I first visited the Karoo between destinations, having little idea at the time that it would become my favourite part of South Africa. It's an evocatively desolate landscape of golden, dusty desert and shadowy valley towns. The best way to enjoy the region is to visit some of its towns, whose sedate avenues with early 20th century homes are steeped in retro charm and soaked with Afrikaner culture. Some of the best spots to visit are Barrydale, a suprisingly artistic community with an offbeat gay vibe, Prince Albert, with it's storybook houses and untamed surrounds, and Nieu Bethesda, home to the Owl House, a surreal museum dedicated to one local woman's mania. These are all great places to try real South African cooking, as well: succulent grilled lamb, creamy milk tarts, and artisinally made cheeses, breads, and preserves. Karoo is certainly not a secret to South African travellers -- most of the region's more attractive towns are well set-up to accomodate visitors. But the region mostly remains just off the maps of most international visitors to South Africa, most of whom are more interested in visiting Cape Town and Kruger National Park. A shame, because to visit the Karoo is to visit the heart of South Africa.
A 45-minute drive from Cape Town, South Africa, this beach may be one of the few places where you can interact with wild animals on their own ground...without adult supervision and without worrying about being mauled or eaten. Isn't that nice? Watch out for the beaks though! It's the code of Penguin Beach: You don't bother me, I don't bother you. That means no attempted petting or picking them up. The colony of African penguins are lounging around and living life as if you weren't there. The water on the beach is cold given the relative proximity to Antarctica. EX-tremely cold. I heard the stories, but when I dived into the water I shivered for a good 10 minutes, my teeth chattering so loud you could send an SOS message. Eventually your body adjusts and you enjoy the cold water, especially when the summer sun is bearing down on you.
About the only thing you have to avoid is the penguin waste on the beach. They are not cute and cuddly stuffed animals so they have to do their business somewhere. Just tiptoe around it and enjoy the sights.
One thing that can be creepy/fun: If you stand in a spot and don't move, you could hear a pin drop. You see all these penguins around you and they are not making a single solitary sound. You feel like you've landed on an alien planet.
This is the exact spot where I first realised that those images in the glossy magazines portraying hammocks, hand-made Pina Colada's and the sound of the wind in the palm trees do in fact exist. It's not easy to get to, with a nine hour, no-stop bus ride from the country's capital, Maputo, to the town of Vilanculo, where these shores await. But the bathwater-warm seas, the dhows just down the road offering a bit of Caribbean-style exploring on the water, the Pina Colada's and the hammocks all make it very, very, worth the time and effort you put in to get here.
The most deserted and beautiful beach I've ever been to is Legzira Plage, Morocco.
Talk about tucked-away! From Tiznit, take an hour bus ride, hop off at the faded roadside sign, and hike down 20 minutes. It'll really just be you, a couple stray tourists, some fisherman with their donkeys, and the sandstone arches that thrust red earth into blue water.
Among the handful of pink buildings that cascade down the cliff into the main beach, there are two hotels that offer relatively cheap rooms. I went high-class and got one with my own shower, squat toilet (doin' big things), and a window that opened onto the ocean view - for under $20.
Another bonus is the Moroccan street harassment factor, and the fact that Legzira Plage doesn't have one. After a couple weeks of solo backpacking, sweating in long sleeves and fending off the barrage of "bonjours," it felt pretty damn sweet to strip down to my bikini and wave-hop in peace.
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Pafos
As a place to start and finish our tour of Cyprus, Pafos was an excellent choice, quite a relief as I’d only bought flights to Pafos because everywhere else was sold out. Pafos seems to have managed a balance between package tourism and historical interest that you simply don’t find in places like Larnaka and Agia Napa, and because of this it’s a great introduction to Cyprus. Pafos repays a bit of investigation, though, because a cursory glance at its harbour won’t reveal all its charm, even though the harbour is one of the more pleasant tourist havens on the island. Where Larnaka’s promenade is bordering on the tacky and Agia Napa doesn’t pretend to be anything else,
Pafos is still rather charming, with its old fort perched at the end of the harbour wall and lots of pretty little fishing boats anchored around the cove. OK, so the shops lining the harbour sell the usual tourist rubbish – I’ve never really gone for novelty pottery ashtrays or T-shirts with slogans that weren’t funny the first time round – and the restaurant we wandered past was unbelievably trying to entice us in by playing David bloody Essex on its hi-fi, but despite some amazing accidents of modern architecture that are worth visiting in their own right, it’s the ancient ruins of Nea Pafos that are the real draw-card.
Magical Mosaics
Out on the headland just behind the harbour, Pafos has its very own World Heritage site, and it’s absolutely stunning. Even compared to the much-touted Kourion, which the guidebooks tend to gush over in more lavish detail, the ancient site of Nea Pafos is amazing, and I vastly preferred it to the Cyprus’ other archaeological treats.
The main attraction of Nea Pafos is the collection of Roman mosaics that lay undiscovered under the headland until a farmer accidentally found them with his plough back in 1962. Since then archaeologists have been slowly unearthing the most amazingly detailed mosaics, along with the ruins of the magnificent buildings that used to house them. The art of the mosaic isn’t something that’s ever lit my fire before, but when you’re faced with huge stretches of patterned artwork that turns out to be made from surprisingly large chunks of glass of rock, it’s hard not to be impressed.
It’s useful to have some kind of guidebook when exploring the ruins of Pafos, as explanatory signs are limited to the names given by the diggers to the various houses that have been found (the House of Dionysos contains lots of mosaics on the subject of wine and partying, the House of Theseus has a fantastic one of the minotaur and its maze, and so on).
But throw in an amphitheatre, a mediaeval Lusignan fortress, a modern lighthouse, and the windswept vista of Pafos’ headland, fortunately protected from development by the potential of more archaeological discoveries under its grassy hills, and you’ve got a fantastic spot for an afternoon’s exploration. On the other hand, I presume the summer months would be less kind to casual wandering round the ruins.
When we sauntered out to check out the mosaics, the wind picked up and the rain started spattering in a way that would become depressingly familiar over the next two weeks, and apart from a few hardy souls and a few complaining children, dragged out by parents who must have been regretting the decision, we had the place to ourselves. No doubt in the package season Nea Pafos is completely chocka-block with tourists, which would change the experience somewhat. Not that this should be an excuse for avoiding the headland, but I’d pack lots of water and take a sun hat; for us, though, it was Gore-Tex jackets and gloves, followed by a thawing meal of suckling pig by the fire in the unadventurously named but very tasty Mediterranean Tavern, back in the middle of town.
As a place to start our exploration of Cyprus, Pafos did the trick nicely.
Sydney to Melbourne
So, on Tuesday I set off on a coach tour to Melbourne. The company was called Stray Cat, and it was pretty good, though I saw so much in those three days that most of it is a blur. The first stop was Canberra. On the surface Canberra appears to be the most boring city in the whole world – it has the same vibe as Milton Keynes, though I presume something happens behind the ordered, dull exterior. We did a tour round Parliament House and watched the Melbourne Cup, the Aussie equivalent of
the Grand National, but there were no politicians in the house because of the race. We also stopped off in a shopping mall in Canberra to stock up with beer, which reminded me of the film The Stepford
Wives where they replace all the women in the town with robots, and nobody notices. It felt slightly eerie, to be honest. From Canberra we headed into Namadji National Park, and stopped off in a field full of kangaroos. What funny creatures: we all got off and stalked around, and they were really quite cautious. They’d just look at you until you got a certain distance away, and then they’d lollop away, stop, and start staring at you all over again. I felt miles away from it all.
Not quite as far as I felt when we got to our stop for the night, though: Bolaro sheep station. Talk about the middle of bloody nowhere; you couldn’t see any civilisation for miles in any direction. We made a fire in the main building and all settled round with our beers, just like real bushrangers. I nipped outside for a cigar, and you’ll never guess what I saw: a full rainbow, right in the middle of the night. I thought it must be the beer, so I popped inside to get someone else and showed them first before getting the rest of the team: it really was there. I suppose the moon was just doing the same thing as the sun when you get a daytime rainbow, but it sure looked weird sitting there. Perhaps you get a pot of silver at the end of moon-bows…
Into the Mountains
Wednesday was mainly spent driving through Mt Kosciusko National Park, where Australia’s highest peak stands, shrouded in cloud. We stopped at these gorgeous little towns like Adaminaby, Jindabyne and Thredbo, which are the main resorts in the Australian Alpine area, and as a result they’re beautiful, but deserted in the summer. We passed Lake Hume, which is a man-made lake that stores water in the winter so the Murray River, one of the main rivers through southeast Australia, can be kept at a reasonable level through the summer. The lake fills valleys that were once filled with gum trees, and quite a few of the trees are still there, dead but standing, making it look like a ghost lake. It’s pretty spooky stuff.
Our stop for the night was in Bright, one of the most picturesque places to visit and, fortunately, void of tourists. We had the mother of all barbecues, and guess who got roped into the cooking? I’m now the world’s foremost expert on the Australian Method of Cooking Sausages. One thing that was weird is that Aussies cook chopped pumpkin on their barbies, and it tastes likes smoked carrot. I think I’ll stick to salad in future. The last day of the trip we climbed Mt Buffalo – the view was amazing – and visited the place where Ned Kelly and his gang used to hang about. In the town where he lived there’s this huge model of him wearing his homemade armour, and it’s possibly the tackiest thing I’ve ever seen; it didn’t stop us all having our photo taken round it, though like good little tourists. And that night we arrived in Melbourne…
I didn’t spend too long in Sydney, just long enough tosee the sights, visit some friends, write some articles for cash, and to blag myself a job offer at Acorn Computers in Melbourne. I was also suffering from jet lag, cultureclash and the hollow feeling you get when you’re just starting a potentially very long trip, so the highlights that follow don’t do Sydney justice. I must go back…
• Sydney harbour is just as beautiful as they say itis. When I landed it was a gorgeous day, the sun
was out, and the Harbour Bridge and Opera House were spectacular. It’s also a pretty laid-back place, with none of the traffic that makes London such a grim place to live. Having a coffee overlooking Circular Quay is one of those things you have to do, so I did it, despite the priced tag of A$3. They
saw me coming, I reckon.
• The next stop: my first taste of an Aussie pub. Bear in mind that it was only about midday when I pitched up, but seeing as my body thought it was late at night, it was fair enough to have a couple. Unfortunately the tap beer was off – they were cleaning the lines – so I settled for a stubby of Victoria Bitter (a stubby being a 375ml bottle). It wasn’t bad stuff, if you like freezing lager, which I figured I’d better, seeing as that’s pretty much all they have in Australia. Ask for a lager, and you’ll get blank stares here: it’s all called bitter, even if it looks, smells and tastes just like lager.
• Sunday, and the heavens opened. Ironically Sunday was Water Conservation Day down in Darling Harbour, with water skiing shows, lots of stands, and a concert by John Williamson, whose folksy tunes about billabongs and gum trees have yet to make it beyond Australia’s borders. Everyone kept going on about how important it is to conserve water because it’s running out, and all the time water was chucking down in torrents. It was, frankly, bizarre.
• If there’s one beautiful sight, it’s a city from above at night. That night I went up the Sydney Centre Point Observation Tower, at that time the tallest man-made structure in the southern hemisphere, but in the shitty weather visibility was pretty well zero. So I waited, as there wasn’t much else to do, and soon the skies cleared and the most amazing sight appeared: Sydney by night. The Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, boats, a wicked lightning storm over Botany Bay – it was stunning.
• After a few days in the Youth Hostel in Glebe I moved to a hostel in King’s Cross, easily the seediest area in Sydney, with sex shows, 24-hour bars and hookers lining the streets; it’s not that scary after Soho and King’s Cross in London, but it was a lot more interesting than Glebe, which was what I wanted. My only memory is of the noisy couple having sex in the room directly above me that night. I swear the whole hostel broke into spontaneous applause when she finally came.
• The following Saturday I climbed the southeast pylon of the Harbour Bridge, for a spectacular view of the city. The only problem was that the rain kicked in just as I got down, so I sheltered for about half an hour before the storm really got going, with thunder and lightning and rain like you’ve never seen. Every time the lightning struck I heard these cheers, and after another fifteen minutes I realised that this was nothing to do with the weather – there was a pub just over the road. It was great. After a couple of schooners of VB I’d met this South African guy who now lived in Sydney, and we went on a bit of a pub crawl which culminated in us watching the Rugby League final (England vs. Oz) in a pub, live from Wembley. Unfortunately I was so pissed by half time that I had to go home… which was quite
fortunate, seeing as Australia won, and they like to rub it in if there are any handy Poms around.
• On Tuesday I contacted a lovely guy called Colin, whom I’d met through work at home, and who’d emigrated to Australia not long before. His story is worth retelling. Colin is a writer of excellent children’s picture books1, and he used to live and work in Cumbria, where I got to know him because he used Acorn computers for his work. Anyway, there was this school in Sydney where the teacher, Anne, had bought a copy of his book Looking for Atlantis, and her class had gone wild about it. Then one day, one of the kids asked Anne, ‘Could we meet the author?’ She explained that no, Colin lived in England, so they couldn’t meet him. The kids protested, and asked her why they couldn’t buy a plane ticket for him to fly out, and eventually Anne and her class organised lots of fund-raising in order to pay for Colin to come over for a twoweek visit.
So Colin came out to Australia to meet Anne and her classroom of fans, and spent two weeks at the school showing the kids how he draws and writes his books. And guess what? Anne and Colin fell in love, and two weeks after getting back to the UK, Colin had left his unhappy marriage (which was on the point of breaking up anyway), packed up his computer and pens, and moved to Sydney. It’s a great story. Colin and Anne put me up in their house for a week, and it was great – what lovely people. We went to parties, had barbecues in the garden, and it all went far too quickly.
• On my last night in Sydney before taking the tour to Melbourne, I sloped off to the
hotel’s bar to see what was making such a huge noise. The name of the band,
according to the board, was Jam Right, and boy, were they weird. They kept
swapping musicians around, people from the audience kept joining in and singing
vocals, and the whole thing seemed to be getting pretty random. It was only after an
hour of this I realised the sign actually said Jam Night. Funny how it all started
