Antwerp - London: The final leg

I woke up with a start, the cold light of dawn searing into my retinas. I stretched my legs, rubbed my eyes and uttered the first of several primeval yawns.

It was hardly surprising: the bus clock read 5.40am.

Cursing the hour I looked out the bus window.

Pubs. A post office. Pigeons.


Hmmm that’s odd – looks vaguely familiar…doesn’t look like Belgium….hadn’t I been here before? Where was I?

This was soon answered – shop signs seeming to suggest we were in some kind of place by the name of Camberwell. Camberwell…hmmm…it was starting to come back to me.

Six hours earlier, in an Antwerp backstreet we’d boarded this bus, heading for London. It seemed a remarkably short period of time to cross three countries, travelling across Flanders before dropping down into France, catching a ferry from Calais across the Straits of Dover, back to England.

We’d piled into the bus, searching out seats amongst the passengers already on board. They’d started back in Amsterdam and many were sprawled about like lifeless corpses.

A couple of students with thick Northern accents occupied the entire back seat, an large Somali family took up the middle and furtive-looking chaps in leather jackets stared miserably at us from the front.

I picked a seat at the back, next to a monosyllabic, pale-faced young Londoner. He grunted at me and went back to sleep, his bowed head edging towards my shoulder.

He looked spaced out and distant: had he indulged a little too much back in Amsterdam?

Just in case we were entertaining the notion of sleeping the dozy Dutch driver had chosen to share his choice of Belgium radio with his passengers.

‘Fame, I’m going to liiiive forever…’

Lara chose to try and overcome this by nullifying all her senses - a well-practiced and often-successful technique which involved blocking her ears and eyes with earplugs and eyemask before topping it off with a good thick hood.

She sat there, trying to block out the world around her. It only needed an orange boiler suit and she might have found herself heading out to Guantanamo Bay.

Somehow we dozed and two hours later found ourselves waking up in France. Never have I been gladder to enter the port of Calais.

We whisked through French immigration before entering a little office entitled UK Border Agency – the first of many new changes back home? – and being greeted by possibly the cheeriest bunch of immigration officials all trip.

Perhaps the chubby English blokes standing about were bored at this ungodly hour but we found them polite, friendly and genuinely interested in our trip. All hail the new border bobbies.

We joined the queue at the terminal and found ourselves amongst hundreds of our fellow countrymen. Yellow British car number plates with their bold, simple lettering, a variety of strong British regional accents, orderly queuing.

It was all vaguely familiar and each little reminder, each little rediscovery came so quickly after each other that it was almost overwhelming. We were going home. It was sinking in now.

We boarded the P&O Pride of Calais and more déjà vu hit us – this was one of the cross channel ferries we saw from the deck of the Singapore a couple of days ago as we headed up to Antwerp.

We wandered sleepily past shops, row upon row of familiar British brands on the shelves, the smooth southern tones of the Captain washing over us in the background.

‘Abroad’ was disappearing; we were leaving the foreign, the different behind. Finally, after ten months of being bumbling foreigners in distant lands we would be back amongst our own.

Tired and confused, my head spinning with it all, I lay back against a seat and fell straight asleep.

An hour later we awoke, just in time to see the white cliffs of Dover. Or at least the base of them in the dark, the clock reading 4am.

England. We were back.

Within half an hour we were rolling through the Kent countryside, green road signs and red phone boxes flashing past in the bus’s headlights.

Sleep called once more and stuck with me right through until Camberwell.

Pubs. A post office. Pigeons. We were back in London.

There it was out there in all its glory – Oval tube station, the cricket ground and the Alec Stewart Gate, Vauxhall and the railway arches, the Thames and the Houses of Parliament.

The city looked smart, moneyed, grand. I felt emotional, until that was I found myself shivering on the cold, empty streets of Victoria.

London, where it all started all those months ago, and now where it all finishes.

The circle is complete.







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Tikal and Wantage: Lost civilisations

Tikal. The fabled Maya ruins of a lost city, buried deep in the jungle, just waiting to be explored.


Such a risky adventure out into the unknown required stolid, dependable companions and who better, as the locals keep reminding us, to accompany me than someone called Lara.

And for good measure we recruited a third, an idiosyncratic potter from North Wales called Rik, a former climatologist and devoted ‘raw fooder’.

I was anticipating great things. We’d visited jungles before on this trip, discovering their hidden splendours both natural (Khao Yai national park, Thailand) and manmade (the temples of Angkor, Cambodia.

Tikal however, offers both, combining to make it surely one of the most enticing destinations on the planet.

Once a huge Mayan city, Tikal was a highly complex society, rivalling and, in some cases, outstripping its European contemporaries, both in size and sophistication.

Its inhabitants made impressive advances in a whole range of fields, including science, mathematics and - perhaps most importantly to the Maya - astronomy.

In its own environs, Tikal was a was a regional superpower; more often than not gaining the upper hand in the many regional wars fought between cities vying for power, managing to dominate the Peten region for 500 years.

However, it still shared with them a common fate when, around 900 AD, like the rest of the entire Maya civilisation Tikal suddenly and mysteriously collapsed.

For reasons unknown its inhabitants abruptly upped and left. Gone. The whole city abandoned and left for the jungle to reclaim.

Soon the great temples and mighty plazas become overgrown, and the whole city began to disappear under a tide of the organic matter from which it had once sprang.

Today the ruins can be visited, spread over an enormous site where the visitor can turn Indiana Jones or Lara Croft, seeking out ruins where falling walls are covered in moss and crumpled masonry sprouts trees.

We had a go ourselves, attempting to decipher glyphs and stelae etched with fearsome-looking squat fellows decked out in feathered headresses, and scaling the great temples, mighty pyramids of limestone which rise up to poke their gnarled heads up through the forest canopy.

Ascending Temple V I discovered a new-found fear of heights, my knees a-knocking, my stomach churning.

As I gripped the rails of the near-vertical wooden staircase I tried not to think about the several tourists who have tumbled to their deaths over the years; as I inched along the narrow ledges at the top I marvelled at quite how the Maya could have climbed up the single, sheer flight of steps, which lay crumbling away below us.

Back down on the ground fear soon turned to wonder as we entered the Acropolis; an involuntary ’wow’ spilling from my lips as I gazed upon the Grand Plaza.

Ahead lay Temple I, resting place of the splendidly-titled King Moon Double Comb AKA Lord Chocolate.

It was the only temple to have been fully clawed back from the jungle, so much of this huge site remains to be discovered, with wonders both manmade and natural.

In the fragile balance between the two worlds, since the fall of the city the natural world has been back in the ascendancy and all around you cannot fail to be amazed.

The ruins themselves sit in the middle of a national park, an oasis of biodiversity, with hundreds of species of trees, plants, birds and animals.

The trees were extraordinary, coming in all shapes and sizes, from delicate little palms to massive soaring monsters.

Strange flossy-like fronds hung off slender trucks, whilst neighbouring titans stretched out their enormous buttress roots across the jungle floor like some kind of monstrous arboreal callisthenics.

Some of them, like the Ceiba tree, rivalled the very temples in both scale and splendour. This tree was revered by the ancient Maya as the ‘holy tree of life’; growing up to 70 metres in height, with a trunk up to two metres thick I could see how they considered it to be ‘the axle of the world’.

Monkeys danced through the treetops, hightailing it through the branches, Agile spider monkeys leapt from tree to tree, bellicose howler monkeys hollered testily at a group of pastel-suited French tourists below.

We gave the latter a wide berth, the lessons learned from an encounter with a troupe of howlers the day before. That group, infuriated at our encroachment into their territory, subjected to a dual assault of terrifying cacophony and aerial bombardment, defecating upon us and going - quite literally - ‘apeshit.’

Other creatures awaited us: coatimundi, strange long-nosed creatures with prehensile tails investigating the contents of rubbish bins; tubby coatis, patrolling the small clearings; and even the odd crocodile, poking its sharp snout out of a pond.

Away from the human visitors, well off the jungle paths, dwelt a rich range of other exotic creatures: jaguars, armadillos, tapirs and snakes.

In the dawn light the forest canopy vibrated to the song of a thousand bird calls, and as the day entered we spotted some of these mysterious menagerie.

High up hawks and eagles patrolled the blue sky and vultures wheeled around on the lookout for carrion. Below them keel-billed toucans called and parakeets screeched as they passed over the forest canopy.

Beneath the treetops lineated woodpeckers hammered out a steady drum while, lower down, tiny hummingbirds flitted incessantly from flower to flower.

Down on the jungle floor, a great currasow scurried out of the bushes behind us while up ahead a gaggle of oscillated turkeys strutted along, scurrying to the edges as we passed through them on the narrow path.

Great armies of leafcutter ants strode across the forest floor, highly-organised creatures who leave a clearly defined path in their wake, a miniature M40 corridor along which they transport freshly-cut leaves.

It was extraordinary to watch these dogged little insects, overcoming all manner of hazards and determinedly shouldering their load, many times their own size, all the way back to base.

Other insects proved less enamouring, tarantulas for example, to which I came rather too close to for comfort.

In the dim dawn light I left the john, sauntering across a stretch of ground, blithely whistling ‘Sheila take a bow’, completing oblivious to the enormous hairy arachnid which I’d come within an inch of stepping on.

The beast must have been at least the size of my hand and surely capable of devouring it.

With such creatures in abundance it hard to concentrate on the manmade wonders. That was of course, until we came across the Tower IV. Bland name, incredible place.

From 64 metres up, on top of this crumbling edifice we looked out across the forest canopy, stretching as far as the eye can see. A spellbinding sight.

It must have been hundreds of miles, our perch a mere pinprick in an ocean of green. The only sign of human existence was a few crumbling towers in the near distance, knocking on for 2000 years old.

The remains of a lost civilisation, mankind trumped by nature.

It was a moment when you realise the insignificance of man in the face of the unstoppable power of the natural world.

It was hard not to draw parallels between the lost world of the ancient Maya and our own. Population crisis, competition over scant resources, climate change.

Rik proved particularly knowledgeable on the latter. He pulled out another enormous carrot and, as he gnawed on it, he pointed out that all mankind was doing was merely speeding up the process, the planet all set, as before, for a major change in climate in a few thousand years.

Adroit scientists and astronomers the Maya believed the earth ‘lived’ in cycles of some 5,128 years. Theirs, and ours is the third ‘earth’, a world that is due to end in 2012 ( just in time for the London Olympics).

Baloney or not it set me thinking about the future. My mind turned to home and I imagined some future tourist seeking out the ruins of our lost civilisation, pulling the creepers back from the remains of the Weatherspoons down our road, stubbing their toe on the collapsed lintel of Finsbury Park tube station.

Wantage in a deep freeze (would it make any difference?); the dreaming spires of Oxford under water. The world come full circle.

2012's not long off: better get that stadium finished sharpish.

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The Olympics

In the north of Beijing, on a large patch of newly-developed land, carved out between the skyscrapers and five-lane highways, large crowds are gathering.

Some of them stop to crane their necks to the sky and admire the wheeling kites above. Flown by old fellows in peaked caps, brandishing acres of string, the colourful and crazy designs proudly claim their patch of blue sky - an ancient and highly popular Chinese pastime.

Back down on the ground though, most people have come to witness the scene of more recently-introduced sporting endeavours - the Olympic Games.

In this year, 2008, no visit to Beijing is complete without a trip to see the Olympic stadium.
It’s China’s National Day tomorrow, a big public holiday, and it seems that every citizen of Beijing is on the subway heading out there to gawp at the ‘bird’s nest’, as the stadium has been unofficially-officially titled.

It’s a fine sight, like a big bowl with holes in it. Another wonder for Beijingers to add to their impressive portfolio: the forbidden city; the Great Wall; the Temple of Heaven.

Not that we got a chance to inspect the stadium at close quarters - it is so popular you need a ticket to even get within 500 metres of it, let alone inside.

And this is over a month after the Games have finished.

We felt vindicated then in the decision we made when planning our trip, to avoid Beijing during the Games - many times we have been told of the massive crowds, exorbitant price rises and constricting security measures.

It was still interesting, though, to visit this Olympic city after the show has ended. In the immediate aftermath we were able to witness the changes that hosting this huge sporting extravaganza has brought to the host city.

Being adopted Londoners, the city due to host the next Games, this was of particular interest to us, giving us a flavour perhaps of what London can expect in four years time.

When London Mayor Boris Johnson (how odd does that still sound?) attended the closing ceremony in Beijing, Jerusalem, Greensleeves and the shipping forecast booming out in the background, to introduce the next host city, what must he have thought of the challenge Beijing has laid down?

Surely he’d have been impressed by the cycling facilities, for Beijing still is very much a city of cyclists.

And undoubtedly he’d have enjoyed the clean air, thanks to the strict curbs on vehicle emissions introduced for the duration of the games. Where were the massive clouds of smog that the British media had told us about?

Then there’s the public transport, where a ride on the fast, efficient and sparkling underground system sets you back about 18p, or on the modern, multi-video-screen buses, relieving you of all of 9p.

But perhaps he’d have been perturbed by the security and its associated costs. Every trip on the metro here necessitates an x-ray check of your baggage. Soldiers and security guards seem to stand on every corner.

Given that he doesn’t have the resources of the People’s Liberation Army will Mayor Boris be shoring up his defences by forming a new Dad’s Army?

I have to admit I have my doubts about ‘London 2012’ ™. But, whether you think flinging ten billion at laying on an exclusive party for a load of lycra-clad athletes and the MDs of the world’s largest corporations whilst much-need projects to benefit ordinary citizens go unfunded is a good idea or not, it’s happening.

Londoners are lumbered with the Olympics and, in the time-honoured British fashion it gives us something to grumble about other than the weather.

So bring on London 2012. As long as it’s got kite flying.
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