Travel

Katie and I spent Thanksgiving in Paris, taking in the museums, visiting Veronica, being visited by Katie's British friend Micky, and hanging out at the apartment we rented in the Latin Quarter near the Jardin du Luxembourg.

When we arrived in Malta after a fairly rough crossing on a catamaran ferry from Sicily the weather was changing from the balmy warmth we had thus far in the trip. Dark clouds, wind, and cool temperatures were paving the way for thunderstorms and rain. This was the view from the deck of our hotel in Xaghrah toward Victoria. You can see the silhouette of Victoria's citadel on the left.


At Oleander, where we celebrated Kari's Birthday, Observed, there was an inexplicable stuffed chicken keeping an eye on the diners from a barred alcove high on the wall.


Our final day on Gozo, the smaller of Malta's two islands, was spent snorkeling at Dwejra, on the west coast. There's a sea arch here known as the Azure Window.


Dwejra Bay is a collapsed sea cave that opens to the Mediterranean on either side of Fungus Rock, so named due to an odd parasitic plant (Cynomorium coccineus) that lives on it's surface. It has no leaves, and was thus mistaken for a fungus. The plant was used medicinally by the Saracens and the Knights of St. John, who built a tower to protect Fungus Rock, as it is the only location in Europe where Cynomorium coccineus is found, and therefore commanded a high price on the open market. Fungus Rock is the large rock towards the right of the picture.





Valletta was built by the Knights after the Turkish siege of the late 16th century, and was the first planned city in Europe. The buildings were tall and the streets narrow to help keep the city shaded, and a sewer system was built that was flushed with sea water twice a day. The Knights also mandated that the residents put statues of saints at every corner.


This isn't that great of a picture ultimately, but I wanted to get the weird colors of this plant in the upper Barraka gardens against the ochre walls, and happily got the form of a pigeon flying away.


The night view from our hotel room across Grand Harbour to Fort St. Angelo.


Another view from our hotel room, this one up Triq San Gwann. The church on the right was having a wedding at the time.


This one should be of interest to anybody who has read Thomas Pynchon's V. This is Strada Stretta, or Straight Street, or (properly) Triq id-Dejqa. I'm the blur in the center-left of the photo, wearing a horizontally striped shirt and khakis, and Kari is the black blur to my right. We're holding hands and running down toward Fort St. Elmo at the end of the peninsula, and the Mediterranean beyond. A silly lark on my part.


This is Hagar Qim, one of the better preserved megalithic sites on Malta/Gozo. It's from roughly 3600-3000 BCE, predating the pyramids of Egypt by a half millenium. They've found female statues here that suggest that the island's culture was matriarchal.


Another sea window on the southeast coast looking toward the uninhabited island of Fifla. Our guidebook spoke of a path leading from Hagar Qim and Mnajdra to the harbor at Wied iz-Zurrieq, which we thought we found. Unfortunately, it went through hunting grounds before ending high above the narrow harbor, with no way of crossing. We had to hike all the way back to the temples, scrambling over rocks and through dense, dry, prickly macchia.

On to Sicily.

Erice is a small town that sits high above Trapani in western Sicily. The streets are winding, and the houses and courtyards are quite pretty. The old church clings to the side of a cliff.


The Doric temple at Segesta is remarkably well preserved, probably due to it never having a roof. After seeing the temple, we walked a few kilometers to the top of the hill to see the Acropolis and the theater. The hike up was rather surreal due to the sun-baked snail shells covering most of the dry shrubs of the macchia. Thousands upon thousands of snails clearly met their demise after being lured out, and I can only guess that a sudden heat wave followed a damp period.


We then headed to the south coast, and the Greek temples at Selinunte. The temple above is Temple E, reconstructed in 1958 and mostly complete. Selinunte is situated on a low bluff overlooking the Mediterranean, and there are over a dozen ruins and temples in the complex.


The Vallei di Templi just outside Agrigento is another impressive ancient Greek site, and includes the Temple of Concord pictured here.



The mosaics at the Roman villa at Casale are incredible, and delightfully perverse. I especially enjoyed the depictions of the animals, including a parody of the villa's mosaic scene of Rome's Circus Maximus, with small boys piloting chariots driven by ducks and other fowl.



At Siracusa, there's a enormous Greek amphitheater, and an enormous man-made cave in the shape of a human ear called the Ear of Dionisios, so named due to a legend that it was built by the eponymous tyrant (not the god) to surreptitiously listen in on the prisoners working in the quarry nearby. The Lonely Planet guide suggests it was more likely some sort of sounding station for the amphitheater.

Continuing from the previous post, here's some context on the Sardinia photos.

There are many ancient nuraghic sites on Sardinia, including this one at Nur Albucciu, and the following picture shows Coddu Vecchiu.




We rented a boat and cruised the Golfo di Orosei from Santa Maria Navarese to near Cala Gonone, snorkeling, swimming, and sunbathing at various spots along the way.




After Santa Maria Navarese, we headed to Cagliari, and there are a bunch of pictures of the large citadel there.




On a wall to the side of the Regio Arsenale was this graffito.




I've always found logos and packaging depicting a food product consuming itself or it's own kind amusing, and I discovered my new favorite, Hausbrandt's logo. Hausbrandt is a coffee roaster from Trieste. I'm going to have to try to find some espresso cups like these for myself.




The Sardinian flag and coat of arms depicts four Moors who are either blindfolded or wearing a headband. The traditional rendition has the Moors blindfolded, a warning to the Saracens from days gone by. I'd say about 30-40% of all the flags/symbols had the Moors blindfolded. It's quite similar to the Corsican flag, with a single Moor wearing a headband. Corsica moved away from the blindfolded Moor a long time ago, and have largely identified themselves with the Moor head. According to my Lonely Planet, General Ghjuvan Petru Gaffori was the first person to make the bandana a headband, which he did before attacking the Genoese at Bastia in 1745. Gaffori and Corsica's hero Pascal Paoli found the Moor's newfound ability to see as symbolic of Corsica's independence.

The photos from the trip are available here.

Some them need some explanation, so here goes. I'll start with Corsica.

There's an (incorrect) local legend in Calvi that Christopher Columbus was born and raised here, and on the outside of the citadel is this monument to him.




The Calanques, near Piana, are a bunch of weird pink and gray granite formations that rise steeply from the Golfe de Porto. At the end of a trail to an overlook of the Golfe de Porto and the Calanques, people have left hundreds of stacks of stones, pictured here at sunset.




The monoliths at Filitosa, near Propriano, have simple faces and other features carved into them. They're also extremely phallic, though it's hard to tell how intentional that is. The site also has many stone structures.




After Filatosa, we went to the south coast of Corsica, to Bonifacio. Bonifacio is a port city hidden in the tall chalk cliffs that mark the Corsican side of the Bouches de Bonifacio. The citadel, pictured here, rises above the port on a peninsula.

Our last day in Malta, and the vacation, was spent looking at 5500 year old stone temples, wandering the south coast of Malta, looking at the blue! at the Blue Grotto, and lying in the sun.

I didn't include this in the post yesterday, but Valletta is a really beautiful city. Maybe it's the fact that the principle city of Malta is also at the end of a peninsula (like San Francisco), but I really felt at home here. The cafes on Misrah ir-Repubblika were great spots to people watch, and during the day the city is has a lively, cosmopolitan feel. At night, though, everything empties. It's very strange. I could easily spend more time here, at a later date.

Anyway, trip fatigue has sort of set in, and I'm looking forward to getting home.

Malta is a densely populated couple of rocks between Tunisia and Sicily filled with stray cats, public gardens, tiny cars rocketing around crappy roads, and more British tourists on package tours than I've ever seen. There are also tons of Americans, with a healthy dose of French and the ever present Germans. It's strange to suddenly be in a place where everyone speaks English, and it was something of a disappointment, despite the linguistic isolation that we experienced in Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily.

It rains very little in Malta, but we managed to hit the first storm of the season, which brought an extended lightning storm and flash floods. Kari was bummed, as we were looking forward to more swimming and sunbathing in the hottest climate on our itinerary, and the bad weather sort of hindered that plan. What was worse was the rain started on Kari's birthday, the 17th (Happy Birthday, Kari!), and continued to the next day, which I called Kari's Birthday, Observed as we were traveling most of the day on Friday.

Part of the reason we had Kari's Birthday, Observed, was the awesomely horrible meal we had on Friday night. We were tired from the ferry crossing from Sicily, and the weather was bad, so we decided to eat at our hotel's restaurant, which was supposed to have a barbecue or something, with entertainment by Shitty! or some similarly named band. Due to the rain, the barbecue was nixed, and we sat down inside, noticing the buffet tables. We should have sneaky-Peted it out the back door right then and there, but we were on a trajectory, and it was easier to stay the course.

Shitty! was playing some vaguely Maltese instrumental folk songs with a modern flair, but soon launched into a vocal rendition of "Unchained Melody," proceeding onto All Your Favorite Hits From the '60s and '70s. The song that really got the crowd on their side was "Leaving on a Jet Plane," which the dining room sang along with during the chorus. Shitty! continued with "Return to Sender," "Bad Moon Rising," "House of the Rising Sun," a Tom Jones song that I've blocked from my memory, and so on and on and on.

The buffet was ghastly, and Kari felt ill all the next day. The mainly British and over-55 crowd loved it, and were clapping along to Shitty!, then dancing between the tables. I felt I had accidentally been transported onto a cruise ship. I had my first cup of truly bad coffee (brewed, American-style coffee, which I later learned was from the kind of automatic brewing machine found in vending machines) of the trip. Shitty! was still going strong when we got the hell out of there, and the whoops echoed out into the empty courtyard, but thankfully were not audible in our room.

We wandered around Victoria/Rabat on Saturday under a gray sky and the occasional lightning flash, and by the afternoon it was raining hard.

The next day was great, except for our good friend Jeff, whom I will no longer mention. We snorkeled around Dwejra Bay and Fungus Rock, so named because of a rare breed of parisitic plant used for medicinal purposes by the Knights of St. John.

Jeff was our taxi driver in Gozo, whom we thought was really nice (he helped us find a dive shop to rent snorkel gear) and was supposed to pick us up at a remote beach on the west coast near Dwejra, and didn't. We had to walk back to Victoria, where an extremely nice Maltese/Australian named Jason gave us a ride back to our hotel, unprompted.

Fate conspired to send Jeff back to us as our driver to the Gozo ferry that night, and he made up some excuse about how he actually did drive to the parking lot and didn't see us. When I called him on it (we were there all the time, and I was looking for him) he made up some yarn about how he was in a different car, and didn't remember what we looked like, blah blah blah. Anyway, because we waited an hour for Jeff at Dwejra, and took an hour to walk along the road, we couldn't return the snorkel gear by 6:00 PM at Jeff's friend's dive shop, nor were we able to make it to the ferry until two hours after our original plan.

Then, due to thunderstorms causing flooding in Malta (which we would have avoided had we gotten to our ferry on time), there were no cabs willing to drive to Valletta. We took the last bus, which took another hour. All told, we wasted over three hours because of Jeff, who tried to make it seem like he was doing us a favor for not charging us to take back the snorkel gear, the asshole. We hadn't eaten lunch or dinner because we were saving our cash for the taxi ride and a generous tip for that nice driver Jeff. Valletta at 10:30 PM is a necropolis, so we had to take another couple of expensive taxis to get to St. Julian's, a tourist ghetto filled with overloud clubs and the kind of public, testosterone-fueled drunkenness common in more boreal European climes, Tijuana, or Majorca. This was the only place in Malta with open restaurants, and all this was due to Jeff. I really hate that guy.

My next post will talk about the things I like about Malta, but this one is all about Jeff-hate.

A quick post from Siracusa, on the southeast coast of Sicily. The net cafe is closing in ten minutes, and it's the first one we've seen since Bonifacio, an island and a country ago.

Sardinia and Sicily have been most kind to us. The people here are extremely nice, and especially tolerant of my idiot mumblings to them in some broken version of Italian straight from the mouth of a linguistic toddler. I'm all nouns and numbers.

Driving in their cities, however, is quite literally maddening. Labyrinths of tiny streets just barely wider than our Opel. Scooters putputting by. We got lost in a relatively small city, unable to find our way out. I kept thinking of a sinister line from Gravity's Rainbow, '...a progressive knotting into....' That was us, looking like the ornery tourists we were.

The old part of Siracuse is called the Ortygia, and it's been the city center for a long, long time. The duomo here (supposedly) has an altar that the Greeks found when they got here, in the 6th century B.C. Then they built a temple to Athena there, and the Christians later filled in the blanks between the still visible columns, and eventually wrapped it in a baroque veneer. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the altar, and the nave was blocked off with two large green curtains that stretched to the ceiling. Altogether, the facade was impressive, but the inside? Eh. I liked the columns.

Tomorrow we take a ferry to Malta, for the last leg of the journey. We'll see about net connections there.

We're in Bonifacio, on the south coast of Corsica just across les Bouches des Bonifacio from Sardinia. We drove down the west coast, stopping for a few days in Piana, near these wild decomposed granite formations called les Calanches, or les Calanques. They're pink, and at sunset they're amazing.

I've had a few "duh" tourist moments so far, and it's most frustrating attempting to convey the subtle nuances of human communication with 20 vocabulary words. I found out the hard way that nobody here in Corsica takes coffee to go. They all thought I was crazy when I asked for "cafe au porter."

The Mediterranean sea is amazingly calm compared to the Pacific. We've finally gotten some wind here in Bonifacio, but it nonetheless has the look of a semi-breezy lake. I suppose in winter it gets worse, but it's not so surprising that the Phonecians, Greeks, Carthagians, and other sea-faring folks couldn't get much beyond Gibraltar for thousands of years.

We went inland the other day to do some hiking and to check out some Genoese bridges built across a river at the bottom of the Gorge du Spelunque, a sheer canyon inland from Porto. After the hike we swam under one of the bridges in a rock pool, and then the clouds and wind came up, and a warm rain began falling.

After the rain, we headed up the valley to a mountain village, Evisa, on the edge of the Foret de Aitone. The village was pretty, and we decided to take a walk in the forest. There, we were surrounded by feral domestic pigs, forraging for chestnuts and acorns under the trees. We continued to the crest, where there's a statue that separates Haute Corse from Corse du Sud. We hiked through the mountain meadows, beech groves, and Corsican pine to a rock ledge overlooking some shepherd huts and a waterfall as the sun was setting.

The landscape is just weird enough to be beautiful and too large to be pretty.

-Paul Theroux on Corsica, Sunrise with Seamonsters

Tomorrow, Kari (girlfriend type) and I head off to the Mediterranean to see some islands. First, Corsica, (home of The Odyssey's cannibal Laestrygonians), then Sardinia, Sicily, and finally Malta. Assuming there will be internet cafes here and there, I'll be posting updates.

Chuck and Elisha have posted their Belize pictures, including some really cool underwater shots while they were scuba diving. I also like the pics of the minivan with Minnesota plates/old Volvo with Oregon plates they found down there.

Boogie on over to the photos section for massive updates to the photos section, including ones from my trip to Thailand and Cambodia last spring, and Colorado and Utah last July.

I should probably point out that for this album I hate the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, who almost won the Stanley Cup last year.

David and I got back from Colorado/southern Utah yesterday afternoon after a fairly grueling drive back from the Rockies. David's family rented a condo in Frisco, Colorado, a small resort town near the continental divide. We spent some time hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, including an exciting hike up a glaciated valley to a waterfall, made even more exciting by David's brother Michael's near fall into the river a few feet from one of the cascade dropoffs. We also went whitewater rafting in Clear Creek around Idaho Springs, and canoeing in Dillon Resevoir in Frisco.

On Friday we drove from Frisco to Moab, UT to see the red-rock country and Arches National Park. We did several hikes on Friday evening and Saturday. It's easy to fall in love the Moab area, as the color of the rock, the arches and walls, the strange sandstone formations, and the rivers and streams are impressive.

We left Moab Saturday evening and drove to Reno that night on Highway 50, "the Loneliest Road in America." And how. If it weren't for the good gas mileage, I don't know how we would have made it accross Nevada, as the few towns we passed were all shut down. We got in to Reno at 2:30 AM, thanks to coffee and Red Bull (nasty stuff, Red Bull, but made slightly more palatable combined with Gatorade). And of course, the traffic coming back to the Bay Area on 80 sucked yesterday, with lots of stop-and-go and impatient drivers.

I'm just finishing my One Night in Bangkok or something. We ate at a fun restaurant called Cabbages and Condoms, which promotes family planning by encouraging birth control. The food was decent, and the atmosphere was nice. The gift shop was hilarious, with many items made from condoms. Particularly nice were the flower buds made from the base of the condom and tied off.

We've all been pretty tired as of late, and are all pretty much ready to head back home. Brian and I did some last minute shopping at the first supermarket we've seen here in Thailand, which had some great items that we will never find in the US.

We went to see Jim Thompson's House today, which was very nice. Thompson was a former OSS (percursor to the CIA) officer who eventually settled in Thailand. He started the fabric design firm that still bears his name, and his house is a good example of 19th century Thai architecture. He was originally trained as an architect, and designed his house by combining several old Thai houses in to one complex with gardens surrounding them. The houses are raised one story off the ground, which helps cool the structures and gives a nice shady terrace underneath the buildings.

After that, we went to the weekend market, a sprawling bazaar of indoor and outdoor stalls connected by a labyrinth of paths and roads, all jammed with people. It was quite suffocating, and Jen was lost for about an hour before she met back up with us. We didn't have a lot of time, so we only saw a part of the market, but it was so huge and crowded and hectic, none of us were eager to stay and shop.

Anyway, we're off to the airport in around 6 hours, and it'll be nice to be surrounded by familiar objects, better smells, less heat, and sane traffic conditions.