Get Lost 33

WIN A PEREGRINE ADVENTURE THROUGH MYANMAR

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BURMA BECKONS Contemplation time is over

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MIND-BLOWING ENCOUNTERS WITH WHALES

ISSN 1449-3543

KASHMIR

Himalayan highs

AFRIKABURN

South Africa’s hottest festival

EASTER ISLAND

Exploring an enigma

BUDAPEST

One wild night

BLUE KING BROWN: Mending the world one song at a time STRANGE BREW: The planet’s most potent party poisons HOLIDAY IDEAS: Explore the Caribbean on a budget

TIWI ISLANDS | ETHIOPIA | JAPAN | UNITED STATES | SPAIN

8 MIND BLOWING ENCOUNTERS WITH WHALES

We give you the world’s best whale trail to follow.

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FEATURES

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POTENT DRINKS What’s the planet’s most potent party poison?

SOUTH AFRICA

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JAPAN Hit the slopes around little-known Mt Iwate.

Hungary? Try Budapest by night.

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MYANMAR (BURMA)

USA

Experience the Himalayan heart of Kashmir, India.

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HUNGARY

Discover Africa’s hottest festival – AfrikaBurn.

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INDIA

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Thrills and spills in La La Land.

Stop contemplating Burma. Here’s why you should go.

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EASTER ISLAND Get to know the world’s most remote inhabited island.

SPAIN Find out why there’s more to the Basque coast than just waves.

get in the know Antigua is home to 365 beaches, one for every day of the year.

contents

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REGULARS

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100 HOLIDAY IDEAS

108 TRAVEL JOB

112 MUSIC

120 CONFESSIONS

Sport and art on the Tiwi Islands.

A Caribbean getaway for under A$7,500.

Nick Reid calls the shots on tequila.

An interview with Blue King Brown’s Natalie Pa’apa’a.

Tight-fisted travellers exposed.

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News, Views & Events The globe uncovered Your Letters & Photos Write in and win Places to Stay The weird and wonderful Top Trips The best breaks

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Retro Travel Travel from yesteryear 26 You Wish Go green with envy 78 Photostory Worth thousands of words 102 Food The hungry traveller

get in the know The largest recorded earthquake occurred in Valdivia, Chile, in 1960. It reached 9.5 on the Richter scale.

104 Photography Expert photo tips 110 Our Shout The world’s best bars 114 Responsible Travel Do the right thing 116 Reviews Gadgets and other goodies ISSUE #33 get lost #9

something sweet to

sing about

Tom Perry explores Song Saa Private Island in Cambodia’s beautiful Koh Rong archipelago.

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get in the know Koh Rong is the second-largest island in Cambodia.

you wish | cambodia

get in the know Fried spiders are a specialty in the Cambodian town of Skuon.

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south africa

Melany Bendix discovers chaos, revelry and art at AfrikaBurn – a flaming-hot festival in the middle of the South African desert.

Photography by Stu Shapiro

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get in the know The first AfrikaBurn was held in 2007.

Silver Rider – many costumed festival folks take their inspiration from the Wizard of Oz. This guy must have seen the re-make, in which the Tin Man mountain bikes along the Yellow Brick Road.

get in the know The festival is located on a private farm called ‘Stonehenge’.

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budapest Vanessa Murray gets in touch with the nocturnal soul of Budapest, central Europe’s party heart.

The River Danube separates the two parts of the city – west-bank Buda and east-bank Pest.

Photo: HNTO.

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get in the know Local rock’n’rollers use Budapest’s disused air raid and nuclear fallout shelters as band practice rooms.

hungary

get in the know Budapest featured as Buenos Aires in the movie Evita, Moscow in Red Heat and East Berlin in Spy Game.

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india

kashmir

CaLLinG Belinda Jackson experiences the very special Himalayan paradise of Kashmir, India.

Photography by Belinda Jackson

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get in the know When Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin wrote the song ‘Kashmir’, no one from the band had ever been to the Indian state.

Houseboats line the fringe of Srinagar’s Dal Lake, where a man skims over the early morning reflections in his shikara (boat).

get in the know Kashmiri willow produces harder cricket bats than the traditional English willow.

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usa

Justin Jamieson feeds his adrenaline addiction in California – the thrill-ride capital of the world.

Photography by Justin Jamieson

The Xcelerator will almost guarantee seeing your lunch again.

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get in the know Founded in 1912, Universal Studios is the oldest movie studio in the USA.

The launch of Transformers: the Ride-3D.

W

e smash through the glass wall of a skyscraper, clinging to the towline behind a speeding autobot, who has just pulled us from the clutches of a very angry Decepticon megatron. We must be travelling at over 100 kilometres an hour as we splinter through the interior and out the other side. For a split second we hang in the air, slowly turning to stare at the street that is thirty-odd floors below. then, we plummet.

My heart races as fast as my stomach churns; the wind chills my face as we gather speed. Our Autobot saviour hits the afterburners at the very last second

and we shoot forward as missiles come at us from the side. We’re so close that I can feel the heat from one explosion.

Megatron fires a fusion cannon. It heads straight towards my forehead and if it were not for some extraordinary evasive action from Evac (the Autobot we’re clinging onto for dear life), I’d be scrap metal. This is like some incredible dream, but it isn’t.

It is the latest simulator/roller-coaster amusement park thrill – Transformers: The Ride-3D at Universal Studios Hollywood.

My addiction to thrill rides can be traced back to a holiday in California in 1983. I was 13 and we were visiting Six Flags Magic Mountain, an amusement

park that was built not on cartoon characters, but simply on thrills. The Colossus was the source of constant screams. At the time, it was the largest wooden roller-coaster in the world with two drops over 30 metres long and old carts that threatened to derail at any second. It had recently gained notoriety as the roller-coaster that featured in Walley World in Chevy Chase’s comedy National Lampoon’s Vacation. Like the Griswold family, the Jamieson family were enjoying a vacation. We continuously dared each other to ride the Colossus, and when it came time, I was the only Jamieson that did. Perhaps it was this

get in the know In 2003 the Brain Injury Association of America reported that: “There is evidence that roller-coaster rides pose a health risk to some people some of the time.” ISSUE #33 get lost #49

myanmar (burma)

the pursuit of

happiness Flash Parker finds inspiration, hope and monks who stare at goldfish in Myanmar (Burma).

Photography by Flash Parker

An Intha Fisherman shows off his one-legged rowing technique on Inle Lake.

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get in the know In 1989, the military government changed Burma’s name to Myanmar.

get in the know Myanmar is the world’s second-largest producer of opium, after Afghanistan.

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japan

On the edge at Shimokura.

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get in the know Snowboarding was first introduced into the Olympics in 1998 at Nagano, Japan.

MOUNTAIN MAdneSS Kelly Irving boards into oblivion around Mt Iwate in Tohoku, Japan.

Photography by Simon Bracken

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S fAr AS IdeAS go, thIS doesn’t seem like one of my best. the front 10 centimetres of my snowboard juts out over the edge of a 20-metre vertical drop. the backlit spike of Mt Iwate hovers ahead like an apparition. A sea of snow peaks and troughs below me, little powdery tornados forming on its surface. the world shrinks. I start making slushies in my stomach. All I can hear is my breath and the blood pounding in my ears. I shimmy closer to the edge, point my board down and count slowly to three.

Shimokura at Hachimantai is one of 17 ski areas dispersed around Iwate-san, the highest peak (2,038 metres) in the Tohoku region of northern Honshu, Japan. Here, powder is god, foreigners are unheard of, and if you don’t attempt a three-metre wide, double-black diamond run – even as a beginner – then you’re missing out.

I arrived at Appi, the first stop on my itinerary, a complete novice snowboarder (I’ve attempted it once before). My mission, over the next seven days, was to sample several of the best ski areas in the Iwate prefecture and go home a confident boarder.

get in the know As a result of the 2011 earthquake, the Tohoku region has been removed from most guidebooks.

I exit the chairlift on the first day – one foot strapped to my board – with the grace of a two-tonne elephant. Parking myself on the side of the wide, powdery white, groomed run, I try to make a snowball. But the tiny snowflakes refuse to stick and float away from my gloves like dust. This is what they mean by aspirin snow. It’s the light, dry and just-right stuff that makes even the most diehard snow junkie regress to a giggly 10-year-old.

“An ogre once lived on the mountain,” says Aki, my guide, pointing to the cupshaped summit of nearby Iwate as I click the other foot into my board. “He kept ISSUE #33 get lost #61

Luke wright explores Easter Island, the most remote inhabited place on earth.

Photography by Luke wright

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get in the know The name of Easter Island’s hieroglyphic writing is Rongorongo. Twenty-one tablets with Rongorongo have survived, but none have been translated.

easter island

The mysterious moai of Easter Island.

How these giants were transported is one of the world’s great unknowns.

get in the know Rongorongo is written in a method called reverse boustrophedon, meaning text is written from left to right, then from right to left, but upside down.

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spain

looking for a Mark Eveleigh goes searching for surf along Spain’s Basque coast, but finds plenty more to sink his teeth into than just waves.

The old Basque village of Zarautz, with its immense arc of sand, is now one of Europe’s most vibrant surf destinations.

Photo: Javi Muñoz.

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get in the know Humble little San Sebastián has three restaurants with three Michelin stars; there are only 10 in the entire USA.

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gEntlE offshorE brEEzE ripples the face of the Atlantic breakers. fresh off the stillsnowy mountains it carries with it a wintery hint of the txirimiri.

This is the poetic – almost endearing – name by which the people of San Sebastián know their drizzle. For whole seasons the txirimiri seems to be the default weather system here. Pulling on my wetsuit, I begin to question the wisdom of my decision to come to San Sebastián so early in the Spanish summer on the trail of what is said to be a surfing revolution.

Carrying my board across the rainpocked sand of La Zurriola beach I count about 30 surfers lined up along the clean, eight-foot faces. The Basques are a hardy race, tempered by a land of mist-shrouded mountains and rugged coastlines. Apparently it takes more than the nip of the txirimiri to keep the local surfers from their waves.

Tucked into the corner where Spain and France meet, San Sebastián seems to benefit as the focus point for any swell that is generated by the spiralling currents of the Bay of Biscay. To the east lies the French Basque Country and to the west a rugged coastline of wave-smashed cliffs and wild, windswept beaches stretches unbroken to Fisterra – literally ‘The End of the Land’ – in far off Galicia.

San Sebastián’s Gipuzkoa province is particularly famed for spots like the legendary surf beach at Zarautz (10 minutes from the city) and the infamous Playa Gris, which seems almost to have acted as a magnet for some of the biggest waves in the history of surfing.

The city itself has two beaches with two very different characters. The immense sweeping arc of soft sand that is La Concha is a tranquil natural harbour and the ideal town beach. The great curving promenade here is still fringed with Art Deco hotels and palaces, built way back when this was the prime summer getaway for Spanish royalty who came to take in the waters and breathe the cool air of green Spain. La Concha has been called the pearl of the Cantabrian Sea, but its Spanish name simply means ‘the shell’.

get in the know The Basque sport of jai alai is the fastest team ball game in the world, with serves recorded at up to 302 km/h.

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