Info on visited countries

 

INDONESIA

www.tourismindonesia.com - Tourism Site

www.thejakartapost.com – Best Newspaper

 

FIJI

www.fiji.gov.fj – Governative Site with a lot of informations

www.fijitimes.com -The historic Fijian Newspaper

 

SAMOA

www.samoa.travel – Turistic portal

www.samoanews.com – Newspaper Samoa-Style!

 

PERU

www.peru.info - Institutional Site

www.elcomercio.pe – Founded in 1839

 

BOLIVIA

www.bolivia.com - Good information portal

www.eldiario.net - Bolivian Newspaper

 

IRELAND

www.discoverireland.ie – Official touristic web portal

www.aranislands.ie - Info on Aran Islands

 

TANZANIA

www.tanzaniaparks.com – Official site of National Parks

www.kiliporters.org – Responsible Trekking

 

CENTRAL AMERICA

GUATEMALA

www.guatemala.gob.gt - Institutional Site of Guatemala

 

BELIZE

www.belize.gov.bz – Institutional Site of Belize

 

EL SALVADOR

www.presidencia.gob.sv - Institutional Site of El Salvador

 

NICARAGUA

www.intur.gob.ni - Official touristic web portal of Nicaragua

 

HONDURAS

www.honduras.com – Info Site of Honduras

 

COSTA RICA

www.casapres.go.cr - Institutional Site of Costarica

 

PANAMA

www.presidencia.gob.pa – Institutional Site of Panama

 

WALES

www.walesinfo.com – info about Wales

 

VIETNAM:

www.chinhphu.vn – Institutional Site of Vietnam

 

MOROCCO:

 

www.maroc.ma - Institutional Site of Morocco

 

A weird Soccer Game

Gili Air, Gili Travangan, Gili Meno

The Gili islands are three small islands off the coast of a larger island: Lombok, which in turn is one of the thousands of islands that make up the Indonesian acrchipelago.

But maybe the whole world is an island… so let’s move on. You can take a boat, leave Lombok and treat yourself to a few days of absolute peace and quiet on the smallest of the three Gili islands – Gili Meno [this is ironic cause 'meno' means 'less' in Italian].

You’ll have to do without lights and electricity, fresh water, shoes and cars for a while. But Gili Meno is a miniature paradise – and all that it doesn’t have, it makes up for in other ways.

The keeper of the light

You can base yourself in a wooden hut right by the sea, only a few meters from the beach. If you walk along the beach you only need to go up three steps and you’ll find yourself on a porch with a little table and two lovely chairs. Insides there’s a basic room with one gigantic bed and a bathroom/toilet with salted water. After a lazy day you can retire to the porch with a good book and listen to the silence, broken only by the sleepy waves.

As night descends the keeper of the light arrives and puts a gas lamp on the steps. He arrives, places the lamp on the stairs and goes away – totally silent, without saying a word. Sometimes you don’t even realise he’s been. You lift your eyes from your book and your little lamp is there, like a precious gift from a shy angel.

Albino restaurant

You’re always near the sea shore on Gili Meno. Almost always. The island is so small that you can walk around its circumference in two hours. And right on the seashore, blinded from too much sun, we walk ten metres with great difficulty and collapse in the shade of a straw canopy – the Albino Restaurant. A beer, two chickens under the table, a cat boiling in the heat under a palm.

Of course you can’t help but exchange a few words with the guy who manages the hut. He’s a young Indonesian albino with white hair and eyebrows who has hung photos and postcards of Nepal on the posts that support the canopy. He dreams about mountains, hoping to be able to reach them one day. But for now he limits himself to dreaming and passes time fishing and sleeping and serving warm beer to travellers. You turn around for a second and then you turn back, and the cat has disappeared. It’s six o’clock, the sun sets on the equator.

Later…later…

Sitting on the verrandah, on the seashore, wandering along the sandy paths of the miniscule hinterland, immersed in the crystal clear waters, under the salty shower, in the intense heat of the early afternoon: these moments follow on from one another but give no sense of time passing. The only thread holding the day together is the children who sell just-harvested, sweet, juicy pineapples After you’ve eaten three you start to say no and they know you can’t take anymore but they still keep trying. They even know your reply: “Pineapple! Pineapple!…. Later, later..”, and they laugh.

But if you get the urge, there is a young lad, very skilled and brandishing a small machete, who transforms a pineapple into a huge ‘ice-cream’ that you hold by the stem stripped of the pineapple leaves and to bite into with relish. At this point the rest of the world can wait: …later…later…

The massage G-spot

On Gili Meno sometimes you find yourself stretched out and dead to the world on the beach until five o’clock – exactly one hour before sunset – and when you wake up don’t know what’s happened to you: are you dead already or is God doing some experiments? Have you won the lottery without even realising it? Are you living out your last wish before facing a firing squad? Have you taken a great drug? Who cares, just enjoy yourself in paradise!

Then on the horizon you can see two imposing figures, slow and solemn, getting closer: Godzilla and his cousin. They offer you a massage, and you, drunk with the heat, naively accept. Lying on the sand, you entrust yourself to their knowledgeable hands hoping to reach Nirvana.

But then you realise that a pair of strong, boney hands are skinning you alive, that you’re sore from the oil mixed with sand. Then you hear the worrying sound of bones breaking, yours, the sound drowned out only by the chatting and laughter of the two Indonesian matrons that are torturing you. But by now it is too late, well and truly, too late.

Ball dancing

Here’s something incredible that you have to see. It’s really unique.

If someone doesn’t believe this, well then, take a plane, travel half way round the world, spend hours on the bus, in boats and walk for miles with a backpack, get eaten alive by mosquitoes, spend at least two days in the can with the runs and then we’ll talk about it. Because if you’re ready for that, you’ll be able to enjoy the most surreal soccer game  ever seen in the history of man.

The pitch: a beach, sandy of course, with a steep slope and the game inevitably moving closer and closer to the waves.

The players: two groups of a random number of men, bare foot, with sarongs in various vibrant colours as uniform

The rules: an outdoor stereo system, a ball to fight over, at each foul a referee that whistles and turns on the music, stops the game and makes everyone dance until the next whistle, and then they’re off running again…towards the sea of course where the ball inevitably slips toward

What about slow motion replay? Who cares? Here time passes slowly, with rhythm, but slowly.

Pictures – Indonesia

Indonesia – Map and itinerary

Indonesia – notes from the journey

Angelino: lost in Flores

Author’s note: Our guide on Flores, Angelino, is a kind and helpful person who struggles every day against all the hardships involved in making a living in an exploited and forgotten developing country. Here, many people like him earn their daily bread by taking tourists on trips in jeeps owned by rich Chinese. Of the money the employers take, the drivers probably get no more than 10%. Maybe in the following story this fact gets overlooked somewhat – hence the reason for this note. We owe him that.

The ruins of Maumere

Maumere, Flores, Indonesia: East of Java, Bali and Lombok we find the extremely poor, catholic Flores Island welcoming us one sunny morning. The small city wounded by earthquakes survives among the ruins of its old houses that have never been reconstructed. The tourists the make it this far are few and far between and naturally there’s quite a bit of competition for them among the local guides. Finding a guide is absolutely fundamental if you want to cross the island. There are very few buses and trains are non-existent. But chosing a good guide is like the lottery. We didn’t win.

Vote Angelino!

Once we got off the plane, we happened to come across a young boy who, in fluent English, convinced us to get in his car and take us to a small hotel (his uncle’s, of course). We make a time to meet in the afternoon to bargain about a price for a tour of the island in the days to come. The pros about him are as follows: excellent English, similar age to us, nice, car at his disposal. The cons are: the price. As stingy as two Scotsmen, we launch into an exhausting bargaining session, we were certain we’d get the better of him. Result: our friend leaves us with an “I’ll think about it” and disppears into the ether. Having lost the first round ofdeal-making, we meet a series of other guides, we weigh up offers and, after a lot of thinking, we chose Angelino: middle-aged, thin and bearded, serene but very persistent. Why did we chose him? That’s a question we’re still asking ourselves.

Angelino drive a car

The following morning, our man Angelino meets us at sunrise for our departure. In front of us are many miles and several days in his company – through forests, volcanoes, isolated villages and dirt roads. On the first leg of our tour he surprises us immediately when we try to understand why we’ve stopped by the side of the road to look at the bark of a tree. His English vocabulary consists of about 10 words. But why didn’t we notice that yesterday?

What language did we bargain in? Oh well, we can’t go back now. We’ll try to use sign language. Our guide drives along the dirt and stone roads, totally relaxed – a little too relaxed actually -especially when we’re going round corners or when we meet other vehicles coming in the opposite direction. Every ten minutes he lights up a Kretek, smelly cloves cigarettes with mildly halluconigenic effects, and his car starts to reveal the signs of shoddy repairs. God preserve us!

Terror in paradise

After an entire day of bunny hops along the island, various trips, some of them incomprehensible, and failed attempts at conversation with our man Angelino, we finally arrive at Moni, in the interior, at the foot of a volcano that we’ll visit tomorrow morning. We find somewhere to stay and after a walk in the rice paddies we discover our little paradise. A pond full of warm water and a waterfall over the rocks. Trousers off! We dive straight in.

It must have been the atmosphere, or the tiredness but somehow we are struck with a brilliant idea: Let’s swim right under the waterfall…yes go on! So that’s what we o and here we are under the powerful stream of water that… in two seconds flat drags us down into an unexpected whirpool. We manage to get out somehow after drinking a good deal of water. We know all about potential gastro-intestinal problems – but what could we do! So just to spoil the magical, poetic moment, we put two fingers down our throat…. we go back to our hut cursing ourselves. Maybe noone saw us. Here’s hoping.

Rally on the volcano

It’s still night when Monsieur Angelino proudly takes his place behind the Jeep’s steering wheel: We have to go with him almost to the summit of the Kelimutu volcano. Here’s how it was: it’s dark, freezing, the memory of the previous night is ingrained in our memory – Angelino, drunk on Arak, dancing on the table and singing at the top of his voice. To go up or not to go up – that is the question? We go up. After the first few corners in the forest, a telling off for uncontrolled skids, three yellow cards for whiplash caused by driving over hidden potholes, fifteen verbal warnings for excessive speed on muddy terrain, we decide Angelino can go to hell. But Angelino immediately calms down (or maybe he wakes up?!) and manages to get us up to the top of the hill unharmed. We will live to see another sunrise.

Pissed off in the plains

After the rally and the sunrise on Kelimutu, the day proceeds with a long trip to the Riung. Miles and miles of roads that certainly don’t do much for Angelino’s car. Infact after a few hours we need a mechanic. We go to the first village and we stop the car infront of a workship. That is, maybe it’s a workshop: men at work, screwdrivers, hammers, some tubes: yes it has to be a workship. Angelino opens the coffin, distraught, and starts the consultation. A few people gather around the motor.

Everyone puts in their two cents worth, except our driver, who doesn’t know anything about motors. He trusts the experts. The Surgical/mechanical team, after various discussions, opts for an open-bonnet excision of the carburator without anesthetic. It is put on the ground, actually on the soil that is, and gets hammered at with enthusiasm by various members of the team in turn. Probably to end its suffering. No, maybe not. Now the mass of battered metal get reinserted, two more blows and it’s done.

Off we go again followed by the looks of the mechanics that observe us with a mixture of compassion, incredulity and derision. While Angelino takes us away we have our noses stuck to the window, mute, looking at our last hope fading away.

Not even an hour later the jeep gives off its last gasp and dies on the side of the road. It’s really dead this time. Angelino won’t accept it: destiny, the inevitable, his lack of understanding of cars: he buries his head in the motor and plays around with things for an hour or two.

We try to help him but he doesn’t even respond to us. From feeling solidarity and sympathising with his pain we become exasperated at his obstinate muteness. Also because it’s getting dark and we are in the most deserted, wide open plains ever seen. And then a miracle happens. A truck appears skipping along on the horizon. We run away without hesitating.

As we run away, we feel like traitors, but sometimes you just have to trust your instincts.Bye Angelino, hope to see you again … sooner or later.

Preferably later.

Pictures – Indonesia

Indonesia – Map and itinerary

Indonesia – notes from the journey