Half Way // 11th May 2005

Hi all

Yes, it's been a while since the last update. The pope died and was replaced. (Not only was I not annouced as the winner, but I wasn't even on the shortlist, dammit...) Tony Blair was made Prime Minister again. They released the long-awaited and frankly disappointing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. I covered a large distance. Meanwhile my beloved car has been sold in order to fund my trip.

Maybe it's been a refreshingly long time - just enough for me to slip to the back of your mind. I'm still here, but where 'here' is has changed its location a few times since the last email. The fun of South America is far behind. If you're short of time, here's my quick version of events: Argentina to Chile to Easter Island to Tahiti to New Zealand. Still alive.

On arrival in the latest country, New Zealand, I checked into the Auckland Central Backpackers hostel. The building obviously used to be an office block (easy to tell from the fact that it still looks like one), and I made the mistake of not specifically asking for a room with a window. The room has not enough space to swing a walnut. Consequently the first night felt like I was living in a prison. I guess this was a positive effect in so far as it caused me to spend minimal time in the hotel room, and more time exploring the city. I moved quickly to a windowed room...

But back to the past - I emailed from Cordoba last. Here I stayed in possibly the grottiest hostel I've been in so far. Run by a sleazy man and his dog Sophia, it proved to be a great place to spend a few days thanks to the student-friendly vibe and constant free supply of tea.

Oh, the joy of hairdressing. After five months of nothing, I decided that my hair was becoming a little lanky. I think the term a real hairdresser would use is 'lacking shape', or something similar. Normally I would saunter on down to a place in Addlestone and ask them to cut it so that it looked good. Then the slightly dense girl wielding the unnervingly large scissors would get to work, explaining how she was adding 'body', 'texture', 'flavour', etc. Then she would, against my wishes, fill my precious hair with nasty smelling 'product'. After being asked if I liked it (how should I know?), my journey home would be spent madly ruffling the new cut, trying to displace the awful Abba-style she had created. On arrival at home, all of the nasty 'product' would be washed out, and Mum and Abi would criticise or compliment the cut accordingly. However, I dreaded getting my hair cut in South America thanks to the large language barrier and unnervingly large amount of people in Argentina with mullets.

Not knowing how to ask precisely for a trim, and fearing that 'just cut it a little' could so easily be misinterpreted as 'cut it little', I decided to simply print out pictures of men with long hair from the internet. So, armed with a badly printed and pixellated picture of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen I set out for the hairdresser. Miraculously, I ended up with a cut that wasn't too bad. The only problem I faced was in Chile, where I was constantly mistaken for a girl. It's only just become unruly enough to avoid this mistake now.

Stupid tamale...
It was my last day in Cordoba and I felt like lunch. Tamales, I thought. I found a restaurant that sold my beloved snacks and sat down to eat. The first one was delicious, and bizarrely an old episode of Mr. Bean was showing on TV. The second tamale proved harder to get into - instead of being tied with the traditional banana leaf, it was tied with string which proved incredibly hard to untie. All over South America the knives used are made by a Brazillian company called Tramontia, whose knives are cheap and with incredibly sharp serrated blades. I decided to cut the string with my knife. Not a stupid decision necessarily, until I stabbed myself pretty hard in the left hand. I removed the knife and miraculously found that I hadn't severed any tendons. Not wanting to look the fool I was (what idiot cuts their hand open on a harmless tamale?), I decided to make some makeshift bandages with the napkins kindly provided for me by the establishment. For the rest of the meal I sat casually while the pain wore down, unaware of the large pool of blood building up under the napkin. There's not really much else to this little tale except to say that the waitress was suprisingly nice about putting a plaster on my hand, and that it's pretty much healed now. The cut wasn't huge, but it bled like you've never seen.

After my little tamale escapade, I checked out the zoo in Cordoba. My heart bled more than my hand for the animals stuck in tiny cages without any companions, including the gentle three-legged wolf with whom I sat for a while. They recieve just about no attention from staff or other animals, and mostly have desolate looks on their faces. There's something sinister about a run-down zoo, and I could just imagine it being the set of a teen slasher movie late at night (there was even a large black ferris wheel, maybe good for the climatic end scene). A lot of the exhibits didn't actually appear to be exhibits at all, and were accessed by going down unmarked narrow alleys hidden behind layers of vegetation.

Also while I was in Cordoba I managed to get a guided tour of the city from a friendly architecture student I chatted up in a bar the night before. Students in Argentina seem to live just like students back home: small flats, lots of socialising. When they go to the park, instead of the cheapest cans of beer they can find, they take a cup with a silver straw and a large flask of mate tea. In case you're wondering, mate tea (pronounced mar-tay) is a sour-tasting green tea that all Argentinians seem to love.

After Cordoba in Argentina, I left for Santiago, Chile. At the border my pot of local honey was confiscated.

Chile seemed like a cool country, although I was only there for a few days. Believe me, it's fantastic to get to a country where you can flush toilet paper down the toilet instead of having to use a little bin by the side, as in the rest of South America. Chile is, much like Argentina, more sophisticated than its neighbours. In the supermarket I found real cheddar cheese, and imported Lee and Perrins worcester sauce, so for a couple of evenings feasted on cheese on toast, destroying a stainless steel tea-tray in the process. Yes, I know how to live on the wild side.

I was in Santiago post office trying to send a parcel full of flambouyant shirts home, when I met a distressed Welshman trying to do the same, except his package was full of more practical items. He was struggling terribly, not only to find the queue (out of a selection of one queue) and fill in the form (in, erm, English...). The thing that sent him into a panic more than anything was the fact that the lady at the desk couldn't answer his questions, all of which abou thow to fill in the form. During my time in South America, my Spanish improved significantly, from practically nothing to what I now call 'token Spanish' - not enough to be able to have deep or meaningful conversations, but with a little effort and a lot of hand gestures the point could normally be conveyed (at least until the person realises that their mate speaks perfect English and would like to practise). My how I laughed to myself about this man's inadequacy and needless panic. Little did I realise I would feel equally powerless when I turned up in French Polynesia a few days later.

Before that, however, I took a four day stop in Easter Island. I was surprised at how like the Isle of Wight the place was. On the East side of the island are some fantastic stone heads on a volcano, which are gorgeous, mysterious and very photogenic. The others, which litter the coasts, generally aren't as cool. The exact purpose of the heads remained not entirely clear to me - it seemed they were mostly ornamental. Along with a Mancunian bank manager, I hired a car and drove all over the island. Thrashing a jeep around a bunch of country lanes probably didn't do much good to the land, but was great fun. As a first time driving on the wrong side of the road, it wasn't too hard, although I was rather careful after being told that none of the cars on the island have insurance.

I heard possibly the best line so far on Easter Island. I was in a bar talking to some English women when I was approached by 'Steve', a mulleted local with a swagger wearing his best headband and 80's-style surf gear (Abi, think Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure), who in the dark lighting mistook me for a woman and tried to make conversation in Spanish. On realising that I wasn't a target, he interrupted me mid-sentence and said a line obviously memorised from a high-quality film: 'Scuse me, man. I gotta circulate and check out the chicks', upon which he did. Classic.

I have to praise the inhabitants of Tahiti, my next stop after Easter Island, for not punching me. My French, quite simply, is awful. The phrases I know are 'Good day/evening', 'Do you speak English?', 'I live in Addlestone' and the essential ' I am a grapefruit' ('Je suis un pompelmousse'). After spending time in South America, I resorted to speaking a strange mix of Spanish and English, which left everyone more baffled than is really necessary. I didn't mean to; ridiculous though it may sound, it's taken a while to get used to speaking in just English again. I baffled the lady at Auckland's airport restaurant by staring blankly trying to understand her when she asked what I wanted.

Security was tight at Tahiti's Faaa airport (yes, that really is its name). Before I could check in, my passport and tickets were examined and everything I was carrying (including the passport and tickets - obviously so commonly used to smuggle huge quantities of Bad Things) was x-rayed. I had to remove the lighter from my pocket (another lethal weapon). Then my final obstacle before I was allowed to even think of checking in was to have my large bag opened and swabbed with a colourless, smelly liquid (anti-terrorist liquid, I assume). Only when I had passed this elaborate procedure was I allowed to approach the check-in desk was I told that this was the queue for the flight to Los Angeles. The check-in procedure for New Zealand was the same for everywhere else in the world; this was just the hyper-secure pre-checki-in procedure for America. I haven't flown in since 9/11, but it seems they've gone crazy to stop even normal people boarding flights.

On my first night in Auckland, New Zealand, I went to a rugby game. The originally-named Blues, Auckland's local team, were taking on the Hurricanes in the semi finals of whatever the big rugby cup is here. The misfortune of having a name such as Blues is that it is hard to discern between those fans who are cheering for the team or those who are booing. Some I think were doing both simultaneously. Strangely enough the seating is mixed, so Blues and Hurricanes fans freely associate during the game. Most of the locals I met supported the other team. It seemed strange to me that the opposing fans didn't rip each other to pieces at every given chance; instead they get on in a lighthearted way(what kind of sporting event is this?). The entertainment came not just from the rugby itself, but from the incredibly nubile cheerleaders who cheered the event (thus earning their name), plus the camera cutting to the 'hot tub' (filled with attractive people) every time play got a little dull.

I originally had a whopping 2 days in New Zealand, but so many travellers have told me that it is the best place in the world that I decided to stay for three weeks and see for myself. True to the hype, it is ridiculously photogenic. It's almost worth taking photos of the ugly bits just to prove they do exist. You have to look hard, but they're there. The country has recently had a nice burst of national pride thanks to the Lord of the Rings trilogy being produced and filmed here (boy, have I heard about it). In a few days I'll head off to see the mountain that played Mount Doom in the films.

For the first time on my journey, I've signed up for a tour group. Unlike tours everywhere else in the world, this one is fortunately not plagued by large, loud Americans with white sneakers, baseball caps and expensive cameras dangling procariously from their necks taking photos and laughing over jokes from bad sitcoms. The main reason for this I think is because they wouldn't fit in the bus. I am no giant, but I have trouble not losing my legs to lack of circulation. Nothing like the luxury buses I'm used to from Argentina, but on the plus side there are no 28-hour journeys either.

Since I haven't been here that long, it's hard to have a real impression of what it's like. So far, it seems modern and clean. There's a general niceness that Blighty doesn't have. Things I like so far... the people wait until the light says they can cross before crossing the road, even if it's completely clear. On weekend nights hundreds of customised cars, from brand new Mercedes to Ford Zephyrs and vintage Rolls Royces, cruise around Queen Street. The local council in Auckland are very supportive of live music: just the other day I wandered into an art gallery only to be confronted by the latest teenage band showing off their talent (nothing on the Fuzz). You can buy baked beans.

I hope I haven't kept you from whatever you were doing for too long. Let me know what it was, and any other news from the home front.

Bye

Ollie