BRITAIN/FRANCE/ITALY/EGYPT - TRIP DIARY 2000

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