A Hoard of Elephants by John Braniff

A Hoard of Elephants – The Abbreviated Travel Log of an Accidental Tourist

A Hoard of Elephants The Abbreviated Travel Log of an Accidental Tourist

A portrait of the artist as a retired mahout. In this brief travel log, John Braniff returns to the autobiographical strand in his previous memoirs, this time as a somewhat accidental – even reluctant – tourist. No profound insights, no ideological argument. Just enjoy...or not!

John Braniff

A Hoard of Elephants

Also by John Braniff

Histories of Education / School Histories St Ildephonsus’ College, New Norcia The Quest for Higher Things From Cradle to Canonization And Gladly Teach The Earning of Insight

Biographies and Memoirs Close to the Wind My Nautical Career Manqué A Tale of Two Doggies Brief Lives My Nautical Career Retrouvé

A Hoard of Elephants The Abbreviated Travel Log of an Accidental Tourist

John Braniff Paddington

First Published in 2014 by: John Braniff 43 Stewart Street Paddington NSW 2021 ÂŠ Copyright John Braniff This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing or the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be produced by any person without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. Design & Production by Marea Ornelas Typeset: Times New Roman National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Braniff, John, 1943A hoard of elephants : the abbreviated travel log of an accidental tourist / John Braniff. ISBN 9780994213600 (ebook) Braniff, John, 1943Braniff, John, 1943---Travel. Travel writing 910.4092

Contents

Introduction

One

The Precursor

Two

The Elephant ManquĂŠ

Three

The Second Elephant

Four

A Neo-Medieval Tourist

Five

A Study Tour Honeymoon

Six

An Extended Study Tour

Seven

My Conversion to Tourism

Eight

The Grand Tour

Nine

Asian Specialists

Ten

The Last Elephant

104

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Introduction The title for this book came to me only last year – 2013 – as I looked at yet another display of souvenir elephants in the tax free retail area of Heho airport in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. It reminded me of the line of little elephants which decorate our mantle-piece at home in Paddington. At first I thought of a ‘herd’ but the array was as ordered as a platoon of guardsmen and the line on our mantle-piece is also quite orderly and un-herd-like. I toyed with the idea of ‘horde’ as an alternative and while that suggests scarcely more order than herd, the sound of the word did lead on - quite naturally - to the vastly more appropriate ‘hoard’. Without ever consciously deciding or even thinking about it, I have somehow managed to collect, or amass, or hoard that line of little elephants over the past sixty years and – most recently and more consciously – as purely token mementoes of my travels. The idea of writing an account of my travels, however, goes back somewhat further: at least to the early years of my marriage to Jenny, who is a much more enthusiastic traveller than I. Prior to my retirement from full time teaching, I had written three books that were – quite simply – school histories and the PhD I commenced immediately after retiring was also very much an exercise in the history of education. The opportunity to commence a second doctoral thesis in the same field was denied me - for a variety of reasons – so I decided, instead, to cover the proposed material in the form of a memoir or autobiography. This deflection led me to include chapterlong accounts of several trips which had played a significant role in my educational development. Readers responded very positively to these biographical episodes of travel and most of my subsequent – less serious – publications have had a strong biographical backbone to them. Even my most recent work, The Earning of Insight - which did mark a return to the history of education theme - still had a strong biographical element and

Introduction

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I really feel that my resources in the education field are now pretty well exhausted. Hence my return to biography. But ‘Why travel stories?’ you may ask. Well biographies, obviously, deal with what you have done or are doing and - both before and since marrying Jenny – I really have done quite a lot of travelling and not written much about it. I have also done a lot of reading, mainly in the areas of History and Biography. Apart from Cormac McCarthy, Alexander McCall Smith and John le Carre, I have almost given up on the contemporary novel and the only non-historical or –biographical non-fiction writers I’ve paid much attention to are people like Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson, particularly in their travel writing mode. I hasten to add that I lay no claims to the forensic but often malevolent perceptiveness of the former nor the more whimsical and benign satirical style of the latter, so the discerning reader should be warned. You must feel free to skip whatever you find tedious or tendentious: or, indeed, the whole exercise if necessary. As a further warning, in my previous book – referred to above – I did claim to have acquired a few insights about the history of Catholic Education in the course of my career. I make no such claim to the acquisition of insight in the course of compiling this collection of travel jottings. The only item on my conscious agenda as I set out to write this account was to register a complaint about the apparently iron-clad rule that one must always buy souvenirs and memorabilia whenever and wherever one goes travelling. A succession of witty and profound observations or even a series of travel tips for the unwary tourist this book is not! The eponymous little elephants are not really cryptic icons encapsulating a host of treasured memories or even of hard-earned insights. They are the merest tokens of my submission to the iron clad rule aforesaid.

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This is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees, — Those dying generations — at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. W. B. Yeats

A portrait of the artist as a young mahout.

Chapter One: The Precursor There is a well-worn Irish joke which starts with the advice ‘Well now, if I was going there I wouldn’t be starting from here...’ and if I had been setting out to become a seasoned traveller and tourist, on the face of it, I would not have been born into a working class family in mid-World War II Kilmarnock, Scotland. We were working class, but not dirt poor. My father, Jacky, was a conscientious bread-winner and a skilled tradesman and he saw to it that we had annual holidays: day trips up to Glasgow and down the Clyde; or to the sea-side at Ayr or Troon; and an all day coach trip to Edinburgh, (but only the once). In honour of his parents’ birthplace, my father even took us to Ireland twice for week-long holidays in the County Down. We sailed across and back - as deck passengers, of course - on the old Laird’s Isle ferry from Ardrossan to Belfast, a two or three hours trip which took us out of sight of land at least briefly. So, by the time I turned ten, I was - rather unexpectedly - a reasonably experienced traveller; but only as a holiday-maker, hardly a full–blown tourist. The next step on that journey was due to my mother’s initiative. A very close friend of hers, who rejoiced in the adamantly Scottish name of Morag McVicar, migrated to Melbourne in 1951, or thereabouts, and sent back glowing reports of Australia as the land of opportunity, sunshine and plenty. In cold and gloomy Scotland, still labouring under war-time rationing, Morag’s siren song was simply too strong for my mother, Rose, and despite tearful opposition from my paternal grandmother and the initial reluctance of my father, we successfully applied for an assisted passage to Australia. The terms of the offer meant that my parents had to pay £10 each, my two brothers and I travelled free, and our accommodation would be provided at a migrant hostel when we arrived in Port Melbourne, where Morag would meet us at the boat. It was proposed as a very serious commitment, however, not an all-expenses paid tour. If we did not stay in Australia for at least two years, my parents would be required to re-pay the full value of their fare.

One: The Precursor

My family certainly regarded it as a commitment, not a grand tour. Our home, like those of almost all of our friends and acquaintances, was only a rented council house and could easily - though not lightly – be surrendered; but our household goods and chattels had to be either sold or packed into tin trunks and tea chests to travel with us to the Australia. My grandfather and my father’s younger brother, Uncle Tom, kept us company on the overnight train trip from Kilmarnock to London. Although we had been as far as Edinburgh and Ireland, we’d never before set foot in England and we saw very little of the city on this occasion, apart from the streets immediately around St Pancras Station. My grandfather and Uncle Tom waved us off from the platform as the boat train took us on down to Tilbury Docks and I thought, as I saw their figures diminish in the distance, that I would never see either of them again. Even as an eleven year old, I could understand that this was certainly no tourist jaunt. And, as a matter of fact, I never did see my grandfather again. It would also be a full thirty years before I could return to Kilmarnock and renew my acquaintance with Uncle Tom. If this conviction about the seriousness of our intent was already well established, my first, rather jaundiced, impression of our migrant ship did nothing to undermine it. The Orient liner Otranto, built in 1926, had served as a troopship during the war and, by early 1954, was certainly showing her age. She was definitely a migrant ship, not a cruise liner like the more glamorous P & O boat Himalaya, a post-war construction, moored on the opposite bank of the Thames and also bound for Australia albeit with what I considered to be a much luckier load of migrants than ourselves. Otranto was reputed to have been re-furbished after her war-time service; but the cabins allocated to the migrants, at least, were distinctly Spartan. Double-decker bunks, six to a cabin and sexually segregated on F, G and H decks, with meals in the aft dining saloon, constituted our bed and board. The self-funded passengers all seemed to have family-friendly cabins up on C and D decks and dined in the for’ard dining saloon where the Captain and senior officers presided and wine could be ordered to accompany the evening meal. Otranto was billed as a

A Hoard of Elephants

RMS Otranto: a workhorse of the Empire.

‘One-class ship’ and we could, in fact, wander where we wished; but there were certainly two classes of passengers aboard. If our ship was an old work-horse, however, her course was redolent with romance and history and the timing of our voyage was quite significant. World War II had made Mediterranean names like Gibraltar, Naples, Malta, Cyprus and Suez familiar to even a small boy like me and although India and Ceylon had recently gained their independence, the sun had not quite set on the British Empire: the Suez Canal and Aden were still under British administration. Even in Ceylon, the tour of Colombo my father took us on was organized by Thomas Cook & Sons and the lunch was provided at Mt Lavinia Hotel: a hostelry almost as endowed with colonial and imperial prestige as the fabled Raffles in Singapore. This four hour day trip, I must add, was almost the only gesture that my father made to the voyage as a ‘tour’ rather than a strictly business-like investment in our new economic future. Almost, but not quite.

One: The Precursor

Otranto’s first stop on the voyage was at Gibraltar and it was a pause to re-fuel and replenish the water supply rather than a real stop. The old ship anchored outside the enclosed section of the harbour - quite late at night - and departed long before dawn the next day. Little could be seen of the famous Rock but a crowd of longboatsized rowing boats clustered around the sides of our ship and tried to sell souvenirs to us passengers. I suppose I’d stumbled across the notion of souvenirs in Ireland or Edinburgh, but there was little in the Gibraltar offering to tempt either my parents or me. The two items that I clearly remember were big straw hats, the size and shape of Mexican sombreros and lots of pirate - or possibly Moroccan daggers made entirely of cast aluminium and enclosed in synthetic leather sheaths decorated with costume jewellery. The bargaining that went on, though, and the transfer of money and goods - by handline, up and down the side of the ship - quite intrigued me. My father said that some of the passengers were cheating the pedlars in their bumboats and I thought that quite unfair. The stop in Naples was a real, all day affair, with time for the passengers and crew to disembark and even take tours and excursions. Some of the full fare paying people apparently went as far as Pompeii and up the slopes of Mt Vesuvius, but my family made do with a stroll up the Corso Umberto or, to be more precise, two strolls. On the morning walk we simply made our way up the Corso, absorbing the foreign-ness of a non-English speaking city, still recovering from the ravages of the war. There were some traditional ‘sights’ like the funeral carriages drawn by dark horses wearing high black plumes on their heads and more brightly painted carreti pulled along by donkeys or ponies; but we also had to run the more contemporary gauntlet of pedlars in their tight, thin, shiny suits and pointy shoes, proffering more souvenirs from shallow, open attaché cases, slung around their necks. This was my father’s first concession to the tourist aspect of our voyage. He already had a small collection of watches but was tempted by some of the cheap and glossy offerings of the pedlars: they all seemed to have much the same range. Even my mother was tempted by a mother of pearl bracelet which, again, most of the pedlars seemed to stock. The prices they were asking, though, were too high for

A Hoard of Elephants

Migrant passenger accommodation on Otranto.

our migrant-rather-than-tourist budget so we returned to Otranto for the free lunch of safe and sensible British food, rather than pay for - and chance - the more exotic, Italian fare on shore. Before setting out for our afternoon stroll, my parents paid a visit to the ship’s shop where they bought several tins of cigarettes at duty-free prices. This struck me as a highly unusual purchase because they were both non-smokers, but I soon discovered the rationale behind this exceptional behaviour. At almost our first afternoon encounter with the pedlars my parents acquired the bracelet and the watch they’d had their eyes on for just a tin of cigarettes which had cost them half a crown, rather than the £2 £5 the sellers had been asking for in the morning. The purchases made, we did a bit more sightseeing, striking off the Corso up narrow cobbled streets with washing strung out overhead between the apartment buildings and the occasional citrus tree leaning over a high garden wall. Back on board and over dinner that night my parents swapped notes with the other adults at our table about their purchases. One of the men told my father that

One: The Precursor

the pedlars had probably done quite well out of the exchange, given the black market price of cigarettes in Italy at that time. This came as something of a relief to me and as I watched the sun set on the Bay of Naples that night I reflected that at least we hadn’t cheated the natives. Our next landfall was Port Said, at the northern end of the Suez Canal but although we arrived early in the afternoon and moored, waiting for the next convoy to head south, we did not go ashore. The Otranto’s officers said that things were a bit tense in the town and we’d have to leave our passports at the gangway. Instead, the pedlars and the ‘golly-golly’ men, or magicians, came on board to sell their wares and display their conjuring tricks. We watched the magic shows but didn’t buy any souvenirs. After passing down the canal and the Red Sea we stopped at Aden late in the evening, about the same time as at Gibraltar. This time, though, we did go ashore in open deck ferries and although the town was mainly in darkness, the lights were on in some of the souvenir and duty free shops and it was here that my father made his second gesture to tourism. He bought a German Zeiss Ikon camera in one of the duty free shops. I don’t know how much he paid for it and I doubt whether there was any bargaining or bartering involved but it would certainly have been cheaper than a similar purchase in Scotland, or Australia, for that matter. I think it must have been the first ‘serious’ camera he’d ever owned. In Kilmarnock we’d always made do with a Brownie Box. This one lasted the rest of his life. Colombo was the next stop on our itinerary and Otranto anchored out in the ‘Roads’ as it had at Gibraltar and Aden and we were ferried ashore again in the open boats. In the morning, we visited a Hindu temple and watched a snake charmer go through his paces. Lunch was in the Mt Lavinia Hotel, as I have mentioned, then we went on to a timber yard to watch elephants at work and were back on board the ship by three or four o’clock in the afternoon. When we re-embarked, we discovered that the pedlars and souvenir sellers had also come aboard and had their wares displayed in small, separate patches of the deck. No straw Mexican sombreros or cast aluminium daggers here, no cheap watches or

A Hoard of Elephants

mother of pearl bracelets either. Instead there were exotic fabrics and wood carvings in the form of high relief plaques and three dimensional statuettes. My mother was interested in a small, reputedly hand-carved ‘ivory’ fan but it was the rows of black or chestnut brown wooden elephants, arranged in descending order of size that captured my attention. As it happened afternoon tea was just being served in the aft dining saloon at that juncture. In a sudden flash of inspiration, I trotted into the afternoon tea table where the plates of cakes and cups and saucers were spread out and secured what I now think was a lamington. Back out in the on -deck market place, I confronted one of the pedlars sitting crosslegged beside his ‘stall’. I pointed to the smallest in his line of black wooden elephants and proffered the lamington in exchange. And that is how I came to acquire numero uno, the very first in my eponymous hoard of elephants and my first personal initiative towards becoming a world travelling tourist. Colombo was the last stop before Australia and when we went ashore first in Fremantle and then in Adelaide, before finally disembarking in Melbourne, there were no pedlars or souvenir sellers to distract us from the seriousness of our purpose. Morag McVicar was there to meet us at Station Pier with her two daughters and accompanied us on the coach that took us to the migrant hostel at Fisherman’s Bend, near the mouth of the Yarra River. By the time we landed, I had become quite enamoured of the life at sea and even of the tired old Otranto and decided that I would make the navy my career when I grew up and left school. My brothers and I were enrolled in St Joseph’s Catholic primary school just one block away from the waterfront and when Otranto called in at Station Pier on her subsequent voyages, I usually made the effort to run down to the corner of Bay Street, nearest the waterfront, to catch another glimpse of the old trooper. We lived on the hostel for almost two years. I had an army bunk bed and a wooden bedside cupboard all to myself. My towel was spread on top of the cupboard and on top of the towel stood the little black elephant to remind me of our nautical mystery tour. Living beside the busy lower Yarra did nothing to dampen my naval aspirations and my parents did little to discourage me either.

One: The Precursor

We even seriously considered midshipman entry to the naval college at Jervis Bay when I turned fifteen, but I was still three or four years short of that mark. When my family moved up to the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland, in 1956, I had to stay behind in Melbourne because of a scholarship I had won and I lived with a good Catholic family in their house in Nott Street, even closer to Station Pier than St Joseph’s was. I didn’t see much of Otranto that year because the July Suez crisis closed the canal and increased the England - Australia voyage to nearly six weeks. My ‘foster parents’ knew all about my naval ambitions, though, and only mildly joshed me with questions like: ‘When you’re the captain of a ship, John, will you take us for a ride in it?’

At the end of that year I won another scholarship which enabled my parents to send me off to board at St Patrick’s College, Sale for the rest of my secondary education. Sale is at the junction of the Latrobe and Thompson Rivers, near the western-most of the

Uncle Tom (right) with wife Nancy and son Andrew, thirty years on.

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Gippsland Lakes and it even boasts a Port of Sale, but the latter can accommodate only recreational vessels: nothing of a commercial, much less naval size. My naval ambitions began to fade but the little elephant still stood atop my dormitory cupboard which was much like the one I’d had on the migrant hostel. As my fifteenth birthday approached I discussed with Br Augustine, my highly respected Latin teacher, the pros and cons of midshipman entry to Jervis Bay. He was quite dismissive. ‘Don’t join the navy, in peace time. It’s just a waste of time! Do something useful with your life. Become a teacher!’ That put the kibosh on midshipman entry, at least, but I was not yet ready to dismiss the navy entirely, nor to embrace a teaching career, for that matter. During the remaining two or three years of my secondary schooling, though, I found I was more adept at literary and linguistic subjects than at the mathematical and technical skills I thought a naval officer would need. So in the end I did take Br Augustine’s advice. I became a teacher. I even went one better. I became a Marist Brother. The Marist Brothers, the Catholic teaching Order which had overseen my secondary education at St Patrick’s, like all Religious Orders, take the three vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience and Poverty was interpreted quite strictly at that time. Brothers did not have any personal possessions or income and had to have annually renewed written permission from the Provincial Superior for everything they had the use of, apart from the clothes they stood up in. (The 1947 General Chapter broke new ground when it allowed the Brothers the personal use of wrist watches!) When I left home in January 1961 to enter the Marist novitiate at Mt Macedon, therefore, I left behind the little black elephant that had accompanied me through my years at Port Melbourne and Sale. My mother packed it away along with a dozen or so books and the other odds and ends that constituted all my worldly goods and I would eventually retrieve it; but that would take a very long time. Longer than my return to Kilmarnock and my re-acquaintance with Uncle Tom.

One: The Precursor

Chapter Two: The Elephant Manqué There is another Irish travel joke in which a touring motorist comes upon a railway guard at a crossing with only one of the gates closed. When asked to explain this situation, the man replies ‘Well, I’m sort of half expecting a train, do you see?’ When I joined the Marist Brothers, with their then interpretation of the vow of Poverty, my expectations of undertaking overseas travel were a good deal less than half. True, there was a mission boarding school of the province at Wewak in Papua-New Guinea but that would be a highly unlikely posting for me. There was also the very slim prospect of being sent to participate in the Second Novitiate program, when I reached my late thirties or mid-forties. The Marist Brothers had been founded in France and the second novitiate – a mid-life renewal course – was still conducted – in French – at St Paul Trois Chateux, an old Marist novitiate half way between Lyons and Marseilles; but only two Brothers from the province were given this opportunity each year and there were fourteen in my profession group to choose from. The prospect of overseas travel was not, therefore, any part of my motivation for joining the Marist Brothers. Even within the bounds of the Melbourne Province – which stretched from Wagga Wagga, in south central New South Wales, to Perth in Western Australia - travel was permitted strictly on a needs basis and by the cheapest means available, usually by car, bus or train. On one occasion, when I was holidaying in Melbourne and was authorised to return to my community at Forbes in the central west of New South Wales by overnight bus, my Aunt Alice offered to pay my airfare. When I asked permission from the Provincial to accept this offer, however, it was refused. ‘We have a vow of Poverty, Brother and we do not travel by plane unless it is absolutely necessary’. That was prior to 1970, mind you, before the restoration of state aid to Catholic schools, when the Brothers’ only

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source of income was from the school fees paid by our students’ parents. Ten years later, Commonwealth funds had started to flow in and to pay for both capital extensions and recurrent costs, such as lay teachers’ salaries. I was in charge of Newman College in Perth by then, and was elected to the Provincial Council which would entail attending a monthly weekend meeting in Melbourne. It was still regarded as an unusual expense, but for the remaining fifteen months of my tenure in Perth, I was regularly flown to Melbourne, economy class of course. My first, quite unexpected, trip overseas had taken place prior to this West Australian posting, however. After my first, sevenyear-long teaching appointment at Forbes in the mid west of New South Wales, I was appointed principal of the Marist Brothers’ St Joseph’s College at North Fitzroy in Melbourne. This appointment lasted four years and was quite successful, but I was asked to swap places with the principal of another Marist College at Wangaratta in north-eastern Victoria before the usual six year term was completed. The first year and a half in Wangaratta went quite smoothly too, but a disagreement between me and the parish priest which developed during the second year exploded quite early in the third. It led to the Parish Priest’s self-imposed resignation and - a short time later - I, too, was forced to resign by the former PP’s supporters, who remained on the School Board. This controversy led to a certain amount of tension between the Order and the local bishop, but the Provincial of the time, Br Walter Smith supported me very strongly and – to restore my morale – decided that I should undertake a Master’s degree in Private School Administration at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco in the United States. Even the bishop thought this was quite a good idea. The year’s sojourn in America was regarded as study leave – not a vacation – and I treated it as such. I lived in the Jesuit residence, Xavier Hall, on campus and soon discovered that I was almost the only full-time student in my course – the others being part-timers usually working office hours, Monday to Friday. The lectures and seminars – it was a degree done by course work rather than by

Two: The Elephant Manqué

In first semester my trips were confined to the Bay area.

thesis â&#x20AC;&#x201C; were therefore held either in the evenings or on Saturdays. I evolved a weekday routine of working in my room all morning and till three thirty in the afternoons and then getting some exercise in before joining the Jesuit community for pre-dinner drinks and dinner itself. Even the evenings were spent in my room, reading or writing. Saturdays were taken up with lectures, as Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve said, so it was only on Sundays that I got out much into the down-town area of the city or across the bay to Oakland cathedral and UC Berkeley, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. The first semester started in September and I worked fairly steadily through until Christmas but in the second semester I did take breaks at Easter and then, for a fortnight, before the summer school session. At Easter, I took a bus trip north up to Eugene in Oregon, which was the location of the only Marist Brothersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; community on the West Coast. Before the summer school, I took another bus trip, south this time, to Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and back through

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Los Angeles. Both these trips could be regarded as pleasure rather than business (i.e. study), but these were neither the first nor the only ‘tourist’ episodes in my study leave. Like that memorable Thomas Cooke tour in Colombo, this introduction to the tourist mode came courtesy of my father. He had sent me $700 as a Christmas present and with this I was able to fund and plan a three week flying tour around the United States on Delta Airlines. The route that I planned was essentially circular and clockwise: Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington, Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, but because Delta’s main hub was then at Atlanta, I kept flying into the hub and out to my intended destination in not quite the order that I had envisaged. The trip from Las Vegas to Los Angeles – which should only take half an hour – therefore involved a one hour flight back to DallasFt Worth, at that time another of Delta’s hubs - a one hour wait and a one and a half hour flight, at last, to Los Angeles. (The wait at Dallas actually turned out to be personally useful, but I will return to that point later). As a result of all this, I was initiated into the benefits and disadvantages of package deals from airlines and into the processes and protocols of airports and baggage systems. For someone who had only previously made three Australian domestic flights and one international – from Melbourne to San Francisco – it was quite a learning experience. If my flight plan was a basic course in Domestic Air Travel #101, the accommodation I had arranged at each of my stops on the circuit was somewhat more unusual. For all these destinations, except two, I had booked to stay at either a Marist Brothers’ house or a Jesuit residence. The two exceptions were Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Pious readers may be relieved to learn that there are no Marist or Jesuit residences in the casino capital of the USA and, in Los Angeles, I had been invited to stay with the family of Bill Sanders, one of the Jesuit scholastics whom I’d got to know at USF. Bill, picked me up at the airport on the Friday evening and besides introducing me to his parents and their home - also took me on a conducted tour of his home town for most of the Saturday that I

Two: The Elephant Manqué

spent there. We went to the La Brea tar pits museum in the morning, to the Jesuit University, Loyola-Marymount, in the afternoon and to dinner and a movie in the prosperous and fashionable suburb of Westwood in the evening. On the Sunday morning, when Bill had to fly back to San Francisco, I accompanied his parents to their normal Sunday parish mass and, afterwards, to brunch where they were joined by a well known science fiction writer, A.E.Van Voght, and his wife, a linguist and court-interpreter. Bill’s father drove me to the airport that evening and I, too, returned to USF. If the visit to Loyola Marymount sounds a little off-beat for a tourist destination –it does have a splendid setting on the bluffs above Playa del Rey, mind you – I should add that even on this parent-funded, round America trip, I had not entirely stepped out

The sabbatical scholar on summer break in Yosemite National Park.

of my role as a student of education. Thus, when I stayed at the Jesuit Provincial House in Boston I took the opportunity to visit the famous Harvard University, just across the Charles River from my ‘guest house’. In New Orleans, I may have taken a short riverboat cruise on the Mississippi and a ride on the streetcar named Desire, but I was staying in the Jesuit residence at the local equivalent of USF. And each of the Marist Brothers’ communities I stayed with: Chicago, New York – actually it was in New Jersey - and Miami were attached to quite sizeable high schools, which were comparable to those I knew in Australia and which the local Brothers took great pride in showing me over. In all of these communities too – Marist and Jesuit – I was treated as one of the family, not just a tourist passing through. The Jesuit Provincial in Boston, for instance, lent me his own down-quilted jacket to protect me from the 5˚F day time temperatures I encountered during my stay. I wondered to myself how the homeless street people I saw occasionally ever managed to survive the even colder nights. Returning to that long-ish wait at the Dallas-Ft Worth airport: there emerged another sign that I was not yet a full-blown tourist. My family name was (and is) quite uncommon but there used to be well known airline in America called Braniff International which at that time also had one of its principal hubs in Dallas, largely because most of its international flights went down into Central and South America. Since my father had been so generous with his Christmas gift, I felt obliged to buy gifts and souvenirs for my immediate family and the Braniff International airport shop looked like a very promising place to begin. It took a little time to get there on the inter-terminal rail-link but I did make it within the elongated stopover and I did manage to buy two full sized airways shoulder bags for my two younger brothers and six miniature bags which could serve each of my nephews and nieces, as either pencil cases or toiletry bags. These souvenirs were not particularly attractive: they were a sort of beige colour with the family name in a brown cursive script on both sides. Still, in the Braniff-less Australian classrooms and locker rooms for which they were destined, they would certainly be distinctive!

Two: The Elephant Manqué

Why, you may ask, does this incident demonstrate that I had not yet emerged from the chrysalis into a fully fledged tourist butterfly? Well, because I was buying souvenirs for my family, not for myself. Admittedly, I had bought a cheap, almost throw-away camera and had taken quite a lot of snapshots - for the first time in my life - and I had also bought a few bits of USF paraphernalia, like a cotton zip-jacket with a hood and the university monogram where the breast pocket would have been; but those photos and my academic transcript were all the mementos that I really needed of my time in San Francisco. During the second semester at USF, I did more travelling than I had in the previous term and I also found presents for my parents and my two sisters-in-law. I was quite proud of the little scrimshaw pendant that I found for my mother. It had a rose painted on it – matching her name - and scrimshaw was reputed to be a northern Californian craft tradition. The gift I found for my father - a Pendleton woollen shirt, woven and tailored at a traditional mill in Oregon and recommended to me by some of the Jesuits at Xavier Hall as the sort of thing that grandpas always wore in winter time – was less successful. It had rounded tails fore and aft and was meant to be worn unbuttoned with the tails outside the trousers. My father could never come at that and my mother had to cut off the tails and sew a square, shorter hem on the shirt before he would wear it! I took the Greyhound bus trip to Southern California and Colorado, mentioned previously, in the fortnight between the end of second semester and the start of the month-long summer school which I had to take to complete my degree. When that was finished, though, there was still a six week gap before I was needed back in Australia, so I summoned the courage to ask my superiors if I could take a month’s travel in Europe. Since I’d now had one overseas trip, I did not expect that I would ever receive that other one – for the traditional second novitiate – and as Br Walter well knew, Scotland was the native land that I would probably never have the chance to see again. The Provincial answered in the affirmative and I was able to arrange a trip involving a fortnight in the UK and another on the Continent. In Britain, I

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The sabbatical scholar doing research on Hadrian’s Wall.

stayed in the Marist Brothers’ residence at Islington in London but I had a BritRail pass that enabled me to travel around, to visit my extended family in Kilmarnock and re-introduce myself to old Uncle Tom. As it turned out, that would not be the last time I saw him either, but that is a different story. In Europe, I had a Eurail pass and went down the Rhine to Munich, Salzburg, Vienna then over the Alps to Venice and onto Rome, where I stayed in the General House of the Marist Brothers in the outer - and quite a-typical - suburb of EUR. On the return leg to the UK, I went – still by train – as far west as Madrid in Spain, where I spent a few days in the community attached to one of the Marist Brothers’ larger day schools in that city. From there, onto Paris, where I stayed at the Marist maison d’accueil located near the Raspail metro station and within walking distance of Notre Dame. This residence was not attached to a school but served as a

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sort of hostel for French and international Brothers who happened to have some business in Paris. Melbourne and Sydney Province Brothers who had completed their second novitiate in the south of France had usually been allowed to visit the UK and Ireland before returning to Australia and many would have stayed at this establishment in times past, on their way through to London. As I too returned via London – on my way back to San Francisco and thence to Australia – I was quite resigned to the fact that I had ‘blown’ my chances of a second novitiate and would never be back. More than resigned, I was quite satisfied that I had done all the touring I could ever have hoped for in the normal course of events and had absolutely no aspiration to leave Australia again. Back in San Francisco, my old room in Xavier Hall was still waiting for me with all of the luggage I’d not taken to Europe packed and ready to go. An Australian friend had sent me, at my request, several art paper prints of Sydney Harbour and I spent an afternoon in a DIY picture frame shop, framing what I thought was the best of them. A few days later, at pre-dinner drinks on my last evening at USF, I asked the Rector if I could address the assembled Fathers and present my selected picture to the community. I told them that fine though it was, San Francisco Bay was not the most beautiful harbour in the world: Sydney’s was! And my present was a clear demonstration of that fact. I also told them that the Jesuit idea of ‘community’ seemed to me very different from the Marist idea of that concept, but that I was very appreciative of the warmth, the length and the genuine-ness of the hospitality they had offered me and that I would be forever grateful for the broader and broadening experience of Jesuit community that I had enjoyed over that year. It was the least I could do and I did, sincerely, mean every word of it. I could make the same speech today without a blush and without the slightest mental reservation. The following morning I caught a Qantas flight to Hawaii for a two day stopover then continued on home to Australia to my Marist Province and my family. Among my luggage there were the presents I’d bought for all my immediate family and a dozen or so

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packets of photos taken either in San Francisco or on my travels around the USA, the UK and Europe, but there were no other mementos or souvenirs of my year away, not even a little black wooden elephant. My testamur and academic transcript arrived a few months later. They were the real reason I had gone to America and refreshed and re-energized by the break and by the studies at USF, I took up again my role as principal of Newman College in Perth, Western Australia. The packets of photos filled two albums and I have them still, faded or darkened with age, in a way that the memories are not. I returned to Australia as a better qualified educational administrator, not a jaded tourist and I had no thought of leaving these shores again. It was not to be: there were more travels and more elephants to come.

The sabbatical scholar with fellow student at St Peter’s Square.

Two: The Elephant Manqué

Chapter Three: The Second Elephant Despite my initially low expectations of overseas travel with the Marist Brothers - further lowered by my Californian sabbatical - I was, in fact, offered a second novitiate in the second half of 1988. Several things had changed. In earlier times, travel to Europe had been by boat, adding a month to each end of the six month novitiate course and making it possible to run only one course each year. The advent of the Jumbo jet had made travel time almost negligible, thus two courses could be run each year and these were now being offered in English to cater for the Anglophone provinces in Australasia, South Africa, Britain and America. Moreover, as the number of course places had increased, the number of eligible participants had begun to decline. Of the fourteen novices in my profession group one had died young and all but three of the rest had left the order before taking final vows. One of the remaining three had already ‘done’ his second novitiate and another was a ‘late vocation’ who had taken first vows at the age of fifty-four. He was now a man in his seventies, well beyond the range of a mid-life refresher. This left only me to take the allotted place and despite the fact that I was still principal of Assumption College, Kilmore and a member of the Provincial Council, I was released from these duties to fill the vacancy. There were other changes too. Since the restoration of state aid to Catholic and Independent schools in the late ’60s and early’70s, financial pressure on the Marist communities had eased considerably. After the second Vatican Council, too, a new slant had been given to the vow of Poverty, calling for solidarity with the poor. To cater for this new thrust and, perhaps, to salve the corporate conscience about our new-found affluence and enhanced mobility, Brothers travelling overseas were encouraged to arrange some exposure to, or even immersion in, ‘Third World’ societies, where most poor people actually lived. Some of the bigger

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Australian Marist schools had even started annual exposure tours, especially to the Philippines and many of the Brothers travelling to Europe had made use of these contacts. I elected to go to Thailand, however, to look at a Sydney Province initiative, working with refugees waiting to be accepted into Australia. There was another project in Bangkok that I wanted to see and a third - recently started in the far south of India - where a Melbourne Province and a New Zealand Province Brother were running a novitiate for Tamil aspirants from Sri Lanka. My ‘exposure tour’ got off to a clumsy start. Br Vincent Shekleton, the Superior of the Marist Community at Phanat Nikom was not at the Bangkok airport to meet my early morning flight. This was especially awkward because, in addition to the luggage I would need for my six months of travel, I was loaded down with a 2.5kg fruit cake and a big German sausage of similar proportions. In our exchange of letters - it was before the days of the internet – he had told me not to bother bringing any duty free scotch as a gift. He was having trouble coping with the monotony of the local diet and was in need of some home cooking! It was my first time in a huge Asian airport and - disoriented by jet lag and not being met - I was quickly snared by a taxi tout who booked me into a three star, downtown hotel and also talked me into a conducted tour of the city sights for the afternoon. The hotel, when we got there, was air conditioned only in the individual rooms and the restaurant reeked of some herbs or spices which I now think may have been predominantly coriander. Still, I managed to get the air conditioner working in my room and also to place a call to the Jesuit residence in the city where I had been booked to stay overnight. I left a message for Br Vincent, assuring him that I had arrived safely and gave the phone number of my hotel but also making clear that I had paid for the afternoon tour and would not be ready for pick-up until four in the afternoon. When my hire car arrived for the tour, I was relieved to see that the young female guide allotted to me was the demure student I had been promised and that her English was quite adequate for the task ahead. I cannot remember much of the tour: we drove past

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several palaces and public buildings and stopped at one or more wats with their brightly-coloured, shiny roofs, where large golden buddhas sat or lay, serenely absorbing the incense, the flowers and the gold leaf tributes of the devotees. The part of the tour that I do recall most clearly was our visit to a spacious, well appointed and air-conditioned souvenir shop: a visit which I – much later – came to realize was an essential, not to say compulsory, part of all such tours. Conscious that I was a pilgrim, or a student, rather than a tourist and that I had another six months of travel ahead of me, I had neither the money nor the inclination to buy any of the souvenirs on display. Pressured by the staff and my demure young tour guide – all anxious to get their tiny cut of the proceeds – I did succumb to the extent of buying the smallest and cheapest of the items available: a little black wooden elephant. He – or she, it’s difficult to tell with little wooden elephants – was a little more ornate than my first elephant, having a brightly coloured shawl or saddle blanket painted on his back, but was only slightly bigger. He cost no more than $2 and would add little weight to and take up little space in my luggage for the six months that were to come.

The Brothers’ (Upper Floor) accommodation in the compound at Phanat Nikhom.

My accidental tourist obligations having been completed, I was then belatedly picked up by my host and he took me by public bus down to Phanat Nikhom in Chonburi Province, about one hundred kilometres south-east of Bangkok. The Australian Brothers lived on the top floor of a two-level local-style house with the Thai family, who owned the house, living on the ground floor beneath. The house was in a compound of similar dwellings also rented out to ‘boarders’ and the tenants took their meals - or at least breakfast and dinner - in a mess hall in the compound, operated by the Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees. I had breakfast in that mess hall and began to see why Br Vincent might be having difficulty with the diet. Most of the other ‘boarders’ though were Thai volunteers – university age students – who had no trouble with the food and even some of the Australian lay volunteers working alongside the Brothers seemed to have adjusted successfully. We travelled to the camp, some twenty kilometres out of town in buses or utility trucks and encountered a mini city of twenty thousand inhabitants in two fenced-in camps facing each other on either side of the ‘Friendship Highway’. Almost half of the camp population were Vietnamese refugees, confined to an area known as Section C, and awaiting acceptance into Australia. These were the people the Brothers and their lay associates were working for: providing them with beginner-level English lessons, trying to provide ‘enculturation’ and teach survival skills to people hopefully moving from pre-war Vietnamese village life to modern city living in Australia. Lessons were held in portable classrooms, suitably furnished and equipped with Video Screens and Overhead Projectors and most of the people seemed happy with the help they were receiving. I did encounter some – younger men, mainly – who were fretful and impatient to be granted their visas. Br Vincent remarked that some of them were becoming angry and troublesome but the atmosphere in the openair but undercover dining area where we had lunch - in the same queue and at the same tables as the refugees – was pleasant and relaxed enough.

Three: The Second Elephant

Back in town that evening, after a mere gesture at the dinner offered at the mess hall, we retired to the Brothers’ house for a supper in which my German sausage and large fruit cake loomed large on the menu. Half a dozen of the lay associates, male and female, attended the supper and it was interesting to hear about their experiences and their motivation. Certainly it was not a lifestyle choice. The climate was hot and humid, the accommodation was clean but basic - with no air-conditioning - and the shower and toilet facilities were of the dipper and squat varieties respectively. How long the various individuals would stay in Phanat Nikhom was not clear, but Br Vincent - his difficulties with local diet notwithstanding - was already looking forward to a further missionary stint of English teaching in mainland China! I, on the other hand, was the merest of blow-ins and next morning I was on the public bus - solo this time – back to Bangkok and to the second item on my ‘exposure’ itinerary. Fr Joe Maier was an American Redemptorist priest whose work in the Bangkok slums had been brought to my notice by one of my Melbourne Marist confreres. His works were multifarious, but he had arranged for me to stay at a hostel staffed by a Thai Order of nuns which operated as a shelter for girls escaping prostitution. He served as chaplain there but he also used it as a base for some of his other activities and he introduced me to one of those the following morning. He had founded and was maintaining a network of 5 baht–a-day kinder-gartens, scattered among the squatter camps along the klongs which drain (and sometimes flood) downtown Bangkok. For their 5 baht (20c), the little children were driven in micro-buses to their nearest school room (they were all singleroom schools) where they were supervised, given lunch, and involved in educational activities before being dropped back home by the micro-bus in mid-afternoon. As well as the 5 baht, the parents were also required to present their children washed and smartly dressed in ironed white shirts or blouses and navy blue shorts or skirts. After we’d seen one of the micro buses do a pickup, Fr Joe asked me to wait a few minutes while he organized my transport for the rest of the ‘tour’.

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One of Fr Joe’s 5 baht pre-schools in Bangkok.

As I ventured warily along the rickety boardwalk which threaded through the shacks and lean-tos along the canal bank I noticed several young women - office-girls or shop-workers very well groomed and all dressed in freshly ironed blouses and skirts, or dresses, emerging from the most dilapidated of dwellings and marvelled at their achievement. Called back to the depot by Fr Joe, I was then entrusted to a team of three teen-agers who manned a jeepney or tuk-tuk sort of vehicle which was used to supply the schools with their lunches. And so began my second tour of downtown Bangkok. Even in the air-conditioned taxi of my first tour, the Bangkok traffic with its swarms of motor bikes, buses and trucks had seemed daunting. From my almost groundlevel position in the door-less tuk-tuk, it looked – and smelled and sounded – distinctly life threatening and I could make no geographical sense of the route were following. Still, I had not come to Fr Joe expecting to be pampered and the boys seemed quite confident in their milieu. We stopped at four or five kindergartens

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and I accompanied the team as they carried the canisters of noodles to the classrooms which were basic but usually of recent construction and well maintained. The arrival of the boys was a daily occurrence and would not normally have caused much disturbance but my sudden and un-announced appearance in their midst certainly did. Even the two or three teachers in each class seemed a little flustered as they urged their tiny but neatly dressed charges to their feet and bow in my direction with the hands joined in the traditional Sawadee Kap greeting. I came away with a very smoggy impression of the city but a very pristine image of the little kindergartens. That evening, Fr Joe said Mass with two of the nuns and me as the congregation and during the meal which followed he asked me to accompany the younger nun who was taking a group of her street children, the following morning, to visit an Australian frigate, HMAS Adelaide, which just happened to be in port at the time. The young nun’s English was quite good and her control of the children also, he said, but she would feel more secure with a slightly more familiar male colleague as back up. The invitation to visit the ship had come from some sort of social outreach club of the petty officers’ mess, I think. Their reps met us at the gangplank and gave us a half hour’s conducted tour of the ship which ended with morning ‘tea’ in the mess. The young nun seemed quite happy with the reception we’d received but the children were, if anything, underwhelmed. I’d noticed that the morning tea consisted of potato and corn chips, and sweet biscuits, washed down with cordial rather than canned or bottled soft drink. When I asked one of the little boys what he thought of the spread he gave the carefully measured reply: ‘Well, the drink is not very delicious...’ And when I reported this to Fr Joe, he said he wasn’t surprised. He’d received many similar invitations in the past and they’d mainly struck him as going through the motions of ‘concern’, rather than serious commitment. My visit to Bangkok was not entirely confined to back alleys, klongs and docklands. Fr Joe took me with him to say a home

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Mass for an American-Thai couple who ran an office stationery supply company and were celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. After Mass we were included in the guest list at a dinner in the restaurant of a five star hotel. After my stay at the hostel, too, Fr Joe suggested I spend the rest of my time at the Redemptorist presbytery attached to the Holy Redeemer Church they staffed in Ruam Rudi. At breakfast that morning a Thai lady I thought must be either the cook or housekeeper was inviting members of the community to come to dinner at her house. Only one of the resident priests seemed interested but he was quite happy to present me to the lady as a ‘pair’ and I was also keen to see what an ordinary Thai home – rather than a refugee camp or lean-to – felt like. It turned out, though, that the lady was not the housekeeper but, rather, the secretary of the Parish Council and her husband who arrived to pick us up that evening was not your average Thai worker, but a director of one of the biggest commercial banks in the city. Our drive through the still clotted traffic in his air-conditioned, tinted-window Mercedes, was another contrast with my tuk-tuk excursion and the house, or rather the compound, he took us to was The Marist Brothers’ novitiate in Tiruchirappali, Tamil Nadu.

The Marist Brothers’ primary school in the village of P. Upydapitti.

not a run of the mill Thai home. It was not extravagantly lavish either, I might add; but it did include several free standing twostorey wooden buildings, one for each of the married children. Among the others at the dinner were a circuit-court judge, the captain of a frigate in the Thai navy and the youngest daughter of the family who was a doctor and a lieutenant in the air force. I felt that I’d now seen the Third World from the bottom to the top! If my exposure to Thailand left me feeling upbeat about Marist involvement in the Third World, the Indian stage of my ‘immersion’ was something of a let-down. I travelled vast distances by bus and train, often the only European on the conveyance, and found the Australian Brothers operating a novitiate/scholasticate for young Sri Lankan Brothers in the town of Tiruchirappali (or Trichy, for short) in the far south state of Tamil Nadu. The house where they were based was apparently of the average local standard and the little primary school which they ran in a small village some twenty

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or thirty kilometres out of Trichy was also par for the course. The Brothers were certainly working with the local ‘poor’. But where the Thai clientele had seemed to rise to the challenge and emerge from their shabby surroundings like butterflies from a chrysalis, the Indian equivalent seemed more apathetic yet still anxious for approval and affirmation. From the middle distance, Indian streets looked impressive enough with substantial buildings and paved roads. Up-close though, the blemishes, the signs of wear and tear and the piles of neglected rubbish were all too obvious. In town and village, it seemed to me, the women spat in the streets, the men urinated and the children defecated: not a pretty sight. From memory, I think I must have spent almost as much time in India as in Thailand and probably covered more territory in the former. In both countries I felt that I had gained the sort of insight and exposure that my superiors had recommended and even with the unintended inclusion of the Bangkok day tour, I suppose I did just as much ‘sight-seeing’ in India as I had in Thailand. The overall purpose of these parts of the trip had been achieved, therefore, but while the little decorated elephant I’d bought in Bangkok was a sort of bonus and a memento of a stimulating and interesting experience, I felt no inclination to purchase a similar keepsake for India. I had bought a pocket camera at the start of this trip and I took photos in both of these countries, photos that I still have. The impression they make today is the impression that I remember from twenty-five years ago.

Three: The Second Elephant

Chapter Four: A Neo-Medieval Tourist One of the ironies of my unexpected second novitiate trip was that, although the old mid-life renewal course was beginning to evolve, the session that I had been allotted was not even the standard, if developing, edition but a once-off, special event, involving members of the three other Orders which share the name Marist. It was to be a co-ed course including seven or eight Marist Fathers, Marist Sisters and Marist Missionary Sisters as well as a similar number of my confreres albeit hailing from the USA, the UK, Nigeria and New Zealand. The traditional second novitiate was already developing somewhat in the direction of becoming a pilgrimage and given that all four of the Marist orders involved had their historic and geographic origins in the Lyonnais region of south-central France our course had a particular emphasis on that pilgrimage aspect. Four of the five months we spent together were based in Rome, at the General House of the Irish Christian Brothers but the central fifth month was an extended pilgrimage to the Rhône-Alpes region around Lyons. Pilgrimages, of course, were the traditional justification for medieval tourism: to the Holy Land, to Rome, to Santiago Compostella in Spain and to Canterbury in England. Even the developing, modern Marist, second novitiate would soon be expanded to include a visit to Israel, but I had already included this in my personal itinerary. If Third World Immersion was becoming part of the rationalisation for Marist international travel, then surely scripture study and pilgrimage experience was well within the range of appropriate objectives for the trip. I had signed myself on for a two week course in New Testament archaeology at the Anglican St George’s College, in East Jerusalem. Quite by chance, there was another Australian Marist Brother – whom I knew reasonably well - undertaking this course and two Australian nuns whom I’d never met. Most of the other participants, however, were English and Anglican, or American - a mixture of Lutherans and

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The St George’s College group visiting an archaeological site near Nazareth.

Episcopalians - including two married women who were getting close to ordination for the Episcopalian priesthood: hardly your average Marist Brothers’ group of second novices. The course itself, however, was all that any modern, part-time biblical hobbyist could have wished for. We stayed in the longestablished lime-stone St George’s complex, a stone’s throw from the Old City. After dinner most evenings we were briefed on the next day’s activities and each day we were bussed to sites either in the vicinity of Jerusalem or further afield: to Qumran and Masada by the Dead Sea, to Bethlehem, and to Jericho. A longer, three day bus trip was included, which took us up to Galilee to visit Nazareth, Cana, Capernaum and the Mount of the Beatitudes. Many of these sites were churches dating back to the late Roman empire or Crusader times and were traditional places of pilgrimage rather than authentically historical locations, but we were also taken to the sites of several contemporary archaeological ‘digs’

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where their significance was explained to us. One day we did an early morning walk in silence from a point on the main JerusalemJericho road along an established but unpaved path to a Russian Orthodox monastery, said to be built on the site of Elijah’s cave. On another, we did a ‘Way of the Cross’ walk through the streets and alleys of the Old City, taking turns to carry a plain wooden cross – though a smaller, one metre version rather than full-sized – on our shoulders. At all the traditional and city- or town-situated sites we were either pestered by or directed towards pedlars and souvenir sellers which I found a bit distracting from the spirit of our pilgrimage, but then I reflected that even in medieval times this had been part of the experience. The Compostella pilgrims were renowned for flaunting their decorated sea-shell badges, for instance. Conscious that I had another five months of travel ahead of me, I had no great difficulty in resisting the temptations of the souvenir sellers; but I was not greatly shocked when some of my fellow pilgrims in the group succumbed to the pressure. I noticed, instead, that the Lutherans and the Anglicans, tended to stick to their tradition and The Russian Orthodox monastery, said to be on the site of Elijah’s cave.

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buy plain wooden crosses rather than Catholic-style crucifixes as part of their memento hoard. And, generally speaking, most of our group, did maintain a respectful and reverent attitude to the sites we visited and the ceremonies we either witnessed or participated in. This stood in some contrast to a much larger pilgrimage group which happened to be in Jerusalem at the same time as us and whose path we sometimes crossed. The American tele-evangelist Jimmy Bakker and his wife Tammy Fae had recently been making headlines for their financial and sexual shenanigans and their Praise the Lord company was the sponsor of this large pilgrimage group which deployed either four or six coaches, compared to our one. On the few occasions when our visits to a site happened to co-incide, I noticed that their participants all sported large lapel badges carrying the slogan Pilgrimage with a Purpose, but I could never discern what this purpose might be. They took a lot of photos at the various sanctuaries – as did we – but they were more loud-mouthed and exuberant and they hit the souvenir stalls with a grim, ‘take no prisoners’ attitude. At a more serious level, some of the Americans in our group told us that many of these fundamentalists were staunch supporters of religious Zionism and had prepared replicas of the temple furniture so that when the Jews finally reclaimed the Temple Mount and restored the Temple itself, they would accelerate the process by providing the furniture. This restoration project was apparently a pre-condition, in their theology, for the Rapture and the end of the world! Certainly, one of the stops on their itinerary, which was not on ours, was the Plain of Megiddo, or Armageddon, where the final battle between Christ and the armies of this world would take place and where they would have front row seats at the spectacle. Pilgrims with a purpose, indeed. My Holy Land pilgrimage had taken place during the First Intifada or Civil Disobedience campaign and although it caused only minor disruption to our itinerary, the atmosphere was sometimes tense, particularly going through customs and security for both entry to and exit from Israel. As my ferry left the port of Haifa, in the shadow of Mt Carmel, heading for Greece, I noticed the half dozen Israeli gun boats on the opposite wharf, primed and

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ready to go and recalled the pair of fighter jets that had zoomed low over us on that silent morning walk to Elijah’s cave. The young woman who had checked my luggage had not been satisfied when I’d told her the purpose of my journey was to follow the footsteps of St Paul and had even called her supervisor to double-check my credentials, but that was in fact my intention and when I reached Athens I not only visited the Acropolis and the Aeropagus, I also travelled south by train to visit the well preserved ruins of ancient Corinth. My pilgrimage was still in progress. The combined Marist group that I joined in Rome was about the same size as the St George’s group in Jerusalem and had roughly the same balance between men and women. The average age of the nuns involved though was somewhat higher and certainly higher than the average age of either the priests or the brothers in the group. Our accommodation at the Irish Christian Brothers’ General House located on the Via Aurelia, just outside the G.R.A. – Rome’s ring road – was more modern and spacious than St George’s and unlike the Marist Brothers’ General House, which was normally reached via the underground, to travel into the centre of the city we had to travel above ground and change buses once in the process. For the first two months of the course, though, we did little travelling as we concentrated on team building and setting individual objectives. Weekdays were spent in a mixture of large and small group activities, the small groups alternating between four syndicates composed of members of the same order and six groups made up of men and women and always including one priest. This meant that our daily Mass could either be a whole group liturgy in the formal chapel or a small group activity scattered around the work areas. There was often some directed activity on Saturdays but Sundays and most evenings were free and we could organize individual or group excursions on the Sunday. Early on in the piece, I usually went on individual trips. We were encouraged to take an Italian style cut lunch with us and on one memorable sunny Sunday I went alone into the Vatican on the bus, attended Solemn High Mass at St Peter’s, then took the bus to the old Roman Forum and ate my lunch there, looking down on the Via Sacra from the slope of the Palatine Hill. On another early

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occasion, I accompanied a New Zealand Marist priest to visit the ruins of Ostia Antica and afterwards we ate our lunch on the beach, or Lido, of the modern suburb. Later on in the course, after our return from France, we ventured further afield, in bigger groups, to places like Subiaco – St Benedict’s first monastery – and, on one free weekend, some of us managed to get as far as Capri. In that latter half of the course also, the whole group did a Sunday trip down to Monte Casino and a week-long visit to Assisi, to do a silent retreat. By now convinced that I would never leave Australia again, I consciously included a selection of classical and historic sites that fitted in with the course itinerary. I have always been interested in Roman history and was working on the assumption that this would be my last chance to see any of these places. The pilgrimage to the Sacred Sites of Marist origins was the centre-piece of our course, nevertheless. We travelled up by private bus to Turin staying overnight in some sort of Catholic hostel and then, next day, up along the Valle d’Aoste and through the Mt Blanc tunnel into France. It was a long day’s drive to our destination at St Chamond, some fifty kilometres south of Lyons; but the weather was fine and the scenery spectacular - especially when we emerged from the tunnel - with Mt Blanc snow-capped but fully sunlit on our right. St Chamond is the nearest town to Notre Dame de l’Hermitage, the motherhouse of the Marist Brothers, partly built by the founder, St Marcellin Champagnat, and his early disciples in the early 1820s. When first established the complex had served as a novitiate, an orphanage and an old people’s home, but in modern times it serves mainly as a hostel for pilgrimage groups similar to our own. The Marist Fathers, Sisters and Missionary Sisters in our group did not have quite the same ‘ownership’ of the place as we Brothers did, but it was very commodious and very central to the range of places we would be visiting. Our pilgrimage at the Hermitage was quite similar, in some ways, to the program at St George’s. In the evenings, we were briefed on the next day’s bus trip and on these trips we usually took a cut lunch to see us through to the evening meal back at the Hermitage. Instead of traditional sites in Israel, though, our daily destinations were often in small French villages or towns where

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La Valla: the village where the Marist Brothers were founded in 1817.

the sites were not as ancient but certainly authentic and manned by volunteers who were either elderly local historians or retired priests and nuns of our several Marist congregations. One day of each week was spent at ‘home’ and in silent reflection and towards the end of the month, we also had a three or four day silent and stay-at-home retreat. The pilgrimage atmosphere was never far from our minds, therefore, but there were a few ‘free’ days and the return to Rome was also an optional activity, to which I shall return. Even on one of the prescribed pilgrimage days, when we visited the ancient chapel of Fourviere, where the fervent group of newly ordained priests had signed a pledge to found the Marist Order in 1816, I managed to absent myself for an hour or so and visited the Roman museum, just half a kilometre away on the escarpment. Lugdunum or Lyons had been a major capital of Roman Gaul and I found the museum very informative. On one of the ‘free’ days, I drove a mini-bus load of our group to the famous ecumenical monastery at Taizé, stopping at historic

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Cluny on the way. On another ‘free day’, though, the bulk of our group opted to go to Paris by the TGV while I elected to go alone – and by a much slower, local train – to Geneva, one of the key cities of the Reformation. The reasoning behind the majority choice was similar to my own: most of those nuns had never seen Paris and would certainly not have the opportunity again. I had already seen Paris; but I did not imagine I would ever again be able to visit Switzerland. On reflection, I don’t know that I made the better choice. I saw Lake Geneva, the Protestant cathedral, and the sandstone carved frieze of the leading Reformation figures in one of the parks; but I don’t know that I really got any better a grip on the Reformation itself. The return trip from Lyons to Rome, at the end of our French pilgrimage raised a similar dilemma. We had come up, as a group, on our own bus; but for the journey back we were each given the same amount of money and told to make our own way ‘home’. Perhaps a third of the group, including most of the nuns opted to travel further west, to Lourdes before turning back to Rome via the Riviera; but I had decided on a solitary excursion to another of my classical destinations, Sirmione, on Lake Garda in northern Italy. One of the first Marist schools, founded in 1820 and still in operation, though now co-educational and with an all lay staff.

I did travel by train with some of my confreres back as far as Milan where we parted to pursue our separate agendas. There, I had to queue at the sportello to pay for my onward journey and thereby hangs a tale. As I waited in the line, I was principally worried about the limitations of my Italian and also about the state of my credit card which had been chipped and partly split in my previous transaction at St Chamond. When my turn came, though, my severely limited Italian was enough for me to gather that I could not use even an undamaged credit card: that I would have to pay cash for my ticket. As I stepped, slightly dazed, away from the counter, one of the two American girls who’d been ahead of me in the queue, said ‘Oh, you too, huh?’ I hadn’t really noticed these two young women when they were in front of me but they now turned out to be a pair of Good Samaritans. ‘We know where there’s an ATM that takes Visa cards.’ they said ‘It’s in a street near the Duomo and we can get there on the Metro.’ The whole credit card business was a new experience for me. All my previous transactions had involved going into a bank, showing my passport and card and drawing out the relevant amount of cash, but this was Sunday morning and although Milan was a strange city to me, I was pretty sure none of the banks would be open. I followed my two Samaritans onto the Metro, noting that Milan’s version was much brighter and cleaner than the Roman equivalent, and got off at the station the girls indicated. We emerged into bright sunlight on the edge of the piazza which the magnificent birthday cake of a cathedral dominates. Prior to this I’d never even heard of the Duomo, but the girls led me off into a side-street and within five minutes we stopped in front of an ATM which displayed the Visa logo, among others. I had never before used an ATM and was concerned that the fractured condition of my card might make it inoperable, so I watched carefully as the first American girl put her card into the machine. Her problem was that she didn’t use it often in this way and wasn’t sure of her pin number. She tried twice without success and decided that a third attempt might see the machine swallow her card for good. The other girl didn’t have a card, so it was my turn to step up to the plate. Although I hadn’t used it in this way, I could remember

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the pin, which was very easy, so I punched it in and held my breath. It may sound blasphemous for a pilgrim to say this but what followed was almost an epiphany. There I was on a Sunday morning in a strange city, in the company of two strangers and a device with which I was quite unfamiliar started pouring thousands and thousands of Italian lira into my lap, so to speak! I did not know whether to thank the patron saint of travellers (St Christopher) or of financiers (St Matthew the Evangelist). I did offer to buy the two American girls a cup of coffee but they declined and wandered off to plan their next move, while I went back to the Duomo where a solemn Mass for war veterans had just finished and lots of elderly men were wandering around in those Bersaglieri hats with their cascades of dark feathers. After the morning’s excitement, reaching my destination successfully and finding a room for a couple of nights’ stay was almost an anti-climax. Sirmione, itself, did live up to my expectations, nevertheless. I had come across the name in my matriculation Latin class where the poet Catullus extols the place as: Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque ocelle (Sirmio, jewel of islands and peninsulas!) It was the end of the season. Many of the holiday villas, boarding houses and hotels were closing up and the weather was mild but misty. In two days sitting on the wharf near the ferry point, I never saw the first escarpment of the Alps on the northern shore but I saw enough of the town and the ruins of what is reputed to be the huge Catullan family villa to conclude that the poet was not far wrong. Back in Rome, the course resumed and expanded, with the visits to Assisi, and Monte Casino, mentioned previously, and an invitation to attend Mass in Pope John Paul II’s private chapel, among the highlights. Our course formally concluded on Christmas Day which we celebrated as a group with Midnight Mass and a midday Christmas dinner. Next morning we all departed for our separate home ports and, having a round-the-world ticket, came

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back to Australia via the UK and USA catching up with family, confreres and friends in both countries. Even in the latter stages of these extended travels, I had resisted the temptation to acquire souvenirs, not even any elephants additional to the one Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d bought in Bangkok. I had taken a lot of photos and I have many of them still in a separate album which has helped me to recall the trip and create this account. When I landed back in Melbourne and resumed my duties as principal at Assumption College I presumed that I would not leave Australia again and I was quite content that this should be so. I had been a travelling scholar and a pilgrim and I had seen all the places I ever hoped to see. But, as it turned out, there would be more to comeâ&#x20AC;Ś

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Chapter Five: A Honeymoon Tour At the risk of being thought to ‘protest too much’, I must insist that embarking on a new series of international travels played no part in my motivation for withdrawing from the Marist Brothers and marrying my wife – now, of almost twenty years – Jenny Ledingham. But just as I made no attempt to analyse my parents’ real motive for emigrating to Australia or my own reasons for joining the Marist Brothers, neither do I intend to analyse or publicize, here, my conscious motives for marrying Jenny. Suffice it to say that, at the time of our marriage, we were both working full-time in separate, private, secondary schools and our wedding took place in Sydney during the third term holidays, allowing us only a few days at Katoomba, by way of a honeymoon. It was at Jenny’s suggestion – not to say insistence – that we celebrated our ‘real’ honeymoon with a month-long trip to Turkey and Italy and for the study-tour format that it took. With my hand on my heart, I can still profess that I was an entirely accidental and unintentional tourist! The destinations and the format of the trip were certainly Jenny’s idea. We had both visited Italy separately previously and - while neither of us had been to Turkey - we both had agendas we could pursue there. Jenny was a specialist Art teacher and I an English/History teacher with a particular interest in Ancient and Medieval History and there were many museums, galleries and ancient monuments in the two countries we were visiting that would reward our attention. The format, however, was particularly Jenny’s initiative and it was to prove so successful a ploy that we used it again on a much longer and more expensive northern hemisphere trip several years later. On one of her earlier, solo overseas trips, Jenny had kept a documented record of her expenses and the places she had visited and successfully claimed an income tax rebate for her ‘study tour’. Our own honeymoon-study tour would not be just

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a bare-faced tax dodge, however; it was quite a serious statement of intent. Well before our departure date, I was commissioned to find, buy and read an up-to-date history of Turkey – from Hittite times to the present day - and also a modern introduction to the city of Rome. We flew by Alitalia out of Sydney on Boxing Day, direct to Rome, with only a short break on the ground in Singapore. In the transit lounge, I came across a young woman whom I’d hired as a language teacher at Sale, the last school I had been in charge of before leaving the Brothers - and I was still getting used to living with my new and married identity. In Rome, too, I took some time to adjust to travelling as one part of a couple. Jenny would insist on following pedestrian rules to the absolute letter, giving me no credit at all for the fact that I had previously survived a full four month stint in Rome, much of it as a pedestrian. After overnighting in Rome we took an early morning taxi back to the airport and flew onwards to Istanbul. I was quite used to credit cards and ATMs by this stage, but I found the sight of all those zeros on the banknotes a little baffling. The Turkish lira was obviously worth The remains of the library in ancient Ephesus.

much less than even the Italian version! It had been snowing in Istanbul – as it had in Rome – and the snow seemed to soften the harsh western lines of the high-rise Istanbul Hilton, where our tour was due to start. Another new experience: my first stay in a five star hotel. The tour format itself was not such a new experience: my ‘pilgrimages’ to Israel and to the Marist ‘sacred sites’ around Lyons had prepared me to some extent. Certainly the sites were different, the mixture of people on our coach was different and the coach travelled a long, vaguely circular route with overnight stays at different hotels for ten or twelve days, rather than striking out each day from the same home base. The sites more than lived up to their historical promise as far as I was concerned: the sites of ancient Troy, Pergamum and the well preserved ruins of New Testament Ephesus particularly so. At each of these three, I even went so far as to purchase some souvenirs but they were intended as teaching aids and I did, in fact, use them as such in subsequent years. Jenny quite enjoyed these historic sites, too, but I thought she was a little short-changed with some of the Art centres that we visited. I was certainly un-impressed with the museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul, with its room after room of embroidered Arabic script and its almost total dearth of any figurative art, portraits or oil paintings. Jenny was less disappointed than I - in that particular instance - and she did enjoy some of the grander sites like Sancta Sophia, the Blue Mosque and Top Kapi palace much better. And we both enjoyed genuine Turkish Baths in a traditional bath house attached to one of our hotels and dating back, historically, to at least medieval times and perhaps even the days of the Byzantine Empire. A distinct difference emerged between us in the matter of souvenirs and, specifically, in the business of bargaining for them. As in Israel, almost all the Turkish sites we visited had their quota of souvenir pedlars or shops and - in some cases - we were actually dropped off at rug and carpet showrooms, souks and shopping arcades. I had very little interest in souvenirs and absolutely no sense of taste or discernment when it comes to rugs and carpets.

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The prices asked for some of the larger carpets quite put me off and the salesmen’s offers to have them packaged and sent to Australia did nothing to tempt me. Jenny, on the other hand, was quite interested in carpets – we already had a few at home – and seemed to enjoy bargaining with the traders for some of the smaller, almost doormat sized rugs, that took her fancy. Even the prospect of having to fold them up and pack them into our limited luggage capacity scarcely daunted her. I don’t much like shopping, anyway, and I absolutely hate bargaining. If I need or want something I’ll go out and buy it and if it’s a big item, like a fridge or a stove, I don’t mind getting two or three prices; but dickering with some salesman - even in Sydney where I understand the language - is definitely not my idea of fun. We celebrated New Year’s Eve with a group dinner at a restaurant in Izmir – formerly known as Smyrna – but dinner was finished by nine thirty. Jenny - battling a heavy and persistent cold - was feeling tired and went to bed early, so I took a solitary walk down along the Corniche and sat on a bench looking out into the darkness of the bay. Izmir is an ancient town and still a big and bustling place and I half expected a fireworks display at midnight, Jenny in her Driza-bone gear in front of The Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

but Turkey is a secular Muslim country and western New Year apparently does not rank highly in its list of festivals. There were no fireworks, even for us tourists. On our last night, back in Istanbul, we had another group dinner and Jenny was still feeling run down, so I had to attend alone. This final dinner was in a big restaurant in the city and accompanied by a floor-show which consisted of fiveor ten-minute dance items which occurred every twenty minutes or so and alternated between ‘traditional’ folk dances performed by couples and belly dances executed by solo performers. Some of the colourful and scantily clad belly dancers also did the more traditionally dressed folk dances and I have never quite understood why belly dancing is so popular in Muslim countries which otherwise insist so much on female dowdiness and modesty. I was quite satisfied with my experience of ancient Turkey – or the province of Asia, as it was known to the Romans – but felt that I had not fully comprehended the contemporary Muslim version. Next morning, after spending the last of our Turkish lire on an airport breakfast and some ‘authentic’ Turkish Delight, we flew – still by Alitalia – back to Italy, but to Milan, rather than Rome. In this second leg of our study tour/honeymoon we would be on our own, travelling on public transport and finding accommodation as best we could. The starting point was in Como, at the southern end of the famous lake which bears its name. As our plane flew into Malpensa airport we saw the snow covered fields from above and then drove through them on the bus which took us into Milan itself. A slow, stop-start local train took us north to Como and we reached the small lakeside part of the town about lunchtime, having picked up an hour on our early morning flight west from Istanbul. We found a three star hotel, had a focaccia for lunch and took a stroll along the lake front. Being mid-winter the town was quiet and the day overcast and cold but almost wind-less. Some of the hotels seemed to be closed for the season and since it was siesta time many of the shops were also shut. The ferries were still running, though, and we took a short cruise up and back the south western fork of the lake. We were the only passengers, as far as I can remember, and our ferry was the only vessel we saw in motion. It was colder and much quieter than Istanbul or even Izmir: definitely the low season.

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Jenny, still in her Driza-bone, in a ferry on a wintry Lake Como.

Jenny quite relished the quiet after the fairly hectic pace of Turkey but I took the train back into Milan to track down the museum of Roman antiquities one day. Another time, we went to Milan together to see Michelangelo’s Last Supper in its recently restored state and setting. Local objectives achieved, we then set off on our proposed, public transport itinerary, down through Italy, heading first of all to Padua, where the remainder of our holiday would very nearly be de-railed. This destination was one of Jenny’s choosing. All I knew about the place was that it had been the home town of St Anthony of Padua, a very popular Franciscan saint and the one pious, old-style Catholics pray to when they’ve lost something they value. Jenny, though, had chosen the town because it was the location of the Scrovegni Chapel, the interior of which is completely decorated with a cycle of frescos by the famous early Renaissance painter Giotto. Jenny was very happy to enjoy the frescos at leisure in the small, peaceful chapel with only a handful of other visitors present. I was also quite impressed, though I must say I would prefer some of the later Renaissance masterpieces if

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I were to hang prints of them in our house. We moved on to visit the cathedral dedicated to St Anthony and took walks through the sights of the picturesque medieval parts of the town. In the late afternoon of our last day in Padua we called in at the station to purchase our tickets for our next destination and on the way back to our hotel the incident took place which almost torpedoed us. I stopped half way home to do some shopping and left Jenny on the bus-stop to complete the rest of the trip alone. As well as being particular about road safety, Jenny was absolutely scrupulous as regards security. I was warmly dressed but with my valuables either in a wallet around my neck or in a small clutch bag – big enough to hold an airport paperback - and equipped with a shoulder strap. Jenny was even more warmly dressed, with an outer layer consisting of an old, full-length Driza-Bone overcoat and a generous leather hand bag the straps of which were just long enough to go around her neck. She normally wore it like that, with her wallet zipped inside and the outer bag hanging in front under her black woollen shawl and held to her chest with her fore-arm. The bus was crowded, though. She had to stand up, holding onto one of the overhead straps and soon found herself surrounded by a bunch of young Italian men who took advantage of the bus’s stops and starts to crowd even closer. As the bus came to the next stop one of the pick-pockets who’d already managed to half-open the zip almost pulled her down the steps and off the bus by her bag straps until she fell to her knees on the kerb. Despite some of the other passengers’ shouts of ‘Bursa! Bursa!’ the bus drove off, the thief finally got hold of the wallet and dashed away leaving Jenny dazed and shaken but only slightly bruised. St Anthony, whose cathedral was directly opposite this bus stop was evidently having a day off! When I arrived back at our hotel, half an hour later, Jenny was – naturally - distressed but not distraught. The thief had got away with her credit card and a small amount of cash but also with both of our passports and our airline tickets. It was the credit card she was worried about – thanks to her security regime we had photocopies of the other documents – and at her urging I rang the emergency number on the back of my Visa card and reported the

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theft. The young woman on the answering service seemed not to know where Padua was but she took Jenny’s name and warned us to report the theft to the local police. We phoned the Pretorio immediately – I smiled to see the relict of the ancient Roman terminology – and were told by a woman who spoke excellent English that we would have to come to the police station and put our report in writing. At the station, the duty sergeant’s English was not nearly so accomplished, but he did provide us with an English-language report form in duplicate and sat us at a desk right there in the vestibule to fill it in. As we bent to the task, I noticed a woman in plain clothes hovering within earshot of our table and guessed that she was the one who had summoned us to the station. I also surmised she was now eavesdropping to see whether we were genuine victims or just a pair of con merchants cooking up a plausible story. The lady must have been satisfied because she soon disappeared and - when we’d finished - the desk sergeant date stamped the two copies of the completed report, gave us one, and filed the other. We would need our copy to continue the trip. And that is what we decided to do. Jenny had regained her self-possession, her fright and distress replaced, now, by steely anger towards the cowardly thieves who had mugged her. She was certainly not going to give them the satisfaction of spoiling our honeymoon. We were fortunate too, that – at that time – we still had separate credit cards and consequently, with my card, plus the photocopies of our passports, our plane tickets and, now, that stamped police report we could stick to our intended itinerary: Ravenna, Arezzo, Sienna and Rome. These destinations had been chosen with the same mixture of historical and artistic objectives as the earlier stops on our trip and - true to her resolve - Jenny thoroughly enjoyed contemplating the famous Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna and the frescoes of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Publico in Sienna. Even in Rome, where we had to spend some time at the Alitalia office being re-issued with tickets and at the Australian embassy getting replacement passports, we still maintained our sight-seeing ambitions and stayed in a conventcum-pensione just outside the walls of the Vatican, where Jenny had stayed on a previous solo visit.

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John with the famous little elephant in the Piazza Della Minerva.

Five: A Honeymoon Tour

These expeditions to secure our passports and airline tickets did curtail our sight see-ing opportunities in Rome to some extent, of course, but Jenny failed to gain access to a very ancient Roman church called Santa Constanza, dating back to the time of the emperor Constantine, more because of an officious and unsympathetic sacristan than due to a real lack of time. We did succeed, though, in tracking down another target that had been mentioned in the book on Rome I’d bought as part of our preparations for the trip. This was the statue of the little elephant with an Egyptian obelisk on its back, designed by Bernini and situated in the Piazza Della Minerva, just behind the Pantheon. On our way there, we passed by a bookshop with a very modern well-lit window and on a shelf, near the door and in among the books on display, was a very nice statue of an elephant, in light coloured wood and only about twice the size of my earlier elephantine acquisitions. Having found and photographed our prey, we returned to the bookshop and asked if the little statue was for sale. The assistant was horrified. The little carving was emphatically not for sale: it was the mascot, the icon, the very trademark of their business! A pity, really. It didn’t have an obelisk on its back but it was a very nice little elephant and all the miniature versions of the Bernini statue, for sale in Roman souvenir shops, looked decidedly cheap and nasty by comparison. We returned to Australia almost empty-handed and - making the eighteen hour trip with only one short stop in Bangkok – somewhat dazed and disoriented. To make matters worse, we soon learned that the robbers had cleaned out Jenny’s credit card to the tune of some $6,000 within half an hour of snatching it. All was not lost, however. We were fully insured and we had followed the correct procedures. Our funds were restored and the new passports we acquired had ten years life expectancy whereas the ones we’d lost were close to their expiry date. The income tax claims we’d made for the study tour/honeymoon were also duly recognized and we started the new school year revived, re-inspired and furnished with quite an array of authentic, up-to-date and thoroughly relevant teaching aids, both historical and artistic.

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Chapter Six: An Extended Study Tour By the year 2000, Jenny had accumulated another ten weeks of long service leave from her job in an eastern suburbs private girls’ school. Since I had only been working as a lay teacher for five years by that time, I had no such ‘bank balance’ to call upon, but I was able to secure leave without pay for the fourth term of that year. By including the January school holidays we were therefore able to plan an almost four month overseas trip and – given the success of the two previous claims – to document and present it as an extended study tour. With lots of additional flights scheduled because Sydney was hosting the Olympic Games that year, we thought we might even manage to secure cheaper airline tickets but, alas, that did not eventuate, though we did score an upgrade to business class for the first leg of our round the world trip, just as far as Los Angeles. The North American three weeks of our study tour was heavier on art centres – galleries and such - than historic sites and we relied more on contacts I’d made during my previous visits to the USA than on pre-arranged hotel bookings. In Los Angeles, for instance, where I had no connections, we visited the new Getty Art Gallery and then flew onto San Francisco, picked up a rental car and had dinner with a lady who’d been in one of my classes at USF some twenty years earlier. Heading north up the West Coast, we stayed overnight with a former Marist colleague who now lives in Eugene, Oregon and reached Seattle after two long days of driving. Although we had both grown up before Australia went metric, this part of the trip reminded us quite forcibly of how much longer it takes to drive a hundred miles than a hundred kilometres, even in very good high-way conditions. In Seattle, we dropped off our American rental car, caught a Trailways bus over the border into Vancouver BC, picked up a Canadian rental car and set off east and up through the Rocky

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Mountains. Another two long days of driving brought us to Calgary and while we found the western side of the Rockies a great deal more arid and treeless than we’d expected the scenery during the remainder of the trip was much more spectacular and varied. We spent two nights in a three star hotel in Calgary, backtracking on the first day there to Lake Louise and the other must-see sights of Banff, then heading north on the third day to Edmonton where we dropped the rental car and joined the Trans Canadian Train, heading for Toronto. Like the lakes and pine forests of Banff, the train with its domed observation car seemed almost familiar to us from the advertising pages of countless National Geographic magazines but although we did spend a couple of hours in the observation dome, most of the two days and two nights of the journey was spent in our twin roomette. It was only at meal times in the dining car that we had much contact or conversation with our fellow travellers, mostly overseas tourists, like ourselves. In Toronto we stayed with my first cousin Pat, who had migrated to Canada as soon as she completed her teacher training in Scotland, about ten years after my family had migrated to Australia. Pat had already visited us in Australia, so she was not just a distant childhood memory, but she was working full time while we were staying with her and we had to ‘do’ the city largely on our own. We also had time to catch up on our laundry, our correspondence and other forms of communication. It was on this trip that I discovered another difference between Jenny and me. Accustomed as I was to solitary and autonomous travel, I hardly ever made or planned to make international phone calls whereas Jenny seemed almost compulsive about keeping in touch with her family, especially her oldest brother and her younger sister. Thanks to our mutual occupation as teachers, we had both been initiated into the mysteries of the internet and in those days before mobile phones really took off, we had established a special hotmail address for this trip. It was early e-mail days yet, though, and we were dependent on Pat’s desk-top PC in this case and on occasional internet cafes thereafter.

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Dinner with cousin Pat in Toronto.

We’d arrived in Toronto late on a Monday night and Pat drove us to the Greyhound bus station on the following Saturday morning. The bus took us back into the USA and to Buffalo where we picked up our third rental car and had a brief stroll in the park adjacent to the famous Niagara Falls. We did not do The Maid of the Mist boat trip though, because we still had to drive on some two hundred miles to Bath, NY where we’d arranged to stay with another former classmate of mine from USF who was now a lawyer with a practice and a young family in this, his small home town. We arrived at Bill’s place about 9.30pm and stayed only the following day, a Sunday, during which our host took us for a drive in the hills and across to the Corningware factory which has a large glass museum within its grounds. Next morning we were off again and heading north east towards Boston, Massachusetts, though we were not aiming to get there in one day since it is a distance of some three hundred miles through unfamiliar territory. We now had some appreciation of the mile/kilometres ratio.

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A long drive through New England in the Fall.

We were aiming for Boston, where I wanted to show Jenny the ‘Freedom Trail’ and the Isabella Gardener gallery, but I had always wanted to visit New England in the fall and this was the first and perhaps my only opportunity to fulfil that ambition. The autumn colours did not disappoint and Jenny got well into the spirit of the thing, taking numerous photos of trees covered in scarlet and gold, white clapboard churches with ornate spires and displays of orange pumpkins, carved to make Halloween lanterns. We arrived at our motel on the western outskirts of Boston by mid afternoon on the Tuesday and drove in as far as a park and ride railway station next day. We ‘did’ the Trail, visited the gallery and went back to our motel by the way we’d come. Next morning we were on the road again heading south: first passing through agricultural areas and small country towns like those we’d seen on Monday and Tuesday; but then into a more built up landscape and bigger towns like Hartford, Waterbury and Danbury, of which we saw just the numbered exit signs leading off the freeway. Our motel was in New Jersey rather than New York City and we arrived there early in the afternoon.

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Jenny and I had both spent time in New York previously so our main objective on this occasion – apart from catching the plane on to Europe – was to meet up with another Marist former colleague of mine who was then principal of Mt St Michael’s Academy in the Bronx. When I rang the school office and told Br Mike’s secretary our address, she assured me he’d be on his way as soon as he finished his class and he did, in fact, arrive less than an hour later. Since we were already west of the Hudson, Br Mike elected to drive us to Liberty State Park and we took pictures of ourselves with the statue of Liberty in the background and of the New York skyline with the World Trade Centre towers still dwarfing the rest of the sky scrapers. Barely a year later, of course, the twin towers were the site – or rather, the target – of the 9/11 catastrophe and I immediately e-mailed Br Mike and Bill, our host in Bath NY, to offer our sympathy at the shock they and their families must be experiencing. We took this photo at dusk in Liberty State Park a scant twelve months before 9/11.

That evening, however, we simply had dinner at an open air restaurant in Hoboken and Br Mike dropped us back at our motel early, to prepare for our departure the following evening for London. Security was already tight in New York. On previous occasions we’d been able to leave luggage in lockers at the Port Authority bus station but now we had to drive it all the way to JFK airport to book it in for the flight: a task which, in New York traffic, took us all morning. We then dropped our rental car off, in the East Village, and did whatever sight-seeing we could squeeze into the afternoon before catching the airport bus from Grand Central station just as darkness fell. It had been a very fleeting visit to the Big Apple and indeed a very flying visit to North America itself. Canada and the USA are both very big countries and we’d travelled literally thousands of miles during our three weeks there. We had achieved all our objectives, though, and looked forward to a somewhat more restful stay in Britain. Our modus operandi in the UK was rather different from what we’d done in America. We did hire a rental car but we stayed in London only long enough to pick it up before heading west to a village in the Cotswolds where Jenny had booked a cottage for a week. For the second week we stayed with another cousin of mine – Pat’s sister, Mary – in Kilmarnock and for the third week Jenny had booked another rental cottage on the Castle Howard estate, near York. In each of these places we were self-catering and did our own grocery shopping. I even purchased and cooked a couple of the meals when we were staying at Mary’s house. And we used these three dwellings as bases for day trips to nearby points of interest. This meant that we still did quite a bit of driving but Britain being a great deal smaller than North America - the only really long journeys were from the Cotswolds up to Kilmarnock and then from York back to London to return the rental car. Just before we left Australia I’d stumbled across a list of all the more substantial sites of Roman Britain and from our cottage in the Cotswolds we were able to visit museums or ruins at Cirencester, Bath, Chedsworth, St Albans, and the Ashmolean

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Museum at Oxford. In Scotland we saw the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University and walked part of Hadrian’s Wall. The Roman Britain ruins at York are mostly buried under nearly two millennia of later development, however, and our sight-seeing forays there were focussed more on ruined medieval abbeys like Rievaulx, Fountains, and Whitby or cathedrals like Durham, Ripon and York Minster. Our day trip to Stratford on Avon was somewhat marred by the parking ticket we received and our time in York was partly restricted by some quite serious flooding of the River Ouse. I certainly felt that I’d fulfilled the study obligations of our tour, nevertheless, and Jenny quite enjoyed our visits to the abbeys and cathedrals and to Stratford, to Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. Quite a busy three weeks, really. We spent a good deal longer in France than we had in either America or Britain – five weeks instead of three - but we adopted the same tactics there as we had in the UK. We rented a studio apartment in the Marais district of Paris for the first week, then picked up a rental car and spent a week in each of four gites, the French equivalent of the English rental cottages – in north western, central and south eastern France. We began to feel we had the process down to a fine art by then. Saturday was the standard changeover day. We would depart early on Saturday morning and head for our next destination, usually some six or seven hours drive away, and did our grocery shopping for the coming week at a local super market either before we reached our new gite, or as soon as we had unpacked. Still catering for ourselves – I did most of the cooking – we then used the cottage as a base for day trips to the local places of interest. There were not so many Roman sites in France as in Britain but we did visit the famous Pont du Gard near Nimes, the well preserved ancient town of Glanum, near St Remy en Provence, where Van Gogh spent time in the asylum and, of course, the Greek and Roman sections of the Louvre in Paris. To fill out this gap, though, Jenny proposed we visit many Romanesque churches, Benedictine abbeys, Gothic Cathedrals and the Chateaux of the

Six: An Extended Study Tour

My lust for the Romans again: the two thousand years old Pont du Gard near Nîmes.

Loire Valley, as well as various regional galleries. Some days she spent drawing the local landscape and on one of those days I did a solo drive, there and back, to the independent Pyrenees Principality of Andorra, thinking to find a Spanish medieval city, sparsely populated and withdrawn from the modern world. What I found was two glossy modern ski resorts linked by a busy highway and each adjacent to huge duty free shopping centres which would dwarf those of even the largest international airport. To maintain my student credentials, I also enrolled in a two week course at Alliance Francaise – at Jenny’s suggestion - just to polish up my schoolboy French. We dropped the French rental car at the Lyons airport and caught the train – using Eurail passes - to Wettingen, a small town just outside Zurich in Switzerland where we stayed for a week with April, an artist friend of Jenny’s, and an Australian born widow who had been married to a Swiss academic. Again we used this base to

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visit Swiss and German points of interest, notably the churches and bibliotheque of St Galen, the cathedral and Roman museum in Cologne and the treasury of the cathedral in Charlemagne’s capital, Aachen. Again, I made a long distance solo journey, by train this time, and to Berlin. The trip ‘up’ took all day even on the German high speed train and all night, coming back on a sleeper; but I was very satisfied with the results this time. I took a guided morning walking tour from the Museum Island back to the Brandenburg Gate and spent most of the afternoon in the Pergamon Museum with its superb collection of antiquities. More brownie points towards my student status. From Wettingen we moved on, still by Eurail pass, to Munich and via Nuremberg to Prague in the Czech Republic. The season had closed in. There was frost on the fields and sometimes snow in the streets and Munich, like Cologne and the other big German cities all had their Christmas markets where people gathered in the evenings to drink warm gluhwein, to buy Christmas decorations and listen to carols sung by student groups, the darkness held at bay by the myriad of neon Christmas lights and decorations. Prague, although by then long free of Russian and communist domination, was much dimmer, almost drab by comparison. Still, the apartment we had rented, just below Prague Castle was larger and better equipped than the studio we’d used in Paris. Another juvenile ambition I’d once conceived was to attend Midnight Mass in St Vitus Cathedral, with its Chapel of St Wenceslaus of carol fame, but we quickly discovered that the Cathedral which is immediately adjacent to the Castle is now simply a museum and no Christmas services were scheduled there. As a consolation prize, we did discover an older church, Our Lady of Victory, in the lower town which did have Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and just happened to be the ‘home’ of the original Infant of Prague. This is a little wax covered wooden statue of the child Jesus, dressed in royal regalia, which has been an object of Catholic devotion since it was first donated to its keepers, the Discalced Carmelites, by the Hapsburg royal family in

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the sixteenth century. I must say that the original looks a good deal more primitive and less saccharine than the multifarious plaster cast replicas and holy card reproductions that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seen over the years. Jenny enjoyed the Czech language Midnight Mass, though, particularly when the priest gave part of the sermon in English. And Prague did have many other attractions, especially the numerous and moderately-priced, short, early evening concerts of classical music, staged in a variety of historical venues. The weather was cold but it did not snow till the morning we were due to leave and Jenny ran down the hill to the Charles bridge to take some photos which turned out so well that the Kodak shop where we had them developed back in Australia asked if they could display them in the window. From Prague we flew via London to Cairo for the Grand Finale of our trip: a conducted tour of Cairo and a Nile cruise from Luxor up to Aswan. I had already travelled this route some twelve years earlier but it was all new to Jenny and even I got a better grip on what we were seeing this time. I was still not converted to the process Jennyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photo of the Charles Bridge shown in the shop window at Rose Bay.

of bargaining or buying souvenirs, however, and stood aside while Jenny bargained for supposedly silk shawls in the Valley of the Kings. Our tour guide added insult to injury by taking us to a much more up-market souvenir shop and Jenny did indulge in buying quite an expensive piece of jewellery. I would go no further than buying a little elephant carved from Lapis Lazuli. I won’t go so far as to say this was the beginning of my conversion to buying souvenirs but it may have been the beginning of my conscious collecting of little elephants. I suppose it was a compromise on the souvenir front. Little elephants are usually cheap and always easy to carry. I don’t know that they actually remind you of the place you bought them but the little Lapis Lazuli carving is an exception to that rule. We flew home to Australia via London and a one night stay in Bangkok and arrived back in Sydney in the middle of January, leaving us just a fortnight to get ready for the new school year. It proved to be quite a significant year: I retired/resigned from teaching half way through and immediately began preparing a submission to undertake a PhD at Sydney University. The students at my most recent school never benefited from the fruits of my study tour, therefore, but hopefully the readers of my doctoral thesis would. Certainly, when the time came for the tax returns, the level of our documentation and my new occupation were such that the quite significant claims for our study tour were accepted without a murmur.

Six: An Extended Study Tour

Chapter Seven: My Conversion to Tourism Jenny retired from teaching about twelve months after I had and - in the six months after her retirement - we managed to downsize from our Californian bungalow in Bellevue Hill to our present abode, a small, two storey terrace house in Paddington. This transition between residences and between full-time teaching and active retirement naturally took some time and energy, but by 2003 we had settled into our new home and into our new routines: I with my doctoral studies, Jenny working on a series of paintings – mainly still lives - which she hoped to have ready to exhibit when I had completed my doctorate. She also hoped to take up travelling again - while we were both still relatively young and mobile – and, as it happened, the outbreak of Asian ’flu that year provided an opportunity. Always one on the lookout for a bargain, Jenny instinctively sensed that China would be anxious to revive its tourist industry after the hiatus caused by the SARS epidemic and would be offering good prices as part of the incentive. Initially, Jenny began by looking at travel agents who specialised in China but her attention was soon drawn to Intrepid Tours, not so much because of the prices as the style of tour they were offering. Intrepid, still at that time a relatively new and Australian-owned company, was advertising tours – of China and other Asian destinations – which were a step up from back-packing and a step down from adventure travel. It was group travel, - in small groups of no more than twelve - where the participants had to manage their own luggage, be up to a certain level of fitness, accepting of travel by local public transport and satisfied with three-star accommodation. The itinerary the company was offering for China was also very promising but it was the insistence on being close to the ordinary people and the local way of life as well as on physical involvement that she found most attractive. We settled on a standard ten-day tour with a few extra days tacked on, from

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mid-September to early October 2003: after the heat of summer and well before the onset of winter. As usual with Jenny’s tours, we had to prepare for our trip by appropriate reading and on this occasion, the book concerned was a whopper: Jonathon D. Spence’s 875 page tome The Search for Modern China. It was quite a recent book, well written but very detailed and even as a full-time student with plenty of control over my time, I struggled to digest it in the weeks before we left. It was much too big to carry with us. New luggage was also required. Intrepid actually suggested backpacks but Jenny and I decided, after looking closely at the itinerary, that we could make do with medium sized cases with wheels and pull-up handles. In the event, most of the other people in our group did elect to bring back packs, but we were quite happy with our decision. Travel insurance and health checks, vaccinations and anti-malaria precautions were also mandatory, especially in the wake of the ’flu epidemic and at the various entry airports we encountered temperature scanning cameras were in operation so it was comforting to know that we were well prepared. This was our first trip with Intrepid – it would not be our last – and we now had to master the company’s routines and modus operandi. We flew to Hong Kong arriving about 10pm local time and booked into a hotel in the downtown area for two nights, to catch our breath. Next day we did our own, mainly pedestrian, tour of the city and noted with some surprise the large gatherings of Filipina women in many open or half-covered public areas, sitting on bamboo mats, doing each others’ hair or finger nails, eating snack food and listening to the radios or tape-decks. A friend who’d lived in Hong Kong for several years told us later that we must have arrived on Thursday which is the traditional maids’ and chauffeurs’ day off. She added that it was the worst day to go driving in the city but since we were pedestrians that didn’t bother us at all and the gatherings of maids seemed curious and ‘colourful’ rather than bothersome or inconvenient. We saw most of the usual tourist highlights and had an early bed, ready for an early start in the morning.

Seven: My Conversion to Tourism

Jenny on the Bund in Shanghai.

From Hong Kong we flew to Shanghai, landing at the very large but still under-used new airport and travelled into the city by bus on the also recently completed (and under-employed) freeway. Despite this very accessible and efficient transfer, the bus then dropped us and our luggage at a small and rather under-equipped bus station where no one seemed to speak English. To add to our dis-orientation, the huge and ugly but apparently famous Oriental Pearl Tower â&#x20AC;&#x201C; which Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never even heard of before - loomed above our heads like a fully assembled space station poised to blast off into orbit. Eventually, a young Irishman with a mop of red hair who must have lived locally and who spoke Chinese, came to our assistance, hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address of our hotel. We knew we were in the right place because as soon as we entered the lobby, the notice board displaying current events had a welcome from Intrepid Tours and announced a first meeting scheduled for that evening. It would be our first of many such gatherings.Â

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At the meeting, we were initiated into the Intrepid routine of mutual introductions and checking of passports, visas and travel insurance: then, off to a nearby restaurant to have our first meal together as a group. We were at full strength – twelve in number – and with a good mixture of backgrounds and ages: a Kiwi couple in their late thirties, an English/Polish couple on their honeymoon trip, several more singles, mainly women but one man and all of English or Australian origins. Jenny and I were the oldest of this particular group but that would not be the case on subsequent Intrepid tours and that was part of the attraction for us. We might now be enlisting in the ranks of the international grey nomads, but we had no intention of mingling only with our own age-cohort or of marching in lock step with them. We felt that we were physically fit enough for the promised itinerary and this first experience of a cross-age group - even with us at the top of the age-range – would serve as our test run. Our first morning was not physically demanding. Our group leader, Eva – a Chinese, part-time law student in her early thirties, whose English was very good – guided us to the Shanghai Art Museum, another recent construction. It housed a very large collection of artefacts, ranging from ceramics to calligraphy, in very spacious, air conditioned and well-lit galleries but like the airport, appeared to be under-patronised. Many of our group apparently made short work of the collection but Jenny had a special interest in the ceramics and we spent the whole morning there. Most of the afternoon was free but we would board the train to Nanjing as a group later and it was here that the advantage of having a local tour leader became obvious. If the modern airport, the freeway and the art museum were under-patronised, the large central railway station was a little old fashioned but very crowded and quite daunting for newcomers, particularly those with no Chinese. With Eva’s help, however, we found the right platform, the right train and the booked seats for our onward journey. She got us off the train in Nanjing about mid-morning and onto a mini-bus reserved just for our group. The traffic outside the station was in absolute gridlock so, again, it was good to have a

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local guide to re-assure us that this was quite normal. Once booked into our hotel, Eva suggested that we find our own lunch, take a stroll around the neighbourhood and she would meet us again in the evening and take us to a restaurant for a group dinner. As darkness fell that night she led us through a kind of covered market area and an adjacent shopping strip to a sort of square or plaza with a canal or creek dividing it in half and a pedestrian bridge, linking the two sides. All the buildings surrounding the square were only two or three storeys high and most were covered in multi-coloured neon lights: not at all what I would have thought a traditional Chinese plaza would look like. The group dinner went well, though, and we found our own way back to the hotel individually through streets that were lively but not busy or crowded. After two days of sight-seeing – some as a group, some individually – we flew on to Xian, the home of the entombed warriors. Xian itself had outgrown its traditional city walls and gates but they were still standing and the old quarter market where Muslim traders had once bought silk and fabrics was also well preserved. The entombed warriors’ site was several kilometres out of town and a very ‘modern’ and fully developed tourist centre with bus parks, car parks and the inevitable souvenir shops; but most of the tourists were still middle-class Chinese. From there we flew to Chongqing - a city of sixteen million (sic) of which I had never previously heard – and there boarded a very three-star river boat to take us on a three day cruise down the Yangtze to the Three Gorges Dam. The dam had been completed just the previous year and was not yet filled to capacity but there were metre placards at intervals along our course showing how deep the water was and how deep it was intended to become. Our boat stopped at several points of interest along the way: some, high up on the escarpment, others at the current waterline and doomed to imminent inundation. In either case, the trinket and souvenir sellers were still hard at work but there was an element of desperation about those working on the lower level. In a gesture of solidarity with those about to lose their homes and businesses, Jenny tried to buy a few miniature glass figurines from one of the pedlars. The girl protested, however,

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The souvenir sellersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; stalls on the lower level whose days are numbered.

that they had to be bought in sets of twelve. They represented the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac and that is how we learned that the elephant is not one of that select group. Pigs and oxen, rats, tigers and even snakes all made the cut, but not elephants. Jenny succumbed to the girlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sales pitch and bought a full set while I mentally absolved myself from guilt at having succumbed back in Xian and bought a little elephant made of ox bone. I had even descended further into tourist mode and bought a miniature of one of the entombed warriors. He was not quite as small as my new elephant but he did fit - fairly easily - into our luggage. So my principals of portability and parsimony had not been entirely abandoned. From Yichang, the city nearest to the dam wall, our group travelled by train all the way north to Beijing, a journey which lasted overnight and took the better part of two half days besides. The long trip too was another endorsement of the Intrepid

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methodology. Our group may not have been the only Europeans on the train, but if not, we were part of no more than five percent of the passenger list which was overwhelmingly Chinese and the train crew, of course, were also local. There was a dining car which we were not booked into and the food available on the carts which were pushed up and down the corridors included some snacks which were recognizable by westerners. They also carried – among other, less recognizable things, bright yellow chicken legs which, it seemed, were to be nibbled as one might nibble a stuffed chicken wing: though with rather less reward, I would have thought. We had boarded the train in late afternoon and saw a bit of the flat, market garden countryside – punctuated by the occasional pagoda-topped hillock – before darkness fell. On Eva’s advice, we had brought some of our own snacks aboard but the food carts did good business for the next hour or so and only after everyone had eaten, did passengers start to circulate and mingle. Since we were in a sleeping carriage, we were mixing with middle class Chinese rather than the ‘common man’ but Jenny quite enjoyed her conversation with a local woman - perhaps a bit younger than herself - who was quite keen to practise her English. I decided to Another souvenir seller at a safer level near the entrance to the Three Gorges.

stay put in our ‘compartment’ and read a book until the curtains were drawn across the front – facing the ‘corridor’ and the lights were switched off. On arriving in the capital, Eva got us booked into our hotel and then took us on a short orientation trip via the metro as far as Tiananmen Square. Standing in the famous square she told us with typical candour that while she would do her best to answer any questions we might have, we visitors almost certainly knew much more about the then not too distant massacre – not her word - than she did. We spent a couple of days sight-seeing in Beijing, either as a group or just the two of us, then travelled by mini-bus up to the nearest section of the Great Wall. Traffic on the arterial roads was quite busy but road construction was even busier. I think the engineers were working on their third or fourth ring road in Beijing when we were there, but at the rate they were working they’re probably up to the sixth or seventh by now. Other big cities, like Rome, Paris and even Melbourne, make do with one! At both the Great Wall and in Beijing there was considerable pressure from pedlars and stall holders to buy souvenirs and The two of us on a section of the Great Wall.

Seven: My Conversion to Tourism

mementoes. At the wall two young local women, quite uninvited, tagged along with Jenny and me as we climbed up to the base of the wall and then for another kilometre or so until we reached the highest of the towers in that section. They then followed all the way back down to where they’d joined us and urged us to buy large glossy photo books and were quite put out when we refused to take the books and offered them only a tip of about $A10 each. We stood firm, though: we had not invited or encouraged them in any way and had received no benefit from their ‘company’. In the larger cities, like Beijing and Shanghai, the pressure was different. The main modern shopping centres were arranged in malls where all the big western brand names for consumer durables, fashion and sporting goods, watches, cameras, computers and mobile phones fairly proclaimed their presence. The prices in these shops were quite comparable with those at home, though, and were no real incentive to buy. The pedlars on street corners, hawking fake Rolex watches or pirated DVD copies of recent film releases, were similarly easy to resist. The real temptation in Beijing came from the specialist markets of which we visited only two: the Silk Market and the Pearl Market. The first of these was not very big – an L-shaped lane perhaps two or three hundred metres long – and it did not particularly specialise in silk. Instead, it stocked a great deal of cut-price big brand clothing and whether these were factory seconds, or cheap imitations or had fallen off the back of the proverbial truck, did not really concern us. Many of the big brands are mass produced in China - to ostensibly foreign classic designs - anyway, so it is all a very grey area! Jenny bought two North Face zip-up ski-jackets for her twin nephews but I made do with a single – albeit silk - Ralph Lauren t-shirt, for personal use. The latter cost me the equivalent of $A10 and I priced the North Face jackets back in Sydney at about three times what Jenny had paid for them in Beijing. The Pearl Market was a very different affair. All under one roof and with at least two storeys, the market consisted of a dozen or perhaps even a score of almost identical stalls, each supervised by an older woman, attended by a younger, female assistant. When

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The final dinner with our first Intrepid group in Beijing.

Jenny decided on the stall she wished to patronise, the selected assistant produced two stools and two bottles of water and the selling/buying process commenced. It was not, here, a matter of bargaining - as in Egypt or Turkey – but of deciding whether Jenny’s nieces and female friends needed bracelets or necklaces and what colour and size of pearls were required. I took no part in the proceedings – it was all obviously secret women’s business – but the assistant took the time to replenish my water supply when the first bottle ran out. Eventually all was concluded to the satisfaction of both parties and I either parted with the travellers cheques or the credit card data and we retreated to our hotel. Like the little elephants – there were no pearl encrusted elephants on offer at the market – the pearls at least took up very little space in our luggage. Our original Intrepid group had concluded and disbanded by this time but we managed to be adopted by another Intrepid group

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which was under strength and with them made another trip up to a different and slightly more distant part of the Great Wall. This brought us back to Beijing on the eve of the Chinese National Day and – just the two of us – made a final trip to Tiananmen Square for the vigil gathering or ceremony or whatever you might call it. There were no fireworks or any ceremony as such, but police in dress uniforms kept the roads clear for a convoy of black limousines to deposit VIPs at the entrance to the Great Hall of the People (into which no ordinary people are allowed) and withdraw. I have since read that the square is designed to accommodate 600,000 people and I am sure that it was filled to capacity that night. I am not sure that we were the only Europeans present but if there were others we certainly formed no more than .05% of the attendance. At lunch time in a cafe next day - a public holiday - while we were waiting to catch the airport bus, a local fellow-diner insisted on ‘shouting’ us to two rounds of Maotai, the national liqueur. The fervent nationalist was obviously headed for an almighty hangover; but it was a touching conclusion to a most eye–opening tour. I wouldn’t say that I was hooked, exactly, but I was certainly impressed.

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Chapter Eight: The Grand Tour When we first discovered Intrepid, the company seemed to be specializing in Asian tours and - having enjoyed their style of travel - we did, in fact, do a combined back-to-back tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia two years after that first trip to China. However, despite Jenny’s efforts to broaden my grasp of Asia, with my background in ancient, medieval and modern European history, I have always been much more interested in Europe than in Asia. Jenny is the one who really wants to travel so - acknowledging my geographical preference – the next major trip we organized was to central and southern Europe. Intrepid had widened their range of itineraries by this time (2006) and we included three or four of their tours in our planning, but we would be away for two whole months and there were weeks, between the tours, when we would be travelling alone, driving a rental car and meeting up with friends and sharing accommodation with them. The trip started very badly. It was not long after a suicide bomber had attempted to bring down an airliner over the Atlantic with some concoction hidden in either his sandshoes or his underwear – I forget which - and most fluids and bottles were banned from our hand luggage. Even after re-packaging them to meet security requirements in Sydney, some of Jenny’s lotions were still confiscated by the security people at Heathrow. The British Airways flight to Budapest was the worst international flight I’ve ever been on, the grumpy female cabin crew practically throwing the plastic wrapped sandwiches and bottled water - which constituted the complimentary ‘food service’- at us. The baggage handlers managed to lose my suitcase when we landed and even after finding our hotel, an exploratory stroll around the city led to the discovery that my credit card wouldn’t work in the local ATMs or, at least, not on Sundays. We had successfully located the hotel that Intrepid had nominated as our starting point but even after our thirty or so hours of travel, I did not sleep very well that night.

Eight: The Grand Tour

From there, however, things only got better. My luggage arrived and when we went on a pedestrian exploration of our immediate environment we found that the credit card did function on weekdays. That night the first group meeting was held and our group leader, Godova, led us to an outdoor restaurant for our first group dinner. Godova was not Hungarian, she was Serbian and she and her mother had escaped the Balkan conflicts to Canada where she had grown up. Her English was quite satisfactory but she was very loyal to her Balkan roots and this lent a distinctly Serbian flavour to this first step on our grand tour. Budapest, itself, was not part of the tour itinerary so Jenny and I patronised the famous Szechenyi baths in the morning and caught the train to Serbia – with the rest of our group – in the early afternoon. It was a three or four hour journey in pleasant sunny weather through mainly open country and I was quite puzzled to see neither fields of wheat nor herds of livestock. How does that part of Europe feed itself? Our first stop in Serbia was the quite modern and prosperous looking town of Novi Sad. It had apparently been targeted during the wars over the break-up of Yugoslavia but showed few signs of it, unless you count a brand new four lane bridge over the Danube, next to the old Petrovaradin fortress: a replacement for an older bridge that had been bombed during the conflict. Belgrade too seemed to have emerged from the wars virtually unscathed. It was only when we reached Sarajevo in neighbouring Bosnia/ Herzegovina that the scars were more visible. The Stari Grad or Old City part of the town, which retains its very Muslim character, was operating seemingly as normal, with souvenir sellers much in evidence; but the high rise apartment buildings on either side of the main boulevard where the tram tracks ran, still showed blast and burn marks and in many places mortar bomb craters in the pavement had been filled with red resin to make a ‘Sarajevo Rose’, a silent but stark memorial to civilian casualties. For a city which had survived the longest siege in modern history – longer than Stalingrad or Leningrad – it seemed to be on its way back to normality. We quite enjoyed our time there, taking a morning swim in the new aquatic centre and a very Vienna Woods sort of country

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walk in the afternoon. As a mark of respect, I even bought another small elephant: this one carved out of pink agate. Travelling on by bus, we made an overnight stop in the rather Spartan accommodation of the Ostrog Serbian Orthodox Monastery before reaching the Adriatic coast at Budva – another town I’d never heard of – in what was then recently independent Montenegro. It was much smaller than Chongqing but it did have a Stari Grad dating back to the times of the Venetian Republic and its post World War II expansion was due to its popularity as a beach resort for wealthy Russians and other central Europeans. Nearby was the large and beautiful Bay of Kotor where our group took an all day cruise which featured more Stari Grads, old churches and stops for swims, one of them in the bay’s own Blue Grotto. Then it was on, again by bus, to the most famous of all the Stari Grads in that region: Dubrovnik, which had also come under artillery fire in the recent conflict. Our Serbian group leader, unlike Eva in The pair of us on a turret high above Dubrovnic’s Stari Grad.

China, was quite confident that she knew more about the siege of Dubrovnik than we did. The pictures we had seen on TV of damage to the old city had been ‘enhanced’ and exaggerated by the locals burning car tyres and rubbish, she asserted. Certainly, there were no signs of shell damage in this Stari Grad although a large bill board near the main gate displayed a map of the town showing hundreds of black triangles and a dozen or so red rectangles ostensibly marking shrapnel and fire damage respectively. Godova dismissed this piece of ‘propaganda’ with a sceptical sniff and toss of her head as we filed past her into the old town. Actually, Dubrovnic was where our first Intrepid trip ended and our next two began. A new group leader appeared, a Canadian girl, and mustered a new group to head up the Adriatic coast as far as Split. From there, another new leader, an Australian girl from Tasmania this time, assembled our third group and conducted us further north, through Trieste and on to Venice. This third group was smaller than the earlier two – only eight of us – and in that group I was the only man but not the oldest participant. On the The pair of us in front of St Mark’s in Venice.

way up the coast - as at Budva and Dubrovnic - we had plenty of opportunities to swim in the clear blue waters of the Adriatic, but the beaches were almost always pebbly. In Split we stayed in a hotel built into the north wall of the very substantial remains of the palace that the Roman emperor Diocletian built for his retirement and even went to Sunday Mass in the chapel built as his mausoleum, seventeen hundred years ago. Passing through Pula we visited the well preserved Colosseum that the earlier emperor Vespasian completed to honour his long time mistress, Antonia Caenis. So Jenny’s taste for physical activity and my interest in ancient history were both well catered for. When our third Intrepid group finished and disbanded in Venice, we began a three-week self-directed tour in Italy where Jenny’s interest in art and architecture became the dominant theme. Our first stop was at Sirmione on Lake Garda, which I had visited solo almost twenty years earlier, and from there we made a day trip to Mantua to see the Renaissance art treasures in the Palazzo Duccale. We then took the train to Genoa and stayed for a few days with my Scottish-Canadian cousin Pat who had found new friends and a pied-a-terre in Christopher Columbus’s home town. We had arranged to pick up a rental car in Genoa and, from there, sallied forth on the auto-strada heading for a villa in Tuscany, a few kilometres outside of Sienna. Astrid and Rosa, two Australian language teacher friends with close European ties, had included us in their group booking for a week. We were the first of the party to arrive and we managed not only to find the place for ourselves but also had time to do some shopping and provisioning in advance. In this way we were able to use the villa as a base for day trips to Sienna, Florence, Volterra and San Giminiano, returning every evening to cook dinner for the assembly, each couple in the group taking it in turns. Badia Amelia, an old abbey converted to a resort and conference centre near the small hill town of San Gemini in Umbria, was our next stop and here we were alone but again in a self-catering situation, still doing our own grocery shopping and cooking, as well as touring the countryside: to Spoleto, Todi and Orvieto.

Eight: The Grand Tour

Jenny having a rest day in Sirmione beside Lake Garda

There were Roman ruins in most of these places but Jenny was just as interested in the old churches some of which – like the cathedral in Orvieto – were very beautiful. Back on the auto-strada we bypassed Rome – which both of us had already visited several times – and headed straight on to Naples airport where we handed back our rental car and caught the shuttle bus direct to Sorrento. Here disaster almost struck. I had made the booking and paid for another self-catering unit in Piano Sorrento – a neighbouring municipality to Sorrento itself – but had failed to record the exact address of the apartment. Despite the best efforts of the tourist bureau, the local bus driver (who spoke no English) and his wife (who did) and of the desk sergeant at Piano Sorrento Pretorio, we simply could not find the place and had to spend our first night in a hotel. This hotel was found for us by Salvatore Ponte Corvo, a local teacher and part-time tourist accommodation agent, whom the police sergeant had enlisted to help us in our hour of need. After our night in the hotel, we were still able to proceed with our planned bus trip down the coast road to Amalfi and up to Ravello. The scenery

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was very beautiful and Ravello was quite peaceful besides; but the roads were very narrow, windy and steep. The buses, too, were seriously over-crowded and if the brakes on the mini-bus coming down from Ravello had failed the forty passengers in the eighteen seater vehicle would all have been mince-meat. By the time we returned to Sorrento, though, Salvatore had found us a new self catering apartment in the local area and we were able to continue with our planned agenda. Perhaps traumatized by my mishandling of the accommodation and/or by the trip down from Ravello, Jenny spent the next two days quietly, sketching the landscape from the flat roof of the house we were staying in. I managed to squeeze in a trip to Capri and on this, my third visit - over a period of eighteen years – finally succeeded in gaining admission to the famous Blue Grotto. The grotto was well up to my expectations – much better than the one Jenny and I had visited in the Bay of Kotor – and I was also pleased to verify why my previous attempts had failed. The entrance to the grotto is so low and so narrow that only canoesized boats can get in and - even then – passengers have to lie on the floor of the canoe. Even small waves would make the entrance quite impassable: as it had been on my previous visits. Breakfast with some of our group at the villa in Tuscany.

After only a three day sojourn in Sorrento, we had to catch the early morning Circumvesuviana commuter train back to Naples before we could board the main line train for our journey south to Messina and the final leg of our trip: an Intrepid tour of Sicily. It was quite a long day – five or six hours – on a well patronised but not over-crowded train, stopping at all the main stations and getting us accustomed once again to the Intrepid style of using public transport. Jenny was particularly intrigued by the fact that when we reached Villa San Giovanni, on the mainland of Italy, our train simply rolled onto the ferry and made the twenty minute crossing to Messina with us still seated in the compartment we’d occupied all the way from Naples. The onward journey from Messina to Catania – where our tour was due to start – took another hour, the train running close and parallel to the coast and reaching our destination at about four o’clock in the afternoon. We had passed through a few showers on the way down and it had obviously rained in Catania within the previous half hour, so I insisted on taking a taxi to our hotel. Jenny would have preferred to walk but compromised by taking the cheapest and most ramshackle cab on the rank. As usual, we were the first of our Intrepid group to arrive. Jenny’s landscape from the roof of our default apartment in Sorrento.

Part of my prescribed preparation to this tour of Sicily had been to read a rather unusual book written by an Australian and combining a short recent history of the Mafia with a travelogueish guide to Sicilian cuisine. I can’t say that this literary combination of such disparate strands actually worked for me, personally, but it was a reasonable introduction to Catania which is an old but not especially attractive town, with a large docks area, like a Mediterranean version of Glasgow or Liverpool. Jenny and I had arrived late on a Saturday afternoon and the following morning we went to Sunday Mass at quite a large old parish church not far from our hotel. The church was on the edge of a large unreclaimed area filled - on that dismal and overcast morning - with stalls for some sort of flea-market and we managed to amuse ourselves there until it was time for the one o’clock first meeting of our new Intrepid group. Our new leader was another Australian girl, this one called Mandy, and the group was full strength with three Australian couples, two American couples and a pair of younger singles. I was no longer the only man in the group, nor the oldest. The other part of my preparation for Sicily had been much earlier. In Year 11 Latin, back in high school, I’d had to read (and translate) a short extract from one of Cicero’s In Verrem speeches and - in my very last years of teaching Ancient History - I’d read (albeit in translation) some more of those speeches. Verres was the Roman ProPraetor or governor of Sicily around 75 BC and – thanks to Cicero’s speeches against him – became a by-word for maladministration and corruption. Syracuse and Agrigento were the first two major stops on our tour and both had featured prominently in Cicero’s indictment of Verres’ depredations. In Syracuse we were able to visit the Archaeological Park and the Ear of Dionysius, the stone quarry used as a prison where some of Verres’ victims had been held before their execution. In Agrigento, we spent a whole morning in the Valley of the Temples, now a World Heritage site, which preserves ruins and the relics of monumental buildings which were ancient long before either Verres or Cicero ever set eyes on them.

Eight: The Grand Tour

From Agrigento we took an early morning train to Palermo where we were to spend just the one night. Arriving at the central station only at 9.30 we fairly galloped (on foot) to our hotel to check in then â&#x20AC;&#x201C; still on foot â&#x20AC;&#x201C; up past the Palermo Cathedral and on to the Palazzo dei Normanni which houses both the Regional Assembly or Parliament and also the Capella Palatina. We arrived at the Palazzo just in time to join a guided tour of the building which, unfortunately, was conducted entirely in Italian. Still, that gave us time to draw breath and prepare for lunch after which we had time to look more closely at the cathedral weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d by-passed on the morning canter. Then we took the bus up to Monreale to see the magnificent Duomo with its glorious mosaics and attached cloister. If the emphasis in Syracuse and Agrigento had been on Classical Greece and Ancient Rome, in Palermo it was much more on the medieval period and its Arab-Norman-Byzantine inheritance. Scampering around all this in the mere nine hours of daylight we had available to us hardly did the place justice and, to make matters worse, it started to rain as darkness fell. But Jenny was very glad to have seen it all the same. Close to the end of the season in Sicily, but Aetna is still smoking.

Next morning we were onto the train early - again - and heading back to Messina, arriving there in time for a hasty lunch in the station cafeteria before catching a bus to our last stop on the tour: Taormina. As you come into the town from the north on the coast road – it’s about halfway between Messina and Catania - it looks quite insignificant, but then the bus turns right and climbs up a steep and winding road – almost as bad as Ravello’s – to the main square of the town and its adjacent, ancient Greek theatre. I’m told that Taormina has been an English tourist destination since the nineteenth century but my introduction to the place put it well into the modern era. D.H. Lawrence had spent some time in Sicily around 1920 and wrote a poem about it called The Snake which I’d read when I was in Year 9 at school. It does not mention Taormina by name but there is a line which reads: On that Sicilian July day, with Aetna smoking... and on the way to our hotel, we passed along the Via David Herbert Lawrence. The main street of the town is less than a kilometre long, lined with restaurants and souvenir shops and on the one level, with shorter, quasi-parallel streets either further up, or down, the slope. I did not find any suitable elephants in the souvenir shops, but on our last morning in Taormina Jenny took my picture in a public park at the far end of the main street with Mt Etna smoking in the background. Our Intrepid group leader finally took us back – again by public bus – to Catania where the tour finished and our group dispersed. Next morning, we flew out from the Catania airport and said goodbye to Sicily ancient, medieval and modern. The Italian domestic flight took us as far as our previous travel hub at Malpensa airport, Milan, but this time – after a few hours wait – we flew on directly towards Australia, though stopping, overnight, at Bangkok. We had learned from previous experience that to do the whole trip in just twenty four or even thirty six hours is just a bit too demanding. We were becoming seasoned travellers if not, yet, hardened tourists.

Eight: The Grand Tour

Chapter Nine: Asian Specialists As I mentioned earlier, when we first encountered Intrepid Tours, they seemed to cater mainly for Asian tours and - my preference for Europe notwithstanding - we became something of Asian specialists ourselves, over the next ten years. Between that initial Intrepid trip to China in 2003 - and after allowing for both the Grand Tour described in the previous chapter and a later (2007) Intrepid tour in Russia – we managed to take Intrepid tours to Viet Nam and Cambodia, India, Cambodia and Laos, and to Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand, this last, in late 2013. Most of these trips were between three and four weeks long and while that is hardly enough time to do justice to China or India, I feel that we have seen all that we need to see of the smaller countries. There are also only a handful of Asian countries now that we have not seen and I have no aspiration in that direction at all. Jenny still has a hankering to see Japan but has become distracted by a new method of touring to which I will return in the next and final chapter, so other Asian destinations are off the agenda for the next few years at least. Viet Nam & Cambodia: Sept - Oct. 2005 After the success of our China tour, we had no hesitation in signing up with Intrepid for two back-to-back tours of Viet Nam and Cambodia. We flew from Sydney to Bangkok and then immediately on to Hanoi arriving just after a rain storm but making it to our hotel safe and dry. The rest of our party arrived in the course of the afternoon and at 6.30 we had our first group meeting after which our tour leader - a very demure and elfin-like Vietnamese young woman - led us through another rain storm to a nearby restaurant for our first group dinner. The restaurant was actually owned by Australians but it employed and trained local staff in both the cooking and the service of the Asian menu. This would become something of a theme for our tour both in Viet Nam and Cambodia. Intrepid was very strong on what it called ‘responsible

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The usual suspects on a cruise in Halong Bay.

and sustainable tourismâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and I suppose it helped soothe some of my first world guilt about travelling in third world (now referred to as Developing Economy) countries.Â On our first morning we were driven in a mini-bus down to Halong Bay where we had a four or five hour cruise among the multitude of pinnacle shaped islands and stayed overnight in a shore-line hotel. We returned to Hanoi next day on the same minibus and collected our luggage from the starting point hotel before catching the train down to Hue, the old capital city. Among the activities there, we were taken as pillion passengers on a squadron of motor bikes, driven by men introduced to us as former Viet Cong dispatch riders, through the paddy fields, the villages and the hill plantations surrounding the city. From Hue we travelled on down by minibus to Hoi An an old trading port city which now specialises in quick delivery tailoring and shoe making. We didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have time to order shoes, but I had a linen jacket made and Jenny a dressy silk skirt for an upcoming wedding. She also celebrated

Nine: Asian Specialists

Our current Intrepid group in the hands of Viet Cong dispatch riders.

her sixtieth birthday at our group dinner that evening in a roof-top restaurant. A short drive took us to Da Nang airport and from there we flew to Ho Chi Minh City, much better known as Saigon.Â It was thirty years since the end of the Viet Nam war but names like Hanoi, Hue, Da Nang and Saigon still sounded familiar to people of our generation. We had found the local people very friendly and eager to sell us their souvenirs. I succumbed, buying another small elephant and Jenny bought a nest of miniature straw hats - like those the peasants wear in the paddy fields - from a woman who was deformed as a result of exposure to Agent Orange. It was only in Saigon, however, that the war became more vividly present with our visit: first, to the War Relics Museum housed in what had been the US Information Service building; then to the complex of tunnels that had once served as a Viet Cong barracks and field hospital, some twenty kilometres out of the city. The tunnels, in particular, made quite an impression and almost demanded respect

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for the fortitude and stoicism of the Viet Cong. It was a somewhat down beat conclusion for a visit which had introduced us to an otherwise bustling, vibrant and beautiful country. Deliberately or not, though, our visit to Cambodia was arranged in almost the opposite order: south to north and the ‘dark side’ to the brighter. A new Intrepid group assembled in Saigon and with a new leader, a young Australian woman who’d been living in SE Asia for several years, we headed south-west by bus to the Mekong Delta. Once over the Australian-built My Thuan Bridge, which crosses one of the main branches of the big river, we turned north–west and reached the Vietnamese border town of Chau Doc in the late afternoon. Next morning, we boarded the nautical equivalent of a minibus – which our group had all to ourselves – and motored up the other main branch of the Mekong for three hours to Phnom Penh. There we visited the usual tourist sites like the Royal Palace and the National Museum – refurbished after the war with Australian money – and the much darker Tuol Sleng – where 14,000 Cambodians were tortured and executed – Embarking on our nautical minibus for a trip up the mighty Mekong.

Getting towards sunset in front of Angkor Wat.

and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek with its mass graves and tower of skulls. We had group dinners in two restaurants run by Non Government Organizations where the food was prepared and served by trainees and were entertained by dancing groups of childrenÂ who were in orphanages or boarding schools to protect them from sex trafficking. This is the dark side of Cambodia. The government is very corrupt and much foreign aid is channelled in through these NGOs, often managed by expatriate westerners. Flying north to Siem Reap we were then exposed to the glories of ancient Cambodia: Angkor Wat and its neighbouring ancient temples and palaces. Our Australian group leader had brought us thus far but to visit the complex of temples we had to buy a three day pass and be assigned a local guide. His English was fluent and easily comprehensible but heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been taught by a London cockney and sounded just like Jamie Oliver. As we wandered along the

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pathways through the larger sites, under his guidance, passing groups of Americans and even English people would do double takes at the sound of the cockney commentary issuing from this obviously Cambodian character. At intervals around these paths and tracks, we would also come upon small groups of physically handicapped musicians whom our local guide explained were maimed survivors of the not too distant troubles. And in the car parks where we left or re-joined our mini-bus there were always gangs of teenage beggars, with very broken English, eager to sell us souvenirs, (second hand) batteries and rolls of film. Even amid the splendour of Angkor Wat, the shadow of the recent past was never far away. I did not buy the usual little elephant on this occasion; but I did purchase a tiny brass image of Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god of fortune and the ‘remover of obstacles’. If any country needed good luck and a lot of obstacles removed, it was Cambodia.

Children’s folk dancing groups were a common feature in IndoChina.

India: Jan-Feb. 2010 India was a very different kettle of fish. Our Intrepid group assembled in Delhi and we took a couple of exploratory trips to slightly unexpected places like the Sydney Opera House-inspired Ba Hai temple and the narrow streets and alleys of Old Delhi, wreathed in tangles of electric and telephone cabling. Then we were off by train to Agra and its Red Fort. From Agra, the rest of our tour of Rajasthan was done on an oldish, boxy but very reliable mini-bus with plenty of room for our party of twelve. We saw a series of palaces that made Buckingham Palace look like a gatekeeper’s cottage; the Taj Mahal, of course, and a temple swarming with rats; streets obstructed by free-ranging sacred cows and forts where a long string of elephants formed a sort of living escalator to the heights. Some of the hotels we stayed in were actually small palaces built and in some cases still partly occupied by local Rajahs. Some days we spent long hours on the bus. On others, we took substantial walks through busy streets, an hour-long camel ride into the Thar Desert near Jaisalmer and a lake cruise round the island palace at Udaipur. Our bus trip terminated in this latter city and we flew from there back to Delhi, while our driver and his assistant took the minibus back to Agra. The spot for this ‘photo opportunity’ is known as Princess Diana’s chair.

Jenny had planned an additional non-Intrepid tour to follow on from the Rajasthan trip so we took an overnight train to Varanasi once our initial group had dispersed. Formerly known as Benares this is the city where the Ganges is considered sacred and a favourite place for pilgrimage and for scattering the ashes of bodies cremated on the riverside ghats. There did not seem to be any particular pilgrimage on at that time but cremations were a daily occurrence and in the evenings there were always half a dozen or more open air shrines side by side on the riverbank where noisy, brightly lit, gaudy and well attended ceremonies were conducted as though in competition. Because it was not a conducted tour we had to find our own way to these spectacles and also cope for ourselves with the traffic clogged streets. Although we had no guide for this trip we did have a driver and in his small four cylinder car we travelled to our subsequent and more distant destinations. The first of these was Khajuraho, home of the temples with the infamous erotic carvings, and we reached it only in mid afternoon after a very early start and a long day on roads which sometimes verged on the dreadful. The Intrepid policy of using public transport wherever possible was intended to immerse us in the local culture but having our own car and driver for this trip provided no insulation whatsoever. Our driver spoke very little English and did not read it at all. The car developed a flat and we had to climb out and wait while he changed to the spare and then consulted with a group of bystanders as to where he could get the puncture fixed. At the next small town we had to get out again and wait on that no manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land between the shop fronts and the road for the repairs to be made: the only westerners in the street and an object of some curiosity to the neighbouring shop workers and casual passersby. That incident and the state of the roads probably explain why we were so late in arriving at Khajuraho. Another long morning in the car brought us to Ochra where we visited a preâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Mughal fort and its attendant cenotaphs but spent the late afternoon by the pool in our very fancy and half empty hotel. Yet another long morning - over more very bad roads - brought us

Nine: Asian Specialists

Up by elephant escalator to the Amber Fort at Jaipur.

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to Sanchi where ancient Buddhist stupas dating back to the third century BC are preserved in a very well presented parkland setting. Jenny was very glad to have seen them and I was happy too; but although there were more than a few well dressed family and youth groups taking their Sunday afternoon stroll, we were almost the only Europeans in the park and several people stopped us to ask whether we would be photographed beside them. There was no suitable accommodation in the township either and our driver had to take us another three hours further on to find a hotel for the night in Bhopal. The drive to Agra took all of the next day but the hotel we found there was well placed and the following morning we had time to catch up on a few of the monumental buildings we’d missed on our earlier visit before heading back to Delhi and the plane home. India - as we’d found on both our Intrepid tour and this followup car trip – is a very big place and Delhi is a very big city. It was here - as we circled round and round in the evening rush hour traffic - that we discovered our driver could not read English. After at least two circuits of one of the major ring roads, as we crawled up to a set of traffic lights, a bus clearly marked ‘Airport’ turned left while our driver turned right to commence another fruitless Sunrise on the Ganges at Varanasi (formerly Benares).

and stop-start circuit. Our plane did not leave until 10pm but it was with some relief that we finally made the correct turn and headed in the right direction. Even then, as we sped along now at 70kph I had to yell at him to take the International turn-off, not the Domestic one and we arrived with barely two hours to spare. In the previous three weeks - both by bus and by car we had travelled literally thousands of kilometres and seen a great deal of the country side. We had shared those roads with gaudy over-decorated Tatta trucks, buses, and overloaded tractors and also with elephants, camels and donkeys. I’d bought my souvenir elephant – a slightly bigger and more ornate version than my earlier acquisitions, but still quite portable – but felt really that I’d seen enough of India. Jenny thinks there are some bits of south India we should still see but I’ve seen Tamil Nadu and I don’t think we have ‘world enough, or time’ for that. Cambodia and Laos: Dec-Jan. 2011 Given that our first impression of Cambodia had been so ambivalent, it is probably necessary to explain this subsequent visit, only five years after the first. Barbara, one of my nieces who runs a backpacker hostel and cafe in Phnom Penh called the Lazy Gecko invited us to attend her wedding to be held on the beach of a resort near Kampot which she had hired for the occasion. It would have been churlish to decline. Apart from family members, most of the western guests at the wedding were either employed by NGOs in and around Phnom Penh or returning backpackers who had passed through the Lazy Gecko in recent years. From them, we learned more about the dark side of Cambodia: of policemen and other government employees who sign on for office work in the morning then change into street wear and spend the rest of the day touting for fares as tuk-tuk and taxi drivers. Under Barbara’s management, though, the Lazy Gecko sponsors a primary school for street children and employs twenty or so local women all of whom attended the wedding, dressed in western-style evening dresses and accompanied by their husbands or boyfriends. It was quite a big wedding!

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In our wedding finery at Kampot in Cambodia.

Nine: Asian Specialists

Jenny and I left Kampot the morning after the reception and flew from Phnom Penh to Vientiane to begin a short unescorted tour of Laos, though one that involved just the two of us, not the usual small group. We arrived late afternoon, were met at the airport, taken to our hotel in the middle of the city and left to our own devices till the next day. In the late afternoon light and from our third floor window Vientiane looked rather drab but my memory may have been unduly influenced by several hammer and sickle flags we could see hanging from various institutionallooking buildings. We walked a kilometre or so back down the street from our hotel and eventually settled on a cafe-like restaurant which was busy but not crowded and the streets gave much the same impression. The following morning, our guide took us to the National Museum, the Pha That Luang (or National Stupa) and the Victory Gate before dropping us at a large, fairly modern shopping mall, where we found our own lunch in the food hall section. In the afternoon, we walked around some of the wats and temples weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d missed in the morning then watched sunset on the Mekong before finding a very quiet, French-style restaurant for dinner. Having thus largely exhausted the tourist potential of Vientiane, we then flew onto Luang Prabang, the former Royal Capital and the major tourist drawcard for Laos. This city is quite large and modern but the old section - for which the tourists mainly head - is a peninsula formed where the River Nam Khan flows at an acute angle into the Mekong. This area is small enough to walk around in a morning or an afternoon and it is dotted with wats, craft centres, the former Royal Palace - now a museum - and overlooked by a steep and rather battleship-shaped hill crowned with yet another golden stupa called That Chomsi. Most of the wats seemed to have monastic schools for boys attached to them and one of the activities in which tourists are invited to participate is to get up early and take food along to the roadside when the lines of saffron robed monks do their morning begging run. Jenny and I joined in this as well as the other â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;religiousâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;/cultural visits to the larger wats and more advanced craft centres. We also took a hire car ride out to the Kuang Si Waterfalls Park which houses a Black Bear

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Back on the mighty Mekong, in Laos this time.

rescue shelter near the entrance; and a boat ride up the Mekong to a restaurant looking down over the river and backed up by a village where elephant rides are available. We didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t actually take an elephant ride on this occasion, but we did hand feed one some bananas, while she was in recovery mode.Â The whole of that peninsula area had a certain feel of authenticity: particularly around the vegetable, fish and meat market which was obviously - but not exclusively - patronised by the locals. There was a strong tourist overlay, nevertheless, especially in an area fairly thickly populated with French-style restaurants, where the menus certainly featured local produce but often prepared and presented as French cuisine. There was also a section of the central road - perhaps two or three hundred metres long - through this quarter, which was closed off each night and converted to a night

Nine: Asian Specialists

market devoted entirely to selling cheap souvenirs. On our last night in Luang Prabang, walking back from a performance of the traditional epic ballet in the theatre of the former Royal Palace, we passed through this market and I bought the obligatory elephant. Jenny, who’d already made purchases at three of the more serious craft and fabric centres, contented herself with several pseudo-silk scarves of dubious authenticity. Next day we flew directly back to Bangkok – bypassing Vietiane – and from there back to Sydney. It had been the shortest of our Asian excursions – twelve days, including travelling time – but quite satisfactory. Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand: Nov-Dec 2013 Oddly enough, our most recent foray into Asia was also triggered by a wedding. A close school friend of Jenny’s twin nephews, Hugh and George, married a Burmese girl from a wealthy Rangoon family and involved the twins and their mother in the wedding, which was celebrated both in Sydney and Yangon (as Rangoon is now known). The twins were even taken to Myanmar for the second half of the celebration and came back to Australia with a slideshow of photographs and brimful of enthusiasm. The wedding had taken place just as Myanmar was beginning to emerge from its military dictatorship and trying to invite foreign tourists and investment capital. With her established interest in Asia, Jenny’s appetite was whetted by the twins’ photos and enthusiasm and further prompted by the bargain prices being offered to encourage visitors. We (i.e. mainly she) decided on a fifteen day Intrepid tour of Myanmar, followed by another, shorter, Intrepid tour of Thailand. As mentioned previously, I had already spent some time in Thailand but Jenny had only passed through the airport a few times and the tour selected was heading for Chang Mai in the north of the country where I had never been. As a gesture to my preferences (and her own comfort) she also researched the climate conditions and opted for a November-December visit when the weather would be at its least trying. We flew to Yangon via Bangkok and landed there after dark passing the huge, gold-leaf encrusted Shwedagon Pagoda on the

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flight path in. Our talkative taxi driverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s command of English was fluent if not entirely comprehensible but he delivered us safely to our hotel after an hour long drive through moderate traffic mercifully free of motor-bikes. Apparently one of the resident Generals had taken a dislike to motor bikes and banned them from the city, making Yangon virtually unique among the Asian cities we had visited. Such are the uses of dictatorship! Next morning, we scrambled to scrape together a breakfast in the badly organized buffet dining room, took some advice from an Intrepid group which had just completed the tour we were about to undertake and did our own walking tour of the downtown area of Yangon. In the evening, our new Intrepid group had its first meeting and after another day of guided sightseeing in the city we caught an early plane north to our first major destination. Bagan was the capital of the first united kingdom in this region and between the ninth and thirteenth centuries AD became a centre of administration and of pilgrimage with more than four thousand (sic) monasteries and temples being built during its flourishing era, on the relatively confined (13 x 8km) Plain of Bagan. It is also a A few of the temples on the Plain of Bagan, Myanmar.

region of high seismic activity and the last serious earthquake – in 1975 – did so much damage that the Generals embarked on a large-scale restoration program to make the place eligible for World Heritage listing. They did such an insensitive and slipshod job of the renovation that the heritage listing was denied but the tourists came nevertheless. The whole site is certainly spectacular and tourist facilities are expanding rapidly, if not quite rapidly enough, so we spent quite an enjoyable three days sightseeing with the aid of push bikes, electric bikes and horse and cart rides. Jenny managed to do some drawings of some of the smaller temples and the only time the presence of other tourists caused a problem was at the sunset gatherings when considerable crowds flock to some of the higher temples to watch the sun set behind the plain, throwing the myriad domes and spires into high relief. From Bagan we went up the Irrawaddy River by local boat for a day and a half to Mandalay. The river is quite wide, very muddy, it does not carry a lot of traffic – more like the Mekong than the Yangtze – and the shoreline on either bank was flat for most of the voyage. The boat was quite basic too – we slept on rubber mattresses on the open deck covered only with mosquito nets – but adequate for the purpose and it was a pleasant enough trip. Our hotel in Mandalay was also reasonably modern and air conditioned. The activities included in our tour were varied but relaxed and we travelled happily on by bus to Kalaw a hill town which in the days of the British Raj had served the same purpose as India’s more famous Simla: shielding the memsahibs and their children from the raging summer heat. Next came Pindaya with its limestone caves chock full with thousands (sic) of Buddhas and onto the huge Inle Lake with its floating farms and gardens and its lakeside villages, markets and temple complexes. From Heho airport – an hour and a half’s bus-ride from Inle – we flew back to Yangon and our Intrepid group again dispersed. Jenny and I had been invited to dinner at the home of our nephews’ school friend’s bride’s family so we stayed an extra night and did not fly back to Bangkok till the following morning.

A Hoard of Elephants

Another childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s folk dance group, this time at a home stay in Thailand.

Thailand and the Intrepid trip we now undertook there provided a striking contrast to our Burma experience. Thailand had been on the road to industrialization a lot longer than Myanmar and its tourist industry was much more highly developed. Our Burmese visits and activities had been many and varied and felt close to the local reality but the tourist infrastructure delivering that experience was, at times, quite threadbare. In Thailand, on the other hand, while many of the experiences were equally authentic â&#x20AC;&#x201C; bike rides around the Sukothai National Park, home-stays in a family compound with bike rides through the paddy fields and folk dances from the children of the household â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the infrastructure was much more streamlined and up-to-date. Ironically, though, just as Myanmar appeared to be emerging albeit very tentatively from the dictatorship of the Generals, Thailand was on the verge of slipping back under military control. Parts of the city centre in Bangkok were occupied by protestors from the day we arrived

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in Thailand till the day we left. Tourist life seemed to go on as normal â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we only had to allow an extra half hour for the taxi ride to the airport â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but within a few months of our arrival back in Sydney the protests were put down, the constitution suspended and an army junta took control. Jenny and I may have become Asian specialists as far as tourism is concerned - able to compare and contrast urban and inter-city transport, agricultural and financial systems â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but it seems we are no closer to understanding the political systems which prevail. In none of the Asian countries we have visited have we felt ourselves to be under close scrutiny nor have we been conscious of any serious restrictions on our freedom of movement. The one mile square Mandalay Palace compound, in the centre of the city, may be off-limits to foreigners - apart from the traffic loop that takes you into the cultural museum within - but it is much less threatening than Taol Selong or the Killing Fields of Cambodia. I Yet another Intrepid group at Sukothai National Park, Thailand.

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felt no compunction about buying a little wooden elephant â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this one coated in gold leaf â&#x20AC;&#x201C; at one of the workshops we visited in Mandalay. Nor did I hope to attain a balanced position between the red shirts and the yellow shirts in Thailand before buying another little elephant in Chiang Mai. They both fitted easily into my luggage and they both sit comfortably on our mantle-piece shelf, along with the rest of the hoard.

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Chapter Ten: The Last Elephant? Although Jenny had an enormous appetite for Asian travel, she had also nursed a long-held ambition to visit Europe in the Spring. As a full time school teacher, earlier in life, her only opportunities for an overseas stay long enough to justify the expense of the airfare had come during the long Australian Summer vacation which, of course, is mid-Winter in Europe. Even after our retirement, the return airfare to Europe is still very considerable and the cost of accommodation cannot be lightly dismissed either, even when frequenting Intrepid-organized three-star hotels. To overcome this latter drawback, Jenny gave serious consideration to renting out our home in Paddington but was conscious that it needed a substantial refurbishment to make it a little more marketable. Nothing daunted, she then commissioned and site-supervised a significant renovation which left us with a sparkling new bathroom and laundry, a built-in staircase to the attic (instead of the pull down ladder it replaced) and a wholesale re-paint of the house, inside and out. This was quite a costly exercise and took up about four or five months in 2012, so we did not do any overseas travel at all that year. By the end of the exercise, though, we had a house that was much more convenient and comfortable for us to live in and one that was much more presentable to potential renters. The trouble with renting, however, is what to do with your furniture: do you put it into storage â&#x20AC;&#x201C; which is expensive and inconvenient for rentals of less than six months â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or put all your trust in the decency and common sense of the renter? After trawling through the internet for potential overseas renters, Jenny stumbled across a strategy which very neatly solved this dilemma: house swapping! Following the recommendation of our friend, Astrid, she signed on â&#x20AC;&#x201C; for a very moderate cost - to a website called HomeForExchange which allowed her to set up a webpage

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with photos and details of our house and our personal situation and nominating the countries and cities where we would be interested in swapping house, fully furnished (in both cases). No money changes hands and the two houses need not be directly comparable in value but when the swap is made, the swapees have the security of knowing that their own property is in the hands of people whose property they are currently occupying. By signing on to the website, Jenny gained access to all the other web pages of established members and with these as a model and guidelines from the website manager, she created and ‘put up’ our web page by November of 2013, before we departed on the trip to Burma and Thailand described in the previous chapter. Even before we’d left on that Asian trip, we’d had several responses and enquiries about possible exchanges. By the time we returned, though, we had a positive stream of them. In house swapping – as in real estate generally - the secret of success is ‘Location, Location, Location’ and our house is ideally located for ‘doing’ Sydney: twenty minutes by taxi from the airport, twenty minutes by bus to Circular Quay or Bondi Beach, twenty minutes walk to Rushcutters Bay or Central Station. The only drawback to the system, as far as we were concerned, was that most of the enquirers wanted to come to Sydney in our Summer time – which only replicated Jenny’s original problem. Within the existing rules of the website it was possible to arrange non-simultaneous swaps and this was an avenue we would eventually both explore and exploit. In the meantime, though, Jenny’s attention was caught by an enquiry from a couple in London who were interested in doing a three week simultaneous swap to include the (English) Easter school holidays. They had a primary school aged daughter, called Leila, and wanted to bring her with them, without disrupting her schoolwork too much. This would become our first swap. As I mentioned earlier, the webpage you create had space for a personal profile as well as a description of the house in question and Jenny had described us as a retired couple with artistic and literary leanings. The couple we were negotiating with, Lucy and

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Aaron, were both still in the workforce and employed at the famous Kew Gardens: she as a botanic artist, he as a botanist. The artistic/ academic link was a confidence builder and the little girl hardly constituted a problem. Although we normally operate with only one bedroom, a second can be organized and furnished quite easily. Jenny continued the negotiations with Lucy via the internet, which climaxed with a Skype video-link conversation just a fortnight before the departure dates and also handled all of our air bookings, flying via Korean Airlines. This left me with the responsibility only of sketching some sort of list of activities and destinations we might consider. I booked a Good Friday performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall and lined up two sets of London Passes which provide pre-paid transport and ‘free’ or reduced entry to a large number of significant tourist venues. My task was somewhat simplified by Lucy and Aaron’s promise of their free Family Pass into the Kew Gardens and Jenny’s determination to spend a lot of time there, doing landscape painting and drawings. She would be getting her Spring in Europe with bells on! The only other preparation required – and one that Jenny took very seriously – was to leave the house spotlessly clean in the expectation that it would be ‘left’ in the state in which it was ‘found’. Again, Jenny took the lead in this: cleaning the windows, tidying the cupboards and drawers, ensuring there would be enough clean bed linen and towels, micro cleaning the bathroom etc. I did, however, help by doing the vacuuming and high-dusting, defrosting the fridge, cleaning the oven and pressure hosing the pavers in the back garden. I don’t suppose it was quite like the daily maintenance required in an up-market Bed & Breakfast place; but with Jenny’s very exacting standards, it must have come reasonably close. She had also prepared a very detailed House Handbook, explaining how the locks and other facilities such as the stove, heaters and washing machine worked and including a local shopping and transport guide and pamphlets advertising what would be currently happening while our ‘swapees’ were in Sydney. She even left a vase of fresh flowers, a ‘Welcome to Sydney’ card which we had both signed and a packet of Easter Bunnies and Easter Eggs for Leila.

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Partly because of the time difference and partly because of their commitments in London, we flew out of Sydney a full two days before Lucy and Aaron left Heathrow and our long flight was punctuated by an overnight hotel stay at Incheon. We flew on from Korea mid-morning local time and arrived in London at about 4pm on the day our swapees had left but – following the directions they’d sent us – we were able to find their apartment without difficulty. Kew is well to the west of central London – like the airport – and we were able to reach it with only two simple changes of train on the Underground network. As expected, their maisonette was much smaller than our terrace house, but it was more than adequate for our needs and lay within easy walking distance of both the station and two quite satisfactory shopping centres. All we had to do now was enjoy ourselves and enjoy London! Also as expected, there was enough food in the fridge and the cupboards to provide us with an adequate evening meal and breakfast, after which I walked to the nearby Marks & Spencer supermarket and bought some provisions for the next few days. That is the glory of house swapping. You are living in the practical equivalent of your own home. You can do your own shopping, cooking and laundry and – apart from a bigger budget for sightseeing and such –you can live as cheaply as you would at home. By the time I returned with the shopping, Jenny was up and breakfasted and ready to go. We threaded our way through the two or three blocks down to the south bank of the Thames and took an hour’s walk along the tow path, feeling quite at home among the dog-walkers, joggers and bike riders on this cool but sunny April morning. My first new ‘learning’ from this experience was that the Thames is tidal well up past Kew and that the difference between low and high tide is some five to seven metres, much larger than Sydney Harbour’s one and a half metres! Some of the larger barges and workboats on the other bank of the river were sitting on damp mud , held upright only by their mooring ropes and quite immobilized until the tide should return. After lunch, we walked to the world famous Gardens and used Aaron’s free Family Pass for the first time. Just as well we had it: adult admission costs about $A20 per day and Jenny intended to

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Startling evidence of the tidal difference on the Thames at Kew.

spend several days drawing there in the course of the subseqent three weeks. Next day we ventured by train into central London – a journey that takes perhaps thirty or forty minutes –and picked up the London Passes that I had ordered on-line from Australia. They were already paid for but we now had to specify the actual dates on which we intended to use them. Fortunately, for reasons which I will shortly explain, we had decided to buy two pairs of three day passes and elected to use the first pair in this first week of our stay and leave the second pair for the middle of our second week. Arrangements made, we then walked over to Trafalgar Square and on down through Whitehall to Big Ben, then past Westminster Abbey and up Birdcage Walk as far as Buckingham Palace. It was still only early April, surely the earliest weeks of the Spring ‘shoulder’ season, but crowds were everywhere: platoons of English primary school children; battalions of French and Italian secondary students and smaller parties of mature age Asians thrown in for good measure. Single decker coaches in a variety of colours roared past almost in convoy and the red double London

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Red London Buses, circling the city like merry-go-round horses.

buses circled the city like the carved animals on a merry-go-round. Even as a veteran of Summer seasons in Rome, Paris and San Francisco it struck me that I had never experienced a city that had so thoroughly sold its soul to the tourist trade and I wondered what High Season in London must feel like. The reason for self-congratulation on the choice of the two shorter London Passes was that the three days we’d nominated had to be taken consecutively so in order to get the full benefit of the travel pass and the ‘free’ entry to the various attractions you had to set yourself quite a cracking pace. A cruise down the Thames to Greenwich and the National Maritime Museum was an all day excursion, for instance, and so was the return train trip to Windsor with a tour of the castle. Even fitting in two or three venues closer to central London, like Westminster Abbey and, say, Kensington Palace, took careful planning. Three consecutive days of this sort of pressure was quite enough for a holiday program and Jenny would take a day to un-wind, drawing and sketching in Kew

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Gardens, whereas I took a cruise up the Thames (rather than down) and dipped into Three Men in a Boat while doing so. If this sounds like grudging or faint praise of the London Passes, I should add that most of the places we visited were well worth the investment of time and money and Hampton Court, in particular, constituted a very interesting full day’s entertainment. I also organised a separate day-trip down to Canterbury Cathedral in our third week and – while very enjoyable – it probably worked out a bit more expensive than a comparable jaunt on the London Pass. Fresh off the Intrepid-style regime of organised daily activities, we did not find this new style of self-directed sight seeing too demanding in the short term, especially since we returned each night to our ‘own’ temporary home and I could cook the evening meal and relax watching the local TV. This, incidentally, was another of my new ‘learnings’. Although we had often depended on BBC TV news in many of our hotels – both in Asia and in Europe – the BBC evening news in London itself was disappointingly poor. To my mind, the ABC and SBS news programs give a much better coverage of both international and local stories than the highly Jenny getting ready to record Kew Gardens in pencil and paint.

vaunted ‘Beeb”. Even the famous broadsheet London dailies were rather underwhelming and I was glad that Jenny had brought along her recently acquired I-pad. Since its transformation to the tabloid format, the Sydney Morning Herald is no longer the paper it once was, but the digital version appearing punctually on the I-pad every morning – still kept us as up-to-date on international news as thoroughly as the London dailies and, of course, also fully in touch with the Australian scene. This first experience of house swapping was apparently proving successful, but it was still something of a trial run or experiment, nevertheless. When Jenny had first considered renting out our house to subsidise holidays in Europe she’d had in mind longer stays of three or even six months. This Kew swap was due to last for just over three weeks and although our interim domestic arrangements appeared to be fully adequate and our access to galleries, museums, theatres, palaces and famous gardens was all that one could hope for, it was not quite like normal living. In our retirement, Jenny and I share the domestic chores and - in the remaining time – she does her art work and some gardening, while I do a lot of reading Canterbury and its cathedral: a comfortable day’s train trip from London.

Ten: The Last Elephant

and a bit of writing, some of it publishable. We had both brought a certain amount of reading material and Jenny had also brought some of her art equipment which she was now deploying in Kew Gardens and elsewhere. I, on the other hand, could do no sustained writing without my trusty PC and the prospect of writing freehand and transcribing it onto my computer back home simply did not appeal. Being a tourist all day, every day is just too exhausting and there are limits to the time you can spend reading, especially in exotic surroundings. If we were to negotiate further and longer overseas house swaps we would have to find some solution to this technical version of writer’s block. All in all, though, this first swap was a resounding success. The weather was kind to us and we saw almost everything in and around London we could have hoped to see in three weeks. Crowds were a bit of a problem in places like the National Gallery and the British Museum but we did have the luxury of being able to make repeat visits to these places and to browse in their souvenir shops. Jenny bought mainly small items to give as presents to friends back in Australia, but I made do with postcards and bought only a few tiny ‘toys’ as mementos. Jenny’s favourite part of the British Museum is the Elgin Marbles; but my favourite is the Roman/ Anglo Saxon section. I bought a coppery looking figurine of a Roman centurion and a thimble-sized model of the helmet and face mask from the Sutton Hoo treasure. I also bought a tiny bronze elephant, the latest and perhaps the last addition to my hoard. Elephants are not as thick on the ground in Britain as they are, say, in Thailand or India, but it is recorded that the Emperor Claudius brought a troop of them to Britannia when he made his triumphal arrival there after the successful Roman invasion of 43 AD. That is why these little bronze elephants are on sale in the British Museum and my interest in travel has always been to do with the history of the places we visit. Lucy, Aaron and Leila arrived back at their home in Kew early on the morning of the day we were due to fly out, in fact, the little girl changed into her uniform and set off for school as soon as she

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came in the door. They were all very happy with their experience in Australia and Aaron took Jenny and me for a tour of the onsite office/laboratory/library complex where he works. After that, we had lunch in one of the restaurants in the Gardens and a final stroll through some of the parts that Jenny particularly liked. Aaron came back from work in time to drive us to Heathrow and we flew out in the early evening, arriving at Incheon about midday, local time. On the way over to the UK, the overnight hotel stay had been part of the ticket, but - on this return trip – Jenny had had to arrange the twenty four hour stopover for us. We reached our hotel in downtown Seoul – not out at Incheon – in the late afternoon and quickly found a wide range of brightly lit restaurants where we could have dinner within easy strolling distance. Since we had until late afternoon of the following day to resume our flight, we organised a morning’s escorted tour of the city and were very happy with the experience. At the very least, it lent some substance to the Korean stamps which now joined the array of other Asian stamps in our well-filled passports. Back in Sydney, we found the house as neat and tidy as we’d left it. There was no packet of Anzac biscuits to welcome us home – that annual observance had passed just a few days earlier – but Leila had left us a hand written thank you note, folded it into an origami swan and placed it on the mantle-piece, in line with my array of elephants: a nice touch. There was not much snail-mail to catch up on and Jenny’s I- pad had kept us up to date with our e-mail correspondence. Among the latter was a significant number of inquiries about house-swaps from people in Britain, Europe and the USA. Buoyed by our recent success, Jenny soon began sifting and sorting through these applications and I could see that our travels were about to enter a new phase. If our days – prior to retirement – of study tours had constituted Phase I and the Intrepidstyle trips in Asia and elsewhere formed Phase II then the Kewswap experiment had surely marked either the end of that phase or the start of Phase III. As I conclude this final chapter, we have already hosted two non-simultaneous swaps with a family from Berlin and a retired couple from Paris. We are firmly booked to undertake a simultaneous swap with a widower in Washington DC

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for the whole of January 2015 and a two month swap in Western Europe for April and May, which will include stays in Berlin and Paris as detailed above. Jenny will get another Spring in Europe with even more bells on! The little brass figure of Claudiusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s elephant may be the last of his line; but he certainly does not mark the end of this story, which is obviously...to be continued.

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A Hoard of Elephants – The Abbreviated Travel Log of an Accidental Tourist

A Hoard of Elephants The Abbreviated Travel Log of an Accidental Tourist

John Braniff