Back to school

“How did you get by without speaking the language?”. People frequently asked us this as we’ve travelled around the world.


It has certainly been challenge to navigate our way through many strange and often impenetrable languages; our eyes bewildered by strange square Cyrillic lettering, beautiful abstract kanji and psychedelic, swirly Thai, our ears twisted by harsh, gutteral Mandarin, soft, whispered Japanese and the long drawl of the American South West.

Yet somehow we managed. Though eating out in a Chinese restaurant often felt like Russian roulette, and coaxing answers in English out of a shy Japanese guesthouse owner, anxious not to loose face by ‘embarrassing themselves’ was like trying to avoid wearing slippers, we managed.

Once we left Asia behind and reached the shores of the Americas I thought it would get easier. It didn’t.

Indeed, for me at least, it was when we reached the new linguistic realm of Latin America that the language barrier, and the associated frustrations of not speaking or understanding the local language, has been at its greatest.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the language more than anywhere else that we’d been, rather it was that, for the first time, I was far behind, in linguistic terms, my fair travelling companion.

With a year in Ecuador under her belt, Lara speaks good Spanish, or rather Latin American. She can hold a conversation, decipher a bus timetable, read a menu.

I, on the other hand cannot. Rather I mumble away in dreadful Spanglish, gleaned from films, television and a fortnight’s glance at my little Spanish phrasebook during our trip across the Pacific.

I couldn’t stand it. I was reduced to the role of a mute bystander on the edge of every conversation, grinning sheepishly in this most machismo of worlds as Lara would happily rabbit on with waiters and bus drivers, hostel owners and even friends.

I’m sure she didn’t appreciate it either, having to shoulder the burden of full-time spokesperson, constantly having to translate for me.

After a month of this, verbally stumbling across Mexico I’d had enough. I decided was time to take things into my own hands. I had to take the plunge into a pool of new vocab, pronouns and verbs.


It was time to go back to school.

Antigua, the grand old former capital of colonial-era Guatemala, is the perfect place to learn Spanish.

It’s a beautiful location, where old cobbled streets are lined with low houses painted sky blue, peach and mustard yellow, their hues faded by the scorching sunshine.

There’s a grand old square bordered by a ruined old Cathedral (a victim of the many earthquakes that have struck the city), decaying old monasteries, and crumbling old churches dedicated to a whole host of saints.

Above the city loomed three massive volcanoes, brooding and very much active, which we could walk up, padding through paths of volcanic dust and gingerly stepping across the sharp fields of recently solidified lava.

Volcanoes and ruins aside the town also offers a huge range of language schools where, for a rock bottom price, gringos can cram in a week or two’s intensive Spanish lessons.

Many choose to do this before pressing further south, heading for other Latin American countries where they can put their newly-learned lingo to use, from San Salvador to Santiago.

We’re both studying at one of these language schools. Lara is ‘just brushing up on’ the pretorect and other difficult and impressive-sounding advanced things; I’m just hoping I can order a bus ticket by the end of the week.

I reckon I stand a fighting chance. After all, we couldn’t be studying in an environment more conducive to learning.

Our school is set in a pleasant courtyard, around which pupils and teachers sit in the open air.

It’s fresh and invigorating, albeit at this this altitude we face the stark choice of either shivering in the shade or sweltering in the sun.

Lessons are one-on-one teaching, four hours a day, which makes for intensive but highly productive learning.

Despite this the atmosphere remains highly relaxed and the courtyard echoes to peals of laughter amongst the strangled words.

Learning a new language can be very rewarding and it’s made all the more enjoyable when you get to mix with so many people, old and young, from across the world, all here to learn themselves and somehow, in the process find out about other countries and cultures.

And alongside the international pleasantries there’s some serious business to be done. I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck in, taking a nosedive straight into a new language.

My teacher is a lovely chap called Raphael, a charming retired farmer with a gentle manner and an infectious laugh. He’s no Mr Bronson, Grange Hill’s tyrannical French teacher, that's for sure. Rather he’s an immensely laid-back fellow, encouraging and - most crucially for me - patient.

On the first day we sat down to work and he spread out his teaching materials, tattered old books, held together with yellowing sellotape.

Straight away he was off, gabbling away in Spanish and scribbling indecipherable words on scraps of paper.

I was bemused at first and, as an absolute beginner, terribly lost, clumsy and awkward like a baby bird.

It was a shock to be back at school. After ten years lying somewhat dormant my part of the brain which is meant to absorb and learn things like new languages is rather dusty and unused. It took quite some effort to shake it back to life and coax it into absorbing a rather daunting-looking foreign language.

It was also intense; and after four hours of hard study I’m left reeling, my brain frying, my memory overloaded with verbs and definite articles.

I’m confused by conjugations and assaulted with adjectives, irked by infinitives and perplexed by pronouns.

Then there’s the pronounciation - all that seems to come out of my cakehole is a bizarre form of mangled Spanglish.

I have to relearn how to speak. I’m trying desperately to reprogramme my Anglo-Saxon genes so that I can replace my long English vowels and sharp BBC pronunciation with the ability to speak in one long, fast rolling sentences and to roll my ‘r’s like a rattling motorbike exhaust.

Raphael gave me a couple of tonguetwisters to get this process going - fiendishly difficult ones that reduced me to slathering, jibbering fool.

Try this one for instance:

Rapido corren los carros cargados de ferrocarril

See?

At first it seemed hopeless. How on earth, I thought, I am going to pick this up in five days? Is it really worth putting myself through this linguistic pain?

Lara can speak the lingo, and besides is it really worth it in a country where a sizeable proportion of people don’t even speak Spanish (the various indigenous peoples, descendents of the Maya, speaking 28 different languages and dialects of their own)? Surely I should be delving into the mysteries of K’iche, Kaqchikel or Mam.

Gradually things improved. A surprising amount of the words were familiar (thanks to everything from the Roman conquest of Britain to the films of Quentin Tarantino) and besides this was conversational Spanish I was after, not Don Quixote.

Now we jibber jabber along quite happily. It helped that, like many Guatemalans, Raphael speaks far slower and clearer then a Spaniard.

He’s a great one for gossip and greatly enjoys the tales I have to tale him of our homestay in a crumbling old casa in one of the nearby streets. It’s owned by an old lady with small darting eyes which nervously follow you round the room.

Raphael grinned when he recognised her name, and laughed out loud when I recounted to him our experiences of her food, or rather the extra ingredients she unwittingly added to each meal.

We seemed to take it in turns to be served a bug of some sort: spiders in our orange juice, flies on our pasta, even a couple of maggots in a chicken fillet (or was it fish?), our hostess provided them all.

Lara and I bravely ploughed on through the courses, determined to stay the course. Our fellow housemate, a game young Aussie fellow, did his best but, after numerous occasions it got too much - our hostess simply couldn’t understand why he eschewed her sena and started to eat out.

Back at school, as we sit under the avocado tree, learning verb endings, a large boom rolled out across the town.

Everyone looked up to see smoke rising from one of the 3000m beasties. A common occurrence, apparently, and one that doesn't seem to concern the locals at all.

It was enough to distract me though and my mind started wandering away from verb stems and pondering the fate of Pompeii.

Maybe I needed Mr Bronson after all.

You boy! Fewins! Pay attention in class!



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Move any mountain

Mount Usu’s four foot fountain of efficacy of each source is expected to have a soft Leave baking soda fountain is the source of the efficacy neuralgia muscle pain, joint pain, motor paralysis to fatigue recovery has been goodneuralgia muscle pain, joint pain motor paralysis to fatigue recovery has been good and our YK proud of the valuable real hot springs, of course, 100% multiplied sink heating source, and any injection is not See the analysis at dressing room as detail

I pondered the meaning of these words as I soaked in the steamy, murky depths of our Youth Hostel’s onsen.

Baking soda aside, they certainly seemed to make some kind of sense: fresh from WWOOFing at Takano Farm the healing waters soothed my aching limbs.

Furthermore, I could well understand the locals pride in their extraordinary surroundings, after all not many people can boast of having 100% naturally heated water, free and, quite literally, available on tap.

However, what seemed less certain to me was their nonchalant attitude towards the heating system which bestowed them with this miraculous aqua.

You see, Toya Ko sits on an enormous puddle of liquid hot magma.

There’s nothing particularly unusual here - after all the entire planet’s crust floats on top of the piping hot liquid core - but, unlike in somewhere nice and safe like say, Abingdon or Wantage, in Toya Ko this magma is somewhat closer to the surface.

The town can thank its geological location for this, positioned as it is on a fault line, where the Pacific and American tectonic plates meet, allowing the magma to rise up.

This is all too evident in the enormous volcanoes poking up across the landscape. Toya Ko itself lives in the shadow of a particularly energetic beast, Mount Usu, one of the most active in the whole of this volcanic nation.

Mount Usu has awoken several times and with catastrophic consequences, most recently in 2000.

Living with the constant threat of being showered with molten hot rocks and shaken by earthquakes, was the volcanic nature of their environment a blessing or a curse to Toya Ko’s residents?

The ones we talked to didn’t seem too concerned. One chap, keen to practice his English, had lived here for 40 years and witnessed both the 2000 eruption and the one preceeding it, in 1977. Did he live in fear? He just shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

Bravado or not, if it wasn’t for the hot springs this place wouldn’t be home to the numerous massive hotels blighting the lakefront, their guests wandering the streets in ill-fitting kimonos in between their hot dips.

And without the smoking volcanoes the roads would be empty of the fleets of luxury tourist buses ploughing the highway up to the cable car station and views over the brooding craters.

However, this natural phenomena has its flip-side. The threat of a apocalyptic natural disaster can be a big turn-off for many a potential house buyer. Unlike in Highgate High Street, estate agents in Toya Ko seemed rather thin on the ground.

And even if one were able to forget the showers of flying pumice, rivers of molten lava, cascades of hot mud and clouds of ash the evidence of previous disasters lies all around.

After visiting the new volcano visitor centre, home to ash-coated vehicles, buckled railway tracks and lots of mind-boggling information about ‘pyroclastic flows’ and ‘lava domes’, one can step outside and see for oneself the devastation a volcano is capable of.

The appropriately-named ‘Konpira Crater - Remnants of the disaster walking trail’ features an abandoned part of the town, where buildings devastated in the 2000 eruption have been left in the state they were found in.

A new crater was created in Mount Konpira and from there hot water turned into a river of hot mud, gushing down the hillside and into the hot springs district.

An apartment block stands between dead trees, its first floor buried, its roof pockmarked by falling rocks .

A former bathhouse stands abandoned, its doors caved in, windows smashed, furniture poking up out of the piles of mud which built up in the rooms inside.

Nearby, a large steel bridge lies at a bizarre angle, its girders poking up, streetlamps twisted against the ground underneath; ripped away from the highway and swept along on a river of mud to its final resting place.

A little further up the hillside the highway which once linked the town with the outside world is kinked and twisted, its tarmac rising up at grotesque angles before running into the grass and ending abruptly, a highway to nowhere.

Even closer to home for us, rising behind our hostel, Mount Showa Shinzan broods menacingly, its summit seared of vegetation, steam pouring out of vents.

This ‘parasite volcano’ only appeared in 1943, growing up out of a corn field, sometimes at a rate of up to 1.5 metres a day.

Thanks to the efforts of the local postmaster, a Mr Masao Mimatsu, this wonder of nature was recorded in great detail, the first time such an event had ever been recorded .

The enterprising Mr Mimatsu also bought the land on which the volcano appeared, thereby preserving the new natural wonder for future generations and protecting it from the Japanese tendency to build ugly great hotels and shopping precincts selling useless toot right next door.

Sadly elsewhere in the area developers were able to get there first. Above Lake Toya itself, a beautiful 11km-wide caldera formed by volcanic activity, the hideous silhouette of the Windsor Hotel stands out starkly against the horizon.

Incidentally, why do people insist on calling hotels worldwide by this name? Perhaps they find Saxe-Coburg-Gotha rather a mouthful and it leads to all sorts of confusion with cabbies.

In July this venue played host to the G8 summit, an event so monumental that we weren’t even aware of its location until we stepped off at the train station. I guess no-one noticed the extra hot air here.

Whatever progress they made on tackling climate change or reducing their golf handicap I do hope George, Gordon, Nicola and co had time to try out Toya Ko’s many free on-street hot baths.

These mini-onsen cater for passing pedestrians, offering them a chance to bathe their hands or feet. There’s something very zen-like about sitting in a small bandstand, in the rain, with one’s feet in hot water.

Back in the proper onsen, my skin is turning pink and my are fingers beginning to resemble those strange pickled apricots the Japanese consider a delicacy. Yes, living by a volcano does have its benefits.

I’m still puzzled by the baking soda though.

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