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sailing in text: justin jamieson
images: justin jamieson & jerry wolveridge
Three sheets to the wind, Justin Jamieson sets sail in the Caribbean looking to circumnavigate Anguilla, a tiny West Indian island famed for beaches and Banks.
I Bankie’s dune preserve bar
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pInCh myself A Couple of TImes. Could this be real? Twelve hours earlier in miami I had stumbled to bed in a vodka-induced haze and now, with my legs over the edge of a 36-foot Beneteau yacht called Escapade, my travelling mate Jerry is steering us out of Anse marcel Bay away from the tiny half-french halfdutch Caribbean island st martins. I wave to Pierre, a kind old seadog who had briefed us on the safety protocols for Escapade and discussed some of the more amazing spots to drop anchor on our week wind-chasing around the northern Leeward Islands. We had
get in the know! The original inhabitants of Anguilla were called Arawaks and were originally indigenous people from South America.
paradise anguilla
Marigold, the main harbour town on the French side of St Martins, determined to get to Anguilla the following day. St Martins is a fascinating island. Volcanic mountains peak in the middle, catching the clouds in a mushroom shape and greening the surrounding landscape. The main ports of Marigold and Philipsburg have sadly lost their souls to the huge cruise ships moving thousands of passengers through in short bursts, but the smaller coves and bays have managed to retain a certain charm, mixing European sugar with Caribbean spice. We dine in a local bar serving fresh barbecued seafood washed down with an ice-cold Carib beer (the local brew), and the Barbadan owner almost forgets to charge us after passionately joining in our discussion of the state of West Indian cricket. When sailing you are generally up early, and on our first full day we work the wind out and steer Escapade on course towards Anguilla
get in the know! Ninety per cent of Anguillans are descendants of slaves from Africa.
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heard of a local Caribbean reggae legend who built an old bar out of driftwood on a snowwhite sandy beach on Anguilla and now spends his evenings playing music and drinking rum punch. Jerry points to a thin flat line of land in the distance. Anguilla, so named because of its eel-like shape (‘anguille’ means eel in French) is so close we could almost swim, and in our excitement and with the wind behind us we decide to raise the sails and make a dash for it. There are certain requirements for a bareboat yacht charter (bareboat meaning you sail it yourself). Particular levels of experience are necessary as is a certificate or two. Nothing too complicated or difficult to obtain, but enough to ensure you don’t hurt yourself, others and the boat. Nothing teaches you more, however, than actually sailing yourself, and once our sails are up we tack back and forth watching Anguilla stay somewhat the same distance away for about an hour. The sun starts to set and we concede defeat, drop sails and motor into
Volcanic mountains peak in the middle catching the clouds into a mushroom shape and greening the surrounding landscape.
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left hand corner title
View from johnno’s, prickly pear cay
well before breakfast. Discovering autopilot proves to be an unexpected bonus and with our bearings set we can relax with our feet up, a fresh mango in hand and the sound of the sea soothing away all the stresses of home. This is what being on holiday is all about: the freedom to explore with no roads in front of you; no traffic lights or even traffic for that matter, just the gin-clear Caribbean sea and a scattering of islands in the distance to discover. There are no worries about accommodation or transport, and each sunset we are spoiled with a view unmatched by any hotel anywhere in the world. There are two real Anguillan celebrities, both famous for very different reasons. The first is Bankie Banx, a dreadlocked troubadour some call the Bob Dylan of the Caribbean. His fame peaked in the 70s with a number of hits and he invested his wealth in a long stretch of beach on the southern end of Rendezvous Bay, promising to protect the surrounding dunes from lecherous developers. His bar, the Dune Preserve, has reached cult status in the region and each year in March (or April, depending on how organised he is) the Moonsplash Reggae Festival is held, attracting such luminaries as Jimmy Buffet, Third World and Rita Marley. The bar has so far been blown away no less than three times by different hurricanes, but
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There are two real Anguillan celebrities, both famous for very different reasons. The first is Bankie Banks, a dread locked troubadour some call the Bob dylan of the Caribbean.
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get in the know! According to a 2001 census, Sandy Ground, Anguilla’s main port, had a population of 274.
anguilla
Bankie, in his inimitable way, collects the bits and pieces and somehow puts them all back together each time, creating a magical place to sit back and watch the old legend play as the moon rises over Rendezvous Bay. The other celebrity is Bankie’s son Omari. He was the first Anguillan to play for the oncemighty West Indies cricket team, and part of the team that chased down a record 418 runs to beat Australia in Antigua in 2003. Omari himself scored 47 not out, but aside from cricket he is known to belt out a few tunes of his own with his dad on a suitable evening. As we make our way around Anguilla, we discover Bankie has plenty of other children of varying ages. Some have suggested he is breeding his own cricket team. I guess it’s good to be a local legend. We drop anchor in a quiet bay around the corner from Bankie’s bar. He tells us later that the hotel developments farther up the beach have banned yachts anchoring off Rendezvous Bay, but for us not to worry. We have, however, read of one of the local guards firing his shotgun at illegally anchored yachts and so decide the next bay onwards is as fine a spot as any (even though Bankie assures us the guard is his uncle). One of Bankie’s recent tunes is titled ‘Stuck in Paradise’, and watching him wander through
get in the know! Bankie Banx was a regular in a US sitcom called Key West.
his old ramshackle bar chatting to the varying tourists who have wandered in off the beach for a drink and a meal, you wonder if ‘ stuck’ is quite the right word. Bankie tells us of a number of his upcoming plans to tour, then dismisses them and shrugs, saying that they probably won’t eventuate. “Just too hard to leave,” he says, sipping on one of his herbal punches. We know what he means. We eventually drag ourselves away and climb into our tender to putt-putt back to Escapade where we can hear Bankie’s singing floating out over the water. Whilst Bankie may be an Anguillan celebrity, he is also quite representative of the Anguillan people in general. The Anguillans have managed to retain the archetypal laid-back attitude that the West Indies are famed for. Whilst Anguilla itself has none of the spectacular volcanic mountains and lush greenery of its neighbours, it more than makes up for it with a selection of the some of the world’s most stunning beaches. Anguillan life is very much a beach lifestyle as a result. From the five-star resorts that are multiplying far too quickly to the simple beach shacks playing live music and serving delicious fresh seafood, it is very easy to fall into the pace of the locals and wonder why anyone would want to leave.
We get a bit of perspective on this when we meet Johnno, a local businessman, on Prickly Pear Cay, one of a cluster of tiny picture-perfect cays a few hours under sail off Anguilla’s north coast. It is almost impossible to describe Prickly Pear Cay without dragging out every cliché written about an idyllic beach. The water is clear with a bright aqua glow. The sand is fine and soft and so white even the darkest sunglasses are bright. And perched amongst the waving palms is a small bar with a few tables and the uber-relaxed Johnno cooking up a storm. He explains that he runs one of the busier bars on Sandy Ground, one of the bays on Anguilla. It’s a typical beach bar drawing in locals and tourists from all over the island for regular Sunday sessions of rum punch and improvised jazz. But Johnno explains how heading out to his second bar on Prickly Pear Cay is what he really loves. No crowds, no problems, just a random group of day trippers, thirsty sailors and local rum lovers to keep him as busy as he wants to be. Our conversation takes place waist-deep in the shallows of the beach. There’s no need to worry about service at the bar – we can see it from the water and people generally help themselves. We catch up with Johnno again that evening after anchoring
ISSUE #19 get lost! #49
delta bydugout text: anim van wyk images: lawrette mcfarlane
truly experiencing the canals, islands and wildlife of Botswana’s okavango Delta means exploring the green maze at water level in a local dugout.
K
agiso Kneels over spoor in the fine grey sand and whispers, “lions! very fresh!” i scan the shoulder-high scrub around us. Kagiso Molefe and his fellow guides at oddballs lodge in Botswana’s okavango Delta don’t carry guns, relying on their knowledge of the bush to deal with dangerous situations. I swallow and try to breathe deeply. It feels as if ten pairs of yellow eyes are staring at me. “Look, here they heard us and started running,” Kagiso says, pointing out the
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spoor as large as my hand. He tracks it for another few metres. “And here one of the two turned away.” We are standing on an island, one of more than 1,000 in the delta. The Okavango has no outlet to the sea and the water that sweeps down from the highlands of Angola slowly evaporates until, by October, most of it has dried up. Photographer Lawrette McFarlane and I have travelled with Kagiso to the island in a mokoro, a boat made of a hollowed-out tree trunk. The day before we had met four Spaniards at the lodge where we are staying. They had proudly showed us their digital photographs of lions. We “oohed” and “aahed” jealously. But now, on foot and in the delta, I’m not so sure that I want to meet a lion. Our trip started two days earlier at the little bush airport in Maun, the ‘capital’ of the safari industry in Botswana. When the delta is flooded,
the only way to lodges (such as Oddballs Lodge where we are staying) is by air. A light aircraft filled with tourists takes off every few minutes. We’re also soon in the air – looking down on an endless network of water channels and green reeds. It’s a bumpy ride in the heat of the day. “I don’t feel well,” Lawrette groans, beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead. Fortunately it’s only a twenty-minute flight and we land before things turn ugly. Our smiling host Jack Drew is waiting for us at the airstrip – under a large tree that has a buffalo skull nailed to it with a sign that reads “International Departures.” Next to the tree are buckets of sand and a fire extinguisher. “This morning there were elephants on the runway,” Jack says. “When that happens while a plane is coming in to land, the pilot just flies low over the animals’ heads to chase them off, and then he tries again.” Lawrette is feeling
get in the know! Botswana’s surface area is 581,730km, roughly the size of France or the state of Texas.
botswana
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a leopard walked in and lay down on the cement floor. for an hour, (the man) sat dead quiet, too scared to turn the page. then the leopard got up and left just as quietly.
much better, so we join the other guests on our first mokoro outing. There’s a guide for every two guests and ours is Kagiso, a friendly guy with an even friendlier, broad grin. Kagiso uses a pole, called a ngashi, to propel his mokoro and fifteen minutes later we arrive at an island the size of a helipad. We spot a huge crocodile in the water only metres away, looking at us. “He heard us and then slipped into the water,” another guide says. He points at the ground at our feet: “You can see from the drag marks that he was lying right here.” Later that afternoon we congregate on the lookout deck above the dining room in the lodge. Three cameras on tripods click away as a bloodred sun dips behind the horizon. Four hippos take turns sticking their heads out the water. Below us, a kingfisher flits through the reeds. Baboons start barking on the other side of the channel, and we hear the liquid call of the Burchell’s get in the know! The Bayei tribe moved from Barotseland in the west of Zambia to the delta in the eighteenth century and brought the first mokoro with them.
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malaysia
text: craig tansley images: jason burgess
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Now, with the first hint of dawn, there she was again, looking as ‘come hither, boy’ as a four-kilometre-high mountain can look.
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get in the know! Sabah is known as ‘Sabah, the land below the winds,’ because of its location just south of the typhoon-prone region around the Philippines.
Craig Tansley may have struggled to articulate his reasons for climbing Sabah’s Mt Kinabalu, South-East Asia’s tallest mountain, but he tackled the climb regardless. With a hangover.
F
or ThAT FlEETiNg MoMENT, iN ThE diMly lit bar with its tinny American pop music, i am not an Aussie tourist on holiday – i am george Mallory, the English mountain climber who may or may not have become the first man ever to climb Mt Everest. We’ll never know, of course, for he perished, along with his mate Andrew irvine, on the northeast ridge of Mt Everest. his body was not discovered until 1999, 75 years after his fateful third and final attempt to ‘do’ Everest. “Wow,” exclaims my fellow barfly. “So you’re a mountain climber?” i put my shoulders back as far as they go and stand just a little bit taller on tippy toes. “yeah, i guess you could say that.” I wake with the sun the following morning, very alone. My only companion is a throbbing hangover. I also have a mountain to climb and a realisation that no true adventurer worth his salt would risk any ascent with a litre of cheap whisky in his gut. Mt Kinabalu had been looking at me since I touched down in Sabah three days earlier. Now, with the first hint of dawn, there she was again, looking as ‘come hither, boy’ as a four-kilometre-high mountain can look. It was hot already, even before the sunrise, but the temperatures on the peak would be 30 degrees cooler. Four kilometres (4,095.6 metres to be precise) straight up is a fair distance, when you have to walk it. I knew I was drastically under-prepared and not just on account of my bout of binge drinking. My only exercise of late had consisted of a couple of gentle games of tennis and far more time in the spa at my local pool than in the lap lane. But I wanted to climb this thing. I was not driven by a desire for a sense of accomplishment. Rather, I’d just read the fantastic Jon Krakauer book Into Thin Air and I wanted to have my own adventure to write about. As anyone familiar with the book will know, most of Krakauer’s climbing group were killed near the summit of Everest. That was an unlikely outcome on Kinabalu, although I was told a young English girl had perished there earlier this decade.
I drove to Kinabalu Park, the entrance to the mountain. At an altitude of 1,585 metres, starting at the entrance will leave 2,510 metres for me to climb. I stay overnight here. Climbers around me discuss footwear, the merits of the climbing stick and strategies to stop chafing. At least that is what they discuss when they are not emptying the small convenience store of anything containing chocolate, guarana or electrolytes. After a breakfast of enough carbohydrates to kill a large Italian man, we walk through the Timpohon Gates. They serve as the starting point of the largest ascent, and descent, of my life. The World Heritage-listed national park that encircles Kinabalu is one of the world’s most significant biological sites. There are hundreds of species of flora and fauna here not found anywhere else on earth, with somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 plant species alone in this 754-square-kilometre park, including over 800 species of orchid, 600 species of ferns (more than the entire continent of Africa) and the world’s largest flower (the rafflesia grows to a diameter of 94 centimetres). That’s more plant species than all of Europe and North America combined. There are also 326 species of birds and 100 mammals, including the orangutan. And if that wasn’t enough, the park also has one of the most ancient vegetation zones on the planet. For the most part however, expect to see sticky, slippery orange clay. A hell of a lot of it. Just as I found some momentum on the track, a tiny man with a 40-kilogram bag of supplies for base camp walked past and completely humbled me. These porters, with their stubbly walnut-contoured legs, have been known to carry washing machines on their backs. They earn seven ringit (A$2.50) per kilogram and climb faster than anyone else on the track. The sight of the porter kept me going for a while, and just as I felt the first ache in my knees, the cloud cleared and the sun came out. As we climbed higher, we entered a stunted alpine forest. The red tubular flowers of the heath rhododendron mixed with the white-flowered Borneo eyebright, the pinkish
get in the know! Kinabalu National Park is one of the most popular tourist spots in Sabah: in 2004, more than 415,360 people visited the park.
mountain trachymene and the Kinabalu buttercup to create a beautiful sight. Above us, sheer granite cliffs reached up for hundreds of metres. The ropes attached to them served to remind us that we were not there yet. We reached base camp at Laban Rata by late afternoon, and by 6.30pm, we are asleep. It was 2.45am the following morning when we trudged off under a spectacular full moon. I felt less than rested. My guide told me it was because I ‘chicken slept’ due to the altitude. I suspected that it also had something to do with whisky. It was cold, about five degrees, and would get much colder. There were plenty of people around, slowing my progress, so I pushed through them on the ropes. I was ISSUE #19 get lost! #63
confessions
text: tom maclachlan image: tom maclachlan
to your health: drinking to
war,women& vodka in the mountains of Poland, Tom Maclachlan discovers that sometimes the only plan is no plan at all.
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expecting us,” he said, knocking again. Finally an old man with kind eyes appeared at the doorway. “Hello uncle, is Beata in?” This old man obviously didn’t know Marcin either, and as he stared at us he opened his mouth slowly. What treasures he revealed within. There were only two teeth that I could see, one on each gum. The top tooth was a giant, about half as long as a pinky finger. It could destroy any gobstopper, but lacking a gobstopper, it had pulverised the middle of his other tooth, which was unfortunately placed directly below it. When he closed his mouth, the juggernaut retreated back inside the bottom
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M
y girlfriend lucie and i were in Poland with an itch to hike through the famous Tatras Mountains on the border of the Slovak republic. we had met up with Marcin, my Polish friend from previous travels, who had promised to be our guide. But when Marcin greeted us with a bottle of vodka, i suddenly remembered from his previous exploits that he is a mischievous fellow who disrespects anything involving or resembling a plan. lucie pointed to another bottle of vodka lying in the back seat of his truck. at this point, i decided to put away my walking boots – we would not be hiking this week. This was confirmed when Marcin announced a short detour en route to our hiking destination. “i am wanting to visiting a friend quickly,” said Marcin. “Just two minutes!” A few hours of detour later, we found ourselves at the door of a dilapidated mountain hut in Szingina (pronounced shin – jee – na), a charming Polish town near Krakow that is slightly famous for its old people who live until they are 100. They credit vodka for its fountain-of-youth properties. They also eat many pigs, which apparently does something for their hearts. We could hear these pigs, as well as three cows and a horse, making typical farm sounds (and smells) in the stables next door to the hut. Inside, the noises were far stranger. There was a wailing of some kind. Marcin knocked on the door and a tiny child appeared with a kitten. “Hello darling,” he said. “Is Aunty Beata inside?” The girl threw the kitten at us and ran away. Marcin looked at us in bewilderment. “I don’t know who that was,” he said. We knocked again and waited. Soon an adolescent boy appeared. He had all the intensity of a sloth, and a fringe that hung over his eyes, which rendered him half blind. “Hello son, is Beata in?” The boy swayed his head in our general direction, trying to place the voice, then, unable to find us, slinked away. The kitten ran inside. A dog appeared, then fell asleep in the doorway. And still we stood there. Marcin smiled at us, and held up the bottles of vodka reassuringly. “My friend is not to
in the four days we spent with them, we were drunk on eight separate occasions.
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tooth. Forget hiking in the scenic mountains, this was as good a view as I could ever have hoped for. I was so transfixed that I didn’t notice that we’d entered the house. Lucie later told me that the old man had rushed us inside as soon as he saw the vodka. He sat us down, cooked us each a sausage, then fetched the shot glasses. The drinking routine was simple. Wait for your neighbour to fill up your glass, say “Naz drovya” (to your health), skol it in one, then fill up your neighbour’s glass. So it went, and so we got very drunk. All I really remember from this first drinking session is the old man and his teeth. He hugged me, and made the same wailing sounds that we had heard outside. Apparently they were songs. There were many of them, but Marcin told us that they concerned only three things: war, women and vodka. It went like this: if you lose a war, drink vodka; if you lose vodka, blame the woman; if you lose a woman, start a war. Or drink vodka. I was trying not to laugh, but it was impossible with
those teeth in front of me. The more I laughed, the more enthusiastically he sang. Soon the two children that had run away from the door joined us. Then the dog and the cat. Then the grandmother, then the daughter, then a few other people. Did I even see a cow? Before long the kitchen was full of Polish locals, singing and drinking vodka and eating pig butter. The only person in the village who wasn´t there was Marcin’s friend, Beata. Marcin was having the time of his life, singing and filling up his unknown neighbour’s glass. Like us, he knew not a soul. We spent the next four days with this pack of strangers, as they fed us, washed our clothes and sang us songs. They told us that when they receive visitors, they believe that God is in the house. Evidently they believe God loves to get wasted. In the four days we spent with them, we were drunk on eight separate occasions. It was a sad day when we said goodbye, though Marcin looked happy – he was pleased that things had not gone to plan.