The Fool On The Hill

It's over, done, dusted.................the Trip of a Lifetime, something I just had to do while the legs were still working. And all in all, it was a bit of a doddle. I didn't have long to plan it so it was a bit of a rush job but it all went very smoothly, with not a single hip-cup that I can think of apart from losing a couple of teeth and my favourite glasses.

I've just got home and it's nearly midnight after having spent last night on planes but the adrenalin is still pumping and who can go to bed after such a momentous trip - so why not write up the Blog.

First some numbers so you can see the size of the thing. Fifteen countries, 20 flights, 4 trains, 3 cars, 3 buses and a couple of ferry boats and a nice, round 50 days. And after a total of nearly 60k kilometres and 90 hours flying I was tempted a couple of times to run down the aisle screaming, "Let me otta here".

Not a problem that the famous Phileas Fogg had to face. He did it in 1873 (ok, it was fiction) for a 20,000 pound bet that he could complete the round trip in 80 days and he  planned using 6 steamers (ships to you) and 4 trains. Well, I have to tell you that an awful lot has changed in 144 years. If you tried hard enough maybe now you could do it now in 3 or 4 days  but what's the point in that - you want to see what the other people in the world are doing. And that is really why I did it. What's it like in Puerto Montt, how are the people in Darwin, what is there to see in Rangoon? So no time for museums I'm afraid and no monuments, only a couple of churches, which all meant not many crowded tourist spots. OK, there was in fact a wonderful, crowded Pagoda in Rangoon, of which I had never heard of before I got there but with only a handful of tourists in sight.

Ok, here's the details. Pretending to be  Phileas Fogg, I decided to find a place that I could return to at the end, to well, celebrate. So I started with a sobering coffee at the Mahoudrid Cafeteria cum bar in Madrid Terminal 4 then hopped aboard Emirates to Istanbul and we took off an hour late, not a good start.

On a trip like this I'm afraid you get a bit a obsessed on latitudes and longitudes. So if you're still following, the latitudes are the up and down ones, and the longitudes are the east-west ones. So after starting at a cold Madrid on latitude 40N  we headed due east with stops at Istanbul and Dubai in a 10,000 km hop to Seoul in Korea which at 37N you would expect to be a tad warmer than Madrid. No. It's really freezing in Korea and a reported 700m walk to the Railway Station was so demanding that I had to stop for  coffee on-route at a rather pleasant cafe. Not so pleasant was the complicated Metro system. There's gates everywhere and an absurd ticketing system so I was forced to climb over them twice. It was a bit warmer at the next top in Japan where I used their fabulous Shinkensen bullet trains to see wonderful Kyoto, grey, stark Hiroshima and Tokio.

After that it was a rather zig-zag course via Taiwan, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jakarta and not forgetting the gem, in my opinion, Myanmar. Pity about the simmering apparent hatred below the surface for the poor Rohinya but which if you are a tourist cum traveller its hard to appreciate although the taxi driver did feel it useful to have two names, one Muslim and one Christan.

SSo our zig-zag Far East course took us slowly down to the 40th Parallel South and Down Under and Australia, landing in Darwin at 5 in the morning. Here the weather  was a bit odd as they suffer summer heatwaves and torrential rain at the same time so the outdoor terraces tend to have a sturdy roof and you run home in your shorts and dripping teeshirt.

Summer Storms in Darwin

The strange and wonderful force of gravity never fails to amaze me Down Under but it doesn't seem to affect the crazy Aussies. There they all were noisily drinking and enjoying themselves despite being upside down although the street-living Aborigines don't seem to be enjoying it so much. Sadly, that is how the world works. On then to fast food Adelaide and a 4 day drive along the spectacular Great Ocean Road along the Southern Ocean linking Adelaide to Melbourne. And just south of Melbourne, of course, is Tasmania, previously Van Diemens Land.

Waterfall in Tasmania

This was a place that I wanted to see for a long time but the boat trip across the Tasman Sea on the Spirit of Tasmania was 11 hours and costs a lot more than the plane so you sadly ignore the damage to the environment and hop aboard Jetstar for an hour flight that takes you to the second city Launceston (Lonceston, to you). And after that followed a manic island circumnavigation of 1400 kilometres in 5 days full of wonderful scenery and dark, steamy rain forests. I really enjoyed it there, the people were very friendly everywhere I went, and there's wonderful scenery and a host of National Parks. There's only hotels in the big towns like Hobart and Launceston so you stay in motels, camping sites and a B&B in the middle of nowhere.

My Time Machine

So, exhausted by the racing in my lovely red Susuki Baleno it was back to the mainland and the epic 12 hour flight from Melbourne across the Pacific to Santiago de Chile. And what can you make of this flight in an apparent Time Machine. You leave one continent at 20:00 in the evening and arrive over 11,000 km away at another one but apparently before you have left at 19:00 the same day!!! This takes some figuring out. You're not on a ship so there's no dunking in freezing water for first timers. In fact, you are fast asleep and don't notice anything.  All of a sudden its 24 hours ago and you appear to have had two days crammed into one. In fact, if you add up the flight time, the sleeping the morning before, the waiting time before the flight and the time at your destination it appears to last about 37 hours but I can't figure out how that should be.

So, there you are in South America, in Chile no less, where the coffee is rubbish and the food a bit iffy. It's a very long 4330 kilometre nation and for a reason that I have now forgotten I decided a couple of years ago to travel from the top to the bottom. Yes, silly idea really and if you drive yourself it's a bit expensive as you have to pay for someone has to drive the car back for you.

Puerto  Montt

And of course the full distance is almost impossible as the roads seem to terminate three quarters of the way down at the quaint cowboy port of Puerto Montt. I think it was the grandeur of the roads name - The Pan-American N5 that was the reason for the ridiculous plan.

Anyway, another milestone has been reached as I've now done approx 3065 km and it is really two distinct countries. Most of the money appears to be in the north from mining and agriculture and things seem more organised while the south is more Wild West country. The Northerner's drive normally like Europeans but the Southerner's drive like the Indians, very unpredictable and easily distracted by the frequent roadside fruit sellers and the occasional but very in-frequent cafe. So if you are ever tempted to drive from Santiago de Chile down to the southern port of Puerto Montt, I would advise against it. Not that the scenery isn't pleasant, just that the overnight towns are a bit of a nightmare and I ended up relying on pizzas and strangely names Chinese dishes.

So what do you do when you get to Puerto Montt, then. Well, there is a convenient boat that will take you down the West coast of Chile where roads are scarce and down to the most southern city of Punto Arenas. Yes, a tad expensive but maybe one for the future. As it was I choose the easy option of a two night stay on the Isle of Chiloe, and Ancud in particular. No less than 14 of the islands wooden churches are listed World Heritage sites and no I didn't see any. A planning mishap perhaps but no car and no time really to use the bus.

After Ancud, a fairly uninspiring 8 hour bus journey over the Andes (last years Santiago to Mendoza was much better) for an overnight at the lakeside resort of Bariloche and then on to Buenas Aires.

And lastly, it was over to Sao Paulo and home via Casablanca.  

So What's the state of the World then Nels? 

Well, there's a lot of fat people out there, is all I can say.  But you probably knew that anyway. There's an awful lot of takeaways in some towns and obscenely big portions in restaurants, maybe that's because of the lure of the takeaway. In fact the only places where you see normal sized people is where they eat rice or consume a lot of soup-type dishes.

And wherever you go, everyone on the planet is staring at their whatits.

So who books all this travel for you and where do you stay?

I plan the whole thing myself and do all the booking. These days its very easy. But if its a long trip and a bit of a rush job, like this time, its possible that I get to a place and don't know what to see or expect. So some times you get back home and realise what you have missed. And I stay in all sorts of places. I slept on the floor in a Ryokan in Japan for a couple of nights (its obligatory), a first floor room in a wooden hut, a shared bathroom in a backpacker hotel, a farmhouse and even a caravan.  

So Give Us the Highlights 

This is the stupendous Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, Myanmar. Estimates of its age vary from 2600 to 1000 years so its old and although it was 18 metres tall at first it has been growing with the years. Rumours may tell you its over 200 metres high but no its only 112. Whatever, it appears massive when you stand beside it and wander around the base (no, you can't go in). Its surrounded by dozens of well, chapels in Christian terms, full of various sized Buddhas. And some are so beautiful that you want to take them home with you.