As dawn cracked through the clouds drifting across the southern hemisphere, the flight from London finally landed in Melbourne. That was several hours ago. A strange time of year for such a jaunt you might think, as downunder it’s pretty grey and drizzly, but I was lured to this side of the world to take part in the first edition of the Melbourne Festival of Travel Writing. This is an ambitious attempt to turn the act of travel-writing into something worthy of audiences and serious thought. The Aussies have always been some of the best and certainly most experienced travellers, so it’s somehow not surprising that they’ve dreamt up this two-day ‘festival’, much thanks to a local university lecturer. One of Melbourne’s biggest claims to fame in travel terms is its role as the honourable ’seat’ of Lonely Planet operations, with Tony Wheeler and his wife Maureen now long-term residents - when they’re not on the hop that is. On Sunday I’ll be hosting his talk about the Irrawaddy Delta and Burma. Meanwhile, here’s a pic from my hotel window in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD - an impressively modern cityscape echoing the infrastructure.
So there I was innocently strolling through bucolic Highbury Fields (that’s a plane-tree packd park near where I live in London), when suddenly I landed in the middle of Outer Mongolia. There were yurts, people in pointy coloured hats, men in brocade gowns and turned-up boots, though I’ll admit it, most women were in jeans and sunglasses.
The USP was that they were all Mongolian, gathered to support a charity rally from London to Ulan Bator. Obviously Brits figured too, a few of them particularly fearless when it came to attempting Mongolian wrestling. This was the exciting bit, though thanks to a fast expiring battery in my little compact, I have no great visuals of it. But here comes a champ…
Anyway, Mongolian wrestling goes like this: two very muscular (and I’ll say it, often pretty paunchy) men in tiny bikini-bottoms, big leather boots and a kind of half-bolero tied with strings at the back, take to the ground. Warily they circle round each other before finally bending forward and locking arms in combat - just like fighting bulls locking horns. Rules are not complex - basically the first man to hit the ground is out. So round they turn, gripping each other’s jacket strings, sometimes for 10 minutes or so, until finally there’s a jerk, a twist, action takes off and one of them, inevitably, hits the dust.
From Athens it takes nearly four hours to drive across the Pelopponese peninsula (via a region by the name of Arcadia - what expectations…) to the south-western corner, near Koroni. This is where my partner and I hid out last week, holed up in a pretty little swamped by olive-groves (www.saintfridays.com) while temperatures outside rose and rose - and rose to 40•. Scorching, but compensated for by the stunningly clear, cool and calm waters of the Gulf of Messina down below. Here’s a watery view on a rather hazy morning, The outline of the Taygetus mountains of the Mani peninsula opposite is just visible. That’s for the next trip. Next minute (or 15) I was down there, afloat in the transparent water - bliss.
Don’t worry - that’s not the new museum below. Patience. The first time I went to Athens I remember selling my blood. Those were my 1970s student days of drifting across Europe and running out of money - pre-credit-card, pre-email. All very footloose and fancyfree but it does make me sound like a dinosaur. However what everyone savvy knew at the time was in Athens you recouped your finances by selling a litre or so of haemoglobin, which we did on the way out and the way back. Very naughty. The other budget ploy was to sleep on a hotel rooftop for a few drachmas. I can’t remember how or where that was, but it was comfortable enough to give us a couple of days seeing Athens’ sights before we hit Piraeus, the ferries and the sybaritic islands.
