Category: Travel | Page 4

Santa Catalina Convent, Arequipa

The water looks dirty, but isn’t. You can see the goldfish clearly enough after all.

Santa Catalina Wall — A wall in a courtyard in Santa Catalina

The Santa Catalina Convent in Arequipa is an astonishing city within a city. In spite of the noise and bustle of the city outside, it manages to maintain a quiet calm. The nuns who lived here (and a small number who still do) may have led an ascetic and simple life, but they also had a very beautiful place to live as well. Fantastic light, colours and views.

Santa Catalina Cell — A nun's cell in Santa Catalina

The colours here just knocked me out. They say that mid-day isn’t a good time to take photos, especially in the tropics, but you can’t really go wrong when the subject matter is so good.

Struck by light — Not everyone takes their convents seriously

I Like It Low

I couldn’t believe how big this guy’s paintings were. Seems that as he got older his eyesight deteriorated. His solution? Paint so that at least he could see what he was doing!

MOMA — It may be a Warhol but I'm a cultural numpty

I believe this painting is by Andy Warhol. But I’m culturally dumb, so can’t rely on my memory. What I do know is that you’re not supposed to take photos in the MOMA without permission. What I also know is that so long as your flash isn’t going off they let you dick around all day with a compact camera. I’ve no idea whether the guards would object to an SLR.

If you wanna see some Pollocks, it’s best to get low down.

This may be art, or it may be architecture. Anyone care to educate me?

Road to Bolivia

This photo is on the main road from North Chile to Bolivia as it heads through Chile’s Lauca National Park. This is the nice and easy part – it seems that once in Bolivia the road deteriorates significantly in quality and safety. Just a few weeks after I took this picture a minibus full of tourists plunged off the side of the road and into a ravine, killing all the occupants.

The very high altitude here certainly makes the lorries work hard. Older trucks belch black fumes in this almost pristine environment, but thankfully they are still relatively few and the damage, I hope, is limited. More modern trucks are cleaner, but you can tell from the roaring engines that they work hard up here.

Border to Bolivia — Preparing Llama for dinner

These people make a living at the border of Chile and Bolivia. Although Chile is relatively rich, times can still be hard for indiginous people in remote locations. In the summer season they make some money from passing tourists, many of whom have visited Lago Chungará – the worlds highest lake. Here they’ve just slaughtered a pregnant Alpaca – its unborn baby on the car’s bonnet prior to preparation.

Valle de la Luna

Ok, first shot to go up on the photoblog*. I’ve decided to leave it up even though it’s a relatively poor quality re-size. However, I feel it still illustrates the beauty and scale of this location. Here we are, perhaps 1000m above the valley floor below. Priscilla, who I’d just met on this part of the trip likes sitting in dramatic locations… but I couldn’t help but notice the significant crack that ran all the way through the rock. One day it’ll fall off, I’m sure of it. It could easily take a tourist with it – half the guides cheerfully let tourists stand on it, while the other half warn how dangerous it is….

* Note, the photoblog and main blog have long since been merged into one.

Maps of the World

Maps have always fascinated me – I can stand staring at them for hours. Or at least, minutes. Whether it’s a small map of the area, or something covering the whole globe. There’s a few in particular that stand out as interesting, partly for their political background, and others for their technical approach. The first two, the Peters Projection, and the Mercator Equal-Area Projection, are attempts to illustrate the real area of the world’s land masses, and the last one is Google Earth, which provides a dynamic way to view the planet, including the facility to zoom into locations with satellite and aerial imagery.

Gall Peters Projection

The Gall-Peters Projection (often known just as the Peters Projection) of the map of the world, also known as a cylindrical projection, is one that’s become popular with many socially aware groups. Mainly because it helps to reassert that the world’s poorer countries take up rather more of our land mass than many people realise.

Although the distortions are a little odd, especially east-west as you near the poles, the map does help to provide a truer picture of the size of many countries than most flat projections.

Mercator Real-Area Map

The better real area map, at least for taking measurements from, is the sinusoidal projection (shown below), but that’s harder to look at. In reality, no projection of a globe onto a flat surface can be perfect.

Google Earth

Now Google is a big commercial company – powerful on the internet, and sometimes not that wonderful, but generally they’ve so far been a force for good. And one of my absolute favourites of theirs is the Google Earth application. I’ve spent many a happy hour zooming into countries and cities, checking out locations, and enjoying the ability to see some of the world’s sights from my computer. It’s an incredible application and I can recommend it to anyone. You can download it from http://earth.google.com/ and it works great on most reasonable computers.

Alternatively a globe makes a great piece of interior decor and doesn’t break when the internet goes down….

Credits: Peters-Projection care of NASA/Wikipedia and is in the public domain and can be used by anyone. Sinusoidal Projection care of Wikipedia and is a creative commons licensed image. Please visit the Wikipedia site for more information.

Cuban bathrooms

Cuba has, shall we say, a more relaxed approach to electrical safety than some other countries. In part because it’s poor – good electrics are expensive – but also, I suspect, because of some ignorance and lackadaisical enforcement too.

But I was still surprised to see this shower in our first B&B:

I will say one thing, however – in a lot of the finer houses the bathrooms remain as they were in the fifties, prior to the revolution. It’s an interesting perspective on design standards of the time, and mostly things were pretty good if you could afford good tiles. The fact that a lot of these bathrooms are still serviceable fifty years on is pretty impressive.

Transport in Cuba

Transport anywhere in what can be considered a third world country is quite a challenge to anyone used to online booking of easyJet flights. But… if you’ve arrived with Western wealth then it’s never going to be all that bad either. I mean for sure, your chances of arriving on time are little better than taking a train in the UK, but neither are you going to be sharing your personal space with a chicken and three donkeys in the back of a truck.

Not unless you’re especially keen on travelling on extreme lean budgets – which if you are, you won’t be in Cuba anyway. Travelling on a tight budget in this country is surprisingly tough thanks to the split economy. If you’re staying long enough and have a good command of Spanish you can buy and use Cuban Pesos as opposed to the tourist money – the Cuban Convertible Peso (or CUC for short) – but you’ll find that unless you can prove you’re Cuban you won’t necessarily get the low prices that locals might enjoy. You’ll also not be allowed in many trucks, taxis and buses where carrying foreigners is illegal.

It makes sense – if rich tourists are going to turn up, you want them to help your economy along. If they go round spending thruppence-ha’penny a day they’re doing bugger all to help. And you don’t want poor tourists anyway – they smell bad, make the place look untidy, and bang on about getting to be one with the locals. Which usually involves trying to find out what drugs they’ll sell them, and then taking them. Fair enough, really – but Castro needs money coming into his country more than anything else. So you’re going to end up spending the equivalent of about 1USD for every ten kilometres travelled – several times what you’ll spend in Peru for example.

Buses

For tourists, the best buses are provided by Viazul. They run a range of routes:

Habana – Santiago de Cuba
Trinidad – Santiago de Cuba
Habana – Viñales
Habana – Holguín
Habana – Trinidad
Habana – Varadero
Santiago de Cuba – Baracoa
Varadero – Trinidad
Varadero – Santiago de Cuba

There are plenty of intermediate stops too – check out their website for more information, prices and times.

Viazul’s coaches tend to leave on time, are reasonably clean (but on a bad day the toilet might smell worse than Swampy) and generally comfortable. Take warm clothes though because given air conditioning Cubans will run it at maximum.

Trains

The information we had was not to bother.

So we didn’t. Which means I can’t really do any more than pass that information on. Apparently they’ve improved a bit, with some new rolling stock from France, but it’s still an unreliable and slow way to travel.

Planes

Again, we didn’t use any, but there are planes connecting some of the major centres, and prices don’t seem to be too bad.

Cars and Taxis

Car hire isn’t cheap, but if you want to get to some out of the way places it can be a great way to travel as the roads are largely empty. You can also pick up plenty of hitch-hikers. The smell might be bad when you discover they’re carrying an enormous fish they just caught. But otherwise it can be an interesting way to meet locals. Obviously, the usual caveats apply – if a guy is standing there foaming at the mouth, holding a large machete, and dressed in bloody rags then it might be best to drive on.

It’s not all perfect though – some roads simply disappear into dirt-tracks with no notice, there are bridges that they clearly lost enthusiasm for part-way through (blame the fall of communist Russia for that one), and pot holes that will swallow your car whole.

And if you drive at night you’ll be able to play chicken with unlit cars, horses, and, erm, chickens.

Taxis should be relatively affordable, and most are metered. If they’re not, they probably aren’t allowed to take foreigners on board and will be taking a risk carrying you – especially in more heavily policed areas and they may ask for payment in advance of any risky places, or will drop you off before checkpoints at which point you’ll have to walk past and possibly find someone else to carry you. Almost anyone will act as a taxi in Cuba, so be careful, and check prices in advance of getting in. Most drivers are chatty and interested in you, and some of the classic cars in use are beautiful – though they won’t sound it as they often run on old Japanese diesel engines rather than big tasty V8s.

Trucks

I mean… just don’t. If you could afford to fly to Cuba you can afford not to take chances with your life and health. Having said that, it’s about the only way to get to some places if you can’t afford a hire-car or taxi and don’t feel like hitching.

Queues are managed by men in yellow outfits, known as ‘Amarillos’. They will make sure you go to the right place, but may not allow foreigners on board. A tip may work wonders….

Local buses

You’ll need Pesos, not CUCs, and a strong backside.

Summary

Overall, Cuban public transport is limited and can be quite pricey for tourists, but stick to the main routes and you’ll be fine on relatively good metalled roads. Only if you visit more remote locations will you find the need to get inventive.

Useful websites:

British Foreign Office Travel Advice for Cuba
Viazul buses

First Impressions in Cuba

If you fly with First Choice on their Cuba West Traveller scheme they give you your first night’s accomodation free. The idea, we think, is that in Cuba you can’t just turn up as a typical itinerant and expect to wander about. Of course, that’s exactly what you can do… You just need to give an address of a hotel. It seems that any random hotel name will work as there are no checks.

But even better is, after a bumpy ten hour flight, to discover that this hotel is a five star all inclusive affair. Nothing beats the realisation when you arrive at the bar that they don’t want your money. Everything is included. A few hours later, drunk and happy, we decided to stay an extra night while we planned the rest of our trip.

And now, in a couple of hours, we have to find our bus to Havana. It may be tropical here, but we’re taking warm clothes as we’ve discovered that when a Cuban gets air conditioning there is only one setting… 16C. After all, if you have air-con you may as well make the most of it. You enter your hotel room to an icy draught. Cars are super-chilled, and basically you find that your UK clothing is just fine and dandy.

Ta-ta for now….

Liverpool Airport (Speke)

Liverpool has one of those small airports that’s done rather well over the past decade. A rise in air travel has been good for many airports, yet Liverpool’s Speke airport (now known as Liverpool John Lennon Airport) has done especially well.

Why? Because first of all they worked well with easyJet – with a combination of popular holiday and business routes with low prices the combination proved irresistable. As a frequent traveller myself I was delighted to get away from the obtuse pricing of British Airways (cheap returns were OK, it was the lack of flexibility and cost of singles that grated) and the extra costs of travelling to Manchester Airport.

Anyway, I was travelling through this airport again on Thursday evening and spotted this picture which summed the airport up nicely – named after a famous Beatle, and popular with a wide range of traveller:

Rocking in Paris

I spend… oooh, lots of time in Paris. Yet I’ve never actually quite got round to writing about it on this site.

Why not? Good question. Perhaps because it’s a little personal. I’ve lived there, loved there, and so on. To talk about it in depth may reveal me more to the world at large. Although I present an open face on this site, I keep my personal and social life as private as possible. However, after a bit of thought I’ve realised that I can still write about the city without actually blowing the gaff, as it were.

Festival des Inrocks

For those that don’t know – this is a festival held annually in France, primarily Paris, by the rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles. I wangled my way in to the various shows this year thanks to carefully blagged passes and was treated to a wide range of music. A lot of it British, curiously enough. Seems a long way to go to listen to Brit-rock, but heck, it’s a nice environment to do it in!

This year’s line-up included Lily Allen, Jarvis Cocker, Guillemots, The Kooks and many more – some you’ve heard of, some you haven’t. A lot of the groups headlining were British, so in effect I’d travelled all that way to watch UK acts. Ah well… there were some good French acts too. In particular Rock & Roll, a punk-rock group (watch out, my music terminology is generally off-kilter) who put in a huge amount of energy and effort. Not my kind of music, but I could enjoy the act. And one of the lead singer’s plectrums flew off, hit Romana on the head, and was promptly bagged by me as a memento!

We also accidentally stumbled into a show by Etienne Daho. We hadn’t heard of him, but reckoning that he was one of the biggest names on the list he must be good. So we were a bit shocked when he came out on stage and acted like it was still the eighties. The music, the clothes, the dancing…. I mean, I know the French music scene is a bit mixed up and not as leading edge as in the UK, but this didn’t seem right.

Eventualy we discovered it was something like Rick Astley getting a gig at Glastonbury. Those that were of a certain age when he was about would love it and enjoy it, but anyone who didn’t realise it was a one-off comeback would be left baffled.

The City of Paris Itself

What is so hard about Paris is that it’s been written about by most of the finest writers in the world. How can I expect to add something new to the mix?

And here’s the answer… I can’t.

There is little left to write about, yet so much too. I’d rather create an entire new site for Paris, than try to sum it up in one article. After all, it’s home to millions of people, with a tightly packed centre full of museums, secrets catacombs, alleys, shops, dreams, nightmares and passion. One page here does the city no justice whatsoever.

But I’m not one to give up quite so easily. So in fact I will sum up Paris in one sentence:

It’s a better city to live, love and work in than it is to visit as a tourist.