AN AFRICANOVERLAND TRIP WORLDWIDE 2005
INCLUDED ISSUE #05$6.95 >GST
SEE INSIDE FOR DETAILS TO SUBSCRIBE AND A CHANCE TO WIN A SAFARI
SPEAFR CIA IC L IN A SID E
TRAVEL CULTURE
TEST YOUR FAITH MALAYSIA’S THAIPASAM FESTIVAL THAI CAVING EXPLORE THE HIDDEN WORLD
FULL MOON PARTIES
+
OF THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE THE BEATLES PILGRIMAGE TO INDIA FASHION PHOTO TIPS FOOD FANTASTIC DEALS
OUR GUIDE TO TRIPPING AROUND THE WORLD
EXCLUSIVE:
SHINE DIRECTOR SCOTT HICK’S WORLD: WHY BURMA IS THE NEXT FILM HOT SPOT
EXPLORE KENYA + MOROCCO + ETHIOPIA + MOZAMBIQUE + SOUTHERN AFRICA
,000+ WORTHOF TRIPS 25 +TRAVEL GEAR TOBE WON
$
*
*GUARANTEED TO GET YOU TRAVELLING!
WINNERS OF
SNAP UP THE WORLD COMPETITION
get informed!
#16 get lost! ISSUE #05
get in the know! 50,000 Hindus make the procession up the 272 steps of the Batu Caves Temple.
SELFMUTILATION
text + images: ed waller destination: malaysia
EXfaith TREME
Ed Waller watches Ashok the old Hindu smear a thumbful of ash on to a passing child’s forehead, smiled at me benignly and adopted a tone I imagine he uses when telling his grandchildren of the great Hindu sagas. “Shiva gave his sons a challenge,” he intoned. “The first to encircle the world would be blessed with the fruit of wisdom.” get in the know! Some Western medical authorities believe that the white ash smeared over the body helps to numb the pain of the piercings.
ISSUE #05 get lost! #17
get informed!
T
HE OLD MAN CLEARED HIS THROAT AND glanced back at the 50,000-strong nocturnal procession escorting the statue of Shiva’s son, Lord Muraga, to Kuala Lumpur’s Batu Caves. There a million devotees would celebrate Thaipusam, a stomach-churning orgy of self-mutilation, to prove their devotion. “Off Muraga went, flying east on the back of his giant peacock,” Ashok resumed. “Ganesh, however, merely put his four hands together and walked a circle around his father: Shiva was the world.” Ashok stretched his tale of how rejected Murgara then became a hermit to fill the long walk, with embellishments and rambling deviations that always ended with “this is a historical fact, as certain as the birth of Christ”. So it was easy to miss the slow dawn and the fact that KL’s Chinatown had turned into broad highways lined with residential blocks, ugly in the dim morning light. The drumming resumed as Batu’s jagged ochre cliffs poked through the flat concrete suburbia, a somewhat mundane setting for a sacred shrine. By the river at the foot of the caves everybody was getting their heads shaved in earnest, emulating their tempestuous god. Long lines of penitent Hindus queued up at makeshift barber’s stalls, where cut-throat razors danced over bowed heads. Nobody was exempt and soon my own locks were blowing in little circles on the ground. One by one, the devotees began fulfilling their vows and saffron-clad saddhus blessed them by ringing a bell and lighting a spoonful of camphor. All around me, the drumming was sending #18 get lost! ISSUE #05
devotees into wild trances. Several women began lolling their tongues lewdly, eyes firmly locked on the middle-distance. Their saddhu unveiled a collection of ornate nine-inch skewers. He cleaned each one by running it through a banana then grasped each woman’s ash-caked tongue firmly by its root and forced a skewer right through it. Other devotees carried beautiful wooden structures, supported by waist straps and shoulder pads, which towered high above their heads. These kavadis were gilded with rows of peacock feathers, tinsel and images of their family god. From the larger ones hung chains that attached to the devotee’s flesh by hooks. In the middle of the ghat I noticed two shrines, adorned by a painful collection of chains and meat hooks. A team of men unhooked the long chains and were readying a pair of devotees. The younger of them had on a maharajah’s turban, and a walking stick laden with bells. In his cochinealreddened mouth were wedged four billowing cigars, and he strutted around like a parody of a British officer, madly tweaking his moustache. The other devotee, with a mess of wet black locks, had both his tongue and cheeks skewered, and dozens of pendulous limes and bells hanging from hooks across his chest. With hypnotic drumming and chants of “VEL, VEL” sending them into frenzies, each devotee was attached to their shrines with meat hooks arranged in two neat lines down either side of the spine. “Their mother has recovered from her illness,” one of their team explained.
get in the know! Lord Murugan’s silver chariot, which leads the procession, weighs around five tonnes.
I followed the two brothers as they dragged their shrines, each with a small electricity generator in tow, up to the cave. Their burden was made heavier after their children sat on various parts of the structure, causing the hooks to rip deep into the flesh. The hirsute pilgrim puffed and roared like an elephant, while his younger brother chuffed on his cigars and, at one point, ripped off his own moustache in fury.
around a small shrine in the wall at the far end, into which Muraga’s statue had been placed. The brothers finally received their blessings, and the younger promptly fainted along with his wife, while the older one sat quietly, deep in contemplation. Back outside it was pitch dark and a tropical rainstorm was doing nothing to quench the collective hysteria. I fought my way down the steps, which were now clogged with discarded flipflops, and re-entered the melee around the river.
’’
Despite the self-inflicted mutilation and obvious pain, not one drop of blood came from the devotees’ wounds. “Divine intervention,” a clean-cut Red Crescent doctor explained, as if it was a stupid question.
Despite the self-inflicted mutilation and obvious pain, not one drop of blood came from the devotees’ wounds. “Divine intervention,” a cleancut Red Crescent doctor explained, as if it was a stupid question. “They enter a metaphysical state and Muraga comes into their bodies.” After an excruciating climb we reached the cave. The interior was enormous, rising high into the darkness and jammed with devotees. Black smoke billowed from braziers and a perpetual drizzle fell from stalactites overhead. The penitents flocked
’’
It was pandemonium. Bone-chilling shrieks merged with the screaming static from rain-soaked speakers and megaphones. Grimacing devotees emerged through the smoke, forcing themselves forward but dragged back by chains hooked into the skin on their backs. Contorted faces pierced by four-foot tridents stared through me. I found entire families rolling on their sides through fires. An old man staggered past wearing large wooden sandals with nails hammered up into the soles, screaming with something other than pain with every step.
My head spinning, I forced myself through the crowds. The ground was a quagmire, with muddy pools of milk and mountains of burning coconuts husks. Everywhere underfoot was an endless carpet of discarded milk cartons, countless limes ripped from the backs of devotees and smouldering piles of black hair. The river itself had been transformed by hundreds of fires that bobbed downstream, each made up of a floating banana leaf, hair and camphor, all representing somebody’s prayers.
get going!
Ethiopia’s #46 get lost! ISSUE #05
get in the know! The so-called Rasta colours are in fact the colours of the Ethiopian flag. Rastafarians revere Haile Selassie as a direct descendent of King Solomon.
CHRISTIANITY & HISTORY
Lalibela text + images: Steve Davey destination: Ethiopia
Now I feel that I should warn you in advance: this story is going to be about Christianity & history. If you want to turn the page now, then please do – I won’t be insulted. After all before I went to Ethiopia I probably would have done the same damn thing.
B
UT THEN, BEFORE I WENT TO ETHIOPIA I HAD the same jaded view of the place that most people do. Band Aid might have saved a lot of lives a bunch of years ago, but it has really coloured the perceptions of a whole civilisation. “feeeed the world - do they know its Christmas time” Well yes, actually they bloody do. The Ethiopian royal family traced their lineage back to a liaison between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. Hailie Selassie - the last Emperor and revered by Rastafarians - was believed to be 155 in line from this regal meeting. The first in line was credited in some quarters as bringing back the Ark of the Covenant from the Holy Land, to Axum in the north of the country. Ethiopia itself adopted Christianity in the fourth century AD (as opposed to having it foisted upon them by missionaries during the colonial scramble for Africa in the Victorian era). So, yes, I think that you could safely say that they do know its Christmas, and they probably care far more than most of the rest of us. And there IS snow in Africa, and not just on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. It gets bloody cold up in the highlands of Ethiopia as I can well vouch for. I am freezing. I am at Lalibela in the bleak north of the country. If any place sums up the multifaceted character of Ethiopia, it is Lalibela. A UNESCO world heritage site on a remote plateau, surrounded by some of the poorest people you will ever meet – eking out a tenuous existence in some of the most remote and unfertile areas on the planet, many of them being supported by UN feeding programmes. get in the know! Ethiopia is the only country in Africa never to be colonized – although the Italians did invade it.
There are 11 stone carved churches here at Lalibela, dating back to the reign of King Lalibela over 800 years ago. Four are free standing, the rest are cave-style – carved into rock faces. Ethiopian legend has it that the king was poisoned, but survived the attack. In gratitude he built the churches, with the help of angels, in just one day. I made the mistake of discussing this theory with Hailemiriam, a young student who guided me around the churches for a few days. His absolute belief in the teachings of the Christian church helped me to get amazing access at the various churches, but he certainly wasn’t the person to question the legend of the Lalibela churches with! There are a couple of other theories. Popular in the West is the notion that the churches were constructed a few hundred years earlier by Crusaders returning from the holy land, but the most likely is that the construction was started by King Lalibela, but finished later. Whatever lies behind the construction, the churches certainly are an amazing feat of engineering. The most well known is Bet Giorgis, the House of St George, created from solid rock in the shape of a giant cross. Looking down into the courtyard from ground level I could see that the builders would first have had to cut down 6 metres to form the outside of the building and the courtyard. Then they would have cut doors and windows into the structure and hollowed it out from the inside – making sure that they left adequate supports for heavy structure. All of this was done (with or without the help of angels) with just hand tools. ISSUE #05 get lost! #47
get going!
We move on to the Bet Gabriel-Rufa’el (House of Archangels) Church also known as the Palace of King Lalibela. I’m a little nervous here. Last time I was here about three years before I managed to get into a bit of a fight with the priest. I was on an overland tour and a few of us were walking round. A small (and quite dirty) boy tagged along with us and offered to mind our shoes when we went into the churches. He was decent enough
to entrance me. The churches are undoubtedly beautiful, which helps, but also the liberal smattering of pilgrims mix well with the odd hermit, who sit there reading tatty bibles. Other highlights are the treasures that each priest brings out conspiratorially at each church. Sometimes it’s an ancient bible, hand painted onto goat skin in the old forgotten religious language of Ge’ez, or even an ancient painting of
packed with pilgrims. Some sit around appearing to do very little, but others are praying at the front. The same priest from the day before brings out the cross and is immediately mobbed by pilgrims struggling to get to kiss it. A moment of fear flickers across his place then he growls something in Ethiopian, and the crowd calms slightly. He disappears down the church pursued by his retinue of the faithful.
’’
There is something about Lalibela that does manage to entrance me. The churches are undoubtedly beautiful, which helps, but also the liberal smattering of pilgrims mix well with the odd hermit, who sit there reading tatty bibles.
so I let him. It was a good arrangement until the priest at this church slapped him round the head without warning telling him to get out of the church. I don’t like anyone slapping kids – something I managed to convey to the supposed holy man in no uncertain terms. True at that time we also had a seemingly tame monkey that adopted us as well, (and was marginally cleaner than the boy) which might have sent the priest over the top. Still if he recognised me (or remembered the boy or the monkey) he seemed to think better than to mention it, and I didn’t think to bring it up. I’m not a very good tourist. I find facts just whistle over my head, and my eyes glaze over with too much sightseeing, but there’s something about Lalibela that does manage #48 get lost! ISSUE #05
’’
religious icons, some five hundred years old, but with colours that are still so bright they could have been painted just yesterday. Inside of the Bet Medhane Alem (the House of Emmanuel), the priest shows me the cross that was fairly recently stolen by a tourist but later returned. It’s one of the most sacred treasures, said to belong to King Lalibela himself. This church is huge. 800 square metres, and completely supported by 72 pillars – half inside and half outside this great structure. Like Bet Giorgis, it was carved in one piece from solid rock and is reputed to be the largest carved monolithic structure in the world. The inside is huge and gloomy. The priest suggests that I come back the next day as there is some sort of festival going on. When I do get back, the place is absolutely
Outside in the overcast daylight, the courtyard of the church is also full of pilgrims. A priest is reading from a bible, but he is totally obscured by a large umbrella and his disjointed voice booms around the courtyard. One of the things that I find the most evocative about the churches is the fact that they’re still so revered, and an active place of worship. Each has its own priest and congregation, and although to Westerners they are just one more site on the UNESCO tick off list, to Ethiopians they’re a source of hope and comfort in their hard lives. On my last full day I decide to visit the Asheton Maryam Monastery. This is a two or three hour walk up one of the mountains overlooking the town. Yet again Hailemariam is going to be my
get in the know! The official language of Ethiopia is Amharic – the same one that most of the dialogue in fundamentalist Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of Christ’ was shot in.
CHRISTIANITY & HISTORY
guide – even though, nothing personal, I would probably rather be on my own. As we head out of town a bunch of touts with donkeys try to rent us mounts for the journey. I feel guilty, but I really don’t want one. I’ve found this a real problem in Ethiopia. I feel guilty as hell turning down services I don’t want as people rely on the income. The path is steep, but hell, the views are fantastic. Not for the first time I get an idea of how absolutely remote this place is. The altitude feels pretty harsh up here, which is not helped by the heavy camera bag. Hailemariam offers to carry it again, but at under half my size, I really don’t have the heart to let him. After a couple of hours slog we reach a plateau. It’s windswept and barren here, but there are a number of small stone dwellings, and a patchwork of dry, pale fields covered with stones and rubble. I wonder how anyone can make anything grow up here – but people are trying. In one of the fields a man is plowing the field, with an old wooden plough pulled by a couple of skinny cows. It’s the sort of thing that you might expect to see in a museum or on the wall of a country pub, but here it’s still in use. A young girl stands in the field in a torn dress and bright blue shoes. She’s sowing seed as he plows. They’re right on the edge of the plateau, and the ground just drops away at the edge of the field. There is, of course, no fence or barrier. We continue on up the hill. Another young girl appears. She has a couple of bottles of a soft drink. They’re warm, so I tell her to leave them in a trickling stream, and say that we’ll buy them on our way back down. get in the know! Many Ethiopian’s chew Qat – a stimulating plant that produces a mild high.
ISSUE #05 get lost! #49
get answers!
STRIPPER
VICAR text: james ellis
destination: las vegas
They say God works in mysterious ways but being a heathen, I wouldn’t have really known - until I went to Las Vegas to become a stripper and returned a reverend.
CONFESSIONS OF A WRITER
V
egas is the fastest growing city in the world and its population increases by 6,000 a month as economic migrants flood in looking to work casinos in a more productive way than just losing their life savings and heading off on the next Greyhound bus. But unlike New York - where if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere you need a skill set to succeed in Vegas that would be pretty much redundant in any other major city. As a result a heap of schools have been set up for people to acquire Vegas skills. Right now in Sin City you can attend classes in just about anything from pulling a rabbit out of a hat to pulling a g-string out of your butt with your teeth. So I had an idea for a story: attend a few of Vegas’s more salubrious educational establishments, cleverly call the write up Leaving Las Vegas and sell it for a few shekels. Magic school and casino card dealing were quickly dispatched on my first day with ease but after a night spent in the hipswiveling company of Tom Jones, the fragile state of my morning hangover was rudely pierced by the telephone. It was Erika, a lady from the tourist board who had helped me set up the lessons. ‘James, the woman who runs the strip school’s mum has died and she has to go to LA to arrange the funeral. The stripping class is off.’ My tacky Vegas plastic cocktail cup (complete with bendy straw) suddenly went from half full to half empty - stripping was to have been the centrepiece of the whole feature. Erika and I convened for breakfast to try and come up with a save-the-story plan, writing a list of typically Vegas things and trying to figure what #96 get lost! ISSUE #05
other schools there were. The first word on the list was about as far as we got: marriage. So we called the Queen of the Las Vegas wedding scene Charolette Richards of the Little White Wedding Chapel. She’s the woman who married Britney Spears, Michael Jordan and Joan Collins - though not at the same time. Sure she’d see me, sure she taught people how to do the ceremonies and sure I could get there in an hour. We put the phone down and Erika looked at me: ‘James. I’ve no idea what they law is but you can’t just learn how to marry someone.
You need some kind of religious mandate.’ I couldn’t get hold of Charolette to qualify this, so I went online. I’d read about internet ordination but never knew it would be so easy. Google it and see. Within minutes I was ordained by the Church Of Spiritual Humanism whose philosophy seemed fuzzy enough to not interfere with my own: ‘Spiritual Humanism allows everyone to fuse their individual religious practices onto the foundation of scientific humanist inquiry. We accept people from any religious background and recognize the validity of all peaceful religious practices and behaviors.’ Three hours and some instruction later and Charolette, Elvis and myself were standing at the alter with an English couple. They had divorced and wanted to re-marry, so we took the ceremony together. At times, Elvis would interject with a burst of song, come over, hand me the mic and say: ‘Sing along with me now, Jim.’ As I’d crooned ‘Love Me Tender’, I hoped I wasn’t spoiling the couple’s wedding video too much. I later found out there’s a slight hitch to my new career. In Clark County Nevada, it’s easy to get married but not easy to perform the ceremony on your own. You need to have your own congregation but the registrar at the courthouse offered some consolation: ‘It’s OK Mr Ellis, a two-month residency will do it. And we’re not bothered how many you have in your congregation. As long as one of them signs a letter saying you are of upstanding moral values.’ So I may go back this year, do a bit of dealing for eight weeks and see if the stripper will sign my reference. She owes me a favour after all.
get in the know! Elvis had a twin brother named Jesse Garon, who died at birth, which is why Elvis’ middle name was spelled Aron.