The Two Faces of Boa Island

A brief detour from Arranmore Island to Boa Island, from offshore to inland.  Boa Island is on Lough Erne and no ferry is required to get there: it's connected by bridge to the mainland and, if you weren't paying attention, you might not even know you were on an island.  We made a detour in search of some very special inhabitants.

These are pre-Christian stone figures.  Nobody knows exactly what they represent or why they have two faces or why they appear to be clutching their nether regions like small children in need of a toilet.  Of course there are plenty of theories … but I'm less interested in the theories and more interested in the fact that they're still there, thousands of years later, nestled in the corner of a tiny graveyard on Boa Island.

I Am a Runner Because I Run I am a Runner

For, oh, three or four years now, I've had secret dreams of becoming a runner.  I would see girls running by the sea or in the park and think, 'why can't I be like that - all free and easy and like someone in an ad?'  Every now and then I would go so far as to embark on an ACTUAL run, but it never really took.  I'd run three or four minutes and then need to stop to expire on the footpath. A few fainting fits were almost enough to convince me I would never be a runner.

But, about this time last year, something changed.  It may have been the influence of having a housemate who was a runner (the fabulous Bernie - who when she wasn't running at 6am was doing Bikram and seemed to have the energy of five people as a consequence).  I decided I needed to give running a red hot go - and this is what I did.

I downloaded Couch to 5k.  This was recommended by many people and it works, mostly because it's based on common sense and building up gradually.
I bought new, cool running gear that I felt good in.  (Thank you Lululemon.)
When I got past the first few weeks without incident, I found a running partner.  I discovered that the ideal running partner is someone who has just a bit more stamina than you and so will push you to go a leetle bit further when you're ready to give up.  Also one who'll distract you with celebrity gossip to take your mind off the pain.  (Thank you Máire Áine.)

It's taken a full year and a few false starts but I can now (and I can hardly believe I'm typing this) run 5k comfortably. I had a bit of a Rocky moment last Saturday when I ran 7k (I know!) around the Phoenix Park in Dublin, winding up at the monument to the Duke of Wellington.  I took a photo to record the occasion (and yes, I did run up the steps for full Rocky effect) and realised that the plaque I was photographing depicted Waterloo.  Which was appropriate, given that I'd just conquered my own personal Waterloo.

This isn't a blog about running.  I won't be giving you blow by blow accounts of my ever increasing mileage and my split times.  I have no plans to sign up for a marathon or other painful feat of endurance (personally I think if you're going to push your body to its limits and be racked with pain for hours on end you ought to at least get a baby out of it.)

However, I may from time to time discuss the joys of running in a new place.  For I have discovered that running in a city you're visiting is a great way to feel connected to it; to feel, if only for an hour or so, like an inhabitant and not a tourist.  It's also a great cure for jet lag.

Where's that Life List?
47. Become a runner

Didn’t See This Coming, Did You?

The other day, while out walking the streets of East Melbourne, I sighted a very rare and strange beast.

It was so unexpected that it took me several moments to get my breath back (it whipped past me on a roundabout) and stop laughing.

I told some friends, who were skeptical. Where’s your photographic evidence, they wanted to know.

Photographic evidence? I’ll give you photographic evidence.

So, I set off in pursuit of this mythical beast.

Actually, it wasn’t hard – I found it around the corner from where I live.

What’s this?

Is it …

It is!

The Mythical Garda Van of Australia.

Pushing Buttons

This is a cautionary tale wrapped up in a cautionary reminiscence.

At some point when I was seven or eight, I learned about nuclear weapons. (I think it was probably from watching War Games with my brother. I also learned about modems and Matthew Broderick being cute from that film, so all in all a very educational experience.) I became obsessed with the idea of a man in a bunker somewhere with his hand hovering over a BIG RED BUTTON. One touch of the button and the world would end. This caused me no end of sleepless nights because of my own, personal mania for pressing buttons. I never saw a button I didn’t want to press – so how would the man in charge of the nuclear arsenal be able to resist? I could see it so clearly: one night he just wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation any more and – almost of its own volition – his hand would reach out and … BAM! Nuclear winter.

But if they were recruiting for the nuclear-button-pusher’s job, I would now be in a position to volunteer. Because I am cured.

As advertised on Wednesday morning, I paid a visit to the Musee de la Magie et des Automates. I thought this would be an interesting, whimsical, very Parisian experience. A museum full of automatons – what’s not to like? (Automatons, by the way, are any kind of machine that moves without electricity – from cuckoo clocks to clockwork toys.) The idea is that you move through different rooms showing different types of automata: in front of each one is a button to press to make it go. So I pressed buttons, and pressed buttons, and pressed buttons … and got really bored of pressing buttons. The machines essentially do two things: move up and down or move from side to side. There’s a special sub-genre where things move up and down and from side to side to reveal women’s bottoms.

I suspect part of my issue with the museum is that seeing so many takes away from the novelty: I remember loving the (single) automaton at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, where you put in money and some strange looking creatures flashed their eyes and moved.

So was there any redeeming feature? Well, there was a magic show, which was fun. And the room of optical illusions was pretty cool. Oh, and I liked the zoo machine where you put your hands in two holes and then you feel something furry brushing them and a lion jumps out and roars at you. (All very innocent, I assure you.) However, a combined ticket for the two museums is €12 and I can’t honestly say that it was worth it. (Oh, and they wouldn't let me take photos.) But then, I go to these museums so you don’t have to.

So, the moral of the story is – be careful of over-indulging childhood passions or you may go TOO FAR.

And instead of going to the Musee de la Magie, go the carousel along the street, beside the Hotel de Ville. Carousels are a passion I haven’t killed, and this is a particularly good specimen.

In Hot Water

Since I came back from Zimbabwe, lots of people have asked me about the trip and been surprised that I didn’t have more to say about human rights abuses, corruption and suffering. But I can only write about what I saw. And so mostly I’ve written about my experience of how, in the face of corruption, brutality and privation, people still carve out their own kind of normality. Did you catch that ‘mostly’ there? Because I did have one brush with the kind of story that keeps Zimbabwe in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

On our way back to Harare from the Vumba, Robbie decided that I really couldn’t leave Africa without seeing a baobab tree. He proposed taking a detour via a place called Hot Springs were there are, in fact, hot springs and also lots of baobabs.

Here’s where I put up my hand and say that I really wasn’t very enthusiastic about the hot springs plan. I would like to claim that I had a premonition, but it was more that it was a very hot day and I wasn’t wild at the idea of broiling myself like a lobster. But Robbie was very convincing, so off we went.

Between Mutare and Hot Springs we went through perhaps ten sets of road blocks, though neither of us gave this much thought: we’d passed lots of road blocks on our trip. The police were friendly, only stopping us to ask for water. We paid more attention to trying to work out the signs being made by locals on the side of the road: they joined their fingers to make a kite shape. Looking for money? Food? A new political symbol?

We got to the Hot Springs Resort where there was fencing around the perimeter and a sign up saying ‘closed for Ren Ovations’. A security guard asked if he could help us and Robbie explained that we had been hoping to go to the hot baths. And here’s where the story gets very strange. This super friendly and super confiding guard explained that the resort was now a diamond mine: ‘very good diamonds, very big, lots of miners from South Africa, Russia.’ He proposed hitching a life with us down to the office where he would check if it was okay for us to use the baths. (Please imagine just how keen I was to go ahead with the bathing plan at this point.)

But it seemed that there was no way out. The security guard went into the office and came back to say that there was no problem, we could use the baths for $3 apiece, and pointed us to the changing rooms. The ladies’ was bad enough – peeling paint, flooding toilets – but Robbie came out of the men’s saying it was being used as the miners’ changing room and smelled like a latrine. I caught a waft as I walked past – he wasn’t exaggerating.

The two cold pools were green with algae, but the hot pool was moderately clean. We got in, carefully, and spent no more than five minutes in the water. Got changed again lightning fast and then – wait for it – took some photos.

Meanwhile a few bearded miners wandered past. We were waved off by the security guards and headed on our way, feeling that we’d had a lucky escape.

How lucky? Well, we got back to Harare and discovered that Hot Springs is part of the Marange diamond fields, seized by the government in 2006. Some miners were soldiers, others locals, forced to work there. Illegal miners moved in (or legal miners smuggling out diamonds in lieu of salaries, which none of them were paid) until, inevitably, there was a crackdown last October. Helicopter gunships came in and opened fire. Depending on the source you read, anything from 50 to 150 people were killed.

The people we saw making ‘kite’ symbols were offering to sell us diamonds. I doubt they were legal. I imagine they count as blood diamonds.

And the truly surreal part is that Robbie and I wandered in, had our bath, took photos and wandered out again.

For more on the Marange diamond fields and Zimbabwe’s blood diamonds, see:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8448335.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8007406.stm

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article5299061.ece

Tony's Tea Shoppe

First of all, a big thank you to Robbie for getting the photos to me on cue. The story of Tony’s Tea Shoppe would certainly not be complete without photographic evidence – and when we went, the battery on my camera had just died.

Tony’s Tea Shoppe is what they call an institution. People I met in Harare, who had never even been to the Vumba, asked me if I’d been to Tony’s. It’s not hard to see why. Tony’s is an extremely stylish and extremely expensive establishment that wouldn’t be out of place in London. In the middle of the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, it certainly sticks out.

Tony himself reminded me of a Siamese cat. (This is a compliment – I like Siamese cats.) He has a triangular brown face and very sharp blue eyes. He sits at a table by a window where he can see people coming and going as he works on a crossword puzzle. Robbie and I were put through our conversational paces for about ten minutes before, with a queenly nod, we were directed to a table.

The tea shoppe is in the upper level of a house that blends modern and traditional African architecture: a thatched, peaked roof, plastered wooden frame, polished wooden floors. Inside the theme is Africa-meets-Chinoiserie, with beautifully upholstered chairs and menu (which Tony made himself).

The menu includes many delicious cakes, many kinds of coffee, tea, hot chocolate and several kinds of booze with which to lace your coffee, tea, hot chocolate or cake. Part of the experience is having Tony declaim the kinds of cake he has - I will never forget hearing him roll the phrase 'creme chantilly'. We ordered ginger lemonade to start, then Robbie had orange and coconut cake with chocolate sauce,

while I had Viennese coffee cake with a meringue and almond topping. Oh, and tea.

Please note the expression on my face, which, then and now, I can only describe as lustful:

And the cakes didn’t disappoint. The coffee cake was moist (helped along by a generous soaking of brandy – no I didn’t order extra, it came like this) and though I (and it) didn’t really needed the cream and meringue topping I managed to choke it down … in about three minutes. The Zimbabwean Tanganda tea, served in a silver pot with bone china cups, was perfect.

And Tony himself was, if you’ll forgive the terrible cliché, the icing on the cake.

Leap of Faith

When we last left our intrepid heroine, she was sitting looking out at the rain. (Sometimes Eithne refers to herself in the third person.) The rain eventually stopped, and after Robbie had pulled up at least 100 non-indigenous pine trees that were despoiling the landscape, we headed to the Gairezi River and ADVENTURE.

The road to and from Gairezi is worthy of a whole post in its own right and, indeed, you will be getting one, but I decided to skip on a bit to the story of what happened when we got to the river.

Robbie remembered a Jumping Rock from his youth whence he used to hurl himself into the river. After scouring the bush for a bit, he concluded that he had found the Jumping Rock in question. It was sufficiently high that I assumed he wasn’t planning to repeat the exploits of his younger days. I was wrong. I waited below (Robbie kindly told me where the car keys were, just in case), camera at the ready.

First Robbie’s head poked out of the trees.

Then he leaped …

Down,

And down,

And splash!

I’m glad to report that he reappeared, so I didn’t need to go back to Harare and tell Scot and Toni that I had lost their son in the Gairezi.

Of course, when Robbie did reappear, he was full of the joys of leaping from the Jumping Rock. ‘It’s awfully liberating, Sue,’ he declared. (Robbie calls me Sue – it’s a long story.) ‘I think you should do it.’

Lord love a duck. I’m really bad at saying no when someone tells me I should do something. Which is why I found myself clambering up the slope, hanging on to the scrub and peering over the edge. There were a few false starts and I very seriously considered turning round but … well, this whole year is about taking leaps of faith. How could I not do this?

So...

And

And

And

And

And, having inhaled quite a lot of river but with my contact lenses mercifully still in place,

I did it twice.

Cramaziness

I’m back! Oh blog, oh telephonic communication, oh world, how I have missed you. (In the interests of full disclosure: communication with the outside world wasn’t impossible from Zim, but it was challenging, owing to cell phone not working, landline not working for international calls and internet being very temperamental.)

I have so many stories, I’m not sure where to begin. But I was just watching The Sound of Music (Christmas present from Robbie) so will take Julie Andrews’ advice: let’s start at the very beginning.

The very beginning was meeting my friend Simon at Oxford and hearing about this strange place called ‘Zimbabwe’. (I promise you I hadn’t more than the vaguest notion that it was one of those African-y places.) Six years later, Si called me to suggest his friend Robbie Honey as a potential flatmate in London (I wasn’t very enthusiastic at the idea – just goes to show). After six years of living together, I suggested to Robbie that this year of adventure might be ‘the’ year for me finally to visit Zim.

All of this led to my crossing the Limpopo River on the 22nd December and getting my first glimpse of Zimbabwe from the window of the plane – and the shock of seeing lots of green below me. It hadn’t registered that I would be there in the rainy season (although we were lucky with the weather and it didn't rain that much) and hadn’t imagined fields and forests of green. The thatched huts with smoke blowing out of them were a clear sign that I was in a WHOLE different kind of Africa from Cape Town.

We touched down on time in Harare Airport – where, if you squint, you can see the tumbleweeds rolling through. There are weeds growing on the runway and apart from our plane and three or four Air Zimbabwe planes, it was deserted. I was tickled to see that the main control tower looks exactly like a giant Dalek. This may explain a few things about the country. (Incidentally, I have no photographs of the airport or any government buildings – I was advised not to take any.)

There was no one to show us where to go or what to do, but I followed the crowd and after a few false starts figured out the immigration procedure: fill in a form, stand in one queue to pay for a visa, stand in another queue to have your passport stamped. Don't stand at a polite distance from the person in front, or you will be overtaken. I made the mistake of putting my true profession on the form. Well, not the mistake, surely (when in doubt, tell the truth), but obviously ‘museum interpreter’ seemed like a made up job to the officials because I got quizzed about my true intentions: ‘are you planning to work in Zimbabwe?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are you planning to work while you’re here?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is this your first time here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you here for work or holiday?’ Eventually, they either decided I really wasn’t a journalist, or they got bored, because they let me through and I emerged (with all my luggage) just as Robbie arrived to collect me.

Not knowing what to expect, I lurched from surprise to surprise: in places, surprised because things worked (escalators, luggage carousel), in others, surprised because things didn’t (streetlights, traffic lights, water mains). My impression of the streets we drove through in Harare’s suburbs was that they looked like the jungle was working busily to reclaim them: the potholes have potholes in them, the verges are mostly overgrown, streetnames are painted on people’s garden walls because the signs have been taken down, what signs there are old and rusty. Imagine if there’d been no maintenance of roads or utilities for 10 years in, oh, Ballsbridge or Wandsworth or some other nice suburb with nice houses. I began to understand why Zimbabwean friends talked about the Land That Time Forgot (more on this later: I got sucked into a time warp last week – I have pictures to prove it).

My home for two weeks was pink, 1950s style with lots of palm trees, guinea fowl running around the gardens and beautiful flowers and birds. More importantly, with lovely people. The Honeys welcomed this stray Irish traveller into their home for Christmas and treated me like part of the family.

During those two weeks I met some of the friendliest, most hospitable people I’ve ever encountered. I saw some of the most beautiful landscape I’ve ever seen. I saw people living in huts. I stayed in pure-1960s style accommodation. I stumbled across a diamond mine. I saw prehistoric rock art – and almost got struck by lightning in the process.

I coined the word ‘cramaziness’ to describe Zim to my family: it is the most surreal, beautiful, mixed-up, crazy and amazing place I have ever been.

This, then, is the prologue for my posts over the next few weeks. Suspend your disbelief, abandon all prejudice, leave expectations aside. My trip to Zimbabwe was like reading a story and then discovering that the story is completely true – and I was in the middle of it.

(The flame lily is the national flower of Zimbabwe.)

(There are a lot of things in parentheses in this post. (I seem to be in a very aside-y mood.))

Byron’s Boot, Chopin’s Piano … Mandela’s Wheelbarrow?

A week and a half ago (the day I almost missed posting at all), I was invited to give a talk about my exhibition work at the Mayibuye Archives, based at the University of the Western Cape. Talking about my work has never been a problem for me … and so it proved on this occasion. I was prepared to run through some slides and talk for about half an hour, but the session went on for over two hours. Let me hasten to add that it wasn’t just me talking – there were lots of questions from the people there and we had a very interesting discussion about museology, design, museum philosophy and museums in South Africa.

Afterwards, we walked around the archive, which has all sorts of interesting collections connected to the apartheid resistance movement and, in particular, to Robben Island. Here’s the Robben Island football team strip:

And the box for Archbishop Tutu’s papers (got to love the Arch Tutu scrawl!):

‘But what does this have to do with Byron or Chopin?’ you cry. Well, here’s my guilty little secret. I have a mania for touching things in museums. And because of my job, I am one of the lucky few who actually gets to touch things in museums. So these hands typing on my MacBook have also been privileged to touch, among other things, the special boot Byron had to support his twisted leg and the piano on which Chopin composed many of his early works.

I’ve added to this special and esoteric list with a close encounter at Mayibuye with a wheelbarrow which may (or may not) have been used by Mandela on Robben Island:

Perhaps I should start charging people to touch my hands, she said thoughtfully.

***

Tomorrow I am going to Robben Island, so will have photos of that expedition in a couple of days.

Road Tri- oh.

Beate, my lovely German housemate, really wanted to go out to Cape Point before she left. (Cape Point is neither the most southerly part of Africa nor the place where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet, but it makes a very good living on the back of tourist assumptions that these two facts are true. It is beautiful though.) She asked me if I was interested in hiring a car to go.

‘We don’t need no steenking hire car,’ said Eithne. ‘I’ll just ask James if I can borrow the uno.’

James’s little green fiat uno is full of personality and I was prepared to defend it against any doubters … until this weekend.

Beate and I picked up two other passengers for our outing and full of glee we headed south on the M3. Norwegian Anne provided a running commentary on the sights we passed and the fiat valiantly chugged along, despite the heat of the day and the fullness of the car.

When we got to the seaside we decided that the only obvious thing to do was stop for ice creams. Ice creams bought, we got back in the car and I pulled away from the car park. Next stop: Cape Point. At least that was the plan.

A few metres down the road, the engine cut out. I restarted the car. It cut out again. We pushed the car into a car park and called James, who suggested waiting for 10 minutes, then trying to start again.

We walked over to the bathing huts,

and watched the pretty people splashing in the waves.

Then we went to stick our toes in the water.

I turned back just before a giant wave broke – and swept Portia off her feet. One moment she was standing there, next moment she was gone. Luckily she was ok, but she was soaked. Pretty dramatic for someone who’d never been to the sea before.

Back to the car, having decided we’d used up all our bad luck and that the car was bound to start. Except it didn’t, even with the best efforts of a crowd of male volunteers, each convinced they knew the best way to start the car again.

Spoke to James again, he called the mechanic and arranged for the uno to be collected. The four of us girls found solace in this café - this signboard says it all, really.

Poor uno got taken away by the tow truck. When I told the mechanic that James would call the next day he said (tellingly) ‘oh, this is James’s car.’ What, I wondered, had James not been telling me.

We went home to Woodstock by train (and how funny is it that we broke down in St James?)

So Beate never did get to Cape Point and has returned to Berlin with a healthy skepticism of Irish girls who assure her, 'no it's fine, honestly - good as new.'

Meanwhile, I am going to put ‘learn to jump start a car’ on my New Years’ Resolutions list.