run through our week on the
hillside. On Sunday we went looking for
Gropina, Gropina church. Before leaving
Melbourne we'd mentioned to a friend that we were staying near Loro Ciuffenna. This friend had said, "ah, right nearby
is a little village and a little church - Gropina - that has some internal
columns and some wonderful carvings on the capitals, and worth
seeing". And on the track up to the
house we'd seen the sign to Gropina. So,
it was in fact directly below us as we sat on our balcony. A surprising coincidence. And as we arrived at the church on the Sunday
morning it was in session, and there was a wedding. Two elderly local people, all the community there, and we sat
in the church at the side and in our own way participated in proceedings; and
you've heard already some of the music from that ceremony.
Later that day a visit to some local towns and
to the market at Teranova Bracciolini, shown on all the street signs as
Teranova B. A huge market that takes
place every so often with street after street of the town occupied by temporary
stall-holders.
On the Monday afternoon to San Gimignano, the
famous town with the famous towers. We
arrived late in the day thinking that the tourist throng would have thinned,
but it wasn't so. While we parked
reasonably easily in a public pay-park we were getting so frustrated by the
numbers of cars and by the huge numbers of people that for us San Gimignano was
a bit of a dud. Like so many places
you'd just love to be there all by yourself.
But it's not to be, and never will be.
On Tuesday, another lazy morning. By lazy I mean reading and relaxing, and then
in the afternoon to Arezzo. Arezzo a bit
of a blur. It was a pleasant place and a
place where we should have spent more time, but the occasion was dampened for
us by the fact that on the way we'd lost Anne's camera. We travelled via some delightful back-country
roads and suddenly there was a rush of on-coming vehicles, the horns blazing
and arms waving, and we soon realised that they were leading a bike race and directing
us to pull off the road. Which we
did. Anne took a couple of photos and
then put down the camera on the bonnet of the car while we watched the
stragglers pass by, and then we drove off without remembering the
camera. We did remember about twenty
minutes later, retraced our steps, and spent more than an hour I suppose
searching the roadside. I left our name
with the nearby farmhouse where the son of the family was home and spoke a
little English, and our only hope is that the camera was picked up by somebody
who turned it in to the police.
Tape 8
So that night I wrote out a lost property
report giving our names and addresses and where we were staying for the balance
of the week and then the next morning, the Wednesday morning, 27 September,
filed this at the local police station.
No one at the station spoke a word of English but the officer on duty
pretty soon understood and filled out a lost property report. But it went into the basket with many other
documents and our only hope, I think, is for me upon returning home to send
them a further letter of explanation and request for help, and to have it
translated into their language by an Italian friend. The silly thing is that we had no
identification in the camera, so if it's handed in at any other police station
in Italy it's likely to remain unclaimed anyway. And the tragic thing is that there were about
thirty snaps that had been exposed on the film.
So we've lost a part of the visual record of our trip. From that point on we started taking
snapshots with my camera rather than slides, and then bought a new camera in
Rome and reverted to the previous arrangement until such time as my
camera packed it in. So we haven't been
very lucky with cameras this trip.83
83. Forget lucky. Try clever.
I forgot to mention that one day I left my camera on the counter of a
small grocery/stationer in Loro Ciuffenna.
Returning next day, with much misgiving, I was delighted to find that
the people had carefully kept the camera by the cash register until claimed.
On the Wednesday morning we also called at the
post office, called again that is. We'd
been there bright and early on Monday morning, but they declared that there was
no mail waiting for us. And then on
Wednesday the same answer, except that we were out the door and down the street
when the lass chased after us - they'd found a letter out the back, the letter
from Gloria. Nice to receive news from
home in this form although we'd spoken to her in the meantime, but a letter has
a different feel about it. But we've
known of at least one other letter that had been written and we'll only ever
see that if it's returned to sender. The
rest of that day just mooching around and then on the Thursday to Sienna. A great place as previously reported. On the Friday just touring around the local
towns; and on the Saturday our day of departure down to Fiumicino at Rome
airport.
Impressions of Italy: well we loved Perugia. It's a big bustling exciting historic
fashionable city, plagued by motor cars and by one-way streets. But to live in the heart of the town, as we
did, was very special and we'd happily do that again. The place in Tuscany, at Loro Ciuffenna: again a magic experience. If you want to be isolated somewhere for a
week or so, this is an ideal place to be.
But despite all this our time in Italy wasn't a thrilling experience, or
at least not thrilling to the point that we'd want to repeat it, certainly not
in the near future. We're quite united
on this point, that given the opportunity we'd much rather spend time in France
than in Italy. We're happier with French
people than with Italian people. We're happier with the French language than
with Italian; and Tuscany to us is
nothing special. We were seeing
it after summer, at the driest time of the year, so it wasn't rolling green
hills but rather drying off crops. But
that's not the issue. The issue is that
even though we had our hilltop paradise we knew that wherever we went we'd
first have to get down into that dreadful traffic. Travel writing on Tuscany invariably
emphasises the small villages, the wonderful local wine, the wonderful local
foods, the language. The writer chooses
a favourite eating place in a favourite village; but Anne and Gary are not fond
enough of their food and drink and this sort of local ambience to go seek it
out and, as I've indicated, on the whole we'd rather be in France.
And Egypt:
well Egypt is Egypt. You've heard
me say that so many of the sights that we've seen have been
"ruined". I say that in
quotes, ruined by there being too many people.
This is unavoidable but it doesn't make the experience any happier. This morning on the train we were asked to
complete an Imaginative Traveller questionnaire, and one of the questions asked
us to indicate the highlights of our tour - and among the many highlights the
one that we agreed upon was the journey on the first day of our Cairo stay, out
into the desert, where we visited the Red Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid and then
later the Step Pyramid at Maidum. Not
because these are more spectacular but because there were relatively few
tourists visiting them. They're not high
spots on the itinerary of the five day tour!
So we were able to go inside in relative peace, to stand outside and
take it all in without the babble of bus loads of many tongues. The Egyptian monuments are vital to world
culture and history. Tourism is vital to
the Egyptian economy. Tourism is also
killing the place, and it's a sad trade-off that the nation must make. For our part we've had a wonderful
fortnight. Our tour group has been
fine. The job done by the tour company
is excellent. We've covered all the
major sites and then some. Those sites
are spectacular; but we have no wish to return.
One of the other questions on this morning's
questionnaire asked where, if we are travelling abroad in the next few years,
we would choose to go? And each of us
responded U.K., France, U.S.A. We must
be getting old. I think the problems of
dirt and dust and unsanitary lavatories are getting to us. And in any event who needs to travel
overseas? We've got the best country
right where we live. One of its greatest
features is that you can find a place where you're quite alone.
Gary Andrews
