Hello all,

As you may have guessed this is the late November & December editions rolled into one large and end of year update to you all ! Unfortunately work commitments have got in the way of my editorial responsibilities…hopefully you can allow me a little leeway though.

So in this month’s update we have some very fine and very Globetrotter Club orientated articles – you can see that Write in (1) and Write in (3) are both written by well established members who you’ll recognise ! And for Write in (2) I’ve included some very positive feedback I received from readers of the October edition…hopefully Neil & Sandra will enjoy hearing such comments.

It’s these positive sides of travel that help to balance the awful happenings in Mumbai and to a lesser extent Thailand. The world can be a very difficult and dangerous place, however there is also a vast amount of charm & beauty that needs to be cherished. I also know that many of you are still planning trips in 2009 – keep going and bring us back some wonderful articles & happy memories.

That’s all for now…enjoy your Christmas & New Year festivities, however you chose to mark them. See you in 2009…

The Ant

theant@globetrotters.co.uk

With host Dan Bachmann at the lectern we had two quite contrasting speakers – the first being on our regulars and the second a debutant for the club ! Both were well received…

The London November meeting saw Martin Featherstone give us a great talk on India, taking in paint throwing festivals, the Jaipur elephant festival and a temple full of rats!, as well as more conventional tourist favourites such as the Taj Mahal in Agra and The Palace of the Winds in Jaipur. Martin somehow packed in places all over India on his trip f

rom Amritsar and its stunning Golden Temple, to the funeral Ghats in Varanassi, where he got into trouble for taking photos, though his favourite was the erotic sex temples at Khajuraho! At Ramthambore he tried tiger spotting, without success until a chance meeting at his hotel with a relative of the park ranger, who took him on a private tiger spotting trip, he saw a tiger in the distance.

Our second speaker was Jennifer Barclay who ended up going to South Korea because her rock drummer boyfriend got a job playing in a band at a hotel in Seoul. While he rocked, Jennifer got to explore a country not on many peoples tourist itineraries. She found it a bit Seoul destroying (get it!) to begin with, as nobody wanted to talk to her, but as she got outside the city taking in the national parks and visiting the many temples, she got to meet “Mr Kim”. Kim being by far the most common name in Korea. At Pusan the locals introduced her to the delights of fish restaurants and the drinking customs that only end up one way! Jennifer has also become a fan of Korea’s national dish Kimchi, which is slightly more palatable than Dog, one of their others and easier to serve to her friends back home ! On her return Jennifer wrote her book, Meeting Mr Kim: Or How I Went to Korea and Learned to Love Kimchi, which you can buy on amazon here

For details of the forth coming meetings of the London branch, December 2008 through to July 2009 – http://www.globetrotters.co.uk/meetings/lon09it1.html.

London meetings are held at The Church of Scotland, Crown Court, behind the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden at 2.30pm the first Saturday of each month, unless there is a UK public holiday that weekend. There is no London meeting in August, but we start afresh in September. For more information, contact the Globetrotters Info line on +44 (0) 20 8674 6229, or visit the website: www.globetrotters.co.uk.

With host Jacqui Trotter at the lectern we had two excellent speakers return to the club – both were engaging through quite different viewpoints on their most recent travels…

Globies were delighted to welcome back Juliet Coombe, whose talk “Around the Fort in 80 Lives”, described the people who live in Galle Fort in Sri Lanka, and where Juliet now calls home. Juliet’s talk based on her book of the same title took us behind the usual tourist landscapes of Lighthouses, Mosques and Markets, to the local inhabitants, many of whom can trace back their ancestry for 9 generations in the Fort area. Juliet showed us the Tuk Tuk driver who doubles up as an ambulance, having had 4 babies delivered in the back seat. A Fortune Hunter in who dives in the sea hoping for the “big one” then works as a security guard. Juliet also explained some of the traditions associated with living in Galle Fort, such as the rituals involved in moving in, that include lighting a fire on the tiles in the middle of your kitchen and sacrificing a scrawny chicken. When her baby contracted chicken pox she was amazed when locals covered him in green leaves from the fort walls, but to her amazement the chicken pox abated. Also divorce is not allowed, with the local Imam telling Juliet to come and find him if her husband strayed and her husband would be stoned! Before Juliet published the book she took over a warehouse as part of a literary festival and exhibited pages and photos from the upcoming book, the people could then see her intentions and ended up coming up with even more interesting recollections leading to new sections being added to the contents.

To find out more about Juliet and the Galle Literature Festival in 2008 – http://www.gallearttrail.com/participant.php

After Jacqui Trotter’s home made Christmas cake had been demolished by those present during the tea interval, our second speaker was John Gimlette whose talk “Panther soup, detailed a European journey in war and peace”. A chance meeting in London with WW2 American veteran Putnam Flint lead John on a journey with Putnam as a guide following the American army’s advance through France, Germany and into Austria. John was able to get the exact route from wartime records of Flint’s journey from US records where every shell fired had been documented. Their journey began in the French Port of Marseille, in The Victory Hotel’s basement which still has paintings that were done by allied airmen while being hidden by the resistance. John and Putnam continued into the Vosges mountains and Alsace where even today you can find plenty of scrap from the battles laying around in the woods. Over the border into Germany via Heilbronn to Ulm, and Ulm’s cathedral is the world’s tallest with its 161m Steeple. Their journey continued through Bavaria, via Neuschwanstein and Linderhof Castles and into Austria to Innsbruck and Oberhofen, which has not changed much in 60 years. The trip was cathartic for Putnam giving him a kind of closure and enlightening for his family who have read John’s book and now know about a period of Putnam’s life that he never talked about, despite having plenty of souvenirs in his house.

To find out more about John and his travels – http://www.johngimlette.com/

For information on Ontario meetings, please contact Svatka Hermanek: shermanek@schulich.yorku.ca or Bruce Weber: tel. 416-203-0911 or Paul Webb: tel. 416-694-8259.

Ontario meetings are held on the third Friday of January, March, May, September and November. Usually at the Woodsworth Co-op, Penthouse, 133, Wilton Street in downtown Toronto at 8.00 p.m.

The Ant tracked down his illustrious predecessor for a catch up on where her travels had taken her, since stepping down from editing this eNewsletter. The results aren’t necessarily what the readers might expect but as ever with the Beetle, its been adventure !

If you’d asked me two years ago what I’d think of running a cheese business and making cheese in a very rural location in the north of England, I would have laughed heartily, but that, in a nutshell, is exactly what has happened to your once globetrotting friend, the Beetle.

Two years ago, the Beetle was living and working in Brunei, then Bangkok and Singapore. Prior to that, for almost twenty years she has lived and worked in four continents, some glamorous places, but mostly not, and working hard. It was a very transient lifestyle, working hard, playing hard, diving hard, but always change: different place, different job, different people, different language, different cultures – always a different situation and embracing a great deal of change and cultural diversity.

In October 2006, she came back to her Beetle nest in London to organise a complete move to Dubai. A flat share had been organised, friends of friends were e-mailed, dates for coffee set up and the Beetle was looking a forward to life in the United Arab Emirates, job hunting, making new friends and embracing another new culture and all that that entails.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Dubai. The Beetle’s uncle, Goaty, called her and asked if she could stop by North Yorkshire to help him value his cheese business as he was looking to sell it as a result of ill health. The Beetle said ‘sure, but I’m on my way to Dubai, I’ll push the flight back by three days, will three days be enough?’ Goaty said yes, three days would be ample and promised to fill the Beetle’s luggage with Goaty cheese. Who could resist!

Sadly, by the time the Beetle landed in North Yorkshire, a beautiful part of England (when the sun shines) Goaty was in hospital and he died ten days later. The Beetle was asked to run the ailing cheese business in the interim and so she did. The three days will be two years come November 2008.

The Beetle is now the proud owner of a cheese business, specialising in goat and ewe’s cheese and a ramshackle old farm house that dates from 1660, three acres of wilderness and a field full of rampaging and mostly evil sheep and enough rabbits to make rabbit casserole to the moon and back.

Who would have thought! For the first time in her Beetly existence the Beetle has a real home, not a transient crash pad or a six month let in a foreign land or a snatched few days here and there, this is long term, which for months was quite a scary proposition. The responsibility of owning a house, keeping the fields and garden under control (an inevitable losing battle), the incredibly rural location, the work the Beetle nest that is a cold bleak house needs to bring it in to the 21^st century….

A similar difficulty the Beetle encountered was the feeling of being anchored to a place because of her cheese business which has become the focal point of her existence over the past two years. We are talking about a rural community of about 200 people and 10,000 sheep, no local shop to wander down and buy a paper and a litre of milk, no bookshops, no theatre, cinema, no meaningful public transport and the first time in over fifteen years the Beetle had to have a car. This has taken quite a lot to get used to, however, the Beetle is nothing but flexible and relishes a challenge.

There are of course ups and downs in any situation, but it is a situation entirely of Beetle making. Her Beetle nest seems to be falling down at each of its four corners. Each upstairs room sags ominously. There is no mains water or sewerage. Water comes from a bore hole under the ground outside the kitchen. Sewerage is occasionally successfully piped into a septic tank at the bottom of the wilderness. When the electricity cuts out which it does about 6 times a year, then you can’t flush the toilet because the pump to get water out of the ground won’t work. Telephone lines go down regularly at each hurricane like gale, and there are many. When it snows, you can’t get a car up the drive. Once the Beetle had to ask a neighbouring farmer to pull her out with his tractor – oh the ignominy – and such a change from leaves on the track in other parts of the country or commuting by over crowded tube in London. The postman won’t deliver mail because he says it is too far out and inconvenient. Such is rural life.

A rash bit of DIY involving dismantling a fireplace downstairs almost culminated in the upstairs bedroom crashing through the ceiling. Ok, ok, the Beetle admits, DIY is not her forte, but she simply cannot afford to get builders in! Finding a good plumber or electrician or builder even here in the sticks is just as difficult as in London. You get put on a waiting list. The Beetle has been waiting for over a year now for a plumber to put in a shower. Her impatience has mellowed as things just don’t happen quickly here.

Things most people take for granted, such as broadband are not available because the Beetle nest is too far away from the exchange so is reliant on a rural community internet service, often uncharitably referred to as Drivelnet. Suffice to say, it is not reliable which is partly why the Beetle (with regret) relinquished editorship of the Globetrotter’s e-newsletter.

On the plus side, hordes of pheasants gather each morning at their and the Beetle’s breakfast time to eat cheese off cuts garnered from work, building up to a gaggle of around thirty when it gets really cold. They become very tame and have names like Bent Feather, Chequer Neck, Fat Pheasant, Timid Pheasant and so on. The garden has signs in rabbit welcoming all rabbits to make burrows and breed as freely as they like. As a result, despite the cold and windy individual eco-system that exists, all attempts to grow vegetables or flowers are thwarted at every turn. The Beetle bought plastic greenhouses on e-bay to grow courgettes and beetroot and attempts to devise new ingenious ways to stop the rabbits from getting inside. They don’t work.

There’s a pair of woodpeckers that live in the wilderness, and a buzzard who has a bachelor pad in the big tree, hedgehogs scuttle galore. Driving to work dancing stoats are a regular sight at certain times of the year. The Beetle has learned how to light a hearty fire with wood and coal in five minutes, cook in the dark when the power is cut off. Gas is bottled and lives undecorously in large orange canisters outside. She can use a chain saw dangerously to chop up logs. She feeds her neighbour’s sheep who graze in the Beetle’s wilderness to keep the grass down. This sounds very Bo Beepish, but in reality should involve the payment of danger money.

Sheep are nothing like as stupid as they are portrayed, in fact, they are really quite cunning. To call sheep, you shout Ho, Ho, Ho, like a rural version of Father Christmas. Then watch out because they will run en masse towards and at you. As they get used to you, they become quite fearless and will head butt you behind the knees causing you to follow over in pain and surprise and they get to gobble up all the sheep nuts your tasty sack contains. Yes, they will attempt to eat the sack as well. The Beetle got wise to this and started to take a stick to protect herself from marauding sheep, but still they got the better of her. The next incident involved being head butted on the bottom which is far too embarrassing to go into details about. The irony of such a life-change!

The other reason the Beetle stepped down from editing the Globetrotter eNewsletter is because the cheese business is a seven day a week commitment; there is so much to do to turn this thirty year old business around and bring it back to its former glory; the Beetle has many plans. There were three people working in the cheese business but in early July, Mac, the Beetle’s great friend and colleague died leaving a large and unhappy gap in the business. There is now the Beetle and Eddie the Steady. The cheese industry is an exceedingly skuldugerous one, but it is something that the Beetle enjoys and has learned much. The business recently moved into larger premises, which was very stressful and by the time you read this, the Beetle will be a cheese maker, making goat’s cheese every three days. Just have to make sure that she does not fall into the cheese vat and become Beetlecheese.

To be continued…..

The Beetle’s cheese (Ribblesdale organic Sheep cheese) can be investigated further here.

Lets pick up your story after your photography course in China and leaving SE Asia…

Well actually there are a few travel stories to tell from the year of the course… I made three trips to Vietnam – spent a month each time shooting two separate projects – one a railway travelogue, the other on the minority tribes of the northern hills which was to become a printed book submitted at the end of my MA.

I was also part of an all expenses paid trip with China Photo Press – a fortnight getting driven across two provinces with a pack of professional lensmen from around the world shooting promotional imagery for local tourist departments and meeting, eating and drinking with top-ranking government officials… A real insight into Chinese business culture!

Where did you head to next & what was your motivation ?

As the end of the course approached and many of my classmates made plans to return to the UK for Christmas, I felt in no rush to remind myself of a London winter… My first thoughts had been to head for my ancestral homeland of Goa and be eating king prawns on a sandy beach at least a week before Big Ben heralded in 2008 a few thousand miles west.

But then my Canadian cousin announced his engagement; the ensuing wedding was to take place in Cuba in mid December. Sadly I was unable to make it as we were in ‘finals’ mode on the MA – photos to edit, book to print, dissertation to hack out…but…I could meet the wedding party as they returned to Canada on Christmas eve in time for a reception in Calgary and other seasonal festivities…

BTW – did you pass your course and how are your Chinese language skills nowadays ?

Yes! I now have an MA in Documentary, Travel Photography and International Photojournalism.

My Chinese language skills didn’t get too far beyond beginner level – the course was taught in English and it was the language of our debates and dissertations. Having said that I built up enough vocabulary to survive – ask directions, buy tickets, order food etc. I could talk a little about myself but not really have a full conversation with someone. Managed to learn a handful of characters though which enabled me to read a train timetable or the destination on the front of a bus and spot a few things on a menu.

Did you ever need to get away from travelling whilst you were away – how did you relax ?

I sometimes needed to get away from the MA and went travelling! Sometimes just walking, though it’s amazing how relaxing rail travel can be. With deadlines looming many an edit or essay draft was tweaked on a laptop on a night train!

What items do you always carry around with you and why ?

The obvious answer, quite predictably, is a camera. I suppose I always have, even in the days before mobile phone gadgetry I would often have a film compact with me on days I wasn’t carting around an SLR. Before I left the UK I had my eye on a waterproof and shockproof digital compact… which I subsequently bought in Hong Kong.

This trip was also the first time I’d travelled with a laptop computer – essential for editing and cataloging images as they are shot. It was a headache at times, always having to ensure it was safe (not to mention the extra weight), but I think the burden justified itself this summer when I was contacted by a publisher in Hong Kong looking for pictures of Chinese museums while I was in the wilds of Guatemala…

Fellow Globetrotter James Robinson met you in Montreal and relayed stories of you following a notion down through Central & South America. What happened next ?

But first, how did I end up in Montreal?? I was way-out-west in Alberta’s Cowtown, taking advantage of the snow in the Rocky Mountains to get some downhill skiing in…

Two and a half years previously when travelling in Morocco I’d met a French-Canadian, Marie-Eve, who told me that next time I was in Canada I must visit Quebec. West Jet, Canada’s budget airline, had reasonably priced flights from Calgary to Montreal (if you go at 3am on a Tuesday.) And while I was there, I met Valerie with whom I spent the spring and made a plan to tour Mexico for the summer.

The original intention had been to head for the Copper Canyon and its scenic mountain railway journey either at the beginning or end of the trip. The way it panned out though was to start in the Yucatan and head south to the jungle at Palenque and up to the highlands of San Cristobal before crossing into Guatemala. A month there saw hikes up active volcanoes, trips out to the jungle and a weekend on the pacific coast.

Then it was back into Mexico and up to the capital city via Oaxaca, Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta. I stayed in Mexico for independence day celebrations on Sept 16th before heading back to Montreal.

Due to constraints with deadlines…the second half of this interview with Gavin will appear in a later edition… The Ant

Hello all,

this month we’ve got quite a packed edition to enjoy !! As you can see the club itself is now fully into its new season with the return of two well regarded speakers, Justin Marozzi & Jonny Bealby – both spoke eloquently to a busy London branch meeting and were enjoyed by the appreciative audience.

And also included are two larger than normal articles by Neil Harris and Sandra Reekes – both talking about their recent trips and featuring some very good pictures. Let me know if you prefer these larger articles or should I keep to the usual 1000 words guideline…

I also need to remind you that the deadline for applications to the 2008 Globetrotters travel award is 31 October – so if you’re a club member and have a unique, independent trip in mind … write in with an outline and you never know, you might find that the club contributes up to £1000 towards your costs.

To close this month I have an appeal from the BBC – for their new natural history show … the corporation are looking for adventurous people who enjoy adventures with nature. Have a read of Write in (2) and let your imaginations run riot !!

That’s all for now … remember to adjust your clocks as daylight savings is shortly leaving us,

The Ant

theant@globetrotters.co.uk