Our last days in Puglia (2018)

It’s been two and half years since I last updated this blog.  I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with blogging and whether it’s an activity I do for myself or to gain the attention of others.  If it’s for others then I don’t exactly go out of my way to publicise its existence, so I’ll continue on the basis that it’s a diary which I happen to post on the world wide web.

This confusion over why I blog also extends to whether my periodic breaks from blogging are a good or bad thing.  Sometimes I think that I stop blogging because I have too much going on in the real world to be bothered with it and at others I feel it’s because I can’t bear to look at my life ebbing its way into oblivion.  Anyway, enough of the musing, here is a version of what’s been happening to me…

Looking back over my old posts I don’t think I mentioned that having become a Director of the management company of Dobsons Quay, where we’d bought an apartment in 2016, I became embroiled in a bitter dispute with the managing agents Lambert Smith Hampton.  This came to a head in the Spring and Summer of 2018 and working with my fellow Director Hans we managed to win a £10k pay-out from LSH and at the same time changed managing agent.  It was a real victory but came at the personal cost of hours spent slaving over accounts, doing Internet research and drafting memos and complaints.  Some of this time was spent sweating in my underpants in our hotel in Allepey and in the school in Keeranur.  The best moment of this debacle was when in early June at a meeting with LSH in their Lincoln office I slapped a bunch of papers on the table proving that a supposed trusted contractor of theirs was actually trading fraudulently and from that point it was all downhill.

Having sold my beloved Suzuki Bandit in April I bought an Indian made Enfield Bullet in June and then made a hare-brained dash from the UK to Puglia on it, without having checked it properly.  Just outside Verdun in Northern France the inevitable happened and the rear sprocket disintegrated, leaving me stuck in Verdun for a few days awaiting a new chain and sprocket set from the UK.  The wait was frustrating but also a useful time out from my increasingly frenetic behaviour.  With nothing to do but wander round Verdun I was forced to slow down and think about what I was doing, actually I was reminded of the time in 1992 when having sold my house in Conyer in East Kent I set off in my little sailing yacht up Conyer Creek heading for London when I ran aground on a falling tide and had to wait until the next day before setting off on my new adventure.  While at Verdun I visited the fort which was at the centre of the French defences in the First World War and was left with many haunting images of life underground on the Western front.

The enforced break helped me see sense and cut my losses, so after the bike was fixed I rode back to the UK and then flew out to Puglia.  On my return to the UK a few weeks later I discovered the bike had been stolen from our parking space at Dobsons Quay, but had been recovered and was just about to be scrapped.  I managed to rescue the damaged bike, before patching it up and selling it a loss – sometimes you just have to accept that a bike is unlucky for you, I guess it evens out given the largely trouble-free twenty-odd years I had with my old Bandit.

Sometime during the summer of 2018 Sue and I came to the joint conclusion that our time in Puglia was drawing to a close and that it was time to put our little stone house in Contrada Papariello up for sale.  When we bought the house in 2004 we had no plan to sell at some point down the road.  For us buying in Puglia was never an “investment,” more an adventure and we had no expectation that we would ever get our money back.  But as the years passed we began to feel that Southern Italy is not a place for foreigners to grow old in and that at some point we would return to the UK or some other English-speaking land.

We both thought the time to move on would probably come in our 70s as the land became more of a chore, but post-Borneo and our trip to India our ties had already begun to loosen and so in the Summer of 2018 we made the call to the local estate agent.  We didn’t expect this to be a quick process, Southern Italians tend to measure selling a house as an activity that takes years, rather than weeks or months.  It really caught us on the hop when after just a few days on the market a charming English/Israeli couple viewed the house and instantly fell in love with it, signing a preliminary sale contract in early September with completion scheduled for early December. As a result what we expected to be a long goodbye turned into a frantic few months planning our relocation to the UK.  

Before the sale our friends Ruth and Subash and their children Suresh and Ezhilvizhi came to stay for a couple of weeks.  Unbeknown to us they would be our last guests and it was a pleasure to introduce them to the beaches, food, life and culture of Southern Italy.  I have particularly good memories of a trip with them to Punto Prosciutto, a lovely little beach resort overlooking the Gulf of Taranto.

Having agreed the sale of the house with most of its contents we decided to hire a Mercedes van and driver to bring back to the UK only those things which were precious to us and this made the process simpler but the choices of what to take and what to leave a lot harder.  Generally things went fairly smoothly once you accept that selling a house in Italy involves being mugged by a bunch of professional bandits, including estate agents, lawyers and surveyors all of whom must be paid handsomely for producing piles of beautiful and essentially irrelevant paperwork.  

The only major hiccup in the process was that shortly after signing the sale contract in September and while we were back in the UK the house was burgled.  We’d conveniently left the keys to our old Fiat Punto in the house which the burglars were able to make use of to take away our large pellet stove and sundry TVs and other electrical items.  They didn’t do a lot of damage but irritatingly did remove two sofa cushions to help move the stove, which proved difficult to replace.  

Paolo phoned us to advise of the burglary just ten days before Nicholas and Hadassa our buyers were due to return for a further viewing and follow up questions.  We had no desire to conceal the burglary from them, but did want to make sure that we broke the news after the damage had been repaired and the missing items replaced.  This meant I had to rush back to Puglia and hire a car then furiously rush around tidying up and commissioning repairs and replacements, including sourcing and installing a replacement pellet stove.  With Paolo’s help I was able to achieve my goal and break the news of the burglary to our buyers in a house that looked the same or better than when they’d last seen it.

Finally, the day arrived when Sue, I and Nicholas met in the offices of the Notary in the nearby town of Fassano to sign the final sale contract, the “atto” in Italian, literally the “Act”.  That was 12 December on a cold, dark evening.  The Notary, a big woman with a smoker’s purr to her voice sped through the process like a true pro, including reading the entire contract at lightning speed.  The reading aloud of the contract is a tradition that dates back to the time when many Italians were illiterate, although the speed of the reading makes the contract pretty unintelligible anyway.

After the “Act” we drove back to an Agriturismo just down the road from our old house to spend our last night in Puglia.  We returned to the UK the next day exhausted and spent the next couple of weeks followed by Christmas and the New Year hunkered down in our apartment in Newark resting up and watching “the Crown” and other goodies on Netflix and eating Quality Street.

Back in Puglia

In April we finally returned to Contrada Papariello to find the place in not bad shape despite being neglected for more than four months.  The fava beans Sue had planted before we left had produced an abundant crop and the weeds were soon brought back under control with the rotovator.

But the most time-consuming task in the maintenance of our little acre of Puglia is the pruning of the olive trees, an especially important task this year as the tree-killing disease xylella fastidiosa advances from the South and one of the only ways to stop the insects that spread it is to keep the land clear of growth and the trees well maintained.  This year we used a fairly new technique, paying our neighbour Paolo to help, which is like having a turbo-boost as he can prune approximately five tress to our one.  While he was at it he also felled our big old walnut tree, which was diseased and we’ve been meaning to get around to removing for years.

After the big prune our land was covered in olive cuttings which we burnt over several days.  It’s a strangely satisfying business burning olive branches as the leaves are oily and when the fire really gets going they go up rapidly with a whoosh of flame and a loud crackling noise which makes me think of the burning bush in the Bible.  Day after day we returned to the house in the evening smelling of sweat and woodsmoke and stinging from the small burns from olives leaves that had been blown skyward by the flames and then floated down as a ash to prickle our skin.

 I don’t share Sue’s passion for growing stuff but have developed an affection for this strange artichoke like beast.  It’s an old type of vegetable popular in the middle ages called in English a “cardoon” and in Italian “cardo”.  It just suddenly sprung up in an unexpected place on the edge of one of Sue’s vegetable plots a few years ago and has grown there ever since.  Right now the heads have burst into a hairy mauve flower which is very attractive to bees and other insects.  Perhaps one day it will take over the World.

Back to Sarawak

At the end of our month of volunteering it was with a sense of relief that we escaped into the departure lounge of Trichy airport to wait for our Air Asia flight to KL and then on to Kuching in Sarawak.  At Kuching airport we got a familiar red and yellow taxi to the Basaga, our old favourite haunt when staying over in the provincial capital.  Breathing in the warm and humid air en route to the hotel my pervasive feeling was one of coming home.

Next morning I had a wander round the town and got a haircut and was reminded what a cool place Kuching or Cat City really is.  Culturally diverse with Chinese and Malay communities and tribal influences everywhere.  There is now a new bridge over the Kuching River to the Sarawak parliament house, a kind of Asiatic county hall.

That evening we dined with Mr Steve, Sue’s old colleague from our time in the little town of Saratok, a few hundred miles further up the coast.  Steve has stayed here since the British Council project in Malaysian Borneo ended, continuing his India summer in this seductive corner of South East Asia.

After a few days in Kuching we hired a car and headed up to Saratok and the Kabong Peninsula for the real business of meeting up with Sue’s former group of mentees.  A feisty bunch of Sarawak women, from diverse cultural backgrounds, Malay, Iban and Bidayu, but united by their commitment to teaching and to not taking any old rubbish from anyone.

The main event was a barbecue in Kabong with the magnificent view over the South China Sea pictured above.  It was a lovely afternoon in which we ate huge quantities of fried chicken and seafood, including jellyfish and just enjoyed the vibe.  The time in Saraok and Kabong was made more intense by the fact that since Sue left Sarawak in 2015 this lovely group has been hammered by tragedy, with Anisha and Jocelyn losing their wonderful husbands within a year of one another.  Such beautiful and strong people.  When we finally bade our farewells it was a feeling that perhaps this is not the last time we will meet these people and come to this magical place.

After the reunion we headed back down the pan-Borneo highway to Kuching for a final few days at another old haunt, the Pullman Hotel.  Travelling that route is probabaly one of the most dangerous road journeys you can make outside a war zone, struggling to overtake overladen palm oil trucks pumping black diesel fumes as they grind their way up the steep hills.  While back in the provincial capital we revisited the Semengoh Orang Utan Sanctuary, which made me think of my last trip here with Sue and Keith Ramptahal back in 2012.  Keith was not well and was clearly depressed, but we had no idea that he would be dead within a couple of years of that trip.  At Semengoh we’d been shocked by how little energy he had, prefering to spend time in the café where he could sit and have a smoke, but still delighted that a mum and baby orang utan came there to say hello to him.

A Small Town in Tamil Nadu

From Kerala we got an overnight train that took us across the South of India to the transit hub of Trichy in Tamil Nadu, ready to begin our month long volunteering assignment in a pre-school in a small nearby town.  During this time we also transited from tourist India to another place, I suppose you might call “real India”.

This “real India” is an uncompromising place, where prices are a fraction of what they are in tourist India, the stares are hard and often angry or suspicious and the flies abundant.  The photo opposite shows where we breakfasted most days before school began, eating with our hands off banana leaves for less than 50p each.  These guys were some of the nicest people we met on our journey and always made us feel welcome.  But living in a stock room next to a busy classroom with constant interruption during the long school day was wearing and stressful.


At the weekends we felt impelled to get a crowded bus back into Trichy to spend a night in a central hotel, for beer, restaurant food and satellite TV.  Trichy isn’t famous for much apart from the Rock Fort in the centre and the massive Srirangam temple on the outskirts of the city, said to be the largest Hindu temple complex in India.  A detail of it is in the picture above and opposite is a photo I took of a temple visitor, which sums up something about the incredible colour palette and sensitivity to colour one experiences everywhere.

The school itself was for me a challenging experience, as I had little to offer the situation and so for much of the time I acted as an inept classroom assistant, looking on and smiling rictus like or singing along in a halfway space between my normal English and the distinct Indian English of everyone else around me.  Sue by contrast was in her element having genuine experience and enthusiasm to offer and doing what she does best – motivating and inspiring teachers.

For me the time might be summed up by this picture of the tired old dog that slept on the road down which we had to pass every day to go for breakfast or into the little town to shop for cardboard, felt pens or cornflakes and who would often growl and snap at me, inducing fears of being bitten and contracting something awful.  In the end we reached a grudging accommodation in which I began to feel grateful affection for his lack of interest.

Kerala is Red

We're coming to the end of our stay in Kerala and this image, which I took in a small village in the Backwaters yesterday, sums up some of my impressions.  Che is everywhere here along with images of Marx and Lenin on the CPI.M (Communist Party of India [Marxist]) banners and flags.  I've no idea how Marxism co-exists with Hinduism, Islam and Christianity.  For many of the devout maybe Che is just another member of the pantheon of local gods.

After our first three days in the cockroach infested tin box we moved to the delightful Raheem's residency next to Alleppey beach.  I had the pleasure of running barefoot in the sand there most mornings and we would often take a stroll on the seashore.  It's a busy place with people casting nets from the beach, fishing inshore on small rafts and just enjoying the fresh air and the sea.  Often while on my early morning run I'd come across the odd bloke squatting in the sand having a shit while smoking a cigarette and looking reflectively out to sea.  It's a bit difficult to know where to look in these circumstances.

Sue had had enough of local ferries, so one day I took the ferry to Collum on my own, getting off at the first stop where the passengers have lunch and waiting for three hours for the return boat.  I killed the time by strolling to the beach and found a "Toddy" shop, where palm wine is sold.  These kind gents served me a couple of glasses of toddy, accompanied by tapioca root and chilli.  It's a bit like sweet coconut cider and not too strong, 7-8% alcohol I believe.

On the trip back I took this cliched but irresistible shot of the sun sinking through the Kerala palms while chatting with Al, a barrister who airbnb'd his West London flat four months ago and is gradually beginning to realise that with the income from this he could in fact keep travelling forever.  Alleppey was a sociable time for us and we met quite a few interesting travellers, including Andrew and Julie from Australia, Stephanie from the States and Kirsty and Russell of the "Rusty Shears" cafe in Whitby, to which we must pay a visit when we get back to the UK.

The Kerala Backwaters

On 18th January we got a taxi from Fort Kochi to our homestay on the backwaters where our driver was incredibly patient while we tried to find the place, which turned out to be a cute little tin box with a verandah facing one of the main canals into Alleppey.  It was great being able to watch all the boats going in and out of town, just a shame about the cockroaches.

On our first full day we hired a local boatman to paddle us around the nearby canals for a few hours and this really was a great way to see some of the small canals and experience the sights and sounds of daily life here, albeit it feels a bit intrusive to be paddled past someone trying to do their washing or having a quiet shave in the canal outside their house.

Many of the canals are choked with vegetation and I helped our boatman paddle through some of the worst of it, where we encountered this egret who seemed to be trying to chase us off his territory.  The trip ended on a slightly sour note as the boatman deliberately took his time on the return trip to get an extra hour's fee from us.

The next day we continued our exploration by getting the Alleppey to Kottayam ferry, a five hour round trip which cost us the princely sum of 50p return.  Kottayam itself is a busy and prosperous place, but the highlight of the trip for me was discovering a run down church on a backwater canal which looked strangely like an East Anglian wool church incongruously plonked in the tropics.  I'd love to know how it got there.

The Doors of Fort Kochi

After our hectic time visiting some of the major tourist destinations in North India we fled to the South by plane from Varanasi to Kochi via Bangalore.  Our posh hotel, the Xandari Harbour in Fort Kochi was pretty much what we expected with amazing views over the harbour and most days we strolled around the town taking in the ambiance.  After the North it was good to be in a warmer, more relaxed atmosphere with much cleaner air, so that for the first time in ages I felt I could actually breathe in deeply.  It makes me worry that there's an air quality crisis in the North of this country that is going largely unreported and practically everyone we met had a cough.

The streets of Fort Kochi reminded me a little of Galle in Sri Lanka with its old colonial vibe, which I have to admit I rather enjoy.  But Fort Kochi is actually more run down and while some buildings are being salvaged there are a lot more that are approaching the point of no return.  Near the hotel there is a transhipment area for tea, rice and spices whose smell and atmosphere reminded me strangely of the Wapping of my youth.  The warehouses, which face the waterfront, where I guess they break down shipping cargoes and load them onto the trucks that create a permanent traffic jam in the narrow streets outside, are called "godowns" a name which also rings a bell in my memory, maybe of reading Conrad.

Anyway, a week passed here photographing the flaking old doors and crumbling walls and trying to take in the spirit of this old place occupied successively by the Portugese, the Dutch and the British before the locals took proper possession.

One thing that came as a surprise was that Kerala is governed by the CPI.M, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and there are red flags with the hammer and sickle all over the place, along with pictures of Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara.  I hope those old British Imperialists are turning in their graves.

Varanasi

We had an uneventful trip to Varanasi via Delhi, although it was strange to have a taxi driver point out the India Gate yet again on our ride from the railway station to the airport.  The journey from Varanasi Airport to our hotel however took ninety gruelling minutes, much of it inching through the insane traffic in the City centre.  Sue needed to rest, but that evening I had a stroll along the Gats and took this photo.

On our first full day in the City we took a long walk through the centre and along the major Gats before returning exhausted to our hotel, a pleasant and more or less tranquil spot in the heart of the mayhem.  On day two we visited the run-down but fascinating Hindu University museum before again walking the Gats back to the hotel.  Both trips were broken by lunch at the Dolphin rooftop restaurant.

What can you say about Varanasi that hasn't already been said?  Actually, it was all the stuff that has been said that was the problem.  I came here with so many pre-conceptions that I expected to be overwhelmed and perhaps gain some new insight into life and death.  Well it is kind of overwhelming to the senses with so much life and colour exploding around one, so that almost everything you look at is a separate rich tableaux of burning pyres, temple entrances, sari and sweet shops, con men, monks and gurus.  And yet at the same time its effect on my brain was really quite relaxing and wandering the Gats by the banks of the Ganges was more like strolling along the prom at Eastbourne on acid, rather than living out scenes from Dante's "Inferno".  Death, which I expected to be ever present, took much more of a back seat than I expected.  I saw no burning bodies and heard no communal keening, just big stacks of wood being weighed and the odd fire, with the occasional body whipped through the backstreets by the special caste of pall bearers.

If I've taken any moral lesson from this fascinating and ancient city it's that here there is a place for everything from birth to death and all the stuff in between, including worshipping, posing, swimming, doing your washing, ripping off tourists, grazing your water buffaloes, flying your kite, playing cricket or just having a laugh with your mates and that all those things are completely normal things for humans to do and it's entirely appropriate that they should all be going on at the same time.

I must say I'm very glad to have been and unsure whether I will ever want to come back.

Agra and the Taj Mahal

The fog we hit at Bharatpur and its effect on the trains worried me, so I checked out our later bookings only to find that our Agra to Varanasi overnight train had been rescheduled to not stop at Agra.  After some furious checking on the internet I managed to get a refund and book new trains and flights.  After the Birder's Inn we then took a taxi to our hotel in Agra, arriving in the still fog bound city before lunch on 4th January.

Our approach to the Taj Mahal was eliptical.  That afternoon we attempted to walk from our hotel in search of a view, but ended up getting hot, bothered and tired as we tramped the dusty traffic choked streets, before getting an auto rickshaw back.  On our walk through the dirty back streets of Agra we saw the most incredible squalor, including at one point a small herd of pigs wallowing in the waters of an open drain in a crowded slum. 


On the 5th we visited Agra Fort which should have a fine view of the Taj, but the fog stubbornly refused to clear.  Then we got an auto rickshaw to the Mehtab Bagh, the gardens on the other side of the Yamuna river from the Taj, where it finally revealed itself to us.  Finally, on the 6th we entered the Taj itself via the East Gate and actually got to see it close up, the thousands of tourists with us reduced to ants by its sheer scale.  I guess the thing that surprised me most, apart from its size, is the colour, which close up is more grey and marbled than I expected, well it is made of marble after all.  Conscious that we would probably see it this one time in our lives we lingered and looked and looked.

While in Agra we stayed in the Grand Imperial Hotel, nearer the centre of the City rather than the tourist places by the Taj.  It was as we had hoped a faded bit of colonial grandeur a bit down on its luck.  Lovely chandeliers, old furniture and decent food and overly attentive service.  At breakfast one morning Sue observed one of the waiters picking something off his shoe and then flicking it absent-mindedly at the buffet.

On the 7th, our last day, we had time to kill before our evening train to Delhi and so went to the Ram Bagh, the oldest Mughal garden in India and in a very dodgy part of town.  Later we took an auto rickshaw to Palliwal Park, where Sue fulfilled a lifetime's ambition by seeing a Bittern, which I managed to photograph.

Keoladeo National Park Bharatpur

The third train of our trip was a luxurious Exec Chair car from Jaipur to Bharatpur.  Comfy seats, tea, newspapers and breakfast with mainly foreign fellow travellers as dawn broke over Rajasthan.  Everything was going well and then we hit the fog and the train slowed to a crawl.

We arrived in the small town of Bharatpur to find it shockingly cold and damp, but our hotel, "the Birder's Inn" recommended by our friend Subash was very welcoming and next morning we touched base with Vishnu and Jitender, the two rickshaw driver/guides he recommended, who gave us two excellent days birdwatching while transporting us along the the paths in the National Park.  Highlight of day one was a pair of Sarus Cranes.

Over the two days we saw an incredible variety of birds and other wildlife including deer and water buffalo paddling through the wetlands.  The Kingfishers were one of my favourites and the park is home to three different species.  In the evening the hotel did a substantial buffet to the keep the large numbers of hungry birdwatchers happy.

The guests were mainly Indian, but with a few foreigners on the longer tours of the so-called "Golden Triangle".  On a couple of evenings many of the Indian guests sat round the big log fire in the garden singing songs, which was delightful.

Jaipur

We had six days in Jaipur arriving tired and confused after our train from Jodhpur was three and half hours late.  At the station we were bombarded with touts looking for our business but eventually found a prepaid taxi stand where our charming old driver took us to our airbnb via a few 'phone calls to Payal the owner.

I'd been expecting Jaipur to be more urban and sophisticated than the cities to which we'd recently been and in some ways it is, but the noise and dirt were still overwhelming.  We visited the City Palace on our first full day, where I pictured this pigeon happily perched in a chandelier and as ever we had to force our way through the crowds.  Payal and Anurag our hosts were charming and Anurag took me out to the Central Park jogging path on a couple of mornings and we also took Payal's cooking class one afternoon, which was a really good introduction to Indian cooking techniques.

Payal is a very knowledgeable guide to Indian cookery and culture and gave us some really good tips about the basics of Indian cookery in which I finally understood why ground coriander is sold in such large quantities in India delis, as most basic sauces start with a mixture of chilli powder, turmeric and ground coriander which act to provide heat, spice and a thickening agent.  Unfortunately during the lesson I began to feel sick and for several days since then I've had first diarrhea and then a bad cold.

On our last full day we booked a car and driver and took in the sights we hadn't managed to get round to, including the Amber Fort, a vast palace complex outside the City which was abandoned after Jaipur was founded and the temples at Galta also known as the "Monkey Temples" for obvious reasons.

Galta kind of sums up some of my feelings about our trip to date.  I was expecting something beautiful and what I found was something dirty, confusing and in some ways ugly.  The ponds at the site are green and fetid and the whole area smells of decay.  Gradually you lose some of the smell and the rubbish as you climb to the Sun Temple at the top of the narrow valley in which the temples sit, but still it all feels a bit tawdry and played out, or perhaps that's me projecting my feelings after three exhausting and bewildering weeks in India.