Chuck Close at the MCA

Posted on January 20, 2015 by mcrae3051

This is Bob where I first saw him in 1982, in the Australian National Gallery. It was an early acquisition and at nearly 3 metres high and 2.14 wide competed with Anselm Keifer’s ‘Twilight of the West’ for dominance of the space where they were displayed. Probably like most people I thought, hmm big photo, quality print, caught a moment and, probably like most people, was a bit shocked to discover it was a canvas covered with acrylic paint. However close you stood it was hard to be convinced. Photorealism realised.

Chuck Close was the artist.

I began to follow his career which has at least two unusual aspects. The first was that Chuck has prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, a cognitive disorder where the ability to recognize faces is impaired while other aspects of visual processing and intellectual function remain intact. It can be acquired or congenital and may affect up to 2.5% of the population. The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus which activates specifically in response to faces allowing the recognition of faces in more detail than other similarly complex objects. Rather thrilling in itself. To date, no therapies have demonstrated a capacity to remediate the condition. Prosopagnosics often learn to use ‘feature-by-feature’ recognition strategies involving secondary clues such as clothing, gait, hair color, body shape or voice. Because the face seems to function as an important identifying feature in memory, it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialise normally with others. Who else has prosopagnosia? Friend to primates Jane Goodall; French actor Thierry Lhermitte (at left) whose face you might recognise if not his name; possibly accounting for his very wide range of wives and mistresses playwright Sir Tom Stoppard (né Tomáš Straussler, who knew); Dr Karl of Triple J and splendid shirts fame; Oliver Sacks who despite writing case studies of prosopagnosia didn’t realise until recently he had it himself.

There is a major exhibition of Close’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney at present, and Myrna didn’t like it much. One of her reasons was that there were too many self portraits, and yes there were a great many, but maybe it’s a manifestation of his prosopagnosia. Close himself has said: ‘I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me.’ A need to establish your own physical identity?

Perhaps paradoxically, Bob the subject (Robert Israel) has said: ‘I had wanted Chuck to ask me to pose for him, but I really didn’t feel it was proper for me to ask. Chuck’s decision of who he would paint had to do not only with whether you were a friend, but with the topology of your face.’ What’s he seeing there? Close tells his own story about Bob. ‘I had taken a break and was walking back into the studio. Looking at the painting, I realised that a highlight in one of the eyes was too bright. And I said, “Damn it, now I’m going to have to take his glasses off”. But when I realised what I had said, I pivoted on my heel and walked out leaving the lights on, the compressor on and the airbrushes full of paint. When you start believing in your own illusion, you’re in serious trouble.’ Clearly his relationship with his work is complex. Is this another version of the idea of art, high art, fine art, being a product of dysfunctionality? And this is Chuck. (It’s a photo that I took of the desktop of the computer at the entry counter.) He’s in his wheelchair. In December 1988, Close suffered a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down. A spinal artery had collapsed. He’s worked hard to get some mobility back and for some time he has been able to paint by strapping paint brushes to his arms and moving them — the second remarkable aspect of his career. So, rather than the very fine work with spray painter, airbrush and so on, his gestures have become larger and his media more wide-ranging. Again, art influenced and modified by infirmity. At left is a detail from the self-portrait on the right. What brilliant colour management.

Another reason Myrna didn’t like the show was its focus on the technical aspects of the work. She had been warned. It was called ‘Prints, process and collaboration’ and it was one of the reasons I enjoyed it.

It was a display of North American can-do technological skill and willingness to experiment in collaboration with master craftspeople. I like that. He moved from paint to print a long time ago but now we have very complex photo processing which produced this lovely portrait in which the whites are stronger than I have been able to make them here. And adventures in paper pulp (above, plugged into the grid at right according to a very detailed ‘colour’ chart), and renaissance games with perspective (below).And this, this, is a tapestry! It was clear how the print series layering colour on colour become their own works of art both as individual pieces and as series. Even the print woodblocks create their own jigsaw of delight. Finally, the audience makes its own contribution. Jacquard tapestries. Roy Lichtenstein on the left. Extraordinary.

•••••••••• Tangential reason #713 for living in one place, or another: in the Wollongong Gallery you get just one pair of Phyllis Stewart’s gorgeous shell slippers. In the metropolis you get more.

Attractive Curiosities: wet and arty

Posted on January 20, 2015 by mcrae3051

Pt Kembla sea pool. Two swimmers. Disappearing into infinity. The colours of ghosts. The terraces at left suggest another different time. Such a beautiful pool.

North Wollongong beach. Hot. From a distance the statue looks, what, Grecian? Up closer, a bit more terrorifying.

The rocks above the Gong’s sea baths.

Wedding Cake Rocks in the Royal National Park.

The Illawarra as described on the outside wall of the Wollongong gallery.

The Illawarra as described on the inside wall of the Wollongong gallery.

The Illawarra as described on the bedroom wall of the Wollongong gallery.

‘Why me?’ Alice McKenzie, Narwan woman. Self-explanatory.

Untitled masterpiece. George Tjungurrayi, Kiwirrkura man. Not self-explanatory.

Lady Di providing direction to three Pre-Raphaelite chaps.

Why this? Why anything?

Sydney.

Pixillated.

Tasmania encore: 2014

Posted on December 6, 2014 by mcrae3051

MONA goes bad!

Headline! Freak out! I have previously expressed my confidence in and delight with Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art. But on our recent trip to Tasmania we went to MONA again and the unthinkable occurred. David Walsh seemed to have lost his touch.

We went. The bottom floor was closed in toto but the upper two floors were still mesmerising. Yves Netzhammer’s giant installation and the welcome return of Nolan’s ‘Snake’ were among the highlights. I also discovered who is singing flat in the Madonna exhibit, and decided it wouldn’t be the same without him.

During a discussion about tickets we got invited back the next night to the opening of the new monster blockbuster — ‘River of Fundament’. The work of the ‘greatest artist in the world today’, or ‘one of the most important artists of our time’ (Nicole Durling from MONA, whose taste I have previously described as impeccable). (Did the ‘possibly’ escape me? I might be being unfair.) Matthew Barney!!! Munich. Beijing. Hobart. 143 crates of material, one casting weighing more than 6 tonnes. Forget Ben Hur. Bigger than just about anything.

And an opening … wooo hooo.

Watching le tout Hobart done up and out and about was worth far more than the price of admission. Special mention to the glittering onesie shorts set. Jack was there (Thompson) and Brian and Rach (Brown and Ward. Come on.) among other luminaries. I don’t know whether that was a bad sign or not. Probably. In the last Monthly David Walsh is quoted as saying, now he just rings up Steven Pinker and says have you got some neurophysiology stuff? And his book’s out. He might have tipped over and gone a bit spack. Or he might just be enjoying the perversity of it all.

‘River of Fundament’ has been growing for decades, longer, from a request by Norman Mailer to turn his worst book ‘Ancient Evenings” into an opera. It is an opera. It is also film described by an art gallery staffer who went to see it as a 6.5 hour marathon (and yes it is) of ‘an artist’s aggressive hatred for his viewing audience.’ That might please David. It would certainly pique his fancy. We didn’t see the film which might provide some sort of entrance to what there was on display in the bowels of Berriedale Point.

What we were left with was (dull)

‘Barney’s three phallus forms, cast in bronze, first appeared during the Khu performance in Detroit in 2010, which is now part of River of Fundament, Act II: when Isis gathers up the scattered physical remains of Osiris, god of the dead, resurrection and Afterlife, in an effort to restore his spirit’s integrity. Dredged from the riverbed in the wreckage of the Crown Imperial, they are a shaft of crystal salt, a muddy twisted root and a silt-encrusted metal rod: here rendered in metal so ‘feathery’ it seems almost organic.’

and (heavy, in literal usage)

‘The physical and iconographic origins of this powerful, immensely heavy (I think The Mercury, VOICE OF TASMANIA, said six plus tonnes) and more than car-sized form, completed just this year, lie in Barney’s great sculpture Djed which was cast on site in Detroit during the live Khu performance in 2010 (now seen in Act II of River of Fundament). Both Djed (too large to be brought to Tasmania) and the present work, Rouge Battery, are part re-embodiments of the Chrysler Crown Imperial that was beaten and ritually torn to pieces in Act I.

and sometimes big (although I quite liked this one. It’s Norman Mailer’s attic where he writes/wrote, upside down. Yeah I know, I know. Obvious.) But really …Excrement, putrifying matter, fighting or copulating bodies, all glisten with moisture. Sulfur is dissolved in urine. Organ pipes bubble. Molten metal flows. Mercury runs across a bathroom floor or falls from the cavities in a murdered car engine. Buffalo blood pours through the attic floor and down Mailer’s apartment walls when Norman III finally dies there. In the exhibition, the phallus forms in Coming Forth by Day [first pic above] seem to ooze into the base of their vitrine; something has drained out of Crown Imperial’s polycaprolactone tomb. The after effects of electrical actions, set solid in sculpture, seem still almost alchemically charged with metamorphic potential. And this great Boat of Ra is cast adrift here with its bronze mooring ropes, almost as far from either Egypt or New York as it is possible to be.

Mmmm obvious. You’ve now seen the highlights. It’s a mash-up of the end of the Detroit car industry, Mailer’s life and book, Ancient Egyptian mythology and the detritus of Barney’s mind. It was never going to be very engaging but without the 6.5 hour experience I’m afraid it’s nothing, just puzzlingly dull and trivial.

And we were left wondering if David had been seduced and violated by celebrity, one of the oldest and saddest stories of all. Or even, horror of horrors, whether he just might be bored.

But let’s be clear. Emphatic. This Emperor has no clothes. And now there’s whole floor of space that needs filling with good stuff. Like before.

••••••

TMAG

So let’s turn to quality. TMAG. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. It’s been done up, completely re-thought, and it’s terrific. I loved it.

After a few hours you leave it with a very powerful sense of where you are, what it’s about and how it’s been with a very fine art experience thrown in for good measure.Upstairs is one of the two extant versions of Benjamin Duterreau’s ‘The Conciliation’ — George Augustus Robinson rounding up what he thought were the last of the Palawa Tasmanians and doing good by carting them off to Wybalenna on Flinders Island in Bass Strait where almost all of them died.

There is so much that could be said about this: the unintended irony of the title, the dog and the pademelon trading glances, the European obsession with the Palawa method of spear-straightening, the record of shell necklaces. And Robinson with his florid cheeks. A joke figure? It’s hard to read otherwise. But what gets me most is that, just like the other version in Canberra’s National Gallery, the paint is cracked and beginning to peel, mostly from the distinctive grey skin of the Palawa. They’re disappearing in front of our eyes. How appropriate.

Below from right: Woureddy (Truganini’s partner), Truggernana (Truganini), Tanleboueyer

The Bush

We climbed The Mountain up the Ice House track

(That view is in front them and they’re taking a selfie! Ha ho.)

and the scoparia was out. Below the very top it was a blaze of floral colour.

We spent some time on Bruny Island, visible off the coast above. I like the complementary lines in the pic. below of the Neck. So much beauty everywhere.

National Park. Russell Falls falling.We were there to climb Mt Field West, a very rocky traverse of the Rodway Range before the Mt Field plateau. We were going the long way via Tarn Shelf for reasons of scenery. But when we got up the top, it turned out to be for reasons of self-preservation. The wind was strong enough to blow me off the duckboards. The horizontal sleet would come from one direction and then suddenly shift to the opposite. It snowed. This is an effort to take photo of snowing.

Rarely have we encountered so many varied types of precipitation (mostly violent) in so short a time.

And this is how it looked at brief moments. Glorious.

But, we were rebuffed. The track up the Newdegate Pass was a river, the wind noise from the tops sounded like a steam train driven by dervishes, and I’d lost the feeling in my fingers. We turned back. What a place.

The new header pic is the view across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel out our Bruny Island shack window with Hartz Peak in the background.

Labilladiere Peninsula walk: 28 Nov 2014

Posted on December 3, 2014 by mcrae3051

First, this is a public service rather than the standard gripping entertainment.

After finding an official-looking correction in our Bruny Island rental premises indicating that the Labilladiere walk was not 14 kilometres but 18, and not 5 hours but 7, I spent an hour on the net looking for information about which I could be confident and failing to find it: could have been five hours, or eight; could have been 12 k.s or 28. There’s a lot of cups of tea difference in those figures. As it is, the finger post immediately behind this sign says 5.5 – 6.5 hours rather than what’s here.

The maps were generally execrable. The scale on one suggested about 8 k.s all up. The most common map, on the Island brochure, suggests a mystery gap of about 2 k.s between where the track is supposed to start and ah… where it does start. So this is an effort to provide reasonably accurate up to date information about this very pleasant walk: times, directions and what to expect.

Second (even though his actual patronymic was Houtou), ‘Larbi-yardi-air’. It makes it easier to remember.

Jacques L. (at left) was the naturalist on Bruny (or really Antoine Bruni, below) d‘Entrecasteaux’s voyage to try to establish what had happened to Lapérouse. (A failure. Authentic remains were subsequently found on an island not far from Vanuatu.) Larbi-yardi-air made a number of major contributions to the collection and description of zoological, botanical and geological specimens novel to Europeans. Tasmania provided a party in this regard.

* * * * *

Despite what the board pictured above says, the walk circumambulating the Peninsula is probably a bit more than 14 k.s but not more than 16; and it took us a bit over six hours with two long breaks, or close to five hours of steady walking. There is, as occasionally advertised, a steep section over Mount Bleak gaining about 130 meters, but it’s short and the track is quite nicely graded.

The rest is the very definition of ‘medium’. If it wasn’t quite as long it would be ‘easy’. Painless exercise in a delightful environment.

While there is water at the camp ground, there is none available on the track.

The track traverses four distinct environments: heathland, very thick bracken, beach walking, and a sandy littoral track through reasonably open grey stringy-bark forest.

The one thing about which there is absolute consensus is that the walk, a circuit, should be done clockwise. I agree, but not emphatically.

On the first north-westerly leg, clockwise does give you an intermittent series of long and attractive views over the beginning of the d‘Entrecasteaux channel, the coastline of the peninsula and the mountains of the southern range including Hartz Peak lowering away over in the background. On the other side direction wouldn’t make much difference.

The track starts at the car park in the Old Jetty camping ground at the very southern end of Bruny Island. (The Jetty served for decades as the access point for getting supplies to Bruny Lighthouse keepers.) Allow at least an hour and quarter for the drive from the ferry dock. And you can actually park at the track entrance in something helpfully called ‘Track car park’.

And if that’s what you want to do, start here.

You walk a couple of hundred metres and are confronted by a choice. You hit a fire trail which will eventually take you almost the whole length of the walk on that side of the peninsula. (There’s a footpad over the hill.) If you’re me, there is some inclination to turn left because you’re a bit turned around by the drive in and you feel a (valid) need to cross the peninsula — and that might be the way.

But it’s not. Turn right. That’s the last unguided directional decision you will need to make for the whole walk.

After 20-30 minutes you will come to a clearly signed option to turn right for the shorter Luggaboine Circuit (about 2.5 hours). This was described by the owner of the Adventure Bay general store as ‘the same, but shorter.’ Your choice.

You’ve been walking through heath, sections of which are well above head height and some of which is waist high with the consequent effects on the view. In late November, and slightly past its best, this still provided a floral wonderland with hundreds of various types of orchids. In the longer views you can trace the course of the track as it wanders up and down over what looks like dune formations. There are two picturesque rocky beaches one of which, Hen and Chicken Rocks, is close to the track. The birdlife was exceptional all the way.

After about an hour and three-quarters, and just past Hen and Chicken Rocks, you will come to Mt Bleak. It took us about 15-20 minutes to get to the top. Views from the top are incidental rather than pronounced — you are still in fairly thick vegetation — but what you can see is lovely.

It is an easy descent from there towards Partridge Island which is appended to the tip of the peninsula. It took us a bit longer than I thought it would and if I’d been patient for another 5 minutes we could have had lunch at Hopwood’s Beach rather than parked on the side of the fire trail. This is after about two and three-quarter hours.

You climb out of the bush onto the beach for 200 or so metres before the signed entry to the trail on the other side. Then it’s about 15-20 minutes through some very dense vegetation with a lot of bracken where the track aperture is about shoulder-wide. I’d already nearly trodden on a two-metre black snake and I was pleased to get out onto Butler’s Beach. Below: this was after it had thinned out considerably. You’ve turned the corner by now and the track takes you perhaps a bit over a k. on reasonably solid sand with lovely views.

Up off the beach, again well signed — in fact once you actually get there the signage and information are fine. Then a bit less than two hours of trucking through open stringy-bark forest along a gently undulating sandy track (with occasional patches of roots and rocks just to remind you that you’re in Tassie) sticking with the littoral at not much less than footpath pace.About 25 minutes from home, you’ll come to this, the second intersection with the Luggaboine Circuit.

And this is the end. Note the track off the other end of the beach for the light house provisioning.

One foot either side of the Equator: and other stories of derring-do

Posted on October 22, 2014 by mcrae3051

Despite the quality of her outfit, this woman is making an unforced error. If she puts her right foot a little further to the right, just the other side of the grout, she’ll be doing the right thing. One foot in the northern hemisphere and one foot in the south. A thrill may travel up through her body although I’m not sure it will. I was left unmoved.

We’re just out of Pontianak (which also means ‘ghostly vampire’ in bahasa) on the banks of the mighty Kapuas, the biggest river in Indonesia, rising in the hinterland of Kalimantan. We’re near its mouth on the west coast where the Dutch decided to conduct a careful latitudinal survey in 1928 and at longitude 109⁰20’E they placed a monument to precisely define the Equator. The Indonesians roofed said monument in the 1970s, and it is now Pontianak’s prime tourist attraction.

Pontianak is more than one-third ethnic Chinese and feels like it. To indicate its diversity, it has a huge Buddhist temple, an enormous Muslim mosque and a gigantic Catholic cathedral (below).

When I was there it rained. Only for half an hour but by that time the surrounds were flooded.

This must happen a lot. No one was fazed.

And while we’re on educational, what’s this?

Rubber drying.

But to move from the paltry to lay some more important matters out.

Apart from the quality of its food, for which it is renowned, the really important thing about Pontianak is that with very little trouble you can balance an egg on its end. I did this, me, moi, so no special gifts required. This is anywhere at the Equator. Look at this. They’re at it everywhere.

Now how come?

There is a tradition elsewhere of balancing eggs on the vernal (and presumably autumnal) equinox — days of equal night and day. And although the National Geographic includes in its games for kids: ‘Some people believe that the gravitational pull of the sun that occurs on the equinoxes can help keep an egg standing on its end’, there is a tradition of rubbishing the whole idea on the internet. And there’s, you know, the direction water drains down plug holes separated by a couple of feet either side and … how come you lose all strength standing on the Equator? And what if you slip and fall through the cosmic doorway to a brighter future. (Ah no, that’s definitely just been made up).

I tried to balance an egg on its end at home and although, notionally at least, you ought to be able to balance almost anything, I couldn’t. In fact they were keen to just flop over. A little man in each of them threw himself sideways immediately the eggs were placed upright. It is suggested that you shake them so that the yolk settles at the bottom. I couldn’t make that work either.

I’ll leave that with you as one of the ineffable thrills available to the traveller to Pontianak.

• • • • • • • • •

Just while I’m here, I want to place on record that I got from Citadines Apartotel in central Jakarta to Terminal dua F of the Soekarno-Hatta Airport in 27 minutes. About 38 kilometres. To properly understand the dimensions of this feat it is necessary to understand that it has taken me 2 hours and 50 minutes, and that you always try to allow at least two hours.

I don’t take photos on this route. You think you’re going to capture the experience but it’s impossible. Coming the other way, arrival in Jakarta is usually a depressing experience — for me. Some people thrill to their first smell of kretek and fish paste. Tired, you forget to pay your US35 at the door and, despite the presence of his fixer, some morbidly obese anglo-celt has an incomprehensibly complex negotiation to complete which causes the payment queue to stall. There are 10,000 cabs (with 10,000 people keen to assist you to find one) waiting outside but none with your name on it. That will take an hour to appear because it must be arranged through Golden Bird not Silver Bird, although you are assured they’re the same company.

But in the end you are tucked up in the back seat of a Toyota Avanza and, once you’re shot of the airport proper, progress is good. You’re on a jalan tol, a freeway of sorts. Modernisation you think. Splendid.

But about 15 k.s later — by the time you get to Slipi when you’re struggling to make out the lights of the tower blocks through the tangible, cuttable, air — the true horror of it all hits you. It’s hard to believe that you could ever find a way through this wall of traffic. You’re stationary behind a bus belching partially digested diesel through your aircon and between a truck carrying scaffolding on one side and one with a very rickety looking load of wood on the other. And when I say behind and between I mean, you know … 10 centimetres.

Arriving this time we hit a giant wedding at the Hotel Mulia and didn’t move except for slight creepings sideways for 20 minutes. We didn’t move because there was a food truck delivering food to the wedding parked perpendicularly across two and a half of the three lanes of traffic. Selamat pernikahan Shana and Dewis. Best wishes. (But with an Indonesian pronunciation.)

To the right, Jalan Rasuna Said at 6am.

It is 5.45 in the morning, not my best time I readily confess. My driver has been waiting at Citadines for 45 minutes, arriving an hour early. Reception has rung twice to say he’s there. Could that have provided a motive? I don’t know. But he escaped from Jalan Rasuna Said almost instantly and headed off through the kampong lanes. Always up for something new, this is good I thought. I had enough time to get my flight, if no more than enough, but anything to get off Rasuna at six in the morning.

It was just a little like Hollywood. You know. Boom go the chook cages. Squash go the paw paws. Through the chicken rice shop. As we cut to local peasants fleeing with motor scooters crashing into each other and flying into the air, it occurred to me that I was about to witness a formidable display of Indonesian manhood. Can be good; but as the excitement mounts might just tip over into something not quite so desirable, especially when you’re a participant.

I’ve watched these performances of weaving through the traffic, often big black Mercs with windows even more heavily tinted than usual. No, you think, he can’t. He’s not going to make it. But he does, even if three scooters have to commit to the shoulder which in Jakarta could mean anything. And he does it again. It’s a bus, it’s a bus, it’s … and then as the jalan turns into a high overpass, you can see in the distance he’s still going, still at it. But I’d never actually been in the vehicle before.

It was far too early in the morning to think of what ‘slow down’ was in Indonesian, and ‘Stop’ which would be understood but unexpected might have produced a calamity. Zoosh we went, just missed him. Zhang, into that impossible hole. Pass on the left, bus in front, he can’t, it’s not poss … Ah my Lord.

On the jalan tol I peered over his shoulder and he was doing 147 kph. Oooo pak, I murmured. Pak pak pak. Phlooot, straight through the middle of two trucks with millimetres to spare. He was good. Outstanding of his type.

The ‘Kurangi kecepetan’ (‘reduce speed’) sign on the outskirts of the airport building seemed to induce a new rush of testosterone. Zhinnnnngg we went, round the clover leaves like a roller coaster. Dua F. Ya pak, ya. Ini. Two F, we’re here pal. He even stopped quickly.

I had some money in my pocket for a tip and I got it out thinking no way no way no way, although with qualifications. I was alive. I was here. I was even early, never a bad thing at CGK. He had shown me his best. There was a blue 50,000, 5 bucks, in the roll. That was never going to be included in any tip. But he snatched, too strong a word, Indonesians don’t snatch — lifted, yes lifted, the 50, cackled like crazy and was gone. I looked at my watch. 27 minutes, door to door.

• • • • • • • • •

I had some time to spare on the first day so after I’d got something to eat at D’ Stupid Baker I thought I’d go for a walk. Midday, no hat, no map, no water, sandals not shoes — d’ stupid walker. But I thought I’d probably survive, and I did even though when I got back I was a startlingly sweaty spectacle.

There were some shady alley ways besides the building sites along with a fetid waterway that kept pushing me further away from my planned route. If I’d tried to wade through it I think I would have gone fizz like a Fruit Tingle and dissolved. I also had a chance to walk through some proper food courts.

And then I came to this. Jakarta isn’t awash with remarkable modern architecture like Beijing, Singapore or the Emirates cities, but it does have the Bakrie Tower.

Which goes with this —

Why, you may ask?

Indonesia is a country exceedingly rich in natural resources. On 26 May, 2006, PT Lapindo Brantas, an Indonesian company exploring for gas and oil, began drilling near the town of Sidoarjo in east Java.

In the first stage the drilling went through a thick seam of clay, then through sands, volcanic debris, shales, and finally into permeable limestone. Steel casing was installed in the borehole to help stabilize it. During the second stage the drill went deeper to about 3000m, this time without a protective casing. A series of small eruptions of water, steam and gas occurred near the site.

Then on the 27^th a 6.3 magnitude earthquake occurred with its epicenter at Yogyakarta, 250 k.s southwest. Seven minutes after the earthquake a mud loss problem in the well was noted at the drilling site. After two major aftershocks, the well suffered a complete loss of circulation. This happens when ‘drilling mud’ — necessary for maintenance of the stability of the bore — pumped down a shaft does not return to the surface but is lost into some opening or a fault system. A day later the well suffered a ‘kick’, an influx of fluid into the well bore. This problem seems to have been rectified within three hours. Then, the next day, 29 May, steam, water and mud began erupting up to 200 meters above the well, a phenomenon that is now known as the Lusi mud volcano. (Lusi from Lumpur (mud) and Sidoarjo, the town, a very Indonesian piece of language construction.)

So it could have been the drilling, it could have been the earthquake, or it could even have been the sort of seismic fracturing that occurs on a day-to-day basis in many parts of Indonesia which is a very lively part of the ‘Fiery Circle’ which surrounds the Pacific tectonic plate.

But whatever it was, the mud (at a temperature of about 60C) erupted out of the ground initially at a rate of 180,000 cubic metres a day, now after 18 years slowed to a regular pulse. 1000 hectares, 13 villages and 28 factories have been inundated. Thirteen lives lost. Estimates vary but around 70,000 people have been forced to relocate.The mud stinks (of hydrogen sulphide among other things) and is described as toxic. Berms and levees have been built to contain and channel new mud flows into the nearby Porong river, which might not be everybody’s first choice. The levees have also collapsed quite frequently with the inexorable increase in the volume of the mud.

At the time this disaster was overshadowed by the impact of the Yogya earthquake: 6,234 deaths, 37,000 significantly injured and 1.3 million left homeless. However Lusi continues today, as do the demands for compensation which remain unresolved.

Who pays? Not us say Lapindo. Its Australian multinational partner Santos (18%) paid up ($US22.5m but not because they were responsible, just being good citizens) and fled. It was an act of god. The earthquake caused it. Etc. The government has in fact, after 18 years, provided about 20% of the agreed compensation.

This is an intriguing case of scientific uncertainty. Apart from its profound political sensitivity and financial implications, what happened was a matter of great geological interest. Thus a large number of studies were mounted of what actually had happened. Several teams of expert foreign investigators have concluded it was the drilling that did the damage. ‘The impact of the earthquake would have been no more than that of a heavy truck passing over the area.’ However round 2009 Lapindo’s PR firm started circulating new research that proved ‘beyond doubt’ that it was the earthquake, and in fact there is independently generated research claiming to do so. The cause of the disaster is not firmly resolved.

For animists and environmentalists alike, however, there is something viscerally authentic about sticking something three k.s into the earth and the earth jacking up, blowing its top, spitting mud. Maybe nuts, but an attractive idea nonetheless. In 1928 that mighty metaphysician and superior spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle published a story ‘When the World Screamed’ which pretty much follows that scenario.

The owners of Lapindo have gone to considerable lengths to distance themselves from the tragedy. They have tried twice to sell the company for nominal amounts (in turn US$2 and US$1m.), but were blocked from doing so by a governmental agency. Lapindo was initially asked to pay 2.5 trillion rupiah (about US$280 million) to the victims and about 1.3 trillion rupiah in additional costs to stop the flow. Thirteen of Lapindo’s executives and engineers were charged with violating Indonesian laws. This legal action subsequently stalled and SBY’s government took over the payment of the reparation funds (most of which have not yet been paid).

Local and in fact international protests continue. The mud now contains sculptures depicting the suffering and despair of the residents. And this man here. Quite a good likeness. (The signs I can read say, left to right: ‘Our lives have suffered much destruction because of Lapindo’, ‘Justice must be served. No more waiting’ and ‘Machines are the destroyers of nature’.)

Who owned PT Lapindo Brantas? Indonesia’s richest man, Aburizal Bakrie, chair of the Golkar party for many years, a key figure in SBY’s government, the owner and developer of the Bakrie Tower and at the time, with spectacular irony, the national Welfare Minister.

From the Jakarta Post of 1 October this year:

The House of Representatives on Monday unanimously passed into law a bill that allows president-elect Joko “Jokowi” Widodo to force chairman of the Bakrie Group, Aburizal Bakrie, to fulfill his Rp 781 billion (US$65 million) financial obligation to the victims of the Lapindo mudflow disaster in Sidoarjo, East Java, next year.

Aburizal, who is also Golkar Party chairman, has lost the privileges he has enjoyed between 2007 and 2014 courtesy of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration.

The President had allocated more than Rp 6 trillion of government money in 2007 to compensate villagers living in the vicinity of the so-called ‘affected area map’.

Such generous financial protection for the Bakrie Group was among the reasons why Golkar helped the Yudhoyono government remain stable in the face of nationwide protests at the President’s generosity toward the conglomerate.

• • • • • • • • •

There are I think about 2500 people in this room, the waiting room at Yogya airport. I have counted a block of 100 heads and there are about 25 of these blocks. If there are 2500 people here then I think it may have been built to accommodate, under some pressure, 1800. There is, of course, no escape. You can’t just stroll back through the wall of officialdom to go for walk ‘land side’. You can’t. You’re in airport limbo land.

But, the real point, there are no planes leaving. When I say a waiting room that’s correct. Not a transit room. I know this because I have been here for more than three hours. From time to time another surge of occupants arrives, but the most visible aircraft sitting taunting us 40 metres from the glass wall which separates us from the runway has covers on its engines.

There may be some air conditioning, although I think not. If so, it is easily overpowered by the energy given off by this mass of human flesh.

At my nominal departure time a lone and lonely Garuda man says my plane has not arrived yet. When will it leave? He doesn’t know. Where will it leave from? Which gate? He doesn’t know. What time is it scheduled to arrive at Yogya? He consults his computer thoughtfully. Can’t help me with that. No information.

I’m asking because a power outage has blanked out all the information systems and while the lights are on again, the flight boards haven’t recovered. A nice young girl is forcing her way through the throng saying ‘567 Jakarta Li-ron Air. Li-ron. 567 Jakarta.’ This is a little like me going through the crowd calling out ‘2015 Footscray premiership. 2015 Footscray premiership’, although people are gathering in one corner and beginning to jostle one another with packages and huge items of cabin baggage. There is a hint of some cut durian filed away over there. But nothing happens.

Somewhere in the hubbub a voice is announcing something. It is completely non-competitive. I can’t even tell what language is being used. Could be anything. Could be the end of the world.

I must be clear. It is not the black hole of Calcutta. In fact I’ve noticed that the streamers attached to the air con grills are gesturing limply that they are being disturbed. But I’ve been here for four hours now and I am torn between choices. If I leave my seat for a visit to the kamar kecil (room small) which is becoming increasingly desirable, I won’t get another.

A middle-aged woman trips on the tiled floor (how?) and collapses into my lap. Sooory sooory pak. Her male companion looks at me angrily. I hold my hands up to activate the no fault clause, but if he had a gun he’d still shoot me. There is quite a lot of oblivious Indonesian good humour here, but it’s not the dominant mood. It’s not resigned good humour, just resignation. I can feel the slightest hint of panic appearing somewhere low in my belly. I’ve gotta get out of here.

Dozens of people are appearing with packages of ‘Yogya chicken’. They smell quite good and breakfast was a long time ago. I investigate. These packages are being given to all those whose flights have been cancelled. Hundreds of them.

Just as I wrote that magically one of the gate boards lights up its red letters: GA 252 Denpasar. Praise be! It’s a sign. What’s the time? 6.45. What time was I due to leave? 2.25. What the. Who cares? I could be an ebola victim. I could be trekking on the Annapurna circuit. I could be … travelling in Asia. But if it’s the wrong plane, I don’t care. I’m still getting on. I have a very urgent need to escape.

Which is not immediately satisfied. I join the surge towards the gate. I note that the Papuans who have been sitting opposite are going to Denpasar too, probably one hop on their way home. Interestingly, just as space appeared round the banks of seats they were sitting in, so an unbridgable gap, a force field, emerges around them in the queue. Altho I’m conspicuously old and white, and I’m wearing a white shirt with a collar AND I’ve got a briefcase, not even I can pull that off. There might be signs of bigger issues here, some cultural and racial distance waiting to be traversed.

The lights are on but nobody is answering the door. The minutes tick by. This is just a tease. The gate sign may simply be an indication that the plane has arrived, or that it might arrive, or that it had left its destination. Or that they want to test the gate sign.

Where I’m standing is at the main thoroughfare for any cross traffic, and there’s plenty of that. Back and forth back and forth. This way, that way. Like many Indonesian queues I’ve noted, this queue moves forward without anything changing at the front. Nothing is resolving; it just gets more packed up. 15 minutes. 20 minutes. What IS going on! The door opens. The door closes. People who look like they might be passengers go through, but only three. Or one. And then they come back. When the door opens, there is a comparatively pleasant gust of kerosene fumes and damp tepid air. The queue tightens up further.

There’s a commotion behind me. Twenty or so tourists with very loud voices which project remarkably well force their way down the middle of the queue following a German with a tour leader flag. I don’t know she’s German; she’s just speaking German. And possibly because of some money passing hands earlier they muscle their way to the very front of the queue while the flag bearer thrusts a mountain of paper at the gate staff.

After another five minutes, a purge. The boil is lanced. Other slightly disgusting body metaphors. The gates fly open and a torrent of travellers burst through. It’s 55 minutes since the GA252 sign came up. As I pass under the gate sign the information board clicks back into life distracting me from the fact that I am about to be hit by a blast of jet exhaust which has just knocked over the three people in front of me. I thought at first it might be some spectacular gust of wind. But it wasn’t. I laughed.

I wave my boarding pass at people I take to be staff but can’t arouse any interest. I flop into my seat. Hoo-rah. It was actually very nice out: a breeze, the prospect of rain. The hostess stands on my foot and I hear an unusual noise and look up at her horrified face. I turn to my left and across the aisle a chunky older man is in the throes of what could easily be a stroke. His face is contorted and his leg is very strangely bent up. Bloody hell.

So we disembark while he’s carried from the plane. I‘ve stopped looking at my watch. It doesn’t matter any more. The patient? Sure. Yeah yeah. I hope he’s ok. Yeah yeah.

And of course we will have wait our turn in the queue to take off anyway. The other night in Jakarta I counted 13 planes in our queue. We waited 50 minutes while other planes came and went. How does all this work? Think. Just how does it? Why doesn’t it all just implode? It might be like the traffic as it converses. The slightest tap of a horn, and it says ‘I’m here.’ or ‘Go.’ or ‘Move over.’ or ‘I’m passing on the left with two wheels in the snack shops.’ or ‘Make room. I’m coming regardless.’ There is no need to say thank you. That would be a waste of time and energy and it might be confusing. Everyone knows the conventions even if they are invisible to an outsider. But planes. They’re big, and when they crash …

Into my seat again. In my row of three there is an attractive young Indonesian woman. Next to me is her very unhappy infant.

What the rich pay for. Comfort of course, but also access, and also space. And also the right, uncodified to the best of my knowledge, not to have to wait.

Tour de Wimmera

Posted on September 24, 2014 by mcrae3051

Mt Arapiles, the very end of the Great Divide, poking its head out of a canola crop.

Victorian city mice tend to forget they have country cousins. It’s not deliberate. They just get bound up in the haste of the city and the rather limited boundaries of their geographical horizons.

That’s a shame, because there is so much to enjoy in the extra-urban world.

With two friends, Barbara and Graham, we thought we’d design a little tour, just a week, to revisit where we’d grown up, to chase up some of our favourite places but also to stretch out and drink in some of the less familiar big skies of the northern Wimmera, a region not famous for its tourist draw cards. What follows, however, provides some evidence to the contrary.

Would you travel with these people?

We drove up the Western Highway for lunch at Lake Wendouree Boathouse and some testing of the quality of the recent products from the Langhi Ghiran winery.

The destination was the Grampians. Graham and Barb were interested to see the burnt relic of Girin Flat; Myrna wanted to get some stimulus material — photos, vegetal matter, images — for a current painting project; and we all wanted to see the wild flowers.

The wild flowers were only just coming out; they’d be at their best in another three weeks or so. The big interest was in what we could see of the recovery from last summer’s fires. The blackboys (Xanthorrhoea Australis, Australian grass trees) in particular had shot and for long stretches of the road round the northern Grampians were everywhere. It’s rare to see them quite so floral.

Hollow Mountain still looked its distinguished self even though much more naked than usual.

Trip Advisor moment: we ate and drank well at the newly duded-up Kookaburra Bar and Resto and, as part of a theme, enjoyed the Kookaburra Motel as much as we usually do.

Meanwhile in Hamilton Keith was casting through the personal ads (‘Mature, full-figured woman. Ask for Jazz…’) in the Hamilton Spec when his eye fell on an ad for opera at Alan Myers‘ remarkable establishment in Dunkeld. His three-chefs-hat gourmet restaurant/pub, the Royal Mail, enables one to explore simply all the varieties of foam available … let’s just say food adventures, and so they are. Bar, bistro, fancy bit — all at the foot of the looming Mt Sturgeon. The establishment over the road, next to the antique bookshop, holds the RM’s wine collection. But then there’s the family gardens (do check this link out, a great description of an extraordinary place) and so on and so on. The opera was on at the auditorium /gallery, newly minted out of Grampians sandstone and attached to a portion of the house. (Adjacent to the croquet lawn, but some distance from the tennis area, etc.) On its walls were, I would say, 3-4 million dollars worth of art: Martens, Piguenit, von Guerard, 15 or so early Australian masters, and a version of Benjamin Duterreau’s ‘George Augustus Robinson’. The other is in the Australian National Gallery.

Robert Divall introduced himself and the artists, Antoinette Halloran (at right) and Dimity Shepherd. Both were fine singers.

They sang the hits, we marvelled and then went off to eat shaking our heads in just slight wonderment. When we discovered that our 50 dollar tickets included payment for our meals at the RM they wagged violently. Graham led the flight to the car before those in charge changed their minds.

A night at the Rippon Road premises and a tour of Arborline is always highlight of a trip to Hamilton; then to Horsham up the Henty Highway the surrounds of which were looking magnificent. Then to Horsham … where I didn’t take even one photo despite seeing houses where Barbara, Myrna and I had lived, the schools we had gone to, the hospital some of us were born in, the stretch of the weir in which I turned into an ice-block during a three kilometre swim. But it was busy, Horsham, making Hamilton which is about the same size look sleepy. We like towns with signs of life.

Then west to Natimuk and Mt Arapiles, home to Brigitte Muir the first Australian women to climb the Seven Summits, the highest peak on each continent. The sharp face of Arapiles contains series of famous climbs.

The main reason though was for a detour through the Little Desert, an arid but complex paradise of small things.We lunched at Nhill. After dallying in the Little Desert we got the tail end of the offerings at Oliver’s, a resto set up to employ disabled people and going very well by the look of things.

We chose to spend two nights in Rainbow because it was a suitable step off to Wyperfeld National Park which had adherents in the group and also because Rainbow has its own low key delights.

We drank the Eureka Hotel out of red wine for example — monumental drinkers in our party! But, yes, while plenty of beer was available, that bottle of Shiraz we drank was the last one they had. And it was 10 dollar parma night! (For those overseas: parma = veal parmagiana, in this case highly and variously modified.) And there was a very attractive open fire. It gets cold up there on the edges of the desert. And it’s got a fine set of silos, very clean air, a school fete featuring jumping castles which we just missed, and an IGA which sells most of the things you might like (including some well-aged St Hugo’s shiraz that the owner keeps largely for himself).

There were also several interesting pieces of public art. Graham said this was picture of the station to substitute for a real one; but there was a station even if the passengers getting on were bushells of wheat and barley rather than people. The centre of the end of the main drag, and I think rather lovely.

For the purposes of orientation, this is the main drag, with returned servicemen memorial.

Then the paintings on the butcher’s shop — the butcher sold very good meat which we barbecued at the motel on our second night having exhausted some at least of the delights of the Eureka (the Royal’s lights were on but no one appeared to be home) — these really got me in. The way they had degraded increased their solemnity and knocked some of the folk art edges off. The diversity of what time had done to the medium was also most engaging. Wild. Appropriate. (The posters in the window are the work of Rainbow PS students advertising their fete. Inter alia, it had a football theme; 11 of the 18 AFL guernseys got a run on the poster nearest the door.)

And there’s a big house at Rainbow — Yurunga.

It was built in 1909, a bare 20 years after Europeans settled this part of the Wimmera, and when more grain was loaded at Rainbow than at any other station in Victoria. The town had reticulated water — goodness knows where they got it from, almost certainly artesian — 30 men were employed as blacksmiths or wheelwrights; there were golf, football, cricket, gun, coursing and turf clubs, a brass band, a debating society, a progress association. Currently, with a population of 525 at the last census, most of those are historical memories, but there’d be worse places to live.

We’ve watched the decline of small towns happen in our life time, as farms get bigger and more industrialised, and people drive more easily and willingly to bigger centres to shop and do their business. So while Horsham (population round 14,000) thrives, the death spiral hits places like Minyip, Murtoa, Rupanyup, Jeparit, Beulah and Rainbow. (Altho something seemed to have happened in Birchip to keep it kicking.)

Yurunga was built by the Cust family who had also acquired a shop and 6000 acres. The shop burnt down one year later, but they built another. However, after three years they’d had enough and moved back to Melbourne, a very common story in this marginal country, never really meant for agriculture, paying costs in perhaps one of five years.

(Not the Custs, the Liesfields in whose family Yurunga remained until its acquisition by the Shire in 1969. History in Australia runs in short spans.)

The house has a certain splendour nonetheless, verandahs all round, a climatic accommodation completely ignored by the chaps currently building houses in Horsham where even eaves are considered anachronistic if not obsolete. As long as the refrigerated aircon works, I suppose, who cares … This house had a coach house, a school room, a tennis court, a kitchen garden and an underground dining room. Not to mention pressed tin ceilings and a fine view of unused municipal conveniences at the end of its very grand passageway.

But, despite beguiling Graham (we still haven’t heard the outcome of his offer for the whole of the main street), we hadn’t come for the built environment. Nature beckoned.

The Wimmera River rises at Mt Cole quite close to Langi Ghiran where we’d begun our business. It runs through Horsham and Dimboola on its way to nowhere. It has the distinction of disappearing first into Lake Hindmarsh, the largest body of water in Victoria when it is full (almost never), then on into Lake Albacutya, then into Outlet Creek and on into a series of mysterious sites: Black Flat, Lake Brambruk, Lake Jerriwirrup, Lake Agnes and finally the Wirrengren Plain. And if you think Rainbow is a bit out of town, try the Wirrengren Plain. Although amazingly, whitefellas have tried to live there running sheep and cattle. Dingoes got the sheep, and the dry got the cattle — the shortest of shrifts.

There is a record of water covering the Plain in 1854. In 1917 Pine Plains some kilometres to the south got wet to the extent of flooding. In 1957 it covered Black Flat and with record rainfall in 1975 (when I was trying to build our house in the Grampians) Lake Brambruk filled. Since then, due partly to the imposts placed on the river downstream (weirs, irrigation, town water), these ‘bodies of water’ have almost always been dry. This means that the red gums which fill these depressions will die. They need wet feet at least every 20 years to keep going, and that will change the landscape forever. This is Lake Brambruk today.

The Wimmera river doesn’t run anywhere. It just disappears into the sand.

Apart from the two big ‘lakes’ these places are all in Wyperfeld National Park, a collection of different semi-arid environments with astonishing bird life and a wonderful sense of quiet.Sand dune country with stands of callitris, native pine, which does not regenerate after fire. After recent huge fires about 60 percent of the callitris in this area has been wiped out. More cheerfully, Graham and Barb proved their indomitability here with a very satisfying walk.

If north is up, it was mostly downhill from here, except for one great drive almost along a line of latitude: Rainbow, Kenmare, Beulah, Birchip, Wycheproof, Boort. It was very interesting to look at the variation in the crops over this 150 or so k.s. Those near Rainbow needed a soak, near Boort they’ll have a good year. But round Beulah and Birchip they might as well be putting their money on horses. This is what tens of thousands of dollars of seed, chemicals and labour sinking into oblivion looks like. These crops won’t even provide feed.

I’d been to Boort not long ago to talk to a teacher of Indonesian there, and found the delight pictured below. Great home-cooked food, good coffee and the sort of individual flourish that, sometimes, rural Australia allows. Look at the windows. This is a masterpiece of the genre.

You may be wondering about the stock in this area. Fortunately we have renderings of same. Big fellas aren’t they? There is even a town, district maybe, named after the Durham Ox. The caption on the pic reads ‘Henry F. Stone and his Durham Ox 1887. The early colonial cattle were of extraordinary proportions.’ (But um … that extraordinary?) The sheep was found in the Bendigo art gallery and the cow was wandering the streets of Boort, just over the road from ‘The Cup and Saucer’.

We did go through Birchip, for one year my home and, albeit a slightly different colour, this was my home.

And I found it difficult to resist this pic from the top of Mt Wycheproof, billed locally as ‘the smallest mountain in the world’, towering a grand 43 metres above the surrounding plain and consisting of a unique substance known as Wycheproofite. How good is that!

Its the first frame of my first film and featured me driving along that long straight line of latitude towards my first job.

Before getting back to a more contemporary home, we drank in the delights of Bendigo where Barbara grew up. When I think of gold field towns I always think of people who found nothing and went home disappointed. But some people made some money. Obviously.

These were the days when public building was public building and meant to last. I give you Camp Hill Primary School.

The Bendigo Oval.

The Town Hall.That’s pretty Bendigo. But so in it’s way is this.

This is the interior of the Great Stupa at Myers Flat perhaps 10ks from the centre of Bendigo. It is only half built, will cost upwards of $20 million and is designed to last 1000 years. It will have attached a convention centre, a hotel, a monastery (built), 80 houses, a school, etc. The (somewhat unprepossessing I’m sorry to say) Buddha has been carved out of a single piece of jade and is the largest, most expensive etc etc etc. Like so many other things on this journey this all appeared as a delightful surprise.

How busy we ants are! What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties. In form and moving how express and admirable. However, along with my Danish friend, there has been a stern inclination of late, for reasons which I’m sure are widely felt, to lose all my mirth.

So what better way to conclude than with something which has not lost any of its splendour after 30o0 years. It won’t always be in Bendigo but it was when we were there.(Just one more big sky …)

ELSEWHERE 2010. Why travel?

Posted on July 29, 2014 by mcrae3051

It’s straightforward to call the experience of travel artificial and ungrounded, and to go on about its inauthenticity, to cite the plethora of foolish misunderstandings and incorrect, shallow interpretations with which, from Marco Polo on, travel literature is filled. There … Continue reading →

ELSEWHERE 2010: The Ardèche. Balanced world

Posted on July 29, 2014 by mcrae3051

Lyon in transit A cup of coffee (une grande crème): €2.50 ($A3.75)

Mr Ryan saw us safely to Lyon. The ash cloud was still threatening but the airlines had decided that the governments were being unduly cautious and anyway they were losing a fortune. The vapour trials over Rome were proof of that.

It was May Day and things were quiet. We went for a pleasant walk with, in the back of my mind anyway, some interest in what would happen next, just how we would get to La Mastre. We could certainly get to Tain L’Hermitage, but the train to La Mastre which would have been great hadn’t run since 2008 and the bus time tables were clearly about school days even if we knew where the stop was. Taxi. Big bucks, but door to door. Two candidate companies failed but the third came through; and I must say taxis, those much maligned tourist rip-off taxis, provided impeccable service everywhere we used them.

As it was, the train did the right thing, the taxi was waiting exactly as requested and the longish drive along the gorge of the river Doux was a real pleasure. We were heading to La Mastre about 140 kilometres west but mostly south of Lyon in the Region of the Ardèche. This was the starting point for a walk shaped like a figure 8 with a tail. It would normally start from Lecrestet but the Lecrestet hotel people wanted their Mayday holiday.[1]

We chose this walk because we wanted a walk in France, we hadn’t been to the Ardèche before and didn’t know anything about it, and what was offered sounded about the right length (130 k.s, 7 days walking, one rest day) and level of difficulty (I’d say medium, I’ve forgotten what Sherpa said). I didn’t say much about the food in Italy (some unmentioned was sensational; click on the photo to the left), but it’s France and I would be lying if I said we weren’t also attracted by the prospect of quality regional cuisine. The Ardèche A cup of coffee (une grande crème): €1.80 ($A2.70)

We arrived at the Hotel des Negociants in a light drizzle and I strolled downtown looking for some lunch and to see what was what. The meerkat had finally run out of energy and was having a snooze.

Downtown La Mastre on a Sunday morning is a quiet affair. Everyone has been to church[2] and then they’re off to hear the 40-piece town band playing in the square. They weren’t much good but they were extremely well received and looked like they were having a lot of fun which is how I imagine playing in a big band to be. The photo won’t show this but the town was out to listen, yelling out requests not all of which were ignored. The last number included a trombone solo from a 40 year-old gent with slightly over-egged good looks and he played until exhausted, not long, and that was the end. Then off for Sunday lunch.

I sat on the steps of the band shell for a while trying to locate just where I was, something else that can happen to travellers. But I found a boulangerie open and we did well from the result. In the afternoon we strolled around the very quiet town and found where we were supposed to leave from (the auberge ‘The Calm Mother’! See below) and looked at the gorgeous stone houses and gardens.

The 70 year-old woman who runs the H. des N. was not a mamma. She was a Madame with a whip crack tone that had her minions trembling. Her 30 year-old daughter-in-law seemed to be doing most of the work. The daughter-in-law had three children including one who was three months old and a bad sleeper. She did the rooms and the cooking and was a very nice person when she wasn’t exhausted. Her husband seemed to be mainly on child care in so far as he was on anything.

There are parts of rural France that don’t quite appear to be a part of the modern world and the H. des N. was one of them. No computer. Not one. Amazing. That said, we sat down for dinner. Crudités, pintadeau roti avec marrons, tarte Ardèchoise et legumes, followed by les startlingly good fromages et pour M’sieur, une coupe d’Ardèchoise[3]. And it may sound disgusting but I remember also having some quail terrine that night. I’m not going to go on about food all the time. Promise. As may have been inferred, the spécialité regionale is chestnuts.

The rain had gone in the morning and the weather bade fair. This was a long day which included a simple height gain[4] of 960 metres and an aggregate height gain which was heaps more, lots of ups and downs. I hadn’t really wanted to start with the hardest day but there wasn’t much choice and we had had plenty of walking practice in Rome.

The start of the start was a stiff climb of about 600 metres up out of the Doux valley, but the first 10 k.s were simply a delight, charming and seductive. The climb offered excellent views across the valleys to St Etienne in the north, the only minor mishap being Myrna trying to electrocute herself on an electric fence while photographing black pigs.

The track continued as it began with lots of navigation required: so many options, little waymarking and such specificity. ‘Behind the house on the left you will find two options. Take the track which appears to begin as a farm track with three stone piles to the right and then veers left through forest … .’ The notes were generally good but slumped in quality according to the difficulty of the problem.

On the way home in the plane looking at the line-up of recumbent bodies with overfull bellies at an indecipherable time mid air it occurred to me that air travel and walking are profound antitheses. However enjoyable, air travel is the last word in artificial experiences. That’s what suits the frequent flyer. On the other hand, Myrna says you don’t walk for a day, you walk through a day, meaning I hope that you are conscious of the terrain, the weather, the time, the surroundings, the task in a way that no other form of travel matches. It’s all there with you all the time, just er hem you and the track, and off you go. That’s it. You’re not judging your form or effort; you’re just off walking for a day. There isn’t anything else. And if you wanted a day to persuade someone of the delights of walking this was surely it. Narrow tracks soft under foot through chestnut forests, gorgeous long views, sunny warmth, animals, farm houses, rolling hills.The first town was Nozières and the one shop which was open (of three) had bread, cheese, ham and juice — everything you could want in other words. I was wearing a T-shirt and my arms were becoming sun burnt. We were going well and at the foot of the Col de Buisson it was time to eat. As often in a saddle, there was a bit of wind here with a bite to it. An old man and his dogs were gesturing at us from across the way and we gestured back. Later we realised we had come to a tourist attraction, Mini-ville (a bit hard to see but it is at right), something he had probably had a hand in building, but we kept our five euros in our pocket and ploughed on up the Col to a high ridge. This was interesting because the forest had been badly knocked around by storms but also by a bush fire, not something you automatically associate with rural France.It was also interesting because the temperature had dropped ten or so degrees, black clouds were massing in the west, it was spitting and I had left our rain gear with our luggage because I was sure we wouldn’t need it, and the ridge at almost 1300 metres was becoming increasingly exposed.

This is another story about walking. It’s quite easy to muck things up when you’ve got your head down just forging along. You don’t get your map out, forget to read your notes, don’t put your gloves on when you need to (if you’ve got them) and before you know it … etc.

It seemed unlikely that we could make a mistake here because there was only one track, a forest road along the crest of the ridge, but we had to get off it, and according to our notes there was a cairn which signalled a left turn to locate a track which would take us down to another saddle. A cairn. A cairn could be anything. You could kick it over in a small fit of pique. Anyway, we missed it and suddenly found ourselves in a welter of logging tracks none of which were on the map. Below us in the valley was a town which I was sure was Lalouvesc, our destination. I was out by about 90 degrees. We did get off the ridge eventually but it was a five or six k. mistake and as well it was getting quite cold. We found the right road and as sometimes happens — a fair bit really — there’s another hour of walking when you think you should be there. And it’s uphill. And you’re not completely 100 percent exactly sure just where you are.

Lalouvesc is built on the lip of a cliff and seems to have been some sort of staging post/ tourist resort for ‘taking the air’ since at least the mid 16^th century. One of the hotels we passed had been there in one form or another since 1538.

That wasn’t our hotel. Ours had fewer stars (a generous one and half), but it did have a bath and after walking 30 k.s a bath is desirable. France has great engineers and several had been at work on the arrangements for getting water into this bath, but unfortunately at cross purposes. A trickle of tepid water was the best it could do until, after some considerable time and largely by chance, I found another button that activated what could be called a flow. Very tired that night and not detained by whatever there was on the television. My notes say: Très froid tonight. And so it turned out to be.

We woke up in good time, pushed the shutters back and it was snowing. Remember the sunburn the day before? Yes. I couldn’t believe it. Snowing. In early June! What would that mean for our progress? While we now had our wet weather gear along with warm clothes I had left our hats and gloves back at La Mastre certain we wouldn’t need them.

We ate petit déjeuner alone but for the cats in a huge dining room looking out at the snow which seemed to be increasing in intensity by the minute, big floaty flakes which largely melted when they hit the ground turning into something more driving and dense. An unseasonal orage, a storm, with winds of up to 140kph. Myrna was not as delighted as she was to become, but completely undaunted.

We geared up and went looking for the entry to the track. This was completely invisible. I was thinking about the intelligibility of: Madame, le chemin a disparu complètement. Nous voudrons voyager à St Bonnet avec les bagages s’il vous plait.[5] But la femme de bon courage made an executive decision that we would follow the D532 to St Bonnet (correct name St Bonnet le Froid; that’s true) which had the advantages at least of secure direction, once we had worked out with certainty that we were correct, and secure footing. The modest disadvantages were walking on tarmac and dodging the (very few) cars and trucks going past. The gentleman we asked for confirmation that we were on the D532 expressed concern for our well being and commented on the storm: extraordinaire. It was eleven k.s in driving snow to St B. le F. and a couple more to the Hotel Fort du Pre[6].

During that time it snowed in five or more different ways, some more pleasant than others. It hailed for a while too, viciously, and head on, as we passed through another saddle. We were on our way to a health resort famed for its views, but the views had disintegrated with visibility regularly down to 50 metres or so, just northern hemisphere Christmas card versions of pine trees outlined in white and the occasional stone house. This is not a heavily populated area. Myrna loved it; I was a bit cheesed off. But eleven k.s is not very far really, and we reached St Bonnet about lunch time with about 150 or 200 mm of snow on the ground.

A moment of meditation on the way. St Bonnet is not a big town. It has perhaps five shops and several big deal eateries, like the Hotel Fort du Pre, just out of town. But one of those five shops is the Bar des Quatre Vents, and we brushed the snow off our gear and went inside. It was warm, the telly was on the weather channel, the patron was a 30 year-old spunk with a gracious manner and a will to help, and a kitchen that produced excellent food of exactly the type that one might want in those circumstances.

Restored, we ploughed on through the weather until the Fort du Pre loomed out of the fog. This was supposed to be the four-star treat of the walk’s accommodation where we were to spend our rest day. It had a flash dining room to which people came from all over the country to eat, adorned with chef’s hats awards galore by various luminous organizations. The premises had a pool, a sauna, a gym (all of modest scale), provision for massage and various herbal treatments, a table tennis table, a babyfoot table, a dislike of children and noise, thick carpet and nice rooms. Style? French bourgeois to a T: neat, polite, rule-driven, reticent, censorious.

There was a big thermometer on the wall outside and I kept checking, fruitlessly, to see if it would get above zero. The forecast was for warmer and wetter weather, but in the meantime the snow was increasing in intensity. I spent quite some time reading about French grammar and reflecting on my deficiencies and we went down for tea, dinner that is; and what a carry on it was. There’s a big difference between good food and mucked-around-with food and this was the latter, and we were somewhat peculiar randonneurs (walkers/hikers) from Australia disfiguring the perfection of the environs.

We went back to St Bonnet the next day to do some internet (the only public internet place on the whole route in a bookshop and papeterie run by a young man) and to see what was happening in the Bar des QV.

This day the road crews were in having their grands déjeuners: chicken salad, roast pork and mushrooms, tarte tatin and a litre of red wine. 16 euros thanks. Brilliant. Pourquoi pas! Much better than being out in it, and they probably have something like that for lunch every day. It was as good as the previous day and we enjoyed its contrast with the starch of the Fort du Pre. The menu that night: quenelles lyonnaise aux poivrons; cervé d’agneau et pulpe de pomme de terre au fenouil; puding au rhum et raisin, or if you like: stodgy pepper dumplings; slice of lamb, and mashed spud with fennel; plum pudding.

St Bonnet the Cold? I read the explanation quickly but the story goes something like — a traveller found himself caught in the snow, lost and bewildered. Someone, St B., loomed out of the gloom and guided the traveller to comfort tying his donkey up to a suitable post. When the storm had subsided the traveller went to find his donkey and found him dangling in the air tethered to the cross on the top of the local church’s steeple, which can’t have been pleasant for the donkey, and it would seem arguable that these would be sufficient grounds for beatification. I am quite happy to accept that I may have missed some points salient to the story.

I was sure we would be on the road again to get to St Agreve, and that was nearer to 20 k.s. The snow had not relented although when we left at eight in the morning it was cold and foggy but still. (Somewhere on the left is the entry to the track.)

We walked down the busier road to Devesset for a couple of hours without pause and had a cup of coffee in a pub which had a number of early patrons, after which we had our first very modest attempt to get off the main road, onto an alternative road really. But just after lunch the fog lifted and we could see a lake in the distance (a feature of the walk apparently), then, lightening my mood considerably, a green paddock, the first touch of colour in three days, just visible in the pic below.

The ice was cracking off the trees and it was noticeably warmer. We’re not talking sunny here, just the odd break in the clouds, excellent walking weather really, and we shifted back onto the track which was not far from and running more or less parallel to the road. It stayed like that till we got to St Agreve where I gave thanks at the Fontaine des Miracules on the outskirts of town, and we found the excellent and cheerful Auberge des Cevennes where one of the staff had lived in WA for a year[7] and was keen to swap stories. Myrna bought some buttons for a jumper she was knitting for Romany. We carry our domesticities with us.

The next day was another delight. We had come down three or four hundred metres and the climate had changed markedly. There was an excellent boulangerie over the road from the auberge and we stocked up and skipped out of town which kept not wanting to disappear. It’s built around its own little mountain.

This was the beginning of the second loop of the figure 8 and we were to come back to St Agreve, which was a desirable prospect. We had morning tea in a cemetery at Beauvert (lots of places to sit) full of Picots and Chabanals. This again was the ‘as advertised’ version of the walk — birds, smells, wild flowers, silage, stone farm buildings converted into weekenders, deep pasture, lovely long views, rolling open hills. Then we were advised by a sign to deviate and we did, around the lip of a high plateau looking at our several destinations 500 metres below. Magnificent. This track then took us directly to the ruins of Roche Bonne. Better again. What a building it must have been. It’s built around a spire of rock on a very steep face. While ruined now it must have been an astonishing sight in its day. Its day appears to have been around the turn of the 11^th century. Un certain Bertrand de Rocha Bonna was granted funds to build it and it changed hands variously for another 300 years ending up with Hugues et Gerenton de La Mastre, a connection. During the religious wars, the castle played a military role, Pons de Rochebonne being one of the principal Catholics of the region. It was taken in 1577 by the Huguenot (protestant) leader, then in 1577 was pillaged and destroyed in 1595. Around 1760, the priest from St Martin de Valamas wrote to his bishop that the castle was entirely destroyed, but the peasants were stealing its stones and something should be done about it. Which is how it remains today, although there are some signs of restoration. It is also close to a waterfall with dramatic character.

It was a long descent to the bottom of the valley, where we found the required abandoned railway line which would take us to St Martin de Valamas. St M. was home to a big retirement village on the flat, but the town itself was a violently steep climb away, 15 minutes of hard exertion, perhaps to keep the oldies fit. It had three cafes all of which were closed because it was the day before yet another French holiday[8], the staff of the Information Touristique were off for a five-day pont[9], and the town’s kids’ playground had one small rocker surrounded by metres of rubber matting with one of the sternest signs on the wall one could imagine: ages 2-7 only, adult supervision mandatory, one at a time, all responsibility abjured, well covered in other words.

It mightn’t be a load of laughs as a place to live, but it was very pretty. Mernz thought the cakes we found there were the best we ate while away.

We weren’t at our main destination yet. We had to absorb the fact that the Dogs had just beaten the D.s by four points, information provided by our reliable Hamiltonian football correspondent, and also to find an unsigned, barely described place called Les Chambas (a dialect term, we discovered, for ‘terraced fields’).

We sort of stumbled over it. I thought we’d found it, Myrna wasn’t sure. But I wandered through the garden up to the door and there was a foolscap sheet saying ‘Les Chambas. Bienvenu.’ It was big house, quite stylish in a 1970s sort of way, a B and B we thought. Mine host appeared from somewhere out the back and took us up to our room which appeared to be someone’s bedroom, closets full of clothes, no telly, no bathroom. All a bit spooky.

I’m not that keen on B. and B.s. They seem intimidatingly intimate and after a long walk you just want to fade out at least for a while. But anyway we were there. The dog ran in, pissed on the floor, jumped on the bed and came to visit me in the bath. Dogs, the French: a love affair. We had been advised that aperitifs were at 7.00 and we wandered downstairs, and there were other people there. We had thought we were the only guests, but we weren’t. There were three other couples (who didn’t know each other either) jammed together on two small couches speaking very fast French. The aperitifs were white wine mixed with a local liqueur, chestnut of course, raspberry and something else I missed. I missed a lot. But one of the older ladies took me in hand and we spoke pleasantly slow French and retired for dinner.

The hosts provided dinner for ten, themselves included at the table, most nights of the year. Now that’s not your everyday job. And people came from all over the place to eat with them. Madame la hôtesse spoke French like a machine gun but the others were kind and patient and we found ourselves comfortably included. French manners can also be wonderfully courteous and pleasant. The older couple had come from Lyon for a un voyage de dégustation (food trip, you know, like ours). He was retired, she had an interest in writing. The youngest couple were having a weekend away from their kids, grandparents had stepped in, and he was a swimming instructor with classes of forty (!) from a small place north of St Etienne. At the end of the evening we discovered he spoke good English, the rat, having spent a year in Ireland. But it was a night of great good humour and jollity with phenomenal food.

Should I say? People may start to talk. Chacuterie — pâté and sausage; prosciutto and cantaloupe; finely sliced eggplant and tomato concasse (‘smashed up’ I suppose); pork and a ratatouille that had been slowly cooked for some hours, and that’s the way to do it; cheese[10]; gateau aux marrons (a chestnut sauce on a very thin and large creme brulee). All cooked to perfection. One of the very good nights while we were away.

The next day was just a haul up the dismembered railway line and therefore a long steady climb which was never very far from the contour. What struck me was the number of massive bridges we went over, and the effort and cost that would have gone into building them. It would have been a fortune, an investment for the years, and now just a sandy rocky trail to nowhere for randonneurs. Walking without thinking, we passed some brilliant stone houses with fabulous gardens and were back at St Agreve before we knew it, and spent some time watching the world come and go in the bar happily doing nothing. What a life.

Later that night we borrowed the hotel’s computer and discovered that the ash cloud was back. The airports of Portugal, northern Spain and Italy, all of Germany and southern France were closed. That was significant news. We were due to fly from Marseille to Prague and then to Helsinki for home. We had been away long enough and didn’t want a wrestle with airports and schedules in foreign parts.

I went to bed with that largely in mind. We were due to return to La Mastre, the final leg of the figure 8, back to the pintadeau at the Hotel des Negociants. It was another gorgeous day’s walking, a long steady descent back down to the Doux valley, through orchards and vineyards and for some distance along the still cobbled Roman Voie des Marchands (Merchant’s Way/Road, at right). It rained steadily for a few hours but we had our rain gear. We arrived at Désaignes ready for lunch, and I’ve mentioned our offence to the restaurateur. Il y a une formule m’sieur, la formule de Dimanche. Oui oui oui bien sûr. Bien sûr. Mais nous ne le voudrons pas, s’il vous plait. Seulement café et un sandwich, une baguette peut-être …

We got to La Mastre after an excellent day to request use of the Hotel’s ordinateur (computer) which is when we found there wasn’t one. Old France, the ‘50s, perhaps insular, certainly by definition provincial. Dinner lacked the sparkle of the week before. Perhaps it was the repetition or the competition from Les Chambas or the ash cloud and our incapacity to do anything about it. That night Chelsea beat Wigan 8-0, a lot even for a mismatch and I watched a televisual hagiography of the French soccer club Paris St Germaine. I enjoyed it all but was struck by one of the chants adopted by the wild and aggressive PSG supporters. I can’t remember it exactly but it went something like: We wish to suggest to you that taking all things into account we will win the championship this year. French. It is a polite and highly embroidered language and I was becoming increasingly conscious of how brute my version of it was.

I proposed to my wife that perhaps it might be possible that we think of getting to Helsinki as quickly as possible. Then we might be out of the cloud which seemed to be congregating over central Europe, and Finnair would somehow have to look after us. Helsinki seemed like getting home. She concurred. But first I needed a computer.

It is six kilometres from La Mastre to Lecrestet by road but 15 via the track. I thought the road for a minute, but was very glad we didn’t. It might have been the best day. Lecrestet is normally where you begin so we were going back the ‘wrong way’. It began with a long climb out of town, four hundred metres in two kilometres, that’s steep, but we were up to a series of consistently wonderful views. It was a complex track but we didn’t miss a beat. And there was a computer at La Terrasse, our hotel destination.

Several hours were spent fooling around with tickets and bookings, most of which turned out to be redundant, a waste of time and money as Isaac our travel agent lost no time in assuring me when we finally made contact; and I hadn’t even worked out how to get back to the train at Tain l’Hermitage which was going to take us to Marseille. I was counting on the bus. The timetable assured us that it would be right, an early morning but quite doable. But when I asked our host about this he shook his head. Doesn’t happen. Only two buses a day, both too late to get us to the train. Back to the taxi, and the same excellent service prevailed, which just left the fact that I needed an email from Isaac confirming our changed tickets to Helsinki.

But what a walk! What a pleasure it was. So much to enjoy. Myrna had become impressed with this idea of the ecological balance this region represented: lightly populated, extraordinarily fertile, well watered, prolifically productive of the basics of life —and yet at the same time it had been left behind, abandoned. You could almost forget global warming in the Ardèche in a way that has been impossible in Australia for years. The storm and the snow we experienced had been extraodinaire, unseasonal, unexpected, rare. But the product of the storm was more water on this fertile deep black soil, not a disaster.

I’m sitting in Broome (north-western Australia) in pindan savannah country writing this. It could hardly be more different. The road to Hall’s Creek, all 800 k.s of it, has three or four major rocky outcrops. Apart from that this is dead flat bright red soil country with nothing much growing above a couple of metres. (these are baobabs.) We cross the mighty Fitzroy on the way which at present is only a series of pools. But in the dry, apart from the spring at Hall’s which creates the creek, there is no other non-artesian water in all that distance. ‘Ski Creek’, a water playground just after the wet, is sand. We pass the truck stop at Willare and go through Fitzroy Crossing but there are no other towns and, apart from a few signs leading off to station tracks there are no other signs of human habitation. There’s nothing much to eat for the cattle that wander through the spinifex and amble across the road in the late evening. They need fattening on grain before they can be sold.

The biggest issue here at present is the ruinous impact the 300 billion dollar gas project will have on the physical ecology of James Price Point (and the social ecology of the whole area). It’s another world just so far away. Some questions to which I have no answer. Is it some atavistic memory that makes countryside like the Ardèche so attractive to people like us? Why are its occupants fleeing it in droves for cities and for such a different life style? (Perhaps that answers itself.) The Kimberley could be described as an inhospitable environment, and this is the nicest time of the year and I’ve just been for a swim at Cable Beach, but should anyone besides its traditional owners live here? Tomorrow I will be with whitefellas who would live nowhere else.

Marseille: worth more time

A cup of coffee (une grande crème): I’ve forgotten

We’re on the run home. If you’re still reading, you’ve been generous and need never have to think about any of this again.

It was pouring rain as the taxi took us to the train for Marseille which came but was 40 minutes late. It nonetheless seemed like progress. Jean-Paul Sartre had been a guest in our hotel in Marseille during the summer of 1978, and I say almost certainly in our room which was on the top floor with a terrace looking out over the Old Port. Marseille looked like a lot of fun, so interesting, almost not a French city with an amazing mix of people, but I was too tired to exploit it, too sick of trying to speak French and organise unorganisable things. We pottered around a bit, found the food bar in a Galleries Lafayette and prayed that the Marseille airport would be open and that Isaac’s email would arrive.

That email kept not coming, despite phone calls, despite prayers. We found groovy-ville which had a market and a very definite bohemian atmosphere; the streets generally were humming with all sorts of life; the weather was fine and we were settled in J-P.s magnificent pad; but I would say I missed Marseille, just passed it by.

Finally, Isaac’s email arrived, and as it turned out we probably didn’t need it. We got up at 5am — something I have to do again tomorrow and I don’t know how I’ll go; it’s not my favourite — but this morning was lovely. The sun rose during the 30 minute drive to the airport and everything glowed pink. The airport was open, the planes were flying, we spent a minute in Prague and then arrived in Helsinki and the Hotel Glo. By that time I’d read ‘The Guardian’. It was that easy.

HELSINKI AGAIN

It was a tonic, like a smiling welcoming face. Everything was closed because it was Ascension Day but who cared? We slept the sleep of the just in an upgraded room, got up slowly and did a bit of shopping.

Helsinki had changed totally in seven weeks. These pictures are of the same place at the same time of day. The snow banks had disappeared, the flowers were out, not a hint of ice in the bays and the populace had their party face on. The bloke in the Nike shop told us that it was their hottest day (25⁰C) for three years, and whether or not it was true it was obvious that the weather had caused a total rush of blood in the locals. They were out in force stripped to the underwear, drinking beer and lying blissed out in the sun. The Esplanaadi which had been denuded of people when we were there last was packed with thousands of Helsinkians and the mood communicated itself. Finland had also just won the annual world ice hockey championship.

We thought we might go for a swim. After a hot walk we found the pool, and we also found the 100 metre queue which was stationary to get into the pool. I have never seen a queue outside a swimming pool before. Go the Finns.I had another pool marked on the map so we set off to find it. Unlike the other one, it was indoor and while not empty was not crowded and high high quality. We got back to the hotel in time to dress up for the opera — Myrna’s new Save the Queen (Rome) giraffe dress got its first outing — but we were not in time to eat. The opera was Verdi’s ‘Masked Ball’ really well done in a modern hall which was grand but intimate. No Finns in the lead roles, a Russian, a Spaniard, an Italian and a Pole, but it was all good. What we didn’t know was that the smart money had ordered food and drink for the several and long intervals. Still it gave us a chance to look around at what Helsinki offers in terms of class. We checked, and no one else had a Save the Queen dress on. We did lots of enjoyable things next day with a very special mention to the National Art Gallery but the tension was mounting and our final meal at Karl Johan was not a success.

Got on the plane. Came home.

••••••••••••••

[1] We booked it through a British company called Sherpa who for a perfectly reasonable fee, book accommodation for each night and undertake to move luggage from one spot to the next. Dinner and breakfast is included in the cost and you sort out your own lunch, a picnic (usually) or you might be at one of the towns on the way at lunchtime. They also provide maps and track notes.
[2] The Huguenots still have a church in La Mastre as elsewhere in the Ardèche. Free Protestants they’re called.
[3] A vegetable salad; guinea fowl roasted with chestnuts, spinach tart and green beans; cheese; butterscotch and chestnut ice cream
[4] From the lowest point to the highest, in this case La Mastre to peaks on the ridge, 320m above sea level to 1280.
[5] Madam, the track has completely disappeared. We’d like to go to St Bonnet with the luggage please.
[6] Renowned for its way with produits de terroir (the region, this local area), en particulier les viandes (meats), les poissons (fish) et les champignons (mushies).
[7] Without going further east. It’s a big country.
[8] They have a couple most weeks. It’s a reason for Andre’s longevity and good health.
[9] A way of establishing a long weekend. Holiday on Wednesday? Take Monday and Tuesday off, hence ‘bridge’.
[10] Roquefort, St Agur and something local. During the conversation we decided, complicit, that Australia didn’t have any cheese — what can you say? It had already been conceded, not by me, that Australia was the greatest sporting nation in the world. On return, what we were the first two cheeses I saw at our deli in the market? Rochefort and St Agur.

ELSEWHERE 2012: Rome. Dolce e ruvido

Posted on July 28, 2014 by mcrae3051

A cup of coffee (cappuccino): €3.50 ($A5.25). €5.00 ($A7.50) just off the Via Condotti. Serves us right.

Rome is not concerned exclusively with tourism. Other things go on there.

But on the other hand this is the city which offers you a choice of Caravaggio’s ‘Judith and Holofernes’ (at left, possibly my favourite painting), the Pantheon, the view from steps of the Tempietto, a range of ice creams, the Piazza Navona at night, the staggering foundations and lower orders of the Palace of Justice — you have never seen stonework like this — the clothes shops on the Via del Babuino and the Cola di Rienzo, the track from the Trevi fountain to the Via della Rotonda, the upwards climb inside the cupola of St Peter’s and the relief when you get out into the air, more Berninis and Bellinis than you can poke a stick at with a special mention for ‘Triton’ in the Piazza Barberini, the outcroppings of places to eat in unlikely corners, a chance to look at the actual chains which bound St Peter, buildings which have a layer or a section from each of the last 20 centuries and before, the Laocoon, legitimate confirmation that Brutus looked just like a Deputy Principal/Rotarian, the Pièta, and oh well the Sistine Chapel I suppose, the church of St Louis of the French, the Borghese Gardens, the cats in the Largo Argentina. I like the Spanish steps for functional reasons in their clusters of 16 and their generous treads but they are always covered in people. There’s the Forum, the Circus Maximus, the Colosseum, Michelangelo’s designs on the top of the Capitoline Hill, the ‘typewriter’, the Vittoriano with its crazy flying chariots, I love it, gigantism incarnate, a glorious sort of madness.

That’s the beginnings of a list. Henrik Ibsen who probably had no business being there in the first place suggested that it would take him three lifetimes to scratch its surface. It ticks every box in the way no other ‘great’ city does. It has history; it has form.

Yet it’s a snake’s belly of a place. Myrna will disagree. She is a resolved fan without a cell of doubt in her body. Maybe a cell of doubt, in fact maybe a small organ of doubt just below the pancreas. There was, for example, the issue of actually getting the cakes from the display case to the table at D’Agnino, and engaging the attention of the waiter at the same venue was one of the designated labours of Hercules.

The issue is the Romans. If they’d all nick off and let the rest of us just get on with it, it would probably be fine. If Graham and Barbara had been there too, as arranged, to whinge to/with instead of being sequestered in a six and half star hotel in Hong Kong defeated by the ash cloud, catharsis would have been available.

As it was, and without ignoring the possibility that I was better man for it, I left after a week feeling like I’d had a good rub down with 24 grit sandpaper.

Our new accommodation was in the slightly jaded glories of the Veneto at the Hotel Savoy, as it turned out an excellent spot. The Savoy is an easy walk from Termini through the corner of Repubblica down Bissolati and up the hill of the Via Veneto. You’ve seen it in the films. The cabanas outside the grand hotels full of people noodling around, looking for someone famous. We walked past and they didn’t even notice. Extraordinary.

We walked extensively. The day we arrived we appeared at the bottom of the Spanish Steps as though magnetized — there really is nothing very attractive about them except the clusters of 16 — and looked down the Via Condotti. Saturday afternoon shopping and, for me, a vision of hell.

How many shoppers? Thousands, tens of thousands, stupendous, puzzling, tiring. Despite the lure of every name fashion outlet in the world, we veered sideways a block and had a cup of coffee to stock up. I was wearing a sign, quite visible to anyone engaged in commerce, saying: ‘Mug. Make the most of him.’ And they did. I provided the title to our house to some Eastern European Italians for coffee, a piece of cake and some biscotti and we moved on, because if you don’t you’d lose all self respect and have to kill yourself.

And then almost immediately we stumbled into the Church of St Louis of the French and stared open-mouthed at the three Caravaggios there detailing seminal moments of the life of St Matthew. I was more than happy to pay the one euro to keep the light on so we could see them. They are just there on the Corso, like in Swanston Street, except just like they wouldn’t be in Swanston St; and of course they have been there a while — a neat 410 years. Caravaggio’s work is always so strikingly modern. His contemporary relatives are the photo realists except he has insight and a narrative purpose that places his work in a very definite time and place. A bunch of older men were playing Piazzola outside in the Corso — sax, accordian, double bass, violin — with so much joy I rushed to give them what little money I had left.

From there we lurched round a corner into the Collegium with its huge dramatic columns, and around another corner to the piazza in front of the Pantheon looking resplendent at evening, not looking a day over 2000 years old, as comfortable, unique and multitheistic as ever, and thronging with people taking photos. What a building, truly!

The structural coffering in its ceiling is one of the world’s great engineering masterpieces. It is still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome and it was 1500 years before anyone approached the same perfection in developing massive curved architectural spaces, and even then it was the Italians — especially Bramante, but Alberti and Palladio with his enormous impact on neo classical building as well, and Michelangelo if only for the cupola of St Peter’s.

Its inscription has the same stark directness as the building: ‘Marcus Agrippa son of Lucius having been consul three times made it’. It is of no concern that it was really Hadrian (if a politician can be truly said to be a builder).

From the Piazza Navona we went and found where we‘d stayed last time near the Campo de’ Fiore and it all looked very much the same. It was dinner time so we sat down at one of the few ristorantes that wasn’t overwhelmed with customers and the waiter questioned our bona fides. Did we really want to eat or just to drink and cause him trouble? It was hot and I wanted a beer. We couldn’t take up space if we just wanted to drink … and so on and possibly on, but we didn’t stay to find out. It’s the big city, any big city. You need stamina. The way home necessitated passing the Trevi fountain.

The next day was hotter, a Sunday, and the schedule was to find shops to buy expensive clothes for a song, visit St Peters &c. Suffice it to say we walked to or past almost everything in the first paragraph. St Peter’s was swarming with queues hundreds of metres long[3], the particular clothes shop was shut, went the wrong way over the Ponte Palatino and found ourselves in the Circus Maximus … look, just another day.

Our guide book to Rome offered seven walks. Reading through it that night I discovered we had done five and a half of them and walked 22 kilometres.

We had had lunch in Trastevere with ‘The Officiant Guy’ and his family. We didn’t have to; we just did.

‘Chris Robinson is the Officiant Guy in Los Angeles, California. He is a non-denominational wedding minister, an attorney and a notary. He also has other wedding ministers on call to help couples in need of an officiant. The combination makes him a very reliable wedding professional. He officiates wedding ceremonies [not ‘at’ just ‘officiates’, you know, like ‘impacts’] in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Chris is specially authorized by Los Angeles county to issue confidential marriage licenses, which is the kind of marriage license that protects your personal information from the general public. Since he can issue the license on the spot, he helps many people to elope and get married easily. Chris is a calm influence on a hectic wedding which makes him very popular. He is a frequent TV guest because his manner is very smooth and sophisticated. Many people have come up to Chris and asked, “Was that you on TV?” Yes, it was. Chris is a popular choice for celebrity weddings because he is discreet, eloquent and makes everyone at ease.’

His wife wrote that.[5] My wife wouldn’t write that about me.

But not only did she write it, she said it, a lot, and without embarrassment. A process of chopping out space for your identity to fill perhaps, but our interaction was a marketing opportunity. Chris himself is discreet, eloquent and makes everyone at ease; and their kids, who they are home schooling because of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cuts to education, are calming influences on otherwise hectic experiences, the older one buried in video games and the twins silently respectful. (When will they break out I wonder and become celebrities?)

Scott Baio, who some but perhaps not many readers will know of, wanted Chris to be in a television series about Chris’s radical and amazing experiences, but when it turned out that these would be scripted he said no. Nice guy. When next you want to be officianted you know where to go.

Sticking with the religious theme, it was clear that we would have to get up early in the morning if we wanted a good run at St Peter’s. And we did. There aren’t too many St Peterses in the world.

It is the church transcendent or the church affluencial or Mammonical or something.[6] But what a good job they’ve done of whatever it was they were trying to do.[7] Once you’ve made it through the metal detectors, actually for some time before, it is instantly and overwhelmingly impressive. When you enter you’re inevitably looking up at the roof of the nave with its rounded shoulders 50 metres above the floor, the very definition of Romanesque style which somehow manages to be both molte grande and personal at the same time. It is this combination of daunting spectacle and warming comfort that makes it so unusual. More of this below. Maybe you can live with, even thrive on, paradoxes of this nature, choose them, shape them, create them even.

I glanced to the right and found myself looking at the Pièta. I’d forgotten it was there. It doesn’t announce itself hidden as it is behind a bullet proof plastic shield in the gloom. It’s not of grandiloquent scale, in fact it is a modest statement of great peace and calm. Nothing is overplayed including the folds in the marble clothing which conventionally provided the sculptors of the day with an opportunity to display their virtuosity. Proportionately the bodies are all out of whack but perfectly internally coherent; and Mary is a 15 year-old girl of very great beauty. When Michelangelo was asked about her age, he told his biographer: ‘Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more so in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?’

The closest statue to the Pièta is of one of the Pope Gregorys, leaning forward over you, black bronze arm raised in either blessing or threat and no amount of fudging can adjust the severity of his features and demeanour. Close to terrifying.

There are literally hundreds of other things over which to ooo and ahh, not least ‘a substantial fragment [in some versions ‘representative’] of the True Cross’ and the spear which pierced Christ’s side which only come out on special occasions. The head of St Andrew which was also there for some centuries has now been restored to the Greek Orthodox clergy at their request. But on the other side of the nave past Bernini’s six storey high baldacchino[8] is Bernini’s last sculpture, the monument to Pope Alexander VII[9]. It has the usual, the man himself in a pose of supplication in the centre flanked by adoring women one of whom is Truth and has her foot on a globe and more precisely on Britain which had at the time been playing up. And it has the unusual. A gilded skeleton is forcing up the folds in a cloth of red marble, hour glass in one hand, so that we have access to a working door, the gates of death, perhaps hell. It’s all a bit literal somehow.

But here we have the beginnings of two ideas of interest: the preoccupation of Christianity with suffering, and the complex relationship of the Catholic church with sex.

Rebecca West writes at length about the former and wonders why, at the same time casting round for alternatives which seem to appear quite readily.

Christianity is distinctive because of its preoccupation with suffering of course. Christ’s suffering provides it with its motive force. Paul’s consequent exegesis and evangelism veered towards the austere, especially for women. For example: ‘A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; she must be silent.’ This is from his letter to Timothy which, if read from a political point of view instead of a religious one, you could place much more effectively. In fact much of Paul’s writing reads like instruction to party branches, which of course is just what it was.

But why so bleak? Why not delight in the world’s possibilities rather than wallow in its depredations? It might be that that was the natural state of the vast majority of the people the Christian church wanted as its adherents for 1500 to 1800 years of its existence. It could be convincing that Christ shared the pain of a peasant’s life, the struggle, the imminence of death, the need for and promise of a better afterlife.

The religious of the Catholic church were expected to join in this process through their vows of celibacy and obedience and in some cases poverty.

We were back in the globalised world of course, so at the bottom of the Veneto hill I could buy today’s ‘Times’ or yesterday’s ‘Guardian’ and I did. If I was in the mood for blabby articulate Englishmen with a deep concern for the environment, political correctness and their own standing in the world I went for the ‘Guardian’. If I wanted some news I read ‘The Times’. So, mostly the Guardian.

One of the first articles I read was a piece of meta-news we’d have to call it, an interview with one of the Boston Globe journalists who had pursued the cases of child sexual abuse within the Boston Archdiocese in the early years of this century. The seven who were subsequently charged by police and sentenced had been steered around parishes by the Archbishop, Cardinal Law, with warnings but also with deep forgiveness. But there wasn’t just those seven the journalist claimed. He said that he had evidence that 190 priests were implicated in sexual abuse, one in three of all the priests in the archdiocese.

Most of the many churches we went into had their share of putti, naked male children with their willies waggling in the air. One of the features of St Peter’s where just about everyone has their photo taken is at the matching holy water fonts just inside the door. The fonts are flanked by very large putti. The Romanesque curves of the architecture could not be described as anything other than sensual, and this applies to a great deal of the decoration as well.

Sometimes this sensuality is profoundly overt. After several tries we eventually found Santa Maria della Vittoria, the base of the ‘Barefoot Carmelites’, open and had a long look at Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St Theresa’[10]. We also had a look at what was written under it. In St Theresa’s own words —

Our Lord was pleased that I should sometimes have the following vision.

I saw an angel very near me, on my left side, in a corporeal form which is not usual with me; for though angels are often represented to me yet it is without my seeing them, except by that kind of vision of which I have already spoken. But in this vision, our Lord was pleased that I should see an angel in this form. He was not tall but rather little, and very beautiful; his face was so inflamed, that he seemed to be one of those glorious spirits who appear to be all on fire (with divine love).

I saw that he had a long golden dart in his hand, and at the point it seemed to me to be a little fire: I thought he pierced my heart with this dart several times, and in such a manner that it went through my very bowels; and when he drew it out it seemed as though my bowels came with it, and I remained wholly inflamed with a great love of God. The pain thereof was so intense, that it forced deep groans from me; but the sweetness which this extreme pain caused me was so excessive that there was no desiring to be free from it; nor is the soul then content with anything less than God.

This is not a corporeal but a spiritual pain, though the body does not fail to participate a little in it, yea, a great deal. It is so delightful an intercourse between the soul and God that I beseech His goodness to give some taste of it to him who may imagine I do not tell the truth. (Life of St Teresa, Chapter XXIX. St Theresa is the author.)

This is St Theresa of Avila, a Spaniard, founder of the Carmelites who had as one of her watchwords: ‘Lord, either let me suffer or let me die.’ Bernini has taken her at her word. She is lying back in a pool of petit mort. He’s done too much with the folds of cloth, a master artisan run amok, but he doesn’t have the least trouble following her directions.

Here’s an idea, not about religion, but about the early Christian church; and not about a considered plan but about inspired intuition.

Religion must be to some degree an ideology, a system of ideas. If I want to interest people in a new system of ideas, by definition, I can’t offer normality — snugness in front of a fire with enough to eat, a happy family, good friends, work that challenges and interests. I have to reorganise those blocks of convention. If I am ambitious I will do this in the most dramatic form I can. I will need to construct an edifice which turns most of the fundamentals resoundingly on their head.

Celebrate discomfort, redescribe the nature of ecstasy, exalt the renunciation of conventional sexuality, find virtue in pain. Mortify the flesh.[11] Shift the focus from now to tomorrow, in another world.

And these ideas must have enough resonance to make sense as an ideal, if one which is out of reach. And when failure comes as it must, you can try harder or you can develop your own tortured response to living within the wild paradoxes and, probably, enormous confusion generated by these incongruous ideas.

Putti will have begun I imagine as versions of Jesus the child, innocence and purity incarnate, shortly to be joined by an infant John the Baptist. But, after that, joined by anyone or no one in particular until Cupid came along, neither innocent nor pure, and much more recognizable in this role than either of the first two options. Artists would not have been disappointed with these developments. But who was looking at and okaying their formative sketches? Some at least would have been men of the church who were thinking more than just: Ah, putti. Cute.

Cerveteri. A pause for air.

I had an idea about some excursions from Rome. We decided that mid week we would go to Cerveteri about 70 kilometres north west. Signora at the Informazione on the Corso said in short order: not in town, never heard of it, don’t know how to get there, why would you?[12]

However there was digital recourse. According to the instructions posted helpfully on the internet, here’s how you get there. ‘To get to Cerveteri from Rome by public transport, you can take either the train (to Cerveteri-Ladispoli station, then take a local bus) or a COTRAL bus (journey time approximately one hour). The COTRAL buses are probably handier, as they stop right in the centre of town. Buses leave from Lepanto Metro station (Linea A); the bus stops are just above the underground station, and there is a ticket desk below ground. A tip: on the way into and out of Rome, the bus may be stuck for a long time in traffic. If you can avoid this by using metro stations further along the bus route, do.’ Easy. Anyone could do that.

Bright and early we boarded the Metro to Lepanto and scoured the station looking for someone who had any idea of how to get to Cerveteri. Someone could and did sell us tickets which would get us there, but no one was quite sure how.

We searched high and low but no COTRAL[13] buses left from Lepanto. Another ticket lady said Italian for go to the end of the line, the Metro line that is, and try there. I would have probably given up about then but Myrna has steely resolve in such matters. We got on the Metro again and went to the end of the line. I note that there is no difficulty in getting a Metro train to the end of the line even if we did have to buy more tickets. So, we got off at Cornelia and, hoorah, there was an Avviso clientele. Fantastico. Signor, how do we get to Cerveteri? We’re a bit out of town by now and the locals don’t even have to pretend not to understand English. ‘Can’t get there. Never heard of it. This is not a place for leaving by bus.’ ‘Signor, mate, have a look at this mappo here on the wall next to you. That symbol next to Cornelia means ‘bus’ and right there it says COTRAL to Cerveteri. Where’s the stop?’ ‘Ah, Cerveteri. That’s interesting. Didn’t know about that.’ It is clear by now that this was not a well-beaten path and also that we had exhausted the confines of his knowledge.

So we climbed up out of the hole in the ground and looked around, a meerkat accompanied by an old and tired wombat. And there was a bus, a few of them, but they were ACTAF buses, and after the meerkat tried to talk one into taking us to Cerveteri, the driver waved his arm towards down the street saying, azure azure. At this stage the wombat wanted to return to the burrow, but the meerkat scampered down the street and there was a new and different bus station. We engaged an elderly couple in discussion about where they thought they were going and when and how they thought they were going to get there, and they thought a bus might come. It did, and it did go to Ladispoli but may also have gone on to Cerveteri. Half an hour later we boarded a blue bus and it did both, an intriguing route with a wide range of opportunities to look at everything that was in between Rome and Ladispoli.

Where were we going which merited such effort?

We were going to look at a necropolis, an Etruscan city of death. We walked the few kilometres from town to the site, another World Heritage site and were in need of sustenance by the time we got near, although it was a bit hard to tell just where we were. Signage is variable in Italy, and it wasn’t clear that there was any desperation to get pedestrians there. I’d seen these signs to La Tulchulcha, a very odd piece of Italian, and we turned off the narrow main road down a track to see if they provided coffee.

There was shaded terrace which looked like it could have been a restaurant (now signed as ‘Tukulka’, we had entered Etruria) and found Mamma, a real one this time. Mamma didn’t speak English and went to get Pappa who did, a bit. We discussed food. I wanted something piccolo; Myrna wanted some coffee. He threw his arms in the air. What for you want something piccolo, and coffee before a meal. Are you savages?[14] So … what can you do? What can you do? He told us what was on today: a pasta with mushrooms and herbs from the garden beyond the terrace where we were sitting, pork from his pigs (he worked at the airport but ran this mini farm as well. Very hard work!), and wine from his vineyard. The pasta was a bit gluggy, the wine sensational but very heavy, but the pork, the pork … [15]

The necropolis covers 200 hectares which contains nearly 2000 houses for the dead I will have to say because they are certainly not tombs. I thought for a start that they really were houses they were so well set up. ‘Dwellings’ have been carved out of hundreds of volcanic tumuli, symmetrical bubbles of tuff and lava, mostly 30 or 40 metres across. There are also ‘cubes’ running along roads for the same purpose. These date from 900 to about 300 BC and their contents — carvings, painted decorations, household items — provide much of what is known about the Etruscan civilisation. Many of them are plain with a corridor and chambers with platforms for the dead, but several had been left relatively pristine and the richness of the information they contained was obvious. We were there virtually alone. The necropolis of Cerveteri is not on the beaten path. It was worth the trip, and that’s saying something.

That night we were eating in a bar back in Rome. (As per the internet instructions there had been a traffic jam of sorts on the way home in our blue bus.)

I was interested in watching the European Cup semi-final in company, Internazionale Milan versus Barcelona, or Inter (Italy) vs. Barca (Spain) to the fans. This would be the best game of the tournament. Inter’s Matto got sent off in the fifth minute for next to nothing but then snotted a bloke on his way off which more or less drove a nail into his dismissal from the game. After this Inter put up a wall with nine men and the goalie behind the ball as they say in soccer and it became a shooting gallery but with no targets in sight. An amazing match.

We fell to talking with a German who lived in LA for some of the time now. He’d been a business man, retired 15 years too early he said. When working he had travelled 200 days a year selling medical equipment and now he just went where he wanted, but was clearly bored. He had families in Hanover and LA and made a great fuss over the need for proximity of parent-child relationships during the teenage years. He had recently shipped his 16 year-old daughter from America to Hanover for treatment for some blood disorder. He was in Italy because his 81 year-old mother had breast cancer and she had heard that the best man who you couldn’t see unless you knew someone was in Rome. He had made it his business to know someone and his mother was being treated.

Borders are for the poor, or for those who don’t have them. The rich have never really been interested. They can make their own as they choose. Globalisation is at least a function of increased wealth as much as it is improved technological capacity. Our friend moaned about the fish that he had scoffed just as Inter’s Piqué got a clever goal in the 88th minute to give the game to the Italians who cheered. Another border had been successfully defended.

Rome giveth and Rome taketh away.

There was a Caravaggio exhibition on, a huge collection on a rare scale. ‘Judith and Holofernes’ had been brought in from the Barberini. We thought we got to the queue early. But so did the hundreds of people in front of us and after a motionless couple of hours we gave it away.

Sat in the Borghese gardens, me reading the Guardian and Myrna doing the crossword. Lovely. Sauntered on to the Museo Borghese. You can’t get in these days unless you’ve booked a ticket and a time (! two hours max.) on the internet. Bummer. They had nice coffee which they allowed us to buy. Good. Proceeded to the Galerie Nationale d’Art Moderne which had lots of wonderful things including the sculptures by Mestrovic I’ve mentioned before but also an exhibition of US and European feminist art from the 1970s.

It wasn’t all interesting, but some of it was. The contribution of an American called Martha Wilson was a series of photos of the artist in costume, called ‘A Portfolio of Models’ with text underneath them.

These are the models society holds out to me: Goddess, Housewife, Working Girl, Professional, Earth Mother, Lesbian. At one time or another I have tried them all on for size, and none has fit. All that’s left to do is be an artist and point the finger at my own predicament. The artist operates out of the vacuum left when all other values are rejected.

Quite.

A tram went past out the front andwe climbed aboard to see where it would take us. The Risorgimento near the Vatican. Good. Had some lunch. Good. Very expensive. Bad. Bought a Roma C’é, Rome’s ‘Time Out’, to see what was on. Not one version origionale film on in the whole city! What is this joint? Got on a tram again for the same reason as before, and the ride provided a rich slice of Rome — in order: shops, palazzos, elegant houses, six storey older housing, industry, tower blocks, graffiti.

The mix of faces also went from predominantly white to a widely varying mixture. That’s the way it goes. Another tram brought us back to where I thought it might. Tried to get to Trastevere on a different tram to see another of Bernini’s ecstasia. The schedule is wrong, doesn’t go any more. You’re in the wrong place. Bad. A mixed experience eating at D’Agnino. Mixed. Walked past the National Museum and walked in for a rest. And in here were remarkable things in profusion. I will mention only two.

There were a lot of life masks, portraits of people made while they were living by a complex reverse casting process but the result is that you get a precise likeness, not a likeness actually because it is exact. Madame Tussaud’s, but better. That’s the person. All sorts of famous people were in there, but Brutus caught my eye. I swear he looked just like a Deputy Principal who is active in Rotary, a very capable organiser, well meaning but strict, very clean, excellent personal hygiene, upright. That explains a lot.

Even more remarkable was ‘The Boxer’.[16] I was transfixed. After probably having been buried deliberately and carefully for safety several hundreds of years ago, this sculpture was found in 1885 during an excavation of the Quirinal hill just a few hundred metres from where it is on display now. It dates from the first century BC and is a masterpiece of realism suggesting that its maker or makers may have been Greek. He is sitting there, naked, forearms on his knees, looking up and over his shoulder at another invisible presence. His nose is savagely smashed, but this is history, not from this bout. In the same way his ears have been cauliflowered. From the bout just concluded he has deep cuts on his forehead, cheeks and shoulder. There have been copper inlays in these wounds to suggest blood.

He is wearing only hand and forearm protection, leather sleeves from knuckles to elbow tied on with thongs and finished with a collar of fur. Across his knuckles are cæstuses, cases of lead to inflict damage on his opponent. Beyond the injuries, his body is lithe and magnificently muscled, a sort of perfection, but it is his eyeless expression which is so remarkable. It is a combination of exhaustion and the inarticulate sportsman’s non verbal questions: Okay? Everything go all right? How was I?

He has been in a state removed from anything but the contest, and even after its completion he is still somewhere else. This might be qualified with a suggestion of the sublime if short-lived confidence of an experienced winner, a professional. This statue is more than 2000 years old. Some things never change.

The drive to Ciampino airport out the Via Appia Nuova (the ‘new Appian Way’) was interesting, almost Portugese, with high stone walls on either side of a two lane road, glimpses of mansions and country houses through the gates and peeping over the top, and I thought how much I’d like a closer look. We went past and through golf courses, and green areas; it was very early in the morning with little traffic about, the air was sweet, and it looked almost rural.

But I wasn’t sad to be leaving. Rome takes stamina, and while Myrna had got another wind every time she bought a dress, I was still considering how to locate the premises of Rome Sweet Home and raze them. I was also thinking about how on earth we were going to get from Tain L’Hermitage to Lamastre on a Sunday which was also a public holiday, two bags of French cement which would ensure nothing moved.

WALKING IN FRANCE (SOME TRIP)

••••••••••••••••••

dolce e ruvido = sweet and harsh
[3] Sunday arvo. What would you expect?
[5] ‘She is the greatest website designer. She just picked it up herself and we get more hits than any other officiant in the US.’ The Officiant Guy.
[6] It does occur to me consistently that the objets in any room any single room of the Vatican museum — any room up to the advent first World War; things went bad after that; people lost their faith, and religious art went to the dogs — would be enough to provide for the nourishment of the population of a small third world country for at least 12-18 months. Almost literally.
^{^[7]} Capacity 60,000. Along the floor of the nave starting from the entrance are markers with the comparative lengths of other large world churches, all smaller of course. What did the Ecclesiast say: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’? And here is an interesting case of understatement: ‘The construction of St. Peter’s, in so far as the church itself is concerned, was concluded within a period of 176 years (1450-1626).’
[8] Canopy over the altar.
[9] Which is very hard to take a photo of as evidenced by a long trawl through the net. The best I found has now been taken down.
[10] I have provided a photographic offering but there are dozens of better ones on the net. I am not alone in my prurience. This is clearly a popular subject. Just google ‘Ecstatsy of St Theresa’ and you’ll find them.
[11] There are too many examples. Just one. St Dominic had iron rings fastened very tightly round his torso and legs and self-flagellated, a word which is only used in this context, so violently, that he looked like ‘barley in a mortar’ (as in combined with ‘pestle’). However, after this experience he developed stigmata which could be used for healing.
[12] After this we went over the road to look at a Hopper exhibition which was a bit of fizzer, lots of filler, and then went to one of the three version originale films in English on in Rome. The rest are dubbed for legal reasons protecting the status of the native language. It was ‘Agora’, starring Rachel Weisz as Hypatia and Christians in blue burlap doing wicked wicked things. Fear not. You’ll never see it. Some kind soul will ensure it is buried deep in an out of the way place. The other v.o. film that was on was Roman Polanski’s new film ‘The Ghost Writer’. An unconvincing story in the end and Pierce Brosnan and Kim Cattrall are in it; but so is Euan McGregor and the photography is worth the price of a ticket. Three stars.
[13] There are two bus systems in Rome. COTRAL buses service regional areas. They’re blue.
[14] This also happened to us in France while we were walking. A Sunday midday, small town, Désaignes actually, tout le monde est à repas, it had been raining solidly for several hours, we had walked about 15 k.s and we wanted a cup of coffee. And a cup of coffee and a baguette were absolutely not on the menu du jour at the Café des Fontaines. But m’sieur did not throw up his hands in horreur. His face started to rigidify but he quietly suggested he would prepare us a salade of spécialités Ardéchoises which took forever but was edible, and to preserve the niceties of civilisation the coffee came after we had eaten. France. Italy. They differ.
[15] Some Americans turned up and Graham will be glad to know mine host had got sick of speaking English and at several points asked me to translate for him. Okay? Good. Right.
[16] Standing out from the crowd, I didn’t take my camera into the museum. Our photo of ‘The Boxer’ was taken with Myrna’s camera and only slightly suggests what I’m talking about. A Dutch (I think) blogger did take his in and went berko. Try: http://willyorwonthe.blogspot.com/2008/08/favorite-boxer.html

ELSEWHERE 2010: Venice. Disneyland on water

Posted on July 28, 2014 by mcrae3051

A cup of coffee (cappuccino): €1.80 ($A2.70) at the deli in the Campo dei Carmini; €4.00 ($A6.00) at the coffee shop near the station

What do tourists like? They like narrow streets and old buildings and water and an occasional spectacle and easily accessible food and pedestrianisation and big churches and a very high quotient of the picturesque. So. Venice. Tourist heaven or what? The Disneyland of tourism. Except bigger. We’d come to the Show with the whole fortnight crammed into one day along with the Grand Final tucked into a small corner.

Sitting at a coffee shop near the station opposite the beginning of the show bags we watched as wave after wave of people came down the steps of Santa Lucia station, the end of the spike of conventional transport from the mainland which is stuck in the Venetian plum. Wave after wave is not correct. There was no break, just flow without ebb, just masses with wheelie bags and maps because Venice must be one of the few places in the world where there is no shame in looking at a map. Everyone does. This happens not for a day, not for a week, but 365 days a year, in Leap Years 366. The crowds tumble in. The island is not sinking because of artesian wells on the mainland draining the water table or global warming or rising seas or the underscoring of the buildings built on wooden piers cut from the denuded mountains of Slovenia and northern Croatia[1], it’s the impact and mass of millions of pedestrians!

Like Disneyland the streets are very clean; and like Disneyland, better than Disneyland, it is beautifully designed to cater for the primary level of Maslow’s hierarchy[2] — food and shelter. Any combination, any permutation, any price range, any time, any place.

That’s in the first 500 metres after you get off the train, and it just develops from there. There is no discrimination. It is for the old and for the young. I cannot tell you how many crocs of school kids we saw there, how many hundreds, and despite Venice being the ultimate adventure playground for an eight year-old boy, I couldn’t tell you what they were doing there except having excellent ice creams bought for them by their teachers. I just don’t know. I always saw them in transit. The halt, the lame and the blind are welcome. One of the things that caught my eye in this post-arrival swirl was a lady in a wheelchair with two large suitcases and several smaller bags piled on top of her, I’m sure with her consent, being pushed along by a man pulling another enormous bag. All colours and creeds — I did spot a group of 30 or so burqa clad persons — although the black representatives seemed to be mainly on sunglasses and handbags and probably getting back to the mainland after the custom fell off.

The hotel was where it should have been, down a tiny lane, well-placed, comfortable, funky even. But my list of things to do in Venice was looking lame — short, dull, obvious — badly prepared in other words. We established ourselves in the throng, the human conveyor belt in motion heading towards the Rialto. Hmm the Rialto …, news from … rings a bell. Which of Shakespeare’s plays was set in Venice? Myrna wondered. (Yes she did. But I need to be careful here. I have not kept a clean sheet.) We deviated a little later and came to a piazza that looked like a crèche, had 30 or 40 kids playing, the older ones with water bombs. But there were quite a few of Romany’s[3] age peers. We sat and watched them for half an hour or so absorbed by the delights of chickabiddies growing up and felt a bit nostalgic for North Coburg. It was the day before her second birthday.

That first night in a new place, … it’s never satisfactory. Tired from the travel, don’t know where to eat or what to do, so looking around in slightly dizzied wonder we had some perfunctory spag bol in a too expensive restaurant with a cold wind flicking at us off the canal.

One of the selling points of our hotel (which lost €120,000 worth of business during the ash cloud scare) was that it had a garden. I should think every customer it ever had would ask for a garden room when all the other rooms were bigger and better. But such is the marketing power of the garden. This rather straightforward garden was where we were sitting, gathering strength. The day was bright and delicious. I was writing about St Petersburg which already seemed so antithetical, a lifetime away. Today, I resolved, we were going to go against the tide, challenge the masses and bugger the consequences. We were going to go anti-clockwise, yes you heard it here first, anti-clockwise, in order to attack the Accademia and the Peggy Guggenheim gallery. Got our heads round the corner of our lane, watched to make sure no one was looking, ran over the Ferrovia bridge the wrong way and trundled down the fundament of San Simeon the smaller. Suddenly, perhaps obviously, as we strolled we found ourselves in a different city, one where people seemed to live.

For the very few people in the world who don’t know, Venice consists primarily of two islands (six really) in a large coastal lagoon, the Laguna Veneto, which has three entrances to the Golfo di Venezia, the very north of the Adriatic sea.[4] The chief islands are shaped a bit like a yin and yang symbol. They could also be a fist which would suit Venice’s history much better, especially from a Croatian point of view. Its two parts are divided by the Grand Canal and, as everyone in the world does know, the whole shebang is striated irregularly by canals. It might be 2.5 kilometres long and one and a half wide and has about 58,000 permanent inhabitants — schools, a huge hospital, and many thousands of artisans skilled in matters of managing rising damp, damp moving in any direction really. These chaps ply their trade from boats set up exactly as tradesmen’s vans would be, and seem to have access all areas. Beyond that I counted 85 churches on my map, very few of which are working of course; but what would it have been like when they were? What an enterprise, what a workforce, what a grip on the public mind!

The city is divided into six sestieri, areas, suburbs, districts, each with their own style and history. We were wandering our way from Cannaregio, the old Jewish quarter, through to Dorsoduro (‘hard ridge’; see ‘dorsal fin’, ‘durable road’; allora, simple as that) in which rather excitingly there is a substantial street which is not a canal, and it was a happily rewarding maze. As Myrna said: constantly picturesque, constantly rewarding.

We stumbled into the Campo dei Carmini, a lovely quiet square close to the university, tripped over some tickets to a night of operatic performances, and fell headlong into a deli that looked like a deli and had almost Melbourne-class coffee and the violently up market (in quality not price) party pies and mini pizzas and the other attenuated offerings you eat in Venice. Next door was a Leb takeaway. You can’t say ‘Leb’ can you? No. I didn’t think so. Near Eastern, Levantine — an establishment which sold food sourced in its conception from the Levant which could be removed from the store in purpose-designed packaging.

Thus reinforced we muscled our way into the Accademia prepared for ART, and that was more or less what we got. You know you can have enough of pre-Renaissance religious art unless there’s something really … well, you know, lots of gold (Catherine the Great’s favourite colour), or big, or a skeleton clambering in an unexpected location, or someone eating jewellery. That type of thing. I think that’s what the collectors go on. It’s not adequate to just have another St Sebastian dripping with arrows, a task which appears to have drawn the Old Master like [add your own simile, you may begin with ‘flies’ if you wish]. More than enough already.

The Tiepolo that appears in the Canberra National Gallery with the ‘trousers’ or ‘upskirt’ perspective, yes that one right up there in the corner near the roof, the putti are looking down at us, along with the ladies, gentlemen and angels, way up there, yep that’s it; well, there are lots of those. Tiepolo found a market and made a bit of a production line out of them. They are remarkable studies in perspective and when you’re decorating simply everything, they do fill difficult spaces. You can just about hang them on the ceiling, certainly they can go in any top corner as long as the walls are high enough. The Accademia also contains some very fine Bellinis. He has a way with flesh and naturalistic facial expression that is a cut or two above the pack (not however in the same league as Caravaggio). But in a desultory field my blue ribbon went to the Tiepolos.

Peggy Guggenheim must have had money leaking from every pore. [later note: she didn’t. She had plenty but wasn’t one of those Guggenheims; a much more interesting person] How or why she came to Venice to establish herself I have no idea, but she did it in as much style as anyone could have. She set herself up in a new palace on the Grand Canal, prime real estate more or less directly opposite San Marco Square. While we were there, there was something very considerably more modest in the palace line and several canals back going for €15.8 million, but I’m not sure her ‘house’ could be priced at present. (And it’s a gallery now anyway.)

It is modern, less than a 100 years old, in two somehow simultaneously expansive and compact sections divided by a courtyard that I would give most of my right leg for — maybe 40 by 15 metres, flagstones in a herringbone pattern within a two metre high hedge ‘flashed’ with elegant brick walls, two large trees and enormous overhangs of wisteria coming from the glazed balcony. The wing nearer the canal is the primary gallery although there is also a sculpture garden. That wing has a concrete roof which doubles as a terrace where you can sunbake with dogs. There are photos to prove this. All the palaces have entries from the water[6], but hers has a magnificent statue around three metres high, an abstracted figure on a horse with arms flung wide in welcome, and a glorious monster erection, removable for when the Pope comes to visit. It’s a cracker. Great paintings in the gallery and not too many of them. And, blow me down! About half of the originals of the plates from Mainstreams in Modern Art, a book I learnt more or less by heart in Year 12, are here. There must have been some sort of publishing deal going on. It was wonderful to see so many old friends, so resplendent in the flesh.

Max Ernst was one of Peggy’s husbands. Perhaps establishing the flavour of the relationship, when once asked how many husbands she had had, she replied: Mine or other people’s? And there are 10 or so Ernsts hanging. The better ones appear to be the product of nightmares, full of tortured alien figures backlit by some green and yellow emergency. The worse ones, most, were shockers without verve or whatever inspiriting it is that turns pigment and binder into art.

There might have been challenges, as we say, in Ernst’s life situation, if not in fact actual ‘problems’. Peggy and Max’s circle of intimates included at least Brancusi, Chagall, Kandinsky, Braque, Hans Arp, Calder, Mondrian and Miro. There is a photo of Giorgio de Chirico making soup in their kitchen, an avuncular figure far removed from the ominous quality of his pictures. A better collection of Italian Futurists was on display here than the Galerie Nationale d’Art Moderne in Rome could manage — this is Italy’s distinctive contribution to 20^th century art — and here is Max and his work. How does he feel? Is he up to it? Will Peggy decide that his work is worth hanging? In this company? And does she pay him for his paintings? Eeeeeeeeeeee … and what private miracles might he have to perform in their domestic life to keep his self respect in the face of all this competition? Better men than Max Ernst would bend and break in the face of such issues. They were married, but not for very long[7]. [Later note: he managed by being a complete shit to her. I guess that’s one way of doing it.]

A couple of hundred metres further along at the point of the yang, the end of the southern island, a policeman in sunglasses and heavy duty gear (guns, two (2)) stood next to a statue. This presumably is to guard the marble frog dangling from the hand of a naked marble stripling. To stop the tourists from, I think the wildly appropriate term may be, souveniring it. Later in the evening we noted it had been secured in a clear plastic box locked to the pavement. Without knowing, I’ll say bullet proof.

We decided it was time to get with the vaporettos, water buses. They’re everywhere. The traffic on the water is as dense as it would be on the street. There’s water cops and ambulances and trucks and cranes and taxis. But what there wasn’t where we were was a ticket office. (This could be considered as yet another part of the discussion of the incompetence, the cultural innocence, the determined uselessness, of the tourist. There’s plenty more of this.) In a fabulous phrase from old Australia, we got our guts up and while there was no ticket office there were some provision. You will remember that this is THE well-oiled machine. They’re used to idiots. And the public transport system is very highly developed, not least for the workers who go home to the mainland or the cheaper islands every night.

We stood in the appropriate corner with the dunce’s hats on, the deckhand came and took €13 off us and, now respectable, off we choofed straight across the Grand Canal to San Marco. What, 600 metres maybe? Great. But I thought if we just sat tight we could go to wherever there was to go and then the vaporetto would automatically come back taking us to the stop nearest home while we were thanked for our custom. I travel optimistically, full of hope and confidence in the fidelity of the world to my needs and wishes.

And it did indeed take us further. Great. San Zaccaria, Arsenale, Giardini, the Biennale Park, Sant’ Elena, lovely to see it all, and then phhwoot we’re off in the open water. We’re on a glorified ferry; how far can it go?

A pink scrim had been pulled down over the longer distances, and with the grey of the water and the lavender and sun-gilding of the Venetian buildings as they receded it was gorgeous. Mellow. Great. We arrived at the Lido — think, we wouldn’t have gone there otherwise — the strip of sand that divides the lagoon from the sea, and that has given its name to an idea of the beach in British (English really) culture[8]. We were encouraged to get off, if not with any great force. Just a firm wave of the arm.

I saw a sign that indicated ‘Express to Venice’ and got in that morass, because you don’t queue for a vaporetto, you surge towards it as though your life depends on it. You fight the other men and some of the women while your wife runs into the cabin and saves you a seat. It’s culture. It’s tradition. The vaporetto didn’t start pointed in the right direction but there was no reason for that to be discouraging. Boats can turn. I’ve seen them.

This one, however, wasn’t one of the ones that turn. It became evident that we were not on the express to Venice and also that there weren’t many people with backpacks, maps and zip-off drip-dry travel pants on board. We were commuting, to an uncertain destination. But, I reiterate, an exquisite evening, the throb of the motor, the hish of a light wind through the hair, a chance to look round the entirety of the Laguna — who could ask for more? Great. The only slightly nagging doubt was the increasing and substantial distance between us and anything that looked remotely like a port. I was reasonably happy with journey, but Myrna was becoming increasingly interested in destination. Some hours later — nah just mucking around, it wasn’t a tick over 40 minutes, maybe 50 — we arrived at Punta Sabbioni, a flank of one of the entrances to the Adriatic. If I’d looked left with my specs on I may have seen the Croatian uplands. The workers got off, and after being assured by a charming deckhand in his very best English that the boat went back to Venice, we stayed on. €13 for all that. A steal.

That night, the concert: two violins, a harp, a cello, a dancer, two singers and an audience of 15 do opera’s greatest hits in the ineffably beautiful hall of the School of Carmen. I was worried that the singers might be wearing masks which covered their mouths but only the musicians were handicapped in this way. The tenor was an inspired amateur with a harsh upper register and plenty of power, a combination which can be highly problematic. The soprano might have been a retired professional and she’d lost her bottom notes but she could really sing. The size of the crowd made attempts to sing along rather overt, but as the French would say, une soirée très geniale.

The rest of the time in Venice was dominated by further maritime experience of an intentional nature. We went to Burano to look at the painted houses. I wondered to myself how the municipal ordinances go in Burano. ‘Right mate. Too much like the last one. We‘re up to Dulux 820 Pheasant Breath for the trim and 614A Malevolent Orange for the body of the house. You can do the upper storey in Transparent Egg or trade with the Marcianos for Used Lettuce. If you don’t like it, you can take the whole thing to VCAT.’ I can’t see how it would work otherwise. There’d be conformists.

And I must say the Lagoon was not looking any less picturesque.

We got a good look at the mud Venice is built on, and it’s just mud. There is a clay base you can’t see and that’s what these very old petrified piles that provide the foundations for the houses of Venice are resting on. The most thoughtful solution to the sinking problem appears to be to pump water into the mud and make the whole thing float higher. That’s not intuitive.

We got home from Burano in time to walk round the Arsenale and the Hospital to San Marco square, and what a show stopper it is. The campanile is threatening to fall over again as it did in 1902 and attempts are being made currently to straighten it[9]. In addition the narthex and façade of San Marco’s was half-dressed in scaffolding and nylon net safe-T wrap. But what majesty, what power in that square and the loggia surrounding it. Had a glass of champagne costing an unfeasibly large sum of money, and on the strength of it went to eavesdrop on a guy in a Murano glass shop buying a chandelier for €37,000. He was direct about it — why wouldn’t you be — I don’t think he’d spent long thinking about it, wanted a look at the colours available and to know how quickly and how well he could get it home. He wore clothes suitable to the task. A very very white dress shirt open at the neck and hanging out, nicely pressed very black trousers with cowboy boots. His wife was a sea of shades of very expensive grey in floaty new wool. Americans.

This was another occasion when we were impressed by the ability of Americans to create space around themselves. It’s a gift that allows a great deal of cushioning from embarrassment. For several hours on the bus from Villach to Venice the top deck was entertained by the life story of a 19 year-old piano teacher from Maryland whose mother could speak four languages and whose dad was the greatest teacher she had ever known and who adored Paris and couldn’t understand why the object of her attention, Claudio a 20 year-old assistant manager from Padua who didn’t drink, hadn’t been there. Among very many other things, she revealed that in New Zealand they don’t have heating. The issue was that every utterance was followed by this cascading, well it wasn’t a bray, it wasn’t a snigger, but a sort of laughing neigh that said, can you believe it? and was very very loud. After some extensive practice, Myrna managed to master it. That’s another way to make space. The chandelier man did it by having, one presumes, 370 €100 notes in his pocket.

That night we found the place where a selection of the kids on the excursions ate and it was another well-oiled machine, a cafeteria which would have fed, was feeding, several hundred young souls aged 7-18 I’d guess, and a few ringers like us. The food for the masses just appeared, manna/heaven, loaves/fishes. The vast queue heaved forward and each was given in a flash, on a tray, prima pasta, secondo main course, dolce dessert, e una bevanda a drink, just like that. It was a bit noisy but it beat the pants off the restaurant on the canal.

We ambled back to the hotel to a mini catastrophe, very mini really, but it’s the sort of thing that has a very bad effect on me. The mini catastrophe was an email which I could so so easily not have read — if we’d been almost anywhere else I wouldn’t have — announcing the cancellation of our accommodation in Rome, 36 hours before we were due to arrive. We were offered something else but it was rubbish. Romans, said the boys at the Hotel Abbazia shaking their heads. Romans. This left a very unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Before the advent of the internet it would have been a disaster. We would have been completely at their mercy. I spent a night thinking of forms of revenge eventually deciding not to negotiate or do any business with them. Rome Sweet Home. Don’t. (Serves me right for doing business with an enterprise with a name like that.) So several hours the next morning were spent finding alternate accommodation and cleaning up the mess that RSH had left. My deposit still has not been returned.

We thought we might go for yet another boat trip to calm me down. We had conquered the vaporetto system by this time, knew when to run, when to shove, when to fold and when to hold ‘em, and Murano (this is not an alphabetical series of 21 islands with ‘urano’ in their name; that’s all) where Venetian glass is made and sold in great quantities. The trip had the requisite calming effect.

Later we commuted from the Fondamente Nova down the Canale di Cannaregio back to our hotel. It’s a different part of town, more land, fewer canals, newer buildings, post war certainly, looking like government housing and already shabby without the chic of the older buildings. Round Tre Archi I saw a trattoria that Mamma must certainly have been running.

We negotiated our way back later in the evening and I was right. It was so ‘Mamma’s’ it was providing for a closed party, and you can’t get much more Mamma’s than that. In purely functional terms it would even challenge the Mamma at Visovac. But it was a promising area so we wandered south to find a gentleman addressing his mobile phone with considerable force. ‘I will break your fucking back over my fucking knee you fucking toe rag. I will make you so fucking sore you will weep fucking blood.’ Just a short sample although he did cut things off as we came by and took his place back in the bar, eyeing us suspiciously as he did so. He may have been developing script for the next Ray Winstone movie, but the depth of feeling combined with the waft of marijuana floating round a corner suggested a commercial transaction in the field of drugs imperfectly concluded.

As it turned out the real Mamma’s was just another 20 metres or so down the canal so we ducked in. She did us proud with some cannelloni made to her own special recipe by three hand-picked warriors flown in from Cannellon and a pizza fresh-picked off the pizza trees in the back of the shop with an egg à pointe smack bang in the middle. Delicious. We went home to pack.

To the Editor

Sir,

For reasons of cost, convenience and comfort, there may be advantages in renting an apartment for longer visits to big cities. Here’s one for example that would suit many people’s purposes very well:

http://www.romesweethome.com/apartments-rental/rome/trastevere/trastevere-wonderful-terrace.asp Looks great doesn’t it? All you have to do is book it — as we did, last November, several months before our due arrival — and pay the substantial deposit, and look forward to using it.

But then you might get an e-mail 36 hours before that moment saying that this particular apartment is not available and offering you something else; say, something without a terrace, with a microwave instead of a kitchen and some sort of sleeping platform up a vertical ladder instead of a bedroom. Here, you can look for yourself: http://www.romesweethome.com/apartments-rental/rome/trastevere/Panieri-Loft-Apartment.asp

It’s a few kilometres from where you wanted to stay, but hey, rube. This is Rome.

On further inspection this notification email is clearly a form letter, and I regret to say that this is something that has happened to us before even though the company (in Paris) had the good sense to offer us something that we might have wanted. The rental company has 200 properties. Some are popular; some aren’t. The owners of even rubbish properties want as much occupancy as possible. Let’s mix them up a bit to make sure we keep the owners happy and our list long. So, fair enough. After all the client is offered something else. It’s not illegal; it’s a game.

It is not illegal but it is fraudulent. It is not what you wanted, or in this case where you wanted it, and it was not what was agreed. It relies on the comparatively fragile position of the traveller and, if it is an apartment, quite probably their family, and the by products are disappointment and anxiety. From the customer’s point of view, it’s a scam. People in this business don’t have to be accountable for their behaviour the way those in hotels do.

When this happened I was initially inclined to renegotiate, but then I thought this is just feeding the beast. The only thing to do is to try to put them out of business. Rome Sweet Home, and the like: avoid like the plague.

Yours etc.

IGNORE ALL THAT AND LET’S MOVE ON. TO ROME. IN A HOTEL.

•••••••••••••••

[1] An ecological disaster fascinating like our very own Queenstown.

[2] I should have offered this previously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow’s_hierarchy_of_needs

[3] Adored grandchild.

[4] With Croatia almost immediately adjacent. Slovenia has its 15 k.s of coastline intervening.

[6] Of course. Where else would you be coming from? From a technical point of view it’s interesting to see how this has been handled, a lot of variety. I’d like to know what works best.

[7] Four years, 1942-46. Maybe the war sustained them and/or limited wider horizons. It may also explain Max’s art.

[8] Boz Scaggs’ Lido is a person.

[9] From a non-expert point of view I would say that Burano has a church tower more urgently in need of such attention.

mcraeblog

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One foot either side of the Equator: and other stories of derring-do

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ELSEWHERE 2010. Why travel?

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ELSEWHERE 2012: Rome. Dolce e ruvido

ELSEWHERE 2010: Venice. Disneyland on water