Sabang - or, This Is My Happy Place.

The beach at Sabang drowns at high tide, the water sweeping greedily right up to the line of sentinel coconut palms that lean sleepily over the sand. At low tide, the beach is a wide graceful crescent of white sand, the flotsam raked away by the diligent staff of each little guesthouse or resort, the heavy thump and swish of the waves a slow, hypnotic beat. 









This is where, despite my better efforts and my previous protests (those of you who followed me through South America will remember my outrage here and here), I became a morning person. The electricity - and more specifically, the fan - only ran from 6 pm until 10:30 pm, so by 6:30 am each morning, at the latest, we both woke up in a hot sweat, desperate for a cold shower or a dip in the waves.



 




 We stayed for five nights in a little bamboo cottage on the beach, swimming (well, more fighting with the waves), drinking two-dollar-a-twixer sugarcane rum, reading, and playing cards. 

We had a single touristy day during which we trekked through the jungle for two hours to see the region's most famed attraction: a massive subterranean river, recently voted in as one of the world's new natural wonders of the world.

Although it’s a two hour drive from the Puerto Princesa City, tour companies in the city sign people up for one-day tours to Sabang to see the river, rather than encouraging tourism in Sabang itself. Sad for Sabang's potential for a tourist boom, amazing for that gloriously quiet beach.


The river was interesting. The guides use paddles rather than motors to take you through the
prescribed route, one-and-a-half kilometres down the river and back (the full river is just over eight kilometres long, so the only sound is the echo of the paddle slapping against water. The stalactites and stalagmites the guides pointed out to us were inevitably interpreted as either food items ('the mushroom,' 'the garlic') or as religious symbols ('the cathedral,' 'the face of Jesus'). It's a deliciously cool break from a sweltering afternoon. 

But better, really, was our week spent enjoying the slow life of Sabang, whiling away the days until out flight to Vietnam, where everything was about to get a lot more hectic.


S.

Sun and Ruins - Fethiye and Pamukkale

We're flat out on the wide stones of Turkey's Oludeniz beach, on the Western Mediterranean shore. The sun beats down, still hot in the late afternoon. Above us, paragliders swirl in the thermals, spinning up and then float down to land up the beach behind us. The fishy-salt smell of the ocean blows over us, the waves, white-foamed in the brilliant azure water, smash again and again against the cove.

Eventually we overheat and speed-limp across the scalding stones to plunge into the ocean, just cool enough to refresh us, but so salty that I surface with teary eyes every time I put my head under water.

When we get out, I consider: should I reapply the waterproof SPF 50 sunscreen on my face when it's already four o'clock?

Yes. Yes I should. Ginger kids burn fast. And I'm not alone with my pale skin - this corner of the coast is practically one big British resort town.

That evening, on our way back to our hotel in Fethiye, we stopped at one of the many tour boats in the harbour to arrange a Twelve Islands tour. Fortunately for us, Ramadan meant a lull in domestic tourism, so an eight hour boat trip with swimming stops and provided lunch was running at twenty-five lira - thirteen bucks. Yes please!

So we spent a whole day lounging aboard the Princes Serap with about fifty other people - not bad on a boat with two levels and 150 person capacity. Drinks are expensive on-board, and outside drinks are forbidden (we were able to sneak some water on), but even with the drink tab, the day was cheap.

We swam in five little coves, some with other tour boats, some alone, and the Captain lent us his diving mask for free so that we could explore underwater.

The next day, we grabbed a dolmus from Fethiye to the Saklikkent Gorge, where we spent the afternoon wading along the polished, white canyon floor.

Dolmuses are driver-owner minibuses but the fares and routes are predetermined by the regional authorities. So a driver will linger as long as he can before leaving to get as many fares as he can, and then troll slowly along the route, honking at prospective customers because more people means more money.

So it takes a while to get anywhere.

Dolmuses are decorated with everything the drivers can think of: evil eye pendants and stickers, Turkish flags (Turks are a very patriotic bunch), photos and business cards taped to the windows. In one, we saw a shag dashboard cover. It was magnificent.

We moved north a few days later to the little town of Pamukkale, which sits at the foot of two impressive attractions.

Visible from across the wide valley are travertines, a shiny, white hill that to our Canadian eyes looked strangely like snow. Rather, the hill is a series of calcium terraces deposited by thermal springs. The mineral-rich water runs down the hillside, forming pools and painting a thick crust as it flows.

There's no shoes allowed for the hike up the hill, just bare feet on the little ridges and in the slimy calcium mud that builds up in the pools.

At the top of the hill is the partially preserved ruin of Hieropolis, built as a health resort when the Romans found the mineral springs. The steep theatre has been partially reconstructed, the necropolis is in impressive shape, and you can pay to use the baths near the white cliffs. We visited at sunset, when there aren't many people, so we wandered the site without the crowds, examining columns and fountains and tombs until the night-time call to prayer rolled over the hills and it was too dark to see properly.

But just one ancient city is never enough, so the next day we packed into a hired car and drove two hours into the dry hills to see Aphrodisias.

The Temple of Aphrodite, to whom the city is dedicated, stands partially reconstructed, and a few of the other major buildings have been excavated and somewhat restored - a hilltop theatre, the massive house of an evidently important man and the baths are in decent shape. The city gate stands tall and glorious in the middle of a field. But just to the north, the stadium reigns king of the ruins.

It's set into a hillside so that you approach from the top of the seating - you pass a line of trees and the enormous oval stretches suddenly before you. It could hold thousands and thousands of people and is in remarkably great shape. The rows of stone seats are warped and crunched, but some are still usable. The ground-level, where I can imagine chariots racing before a roaring crowd, has been excavated and re-established.

Best of all, because Aphrodisias is so far from any major towns, there were only a few small tour groups and a few independent travelers around. We sat alone in the carved seats of the two-thousand-year-old stadium, contemplating chariots, awed by the enormity of it.

We ran into difficulty leaving Pamukkale. Whereas earlier in the week, Ramadan had proved to be a cost-saver, now it was ruining our plans to head up the coast. Ramadan had given way to Beyram, the festival celebrating the end of the fasting. Which is when everyone in Turkey goes on holiday, and the buses are booked.

So we ended up heading right back to Istanbul, because the night bus wasn't full. We spent two days doing nothing but wandering the crowded streets and eating kebab, and then loaded onto another night bus, destined now for the Bulgarian border and the Balkans.

S.

Cave Dwellings

Capadoccia is out of the way. It's in the centre of Turkey, hours from any other touristy destination - but it's incredibly popular as a window into an ancient lifestyle and a unique landscape.

We rolled into Göreme, the region's most popular town, on a Sunday morning, tired from a restless snooze on the night bus from Istanbul. We made our way through the little crowd of hotel owners offering lodging, and down a street full of restaurants and souvenir shops and ATV rental agencies to find our hotel.

Soft, white stone is the defining feature of the whole region. There are two major draws: the natural rock formations created by erosion, and the homes and churches that were carved out of the same stone by the Byzantine Greek population beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

We were staying in a 'cave' hotel, which means that some of the rooms on offer have been carved out of soft volcanic rock to make a unique and atmospheric little room. It's a cute change of pace.

Göreme itself grew up around a collection of carved-out Byzantine churches that forms the Göreme Open Air Museum, which was our first stop while we waited to check into our cave room.

There are a number of individual churches and chapels as well as a monastery in the complex, all long-abandoned but well-preserved. They're each carved out of the cliff side and filled with artwork.

In some, the predominant art is primitive red ochre: lines and geometric shapes drawn in decorative patterns. But in others, there are full-colour frescoes of biblical stories and figures. The faces of the figures were largely smashed off in the following centuries, but in many of the churches, the colours are still clear and the designs are easy to interpret.

At the end of the string of churches is one nicknamed the 'Dark Church,' because no natural light enters the chamber, thus preserving the original, vivid colours of the frescoes, to incredible effect. From floor to ceiling and front to back, the church is covered in paintings, angular figures with black-outlined noses, wrapped in colourful robes set into a deep blue background. Here, too, many of the eyes have been gauged out, or the faces have been smashed off by rocks - some of the paintings are eerie in their facelessness, bright colour abruptly giving way to dull gray rock - but the room is beautiful and quiet.

That evening, we went for a short hike east from Göreme through the Rose Valley, a fertile little stretch of grape vines and dry shrubs and trees. On the way, we found many more abandoned cave houses, carved inside big conical formations and into ridges that swirl gently upwards like rosebuds.

At the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Turkey and Greece held a population exchange. The Capadoccia region was populated primarily by ethnic Greeks, some of whom were still living in the traditional carved-out homes, but few Turks came here to replace them. We wandered through a few of the homes - it's so hard to know if these were in use at the time of the population exchange, or of they'd already been abandoned for centuries. The empty, dusty shells defy all attempts to pinpoint a timeline. In places, we saw where the rock has given out and houses have collapsed, or half a room has tumbled two stories to the ground, exposing a perfect cross-section of this bizarre, ancient lifestyle.

We sat on a ridge above the Rose Valley and watched the sun sink over the horizon before making our way home along a ATV trail.

Th next day, we took an organized day trip - nice to get a full sampling of the region and let someone else do the planning, although being shuttled around in a convoy of mini-buses on identical tours is at most a once-in-a-while activity for me.

We admired the fairy chimney formations in Göreme from a viewpoint above the town, then drove an hour across Capadoccia to an underground city, carved out two thousand years ago and used for centuries in emergencies. When war struck the region, which was often given its position on the trade route to Asia, the entire population of each town would move into their respective underground labyrinths of tunnels for safety. They could stay for a year or more if necessary and subsequent generations tunneled deeper. This city was twelve floors deep: we squeezed down the long, short stairways to the eighth floor, deep in the cold earth.

We went on a short hike through a forested, shady canyon (so rare in this dry, dusty place!) and ate lunch at a riverside restaurant, then climbed through an ancient monastery carved into the side of a towering, rocky hill.

Our final day, we were booked into a night bus to the Mediterranean coast, so we decided to spend the day hiking to exhaust ourselves. We walked back through the Rose Valley, this time making our way past the grape vines to the adjacent Red Valley. By chance, Dan noticed an opening above us in the rock wall - through it, we could see St. John's cross carved into a ceiling. We found a dusty path hiding in the shrubs and scrambled up to find a church, certainly Byzantine and so certainly old, one room decorated with faded frescoes, all to ourselves.

We ate lunch in the cool inside of the church, examining the paintings and the carvings. Once, this place was covered in polished, gleaming white stone and in bright frescoes. Amazing.

We left the valley church and walked along the sweltering, shadeless highway to the Love Valley, famous for its tall, thin 'mushroom' formations... most of which look extremely phallic. (It is the Love Valley, after all.)

The rest of our hike took us through the aptly named White Valley and after a lot of backtracking, back to Göreme for a much-needed shower before loading onto the bus for the night.

S.

Roadtrip: Ireland

Snuggled deep into my sweater, I watched the gray sea slap the stretch of black basalt that has been depicted in legend since ancient times. And no wonder. Descending into the ocean in a lumpy road are surprisingly perfect hexagons, slick with algae and worn smooth by the pounding water and the feet of tourists. Local legend says the Irish giant Finn McCool built a road from here to the Scottish Isle of Iona, where similar formations exist.

This is the Giant's Causeway. Created millions of years ago when cooling magma cracked into vertical columns rather than fashioned by a crafty giant, the stones are impressive. Especially as the usual crowds have now faded away into the cool, misty evening.

We picked our way over the slippery rocks to take a few photos in the fading light and then scrambled back up the path to make dinner.

In the kitchen, we found our ruddy-faced South African host cheerfully chopping pineapples and tossing them into a new-bought, washed-out garbage can. To the fascinated audience, he explains that he still likes to make traditional South African home brews. He adds water, raisins, sugar and yeast and gives the tub a stir with his hairy arm. He locks a lid to the can but opens it up to check the progress an hour later: the thick, yeasty smell fogs the kitchen with the promise of future beer. "Next week," he says, "that will be perfect. Sweet and strong."

The next day we take a short hike down the Causeway Coast trail. The basalt of the Causeway columns continues down towards Carrick-a-Rede, creating a picturesque cliff-scape of pleated stone dropping into the hungry Atlantic. We made it about half-way to Carrick-a-Rede, so about three hours of easy rambling along the top of the cliffs, and nabbed a bus back to the hostel.

Our next destination was Sligo, a town on the West Coast known for its surf. To get there, we drove through the western corner of Northern Ireland, where each village is proclaimed to be either Loyalist or Catholic by their flags. The Loyalist villages are plastered with Union Jacks, on flagpoles, on houses and strung over the streets.

We crossed the border into the Republic of Ireland and headed south through the impossibly green countryside. This is a true cliche,  at least in this region. It rains all the time, so the fields and the forests are lush, sporting every shade of green. Even the tree trunks are covered in creeping ivy vines.

We made it out to Strandhill Beach near Sligo, but the waves were tiny and the water glassy-flat, so we dropped the surfing plan. Instead, we climbed Knocknarea, a pleasant if slippery forty-minute hike up the tabletop mountain that watches over County Sligo. At the top is a massive rock cairn - legend claims this to be the tomb of Queen Mabhe, or Maeve, an ancient Celt who makes appearances in mythology all over Britain and Ireland. There is speculation that below the great cairn lies a passage tomb that would rival the size of Newgrange, but it has never been excavated.

We drove out to the Arrowrock Hostel, south of town, to check in and decide what to do with our afternoon - fortunately, our host enthusiastically told us the perfect plan.

So an hour later, we drove up a bumpy, pothole-ridden track, let ourselves through a sheep gate and parked the rental car. We circled a small ridge, and once we ascended, we found our goal: Carrowkeel, a collection of mid-size cairns marking passage tombs older than Newgrange by a thousand years or two. They haven't been reconstructed or even excavated. They've sat on this ridge, white quartz exteriors glittering in the morning sun, for somewhere between five and seven thousand years. There are fourteen on this set of ridges, and where we were, there are four.

Two are in good shape, although they don't sparkle white like they once did, so we dug out the headlamp. For the first, I climbed over the entrance stone and crawled backwards (otherwise you end up on your back) through the short, narrow tunnel. Dan followed me with a bit of squeezing.

The inside is maybe three metres tall, so we could both stand comfortably. Like Newgrange, the passage opens into a small central chamber with three alcoves at right angles. The inside is smaller and less elaborate than that of Newgrange, but we were free to examine it for as long as we wanted. The only other people on the ridge were an older trio of Irish expats on vacation from England.

The second one was slightly larger, but identical in design. We examined a caved-in cairn, and I belly-crawled into the fourth to confirm that although the passage is still open, the inner chamber has collapsed. We also saw a shallow pit lined with stone slabs that looked very much like the prehistoric graves that are modeled at the Museum of Archaeology in Dublin.

We spent the next day, Sunday, in the Burren National Park, a rugged and stony landscape that, in the south end of the park at least, plunges abruptly into the sea. These are the gorgeous and alarmingly steep Cliffs of Moher.

(Also known as the Cliffs of Insanity in the film 'The Princess Bride,' which, if you have not already seen it, will change your life.)

We drove past the entrance to the visitor's centre and spent a good half hour whipping around the tiny country lanes just south, until we found a suitable spot to leave the car. The weather was shockingly perfect, so we decided to walk along the cliffs from the Hag's Head formation, where a trail begins, to the visitor's centre and back.

Yep, that's me behind the sign.

Officially, you're not supposed to leave the visitor's centre area, where there are walls to prevent you falling to your death, but the trail is beautiful and worth the vertigo so long as you focus on staying on the path and don't leap about like an idiotic gazelle.

We spent the final two nights of our road trip in County Kerry, in the southwest corner of the island.

The first day, we took the famed scenic drive around the Ring of Kerry, where the views of the sea and the jagged islands and the cliffs are beautiful - and in the evening, the tour coaches on the thin roads are mercifully few. We explored an Iron Age ring fort and then drove back to our hostel in Tralee at dusk, through the fairytale forest of Killarny National Park.

And finally, we spent the day at Brandon Beach on the Dingle Peninsula. We rented surfboards and wetsuits for the afternoon (€10 for the day! ) and rolled around in the waves. They weren't huge, but big enough for us to work on standing up and retaining control. It's always nice to see improvement!

In the evening, we drove around Dingle, but I was tuckered out and slept through most of it.

The touristy parts of Ireland - that is to say, most of it - are so for a reason. They are gorgeous, green forests and pastures, they are dramatically stunning cliffs. But on the sidelines there are still quiet and rewarding places. Ours was Carrowkeel - to find those tombs just waiting for us, unattended... amazing.

S.

Colca Canyon

As planned, my group from the Loki hostel in Cusco rolled into Arequipa on Tuesday morning and took over a little hostel near the plaza. Myself and one other in the group were on a different bus than everyone else, and so there was a little confusion initially over where I was trying to go, but by midmorning we'd found them and set up a tour for 110 soles.... amazing price thanks to Nathan's haggling.

We bummed around Arequipa for the day... I see why people fall in love with it. While activity-wise there's not an awful lot to do other than the canyon around the city, the city itself deserves some credit. It's beautiful. Most of the buildings are white-washed volcanic stone, painted all sorts of colours down the streets and in the Plaza des Armas, kept gorgeously, glowingly white. What a pretty plaza. It's a pity I didn't get to spend more time in this city, it was a treat.

Bedtime came early and then morning came earlier... remember in my last post when I declared that I would never again wake before 4 am? I lied.

I got up at 2:55.

I am not kidding.

It's a 4 hour drive to the canyon, plus breakfast at 6 or so, and the condors that nest around the deepest point only fly in the early to mid morning. Thus, we woke up at 3 and slept in the bus on the way there. We were rewarded by 3 condors soaring through the canyon - one of the deepest in the world. The birds were beautiful, hardly bothering to flap. And from that high up, they almost look small.

The first day's hike wasn't too bad... mostly down the canyon's side, which can be perilous only because of the excessive amounts of dust on the trail. A few of us slipped and fell, but never over the edge. We spent the night in a tiny village at the bottom and split two bottles of rum between 12 of us. (We'd bought them at the top because its cheaper and carted them down... we'll call this dedication. Ha.) Nicely drunk, we were still in bed by 10.

Day two was your basic Peruvian flat hike... up and down and up and down along the side of the canyon. Slippery still, but manageable. By noon we were at the canyon 'oasis,' a little resort with a swimming pool, wood huts and a bar at the bottom of the canyon. Perfect. We spent the day lounging in the sun and learning card games from each other.

At night we had a bonfire and more rum. The bartender decided to teach me how to drink like a Peruvian. You take a shot, count to 8, breath three times and THEN you get your pisco and sprite. And when you are doing this at the bottom of the world's deepest canyon, you take your shot of rum out of a bowl. Because sometimes you have to make sacrifices.

He also gave me recipes for Peruvian food and for pisco sours. Amazing.

Again, we stumbled to bed drunk before midnight, only to be woken up at 5 for the hardest part of the whole trek: a three hour up-the-mountain climb to be done before breakfast because if you wait too long, it's just too hot to even bother.

And so for the second time in a week, I climbed a mountain before breakfast. It's almost become routine, really. (Kidding... oh my god my thighs hurt...) In reality it was one of the hardest things I've done on this trip, only partly because of the mild hangover.

About half way up I banded together with one of the Aussie girls in the group and we managed to keep each other going the whole way up... although by the last third we'd essentially stopped talking and just moved to grunting and swearing because we didnt have the energy for words anymore. We did well, in the end. We set a good pace for each other and managed to power through the agony, and we made it up the canyon in two and a half hours, so better than average.

After breakfast we drove to a hot springs, where we basked for an hour and showered (VERY necessary), ate lunch at a buffet (the most full I've been in weeks...) and then drove back to Arequipa.

Instead of staying friday night, we all just hopped on a night bus. Most of the group got off in Ica this morning (If any of you see this, I miss you already!!!!) And myself, Nathan and one other went through to Lima. They went past Lima to Mancora this morning, leaving me on my own again... I'll miss you, my favourite Essex boy!

It was neat to spend so much time with one group of people. I haven't had that my whole trip and it was a welcome change, especially as this group had a fantastic dynamic. Everyone was constantly joking and playing around, keeping the atmosphere light and easy... except when food was late or skimpy, but that's just natural. Ha.

So now I'm in Lima, in the Point hostel by the ocean. I'll be here until I fly out monday night.

S.