Journal extract…
…So I’m just wrapping things up in Tallinn, capital of Estonia (hitting the headlines this year after riots in the city, hosting the Eurovision and winning silver and gold in the Finnish Wife Carrying Contest!). Occupied for centuries by the Danes, Swedes, Russians and Nazis, it finally got independence in 1991 and is centred around a beautiful medieval old town dotted with spires and soviet housing projects. The girls here are so absurdly hot, it’s too intimidating to look them in the eye, let alone pretend to ask for directions… Unfortunately, the city has long been dubbed ‘the new Prague’ by hoards of horrid English stag/hen groups – they’ve particularly increased in number lately and I’ve been cringing at them, along with everyone else, since arrival.
Getting here was a game in itself, time and cost meant I had to fly and skip Europe, but I’d booked the flight to depart in the middle of the night. I ended up being awake for 32 hours and then sleeping for about 19, which all made me quite queasy. Annoyingly the weather when I landed was exactly the same grey dull drizzlyness I’d left behind at Stansted…
Ahh Mongolia – the only place in the world where the playground taunt “you’re a Mong” has little significance. The last stretch of unspoiled land in Asia, the lowest population density in the world, with horses outnumbering people by 13 to 1 (and most of its citizens living in Russia or China) – the ultra-friendly ‘Land of the Blue Sky’ is a firm backpacker’s favourite. Almost all of the locals I’ve met have been legends, and Ulaanbaatar feels a lot like a ‘more-developed Laos’, in its Buddhist traditions, laidback people and the noticeable absence of multinationals. In fact, according to a recent University’s ‘Subjective Well-Being’ survey, Mongolia is the happiest nation in Asia despite being amongst the poorest.
“Nous faisons l’autostop au Maroc pour un organisation benevole” I ineloquently announced to a burly trucker with my GCSE French spluttering back into life. All the truck drivers on board fitted the stereotype neatly yet, despite their tattoo-ridden, bearded, meaty, brink-of-violence appearance, they were all incredibly friendly and sympathetic. Interrupting myself part way through the next line of my inarticulate appeal, I realised my first victim was blatantly British. He laughed and said he was going to Germany . This was not good. Along with my gap year buddy Dave we were meant to be hitch-hiking to Morocco for ‘Link’, an African development charity, but found that most people on our 5-hour ferry to Le Havre were headed East or twenty minutes down the road. We pondered the progress of the 400 other sponsored hitchers (including dozens from Leeds University) and began to plan a night on the streets to await the next influx of passengers from Portsmouth .
This was written during my student days and published in Leeds Student.
To be fair, 45ºc is just unnecessary. There’s really no need for such blistering heat – particularly when you’re a ginger fair-skinned Brummie. When I landed in Delhi this summer, India was approaching the end of its worse heat wave in decades. The hot and sticky humidity made my month of backpacking around the North a bit of a sweaty struggle. However, during an unexpectedly productive four weeks of solo travel, I went paragliding off the Himalayas, rafting down the Ganges, took an elephant ride in Rajasthan, joined the patriotic hollering on the Pakistan border, visited 18 cities, survived numerous lethal rickshaw rides, acquired a good few dozen mozzie bites, learnt some Hindi, received endless grillings from curious natives, cultivated an impressive ginger mullet and witnessed all manner of festivals, forts, heritage sites, museums, shrines, temples and ghats. Awesome.
13 rolls of film and 6 hours of video tape later, I looked forward to settling in the cooler Southern city of Bangalore for my subsequent two months of development work. The highly Westernised ‘silicon city’ of the sub-continent, Bangalore boomed in the 90’s, attracting lots of foreign interest and migration – putting a heavy strain on the infrastructure. A portion of India’s 250 million English-speaking-middle-class elite work in the plush high-rise offices, literally on the doorstep of some of the world’s poorest. It is a grim contrast.
This article was written in my student days and originally printed in the Leeds Student newspaper on 27/2/04.
A hygiene freak, I hated hot weather, emitted impressively high-pitched squeals in the presence of most insects, and didn’t like children much. Initially, teaching in a rural Ugandan school didn’t seem particularly alluring. Nevertheless, I’d dropped out of University ten days before Fresher’s Week with an unprecedented desire to do take a year out to do something radical and worthwhile. That very day, I signed up for a four volunteer month project with the reassuringly expensive ‘Africa Venture’ gap year company. Over the next ten months I raised about £5000 by working for IKEA and by writing off to companies, trust funds and millionaires. Recent lottery winners and Tom and Rita Naylor were kind enough to donate most of the costs.
As the days ticked away, I began taking a vaguely dodgy anti-malarial called Larium. The ‘Larium Victim Support Groups’ on the internet and tales of lasting brain damage and depression did little to reassure me about the 90% effective one-a-week tablets. Already I’d learnt that hard way that taking them on an empty stomach was a painfully bad idea. Half a dozen jabs and two days of packing later, I was set to go – my nervous inexperience reflected in the 40kg suitcase I packed containing ‘just the essentials’ (including 8 bottles of shower gel, 30 packs of polo mints, 6 tubes of toothpaste, washing up gloves, thesaurus and washing line.)
