text: will gray images: will gray + brian sheedy
RIVALOF THE
SILVER SCREEN S
TARS ONCE FLOCKED TO FILM IN LONDON, bringing glitz and glamour to the streets of the national capital. After losing out to Hollywood for decades, London is now becoming movie mad again. It is three years since Film London was set up to promote film-making in the capital. With scenes from ‘Brit flicks’, Bollywood blockbusters and recent hits such as The Da Vinci Code, Blood Diamond and Casino Royale all being filmed in the capital, London is back on the filming map. In 2005, London had some 12,655 shooting days. Think of big icons such as Bridget Jones and James Bond and films from The Thunderbirds to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and the list of top flicks that have been shot in London’s streets quickly accumulates. To cater for the moviemad tourist, Film London and Visit London have collaborated on London movie maps that highlight locations from over 50 London-shot films and a range of attractions with a cinematic connection. In 24 hours, you can easily take in a trailerload of movie locations.
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Grand Greenwich To The Tower
Bridget Jone’s Diary: Edge of Reason. CourtesyJones: of Universal Pictures. Bridget The Edge of Reason courtesy of Universal Pictures.
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Begin in Greenwich and take a stroll into the impressive Old Royal Naval College, spectacularly situated on the banks of the Thames in this sleepy London borough. The building’s Painted Hall is a regular movie venue and housed the bellringing concert in The Madness of King George, the world leaders’ meeting in The Avengers and the meeting of the Illuminati in a ‘Venetian’ church in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. The nearby chapel played host to Hugh Grant and his mates when it was turned into the St Mary of the Fields church in the fictional borough of Cripplegate, the location for the second wedding in Four Weddings and a Funeral. It also stood in for Charing Cross Station in Shanghai Knights and was used in Patriot Games both as itself and, rather bizarrely, as Buckingham Palace when Jack Ryan foiled an IRA attack.
get in the know! Richard Curtis, the screenwriter behind Love Actually, Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, was born in New Zealand.
london
CITY The Da Vinci Code.
From Greenwich there are plenty of boats that will take you to the Tower of London past the controversial Millennium Dome, which James Bond descended upon in the opening scene of The World is Not Enough. Back on dry land, a short jaunt past the Tower will deliver you to the impressive office of Willis Faber at 10 Trinity Court. It towers over Trinity Square Gardens and was used as the London home of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’s villainous lawyer Manfred.
12:30pm Bankside,
Borough Backstreets& Bank
After crossing Tower Bridge, you can walk the same route that was flown by Thunderbird 2: down the Thames past City Hall (used as Billy Mack’s record company office in Love Actually) to the Tate Modern (its huge Turbine Hall featured in Match Point). Double back and you will arrive at the Anchor Tavern on Bankside, where you can enjoy a pint
of London ale on the same terrace where Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise, unwound at the end of Mission Impossible. Just a few streets away is Borough Market, one of London’s busiest film locations. It has plenty of unusual cafes for lunch and is famous as the location for Bridget Jones’ flat, which sits above the Globe pub at the entrance to the market. Also in this area, at 13–15 Park Street, are the gang hangouts featured in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. One is currently a Paul Smith clothing store. Also found here is the dark alley of Winchester Walk, where the wolf was finally cornered in American Werewolf in London. Cross the Thames via London Bridge and discover Leadenhall Market. Lara Croft rode her motorbike through this market in the film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
3:00pm
North Of TheThames A short walk takes you to Bank from where a Central line tube will whisk you to Chancery Lane,
the stop for London’s famous jewellery quarter of Hatton Gardens. It has featured in numerous movies in different guises. In Eyes Wide Shut it was transformed into New York’s Greenwich Village, with New York-style payphones installed. The Professor and Sophie’s mad dash away from the coppers in The Da Vinci Code was also filmed on Chancery. In Snatch, 12 and 13 Chancery Lane were home to Doug the Head’s diamond store and director Guy Ritchie made his cameo appearance at the tiny Ye Olde Mitre Tavern at numbers 8–9. The resurgent nearby area of Farringdon and Smithfield, home to some trendy cafes and restaurants, is a good spot to take a break. Perhaps pop into the Vic Naylor pub on St John Street, used as “JD’s”, Eddie’s dad’s bar, in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Will’s flat from About a Boy can be found at 16–18 St James Walk, a pleasant street next to a quiet square. However, the real highlight here is the Church of St Bartholomew the Great, where
get in the know! Casino Royale was the first Bond film to be shown in cinemas in mainland China although Judi Dench has stated that she had to re-dub lines with references to the Cold War.
ISSUE #12 get lost! #19
vietnam
REAL VIETNAM text: steve davey
A SHOT OF
images: steve davey
Steve Davey wanders the northern province of Lào Ca to Sapa and beyond on the trail of the hilltribe people, all the while ‘battling’ against Vietnamese hospitality and its brutal rice wine.
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get in the know! Vietnam has 54 distinct ethnic groups recognised by the Vietnamese government, each with its own language, lifestyle and cultural heritage.
get in the know! Hmong court partners by singing love songs that boast of the composer's physical attributes, domestic abilities and strong work ethic.
ISSUE #12 get lost! #37
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LIE AWAKE FOR ABOUT TEN MINUTES. I AM TOO scared to open my eyes. My neck feels like it is caught in a vice and pain shoots up across my head to my eyes. They throb with each heartbeat. My mouth feels dry and furry. Tightness in my throat sends waves of nausea through my body. I open my eyes. I am sprawled on a sleeping mat on the floor of a bamboo-woven house. This is my Apocalypse Now Martin Sheen moment, but it is not the sound of fans or helicopters that I am hearing, just the pulsing in my head. Through half open eyes I see a table in the corner with the remnants of the meal from the previous night. An empty bottle sits malevolently on the table. I groan and let my head slip back to the floor. I vow never to engage a Vietnamese ruou (rice wine) drinking session ever again. It had all started so well. I had been staying at the Auberge Dang Trung Hotel in the northern Vietnamese town of Sapa, waiting for the famous weekend market. I arrived a couple of days early and spent the time recovering from the slow single-line railway journey. Hard seats made the journey seem twice as long and the stops in the middle of nowhere made it seem eternal. When, at each stop, scores of locals arrived to sell sweets, cigarettes and great lengths of sugar cane to the passengers I started to wonder whether the train drivers were being bribed to stop by these budding entrepreneurs. The weekend arrived and the market was packed. There are around twenty ethnic groups of so-called hilltribe people living in South-East Asia. This market is particularly renowned for the regular presence of the Hmong people. The Hmong, who wear indigo clothes that they weave and dye themselves, occupy a strange place in Vietnamese society. Many of them sided with the Americans during the war and when the south fell many Hmong were airlifted to the United States by their erstwhile allies. Many more were left behind, however, and were persecuted for being on the ‘wrong’ side of the war. Members of other hilltribes were also present at the market, including a number of women from the Red Dao (Zao) hilltribe with shaved heads and bright red headdresses. In addition to visiting the market to make purchases, many of the hilltribe women were there to sell an assortment of tat to the tourists present. The Zao women were the most engaging of these vendors: laughing and joking while trying to convince me to buy #38 get lost! ISSUE #12
get in the know! In the 19th century, Hmong were encouraged by the French imperialist government to grow opium in order to pay hefty taxes, and so the colonialists could buy it.
vietnam
a ‘traditional’ hilltribe shoulder bag made out of someone’s leftover denim jeans. I decided that after the market closed I would accompany the people on their trek back to their villages. I arranged a guide, Tran, and set off. The hilltribe women trudged along, carrying whatever they had bought at the market. Every so often I heard the grumbling of an old Russian Minsk motorbike and had to move out of the way to allow the rider and two or even three pillion passengers to pass. Only men rode on the
The sessions always seemed to proceed in the same fashion: every man in the room wanted to drink a toast with me individually. With three or four important men from the village at the table, I was drinking far more than anyone else. Others may have ended up sprawled on the table, but I was underneath it. Waking up the following day and piecing events together, I cursed myself for falling for that trick again. I stagger out to the veranda. Down below, two great water buffalo are standing next to
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Only men rode on the motorbikes – the women had to walk... (They) were probably safer: drink driving seemed to be a hobby in these parts.
motorbikes – the women had to walk. The wobble of the motorbikes down the tracks suggested that the women were probably safer: drink driving seemed to be a hobby in these parts. After a day of walking, we arrived at a house owned by one of Tran’s cousins. Thrilled to see us and perhaps with one eye on the dong in my pocket, he laid on a slap-up meal washed down by many toasts of ruou. I had consumed the local rice wine in Asia previously and despite being 6’2” and equipped with a stone liver, had suffered after each occasion.
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two giant boulders. The smell of buffalo shit rises towards me and makes me gag. Today is going to be difficult. When I wake up feeling this bad I usually spend the entire day in bed. Today I will spend most of the day trekking. Tran brings me a cafe sua – a strong filter coffee dripped onto sweet condensed milk. He also looks rather crestfallen and sorry for himself. I drink the coffee in silence and then down another three. I am beginning to feel up to breakfast and as the sun makes it over the surrounding mountains we resume our excursion.
The light in the village is fantastic: backlit morning mist mingles with smoke from the morning cooking fires. People are starting their days and travelling out into the terraced fields. An old man wearing the standard indigo baggy trousers and tunic of the Hmong leads two water buffalo up to a recently harvested field. The buffalo will spend the day grazing on the stubble. The small village is largely constructed from the ubiquitous woven bamboo. Indeed, each village that we pass has a large plantation to service the many construction needs. Bamboo is a fantastic building materia: for its weight it is stronger than steel. It can be hollowed out and used as a water pipe, and also grows remarkably fast and will thrive almost anywhere. As the morning wears on, the temperature climbs. It is also getting humid but the elevation prevents it from getting too oppressive. I cannot imagine what it would be like here in the rainy season when most of the rice is planted. There are few roads and many of the paths cross the raised boundaries of the rice paddies. In the wet season, when the paddies are flooded, these are slippery and covered in leeches. In many places snakes live in the flooded fields. After a couple of hours trudging up and down steeply terraced hills, we reach another village on a sunny valley floor. A strange sight greets us: a wall of wanted posters, each with a grainy black-
get in the know! The Vietnamese currency (VND), dong, means copper or bronze in Vietnamese, which was what coins were minted pre-French colonisation.
ISSUE #12 get lost! #39
text: chris ord images: chris ord
Brad and Angelina deemed it good enough to have their child there and if the rising number of travellers making an overland beeline for its expansive wilderness is any indication, Namibia is Africa’s golden child destination in more ways than one. Travelling the length of the country, Chris Ord tempts the appetites of some wild cheetahs. #42 get lost! ISSUE #12
get in the know! Cheetahs are relatively weak hunters – they can’t pierce a victim’s neck with their teeth as leopards do.
namibia
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ROBLEM: YOUR PRIZED LIVESTOCK – YOUR livelihood – keep ending up as ravaged carcasses rotting in the African sun, the victim of midnight raids by local wildlife. SOLUTION: ditch the sheep and ‘farm’ the predator to create Otjitotongwe, a unique grassroots cheetah conservation project operating on the Namibian plains. That’s the thing about Africans: black, white or otherwise – they make the most of any situation. The glass is always half-full, even when it hasn’t rained in months. The prevailing attitude (and saying) is “make a plan”. Which is exactly what the Nel family did when their livestock charges kept turning up dead, stripped of all but skin and bone by unseen predators on their farm in northwest Namibia. They knew cheetahs were to blame. But the spotty devils are elusive and no matter the violence of their appetite, they elicit a sympathetic following worldwide, which makes them mighty hard to put a bullet in with any kind of public (or legal) support. That’s assuming you’re a crack shot in the first place and able to hit the world’s fastest creature on land, which moves at speeds of over 100km/h. But with 38 livestock lost in a four-week period in 1994, something had to give. Rather than shoot them, as would most Namibian farmers, Tollie and Roeleen Nel decided to trap the cheetahs with the hope of relocating them to a game park. Releasing them back into the wild far, far away wasn’t an option as nearly every inch of Namibia is either farmland or tightly controlled reserve, the only exception being the Namib Desert where cheetahs cannot survive. “But the bureaucracy that controls wild animals in Namibia is bloody complicated”, says the Nel’s eldest son and park manager Mario. “We couldn’t legally transport the cheetahs to any game sanctuary outside of Namibia.” This was despite strong interest from parks in Tanzania and Kenya. The Nels then contacted Namibia’s famous Etosha National Park, located to the north of Otjitotongwe, but park authorities weren’t interested. They were faced with having to
conservation effort and the farm stays open and financially viable by charging travellers to see and feed the animals.” It’s the now grown-up cubs that greet you with
After a heavy petting session Tollie feeds the cheetahs, which lose all interest in our bags and cameras as soon as the glistening flesh of goat and donkey is thrown their way.
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They like to play with things, like cameras, so don’t leave anything unattended.
release the cheetahs back onto the land, until one of the captured cheetahs, which happened to be pregnant, gave birth. Of five cubs, three survived. Returning the newborn cheetahs to the wild would condemn them to death (only five percent of cheetah cubs survive in the wild). With the prospect of having to hand rear the cubs there was only one answer. “We figured we would farm the cheetahs”, deadpans Mario. This didn’t mean the Nels were looking to flood the Japanese delicacy market with cheetah steaks. “We thought if we could use the land as a cheetah reserve we’d solve all our problems at once: no more dead livestock, we help the cheetah
a surprisingly pet cat-like curiosity at the high steel mesh fence that surrounds the family home. The garden behind doubles as a feeding enclosure for the cheetahs, which seem a whisker away from being fully domesticated felines. Entering the enclosure, our host Tollie Nel rattles off the dos and don’ts as though talking about kittens that can’t slice you in ten with a nonchalant whisk of their paws. “They like to play with things, like cameras, so don’t leave anything unattended.” And in typically relaxed African fashion, that’s it for rules and regulations as you are invited to pat the purring cheetahs, an experience as unnerving as you’d expect. Yes, it’s zoo-like, but you’re inside the cage.
get in the know! All cheetahs living today appear to be descended from a relative handful of survivors.
While Otjitotongwe doesn't have the research aspect of other comparable cheetah conservation projects like Africat or the Cheetah Conservation Fund, there’s no doubt that the Nel family has developed a fervent passion for their charges. Which is comforting, because in the small pockets where they do still roam the world beyond Namibia, cheetahs are considered endangered. Inside Namibia’s borders, they aren’t. Of the estimated 7,000 to 15,000 cheetahs left in the world, 2,500 are found in Namibia where locals don’t consider them to be under threat; rather they view them as a threat. After the Nel family decided to take on the cheetah cause, they gained a bleeding heart ISSUE #12 get lost! #43
E U Q A C A M E H T G N I T K T C E A G YOUR B OFF
confessions
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get in the know! Banana in your backpack? Bali’s monkeys will bite you for it.