Cont

ents

A Life Left Behind

Bradley Garret captures life on a remote Hawaiian island

Diaries

Sophia Satchell Baeza collects her thoughts and sketches

Environmental Issues

Indian attitudes towards global warming

THE

WANDERER Oxford Student Travel Magazine ● Issue 2 ● Hilary Term 2010 ● www.thewanderermagazine.co.uk

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THE WANDERER CONTENTS

24 Development issues “Dying Slowly: How life goes in a refugee camp” (cover)

26 Environmental issues Indian attitudes (cover, bottom inset)

28 Country guide Jennifer introduces Lebanon

regulars

22 Diaries A collection of entries from Sophia’s creative diaries. (cover, centre inset)

art

4 IRAN “Overdressed and Underestimated – A Female Archaeologist’s Experience in Iran”

Jennifer travels to Iran, and findsherpreconceptionsofthe country challenged in unexpected ways.

6 CHINA “Sky Burial”

Jon witnesses a rarely seen burial ritual in a remote area of China.

8 SPAIN “Santiago de Compostela Pilgrimage”

Following in the footsteps of pilgrims of old.

10 NORWAY “Man and Nature”

Kelsey takes her camera on a ride with Norway’s dog sled champion.

13 GERMANY “My first flat-hunting experience”

features

16 Photo Essay: “A Life Left Behind” Bradley’s archeaological life in Hawaii (cover, top inset)

14 Corcoran Photos by Madeleine Corcoran of Bulgaria, Greece & Italy

Contents

photography

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Cont

ents

THE WANDERER CONTENTS

A Life Left Behind

Bradley Garret captures life on a remote Hawaiian island

Interested in Web Design, IT, Online Editing or Graphic Design?

We’re looking for talented individuals to take the magazine and website forward.

Get in touch with the Editor for more information.

Contact

Want to join The Wanderer team? editor@thewanderermagazine.co.uk

Tell us about your wanderings!contributions@thewanderermagazine.co.uk

Websitewww.thewanderermagazine.co.uk

Editorial Team

Editor - Jonathan MonkFeatures Editor - Eleanor Warren-ThomasRegulars Editor - Sophia Satchell BaezaPhotography, Art & Design - Matt RobertsPublisher - Richard StraussFormat - Claire Fitzgibbon

Notices

The content of The Wanderer is the copyright of the respective contributors. The Wanderer Logo and the footprint are copyright of The Wanderer Magazine. Not to be reproduced without permission.

This is the second edi-tion of The Wanderer, and we’ve gone online. Our aims, however, remain unchanged: we want to provide a space for entertaining and informa-tive travel journalism, and we want to look good doing it.

One of the benefits of the in-tense eight week terms at Oxford is longer holidays, and the opportunities that come with this. Whether interning, researching, or travelling abroad our contribu-tors have engaged with the en-vironment around them. The result is artwork, articles and photography that range from life on a remote Hawaiian island, to film-making in Norway;

Tibetan burial rituals at 4,500 metres, to archaeology in Iran.

In making novel experi-ences accessible, we hope to encourage an increased ap-preciation of the people and places we share the planet with.

We hope you enjoy reading The Wanderer online. If you would like to contribute to the next edition, or help put

the magazine together, then we want to hear from you.

Similarly, any other feedback would be appreciated – we’re still learning.

Get in touch by emailing editor@thewanderermagazine.co.uk

Jonathan

Diaries

Sophia Satchell Baeza collects her thoughts and sketches

Environmental Issues

Indian attitudes towards global warming

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16

26

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not familiar with the work of Hafez” I replied. To which the official’s response was to spend the next few minutes quoting verse after verse of poetry. The guy could have been saying anything for all I know, but I continued to smile and gave what my US friends call a very British response “How lovely”. The offi-cial smiled, grabbed his stamp, whacked it into my passport and confidence restored, I was on my way!

This experience at passport control was to be the first of many during my month in Iran that would challenge what I knew about the country. Almost immediately on leaving the airport, I was to real-ise that another misconception I held was the way that women had to dress. I had been sent a list of instructions by my supervisor stating that I needed to cover my hair completely, and wear a loose tu-nic that reached my knees, with full-length sleeves and a high neck. As we drove down a shopping street in Tehran, featuring many shops recogniz-able from UK high streets, I suddenly felt very out of place. The reason? I was too covered up; my new Iranian friends described my outfit as com-parable to a nun’s! I soon learnt that to fit in with Iranian women in Tehran I needed to buy some very stylish mantu (tunics) that looked more like dresses, show at least a few centimetres of hair, and most definitely wear make-up; the frequent sto-ries about crackdowns on women’s dress suddenly seemed rather exaggerated. Although, whilst in my friends homes I was told I could wear what-ever I wanted (“you can wear bikini if you like”), caution was still required on the streets outside.

Tehran is an enormous, modern city and gives an in-itial overwhelming impression of crazy traffic. Eve-ryone, and I mean everyone, seems to have a car (in-cluding women, who contrary to what some people think, are allowed to drive), and anything relating to motoring in general is a good talking point; from F1, to the doubling in petrol prices (to $0.25 a litre).

I visited many cities, but the city of Hamadan was particularly special. The dusty and bar-ren drive up to this place, high in the foot-

As I stood in the queue for passport control at Imam Khomeini airport, several things were running through my mind. I was about to en-ter Iran - a country, which when mentioned to people as my destination, had elicited less than positive responses: “Why on earth would you want to go there?”, “Aren’t you worried that you will get arrested/attacked/stoned/killed?” and “What’s the point, surely women are not al-lowed to do anything in Iran?” Having spent three years studying Near Eastern archaeol-ogy as part of my degree, I was thrilled to be asked to work on a new excavation in Iran. It would be my first excavation as a qualified ar-chaeologist and I was going to get a chance to see a country that had fascinated me for years, but one that I never thought I would get the op-portunity to visit. I knew perhaps slightly more than the average person on the street what to expect, had argued with every person to make a comment similar to those mentioned, knew that what is featured in the media is rarely the full story, and yet I will admit to a definite feel-ing of trepidation. As the minutes ticked by, and only one person had made it through passport control, I did start to wonder if I was really so confident in all those arguments I had made.

My main concern was my visa. I had only been given leave to remain for 30 days and yet my flight home was in 40 days time. My site director had assured me that it would be no problem to extend my visa once I was there, but I was con-cerned that it would still be an issue. The rest of the dig team had all arrived together; I was on my own and my Persian extended to ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

Eventually, it was my turn. Plastering a smile on my face, I stepped up to the booth and handed over my passport with its inadequate visa. “You have come to work in Iran?” asked the official. I assented and explained about being an archae-ologist, and waited for the next question. “Have you heard of our famous poet Hafez?” Definitely not what I was expecting… different possibili-ties raced through my mind: is it some kind of test? How should I reply? Will my lack of knowl-edge deny me entry, or is the work of Hafez a text banned by the government that an interest

in could get me arrested? I went for what seemed the safer option: “Sadly no, I am

Overdressed and Underestimated: A Female Archaeologist’s Experiences in Iran

Article & Photography: Jennifer Booth

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of someone who was interested in their country and was willing to look behind the headlines. People were desperate to show that there is more to Iran than the extremist, nuclear weapon hungry country that is the common depiction in Western media, and after a month there, I defi-nitely agree. Within Iran there are many differ-ent provinces, each with tremendous variety of natural scenery, and sites of extraordinary his-toric significance. I saw only a few and there are so many more, I cannot wait to go back. For the adventurous traveller, who has an open mind, Iran has so much to offer – it really mustn’t be missed solely because of its media portrayal.

One cannot, though, be totally ignorant of the po-litical and social climate and anyone visiting Iran needs to be culturally sensitive. There are some areas that are safer than others; anywhere in the southeast and near the borders with Afghanistan or Pakistan might be best avoided. With the re-cent elections and subsequent demonstrations, getting involved in political discussions might not be a good idea. Neither would be going to Iran with an agenda, for example to protest against anti-feminist regulations. If you can cope with certain restrictions for example wearing a head-scarf, or not travelling alone as a woman (this is more taboo than a legal restriction; you would not be arrested), then you will get to experience a fascinating and beautiful country and meet many generous, friendly, people. If you cannot accept certain constraints then perhaps Iran is not the place for you, but that is a shame because accepting that job in Iran, gave me some of the most interesting, exciting and reward-ing experiences that I have ever had.

hills of the Alvand Mountains, belied the incred-ibly green and deliciously cool city, that was to be found absolutely buzzing with life. Arriving on a Thursday evening, the many parks, green spac-es, and even the pavements, had been colonized by visitors camping out – there was an infectious party atmosphere throughout the city. Hamadan is thought to be one of the oldest cities, not just in Iran, but also in the world, and as a consequence of this is full of cultural sites; plenty archaeologi-cal, but also many to interest people who are not such huge fans of digging. An example is the tomb of Avicenna (Ibn Sina/Abu Ali Sina) who is consid-ered by many to be the father of modern medicine.

For the avid shoppers amongst us there is the ba-zaar – with a difference. Unlike those in countries more accessible to tourists, the bazaars in Iran are the real deal. Still a main shopping source for locals, the different lanes remain defined by the different trades. Rather than selling tourist trinkets, artisans can be found in most areas providing the purchas-er with the chance to see how wares are made, re-quest certain styles or designs, and have proof that what they are buying is not an inferior import. I was enthralled by the man making samovars, who let me watch for ages and take photos. If I could have thought of an easy way to transport one home I would have done, despite complete incompetence in working the one in our accommodation. Iran is a country with a closed currency, so the bazaar also provides a place to change money. Rather than a bank, head to the gold souk and prepare to barter...

Outside the cities, Iran has stunning scenery. The Western Zagros are awe-inspiring mountains with hidden towns and villages, in a fertile farming area that is a striking contrast to the desert south of Kermanshah. Fields of sunflowers provide a surprising comparison with southern France, and the mud brick architecture of the villages means that there are moments where you almost feel you have gone back in time. Until, of course, the vil-lage children come rushing to take a picture of you, with their camera phone, because you are the first person they have ever seen with blonde hair.

Everywhere I went in Iran, the warmth and friendli-ness of the people was incredible. It was not false kindness extended to tourists because they are necessary for income, but it was an appreciation

Overdressed and Underestimated: A Female Archaeologist’s Experiences in Iran

IRANTehran

Article & Photography: Jennifer Booth5

Sky Burials

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Litang is a strange place. Situated in the south-western Chinese province of Sichuan, it is reached by passing over crumbling roads, riv-ers and rockslides which wind through 5,000 metre high mountain passes. All of a sudden, the landscape flattens out inexorably towards the horizon. This vast land is the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, and this is Litang: a Ti-betan town of 51,000 which, at 4,014 metres, is the highest town in the world. The roads to Litang are blocked with snow much of the year, whilst in the summer mudslides often make the roads impassable. For those who do make it here, many are forced to turn around upon arrival, descending imme-diately due to altitude sickness. We arrived stiff-legged from our journey, late at night in a lightning storm, and as we welcomed the shelter from the rain, we chatted to our host. The lady we were stay-ing with invited us to witness a sky burial the next morning. On the way to Litang we’d heard murmurings of such burials, but lit-tle did I expect to witness one. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. In this part of the world an ancient Buddhist-Tibetan burial tradi-tion remains: bodies are neither buried nor burned, but offered up to the sky instead. The ceremonies begin at dawn, and driving out into the hills on the far side of town I could begin to appreciate the landscape that had been masked during my late-night arrival. Ra-zor-sharp peaks topping 6,000 metres reach for the deep blue sky, surrounding the flat expanse of the Tibetan plateau. The foothills here are considered sacred, and over the years thousands of bodies have been buried here –

though you’d never know it. Little evidence re-mains of the lives lost - for every body offered up to the skies, all that remains is a small stone carving heaped in a pile on the hill’s peak. The burial began with a squabble between two Tibetan monks over the location of a suitable spot on the hillside to conduct the ceremony. Monks, or intelligent men, we were told, are buried on the hill top; ordinary citizens dying of natural causes may be buried towards the mid-dle; and criminals or murder victims towards the bottom. In an analogue to Christian prac-

tices, suicides are not permitted to have a sky burial (they are particularly wary of those who

have poisoned themselves, lest their flesh kill the sacred vultures).

The body in question was that of an old man from Xiangcheng,

his natural death and good life warranting an upper-middle position. He had died just the day before. With little hesitation, his son had placed his dead father’s body into a square cardboard box. Owning no car of his own a friend had offered to drive him, and together they had come eight hours through the night to bury his father at this sacred spot in Litang. And here was his son in the early light of day, removing the body which he had curved into the fetal position, and laying it face down on the ground. He tied an orange cloth around the neck to an adjacent pole and then stepped back. And then we waited. The ominously named ‘cutter’ was late, and the son of the deceased chatted amiably to the lady who was accompa-nying us. Eventually a figure came striding up the hillside. Wearing a disposable plastic apron,

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CHINALitang

wielding a large axe over his shoulder and with a large knife in his belt, this was unmistakably the cutter. He proceeded to cut open the body at every point; leading a sharp knife down the side of the neck, along the shoulder, gliding down the arm and struggling in between each finger.

Excited by the smell of flesh there was move-ment from afar. It was at this point I realised the herd of what had looked to be sheep or small cows on a nearby hill were in fact the largest birds I’ve ever seen. Huge vultures, some with wingspans approaching nine feet, circled above - perfect gliders who were dark-ening the sky. The cutter continued with his incisions, pausing on the tricky toes, as the vultures began to land and queue uncom-plainingly. Finally, a long cut was made along the sternum and the head was scalped, giv-ing the vultures access points to all parts of the flesh. Although the smell excites some of them, the vultures have wait patiently. As the cutter steps back though, it’s a liberal feeding frenzy. The vultures encircle the body, devour-ing the carcass within about four minutes. The circle remains a tight mass: birds jockey for position; glimpses of the body are seen; smaller ravens stand looking on waiting for any scraps. The uniformity of the circle is broken, however, as two vultures emerge fighting over what looks like an arm, though it could be a leg.

The cutter, now joined by religious attendants, enters the fray once the majority of the body is gone. Shooing away any remaining vultures, they lay down a sacred stone plinth. It is against this stone which the body, which has quickly become a skeleton, is placed on. The bones are beaten: crushed by repeated hammer blows and mixed together with barley flour and sugar. Thus even the skeleton becomes an appealing avian snack, and before long the sky burial is complete. The body returns not to the earth but ascends to the sky, as these giant sacred birds take to the air, ready to return another day.

The sight of the sky burial occupies my thoughts

for days; one of my companions had walked away feeling ill at the time, while the other had nightmares. Yet for all its seeming primitivism and brutality, the genesis of the sky burial is un-derstandable in this part of the world. The buri-al fulfills an ecological and practical function, as bodies cannot be buried in ground which is fro-zen much of the year, nor can bodies be burned in a land where wood is scarce. On a spiritual level, such a method of burial is in keeping with Buddhist beliefs which see the body as a temporary vehicle through life. By giving one’s body to the sacred vultures, one can become intimately connected with the cycle of life.

The opinion of many Han Chinese is that sky burials are a savage practice of Tibetans. The burials were even banned in the 1960s and 1970s, part of the wider limitation of the reli-gious rights of Tibetans. Legalised again in the late 1980s, sky burials still require expensive and difficult to obtain permits for foreigners wishing to view them in Tibet. Litang, by virtue of lying just east of where the provincial Tibetan border is drawn, avoids such restrictions. I had tentatively asked our Tibetan host if she would like to be buried like this? “Yes,” she replied, “I want to be buried like this, every Tibetan wants to be buried like this”. This perhaps ex-plains the willingness of our host to take us to the sacred hills, and the appreciation shown by the man burying his own father – a sky burial represents a cultural expression; an expression from a culture that is increasingly restricted upon by a government that would rather mute such tradition. Out here though, in a town on top of the world, the Tibetan culture lives on.

Article & Photography: Jonathan Monk

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People go on pilgrimages for many different reasons. Even in the 21st century, spiritual reasons probably dominate. The group I travelled with, known to themselves only as the Cofraternity of Repentant Hedge Fund managers, juggled the twin pillars of God and Bacchus adroitly. Arriving in Santiago after a week’s trek-king, the sight of the Cathedral made the grown men weep, and head towards the nearest bar. As the waiter brought bottles of champagne and crayfish to the table, the group toasted each other and the large amounts of money raised for charity. This was not a pilgrimage for pilgrims, this was a pilgrimage for executive pilgrims.

Santiago de CompostelaPilgrimage

The Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage is an ancient path that follows many routes. Our group was on the Camino Frances (The French way), which

went over the Pyrenees and across the farmlands and forest tracks of Northern Spain into Santiago. This is where the remains of the apostle Saint James (San Tiago)

now rest. It is said that James left Jerusalem after Christ’s death, with the intent of evangelising Spain. Having had little success, he returned to Jerusalem, only to be beheaded by Herod Agrippa. The

remains of his body were carried away in the dead of night by James’s followers and placed in a boat, only to float off unguided to Iria Flavia in Northwest Spain. About 800 years later, strange happenings started

to occur in the field where St. James’s body was buried. A mysteri-ous star was observed and enchanting music was heard there. As news spread, pilgrims began to come to the Field of the Star of Campus Stellae.

For an executive pilgrimage, our journey was not without its challenges. The route was hilly, unsteady underfoot, and the weather changeable – it

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eaten along the route at any number of small kitchen inns or local bars. Indeed, the presence of the pilgrim-age seemed to keep up an economy that was other-wise non-sustainable. This proliferation of bars also fulfilled the requirement that pilgrims have their cer-tificate stamped at least twice a day, mainly (and con-veniently) in bars and hostels. Once you have finished the route, the Pilgrimage Bureau (Oficina de Peregri-nacion) in Santiago check your pass, ask you several questions and present you with a certificate. This cer-tificate, which requires a minimum of 100 kilometres on foot or 200 on a horse, will redeem your past sins up to the time of arrival; if you complete this on a Holy Year (next year), the penance is even greater.

The Cofraternity made quite an impression along the route, particularly given the fact that one of the pil-grims was a Scotsman in a kilt and a bandaged leg, sev-eral of the members were wearing bright orange wigs, and one of the pilgrims (my father) was wearing a penance round his neck for extreme and unnecessary competitiveness. All of us wore the shells round our neck, the ornament adopted to symbolise the tomb of the apostle and identify fellow pilgrims along the route. Though the pilgrimage was an enjoyable and light-hearted (though still physically taxing) trip, it was clear that not everyone treated this trip quite as lightly.

The majority of the pilgrims along the route are Span-ish, and to them, as it is to me, the pilgrimage is an important cultural experience. Some of the pilgrims are Christians, and the sight of nuns and priests in habits and backpacks is immensely moving. It is hard

for a modern pilgrims to understand the impact such a pilgrimage had on Western European cul-

ture. It practically created tourism, albeit in a superior spiritual form and was instrumen-

tal in the reintegration of Christian Spain into Europe. Notably, it also created a

concept of ‘Europeanness’ among its participants. The popularity of the pilgrimage peaked in the 11th and 12th centuries, when as many as half a million pilgrims a year would make the journey. Though we were not travelling in the high season (which is July), there was always a pilgrim or two on the path with us for the en-tire week, and the density increased as we got nearer to Santiago. The pilgrimage fits into the 21st century because of the breadth of its appeal: it works for stu-dents, sports-enthusiasts, the rich and the poor, the religious and the god-less. It clearly makes virtually everybody better – even an ag-nostic like myself can see the beauty and attraction of the re-ligious experience, where I might not have seen it elsewhere.

Article & Photography: Sophia Satchell Baeza

could change from very cold and foggy early in the morning to unpleasantly hot during the day. Our ranks were thinned by foot ailments, which resulted in a mildly amusing evening spent at a local Spanish hospi-tal, where the author was the only Spanish-speaker among the group, and had to find Spanish words for, among other things: ganglia, deep-vein thrombosis, torn ligaments, blood clots and internal bruising. One of the team couldn’t go any further, which didn’t stop his partner from demanding the immediate use of a horse at the local hospital, in broken Spanish. Spanish medical healthcare is notoriously good, but even still...

The route we followed was really quite beautiful. Starting from Sarria, we walked to Portomarin, then Palas de Rei, then Melide in A Coruna, and finally Santiago. Though the daily distances were long (we walked approxi-mately 20 miles most days, though the last day was much shorter), the landscapes and passing pilgrims were enough to ward off the boredom of the dusty path. The route traced across villages, sometimes into someone’s back garden or just outside the kitchen of an ancient crone whose cooking skills far exceeded anything I’d tast-ed before. Pigs ears, pardon peppers, octopus, local cheeses, stews and seafood dishes - these meals could be

At 7.00am in late October I am just beginning to get the feeling that something is not quite right with the sun they use up here in Norway. It is pitch black outside my window, but despite my body’s protests I throw back my warm quilt, shiver as my feet hit the cold floor of my apartment, and shuffle to the kitchen to put on water for tea. Returning to the bedroom I am faced with the first challenge in many women’s day: what do I wear?

Yet today I am not concerned with fashion or style. I couldn’t care less if my hat matches my top or even if my jeans are clean or dirty, because the thermom-eter outside my window reads 1.6 degrees Celsius. Even in the morning darkness the clouds overhead are ominous. I am preparing to embark on a day-long exploration of the world of dog-sled racing - one of the few sports I know nothing about - in a forest north of Oslo that I have never been to, with a man I have never met. All that I am sure of right now is that I will be outside and it will be cold. You see, I am a documentary filmmaker and we revel in the unfamiliar, the under-the-radar world. This is where the stories are. I also know for certain that I am already running late.

10 minutes later, camera bag slung over my shoul-der, tripod under one arm, I am running down the hill praying that I don’t miss the morning bus to Gardermoen airport where I have arranged to meet Robert Sørlie. He is the defending 3-time Iditarod champion, and the pride of Norway in this endur-ing arctic sport that embraces this country’s pas-

sionate love of nature, and of alliance between man and animals. I am equipped with Robert’s mobile number so that when I arrive at the airport I can ring him. Yet the precaution seems unnecessary, for when I disembark from the bus at the Oslo airport terminal, a large Ford 4-door pick-up truck, painted from headlight to tailpipe with a panorama of huskies thundering across the frozen tundra greets me. Something tells me this might be my guy.

In my two months of study at the Uni-versity of Oslo, I have only semi-mas-tered the Norsk language…

“Hovrdan hard u det?” (How are you doing?) “Hva koster det?” (What does this cost?)“Jeg vil gjerner ha en glass øl.” (I would like a glass of beer)“Jeg vil gjerner ha en glass øl til.” (I would like another glass of beer.)

From our email exchanges I have determined that Robert’s command of English is, albeit better than my Norsk, only slightly so: this is going to be an interesting day. The car ride was as anticipated, a slightly awkward experience that I was willing with all my might to be over quickly. It is much easier to avoid social awkwardness from behind the lens of a camera. The safest topic of conversation seemed to be cultural comparisons, and a constant exchange

Man and Nature

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Riding with Norway’s dog sled champion...

of a Norwegian’s favorite phrase: “Hva betyr *blank* om engelsk?” (What means *this* in English?) All the while my eyes were glued to the truck window as we

climbed higher into the hills and drove deeper into the forest.

The Jeppendal Kennel in the Hurdal Forest is a modest affair, housing the 50-odd dogs that make

up “Team Norway”, and abutting the houses of their owners: Robert Sørlie, Bjørnar Anderson

and Kjetil Backen. A cozy dog-sled commu-nity shrouded in evergreens and half an

hour from anything most Americans would associate with civilization.

The dogs greet Robert with con-trolled excitement, obedient in their silence yet eager in their

tail-waging, as he invites me in-side, introduces me to his wife and prepares a breakfast feast fit for a Queen. Then he politely yet hesitantly asks me what it is that I am doing.

Pause.

“Um….” Panic seizes as I realise that I don’ t exactly know what I am doing. I am a film-maker, and while I may revel in the unfamiliar and adventurous experiences of the world, I also dread the impromptu. Collegiate film students depend

upon a network of academic peers and community volunteers to make our projects a reality. I hadn’t realised until now how much I, as a student, rely on this safety net; yet here I was, in an unfamiliar culture with no resources save my small hand-held camcorder and my “Directing the Documentary” text book, ready to film what I hope will be a suc-cessful documentary exploration into the culture I have come to love. And I realise suddenly that docu-mentaries don’t depend on plans, they depend on life.

Deep breath. I smile, look up at Robert and say, “You do what you do, and I’ll film.”

The walls of Robert’s equipment shed are covered in drawings and letters from young children. I peruse the wishes of “good luck” while Robert organizes the harness lines, and outfits me with the smallest weather-defying jumpsuit in his collection. Imag-es of the pioneering documentary “Nanook of the North” flash through my mind, as I secure the zip-per of the still-too-big-jumpsuit under my chin. I must have been a sight, as Robert stifles a laugh. The grey skies of early morn have given way to steady showers; no matter for this is the reality of the sport – you train in any weather. While the temperatures flirt with the freezing point, there has been no major snow accumulation in the forest yet, and so Robert trains with an ATV until the Norsk winter arrives in full.

Roll Film.

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Unleashing the dogs 4 or 5 at a time, Robert calls them individually to him to take their place in the waiting harness lines. The excitement is audible, as yips and whines crescendo throughout the yard. Dogs thunder through the gate past my camera, some oblivious to my presence, others pausing to sniff my boots and the most courageous barely slowing as they leap through the gate to plant their large paws firmly on my shoulders, deeming the camera lens worthy of an up-close and personal inspection.

Eighteen powerful huskies harnessed to the ATV strain against the lines in poorly contained anticipa-tion until Robert finally gives the command and we are off. Beauty as I have never seen before passes before my eyes, as the ATV surges through the hills under the vigor of the exuberant team. The majesty of the forest rests in its solitude, and is emphasized by the rhythmic breathing and echoing thunder of paws on the rough trail. Though I could understand just half of the steady stream of Norsk conversation between Robert and his team, the encouragement and energy with which he addressed his team par-alleled his eagerness to assist me with my film. De-spite the relentless rain the afternoon of filming was both enjoyable and successful, as Robert was more than willing to alter his training regime to accom-modate my cinematography requirements.

I could not help but anticipate the warm house and dry clothes awaiting us. Releasing the dogs from the harness and returning the equipment to the shed, Robert comments that I look like a drunken cat. Odd, I thought, but oh well. At the house, a new face hands me a towel and points me in the direction of the guest bathroom – Robert’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed 22 year old son…and I’m sure I am absolutely STUNNING in my dripping wool hat and muddy jeans. Hastily retreating to the shower,

I emerge refreshed and cleanly clothed.

Supper in Norway is no joke, and the family affair that awaits me is revitalizing and hearty. Tradition-al caribou stew, a first for my somewhat discerning palette, is surprisingly delicious. Robert regales the stories of the afternoon for his wife and son, ending with his reiteration that I emerged from the experi-ence looking like a drunken cat.

“Um, I think you mean drowned cat” I said hesitant-ly. The son, whose command of English is somewhat better than his parents’ begins to laugh as I explain that drowned cats have fallen in the water while drunken cats, if there is such a thing, are inebriated house pets. Robert laughs at his own expense.

Life in Norge is different. I am living in a foreign land, in a foreign culture, with foreign students from all over the world, endeavoring to submerge ourselves in the Norsk society. And in this day, as in all other days here that I interact with the Nor-wegian people, I am touched by their generosity. A stereotypically “shy” culture, I have found the Norsk to be anything but. Reserved, perhaps, but undoubtedly friendly, eager to please and eager to share. Though my film has yet to be edited, and the audio is not yet mastered, the experience of that day foretells success.

Article & Photography: Kelsey Eichhorn

NORWAYOslo

My f rst f at-hunting experience - Phoebe

I get out at the wrong S-Bahn station and have to walk for twenty-five minutes down the isolated and unlit pavements of Sonnenallee to reach my destination. This is my first ever flat viewing, and the fact that it happens to be in German is certainly a contributing factor to my feeling of angst.

It’s 21:05 on the kind of night that you wouldn’t will-ingly step out in alone in - (dark, crawling with shadows: creepy), - and as I stand outside and dial a German house number, I am aware that my heart is clattering somewhat like a S-Bahn train. After a brief call to Jörn I am collected by a short, amiable and clearly inebriated 30-something man, who after staring at me questioningly for some seconds, bids me follow him through the courtyard of a former fac-tory building.

We climb to the fourth floor in a tiny lift whose only window reveals flash-es of flats that we pass: odd, unexpect-ed insights into the living spaces of people I will nev-er meet. The eleva-tor slows, the doors (which sport a ‘Auslän-der willkommen!’ sticker) creak open, and I attempt to hide behind Shortie as we walk directly into the flat and come to the kitchen, around whose beer-bottle thronged table six Berliners sit. Engulfed in ciga-rette smoke their indifferent faces turn only the slightest fraction in my direction. Shortie gives me a guided tour through the flat, which screams GHETTO!, despite its spatial grandeur: the gloomy lighting and minimal furniture, added to its still factory feel produces a kind of stark and despondent grittiness. Inexplicably there is a huge workshop at the back, right next to my proposed room (unfurnished). An image of me sleeping on the bare wooden slats, dreams pierced by actual drilling, flits through my mind.

We move back to the kitchen, for what I suppose is the Getting To Know You part. Someone asks me if I drink beer; I say yes; I sit down; I roll a cigarette. Nothing like trying to fit in with your surroundings. Between being mocked about the inferiority of England’s female football side to Germany’s, and prompted to affirm the compara-tive coolness of our Smoking Kills health-warning signs (“It sounds so much better in English!”), I am asked by the white-blonde Jörn to say “Please could you pass me the cucumber sandwiches” in my most exaggerated Oxford English. When he insists I oblige, and he laughs hilariously. As I near the end of my beer the motley crew start pointedly yawning, glancing first at me, and then in the direction of the exit. I take the hint, leave my number and hastily take my leave, stepping into the lift.

The feeling of relief rapidly evaporates when I am unable to get out at the ground floor - the doors have jammed. Fifteen minutes of futile button pressing later claustrophobia gets the better of me and I ring the house phone again, to be promised rescue by what sounds like Shortie. At least five minutes more pass till a face presses against the window, causing me to scream. It is Shortie, indulging in a little joke. Ha-Hardy-Ha. Upon his direction I descend to the concrete-walled basement and back up to the ground floor, where the doors still fail to open. At length he produces a key, unlocks the lift door, (which I presume he could have done

f r o m the outset),

and announces, chuckling, that the lift is often broken and he will be taking the stairs back up. We shake hands, and I stumble onto the street, relieved to have got out in one piece.

The flat hunt continues...

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On a late August afternoon I saw my travel photos for the first time and I was startled, a bit confused even, had something gone wrong with my cam-era? The colours seemed off – way too bright, unreal neon shades glancing off the prints; fizzy greens and pinks, fluorescent blue. Under the flat grey sky of an English August, these colours seemed impossible.But no, the camera had worked perfectly - these are the colours of Southern Europe in the sum-mer. This is how me and my friend, Lucy, saw it.

CORCORAN

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MADELEINE CORCORAN

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As an archaeologist, a vocation that sounds cool but I assure you was mostly shitty, Isometimes had opportunities to experi-ences places of rare beauty, to partake inmoments of exotic encounter with things previously unknown. These experiencesranged from taking the time to smell a delicate flower while digging an excavationtrench in the middle of the Yucatan jungle in Mexico, to shovelling stinkingradioactive swampland soil in New Jersey in a hail storm, to being allowed to entervast areas normally closed to public wit-ness. This was the case in what ended up being my last research assignment in Hawai’i before I was ostracized from the Islands –archaeological monitoring (i.e. watching people dig) on the Kalaupapa Peninsula ofMolka’i Island.

After weeks of dodged phone calls, mixed communications and crossed signals, I was

finally sitting on the edge of my bed on the Island of O’ahu at 5:00am, bags packed,the only thing containing my eyeballs being my eyelids which threatened mutiny if Icontinued to force them to stay open. But excitement (along with a large Ameri-cano) soon chased away the terriblepossibilities proposed by my body – I was finally off to Kalaupapa, one of the least-visited places on the Hawaiian Islands.

The leprosy colony was established in the 19th century, but this was a place thatancient Native Hawaiians had populated long before, evident by the conspicuouslyplaced Heaiu1, that I eventually encountered there. At some point in history this placehad been depopulated and then repopulated by exiled lepers marked for death; thrown from huge wooden ships to either sink and die in the breathtakingly

1 Hawaiian religious buildings

A Life Left BehindBradley L. Garrett

17

Flying Coach

beautiful bay or swim to the peninsula where their debilitating disease would preclude the possibility of climbing the three miles of treacherous cliffs required to get the fuck out of there. Or so the stories go. It was a place that, strangely enough, one of my old mentors, a nurse named Les form Arizona, had conducted immunisations in some pre-vious decade, as well as the place where one of the only two Christians I ever respected lived – Father Damien, a Franciscan priest who condemned himself to death by go-ing to the peninsula in 1873 to help the ex-iles construct community and architecture.

Hours after my pre-dawn eyeball crisis, I found myself packed into a plane with sixpeople I had never seen before. I say packed because this was a sold out flight on atwin-prop jet. The plane skipped across the runway of Honolulu International Airport like a retarded June bug with a full belly trying to take off. I think my bucket wasthe issue: full of trowels, pickaxes, measuring tapes and field reports, which the pilot reassured me were “too heavy for this plane”. Or maybe it was my backpack full ofbooks and raw fruits and vegetables that he never weighed. In the end, he wasreluctantly willing to make exception on the weight limits for this trip on the promiseof stories brought back from the field and some Lilikoi2 picked from my house. Theflight only lasted about 40 minutes and as we descended from the “top-side” of Moloka’I to the tiny penin-sula, my breath caught in my belly as winds pushing up from the sea and through folds of the ragged 1000-meter green accordion cliffs grabbed the plane and shook it, like the gods were wrestling this encounter with modernity descending from the clouds. I was sitting next to my future co-workers and wondered if they thought that it would be weird if we died together as well. A few of them were

2 Passion fruit

doing the actual excavation, Hawaiian construction workers with a propensity for bombastic rantings and constant calls home to their wives who they both called “Big Momma”. The other ‘scientist’ on the project was a guy called Mike, a large man from Virginia with a huge appetite both for food and life who was apparently doing soil analysis, though he seemed to spend the majority of his time cooking shit that he picked out of the jungle and complaining about the fact that he never stopped sweating.

Only later did I learn that the pilot was indeed the pilot, making him as much a part of the field crew as we were. This little soft spoken man, in what came to be known as his normal MO of inspiring sweet terror, pointed out a plane that looked frighten-ingly similar to ours in the water in front of the runway as we landed. He looked at me so nonchalantly and said, “He missed it a little.” At first I think “What the fuck does that mean?” but then I realize how this is possible when I see the runway which is smaller than the parking lot of my local post office, perched precariously next to a small embankment which apparently impedes

Destination

aquatic erosion in one of the few places, I was told later, that there was no archaeo-logical remains, forcing them to construct it there. With bored eyes, the pilot tells us it’s a bit windy today (no shit buddy, my head hurts from hitting the roof) and that he has to time his landing with the waves hitting the rocks next to the shore. Brilliant.

The odd man out on this flight, strange-ly enough, and the only one who wasn’t

shaking and crying at this point, was a patient of the colony, a man who retained only his thumb and middle finger on his right hand, with which he used to pick at a traditional ukulele almost constantly. As we were bouncing around in the wind and skidding into the runway, sliding into the grass, this little tank of a man just kept playing cheery music, smiling like it would be some kind of sick celebration if we just kept coasting right into the ocean, making the two sides of the runway sym-metrical with one plane in each bay. He was the happiest little fucker I have ever seen and apparently was one of the only remaining patients who dared to

venture outside of the peninsula. In the car-go hold (a little area behind our seats), he had a painting collected from some great ancestor that had been rotting in an attic on O’ahu, which was apparently finding a new (or reclaimed) home on Kalaupapa.

The plane skidded to a stop and we were picked up in a rusty Dodge truck, shown to our quarters 100 metres away, old dormitories used by patients long ago,

now owned by the National Park Service as some sort of creepy living heritage project, and told that we needed to look around for sheets. Fend for yourselves, Houle3 beasts! I glanced at the others in the room with me and realized we lost happy man back at the airport. Shit. I decided that Mike, who carried a massive suitcase adorned with Hawaiian flowers that gave me the impression he thought he was on an extended vacation, might have the coolest forms of en-tertainment packed. I opted to bunk with him.

It proved to be a mistake because, al-though Mike did have a DVD player and

3 Roughly translated from Hawaiian as “Foreigner”18

Home

Ursula K. Le GuinScape

a laptop loaded up with a bunch of video games, he snored like a goddamn pit bull hallucinating on sedatives. What’s more, I realized that being his bunkmate, he felt pretty much entitled to grub on the food stash that I had carried in my gym bag from O’ahu. He was also, finally, a man prone to posing hypnotic, controversial existential relationship questions to me late at night while we were lying there listening to nocturnal birdcalls and fish launching themselves out of the cove with satisfied plopping aquatic re-entries. This was not, in the end, necessarily a bad thing, as my relationship with my girlfriend was more fucked up than I knew and Mike loved hearing about it.

I spent 5 weeks on Kalaupapa, com-ing home to my girlfriend on weekends in a transparent attempt to to be a committed partner, though we both had a clear case of wanderlust that was eating away at our eternal commitment attempt. She ended up fucking some guy in Oregon two years later and leaving me to go work on the same peninsula full-time in some sort of strangely sadistic and beautiful irony of fate.

In my time there, I watched these Hawaiian guys dig a massive amount of trenches with these little yellow backhoes that were shipped in on the one week last

year that a ship could get into this tiny stormy harbour. What was exciting was the stuff that came out of the ground. Mind you, none of it was spectacularly archaeological, you know, broken ceramic pottery sherds, cut horse bone, old nails and pieces of shattered wine bottles smuggled from

neighbouring islands. One time I spied a subterranean wall and made them move the pit, but the excitement for me, after standing there sifting the back dirt from the trenches through a screen I had constructed out of an old boat laying in the harbour and some chicken fencing week after week, was that I was connecting with the people who had lived there… because I now lived there.

I had become part of this tiny little group of rogue Kalaupapians who had the strange fortune/misfortune of living in this petite little place that felt like it was floating around

the Pacific Ocean, sure at any mo-ment to smash into the coast of Cali-fornia so I could walk to my parents house for dinner. They were also, at the time, filming the TV show Lost on my home island, and my memory of watch-ing the show and then running into cast members at the organic corner market made it feel even more like I was stuck in some beautiful time/space/mind warp.

After some period, the artefacts

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Tangled

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stopped coming out of the ground as we moved into localities further from sites of historic human habitation, and I eventually found myself diving off of the empty docks into the crystal clear harbour instead of work-ing, day after day, forgetting why I was there or what I was supposed to be do-ing. I even forgot to keep photographing the experience, which I later regretted.

Kalaupapa became my playground. I floated on my back looking at the stars at night, snorkelled out to a shipwreck that could be seen from the shore to pull myself around on its rusty bits of metal protruding from the water, getting stabbed by it every once and a while. I read countless books; laid out in this little shelter I found where a tree had grabbed a boat and tangled it up in some erotic attempt to reclaim its own wood. Soft grass completed my little summer hut. I did my work, yes, and did it well, but I realized that without a computer, an internet connection or my Playstation 3, I had so much time to do nothing. It was reliving. It was so human to be away from humanity.

After a month or so on the peninsula, I

departed Moloka’i with a heavy heart. As well as taking

away stories and photos, I left behind rem-nants of my existence in an attempt to claim space in the time of the place, including a massive tome by Neil Stephenson that I read while I was there, destined (I hoped) to ex-cite and confuse the next unwary passerby who found it. I also left little pieces of my time on the peninsula in all of the excavation trenches we had put in. Cherry Coke cans smuggled in next to my trow-els and brushes in the bucket, tubes of oil they used for the backhoes, artefact bags with poetry written on them, you know, normal stuff from the age. In one, I even left a small flash drive which con-tained all of my photos and writing from the trip, as well as a video of me danc-ing with the memory of Father Damien on an empty Tuesday in the church he constructed during his short life there.4 Perhaps one day, some unwary archaeologist working for Nation-al Parks Service (who will adminis-ter the park in the years to come) will dig it up. A digital time capsule from circa 2007, the end of an era on Moloka’i.

4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFRwcBoPprg

Left behind

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THE L.A

. DIA

RY

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Kampala (Uganda), August 2009

Kyaka II refugee settlement lays on a vast area amidst the lush and green-painted hills of western Uganda. This is home to rough-ly 16000 refugees, mostly coming form the DRC, Sudan and Rwanda. This people are part of the 31 million under the formal re-sponsibility of UNHCR: the size of an aver-age European country, a country without borders and without official representatives.Women and men living in camps like Kyaka II, escaping genocides and civil wars rag-ing in their home-place, are the waste pro-duced by the violent political dynamics of the South of the world. Few westerners bother to give voice to waste-persons like Joseph.

Joseph has been living in Kyaka II for nine years, his degree has no recognition in Ugan-da so he cannot work. He sleeps under a hut that he made himself with wood and mud and covered with a piece of white plastic provided by the United Nations, just like any other hut around the camp. The United Na-tions also give him a monthly ration of maize flour and rice, which is only enough for the first three weeks. Joseph manages to find the rest by digging the small maize field he was assigned, the economy here is exclusively ru-ral. I ask him how he arrived in Kyaka II: he escaped on foot for 500 Kilometres through the Congolese forest; half of his family was taken away by war and he lost contacts with the other half after a fire destroyed the hut he lived before, burning his address book and mobile phone. Joseph tells his story calmly, as if he is talking about someone else.

What strikes me more about refugees’ life is the extreme shakiness they are forced into. In one of the tiny villages of the settlement live some Rwandese families, their kids are scratching about at the time they are sup-posed to be at a camp school, in one of those classrooms with one teacher and one hun-dred pupils. I ask their parents about it, and their answer, faultless and logic, sounds some-thing like: “We are waiting to be repatriated, it makes no sense to pay the school fees if we are going back to Rwanda soon.” The problem is that none of them was told the day of repa-triation, it could be a matter of two months or two years. Hence, for two months or for two years, their kids are not going to school.

The existence of refugees entirely depends on the intermittent and unpredictable repa-triation arrangements between the govern-ment of their home country, the Ugandan officials and the United Nations. Planning a future in Uganda is impossible for them: finding a job outside the camp (the neces-sary condition to exit from it) is too hard, not to talk about achieving the Ugandan citizen-ship. So, most of them remain inside the set-tlement, where at least they have their food ration. Unfortunately, for many of them, life inside the camp can turn into a hell.

Kanyesoko, for instance, is a 32 years old man who escaped from North Kivu. As he reached the Ugandan border, he was put on a UNH-CR vehicle and taken to Kyangwale refugee camp, where he found the very persons that

Dying SlowlyHow life goes in a refugee camp

UGANDAKampala

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killed his parents and burnt his house back in the Congo. They threatened him to death and they burnt his hut, forcing him to sleep every night in a different place. After months, he succeeded to be transferred to another camp: he is now in Kyaka II. However, Kan-yesoko is not feeling safe even here, he wishes he could escape to a new country. His voice trembles as he tells me that he is trying not to reveal his ethnic origin to anyone, but such a discretion is impracticable in Africa, and intrinsically dodgy. Anyway, between one escape and the other, he found the time to get a wife, but it didn’t work out for the best: he chose a wife from a different group, which made him lose the support of his companions.

Safety problems like the ones of Kanyesoko are quite common inside the camp, togeth-er with rapes, robberies and arsons. For this reason, the settlement administration was recently entrusted to a military com-mandant, who gets his wage both from the Ugandan government and from the UNHCR. No accident, then, that all Ugandan refugee settlements are built next to military bases.

Outside the commandant office I meet Baun-da, a Congolese man from South Kivu who has been living in Kyaka II for a whole fifteen years. The camp, he tells me, is like a prison without locks and gates, where life is in a state of ob-livion. I dare to ask him to compare his life in the Congo with the one in the camp. This is his answer: “I had to make a choice: staying in the Congo and dying suddenly or escap-ing and dying slowly. I chose to die slowly.”

Article & Photography:Giulio Morel

UGANDAKampala

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The evil Thyagu stands over Shenbagam hold-ing the wedding Thali round her neck as she sits submissive and dazed. To secure her inheritance, all he has to do is tie the knot. Uma is being re-strained in the crowd, helpless. A reincarnation of Shenbagam’s mother Jeeva, she remembers the pain of having her husband corrupted by drugs, being falsely accused of adultery before being pushed off a cliff by Thyagu. He has ruled tyrannically over the village ever since, keeping the labourers poor whilst soaking up its wealth.

Stalls outside the stations of Tamil Nadu are lined with 10 Rupee short stories, which clamour to seduce the reader with displays of crime, horror and suspense. A victim under the blooded fangs of a giant tabby cat sits above a sari-clad woman armed with a machine gun.

Suddenly a shot. Five more rattle in quick succession. Thyagu’s ex-wife stands with a smoking gun: “May this story be a lesson to the world that justice will always prevail”.

And so The Rebirth of Jeeva ends, balanced in a karma that has taken two generations to achieve. This is symptomatic of a powerful world view in the Indian popular imagination, which the author, Indra Sundar Rajan, summa-rizes by saying “if we make a mess, then it’s our responsibility to clean it up. We must pay the debts of our karma ourselves”. It’s an idea that returns again and again in Tamil Pulp Fiction. Working for The Climate Project - India over the summer, an independent chapter of Al Gore’s NGO, my boss, a fervent atheist, said to me wryly, “you see in climate negotiations the

West adopting a Christian view where if you mess up, you say sorry and get absolved. The thing is, if you mess up as a Hindu you have to make amends, else you’re a cockroach”. There is a lot of frustration in India about the way the West are trying to deal with global warming. Equity is at the heart of it. China and India are consistently getting classed as the first and fifth largest polluters in the world, with an implied burden of responsibil-ity that’s proportional to these positions. But per capita, the average Indian emits roughly ten times less than the average American, and four times less the average European. It’s even below the developing world average. In fact, 400 million people live in non-elec-trified dwellings in India and this poverty is the most ignored ‘carbon sink’ in the climate change debate. The graph that gets pulled out even less is the one showing historical emissions over the last 250 years. The UK stands awkwardly at the top closely followed by the US, whilst India and China are only specks on the horizontal. If you’re thinking in karma it’s a large debt to pay. What is more, the countries least responsible for climate change stand to suffer the most be-cause of their geographic locations and limited resources to adapt. For instance, the UN esti-mates that if the global temperature rises by 2 degrees, India stands to loose between a fifth and a half of its agricultural output. This is so dangerous because 60 per cent of the popu-lation is involved in agricultural production.

But there’s something up-side-down about the way climate change tends to get reported.When I was in Mumbai in late August, the

Indian attitudes towards global warming

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Article & Photography: Richard Strauss

Compare this to the cli-mate change message in India. One of the ser-vices that The Climate Project - India provides is a training session for teachers and businesses where there is a heavy emphasis, not only on saving energy, but on reducing waste and wa-ter consumption as well. What seemed strange to me was that many of the audiences consisted of fairly poor people who would in any case

consume relatively little. Asking why this information was included, I got told simply that it got a very popular response. In fact, for millions of Indians, the idea of conser-vation gives a dignity to their way of life. What this means is that whilst the British pub-lic are busy stock-piling halogen lights and pointing out the reluctance of India and Chi-na to accept binding emissions targets, school teachers on £100 a month are consciously continuing to take bucket showers rather than wasting water through a mains system. Of course, India will have a huge role to play in helping to prevent global warming. Certain-ly, if its eighty-odd years of coal reserves are all burnt, then the world will get very toasty. But the Indian Prime-Minister, Manmohan Singh, has said that India’s per capita emis-sions will not exceed the developed world average. If people in the West consume sus-tainable amounts of carbon, so will Indians. And when it comes to international negota-tiations, it seems only fair that responsibility

festival of Ganesh Chaturthi was in full swing. Large statues of Ganesh, up to five stories high, were paraded through the streets by families and neighbourhoods to the accom-paniment of symbols, drums, even stacks of speakers. Dancing and covered in red paint, Mumbaikers took their idols down to the sea to be ceremoniously drowned. As the mov-er of obstacles, people pray to the elephant god for success and wealth in the coming year, with heads of households waving bank notes over relatives as a sign of good fortune. I think many in the West are intimidated by this vision of India: a rapidly growing economy full of people desperately wanting to make money, get more things, and earn a more comfortable existence for themselves. No-one would deny India the right to do this, but the ‘oriental con-sumer monster’ is often used by us as an ex-cuse to do nothing about lowering greenhouse gas emissions; at least, nothing about chang-ing lifestyles. Instead the emphasis is on tech-nology. We want to make new stuff that emits less, rather than using less in the first place.

Article

& Photography: Richard Strauss 27

The capital is a triumph of rejuvenation over disaster. Apart from the odd apartment block yet to receive a post-war facelift, you would never guess that this city used to be an expanded bomb site. Optimism fills every corner of its beautiful scenery: ac-cording to everyone you meet the glass is always half full. Unsure of what is to come tomorrow, the ethos is to live for today - bitter memories of the past two decades can be forgotten. To gain a real sense of city life, a long stroll down the coastal road of the Corniche is all you need. Old men playing backgammon in the torch-lit alleyways; teenagers smoking hooka in abandoned car parks; young boys risking their lives diving off the great Pigeon Rock – it’s all there. A little further afield and you reach Verdun: the Oxford Street of the Middle East.

Here you’ll find Saudi fashionistas and wealthy Lebanese youths fighting for at-tention in the plethora of outdoor coffee bars. Further inland is the famous ‘Down-town’: once the home of sniper fire, mil-lions of dollars worth of renovation have transformed it into the high class home of Beirut nightlife. Close by lies the area of Achrafiye, built upon the site of the Roman City of the Dead. Predominantly a Christian reserve, its winding streets house more bars and clubs than Soho and more atmo-sphere than Covent Garden. Fun-lovers of all ages crowd there every night of the week to party until dawn and drink enough to put Oxford students to shame. Never a bad word to be heard nor a fight to be seen, conflict is an unknown term. Friendli-ness that may seem superficial is actually anything but.

Beirut

Along the coast there’s so much to explore that you’ll only just find the time to hit the beach. It is outside the hustle of Bei-rut where you will find the Jeita Grottos; a stunning series of cav-erns with bizarre mazes of sta-lactites and stalagmites. The boat ride from the lower cavern will take you back to the beginning of time, with intimidating rock for-mations and thousands of years worth of atmosphere lingering in the musty crevasses of the many caves. With slippery stone stairways to scare even the most confident of beings, the grottos always promise to wow their visi-tors. Out of the underground and onto the coast, there are enough beaches and resorts to keep you busy all summer. From the newly

built beach huts and freshly filled pools to the quirky straw umbrel-las and Jamaican themed bars, every personality will find some-thing to satisfy their tastes. Soak up the Mediterranean rays with a rum cocktail or traditional fresh lemonade and enjoy world class service from the young waiters and waitresses who will cater to your every need, especially if you’re English. For a five star ex-perience, order some cold mez-zes (food platters) to keep you energised in the heat. Some of my favourites include tabbouleh, a fresh, zingy salad, and lebneh, a cold soft cheese served with freshly baked bread. Relaxing with friends and family by the sea is the only way to spend the long summer days.

The

Coa

st“Lebanon shouldn’t be defined by the news images and stories that are projected to day to day in the press – see beyond that, and you fill find a stunning Mediterranean country

hiding unique treasures of all kinds, ready for discovery.”

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Being the place of my birth, I’m bound to be biased towards the beauty of this par-ticular mountainous inland area. Amongst the winding lanes and endless expanses of woodland, you’ll find freshwater springs and sparkling streams surrounded by crops of olives, apples and grapes. Predominantly populated by Druze, the traditional dress of this religion can be seen adorning men and women along the roadside leading to the main villages. One of the prettiest of these villages is Deir Al-Qumar which is known widely for its tolerant view on religion: it houses a church, synagogue and a mosque. During the summer season it can be found overrun with tourists of all nationalities, lan-

guishing in the overpriced coffee bars and gift shops. However, if your visit happens to fall in Autumn, the quiet streets are lined romantically with leaves of orange

and red and the restaurant owners will be pleased to serve you wonderful quality food at lower prices and, more traditionally, friendly service. Nest-

ling between the columns of the old stone buildings you will find market stalls that appear to be lost in a world of centuries ago. Far from the

tacky tourist trinkets you find in most markets, here you can find handmade cedar woodwork, loaf upon loaf of tasty bread and even antique gold and silver jewellery. If you’re lucky enough to be invited inside the home of a resident within Chouf, you are sure to be welcomed with fresh mint tea and a platter of juicy fruit picked the same day. Following this, a serving of coffee as thick as mud will be prepared, to send you on your way back down the winding roads to the city.

The

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ouf Mountains

Known as Gebal in the Bible, dating c. 5000BC, Byblos is one of Lebanon’s oldest inhabited towns – this Mediterranean city hidesa picturesque ancient fishing harbour, delightful seafood restaurants and imposing Roman ruins. It was once the Phoe-nician stopping off place for papyrus shipments en route to Egypt, hence why the gift shops are full to the brim with Phoenician figurines of all shapes and sizes. The harbour is overflowing with old fishing memorabilia scattered along the coastline, and shells still entwined in the handmade fishing nets. Back in the 1960s, Byblos was the home of celebrity yachts and wild parties, however, ever since the devastation caused by the war, it has returned to the quiet, idyllic place it once was. One thing not to be missed when visiting this area is the famous Memoire de Temps: an old fossil museum boasting weird and wonderful thousand-year-old rocks im-printed with the life image of eerily recognisable creatures. This beautiful town is a home away from home for any city resident and definitely a destination not to be missed.

Byblos

Jennifer Hamada

Some may

think of Lebanon as a war-torn country strewn with roadside army trucks and tankers patrolling the streets - they couldn’t be further from the truth. Al-though memories of the war still linger in the air, Lebanon has come a long way since the days of the Gulf War. Always greet-ing you with a smile, the locals have a level of hos-pitality that is hard to be-lieve until you experience it for yourself. No matter who you are or where you are from, you are bound to have a connection of some sort with Lebanon; and if you don’t, you’ll soon find one.

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