East Cape Jan 2013

Anaura Bay

Is this the home of the mythical kiwi holiday camping trip? The camp-ground is on the beachfront, with facilities in the old village school.   The sink benches and loos will test your knees and thigh muscles. In golden weather, this place is close to heaven on earth, as long as you have remembered to take all your "necessities" such as coffee and food. Lots of fish in the sea, though. The sign that says "No sand in the showers" is one of the most determinedly optimistic notices I've ever seen. 

One of a couple of long, long wharves still standing- at Tolaga Bay- diving lessons for local kids. They used to load bales of wool here, but now the hills grow ugly rows of pine trees instead.  Anywhere else, this fine example of early C20th industrial architecture (the old woolstore) would have been gentrified, turned into restaurants and shops...places to be a consumer, not a producer of something useful...but this place is just too damn  far from anywhere. Great. 

The last time I went round the cape was about 1990...very little has changed. Forestry on the razor-sharp hills, logging trucks swallowing up the roads. Basic dairies in the few settlements large enough to support a shop of any kind. A few modestly fancy houses with stunning views, on the coast. Maybe built by people bringing home some earnings from Australia? 

At Te Kaha, on the North side, a tousle-haired boy rode his horse bareback onto the beach and then galloped the length of the sand and back again. Tied his horse to a tree and took a swim. At the same place, someone has built a white plasterboard hotel on a clifftop. Better sea views would be hard to find anywhere but the building would fit right in to somewhere a bit tackier than Takapuna. 

You can camp for free in lots of places, if you take your own portapotty. Oh Lord, no.

But the Cape is still itself, despite a couple of movies and a minimal amount of welcome economic development: when you finally get near to Gisborne, a bit of suburbia seems disturbingly urban. And Gisborne, a town with about two and a half shopping streets and a weirdly noisy town clock, is not exactly Birmingham. 

 This little blue penguin was not happy to be disturbed on the beach at Te Kaha.

Another camper had a spare crayfish. I ate it. That's my ration of koura for 2013, done.







The church at Waihau Bay stands on the beach front and a notice in the porch apologises for any fishy smells caused by the little blue penguin whanau that lives under the font. This was an early mission church, which is still in use today.

view from the church porch

 It's on the north side of the cape.

The Matata DOC campsite in the Bay of Plenty is another holiday spot that is untouched by time - make your own fun. Just don't camp next to the unfortunate woman with 4 small daughters, all of whom had inherited her penetrating voice....

beach south of Whakatane

    

No place like it.

Louis Vuitton handbags in Cairns

There are many good things about being a salt-water crocodile at Cairns Crocodile Farm in Queensland. Freshly killed and plucked chicken arrives promptly and regularly. You'll never get cancer or infections, because crocodiles don't. If you're a lady crocodile then you might wonder why the eggs you tucked up in their nice little nest under some reeds never hatched out into that family of 17 you'd been hoping for -but in any case you would only have looked after them for a few weeks, since crocs are a bit low on parenting skills. If you were a crocodile daddy, you'd just have eaten any of your offspring that you ran across - before they got big enough to have a go at eating you. 

However, the not-so-good thing about this seemingly idyllic reptile existence is that the purpose of the daily  uncooked KFC picnics is to encourage you to grow as quickly as possible - until you reach  optimum handbag, belt and shoe-leather size.     Which is a little larger than the adolescents in the photo above, clambering grumpily over each other's backs. Each one uniquely was patterned and coloured, intricate and beautiful in the golden Australian afternoon sun. Most of them are little boy crocodiles because when three farm workers come along to rob Mama Croc's  nest (two blokes with big sticks in case Mama comes back early from the shops, and one with a special box to put the eggs. They must be placed  in exactly the same position as they'd been in the nest- because if the eggs are shifted around they won't hatch.) The farm workers incubate the eggs at a slightly higher temperature that produces more boy babies. Boys grow into handbags faster-  which is another good reason to be female, I'm thinking.

There are two crocodile farms in northern Australia. This one was set up as a Government development project for the indigenous people of the area but management skills were lacking and private enterprise stepped in. (Or such is the current owners' version of events). The farm is the main world supplier of crocodile skin to Louis Vuitton and similar people who sell posh things in duty-free shopping centres. LV etc get the best bits of croc but the tour guide said that some dodgy bits go to Singapore now, presumably to the LV knockoff folk.

 The farm has plenty of big old beasts like this one, who is of my generation. I should've asked him if he liked Iggy, Bowie, the Stranglers...he looks just like Sid Vicious anyway. The fence separating us from them seemed quite flimsy compared to the size of this guy. He's just biding his time...


The farm also have 2 American alligators which some bozo attempted to smuggle INTO Australia. So that's 2 "pets" that didn't end up in the urban myth New York sewer system, but instead are now part of a research project where they lie around pretending to be logs. According to the Australians, THEIR crocs are by far the most aggressive and will have a go at you just because you're in the way, not because they're hungry or even cross. (Sounds quite Australian Saturday Night). 

I took a cruise boat around the mangroves which are  fantastically all mimsy and jabberwockial. We were supposed to spot wildlife but mostly just saw egrets poking at fish. There were a couple of small wild crocodiles and one large ripple aka swimming crocodile. The trouble is that crocodiles look exactly like mangrove roots, murky seawater waves and mud, while mangrove roots etc look quite a lot like crocodiles if you are feeling nervous. If not on the deck of a large motor cruiser I would feel a tad uneasy, what with the taipans and other lethal beasties lurking amongst the ecologically essential and scientifically fascinating but unfortunately rather dull-looking,absolutely  identical  Different Varieties of Mangrove (according to the commentary).


They said that stray crocodiles in people's back gardens are quite a problem and that this happens because sometimes after bad weather crocs get disorientated. If I had a large aggressive reptile hanging out in my backyard I would feel more than a little disorientated myself. They also said that the beasts are relocated, sometimes to the croc farm. They did not explain how this is accomplished, especially if the reptile in question is aware that only 2 of his/her brethren have ever left the farm alive. One is in a zoo in South America and the other is in a rainforest display on the top floor of the Cairns Casino, which seems highly appropriate. Other crocodiles are to be found in steaks on the plates of casino restaurant diners. 


When I got on the boat, I was quite tempted by a crocodile skin belt which I thought would look nice holding up the pants of my beloved. However, once I had met so many of the somnolent but most assuredly  living relatives of that belt, I felt that the hide looks best covered in slime and lounging on a creek bank. Sorry, honey, I'll get you something else. 

OW doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the (Cairns estuary) Nile

On every golden scale!

 

How cheerfully he seems to grin!

How neatly spread his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws!

Always save the icing on the cake

When I was a child, occasionally I would lose the icing from my slice of cake -because I would save the crust of white sugar until I'd demolished every buttery cake crumb, but then some other hand would swoop with a rapid mutter about don't you like that bit, can't you manage that and -gulp- my lovingly anticipated sugar hit would be gone.

It wasn't like that with the Taj. We saved the icing sugar on the dusty, gritty, cardamon-flavoured cupcake of NorthEast India for last and nobody snatched it from our plate, nobody else got to savour the most exquisite thing instead of us.

No, the Taj was the most deliciously sweet thing of all the sugared, rose-petal-scented treats India has had to offer. No desparate-eyed hawkers, no bumptiously knowledgeable official Government- approved guides can obscure the loveliness of this World Heritage site, surely one of the Seven Wonders. (What were they anyway? Hanging gardens? A library somewhere?) The World Heritage status adds 500 rupees to the entry ticket, but does not pay for overly antiseptic cleanliness. It wouldn't be the wonderful human-ness of India without many grubby finger-smudges on edges, dusty corners and the guides slipping a few rupees to the guard in return for the loan of a pen-light to illustrate the translucence of the marble and the ruby glow of the jasper in the multiple semi-precious-stone inlay.

The sublime Arabic inscriptions around the gateways speak of the perfection of God. This place is certainly perfect beyond most human imagining and there were few enough other tourists at the 6 a.m. opening time to allow the beauty to be unobscured.

Well, who can describe a visit to the Taj and avoid repetition, cliche and the echoes of a million other visits- visits in every language and through long eras where different powers held sway. But it's still an amazing place and you gotta see it. Even a couple of days after Kate and Willy got spliced and of course said , yes, they'd love to visit India and the Taj just like poor old ma-in-law did. (Rereata queued up to sit on the Pensive Princess bench.We got the photo.)

After the Taj, on the way to the obligatory marble-inlay-whatsits shop, I got a text from my honey: Osama Bin Laden got rubbed out. So, there we are: a few hundred K away on the other side of the border, another blood bath. It seems strangely pointless next to the timeless peace under the great green trees of the Moghal gardens before the Taj.

Insha'allah, let not too many other harmless people die for no good reason in the wake of something few of us can truly understand or control.

The taxi is here to take us to the airport. Goodbye, India- incredible,intricate and infinite. The name of the Indian tousrim webssite says it all.

Tiger Number Nineteen

http://www.flickr.com/photos/62281924@N07/5671838622/in/photostream
Click above if you want to see her take a stroll.


She's only three-and-a-half and lives near her sisters and litter-mates Numbers Seventeen and Eighteen. The ranger said they're hoping for happy news from her this year. The female tigers have individual territories 3 or 4 km square,while the males have a much larger range with several females within it.

There are about 30 adult tigers in the park now, with 11 cubs- as well as leopards and sloth bears. We didn't see either of those but we'd only been going into the park by jeep for 20 minutes when Number Nineteen wandered across the track. She loped ahead of us for a moment and then settled herself down in a shady spot.

We watched her for an hour or so; at one point there were four 5-passenger jeeps and a "canter" (open truck holding about 10 people) all keeping quiet, awestruck. The only sound was the click of cameras, including some impressively massive telescopic lenses which practically needed their own separate jeep for portage. In a private jeep, there was a camera team from National Geographic; shattering my illusions, as I'd always imagined their cameramen scaling waterfalls with the camera in their teeth rather than getting a tourist jeep just like anyone else who could afford about $NZ 50.00.

It comes with the supermodel territory: paparazzi. She ignored us with a polite but imperious disdain.

The ranger said he thought #19 was probably very hungry as she hadn't killed for a few days. Well, she might have a touch of morning sickness, if his other prediction is true. She certainly didn't look like she felt like rushing around much. The other thought that did occur to me was that, if #19 was more than a little peckish, there were some 30 tasty humans within fairly easy reach, varying between rather tough-looking and scrawny Indian rangers and much more juicy well-fed city and expatriate Indians and no-doubt-slightly-strangely-spiced foreigners. Not all of the open jeeps would have been able to start their engines and get out of the way of a reasonably determined tiger.


Good job the tigers prefer a snack of peacock or a lunch of spotted deer. One thing we weren't too keen to see: Bambi becoming tiger tiffin.

If you were a twitcher, this park would be a splendid place to visit, with many brightly-patterned birds. There was a mongoose, too, from the Snake Control Department, going about his business.

But we'd seen what we came for, heading straight for the top of the food chain; Rereata's twentieth birthday present, a real live tyger burning bright although surprisingly well camouflaged in the forests of the not-night.

Bundi is best

http://www.flickr.com/photos/62281924@N07
If somebody asked me where they should go to stay in Rajasthan, I'd tell them to go to Bundi. Qualify this with the fact that I've spent about 24 hours there, at the absolute skinny-monkey-tail-end of the tourist season. Qualify it some more: the questioner needs to be someone else that wants to get away from tourist-packaging, tourist-marketing and glitzy palaces that have been restored to a movie-set pristine-ness. Bundi is 25 k or so off the main N-S motorway (a motorway,incidentally, which is at least as good as if not actually much better than any we have in NZ, although there are fewer cows wandering across the 4 lanes in NZ, and you are unlikely to see an elephant parked in a signposted "lay bye". And, just while we're on the subject, lay bye makes a lot more sense than layby. You lay around for a bit and then you go bye.)
The road to Bundi is narrow, splintered and pockmarked as if it had been hammered with a hundred thousand cannonballs but it runs through charming villages where water buffalo lumber into ponds and bullock-carts puddle around the potholes.
Bundi itself is a small town, clustered into a fold of some sizeable rocky hills. The streets of the old town are narrow, too narrow to be navigable by car, jeep or tuktuk although that causes no hesitation in the minds of the average local driver. We took a tuktuk ride back from the market which was far more exciting than anything you'd meet at a funpark, if slightly less safety-padded. It was a hold-on-tight-and-pray-a-bit experience, like all such rides, with the shops and crumbling buildings whirling past kaleidoscopically.
In fact Bundi is one of many Indian towns that has perfected the art of crumbling gracefully in stone without actually falling down, although I'm sure that buildings do collapse sometimes. This is an earthquake zone as is all of Northern India.
The palace, perched above the town, is threatened with restoration- so here is a message to the Rajah.
Dear Sir- or Your Majesty, if you prefer-
If you're thinking of smartening up your palace- think again! What you've got now is the most atmospheric, impressive palace that we've visited on our tour of Rajasthan. Okay, it's a bit smelly in places and the bats and the monkeys are a bit of a pest. (Thanks! by the way, for the loan of the sturdy bamboo canes for chasing away those simians. Luckily, we didn't need them.) But the unrestored miniature wallpaintings are truly exquisite and no matter how good a craftsperson the restorer may be, he or she is bound to ruin them. Just pop down to your colleague the maharajah of Udaipur's palace if you don't believe me: yes, the place is impressive and glitzy, just like when Bond was swishing around doing Octopussy- but do you really want things to be quite that manicured and OTT? And also by the way, the kids in the street outside are just like any kids anywhere and have not been corrupted by tourism into asking for money, pens and chocolate. Which is a very good thing and you might like to think about employing a few of them to take when you pension off the knowledgeable but slightly doddery retainers you've got up there now. The truth is , what you've got at Bundi is truly majestic, your Majesty- so please keep it that way. Just prop up the bits that are falling down and maybe give the latrines a bit of a hose down and a splash of Dettol.
Yours very gratefully,
two kiwi visitors
(yes, that's right, our cricket team are just the try-hards at best. No need to point it out.)

Teaching people your language and the media in the world's largest democracy

It started with the guy with a sweet smile who looked up from the strip of resin he was bending around a red-hot stake and said kia ora -you want look my bangle shop? The kia ora he'd learned from some passing kiwi tourist ensured that we bought a few camel-bone and silver bangles from him and not from any of the dozens of other bangle shops.
You've got to have an edge to make a rupee, but really, how often do New Zealanders wander down that dusty, narrow street in Jodhpur? Kiwis that want to buy bangles, that is. To tell the truth, the charm and persuasiveness of Indian shopkeepers often means that when you set out to buy shampoo, you come home with a new shirt or a set of framed miniatures.
Everybody asks you what is country, and some try to pretend that the Black Caps are more of a success and less of an embarrassment compared with a team that proudly represents a billion people, many of them small boys who bowl and bat away for six in dusty villages.
But it was the guy in charge of shelves of sandals at a temple in Udaipur today that really impressed. Namaste, kia ora, haere mai, he grinned. Bells clanged, incense wafted and ladies in saffron and orange saris chanted . A boy shared out a cardboard box of barfi. The mothers-in-law come every day to gossip and wait for this moment, when the gilt-edged purple velvet curtain in front of the image is drawn back and the ebony face of the god revealed. And on the way out, hopping across the scalding-hot midday marble, the slipper guy said it again. Haere mai.
And this is the world's largest democracy: not a perfect one, as none are, but a country where in Jodhpur there is a free public newspaper reading room where people (men) gather to read the news. Literacy is around 60 % - higher for men- much improved in the last 20 years. The reception staff of the hotel we stayed in squatted on the verandah together, reading the news in Hindi and in English.
The Times of India, in English, seems a good solid newspaper. I've read stories about people fighting corruption, about scandals involving accidents and about women courageously fighting for justice over rape complaints and exploitation. Movie stars and their marriage plans, too. The death of the maharajah of Jaipur, reported very even-handedly. The death of Sai Baba, also not uncritical.
And, the other day, the story of the snake charmer's protest. They picketed the house of the Minister of the Interior, a woman because they want to be recognised as an official minority.
I hope they get their recognition quickly because, if I was the lady minister, some of the last people I'd want to piss off are the snake charmers of Delhi.

Jaipur Pink City

Jaipur is the pink city and the capital city of Rajasthan; so it's another loud, hot, jostling swirl of people and motorbikes and trucks and camels and dogs. When we arrived, we learned that the 84-year-old maharajah had died the day before and so the city palace and Amber Fort were closed for his funeral.
The maharajah inherited his title just at the time when Indira Ghandhi's government took away the last vestiges of his political power. Life seems to have revolved around business and polo and hobnobbing with other royalty, but he seems to have been popular. Our guide at Amber (silent B) fort said that he was going to the funeral the next day ( he was the secretary of a political party) and that there would be 20,000 guests.
The usual way up to the fort is by elephant, but the queue was too long and we didn't bother. It's not every day you can say that you couldn't be stuffed waiting for the elephant. It was good to learn that the elephants only do 3 trips and then they go home as it's a long way up.


The water palace where the maharajah's saffron was grown.

The mirrored hall in Amber palace and the zenana (women's quarters)- the guide said that the maharah would have 12 wives or so.

Life in a vast stone palace on a mountain crag surrounded by 12 km of walls involved a lot of infrastructure and engineering.

Water had to be hauled up from the lake far, far below, apparently by human hand. The shaft up which the buckets were dragged is now full of bats (Rajasthani royal version of having bats in the belfry, perhaps?) but there was enough water for these gardens in the central courtyard and for a system of copper piping that sprayed water around the scorching marble terraces, including the one where the royal children played and swung above a 200 m or so drop. It may be that some dodgy scrap metal merchant has made off with these pipes, but some sort of cooling system would not be out of place nowadays.

On the way into the fort, we visited a shrine and were garlanded and daubed with yellow powder. Note on yellow powder: take wet wipes when visiting shrines. Otherwise much of self will end up smeared in yellow. On the way out, we gave our marigold garlands to monkeys, who apparently find them quite tasty.
Note on maharajahs: there are quite a few of these knocking around, which is just as well for the likes of Eton and Harrow. And the Jaipur one used to pop in to the local bookshop quite regularly, according to the proprietor. This chap, who had the brandysoaked Christmas-cake richness of accent of the Indian Army officer (retired, on his wife's orders "if it was a choice between obeying my wife or my commanding officer- well-") showed us some shots he'd taken of a tiger about 8 metres away, in Ranthambore National Park. Photo shots, you understand. The tiger looked faintly harrassed but intent on having a peaceful walk around a nice spot of jungle.

Let's hope we get that close to a tiger, too. Next week.

Multistorey bamboo scaffolding in Jaipur.

The view from the Amber palace

12 km of walls surround the fort.