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13

Not so average

honeymoons Whipping & Worship Peru’s Snow Star Festival A Surfer’s Paradise The Taiwan you’ve never seen Twilight Zone Aurora hunters and Nordic fjords Ride On Unravel Slovenia by bike ISSN 1449-3543

AustrAliA | French PolynesiA | indiA | isrAel | MAldives | northern irelAnd

13

Not so average

honeymoons 88 Take your pick from our collection of two-part honeymoons that marry adventure with beach bliss

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AmERICAN SAmOA

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NORWAY

meet Big momma, the coral queen

SlOvENIA Cycle a fairytale landscape

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TAIWAN

Cruise through days of never-ending dusk

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Grab a board and surf the east coast

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AUSTRAlIA Step into the kimberley’s natural drama

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INdIA Soak off your sins in sacred waters

get in the know Arnold of Soissons is the patron saint of hop pickers.

WIN

contents

mera, 10 Olympus ca res tour, 18 ntu Urban Adve ggage, 19 lu te Pakli ture, 44 Arctic adven

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Festival pERUvIAN mASkS, mYThS ANd WhIpS 14 ON ThE RAdAR

24 hOT FIvE

19 hAppY SNApS

28 YOU WISh

Travel happenings around the globe Send us your photos and win!

20 plACES TO STAY The weird and wonderful

22 TOp TRIpS

Get going in a group

high-flying hot air balloon rides

Skydiving in the Red Centre

30 GET pACkING

An instant itinerary for road tripping in New Zealand

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like a local A FAShION dESIGNER’S FAvOURITES IN TEl AvIv 118 FOOd

124 BARS

Create and salivate over French polynesian fare

drink it down

120 phOTOGRAphY

All the gadgets you’ll need

Get ready for adventure

122 TRAvEl JOB

This office is under the sea

126 REvIEWS

128 CONFESSIONS

Who knew karma could be this good?

32 AF TER dARk Fine dining, whiskey and craic in Belfast

get in the know Globally, more than two million guests stayed at an Airbnb on New Year’s Eve.

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threw myself Into Peru wIth wIld abandon. It cracked my heart wide open and I let every detail of the experience rush in. After some time winding our way up a dirt road to a remote corner of the sacred Valley, we eventually arrived in huilloc – a village set deep in the mountains, sitting pretty at 3500 metres above sea level. the town is known for the way it has preserved traditional weaving techniques and the community was clothed in hypnotising, bright textiles and friendly grins. the woman in this photograph was selling exquisite creations from her loom and giggled as she met my lens with a shy but willing gaze. the people living here had very few material possessions, yet there was a sense of happiness that filled the air.

• Canon eos 6d • 24–70mm f/2.8 usm Is lens at 70mm • Iso 100, f/2.8, 1/400 sec Congratulations to Elle Opal for winning our Frame Your View competition! She’s scored an Olympus camera for entering this shot.

Think you’ve got a winner? send us your best travel photos for a chance to win an olympus om-d e-m10 mark II, valued at Au$999, plus a double-page spread in the magazine! this stylish, compact, interchangeable-lens camera is perfect for travel. olympus.com.au

to enter the competition, go to getlostmagazine.com/competitions

BelfaSt Twenty years ago it didn’t even register on the tourist radar. But the city of Belfast has displayed a colossal level of fortitude in the face of a turbulent past. Samantha Kodila uncovers shining Irish camaraderie and a rollicking craic that is still very much alive.

Photography by Samantha Kodila

Saturday nights bring the masses to the Duke of York.

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ou feel the warmth immediatelY. and before you ask, no, it’s not the weather. “Belfast is like a village – everyone knows everyone,” says dee, my guide. and that sense of community is evident from the moment you set foot in the city. locals greet each other on the street, help visitors with directions without a grumble and strike up conversation with strangers at the pub. an intimacy runs through the city’s cobbled streets that dublin, with its cosmopolitan atmosphere, lacks. here, there’s always a story to be told: you’ll spot tales splashed across building walls or hear them muttered in the corner of a bar. and there’s a watering hole on almost every street. in fact, there are so many to choose from you could spend a week here and not have time to drink in each one. let the craic begin!

3.30pm Belfast is still, to this day, a city feeling the effects of its complex past, and there’s no better way to delve into its chronicles than on a Black Cab Political Tour. Learn about the city’s landmarks and history of sectarian violence as you zigzag through the northern and western suburbs. Some of the stories behind the sights are incredible, but it’s the murals that will leave you floored. Unable to speak on camera, activists in the 1970s and 80s created protest art, painting their feelings about the violence and oppression in murals on the city’s walls, many of which remain today. The largest is the Peace Wall on Cupar Way, which separates the Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, and is splashed with vibrant images and thousands of messages of hope from both locals and visitors. When booking your tour, ask for Billy Scott. His depth of knowledge is nothing short of extraordinary and it’s delivered with a wicked sense of humour. touring around Belfast touringaroundbelfast.com 34 get lost ISSUE 52

a pit stop at Cupar Way is a stirring experience.

5pm After your lesson in Northern Ireland’s history you’ll be parched, so ask Billy to drop you off at Crown Liquor Saloon. A Belfast institution, this pub has been around for almost 200 years and shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.

Once a famed Victorian gin palace, its ornate interior is the handiwork of Italian craftsmen who had been brought to Ireland to adorn the many new churches being built at the time. Patrick Fanigan, then-owner of the saloon, convinced these artisans to work on the property’s interior after hours. As the sun sinks, stained-glass windows colour the interior with rainbow swirls along the mosaic-tiled floors, and the mahogany snugs make for a cosy spot to sip a cool glass of gin from the pub’s heritage selection.

Crown liquor Saloon 46 Great Victoria Street nicholsonpubs.co.uk

portfolio spanning seven unique establishments.

He also previously held a Michelin star for 14 consecutive years (the longest in Northern Ireland) so it’s safe to say you’re in for a treat. Here, the speciality is in the moniker, so sink your teeth into one of his lip-smacking steaks. Each prime cut is matured in a Himalayan salt chamber before it’s cooked to perfection on the restaurant’s Asador grill and served with beef-dripping chips. Not into red meat? Head next door to one of Deane’s two other restaurants: Love Fish, serving fresh seafood; or Eipic for fine dining. meat locker 36–40 howard Street michaeldeane.co.uk

6pm Before you consider filling up on Guinness, you should know Irish cuisine has come a long way since the humble potato. If you’re after a true gastronomic experience, book a table at Meat Locker by chef and restaurateur Michael Deane. Credited with revolutionising Belfast’s foodie scene – and a champion of fresh, local and seasonal produce – Deane has a restaurant

Dinner is served.

get in the know Guinness was once used as a sedative and given to patients and pregnant women.

after dark Belfast 7pm

Cheese, cocktails, jazz – what more do you need?

It’s the quasi-religious experience you didn’t ask for, but have always secretly wanted.

Ascend to the second floor of the Spaniard and you’ll feel like you’ve stepped into a holy shrine. Religious paraphernalia decorates every wall – large golden chalices, ornate framed images of the Virgin Mary and figurines of Jesus Christ gleam in the soft light – and sweeping red velvet sheets adorn the ceiling.

Before you confess your sins, you should know the atmosphere in this tiny bar is anything but holy – dance beats bounce off the walls and with over 50 types of rum to choose from, the cocktails err on the wicked side of delicious.

It seems fitting that this debauched venue is a popular spot with the Game of Thrones cast (including Sean Bean and Emilia Clarke), who have been seen imbibing here between filming.

A bar blessed by the Mother of Dragons?

Amen to that. the Spaniard 3 Skipper Street thespaniardbar.com

8pm

the decor’s divine at the Spaniard.

Watering holes the world over have tried to recreate the craic found in Ireland’s pubs, and the Duke of York is just the type of joint they aim to emulate. Located on one of Belfast’s oldest laneways, this bar pays homage to both the city’s industrial past and its residents’ love of whiskey (it boasts the largest selection in Ireland). Downstairs, walls glitter with antique mirrors advertising hard liquor, while every other surface is covered with memorabilia from a bygone era. It fills up fast so get there early to claim a table. Then squeeze through the crowds and climb up a narrow staircase to the band room where Snow Patrol got their start in the 90s. Spin and sway to live bands playing cover songs before fading to traditional Irish folk from Thursday to Sunday nights. When the place is fit to burst the crowds don’t disperse in defeat; they spill out onto the cobbled alleyway festooned with blossoming red flowers and continue the craic under the stars. the duke of York 7–11 Commercial Court dukeofyorkbelfast.com

get in the know Crumlin Road Courthouse, a neo-Palladian-style building constructed in 1850, was sold for £1 in 2003.

9pm Ireland has an impressive music pedigree, so it’s not surprising that everything from traditional Irish folk to rock’n’roll filters out onto the streets. But did you know there’s also a thriving jazz scene? Tucked behind the Merchant Hotel is Bert’s Jazz Bar, the only venue in the city dedicated to this music genre. Decked out in Art Deco glamour reminiscent of 1930s New York, its plush red-velvet furnishings and polished brass surfaces exude intimacy in the soft lighting. Wander in any night of the week from 9pm to hear musicians from across the country play. The cocktails also possess legendary status: the drinks list resembles a novella and the inventive concoctions – crafted slowly, but with flawless precision – are well worth the wait.

Pull up a bar stool and watch the mixologists whip up liquid magic, or ease into one of the booths, dig into a board of camembert and cured meats from the French-bistro-inspired menu and allow yourself to be bewitched by dulcet guitar licks and soulful sax.

Bert’s Jazz Bar 16 Skipper Street themerchanthotel.com ISSUE 52 get lost 35

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PERU

MOUNTAIN Once a year, beneath an Andean glacier, the biggest celebration in the Americas takes place. Mark Johanson becomes the whipping boy at Peru’s awe-inspiring Qoyllur Rit’i.

Photography by Mark Johanson

Revellers wait for their turn to parade through the makeshift village.

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et me introduce you to Peru’s Qoyllur Rit’i festival with a few numbers. And let me begin with 5000: that’s the altitude, in metres, I’m at right now.

The air here is so thin it feels more like standing on the moon than earth. My head is a veritable balloon ready to explode; it’s so filled with pressure that even the mouthful of altitude-busting coca leaves stewing in my chipmunk cheeks can’t cut the tension.

Masks are an integral part of Qoyllur Rit’i rituals.

A ‘nation’ parades through the festival in lavish costumes.

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I’m up against a mountain spirit – really the edge of a toothy peak sacred to the people of the high Andean plateau. These Aymara and Quechua farmers make a 13-kilometre pilgrimage here into the Sinakara Valley once a year on the full moon before the winter solstice. What begins as a trickle to this remote Andean sanctuary from the small village of Mahuayani, three hours west of Cusco and the Machu Picchu crowds, quickly becomes a flood.

100,000: that is, approximately, the number of people standing alongside me on this mountain making up our ethereal city in the sky.

I guess they’re not really standing; they’re mostly dancing. Or marching.

Some of them are dancing and marching, and they’re headed up the mountainside to form a human cross. The rest are either duelling with ropes in the makeshift plazas below the lone Catholic church or lining up in elaborate costumes for a parade that won’t end for another 48 hours.

Minus 10: that’s how low the temperatures can go. When your only shelter is a thin snap-together tent, it’s the kind of cold you feel deep down in your bones. You probably feel it even more when you’re sleeping under a blue plastic tarp, as most of the festival-goers do. Then again, people don’t come to this event, also known as the Snow Star Festival, to sleep. With the overnight pyrotechnics and 24-hour parades who could sleep anyways?

Two: that’s how many times I’ve been whipped since I got here. The punishments are for infractions I didn’t know I was committing, such as wearing a beanie in front of the ukukus. These disciplinarians who, according to Quechua mythology, are half-man, half-bear, talk in falsetto voices to disguise their identities. Their whippings are fairly gentle, but the other three whippings – the ones I don’t know about yet on this first night at Qoyllur Rit’i – those are full-on.

I never expected to get the strap at Qoyllur Rit’i (pronounced KOL-yer REE-chee). I guess I didn’t really know what to expect, even though I set off for the festival with more preamble than any other trip in my life. Long-time Cusco resident and Melbourne native Katy Shorthouse, director of travel outfit Aspiring Adventures, met with me on the morning before I left for Mahuayani. Qoyllur Rit’i, she tells me, “is the most full-on festival in Peru”. Religious scholars have called it the largest and most important religious pilgrimage in the Americas, while historians have dubbed it the original Burning Man. “It takes me a few days to mentally prepare for a visit,” Shorthouse told me over breakfast at Jack’s Cafe in Cusco. “It’s unimaginably overstimulating.” And here I am, a few hours later and a gazillion degrees colder – on account of an unexpected hailstorm on the walk up – right in the thick of it all.

The full moon peeks its head over the scraggly peak of Qolque Punku as we settle in for our first night in the bowels of this Andean amphitheatre.

PERU

Young and old alike trek to the festival.

Panpipes echo off the crowded valley walls and the air smells of fried trout and gunpowder. To my right are dancers who’ve fashioned dead baby llamas into belts, their limp carcasses bobbing up and down like rag dolls as the revellers twirl past. To my left is a man dressed beak to claw as a human condor. And next to me, in a black tracksuit, dragging her pet gringo around like a lost puppy on a leash, is Betty.

Everyone who comes to Qoyllur Rit’i arrives as part of a ‘nation’, representing anything from a single church to an entire town. Each nation carves out its own patch of the Andean plateau to call home, and I just happen to plop my tent down with Los Hijos de Los Angeles Cordilleranos, a church group from the southern Peruvian city of Ayacucho. Betty (pronounced ber-tee) welcomes me into her nation with open arms and big plans. I don’t know quite what that means at the time, but I find out good and well the following morning when Los Hijos wake me at sunrise from a fitful night for a stirring morning mass.

The official Catholic version of Qoyllur Rit’i talks of a miraculous vision of the Christ Child by local shepherds here in 1780. When clergymen came to find the boy they instead discovered a boulder marked with the image of Christ.

It may come as little surprise that this apparition, which placed Catholicism right in the heart of a festival with pre-Incan roots, occurred during the same year as a massive indigenous uprising against the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. It may shock you even less to learn Vatican records show a payment made to a prominent artist of the time for his work on the boulder, which pilgrims now line up to see within the church it helped inspire.

Although a few thousand people join me at the morning mass, there are tens of thousands more who are off beating drums, shooting fireworks and twirling technicolour shawls in the distance.

Receiving a whipping beneath the Qolque Punku glacier.

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AmericAn SAmoA

Bommies AwAy

Its islands are mere specks in the Pacific, but American Samoa’s incredible undersea action lures aquaphiles from around the world.

Deborah Dickson-Smith and Simon Mallender take the plunge.

Looking out over Pago Pago Harbor.

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Dark Light Into the

to f Ind t he

Justin Jamieson discovers the journey north is almost as exciting as the destination.

The aurora borealis lights up the sky above Longyearbyen.

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Image: Akiko Kinoshita

Photography by Justin Jamieson

norway

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’m heading north.

Almost as far north as you can go before leaving civilisation behind. My final destination is Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago sitting at almost 80 degrees north – well within the Arctic Circle.

It’s late November and I’m told the polar night is in full swing, meaning the sun has taken leave and will not reappear for another 90 days.

There will be light though. Well, at least that’s what I’m searching for. It’s here that particles from the sun, attracted to the Earth’s magnetic poles, collide with the atmosphere and create a light show electrifying the long winter nights.

The northern lights beckon me, and I can think of nowhere better to experience them than the unadulterated darkness of Svalbard.

American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “To find the journey’s end in every step of the road… is wisdom”. While the great Robert Louis Stevenson mused, “To travel hopefully, is a better thing than to arrive”. Both wise men echo an ancient Taoist saying: “The journey is the reward”. It’s a philosophy I strive to embrace, though I’ve had doubts ever since I suffered a 48-hour non-stop bus journey through India with my bowels begging for Bombay’s porcelain. Yet, as I sit down to lunch on board the MS Kong Harald – a Hurtigruten passenger ferry currently docked off the Norwegian coastal town of Trondheim – at the start of my journey, I embrace once again the writings of Emerson and Stevenson.

An enormous fish tank sits front and centre of Kysten restaurant (one of three on board). Inside, Norwegian red king crabs the size of steering wheels vie for space. Each crustacean has a tag with a QR code linking to information about where and when the creature was caught and details of its captor.

I’ve chosen what looks to be the plumpest crab and, having scanned the code, find myself toasting a Norwegian fisherman named Ole who caught my lunch near Finnmark, the northernmost point of mainland Norway.

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Local surfers head out for a wave on Taiwan’s mountainous east coast.

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taiwan

st coast proves a e ic n ce s ’s n a Taiw A surf trip along Kirk Owers. s te ri w , d e ct e rich in the unexp Photography by

Kirk Owers

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The banks of Lake Bohinj are a popular place for a picnic in summer.

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SLOVENIA

Tucked away in Central Europe is a land of glimmering lakes, wild forests and little hamlets. Shaun Busuttil hops on two wheels to unravel the Slovenian landscape.

Photography by Andy Aungthwin and AleĹĄ ZdeĹĄar

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