Travelling Bead

NEXT INSTALMENT

2011-07-13T08:57:00.000+10:00

Hello readers:

This blog is enormous - almost five hundred pages of a book. So I'm going to make the Venice blog a separate one, starting from this week. The new blog address is very similar to this one so you won't forget it ...

www.travellingbead2.blogspot.com

Please join up there to follow me. Make it easy for yourself - there's a "follow by email" link which means each time I post you'll get an email automatically. Then if you want to post comments, that's easy too. For all those who have wanted to post comments but haven't for some reason been able to, just send me an email as usual and I'll post the comment for you.

So before we both switch a catchup: I arrive 1st September in Venice. My apartment is all set to receive me! Sylvia and Giorgio are excited about my coming and said they don't know why I am bothering to go to language school because judging by my emails to them, my Italian is excellent. The secret is that I have used Google translate! So University starts on 6th September. Five days a week, and a cultural activity every day to facilitate the process.

I'm also learning at home with a fantastic free program I downloaded from the internet, with advanced upgrade for a fee, called BYKI. I'm learning repetitively like a child learns a language and somehow it's sticking in my long term memory. Instead of learning one to ten and Monday to Saturday in order, so you have to mumble through until you get the word you want, everything is jumbled, and then in the middle the program throws in a rogue word like il scarafaggio. So far it's my favourite word. It means cockroach. Hope there aren't too many in Venice!

DON'T FORGET!!!!

http://www.travellingbead2.blogspot.com

Six degrees of separation

2011-07-10T18:57:00.000+10:00

A long time ago, when D and I were just beginning the bead business, we had a table, an umbrella, a few shoeboxes of trinkets, and a gig at a market in Sydney's whoop whoop. If I remember, it was raining, and cold and neither of us wanted to get out of bed that Sunday to drive an hour each way in the hope of making a few dollars. But we did, and we did, and we did. And we also met the man, BK, who was to turn our lives around .. and lead me, particularly to this path. The story goes that he sauntered up to us, fingered our trinkets, and asked what we were doing with such nice stuff at a place like this. Would we like a shop? A shop? How? Where? Why? When? Yes! I'll show you one! Here! Why not! Next week! We took the shop and his very generous offer ... and the rest is history - and my story. A few years later D and I were over living in whoop whoop and wanted to return to the bush and the beaches - I'd had such bad luck there. I'd broken my nose very badly when I walked into a glass door, I'd broken my wrist, I'd broken two toes, and a blonde was stalking D so much that I had to get a voodoo doll to giver her stomach aches every time she came near.

We said goodbye to BK, and thanks for all the loaves and fishes and parties. We closed the shop, packed up our home and travelled around India for several months. When we returned, we moved back to the bush and the beaches and began our bead business with renewed vigor, and all was rosy in Stormland for years until much shi+t hit my fans. You've read all about it for months. Then the Venice Happening. A lifelong friend commented last week that my Venice Happening was similar to the life changing meeting with BK - a stranger walking into my life and offering a Chance. I agreed with her. And I gave a silent thanks to BK, although I hadn't been in contact with him for YEARS, for pushing me resoundingly on this path ... even though D is not part of it now.

So. It was so cold this Sunday morning in Sydney, I dared not venture out for my attempted daily walk. My phone rings. Do you remember us? Of course. Instantly. It's BK's wife G. They're in the area - can they visit now?

How amazing ... I hadn't thought about their role in the scheme of things since L mentioned it. They arrived, I brought them up to date, a gallop around the twists and turns, the tunnels and hills, the floods and famines, the losses and prophets since we last talked. The kids have left home, they are grandparents, their business interests are elsewhere, but life's still pretty okay. I wonder how I affected their lives? Not a corpuscle as much as they affected mine. I'm astounded that they just reappeared in my life, in the short time I'm here - such important cogs in the early wheels of this incarnation. It was as if they were my guiding spirits, come to check on the progress of my journey. I now feel I have achieved perfect closure on what led me here. I have booked my ticket to Venice. My new life awaits.

So here - another thanks to BK for a chance meeting and a chance taken ... and reinforcement that there really is a grand plan in our lives, and that no matter how convoluted the path ... there is meaning to the journey. And when a stranger comes to your door, and says - here - take a chance on something different! - you'd be a fool not to. I've proved it every time.

You should try it sometime.

All power to the goddesses!

2011-06-29T08:23:00.000+10:00

Quote of the day:

Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of sh!t.

Still call Australia Home

2011-06-28T23:39:00.001+10:00

It's taken me a week to get over my jet lag .. or perhaps the rigors of travelling for five months. I've been sleeping 10 hours a night, and am finally rested. I've caught up with friends, and I've unpacked my winter clothes from storage. Every time I hear a crow call, it reminds me of the CIAO!!! of Italy. My iphone has church bells as its ring. I'm glad to be back, surrounded by my friends, and my truckload of goodies, but I'm looking forward to being back in Italy in September.

When I set out on this journey, it was with the idea of taking a tiny bead and trading it up to something wonderful. I traded beads with people I'd had significant interactions with and when one person gave me two beads for my one trade, I decided to keep that momentum going and keep one for myself and trade one onwards. Many of my dealers gave me gifts of beads, or put surprises in my goodies bag. All of these are going to go in to my travelling bead necklace, which I shall post when I've assembled it.

In Nepal, I traded my first little glass frog bead with Salim for a dzi bead.

In Essaouria, I made the next trade of the dzi bead for two Venetians from the mid 1800's.

I traded the two Venetians for a Roman eye bead and a rare Kiffa bead in Taradount.

I kept the Roman eye bead and traded the kiffa bead for a big chunk of amazonite and a Yemeni silver bead in Marrakech. I kept the Yemeni.

I traded the amazonite for two old double Afghani silver beads in Istanbul.

I traded the old Afghani silver bead to Sarah, in London, for a piece of very old Moroccan fossil amber and a rare moon bead.
I didn't want to trade the pieces Sarah gave me! I'm putting them on my travelling bead necklace.

But the bead journey continued. In Venice, Giorgio gave me an old Lewis & Clark glass bead from the mid 1800's. I gave Sylvia an old Turkoman silver and carnelian pendant.

They gave me the use of an apartment in Venice, and the keys to their friendship and guidance.
Fair Trade. Very fair trade.

Bali was the vague idea of making a new life out of this journey. Venice is the remarkable detail.

I couldn't be happier than if I were a boar sniffing truffles mid season!

Arrivederci Italia!

2011-06-22T22:54:00.003+10:00

And so my Italian stay ends. For now. There have been 7050 page views since December.

This morning I threw away my trekking boots that I’ve had since 2002. They weigh over a kilo and take up easily the size of a large shoebox, and besides, I needed the space for my Roberto Brunelli blue leather drop dead gorgeous food adornments. When the wind blew I was safe as these boots anchored me to the ground. I never got bitten by a snake. I walked over glass, over buffalo pats, over muddy patches, and through water. Not once in a decade did they let me slip. In those boots, I walked the Himalayas, twice. I stomped through India’s heat and dust and hail storms. I trekked through Balinese rice paddies, Thai hill tribe villages, African savannas, and deserts and English moors. They have the mud of ancient Cappadocian homes, the slime of Australian swamps, outback dust, wetlands, bushlands, mangroves, Etruscan soils, English moss, and Roman ruins embedded in their soles.

My boots are a metaphor for this past decade: I think they are, without exception, the only things that never let me down, but now their weight is holding me back. I am travelling light now, with all its nuances.

I should calculate how many kilometres I have walked in them. If I averaged 10km a day - minimum that I walk when travelling or weekending at home, and multiply that by at least a third of a year - 120 days and multiply that by ten, I get 12000 km - which is, I think, something like half way round the world. Sometimes at the end of a day’s really hard walking, it feels like much more. Venice is hard going. Art galleries are hard going. The Himalayas are killing. My boots could easily have gone another 9000 kms as they weren’t even close to disintegrating, so they deserved a decent farewell: I kicked them off, threw them across the room, massaged my toes, said thanks for all the memories, then I left them outside in the Bellagio rain overnight. Just before I left for Milan and the airport, I put them on a Medieval step for some person who needed them more to take them on. It’ll have to be a tourist because no Italian would be seen dead in them. What tales my boots would tell, if only they could talk.

Things I wished I’d done this trip:

Kayaked on Lake Como, but it rained most of the time. A flight over Lake Como ditto

Taken a gondola ride with a beautiful Italian man and spent the night with him at Cipriani. Plenty of offers, but I don’t think I was ready. Photographed the whirling dervishes but the time in Istanbul just evaporated. Swum in the Black sea, but it was far too cold. Biggest biggest faux pas: not doing Holi. I can’t believe I didn’t do Holi. It seems so long ago that my spirit was so crushed I was unable to walk into a wild exuberant crowd. But that person has gone. And there will always be another Holi, somewhere. And this person will go in there, boots and all ...

Things I am sorry I have done: nothing. Niente. I’ve had a ball.

A place I shouldn't have gone but had no control over: The Lizards and Flies village in Morocco. I still have holes in my skin, and the bites still drive me nuts with itching as apparently those biting monsters also laid eggs in my skin. UGH. I'm also now a non meat eating person - I still have nightmares about those intestines.

Things I'm delighted to have done: everything I did except the above!

Best parts in no particular order:

Hot air ballooning in Cappadoccia when I knew I could do anything alone ... because I wasn't alone any more. I had my happy self.

Meeting Sarah who taught me so much and led me to silver pastures I never knew existed.

Learning on the bead trail in Morocco and finding I had a nose for treasures.

Meeting Giorgio and Sylvia in Venice and knowing instantly that this would change my life in a wondrous way.

Walking through Villa Melzi in Bellagio and discovering serenity.

Having insane fun and laughter with Luda in Istanbul and knowing we had more pulling power than a mighty tugboat.

Leaving Nepal!So sick of being so sick!

Doing ridiculous right hand turns all over Italy with Dawn, and the hilarious, delightful results. Like putting on weight and not caring!

Most of all: not being afraid to go out on the longest, skinniest limb I have ever dared - with a broken heart and the loss of my my home, my car, my known career path, shaky health, and no idea of the road ahead.

I am emotionally the best I have been in a long time. I am truly, madly, deeply happy. I have made exceptional friends. I have made an adventure with memories to last a lifetime. I am once again a photographer. I have become a collector. I will be a better designer, and a better known designer. My future is golden, delicious, exciting. I am unafraid of anything. And I am only halfway through the year I'd given myself to recover.

I took a risk a day and it changed my life.

I leave for Sydney now. I won't post much from there, as I'll be very busy making arrangements for phase two. I return to Italy in 8 weeks and will post again when I arrive.

That's Amore!

2011-06-22T22:44:00.002+10:00

Right outside my door, Bellagio

It's five am and I'm waking in large room in what was once a stone home for 15c fishermen. Around me are the enormous, ornate villas of the Italian aristocracy, who spent their time organising frescoes on their ceilings and stupendous artworks for their walls. They'd come here, to Lake Como, escaping the heat or cold of Milan, just 60km away.

Old Como smuggling boats

Or they'd help smuggle Jews to Switzerland, driving them over the border, just 30km away. I can hear the water lapping, rain dripping off mossy tiles, the occasional whine of a speedboat.

I'm leaving this morning for "home". Sydney. I don't know if I'm excited or sad. Home isn't a concept for me, and that itself is an alien feeling. I've always had a lover or a husband and children to return to. I don't have that and I don't have a home, or a car. When I return I will have to find somewhere to live, remove my remaining bits of furniture from storage, start making a living again. For months my questions have been "what now?" In three days it will be "how now?" My children are grown and making their own lives, and I don't really fit in there. I think they'd like me to be the sort of mother who'd plant their vegetables and babysit their cats, but I've spent so long travelling, I'd want to take off before the tomatoes turned red.

I've been away from "home" since January. Almost six months. I am so comfortable about the rigours of travel now, and the delight in different environments, that I could carry on for what seems like indefinitely. My cases are a bit heavy, because I've fallen in love with Italian fashion and I am delighting in looking sophisticated and elegant again. I've bought a few lovely pieces of clothing; chosen by weight, crushability and suitability for the unknown path ahead. My hair is long; if I have to tie it up, it goes into a tortoiseshell clip at the side of my head - only Americans wear ponytails. I've found that I am less invisible with a bit of makeup, and as my eyes are my "best" feature, I am making them up to advantage.

Bellagio rooftop

Yesterday I was taken for an Italian who can speak very good English. I'm greeted in Italian, and I'm replying with confidence, and with the correct accent, but that about sums up the extent of my linguistic journeying. All that will improve when I return to Venice in September, and attend the language school.

If I wasn't returning to Italy in nine weeks, I'd be very depressed about returning to Sydney today because I'd be returning to where I was, and left, six months ago.

So here I am getting down on my knees and thanking every person I've met along the way, and every experience that happened as a result, that has brought me to be able to return here to begin a life I could never have imagined. If you asked me what I wanted most in the world now, I couldn't come up with a better answer than I'm going to Create and Learn in Venice. I could add that I would like to be discovered by an aristocrat and be ensconsed in a villa, but I don't know if I'd really like that, right now. I'm still not quite "ready" for that sort of adventure, and right now, too, I don't want anything to come in the way of returning here for Phase Two of this Great Big Adventure.

Garden at Villa Melzi, Bellagio

When I was 21, I left South Africa to visit my father in Kent. I'd booked to go skiing in Switzerland. I was attached to a young man who went to America, from where he proposed, and asked me to go there to get my ring. My father said, don't be mad, go skiing first. I didn't. Instead I spent what would have been the skiing week sheltering from a terrible tornado in Toledo, Ohio. The relationship didn't last because I met G. Years later, I was in London, again, working on British TV, when G asked me to return to South Africa to marry him. My father said, don't be mad, you have a job that other young girls would kill for. I returned, and that blew up and I stayed in South Africa until I married a man who took me to the windy part of Australia and I never returned to London. Years later, still in windy Australia, I fell in love with a Maltese man who had a family castle on Comino that he'd offered me to renovate. We'd live in Europe and I'd teach in the castle. That life turned upside down when I went away for a long weekend and he met someone else and married her before I'd returned. I was more upset about losing the chance of a castle than losing him.

All my "I shouldn't have done that" decisions were based on my affections for a man. I will never do that again. If things go haywire I want to be able to say I caused that, not that I followed my heart into a decision that changed my life in a negative way. So for now, I'm putting thoughts of an Italian aristocrat into a very nice Italian shoebox, storing it in the boot of a very nice Italian car, and going my own way.

Outside Bellagio apartment

I don't know if I have fundamentally changed in the past six months. Certainly, I look much healthier. My skin isn't grey. My eyes are clear and sparkling. I laugh a lot. I've put on a bit of weight but I actually prefer to look buxom and womanly than grey and miserable. I have a radiating confidence in my ability. Someone asked me how I was "going to manage" in Venice. I have no idea. I'll do each day as it happens with the knowledge that it is my choice.

Bellagio

Ending phase one here in Bellagio, on the shores of Lake Como has been ..... I'm struggling for words. I am surrounded by beauty the likes of which I haven't seen. Pale mists lick the lake shores, and wisp around marble statues in the gardens of Villa Mezzi. The waters of the lake change colours every hour, from grey to blue to green to mauve to taupe; the surface is pocked and smooth and churned and swept and angry and mirrored. Mountains rush up to the sky to fetch snow and crash down the other side in dense forests of oak. At the base of the mountains, dipping their toes in the lake, are hundreds of little villages and towns, each with a distinctive personality and style.

Typical Varenna lane

Yesterday, our final day, Dawn and I caught the ferry to Varenna, in such dense rain that it was like travelling through the fog. We'd spent the morning on Bellagio shopping for lace lingerie confections, as my K Mart uber uplifts were ditched in Istanbul. We lunched upstairs in the Heaven Room at Divine Comedy, on provolone, pizza, formaggio in various guises and liberal glasses of vino bianco, as the rain hurtled across the rooftops and inverted umbrellas, drowning out the love songs to Italy played on American radio. Dawn and I were sharing my Kathmandu silver collapsible umbrella, until a shopkeeper decided that it didn't match her orange and black outfit and gave her a bright orange umbrella of her own.

Varenna on Lake Como

The weather has been mostly imperfect since we’ve bee on the lake; but with its own mysterious beauty. On my last day on the lake - in teeming rain - I left my camera in the apartment; knowing that I’d be sorry, but lugging the extra 3 kilos a day have recently been exhausting me. But Varenna in the rain is possibly more beautiful than in the sun. The houses dip their foundations in verdant hydrangeas of every colour of purple, lilac and pink, deeply saturated colours in the rain. Pathways were mirrors reflecting the exquisite 15c villas, the worn walkways were dappled with pink petals and grey water lapped our feet. Fishermen leaned into the rain from overhanging rocks curtained with ivy, hauling their catch. Simple shops selling jewellery or silk scarves perched on medieval rock promontories, with views through ancient arches across the water to villages a ferry ride away. Light caught glasses of campari, bounced off umbrellas and kayaks and reflected off stones. Even the ducks shone wetly.

Terrace at Hotel du lac, Varenna

I stood on the terrace of Hotel Du Lac, looking up to the mountains, some still covered with snow, out across the water where yachts were looming in the rain, and up to the villas. A wedding was to begin in a few minutes and a sultry singer was warming up her Italian and English repertoire. Rose petals fell at my feet from mossy ancient urns. Drizzle curled my hair. Arias rang in the air. Tears welled in my eyes. And rolled down my cheeks.

On my last day in Italy, I stood on one of the most beautiful places I have seen in my extensive travels this year - possibly even in my life ... and shed tears. For being in Italy. For the long months I’ve been away. For the joy of being here, in this miraculous place. For having to go “home” - in name only, if only temporarily. I don’t want to leave Italy. It’s been the most spiritually rejuvenating place of my travels, where I have burst out of my tangled past into a sunny clearing of wondrous possibilities.

Varenna from ferry

We walked up the slippery, dark lanes, down the uneven cobbles, under mossy arches and across wobbling bridges. Verenna is the quaint fisherman’s village of the lake, compared to the haute and pomp of Bellagio. But I loved it more. Halfway to the ferry to return to Bellagio, as the clouds darkened and lowered, we turned back to eat our last supper at a waterside restaurant. The rain came in so hard visibility diminished to fifty metres, and the yachts on the lake seemed to vaporise in the mist. The mountains across the lake vanished into a fog, then returned looming to tantalise, then vanished again under a torrent of rain. Jetties were submerged, and drenched ducks came into the restaurant to shelter. I took pictures on my iphone. When the rain eased slightly we rushed back across the rolling jetties and cascading rockside walkways to get the second last ferry to Bellagio for the night, battling under our soaked umbrellas and squelching in our battered shoes.

Missing our ferry by minutes, we had an hour to kill until the last one or we’d have to spend the night there. Two sopping cyclists who’d ridden from 2000metres high and Switzerland limped into the shelter, shivering and soaked to the bone. They hobbled across the road with their bikes to the Hotel Olievo, for deserved coffees. They were seated at a warm table and served their coffees immediately. Like two orphans in the drain, we watched them with envy, then decided to do the same.

So there was still time for another misadventure! There were four or five empty tables at the restaurant. It was almost nine pm and the heavens were emptying themselves on the Hotel Olievo in Veranno. Rain coursed in rivers past the terrace where we shivered, cars slushed and made mini tsunamis into the flower beds. No sane person would be out on a night like this. We sat down at a table. The following happened completely in Italian, which made it much more dramatic and theatrical. As with all Italian interactions, the more excited the conversation, the higher the volume and the faster the speed. The woman who had shooed Dawn away a week ago when she needed a loo stop, had the memory of an elephant and still had it in for Dawn, obviously because she was much prettier, sexier and obviously had a life. Glowering fr behind her (mama mia) cheap reading glasses, she told us to leave as we were not eating. But we want coffee! we said - you haven’t even asked us! Go, she said, you can’t sit here - practically lifting me by my shoulders - you must sit there, pointing to a table half of which was in the rain, the other half of which was a receptacle for the dripping awning. It’s wet! said Dawn. The chairs are wet! Bo, with a shrug, if you want coffee, you sit in the rain. This is not a bar.

You want a drink, you go up the hill to the bar - pointing into the veiled wet distance where we couldn’t even read signs. I pointed to the cyclists, warm and sheltered. But they’re having coffee! The woman huffed. They are guests in this hotel! You lying cow was the literal translation, they’re not they’re catching the ferry with us. If you want to sit, you sit at that table in the rain, curling her nose up as if we had leprosy or as if (mama mia) were wearing bad shoes.

Dawn refused to sit. I pulled the table further under the shelter, but the woman pushed it back into the rain. Dawn said, I will stand here and embarrass all of you until you give us a table. The cyclists picked up their coffees and said, if you don’t give them a table, we will take our coffees to the ferry station. The woman said no no, you stay here. With a look of loathing, she offered us to share the table with the cyclists. We said, No, there are four tables here that we can sit at but you want us to sit in the rain?

Dawn told her we worked in tourism. I told her I was doing updates for travel books. Dawn added a few words like donkey, and moron, and idiot, and worst Italian insult of all - you are letting your side down. My brother slept with your mother - or words to that effect. The other diners had stopped eating or watching the rain and were laughing and shaking their heads at the goings on. The woman stomped away. Other people who had come after we’d arrived already had their coffees or menus and wine. I sat at the wet table. Dawn stood behind me with her orange umbrella. The woman eventually returned and with a gritted teeth Senori, commanded we sit down, this time at a less wet table, slightly out of the rain. We ordered a hot chocolate and a macchiato. They cost as much as the pizza we’d had for dinner along the jetty, which came with chips and olives and a salsa for the bread sticks. The woman threw the bill down with the drinks, and said Pay Now. What? Do you think we’re going to run away? She hovered over my shoulder. I paid and told her she was the rudest woman I had ever met and she should be ashamed of herself. The rain crashed down, the ferry lurched in and when we left, Dawn, who had been scheming to totally unhinge the woman, said .... I’m going to give her a very very dirty look. That should fix her.

Bellagio, by ferry, in the rain

We played charades on the ferry to Bellagio. The windows were fogged up, pale lights teased in the distance, seen through the little rivulets of condensation. Alone upstairs - apart from the shivering cyclists on the other side of the ferry - as only the senseless or desperate would travel on a night like this, we made our own theatre. Dawn mimed four words, a big circle, waves. I shouted out - Perfect Storm! Mo-By Dick-Us! She ran her hands over her body. I shouted out Bo Derek! 10! She made rolling movements again. I shouted out Shark! Pirates of the Caribbean! She pointed upwards, then fluffed her hair out. I shouted out Ancient Mariner! God, you’re hopeless, she laughed, holding her sides, it’s Under the Tuscan Sun! SUN? Mama mia! Non sole! I haven’t seen sun for days!

Walk way to San Giovanni, every day

Back on Bellagio, the taxis had gone to bed so we happily walked the 2 km uphill back to the apartment in the rain. Swanky cars swooshed by as we huddled against the ancient mossy walls that bordered the Villa Melzi, splashing us. Moss dripped from the arched bridges. We passed again the enormous aquaduct that straddles someone’s garden, so large it can be seen from across the lake, and squelched down the winding lanes to the cobbles and the private church that looks like a small White house where the owners of Villa Melzi go to give thanks for their particular slice of paradise. Up the 600 year old steps, into the garden of ancient olives and giant magnolias, to make some strawberry and cherry tea from the leftovers in our fridge.

Delsene coffee shop, below our apartment

Soaked, happy to be here, sad to be leaving. That's amore ...

Paradise Lost

2011-06-22T22:41:00.001+10:00

From Umbria, we trained to Varenna. When Dawn asked me to come to Venice to meet her, I had to change my ticket to Sydney so that I left from Milan. Milan, hmm, she said. That’s pretty close to somewhere wonderful. I’ll take you there, she grinned, after Umbria, but it’s a surprise.

We arrived at Torontola, the stop for Umbria, from Venice, in the rain, and left it in the sun, after some tortured negotiations about tickets to Milan and onwards. Train travel in Italy is fraught with changed time tables, tickets that don’t guarantee seating, stops that may not happen, platforms that change just as the train is coming in which involves hurtling myself and my luggage down the stairs and up the other side before the whistle blows, risking life limb and vertebrae to get onto the train, wondering how I’m supposed to drag 25kg of hated luggage through a passage that is as wide only as a wedge heel, and finding out that the 6 hour train that promised food, doesn’t. It’s all part of being in Italy and I follow Dawn like a love struck puppy as she works the system.

Why are you wearing a short white pleated skirt when its raining and we have 60kg of luggage between us and three stops and we don’t know if we have a seat or what platform the train will be on, and how come we’re sitting in first class when we’ve booked second? Shhh, she grins. This skirt has got me a lot of help in the past. Sure enough, at the top of a flight of stairs, when we are almost being mowed down in the rush of other passengers, blonde Dawns does a little Marilyn Monroe twirl, and instantly her giant pink case is carried by a total stranger, the tickets are sorted, nobody dares move us from our non guaranteed seat as she unpacks the cherries she’s brought for the journey.

We changed at Florence for Milan. I forgot to write about the ride to Torontola when we first sat in a coach where an ancient man, stretched across the seats, was gasping his last breaths as his daughter watched anxiously out the window. Dawn and I smelled death and decay and would rather stay in the aisle for four hours than sit with them. Later a whole coach was disabled and sealed off, so all its passengers were moved into a few crowded coaches, while we wondered if he had actually taken his last ride. In Florence station, I sat on the suitcases swinging my red shoes to detract would-be gypsies, thieves and pickpockets from thinking I was a naive tourist, while Dawn rushed around changing tickets so that we’d arrive earlier, at a different station, on a different train, which meant we wouldn’t have to take a taxi, just a ferry, but she had to pay a bit more, and maybe she could get credit for the ticket we don’t use, and she could use it later, but then again she has a Europass, but then we’ll have to get a lift from the ferry, so we better hurry because that’s the train, right now, first class that looks and sounds like second and the conductor is blowing his whistle and waving his green bat, and there is nobody around to appreciate her white frilly skirt and take pity on her huge pink suitcase that goes up to her waist, so we haul our cases up the four metal stairs and wedge them into place taking up two passenger seats and lurch into two window seats to spend the journey talking to an Italian architect from Venice who travels the world with her husband who makes sails for yachts. And who says that where we are going is the most spectacular place in Italy.

We arrive at Varenna, in pouring, drenching rain, running down hill over the cobbles after our runaway cases that have had enough abuse, thankyouverymuch, to last a lifetime. The road ends, before it branches into tiny lanes that weave up through the ancient village, at a ferry terminal, lurching in the rain. Our clothes are soggy. Our hair is frizzy. Luckily, I have proved to Dawn that my shoes are really Italian leather because the colour hasn’t bled onto my skin.

We’re on the shores of a very very large grey lake. Mountains race to the sky and crash back down into the sea. Magnificent villas buried in hydrangeas cling to dripping forests. Motor boats, ferries and fishermen break the surface of the lake. Snow tips the mountain tops. Houses are painted pink, cerise, salmon, cream, pale yellow, ochre. Oleander bushes the size of houses scatter the cobbles with petals and magnolias the size of oak trees drop their blooms in the water.

I’m on Lake Como, rowing distance to Switzerland, home of the terribly rich and some incredibly famous, and eccentrics and recluses and people who just want to be here because this is where earth was invented, and I think I’m going to faint, surrounded by so much beauty.

I stand like the French Lieutenant’s Woman on the prow, ignoring the drizzle as the car ferry churns its way across the water to Bellagio, built at the fork of the lake. Ochre and yellow villas loom out of the rain as the ferry pulls up at the quay: we’re met by Ornello, in whose apartment we’re staying at San Giovanni, one km from Bellagio. She’s clad from head to toe in oilskins, and wellies, and flings our luggage into the minute boot of her Fiat, tears up the road under bridges and down winding lanes so narrow the mirrors have to be tucked in, and deposits us in the 300 year old apartment. I fling open yet another set of shutters, lean way out and breathe deep, seeing the boats, and mists, and silver water. I go up to Dawn and hug her. Grazie mille.

The apartment is part of the Villa Melzi complex, a magnificent 17th century villa, built by a man who was crazy about gardening, and every morning the grounds are swept by hand, every out of place leaf picked up, every azalea inspected for blight or bugs, every Japanese maple trimmed and plucked, every white marble statue dusted. Below the apartment is a coffee shop, and a pizza restaurant under creaking vines, where old boats bob in their shallow water.

One day we’re taken up to Bel Vedere, a restaurant way up the mountains by F. He arrived here in the sixties, fell in love with the place, kept coming back over the years as his fortunes changed in America, and then met his girlfriend who ran the local laundry. He's a lively raconteur and has become a vivid fixture in the village.

You see this here, he says pointing to a house, this is where Antonio (all names changed to protect identities) lives. Antonio’s wife left him and now he grows olives, you must taste his olive oil, the best in the world over there is CIAO! he leans his huge frame out of the tiny car and slaps the hand of the man selling fruit from a truck, that’s Marcello, he’s having trouble with the tax department so had to leave his villa to rot and he’s living with the daughter of .. Bon Jello! he shouts to a kid wheeling past on his bicycle, are you gonna play tennis tonight with me, that’s Giorgio, his mother is French and she ran off with the baker, now living in Milan, her husband Luciano sold me my goats because I can’t mow such steep lawns see those lawns there mine are just like that except the fken goats eat everything else as well, oh he’s back! that restaurant is run by Luigi when he wanted to renovate it and put on a third story the communale got wind of it and he had to tear it down, there’s that tree that fell on top of Maria’s house and killed her mother, what a story so Maria had to go and work in Luigi’s restaurant and now she makes the best breads in town, you must try them, specially with Antonio’s olive oil, Oh! there’s that old man, CIAO, Bon Jerimino! Ya wanna ride? he pulls up alongside a wheezing puffing octogenarian leaning heavily on his olive wood cane as he makes his way painfully up the impossible mountain road, I see this old dude every day he walks miles to visit his friends, sometimes I give him a lift come on old fella, claps his hands, hurry up, we haven’t got all day, move over we’ll put him in the back because he usually doesn’t smell too good, old man gets in, whiff follows him, old man starts shouting ..

In Italian: I went to visit my friends, but then I had to hit one of them with my stick because he was rude to me and I don’t like people when they are rude to me, every day i walk down the hill thankyou for giving me a lift, my god if you didn’t do that I would probably have died of a heart attack I used to do it when I was a young boy but now I am nearly ninety and when I got to visit my friends they weren’t there and some were there but they were eating lunch now I have to come back for lunch all the way up the hills an my heart isn’t so good and thankyou my god for giving me this lift nice legs the blonde girl has is she yours my wife used to have legs like that but my god she’s dead now you should have eaten her tagiatelle best in the village and I had to hit my friend with my cane because he was rude, who’s the redhead in the front why is she laughing until she is crying doesn’t she respect old men if she doesn’t shut up I’m going to hit her with my stick too or maybe I’ll just put my gnarled old hand on this blondie’s legs then we’ll see if my cane is still working my god thankyou for rescuing me from sudden heart attack death on this road, it’s steeper than it used to be, I used to take my goats up here, my wife made goat that all the villagers wanted to eat why is the redhead laughing so much? Let me out I’ve had enough I will walk the rest of the way ... end Italian.

F's contribution is interlaced with the hitchhiker: There you are old man, out you get, you can walk down the road now to your stone house, careful you don’t fall on your cane what a crazy old man I sometimes give him a lift his wife used to make the best goat stew we also have 37 cats which drive me crazy and eleven dogs and they sleep on the bed I don’t mind but you know it can drive you crazy CIAO BON Jeeorno! there’s RIccardo, his father owns that villa up there his second wife comes from Como, his first wife ran off with the fisherman ....and so on.

He “took” us to lunch at a crack in the mountain with views down to Bellagio where the speciality was wild boar (oh, yea, I could think of a wild boar that isn’t even Italian) rabbit, home made cheeses and the famous olive oils Fred was going on about. Th grappa flowed, he ordered more dishes that we said we didn’t want and couldn’t eat, and the grappa flowed more, and so did the wine, and platters of cheese came out, and home made honey and jams, and finally when we dragged our bursting bodies from the table, he disappeared to talk to his friend who owned the restaurant with a Thankyou For Lunch, ladies, and left me with the bill for what would otherwise be spent on a very nice Italian leather handbag, indeed. I didn’t say a word all the way down, apart from aren’t we going to be too late for Como, Dawn, if we don’t try and get the ferry now? which he ignored as he took us to the cycling museum, and the tennis club where I was swarmed by flies and deafened by kids playing pin ball machines and other kids screaming and splashing in the pool and the buzz of flies, and was almost traded to his CIAO! Bon Jeeorno! amici who sells melons in the street. Fred hasn’t learned a word of Italian, and doesn’t want to. He says his tongue just can’t get around the words. His girlfriend is learning English ... slowly.

The Hills are alive ...

2011-06-22T22:29:00.001+10:00

Umbrian time seemed to flow from one day of mellow fruitfulness to another. I’d wake in the castle, pad across the stone floor and throw upon the shutters to look onto the forests below where hunting dogs yapped, excited at the fact they’d found a jogger to bite: one morning a guest limped in, bandaged behind the knee. Signs in the forest warn of hunters and wild boars, but seeing the boars stuffed and trussed, processed and smoked with wide jaws and ghastly fangs in the local food shops, I wonder why people would want to eat them.

Castello della Oscano

The fields stretched in patchwork colours over the hills and far away: laborers toiled their vines and orchards, crops turned yellow and others became green and every day more sunflowers prepared to burst onto the landscape in July. Silky grey groves of olives dropped their bounty with abandon to produce some of the best extra virgin olive oil I have ever tasted .... Yumbria ... dipped into the local breads and sprinkled with rock salt and peppers.

Just me and my Vespa

Wandering around the ancient towns among the quiet of the cobbled, narrow lanes, thankfully the 21st century seemed very far away - if only I could ignore the shoe shops! But looking closer into tiny arcades and there’d still be a cobbler, or tailor, a old man watching the world from his balconette, another tending their tomatoes in their window boxes.

We drove to several hill towns over the few days, each with its own personality and style. We were happily lost in Montepulchiano for a few hours, when we went one way and Virgilio went another, but it gave us a chance to see streets off the regular track beaten to death by tourists. Food tasting is everywhere: when peckish, we’d sip a glass of wine, sample the pomodoro or provolone, discern the difference in flavour, density and colour of the local olive oils.

The town is named after the Mount of Publicianus, and Etruscan ruins prove that a settlement was already in existence in the 4th - 3rd centuries BC. Little seems to have changed since then, when it was the seat of a garrison guarding the main roads of the area. Instead of soldiers throwing boiling oil on suspects, the bases of the buildings are crammed with shops selling shoes, bags, belts, and food.

In typical Italian style, we spent several hours at the regionally iconic Fontanella restaurant at Campello del Clitunno, where no matter our protests of being close to bursting, the food just kept on coming .. and coming ... and coming - varieties of meats and cheeses, home made tagliatelle with truffle and a typical regional tomato sauce. We walked off our meal down a snaking road to get closer to the fortified town, where few things stirred, barely even a ghost or old lady.

The sunny town of Cortona was built 273 years after the great flood, and is supposed to be where Noah entered the Valdichiana via the Tiber and Paglia rivers, preferring it to anywhere else is Italy because it was so fertile. He lived here for thirty years. Now it’s more famous as the setting for Frances Mayes Under the Tuscan Sun, and the fountain that was built for the movie was later removed, because it wasn’t part of the original architecture. Cortona is larger, and was obviously far wealthier than some of the other towns because the streets are wider, the churches larger and the fortifications even more impressive. A wedding was in full swing in the cobbled square when we arrived, but that didn’t deter one of the guests who wore her killer shoes to match her fabulous frou frou red dress, and carried a pair of brown Birkenstocks which she changed into as soon as she could.

San Gimignano

Just as important as the hill towns were the stops at shoe and cashmere outlets we nagged Virgilio to take us to. But we spent so much time buying buying purple and orange and olive twin sets, that feel like silk, but are warm as wool and light up a room, that we arrived in Corciano too late for our tour. Archeologists have found the earliest traces of human presence here, in fragments of flint tools on blades, and pieces of vases dating to Neolithic times that have turned into dough. We arrived as the sun was setting, and the only activity over the din of pealing bells were the locals who’d pulled their chairs outside the front doors into the squares, under the clocks and near the fountains to chat about the day.

The boot of the Mercedes was stacked with shoes and cashmere, the camera with hundreds of photos. Italy couldn’t be better. That night we stopped for pizza on the way back to the Oscano, preferring to sit on the terrace than eat formally in the the grand dining room - after our enormous lunch - with its painted ceilings and five course menu. The slipping sun slowly darkened the sky as we sipped a local Chianti, and ate the local pizza with skinny crispy crust, lightly basted with melted cheese and a light topping of salami, artichoke and anchovies. The pizza outlet was crowded with irate customers trying to get their pizzas home before they cooled, thinking that shouting and gear grinding would help. Some customers staggered out under six boxes, but we were more restrained considering our long lunch, and enjoyed the languid night only only when the mosquitoes (zanzare) decided to join us.

San Gimignano

One of the most impressive hill towns is San Gimignano, built by the rich residents who always tried to out do each other with the height of their stone work. I visited it a few times with my Latin lover A, many years ago. He wore a cheeky red hat and an enormous cream cashmere shawl, and he kissed me passionately in one of the medieval towers, then shouted down to the people in the square that he loved me. Ah, these Latins. I love their outpourings of passion, so much more exciting that the Australian version: “are you done yet?”

The gelato shop is one of the busiest in the region, its windows plastered with photos of its owner draping his arms across the shoulders of famous people, gelato cones in sticky hand. I sat in the sun at the base of the fountain, eating my pistachio gelato surrounded by tourists and wondering what it must have been like, 900 years ago, living in this city where everyone was so terrified of being invaded they had to protect themselves with impenetrable walls, and tall towers from which they could fire and shoot. Daily activity was around the well, but in those days people also feared water because they knew it could bring disease. People drink water from plastic bottles the world over now, but we filled ours from the many fountains and streams every day.

San Gimignano

Needing a loo stop, I followed signs to a public toilet, a concrete block near an olive orchard. I circled it twice, unable to find the door, touching the walls like a blind person unable to find the secret code to open. There was a machine that looked like those in parking garages, where you insert your card and it takes your money and gives you back your car. I stuck in my lire. A green light flashed and things grunted as I waited for a coupon - or something. I pressed the red cancel button, but I didn’t get a refund. When I pressed the green button, an enormous metal door, the width and height of the concrete block, began grinding open. Like Lara Croft in Tomb Raiders, I peered in nervously, one foot still outside on the grass. Inside this stinking tomb was a frighteningly stained stainless steel toilet, its floor scattered with dead insects in a scene from one of Harrison Ford’s movies. Lights flashed (in Italian) “automatic cleaning in progress - please wait”. The door began to grind closed, supposedly with me behind it, trapped forever in one of my worse recurring nightmares. With a bursting bladder intact, I leapt out with seconds to spare before the door sealed, terrified that if there was a power failure of any sort, I’d be trapped in this stinking, pitch dark tomb, unable to find any buttons, just a pile of rotting bones when I was finally - if ever - found. Later I begged the use of a loo in a pasticceria, and all it cost me was a bottle of water.

There was a wedding at the Castello while we were there. Ivy arches had been set up across the paths, red and white flowers were planted overnight, tables spread with fabulous food, the string quartet played near rose bushes. The English bride arrived in a horse drawn carriage, the groom wore a Valentino embossed silk jacket. Her family wore Birkenstocks, his wore Armani. Her mother wore a purple Royal Wedding hat and shoes without stockings, his parents wore Haute Couture and back fishtale gowns with kiler shoes. We stood upstairs deciding which side of the family the guests came from. When the ceremony was over, the happy couple climbed into their horse drawn coach for a celebratory lap around the grounds. The horses set off at a sensible trot, but when they reached the ivy arch, they whinnied, pulled at the reins, yanked their heads away and to the delight of us watching upstairs, and the shock of the guests, the horses bolted down the same stairs that Hitler went up with his car during the war, dragging the coach and the terrified horseman and stunned married couple behind him, and tore off back to to the stables at the speed of a highwayman.

Before any more harm could come to the couple, the photographer took them off into the forest for photographs. The bride struck elegant poses in her long silky gown, lit by a pale Italian light on her pale English skin so that she glowed nymph-like in the trees. The photographer, a very short stocky man made clumsy by his cluster of cameras around his neck, manouvered the bride for the best light. Dawn and I were watching them from behind a tree as we just weren’t properly dressed to be blend in the wedding guests.

Gubbio

The photographer tried to explain to the bride that he wanted her to lean against the groom and look up at him, with her head on his shoulder. To explain further the photographer waddled up to the groom, and put his head on what should have been his shoulder, but the groom was tall and the photographer was chest height. As he leaned against the groom, the ground started sliding. So did the photographer, down and down and down, his feet splayed out backwards in the mud behind him, until his nose was touching the groom’s groin. The photographer grabbed the groom’s legs to stop himself from sliding further, the groom held onto the tree trunk, the bride rushed up to the groom to protect him from an unknown fate, the photographer re-erected himself and dusted off the dirt from his cameras and the hubris from his face, and resumed shooting as if nothing had happened. Dawn and I were so completely hysterical with laughter by this time that we were holding onto each other and our sides, and had to flee our hiding tree to recover.

Sienna

In Sienna, place of the palio, much wind, plenty of postcards and wonderful restaurants, I had a confirmation call with Giorgio that my apartment is arranged; that he and Sylvia are looking forward to my return. Until now, I’d been a little worried that it was a knee jerk invitation - but Dawn continually assured me that this is the way things are done in Italy. A promise is a promise, and to have asked for confirmation of any sort would insult. I felt so relieved, so happy, with so much to look forward to. I skipped through the town, and when Virgilio and I were leaning against an ancient pillar while Dawn was getting a macchiato, he told me that I am a flower, a sunflower - a golden face with a dark centre. I asked him what he was - I am a tree! he said. What kind, I asked. ANOAK he replied, puffing himself up to twice his very decent size. He asked if I would come and visit him from Venice, and was aghast when I told him I’d go to the Venetian School for Stranieri, as I’d get a terrible Venetian accent. He asked if he could paint me. I asked if he was an artiste. For you, he said, I am an artiste. When we left Umbria, he gave me an apron of a map of Italy. You like cooking? he asked. For you, I thought, I’ll like cooking even more.

Gubbio

The last town I visited was Gubbio, famous for the insanely spectacular candle race from the main square to the church on the top of the hill, where thousands of men take turns running with 10 metre high candles on top of balance their saints. The idea is to get the candle to the church without dropping it or losing its balance - both of which have points deducted. Groups of twenty or more men at a time run with a sort of bier on which the candle is balanced, in a relay race where other men rush in at strategic points to take over before anyone can have a heart attack. The town is distinctly medieval with beautifully maintained 14th and 15th century houses toppling onto each other in the narrow cobbled lanes. We rode the cablecar to the top of the town for a birds eye view of the amphitheatre and colonnades, squares and churches, and wandered down the Sunday deserted streets. Walls were were plastered with posters of those who’d died in the past few days, with photos and their dates of birth and death, austerely designed with Catholic crosses on black and white - quite an antidote from the adjacent artistic posters advertising dance, music, opera or art.

I left Umbria heavy with gorgeous knitwear and sexy shoes, ignoring the fact that I'd have to lug my wardrobe on and off trains before our next stop. But I didn't care - this warm travelling woman was a far different spectacle from the ghost that arrived in Nepal months before.

All the World's a Stage

2011-06-22T22:21:00.001+10:00

And the Italians all actors ... from their astoundingly beautiful medieval and Etruscan towns, their forbidding fortifying turrets, their villages that seem to tumble down mountainsides .. to their shiny cars, shoes, handbags, shop windows and flower boxes. Every time I look at another aspect of Italy's landscape, I understand why the Italians are such artists - of music, paintings, fashion, design, architecture, textiles, sculpture.

You can't help being surrounded by the most breathtaking beauty everywhere. Every aspect of Italian life makes you want to rush out and create. Or make yourself more presentable ... if you don't it seems you don't want to respect the trouble that other people have gone to, to make themselves as beautiful as their landscape. Every purchase is an offering; every church a true gift from a god; every stone carefully chosen and laid by a gentle, talented hand. Meals are laboured over with love, and savoured with delight. Gardens tended as if they were made on the first day of earth.

A piece of cheese is wrapped like a sacred offering. Salami is trussed with herbs and special strings. Nougat is packed in decorative tins you want to keep forever. Chocolate wrappers should be framed as objects d'art. Wine bottles wrapped in raffia deserve to be preserved forever, as a memento of good times shared. Grappa, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, limoncello, held to the light are luminous; a simple mushroom is a terrestrial landscape, but truffles - oh! truffles! Treated as if they are nuggets of gold, laid out on trays to be drooled over and negotiated with deep respect, carried home like trophies and savoured slowly, admired aromatically and digested with dignity. Yep, you have to hand it - well, everything - to the Italians.

A CASTLE FOR A PRINCIPESSA

2011-06-10T07:43:00.003+10:00

Castello Della Oscano, view under arch to Villa Ada wing, where I sleep.

I HAVE WOKEN THIS MORNING IN A CASTLE. A soft mist wraps around the ancient parapets and rain drips from the forest of trees below my shuttered, tall window, from where, on a clear day, I can see stone houses with weathered terracotta rooftiles that cling to the hills like barnacles. The statues in the vast garden that tumbles down the hills are mossy and worn, their feet sunk into centuries of Umbrian soil. I'm surrounded by the drama and duels, and magic and mystery, in the green heart of Italy.

Not Dello Oscano ...

Clouds of white voile curtains flutter in the soft breezes and I stretch out across my enormous bed, languid and happy, still fairly delirious that I am in a country that feeds the senses which such abandon, without pause. I'm sleeping the sleep of the just, the chaste, and the blessed. Every day now I am molto bello - people are commenting that I am serene, that I am passionate, that I am happy. I love Italy and everything about it so much that I feel I'd like to live here as long as I can and I'm trying to soak up the language as much as I can. I was so happy that I told Virgilia that I was fragole. Strawberries. At least I'm good value for their euro!

Garden at Castello Dello Oscano

Castello dello Oscano www.oscano.it was built in the 14th century. There are grand drawing rooms, and sweeping staircases and stone terraces and intimate libraries containing crumbling centuries old books for perusing when the lure of countryside has swamped me momentarily. Then, I can sit at a frail old table, covered in hand stitched Italian cotton, and wonder at the intrigues that went on in this castle. It's survived major world wars, earthquakes, Italian rain, shine, hail, snow, heat and dust; family dramas, political upheavals and shifting stones. As I walk through the halls and softly frescoed rooms, enjoying the subtle Italian light drooping into the windows I'm tempted to whisper softly so as not to disturb the ghosts. I am silenced by the secrets the castle contains, yet it's warm and beautiful and elegant.

Splashing around the new pool the first day, surrounded by groves of olive terraces and misty hills as far as I could see, a guest approached me and asked what I thought of the castle. He thought it was rather "primitive". Primitive? It's almost 700 years old! The only thing that creaks around here would be floors, beautiful inlaid parquetry that's been trodden on by the aristocracy and the gentrified; or perhaps his expectation that something of this age and accompanying history should look like a Sofitel. Was it safe to eat here? Safe? Over the past few nights we've dined under frescoes, had our Umbrian wines in sand etched antique glasses, been elegantly served lightly scorched salmon with chicory and blackberries, or rabbit with an aromatic truffle puree, angus beef soft as the morning mists, pheasant, local cheeses, pates, honey, homemade pasta. Was it safe to eat here? No, Sir, not with you around, expecting Mackers. No wonder your wife looked so miserable. She wanted what we were having - fabulous food, in good company, in a fascinating place. Primitive? I've had the best wi-fi connection since I've been in Italy! If you don't like the sound of cobbles under your feet, doves, deer crossing your path and urns, go back home you grumpy, unappreciative sod!

Moi at Montepulchiano

Two handsome, elegant young men, enjoying breakfast of rich cakes, strong coffee and proscuitto and melon, in the rays of soft light one morning, told us they'd driven from Belgium, across Italy. They were enjoying the gardens, the light, the food, staying in beautiful historical places. I expected them to languidly brush their thick dark locks off their forehead as they lay on a picnic blanket in a field of poppies, clad in white linen, reading Keats to each other. Italy is where Keats died, and where he wrote his most famous poem - Ode to a Grecian urn. He loved Italy because he sought beauty in words and the art and myths of the ancients. No matter how old anything is in Italy, I wouldn't dare call it primitive! It's far too sophisticated and exquisite. The man is a donkey.

The Castle is about twenty minutes drive from Perugia, so old and exquisite, too; enormous fortified castles built with engineering feats that would challenge the computerised age still guard the town. We walked along a Roman aquaduct in a soft rain, wondering how these were built, when buildings that have gone up this century are already crumbling. The ancient towns hang like necklaces around their hills, looking across to each other, challenging each other to see who can have the highest tower.

Spello

The countryside is so beautiful, I understand why the Italians would rather paint, plant and make love and music than conduct successful wars. Nobody in their right mind who lives in a country like this would want to bring guns or war into it. Food, love, the valleys, the skies, style and colour, the humanities and values are the pulse of Italians. Virgilio, our driver, spends his time waiting for us to return to his black Mercedes listening to Rigoletto and La Traviata, followed by passionate discussions about who is the best tenor or soprano. Occasionally he'll get out of the car and lean against it, smoking a Camel, while philosophing about art or literature. Or he'll tell us the best way to make cherry jam, using the cherries plucked from his garden. In a restaurant he'll explain how to make the cheeses, or why the bread is so crusty.

Ask him when is the best time to phone someone, and he'll pause, and look at me as if I'm mad, and reply, "When you want to talk to them, of course! Why would you call them if you didn't want to talk to them? You can call your doctor at 3am, but you don't call anyone before 9.30 in the morning to tell them about your new shoes. If you call them at dinner time, it must be about something very important to disturb them. Otherwise, you can call until midnight. If you are a mother, you can call your son anytime. Wherever you are, the mothers are calling their sons. Can I put the pasta on now? In the bank, in the car, the sons are calling their mothers. When I ask him what he's having for dinner, he looks at me as if I'm mad, again, and says he'll call his wife and ask her. We point to the vines, and he's waxes lyrical about the various ways of growing grapes, for the best quality.

Flower time in Spello

Over the few days here we drive to the hill towns; to Spello, Montepulchiano, Torgiano, Cortona; each is so different, from the width of the streets to the type of stones, to the heights of the towers and the flowers in the windowboxes. Spello was having its annual flower fest, and every windowbox was bursting with spring, and the smell of jasmine and wisteria was intoxicating. Churches smell of wax and frankinsense and the are dark, sacred places built for worship tens of centuries ago. A priest sits in a confession box with his green light on, and I realise that he's really like phone a friend when in trouble . ... unh, unh huh don't worry he'll forget about it all in the morning. Many of the frescoes are intact, and many others are attempting to be restored; and every time I'm agog at the engineering feats of the builders of those times. We visited a tarturo/truffle factory where the owner, Alfonso Fortunato, gave us shaved truffles and semolina as a gift, just because I took photos of his divine, earthy smelling truffles. I'm now addicted to them .. they smell like .. earth, and rain and mud and sex! But I still don't understand how man could have decided to make money - and such a lot of it - out of something that looks like a spiky chestnut covered in mud, smells like all of the above, has to be sniffed out of the ground by a dog, kept refrigerated, shaved, boiled, squashed and then spread on toast.

But mamma mia, how multo multo belissimo! These Italians know how to live. In the past few days I've eaten tartufo like it's going out of fashion, I've bought some blue leather shoes, I am the very proud warm owner of two cashmere twin sets (do not say a word about nonnos and bobbas and grannies - they look and feel divine and one is orange and the other deep purple and also do not make a comment about those being the colours of frustration!!!). I've eaten cherries till I'm about to burst, amazing cheeses, raddicchio, I even had a coffee that it was so bitter I though my nails would curl. If I could drink the wines I would, but I want to live long enough to return here as quickly as I can. I only have 8 days left of my journey phase one ... thank goodness I have plans to return to Italy or I would be a very unhappy principessa indeed .... only a few more sleeps in this castle then off somewhere just as wonderful ....

Truffles/tartufo of high quality at Alfonso Fortunata

Field of dreams

Field of poppies

These shoes were made for walkin ...

2011-06-07T03:05:00.000+10:00

I’ve have become a shoe stalker, a foot fetishist. Dawn is the spotter, and I keep a keen eye for carabinieri thinking I'm a freak.

If the shoe fits ....

I’ve been taking photos of shoes. I’ve never seen shoes like this in my life. They are the highest and sharpest and sexiest things on earth. They carry their owner to her destination, no matter the pain. Watching feet in these shoes, you expect pools of blood under the soles. You expect the toenails to turn black, the ankles to be in casts. A look of extreme agony on their perfect faces. You expect the owners to trip, or stumble, or tremble. But no, these shoe wearers could happily audition for tight rope walking between hot air balloons.

You can always spot a tourist. First, because they are wearing comfortable shoes, and staring with horror at the Venetian form of footwear. Second, because the Venetians wouldn’t even look at a shoe that wasn’t a Magli, or Cavelli, or Choo and wasn’t the most expensive accessory in a woman’s wardrobe.

The first point of interest for a Venetian is always someone’s shoes. There are more shoe shops here than gondoliers. I would imagine that women could walk naked in the lanes and be accepted if their shoes made the grade. There is no consideration for bone damage, spinal injuries, or shape of leg. The higher the better. Wedges, points, straps, glitter, diamante, diamonds; coloured soles, black soles, suede, and always, always polished to a mirror shine or buffed to velvet. And they’ve developed a walk to go with it - a sort of swing, and a catwalk stride and a knowledge of the cobbled terrain.

Mirella was markedly distressed when I tried to wear my croc thongs on the bus as I’d be standing, even though I had a new pair of shoes she’d approved in my new bag she’d approved. Bunions? So? Neuroma? Ha! You think you’re the only one? Callouses? When your feet bleed I will take your complaints seriously - even then, keep quiet until you get home and soak them in Alka Seltzer, but just don’t tell anyone. This all said under her discrete breath, but the Mamma Mia gave away her sentiments about my footwear.

On various evenings when I’ve returned home in agony after bus strikes, long waits and circumnavigating the globe like Marco Polo trying to find one little street not market on the map, I’ve tried to explain my distress. Translated, I’ve told Mirella that my feet were rocks, depressed, melodramatic, bread, tragic, crying, unhappy and dead. Incidentally, I’ve also tried to dry myself with a baby, needed more cheese for my piano, put shoes around my neck and a scarf on my praying feet, asked her to open the first, tried to trundle the tram with her shopping back home, asked where I could hang my dripping lavender, had my hat cut and folded my hair in my bag.

Mirella took me firmly by my arm and escorted me into a shoe shop the way she would have taken her son to the orthodontist. Fix this, she commanded, shuddering as she pointed to my slush puppies, worn since Nepal, and quite the worse for wear. The shoe assistant had to restrain herself from finding some rubber gloves, and a face mask, and brought out a succession of dangerous, tarty, inadequate, reckless shoes so that I could at least do the passegiata with Mirella later that day. The passegiata is what is sounds like - ostensibly a social walk with friends, but it’s a dance of display of fashion, endurance and style.

Each shoe that I rejected elicited another sniff of derision from both Mirella and the assistant, although they were both trying desperately to be firstly sympathetic to my tortured pedicles, then decided to revamp my pedestrian affiliations with due haste. I love Mirella, she's wonderful and warm, and I've adopted her as my auntie as well, and we've had the best of laughs this week over my language manglings. But she would not get on that bus with me unless my feet were suitably attired.

I had the new dress, the hat, the matching sunglasses. I had to have sandals to match the lot, and they both relaxed with mutual looks of relief when I finally managed to find a pair that didn't give me a thrombosis.

But to their horror, I put them in my bag. How, I reasoned, could I be expected to spend the whole day wearing NEW shoes? How could you not? was the astounded response. Do you think we wear Old Shoes ANYWHERE?

In Venice, I bought a pair of beautiful Red Leather Shoes. I wore them immediately. I had redeemed my relationship with Mirella. She took me by the arm and we walked happily through Venice for the rest of the day.

When Giorgio met us at the bridge, the first thing he said was "AH! Bella Rossa Scarpe!" Great red shoes!

WATCH OUT FOR FALLING ANGELS

2011-06-07T02:08:00.003+10:00

WATCH OUT FOR FALLING ANGELS : a sign posted outside the Santa Maria della Salute Church in Venice, in the early 1970’s before the restoration of its marble angels.

I was about to write that in the week I’ve been here, I haven’t been into an art gallery, or a church, or heard a music recital. That I haven’t done a passeggiata - evening walks with a loved one, dressed to the nines in killer shoes. That I haven’t eaten enough Venetian food or walked enough bridges although I have walked here until my feet have cried and become depressed and melancholy. I haven’t spent enough time in St Marks Square or fed a pigeon in a piazza, and I haven’t had time to smell the roses or pick jasmine. That my days here are coming to an end and I haven’t had a gondola ride - or an Italian kiss! I’m a bit panicky that Venice hasn’t even touched my skin as lightly as a zanzare, (mosquito) or a floating mist.

But Venice is an art gallery. It is a church. There is music everywhere, in every stone, at every corner, in the look of rapture on everyone’s face. It’s a city to be loved, passionately. I can never, ever have enough of Venice, no matter how much time I spend here.

Something wonderful has happened. I am going to return. Soon.

Giorgio and Sylvia

Giorgio, introduced in the previous blog as the owner of a shop selling Venetian beads, and his gorgeous French wife Sylvia, arranged to meet Dawn at I at Ponte Nuovo for a lunch trip to Murano. We’d walked for miles and miles through the labyrinths of Venice, past the usual spots to the less popular, almost deserted, crumbling parts where the Chinese hadn’t yet invaded with their knock off Venetian masks and handbags, where locals clustered around tables criticizing the government and everyone’s shoes. We’d asked directions, over and over, and everyone told the same vague story - it’s only cinque minute away. It took almost an hour to reach the port, going down several blind alleys heralded by bells, but Giorgio and Sylvia were there on time, in their mustard and white linen suits and scarves and cravats. We were greeted with hearty double kisses and hugs, as if we’d known them forever, and boarded the vaporetto for Murano, the island where all Venice’s glass is made.

Waiting for vaporetto after new life door opens, Murano

The factories used to be on Venice, but the furnaces caused so many fires, the factories were moved to the island of Murano. They’ve been the source of all the Venetian beads across the trade routes, from the mid 1800’s, and the old ones are highly collectible, expensive and becoming less available. The modern beads are also exquisite miniature works of art, sought the world over.

The sea was choppy, the vaporetto bursting with people facing into the breezes, being stung by salt. Murano was sunny, warm, welcoming. We walked through the back streets, past magnificent churches, and waterfalls of bougainvillea, to lunch at our hosts’ favourite restaurant under a canopy of blossoming trees.

Giorgio, moi and Sylvia in Murano

We talked beads. We talked lives, and intersections and pathways and religious experiences. What led me here? How did I get involved with beads? Why trade beads? What lay ahead for me? They asked me if I’d like to live in Venice. Si! Would I like to do some work for them? Si! Would I like to have an apartment where I can work at a big table, to sell my creations here in Venice? Si. Si! They think I should have a shop. MMHmmm.. Non cuerto. But they say that with my personality I can sell anything. I would make a lot of money. Hmmhnmn. Still non cuerto. (Vendere grande fumare, grande miserere, troppo matrimoniale) (shop very big drama last time many cryings)

Mirella and moi looking Italian

Okay, how about if they give me access to an apartment for however long I want, starting September, and I learn all about Murano glass, and the factories and the history of Venetian beads, and spend my time creating my masterpieces? SI!! There are no other shops in Venice, that good quality pieces with antique beads. Allore! Would I like to come tomorrow and see the apartment so that I can decide for sure? Si! Si! SI!

But I don’t need to decide. I have decided. Si. Si. Si. I think my face is going to burst with excitement and the sun and the blossoms, and bells, and the campari, and fried sardines an al dente spaghetti vongole and the handsome man at a neighbouring table who can’t take his eyes off my heaving cleavage clearly visible within my new Chinese/Italian linen dress, and my fake leopard skin ray ban sunglasses in 1950’s style, and my huge straw hat in a fashionable mushroom colour and the glittering stars in my eyes which are really tears of euphoria.

Sylvia looks at me, touches my hands, and asks if I am religious. Non! But I believe in pathways. But you have a religious expression on your face, she smiles. I try to explain about sliding doors and slamming doors and opening doors and doorless doors. And she says, you must come to Venice. I will show you the apartment tomorrow. She kisses me on both cheeks, and takes the next vaporetto Venice as the sun deepens and the colours of this Turner pallette intensify.

Snr Morelli, and moi looking happiest in years

1800's Venetian trade beads - Chevrons

Lunch finishes around 4.30. We go to the most famous glass factory of Murano, Encolo Morelli, established in the mid 1800’s, whose beads have gone world wide, who made the first of the millifiori that are now highly coveted Venetian collectibles. We’re introduced to his descendent, who shows us his private collection of antique beads; his sample cards, and he tells us about them. He inscribes a book of the biography of his family “a Savanna” .. and signs it. I Morelli. I buy some of his special collection - really unique contemporary glass beads that Giorgio wants me to incorporate with the old beads.

We kiss and hug farewell on the vaporetto - Giorgio returns to Venice and Dawn and I swing on to Burano, home of the lace makers, where once upon a time I spent a delirious day amongst the coloured houses, bordering the canals and painted vividly so that when the fishermen returned from their travels, they could recognise their homes before they landed.

Aurora/Dawn in Burano

Subject of many artworks

Leaning spire of Burano

Moi, in transition!

One of many of Burano's colourful canals

We’re quite exhausted by this time and practically drag ourselves around, after getting some religious sustenance at the church with the dangerously leaning spire, and find the most famous restaurant on Burano so that I can treat Dawn to my long promised meal as celebration, but they’re closed. Several large noisy Italian men, owners or co-owners or friends of owners, dressed in the Burano equivalent of thongs and singlets, do a mock kangaroo impersonation when, in answer to their question, realise we’re Australian. Inside, those who run the restaurant were having a meal, so we weren’t even able to be served water. I walked around catching the changing light on the walls and being highly emotional at the change in direction of my journey, not yet set in stone.

Mirella and moi, celebrating in Venice

Mirella came with us the next morning into Venice because she didn’t believe our story about chance meetings and serendipity and path followings. I showed Giorgio and Sylvia some of the antique Turkoman pieces I’d bought on my last Istanbul day and they loved them, convinced that Venice has nothing like this, that I should incorporate them with Venetian beads, that I had a very good eye, and would I like to see the apartment subito? Si!

This close to canal

I loved it immediately. It’s not even a hundred metres from Giorgio’s shop. Dead centre near Piazza san Paulo, with a pasticceria on the corner, a canal at the end, the lane so narrow that you can touch both sides of the ancient stones at once. A heavy green door opens to a small entry hall, to the left of which is an ancient marble staircase with a black wrought iron rail; then there’s a landing off which is “my” apartment. There’s a huge bedroom with two beds and a giant cupboard for all my new shoes and handbags. A large work room with diffused light and many shelves, and views onto a fig tree, which I am sure will deliver its figs onto the windowsill when they’re ready. The cucina is modern and equipped, I’ll be within cooee of the church bells. The bagna has a bidet, toilet, bath and shower, marble floor and new taps.

Entrada with Dawn, Sylvia and Mirella

Do I like it? Si, in seventeen languages. I am almost levitating. Will I return to Venice? Si! When? First week of September! I am feeling dizzy and light headed. My head is reeling with how to get Venetian beads from Morocco back to Venice as Venice seems to have run out of the old collectibles. I’ll be able to cook. I’ll go to Italian school. Maybe I can run workshops there while I’m there. But wait a minute! I won the cruise in October! I’ll have to return to do the cruise! Then it will be November and getting chilly. That’s okay, I can return when I want to.

The via where I will live

I feel short of breath. I see stars. I am having a Stendahl moment. I am at the fulcrum of my life doing an enormous change. I will not worry about how, or how long, or what if, or being alone, or not loved. Ever again.

I am returning to Venice, to work under the guidance of a master. And adopted by his beautiful French wife.

In less than three months.

To live in an apartment.

To create at the source, surrounded by everything I wasn’t ready to leave here. I feel a deep sense of awe and amazement.

Can't open a brolly in my lane!

View of fig tree from window

Venice, alive alive OH!

2011-06-06T23:29:00.003+10:00

My horrorscope today:

You could have more bounce to your step today, as if a lightness of being has entered your body and activated your cells all the way down to the tips of your toes. However, your head is also affected as the changing clouds move quickly across your mental landscape. Luckily, Mercury shifts into your 9th House of Future Vision, encouraging you to reach further than usual. Give yourself permission to fantasize about what's ahead without worrying about whether or not it's actually possible.

It’s morning. The sky is pink, in the distance church bells peal. The sweet aroma of jasmine fills my room. The floors of the apartment where I’m staying are mottled grey marble. Oil paintings of religious subjects are hung above softly aged inlaid walnut tables. I can hear doves cooing, and a pot boiling in the cucina, and in the apartment below, someone is preparing risotto - I can smell the aromas.

I’ve been to Venice several times. I think it’s one of the most beautiful, delicate, fragile, exquisite cities in the world. It’s ethereral. It’s vulnerable. Seeing Venice for the first time is like lifting a silky veil to reveal mysteries of light and shadow. I spent very happy weeks here many years ago, on my own. I wandered down the damp, mossy calle (laneways) where the light hardly dared venture, became happily lost, found myself in a painted basilica where an opera was in performance. I wrote copious journals of my delight in this city, about the operas I attended alone, the churches I meditated in, about a lone lunch on Burano, an adjacent island. I lamented I was waiting for a special occasion and a special person to do a gondala ride with. But my then partner “lost” my journal, believing I was having an affair. He didn’t realise it was Venice.

And now I’m back. Every moment of the day I think I’m going to faint. I’m having dizzy, delirious spells, and moments of total visual abandon where I am deeply lost in the elusive beauty of Venice. I walk up a bridge to be confronted with watery palettes of the most subtle of colours. I look up to the toppling 16thc buildings with their exquisite stonework and delicate architecture or look across to a laconic gondolier steering his boat by pushing his leg up against a well-worn wall. I look down at the softly endented cobbles where the killer shoes of the immaculate Venetians click-click by, and I want to sit down on the steps and just cry.

Once I’d regained my breath and composure on the Istanbul Venice flight, I talked to an Italian woman who’d just spent some time in Bodrum, Turkey. I told her I’d ditched my known life and had been travelling for four months. She told me I was brave, and asked how I managed to do it, and why I was doing it. She said she wanted to do the same, one day, but what of the future, after she’d ditched her known life? I told her a new life would come to her. That once you start travelling, all the pain of the past life assumes less and less relevance, as you learn to realise how strong you really are, and how little you need the person who brought your previous life to a shocking halt. I told her that I was scheduled to return to Australia that week, and because I now had nobody to return to, decided to return to Venice.

I’ve never flown into Venice before. I’ve sailed in, on a yacht, at daybreak, with my hand over my mouth as the Grand Canal opened its breathtaking vista for me. Past the palaces and villas with their typical Doge architecture, the delicate curling mists, the slightly stinky water sometimes clotted with seaweed, the speeding vaporettos that take charge of the waterways as they transport everybody everywhere. Arriving my sea is how a Venice landing was always done, which is why it is, with Istanbul, such a strategic waterway.

Flying in over this mythical city was extraordinary. Across the sea, seen from the skies, a small lip of land approaches, and then solid ground is broken up into thousands of tiny islands, like a jigsaw puzzle clotted with seaweed; many once islands are now slightly submerged. The area is an enormous swamp, and you have to wonder why people chose this because sure as nuts their boats, having travelled so far, would have become entangled in the weeds. The islands are like a maze leading you to the main prize - Venice, where the bronze domes of the churches, the spires, and the dense patchwork of terracotta tiles are first seen.

From the air Venice looks like an enormous crust on the islands, and closer I could see small of dark lines between the rooftops - the narrow lanes between the villas, and toppling chimneys, and then bridges of stone, and bridges of iron, and bridges of bricks, and of wood, and shadows and light, and I landed in this city that doesn’t reveal its secrets very easily.

It’s said that the rhythm is Venice is like breathing and is measured by the tides, unlike other cities where it’s measured by the wheel. Venetians see bridges not as an obstacle - another set of steps to get from one place to another, but an object of transition, to be got over slowly, as part of the rhythm. Bridges are links between two parts of the theatre of Venice, changes of scenery from one reality to another. With all the reflections bouncing off water and windows and glass, what is Venice’s truth?

I understand all this perfectly. What now, for me?

I’m here at the invitation of Dawn, with whom I stayed in Perth, and who nursed my very fresh wounds at the beginning of the year. Two weeks ago, she told me she was going to be in Italy for a month, beginning in Venice. Would I come? Would I come! I called my London travel agent for one leg, I called my Sydney travel agent for the next, and I confirmed with Dawn. I ditched all my winter clothes, rushed around Istanbul getting my last fix of the city and bought a few packets of Turkish Delight and some olive oil soap as gifts. Dawn’s a fabulous traveller and we’ve been to Italy together before. She speaks fluent Italian and doesn’t mind being my linguistic life raft. I’m taking her with me on the cruise to Vanuatu.

After a suitably Italian airport re-acquaintance that involved shrieks, hugs, kisses on both cheeks, and more shrieks and hugs, we caught a bus from Marco Polo aeroporto, and trundled my luggage over cobbles past the glossy shops and through a blossomy park to the apartment of Dawn’s adopted aunt, Mirella.

Mirella, who is 84, doesn’t speak English. I speak two bad words of Italian, and each of them are impolite ways of saying go away. Mirella lives in Mestre, a twenty minute bus ride out of Venice, a suburban flat area of apartments, laden trees and beautiful shops. Mangare - to eat- is a very important part of the culture. Mirella’s tiny fridge bursts at the seams with fennel, apricots, cherries, formaggio from many regions, pomodoro, gelati, latte, provolone, carpaccio, pane. We’re asked hours before what we’d like for pranzo or cena. But most times it’s been a plate of dark bread, cheeses, sometimes boiled beans and fennel, melazone and hilarious attempts at my learning the lingua Italiana.

The first morning we take the tram into Venice, speeding over the long bridge that joins the mainland to this strategic island. Tall dark men from Uganda and Nigeria, who have arrived on leaking vessels and now speak Italian, along with Chinese and Korean vendors, strap hang, straddling big carrybags of knock-off designer handbags nestled between their legs.

Venice approaches through a mist across mirrors of water. Hundreds of boats churn up the pale green sea. The green bronze dome of Madonna della Salute, the church built with proceeds collected by those who survived the 17c rat plague, rises above a million terracotta roof tiles. I step onto my first Venetian bridge in fifteen years, carved from marble, straddling a line of leaning villas, and my heart is pounding. The steps are worn and soft looking, with a wonderful satiny patina from centuries of hasty footsteps. Where will they lead me in the next few weeks?

Venice is a sensual overdose. It’s not a city I can just walk through, on a mission. Every corner, every square, reveals some stunning architectural secret, like a gift being opened from delicate tissue paper. It’s a city I have to walk slowly, stroll, so I can take in every step, every cobble, every dark mysterious wall, every breath and movement of its arteries.

Most shops are mini art galleries, displaying their wares with mastery. The masks lure us first, and we spend a decadent hour trying on the fabulous creations that change our personalities as we lean into them, covering ourselves with feathers and boas and glitter. It’s tempting to bring a mask back home, but I don’t have a home, and I don’t have place to keep the it, even though the one I love most is similar to that worn by Nicole Kidman in the Kubrick production of Eyes Wide Shut. I like that my face is impassive behind it, and yet again I wish that I could be here for Carnivale.

I want to be a Madame Pompadour, or Josephine, or Cat Woman, in enormous skirts and be somebody completely different, or mysterious. Dawn and I think we should start a new fashion for reading glasses - masks on sticks, but with optical lenses. But we don't buy masks, because we can't take feathers into Australia, and probably they'll be one of those souvenirs that are totally out of place in a different environment.

We wander down another calle, breathless and delighted and struck, and swallowed by the crowds coursing through the city. By accident find ourselves manoeuvered by the crowds in a shop that sells old Venetian beads. The window is laden with new and old Murano creations, religious icons, lamps, paperweights and vintage jewellery. Inside, where we move with difficulty, my bead geiger counter points me to a bowl of 18c Venetian trade beads - millifiori elbows. “They’re old Venetians”, smiles the dapper, friendly owner, who is dressed in a yellow linen jacket, a navy silk cravat and white linen pants. He introduces himself as Giorgio Mion. “They’re not easy to get any more!”. “I know,” I reply, “I collect them myself!”

We start talking about trade beads, and I identify some beauties. He pulls out the Picard Bead Museum bible, and I tell him I’ve bought beads from Ruth. He’s known both her and John for decades, he tells me. It was from him they they bought their first beads, took them back to the United states, where they sold them for a tidy profit, and then returned to him to buy more. “In those days,” he smiled, “You could buy a hundred strands at a time. Now, no.” I identify some Fishermen’s friends, some bicones, some king beads and skunks, and gooseberries, old chevrons and watermelons and, my identity suitably established, Giorgio reduces the price of the old chevrons I’ve selected.

He gifts me a piece of chevron, sliced obliquely so show the cane work, that he says he found submerged on Murano, where he lived and worked as a young boy. Then unaware of the impact of his question, Giorgio says he’d like to take us to Murano to meet some of his bead collector friends and possibly, if it’s low tide, try and find some old beads in the water. I’m stunned, excited, beside myself. He tells Dawn in Italian, which I’m beginning to understand rapido, that with a personality like mine, I should come and work in Venice as a bead trader, as I’d do very well. We take some photos to prove this magic moment was not a figment of our overworked imagination.

Dawn finds some beautiful new cane work Murano beads in his window, made now as they have been for three centuries, which I also buy because I don’t want to wake up and find this didn’t really happen. I dream of beads so often now, and of finding remarkable pieces, and when I wake they’re gone. So, giddy, we leave his shop with promises to meet up in three days, for our Murano outing.

I’m so excited I’m radiating gold. We stagger down the alleys, pinching each other, and celebrate with a bowl of pasta vongole and a bicchiere vino bianco, but our meal is cut short when we realise its almost three and we’re supposed to be back at Mestre, so that we can accompany Mirella to an operatic recital at the local old age home.

Now in most places an invitation like this would be an ordeal, a shambles of organisation, bad smells and bad music. But this is Italy. We gather some of Mirella’s friends at various bus stops - nobody drives here, of course, because it’s Venice and full of water and canals and bridges, so buses, trams and trains run everywhere every five minutes and are fast, full and efficient. We ask Mirella about one of her friends, and to identify her, say we think she’s 82. Mirella puffs herself up and says with enormous Italian indignation. 82! She’s not nearly 82! How can you say such an insulting thing! She’s much, much, younger than 82! She’s 80! She’ll be 82 in 21 months!

The residents of the home are all dressed to perfection: perfect leather shoes, matching handbags, exquisite silks and linen, immaculate hair and nails and makeup, even though they’re all octo- and nonno-genarians. The immaculate old age home, with its predominant chapel, is in a garden of roses, wisteria, oleander and frothy jasmine. Inside those who aren’t on their walking frames or in wheelchairs, sit on red velvet chairs, surrounded by beautiful Italian furniture donated by those who are now with their Maker. Expensive perfumes waft around, and Dawn and I, having given our seats to those more in need, sit on the marble steps of the main lounge room and are transported by the opera singers, while many of the inmates pay more attention to our scruffy shoes.

Perhaps many of the residents are tone deaf, and didn’t notice the excruciatingly out of tune piano, but the mezzo soprano, the contralto, and the soprano singing the most popular arias from La Boheme, La Traviata, Rigoletto; music from Verdi, Tosca, and Puccini did their very best to counteract the abomination of keys and strings by drowning it out. These photos are taken in Piazzo San Marco, as I didn't want to put the oldies on the blog!

The ancient audience yelled and clapped and shouted Bravo! Brava! Bravi!! and stamped their feet until clouds of mothballs came out of their cashmere cardigans, and if the bowls weren’t filled with artificial flowers, I am sure they would have been tossed to the singers. The very very very very elderly, attached to their drips, who’d been wheeled out of their rooms to the marble landing, peered myopically through their foggy glasses and over their gnarled fingers gripping the wrought iron balustrades. They twitched a foot here and there in time to the arias, and I could see a glimmer of cultural recognition somewhere in their foggy brains. And I thought, well, if you’re going to die here, you may as well die listening to fantastic opera than a rerun of The Diary of Anne Frank, which was what my sick mother was offered as an incentive to be moved into the Jewish old age home in Cape Town. Instead, she died under her fox fur, which was something she always wanted, besides dying under something young and handsome.

The land is so flat, and the landscape so scenic, that most people ride bicycles, even the elderly. In their straw baskets are loaves of bread, herbs, flowers; I’ve never seen a nation with such fantastic legs. It’s spring, too, and the sun sets at 9.30 with a silky golden haze that drops softly over everything - a genteel old lady covering herself up slowly for the short night ahead.

We closed the shutters in our room and were enveloped in the blackest of night, essential if you want any sleep in a city that is too gorgeous and full of itself to waste time on such a useless pastime. Children are awake until close to midnight - schools finish after lunch, and all shops close for afternoon siesta so everyone is fortified for the night.

We woke to blinding light slipping under the door and waves of jasmine floating through the windows, and set off by train for Padova, the 15c university town where Tintorelli painted stupendous frescoes, Leonardo da Vinci taught mathematics and the current students graffiti the ancient walls as a rite of passage. We lunched under dropping petals in the garden of the Ritz Hotel, surrounded by fountains, and sculptures of buxom women holding cornets of flowers, on a feast of lamb chops, grilled salmon, masses of salads, olives and a vino bianco so floral and aromatic I thought I had imbibed perfume.

I wanted a cup of tea. Tea? sniffed the waiter. He looked up through the blossoms to the impeccable blue Venetian sky. You cannot have tea. I can still see the sun! He puffed himself up with indignation, and walked away. I had to call him back. What do you want tea for? You are in Italy. You think this is the Ritz in London? He suggested a glass of champagne mixed with peaches. I asked for a half glass. He sniffed again. A half glass? A half glass is for boys who haven’t shaved yet! You are a woman! This will fill you with love in the afternoon! He poured an enormous glass of frothy champagne which went directly to my eyebrows and the backs of my knees. For the rest of the afternoon, he winked at me.

We were the guests of the owner whose father built the Ritz in the 1960‘s and who is now, with the family, buying it back from the present owners. Padova is famous for its thermal waters that come down from the volcanoes, and thousands visit every year for spa and mud treatments so the shops are bursting with swimming clothes - and the most ridiculous colletzione of bathing caps I have ever seen, as it’s compulsory to have capelli covered. There are lurex leopard skin turbans, rubber lotus flowers, pink towelling with beadwork, snakeskin spandex, black and white pedestrian stripes, bunches of rubber daisies, blue net, seaweed with hidden fish. Instead, I bought a half kilo of big fat red cherries for $4 which lasted all day, no matter how many I ate.

Dawn with Nymphs in Padova

With the sun deepening and the colours of the villas and trees intensifying, and the promenades filling up with strollers, we joined the crowds, like two grubby runaways down at heel and smelly of armpit amongst the pampermousse and pedicured. We splashed in the fountains where fabulous bronze statues reclined in the water and watched the cyclists and manicured dogs.

We chanced into a shop run by a man who also worked in a Murano factory - he showed us photos of him there as a young man, and a reference to him in one of the Venetian bead books, as proof that he wasn’t selling Chinese glass beads. I wasn’t going to buy any contemporary glass beads, but I’m here now, and the beads I collect anyway began in Venice and then Bohemia, and I must follow the path I’m on. I bought several small strands of new millifiore because I really liked them. There are a lot of rightly indignant Italians who are up in arms because the Chinese have come here in their droves and have filled the cities with knock off everything, even the Murano glass, and masks, so many of the shops have the discrete version of Chinese go home, no more 365 day Vendere! Vendere! (Sale Sale). It says instead, please support Murano Glass!

The real deal Murano

On the way back to Mirella’s apartment from the station, a silver convertible Audi circled us and once we’d crossed the tramlines, it’s owner got out of his car and intercepted us. He was early sixties, with a trembling lip and beads of nervous perspiration on his brow. He couldn’t take his eyes off Dawn’s legs. He asked if he could walk with us. Dawn said, NO NO we are not what you think, to which he replied, of course not, but I had to drive twice around the block before I could stop for you! And then, he complained, he had to find parking, so that was a good enough reason for us to let him walk alongside. He wanted to take Dawn for drinks, and Dawn wanted me to accompany her, so they made loose arrangements for another day in a bookshop where I could amuse myself amongst Italian and he could, as he kept telling her, lose himself in her eyes and smile. As he wouldn’t give his phone number and Dawn wouldn’t give hers, when the date arrived, we don’t know who stood each other up first!

It was Mirella’s 84th birthday. I had the best haircut I have had for years, not only because I haven’t had a scissors near my head for five months, but because my Scissorhands was a Tony Curtis lookalike in a very tight white shirt, bangles, chains, bracelets, and piercings, who wielded my mop like a maestro. He teased it, he fluffed it, he put it in curlers, he ran his fingers through it, and when he’d finished I looked like Natalie Wood when she was still alive. The woman sitting next to me told me that she’d changed houses, and men, but she’d never changed her hairdresser and he’d been doing her hairs since the seventies. Mirella had another application of blue, and Dawn came out more blonde and bobbed than ever.

Not Mirella! Another nonna, attending her mini garden

Mirella ordered plates of sandwiches for her party from the local pasticceria, and we staggered out of the supermarket with ten times more than we needed and trundled the trolley home over the cobbles and through the park and up the two flights of stairs.There were over a hundred different types of cheese and processed meats, breads, wines, olives pastas; cherries and apricots bought by the bushel, biscuits, cakes, savouries, salamis, and gelatis, but I was more interested in the way women dressed for the supermarket, in killer heels, world bank jewellery, bosoms exposed to navels that threatened to roll into the formaggio, fashions fit for a barmitzvah, and seriously big hair. They also wear so much makeup that they wouldn’t spoil the effect by wearing sunglasses.

Moi, in Venetian apartment

Dawn and I went into Venice to meet some of her prospective landlords for the properties she might handle. She has a business called Italy France Vacances - helping people find fabulous accommodation in Italy and France. www.italyfrancevacances.com It was a wonderful way for meto see the interiors of some of the villas, especially to see how they’ve been renovated into modern, light apartments with modern facilities, yet still keeping the magnificence of their history. We gazed onto the canals, an looked at the tops of the heads of the gondolieri, and looked up to the rooftop platforms where in the old Italian days, the women used to henna their hair so that the red wouldn’t run onto the floors of the villas. We walked for hours and hours because there was a bus strike, and finally arrived home very late, very tired and my feet very “depresssed”, as I complained to Mirella.

For Mirella’s birthday party the next day, she fussed while we prepared. The formal lounge room was officially opened. The silk flowers were shaken. Out came the family silver and crockery, the white lace curtains parted to allow the light, the antique wood and frail glasses dusted with a pair of old grannie panties and the cushions and lace doileys rearranged. There were plates of pretzels, meatballs, nuts, chips, cakes, chocolates and the local delicacy - the sandwiches, which were sponge like slices of processed bread that resembled brillo pads, filled with spinach or tuna - inedible to people with normal gastronomic desires but obviously highly palatable to those with synthetic teeth. All this was just for show, anyway, as 5pm is cocktail hour and the women don’t want to spoil their figures. Mirella’s friends arrived in puffs of perfume bearing flowers and plants, and we left them to explore Mestre and complain about our culinary input - and our shoes.

Dawn and I took a boat trip down the Brente river, to visit the villas built by Palladio, whose design was copied for the White House. We left Venice early morning in a soft rain, on an open topped barge-boat - burchiello - passing through locks, with magnificent villas straddling the river on each side. This region is where the Venetians would decamp for the summer to escape the blistering humidity and the social fervour of Venice.

Going up locks on the Brente river

We lunched at a tiny cafe - where the toilets - the old fashioned hole in the ground “launching pad” - was identified on the appropriate doors by a pair of grey jocks for the men and a grubby bra for women. The villa at Malcontenta has the remains of breathtaking, feminine murals, which were ruined by lime in the 18c when the villas were turned into granaries to avoid paying taxes. The villa was built by a very rich Venetian for his very young wife, whom he practically imprisoned when he went away to war and trade, and she was terribly unhappy because he wouldn’t let her have affairs.

Moi at Villa Pisani

I don’t understand how I can walk for hours and hours and hours through forests and along rivers, and over rocks and along beaches. But put me in art galleries and villas and I’m dead after a few hours. My feet weigh like lead. I don’t know if the enormous weight of history and drama and passion ties itself to my feet and expects to be carried out, but always after a few hours of filling my brain, I’m exhausted. Dawn and I both fell asleep on the boat, curled up on the banquettes while the other passengers stayed up in the sun.

Napoleon shagged here

Villa Pisani was the most marvellous villa of all, but we trudged listlessly through some of its 400 rooms, listening to long Italian monologues, jammed amongst tired tourists. I was drugged from my sensual overload of the past few days, and a bit disinterested, until I realised I was standing in front of the bed that Napoleon slept in. Napoleon. Him. The one who sent a message to Josephine not to wash because he was coming home. There was an N on the canopy. And all I remember of the talk was that in those days everyone feared death so the beds were made short so people could sleep sitting up.

Private villa, locked up for season

Private villa

Moi, totallo mento amore with Venice

Back streets of Venice - sans tourists!!

Returning at night to Venice, we staggered around culture-drunk, and foot sore. Although Dawn has for days tried to dress me in sophisticated Italian clothes so that I’d look like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in lovely fifties shaped frocks and high heels and cotton shirts with collars, I bought a hat, and shoes, and a bag, and two summer dresses from a Chinese outlet for the cost of a pair of Italian socks. We shared a pizza and a bottle of water, and caught the crowded vaporetto, the public taxi, to the bus station. Passengers dressed in ball gowns, silk suits, velvet jackets with white bow ties, hats, sailor suits, masks, satin coats filled the boat, talking about the parties they were attending as we churned past the illuminated Peggy Guggenheim museum, a Tintorelli exhibition, rotting villas and grand, restored villas through whose windows we could see brilliant chandeliers, magnificent paintings and wallhangings where many people were making merry with fluted glasses in their hands as the sounds of music and glass tinkling over the water.

We watched agog as Venice passed by - an entire floating city, completely in love with itself. And everybody in love with Venice.

TAXI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2011-06-06T19:02:00.000+10:00

Farewell, proud Turkey!

Taxi!

Leaving Istanbul wasn’t to be easy. Four hours before I was scheduled to leave for Attaturk airport by my prebooked private Mercedes, I decided to test my new acquisitive skills. I went back to the Grand Bazaar to my favourite Turkoman dealer - the one whose tiny shop resembles more a museum than a cluttered stall, and negotiated with him on two matching what I think are museum quality Uzbekistan gold pendants I’d fancied ever since I saw them my first week in Istanbul. The price was alarming. I had my tea. I considered. I looked at others. A phone call was made. The price came down. I refused. Another cup of tea, and another phonecall. The price came down further. I considered. Then I was told it was Turkish Lire which made the value one third less. I bought them, with shaking hands , and barely a half hour to spare rushed back with my plastic bag of what I know to be very valuable pieces, to my hotel, to collect my luggage and wait for my driver.

Goodbye Ottoman houses!

It was raining. Twenty million Istanbulians were out on the town, this time under umbrellas. It took me a half hour through the throngs to get back. I checked the driver was on his way, and waited in the lounge. I checked the driver was on his way, then I waited on the street. A phonecall was made. The driver couldn’t get across town. He’d decided to return home. A taxi was called. I waited in the rain. I waited on the side the taxis came in. Another phonecall was made. The taxi would be two minutes. Then he would be three minutes. Then five minutes. Then two minutes. Each update necessitated a phonecall from reception. My plane for La Serenissima was taking off in two hours, and I hadn’t left the city yet. I didn’t even have a taxi. Standing in the rain, with two suitcases, twenty million people, trams and no taxis and a plane going without me. Fock. Fock. Fock. Fock.

My own ticking clock. Another phone call, and the taxi said he couldn’t get through the traffic. Standing in the rain, two cases, twenty million people on my footpath. No fookin taxi. Sheet. Fock. Sheet. Fock. Sheet. Sheet. Sheet Fock. I kept checking my watch as if I had a nervous tick. Fock. Check clock. Sheet. Watch watch. Fock Sheet I’m out on the street and my fookin international plane leaves in an hour fortyfive.

Running on empty down this street to get a plane

Suvanna! Sussan! COME WITH ME! The gorgeous man at reception, who’d delivered my washing, given me room at the inn, looked after my luggage, carried my parcels and greeted me each day, grabbed one suitcase and started running down the hill. I followed, dragging my new yellow four wheeled masterpiece of luggage design which just proved that it could do 0 to 15 in as many seconds.

Move, out of my way, I have a plane to catch!

Move! Via! Move! Fook! Sheet! we clattered and rolled and bumped and jaywalked and zigzagged all the way through Sultanahmet and down past Topkapi, knocking slow walkers aside and tripping on the toes of pedestrians, Fook! Sheet! Via! Move! Make Way! Mscusi! Pardon! Sheet! Fook! past the Locum turkish delight shops, and the tapestries and the coloured lights, FOOK! not a single taxi in sight, luggage clattering over tram rails, all the way down that road I walked to the Galata bridge which took me an hour - both of us running as fast as we could, as if we were being chased by our past. We reached the ferries, the buses ... and a taxi stand, jammed tight in the Saturday traffic. Running Hero practically threw himself on the bonnet of an idling taxi, begging him to take me to the airport.

Making gosleme pancakes

The driver laconically shook his head - Yok! Yok! No! He was already hired. Running Hero, having abandoned the luggage while he fought for wheels for my airport ride, flung himself through the window of a second taxi, brandishing a fistful of Lire. I leapt onto the bonnet, beating my breast and making heart attack movements. One hour and ten minutes before my plane left, with a half hour ride ahead. Was it rush hour? I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

Running Hero hauled open the boot of the taxi as it tried to drive off without me. He heaved my luggage inside. He yanked open the passenger door - but before he could throw me inside, I kissed him on both cheeks and hugged him and said thankyou, thankyou, just as he threw another handful of lire at the taxi driver and shouted GO! Once in the car, with my luggage in the boot, he had no option but to take me to the airport.

We broke every speed limit. I rushed into the airport, I gatecrashed the xray machines, I apprehended a stunned official who fast tracked me to check-in. I arrived at boarding as the last of the passengers straggled in. Breathless, speechless, and practically legless at this stage after all the running and potential heart attacks, I was on my way to Venice. La Serenissima. The most Serene of cities. I certainly needed it.

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink ....

2011-06-06T17:09:00.001+10:00

QUOTE OF THE DAY .. Sometimes you only need a moment to forget a life, and sometimes a whole lifetime is not enough for forget a moment.

My Istanbul adventure is coming to an end. It’s hard to believe it’s a month since I first arrived here with Luda, excited after Morocco to be in another exotic city, with only the faintest memory of my last visit ten years ago. Then we wandered lost down side streets, shrieking with laughter as we walked in dark circles, layered to the eyeballs with thick coats and scarves. Now I know my way around the back streets, and I’m known in the markets where many vendors wave hello, and ask me to stay for lunch. My pomegranate juice seller charges me the local price and pulls up a little wooden stool when I walk past. The Star Holiday Hotel, has, like my hotel in Kathmandu, become like home. I’ve got over the blues, and I’m in a really, really, happy place. I have a bounce to my step, my hair shines like copper, I’m sleeping like a baby, I don’t have nightmares. I think I can see the path ahead.

Moi on Bosphorus cruiser, enjoying sun

The day after the Bosphorus cruise, the sun shone like it had something to prove. Istanbul burst into light, people played music in the street, they pulled up little tables to play chequers or chess, singers were busking in the square, and everyone was eating ice cream. I needed to ditch my backpack for a new, more portable case for my next journey which I knew from previous experience would involve a lot of steps and a lot of fashion criticism.

I returned to the Grand Bazaar. Its labyrinths don’t frighten me any more. I found the yellow wheelie case I’d seen previously and quickly negotiated my price. I collected the Afghani lapis which I’d set aside before England, and the two Afghani coats from Salim, the Afghani trader, that I’d promised to get for Lovely Miss Marvel. I sat with Salim’s dad on a stack of Anatolian carpets spread out in the sunny square, drinking tea in tiny glasses while he patched up the sleeves and stitched on some cord and Salim put my phone number in his Blackberry and offered to meet me at my next destination.

My next home - in shallah!

I was on my way back to the hotel, because D had arranged to call me. Yes, we’ve been talking and skyping and for a myriad reasons, I’ve been very happy that we have. He’s always been some sort of lifeline to me, a fundamental fix that during this journey was hard to let go of. When the nights were long and the days sucky, he kept me going. I wanted to get back to the hotel quickly, so I wouldn’t miss him. We had a few hours of opportunity before my next destination. But I needed a loo stop. I was working my way into the door, legs practically crossed, dragging my new yellow wheelie case in one hand and my loo payment in the other, when a young man grabbed my arm.

“Merhaba, hello! Remember me?” he asked. “I saw you at Dervish dance at Arasta! I want(ed) to take you to Taksim, where you go?” “Right now,” I said, “I go in here, where you can’t follow me!”. “So, I will wait,” he said, leaning indolently against the ancient stone pillar, one leg crossed against the other, ready for as long as I’d take. “I’ll look after your case also!” Instead, I left my case at the door, paid my half Turkish lire to the Turkish woman in a Turkish polyester head scarf, who was watching Turkish soap opera on her iphone plugged into the white tiles, while five other women waited their turn.

I did what I had to, in a tiny glass fronted booth, two metres from the kebab vendor who was doing a roaring lunchtime trade. Tea porters rushed by with their little brass trays of tiny tea filled gold cups, delivering them to the many vendors who relied on this service to keep their customers inside. It’s the sort of toilet stop that your nightmares are made of. You have to calculate how much toilet paper you’ll need before you go in, and most of the visitors to this well of sanitation bring their used paper out with them and dispose of them in a communal bin.

The brilliant Turks practically invented the flushing toilet - in the old days the marble seats of the great palaces were heated with hot running water from the thermal springs, and they were, with the hamams, the places where great conferences, of the financial and engineering type, took place. But they’ve never taken to paper, and that’s something I can’t take to. What a hideous place for a pickup.

But wait my young friend did, and then led me into his handbag stall where he tried for the next hour to persuade me to come out with him to Taxsim for dinner and whatever. His English was excellent, he was a sociology student, he was as cute as a button, he wanted to visit Uzbekistan, but hey, his post-adolescent pimples distracted me from his intentions. It cost me a $60 orange leather fake Valentino handbag to shake him off. It’ll be my memento that I do have the potential of making the earth move for a twenties something trader.

Manoeuvering my way out of the labyrinth with relative ease, a delicious Turkish man ran after me, through the throngs of shoppers and glittering emporiums and cluttered stalls, begging me to have tea with him under the faded, painted arches of the Grand Bazaar. “No!” I laughed, “You’re trying to sell me a carpet!” “I’m not!” he said, “to other people, yes, but not you, I want to talk with you. I have seen you on many days and today you look more beautiful!” He held his hand out to mine. It was warm, so warm. Fifty thousand volts of attraction shot through both of us. “Please,” he said, “this is very important”. “No, I’m so sorry,I can’t,” I said, and for the first time in years and years and years and years and whatever, I was truly sorry. “I am in a hurry!” He held my hand, then my palm, then my finger, then fresh air, for long moments as the other fifty thousand volts left in Istanbul flashed through us both.

Flushed to my core, and looking to see if he had continued to follow me, I moped back to the hotel, through the lanes of wholesale silver sellers and past the wrought iron grilles of the mosque, truly sorry that I hadn’t stopped to talk to my ardent pursuer. He was handsome and sexy and articulate and there was a connection, and maybe he did have a villa on the Bosphorus. And a big swanky yacht. And the desire to go to Corsica on holiday. He said he had a cousin in Sydney I should meet. Perhaps. Most probably he would have a wife. It didn’t matter - I wouldn’t have taken up any short term offers. But he rattled me in the nicest of ways and it was wonderful for my ego.

I realised something was fundamentally shifting in my attachment to D. I don’t know if I was pleased or sad: emotionally this journey has been a slog. It’s easier to hold onto a known intimacy than begin a new one, even if that intimacy - and its intracacies - led to the journey. Across the world, D would always know where I was going, and whether I had arrived. It comforted me, in a time of instability. In a time of strangers. In a time of no possessions, or home, or common language.

“Travelling is a brutality”, wrote Cesare Pavese. “It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky -all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

I’ve learned on this journey to rely totally on myself, on my intuition, and on my desires. The most freeing element of all has been the ability to be spontaneous. I haven’t had to consult anyone about where or what I ate. I’ve gathered and discarded as I’ve needed. I’ve befriended and ended, as I’ve needed. I’ve been silent where I wanted and reached out when I needed. When D left me last August, left me to an enormous task that I thought would kill me in its completion, it was weeks before I could enter a supermarket and buy food for myself - weeks before I ventured to fathom the dvd player - months before I stopped waking in tears, in panic at his absence. I just existed. I hated my home and I hated my bed and I hated my clothes. So I discarded them all and I slammed shut so many doors and I bought a plane ticket to the most far and challenging places I could imagine. Alone in strange countries, I was invisible, and I wanted to be so. I could be as miserable as I wanted, and I didn’t have to feel guilty.

I look at the photographs taken early in this journey, and I look shrunken, spiritless. The experiences and people I attracted then depleted me further and took more from me than I could give - the relentless cold, the school, the glue sniffing children, the dirt, the constant sickness of body and soul. All this was evidenced by my paralysis to do what I wanted so much - attend Holi and celebrate colours with a riot of happy people. When I contacted D on that day after my long disappearance, I slunk back to what was familiar, and then to my dismay I had to start the recovery process all over again. In places my spirit should have been soaring.

Sometime over the past five weeks, my spirit has shifted. I don’t recognise that miserable person any more. I feel five inches taller. I feel light. Physically, my hair is five inches longer, I am four kilos lighter and one size smaller. I’ve stopped wearing colours that make me invisible or unflattering clothes that hide my body because I feel inadequate. I feel alive and I feel loved and I feel as if I’m a worthwhile woman again. And I don’t need anyone’s permission to buy a fake leather orange Valentino handbag!

I packed the case for another load of goodies to Sydney, and trundled to the courier on cobbles, between couples lunching and drinking and couples holding hands and couples snogging and couples making plans. The courier asked if he could carry one of my cases on one of my journeys, and in the street, another man stopped me to ask if would have tea with him. “Why?” I asked, “Just because you are so beautiful,” he replied. I smiled, refused, and walked jauntily back to the hotel, under frothy branches of jasmine, past the Cisterna, over the ancient stones, past the postcard sellers and Turkish delight boutiques and the people selling spirographs. The hotel crew shouted “Hello! Suvanna! You have good time?” when I walked in. Back in my room, I opened the windows wide and watched the square while I waited for D’s call.

We talked for an hour. Sometime during this conversation, I lost interest in all of my past and everything that held me to him. What happened, happened, and I’ll never know the full story, or why, and searching for truths here any more seem futile. Our lives are too far apart now. I wanted to be outside, in the sun, enjoying my last rays of Istanbul. I’m not alone any more because the fractured part of me has healed. I have learned too much and grown too much and let go of so much. I have become the me again that I like, and that other people want to love.

HIs phone card ran out and we were cut off, in the middle of my saying “shattered”. I sat there with the receiver in my hand, and I knew. I am not shattered any more. I am over all this holding on and waiting. My life is too good now, and too wonderful now, and going forward so fast now, that I don’t want what I had. I am done. I am worth far more than crumbs. There are so many other people around me who want to, and do, love me. I’ve been wanting, for so long, what no longer invigorates me.

Blue Mosque, from my window, with Marmara sea in background

The muezzin started his five o’clock big song of the day, shared with his other mosque mates. It was one of the calls that made all my hairs stand up. I got up off the bed and leaned way out the windows. Blossoms blew in and landed on my hair. The muezzin went on and on. The Blue Mosque gleamed like it had no tomorrow. The sun was brazen. And I was done. I was, finally, free. I shed a little tear, then I opened my arms wide, and, alone in Istanbul in a lovely room overlooking everything I love, I embraced my new life.

I know I’ve made jokes about the mosque being so close that I could spit on it if I didn’t fear a fatwah, but there is a Jewish ceremony of separation that requires you having to spit three times into the wind. I was ready to separate, finally; a little ceremony for myself, a truthful one, not the many separations I’ve told my friends about when my heart was still breaking and I was still half of him and half of what I used to be and none of whom I wanted to be.

Yet all of this brought me here, and I could not be in a better place, geographically, physically, or emotionally.

I squared my shoulders, and faced the mosque, and the evening sun, and the blossoms, and all those below who love me in their unique ways, and I said Thank You. Then I spat three times into the wind.

And I decided not to return to Australia after Istanbul.

I’m going to Venice.

Talking Turkey

2011-06-06T16:29:00.000+10:00

The minarets glittered, the flowers opened, the streets were swept meticulously so that every leaf and petal was scooped up, then doused with rose water. Sipping Turkish coffees, the waiters rewrote their culinary offers of the day and flirted through fans of eyelashes. The gulls swooped and cawed and the muezzins replied more musically. The sun flexed its rays, and the vendors flexed their negotiating muscles - it was a perfect day for a Bosphorus outing. And an insight into the mind of a man who takes different people to the same place, day after day, after day after day after day.

Cruise ships moored at Galata

On the cruiser, built for 50 but carrying 12, the guide was a small, nervous man in a yellow shirt and a short neck. “Today,” he began, talking softly into his microphone from some unseen spot in the boat, “I will tell you about Istanbul. There are many people. There you can see some boats. That is the bridge that was built by ships. There is a story about the Bosphorus and a girl but I forget. Over there you can see the Blue Mosque. It is very old. Over there - you can see some other things. Also very old.” Very soon we’d lost interest and just stared and wondered at the astonishing villas that lined both east and west sides of this most important avenue across the old spice trading route, where villas are now sold us into a magnificent castle on the banks of the river. “Inside, you must walk only on the right side. You must put these raincoats over your feet. Do not touch anything. Do not take photos. Do not leave the group.” We lined up like obedient school children with shower caps over our shoes.

Someone leaned for support on a door frame. “You must not touch anything! Walk on the red carpet. You will see a chandelier. It is very heavy. It is Murano glass, gift to the Sultan. You will see that this room has a colour scheme. It is red. You will see that this room is symmetrical. Over there is a red vase. Over here is a red vase. In the middle is a table. This room is very symmetrical. Do not walk off the carpet. You must stay in the middle of the red carpet. Underneath the red carpet is original straw matting from Egypt. You must not touch. Stay on the red carpet. Here you will see another room. It has a colour scheme. The colour scheme here is pink. There is a pink chandelier. It is very heavy. It comes from Murano. There is a vase. You will see it is pink. Here also is a vase. You will see it is pink. The colour scheme in this room is pink. Everything is very symmetrical. Every carpet that you see here that is not new is old. Here is a bedroom. It has a colour scheme. The colour scheme is blue. This bedroom has a bed. People used to sleep in this bed. Do not walk of the carpet. This room is symmetrical. There is a blue vase here. And a blue vase there, if you look at the symmetrical. If you stand on the other side, stay on the carpet, you will see the room is symmetrical from the other side also.”

Bosphorous villa - yours for $20 million

We had three minutes in each symmetrical, colour coded room, accompanied by a grumpy uniformed guard. We were not allowed to touch the banisters as we trotted upstairs like a group of orange footed ducks, waddling behind each other. It was a very symmetrical visit to a very symmetrical palace. The only bit of information that veered from his expert patter was that which followed the talk of the guide in front, who told of the antique clock that stopped, short, never to go again, when Attaturk died. “This clock”, he began, thrilled to have some new information, which we had just heard from the other guide, “stopped when Attaturk died. You can see where the hands stopped. They are not going anymore. When he died, the clock stopped at that very moment and nobody make it go again.

“Must be a very symmetrical clock” one of our group commented.

“Now you will get on the boat. Now you will get off the boat. Twenty minutes that is not fifteen not twentyfive twenty minutes we leave.” And so on.

I got off at some little port and walked in the wind, watching the fisherman reeling in ten fish at a time on a sort of fishing washing line, their catches swinging in the breeze like little silver socks. Ancient walls that had protected Turkey for thousands of walls crumbled above me. A crumpled man sat on a bench on the promenade, miming binoculars in his hand. In English he commented on what he saw - “A finch at twelve o’clock! I daresay a wren at three o’clock! Nine o’clock and there’s an egret!”

All I and the rest of the people on this peninsula could see were gulls.

Fisherman on Bosphorus

Black Sea

THANKSGIVING TO WONDERFUL TURKEY

2011-05-28T20:52:00.000+10:00

I'm about to board for another destination. I've spent a month in this wonderful country, in this wonderful city. I've had pedestrian rage, and I've been sucky lonely, and I've been cold, and I've sweated, and I've flirted and I've laughed and I've OD'd on pomegranate juice. I've slept in a crappy hotel and in a magnificent hotel and in a hotel that very quickly became a home to me - from giving wallpaper advice to getting complimentary coffees just because I was here.

It's difficult to believe the month has gone. While i was in it, it seemed ages - then, like every ending, it falls on your head, and you pack your bags and close the door and kiss farewell and walk away, and an hour later you try to remember the feeling of BEING there.

When I'd recovered my land legs and got enough oxygen in my head to start behaving normally after the balloon flight, and the champagne showered all over me didn't speed up the process, I took a tour to South Cappadocia, through green fields and stone houses, and men harassing their donkeys through crumbling villages. Wild red poppies and purple flowers and yellow wild daisies tumbled over stone walls as we went to an underground city to see how the ancients lived when the armies across the Silk Route were invading. I've never understood wars, or the reasons, or the results, but Turkey is such a rich, vivid, vibrant, proud country with so many resources, on such a strategic route that I do understand why they have to hold onto it in every way they can. I remember being in Gallipoli years ago, just wandering around the slaughterfield and being upset the senselessness of it all; but Turkey retained it's land and its dignity.

There are so many astonishing ruins of old civilisations, so many glorious promenades where people like Constantinople galloped with their horses in shows of strength and power. So many places were engineering feats even now leave one speechless, yet they worked with the stars and abaci and plumb lines. You can feel the ancient in this country, and they'll do anything and everything to preserve it.

I walked four km through a limestone valley of strange creations, bisected by a river. I walked with my new best friend Sara from Brazil, who lives in Houston and teaches English to Turks, and has just finished four months in Milan learning Italian.

Following the bubbling water, we hopped over rocks and ducked under spring branches and plucked wild flowers and ohhed and aaahed over the staggering beauty of the soaring limestone pinnacles that towered above us, where in ancient times we would have been watched over with fear and probably had bushels of oil or rocks or water or pellets thrown over us. We talked about goddesses, and witches and the freedom to make choices that lead us down new paths, and right then I there I decided that she had to be part of the goddess circle, and promised her that when we returned to Istanbul, I would give her a hag stone. We had a fabulous day, laughed ourselves silly, shared many crazy stories of what brought us to travel and how we survive, and to our delight we were on the same bus back to Istanbul, which, shared, wasn't such an ordeal as I bought us some bread rolls, cheese, bananas, water, biscuits, nuts, apples ... all for less than $5. Luckily the bus was almost empty, and the engine had already had its once over, so although we stopped often, we arrived back in Istanbul on time, having dozed a bit because we could spread out on the seats. Anyway, in the scheme of things, 20Euro for a return ticket to Cappadocia should have some dramas! And again, if I wanted comfort and first class, I should have been far more sensible and found a Turkish fella with a Ferrari in his pocket ......

This photo shows how a large section of rock fell away after thousands of years of holding on, revealing the larger holes which were previously hidden ... from a distance the openings in the rocks are almost invisible. You can see the scale of the dwellings, and inside the rooms are large, and airy, with astonishing views that you can believe their invaders would kill for!! This particular structure had a missionary school, a large kitchen, toileting facilities, nooks in the cave walls for candles, complete with dark smoke smudges of yonks ago; you can still see the chisel marks on the floors and walls.

Mountain sista asked to see some of the paintings on the walls ... here ya'r! Incredible to believe they are 2000 years old. The oval "hole" is of course a window .. there wasn't any glass of course, and some of the holes were used to collect water. The pigments were taken from local crushed stone or vegetable dyes.

By the way, my hair is really long, so I have to tie it up most times now as I'm afraid of doing an Isadora Duncan and getting it tangled in some jewellery!

When I returned to Istanbul, Sara and I found an evil eye bead to hang in the middle of her hag stone; we met up with Julianna who was also in Cappadocia, a Brazilian girl who is living in Japan, working in a factory, who had a Peruvian boyfriend with Japanese parents. Phew! Now she's off to Israel to see her new boyfriend! Phew! I acted as tour guide around the grand bazaar, took them to the free show of the whirling dervish at the Arasta Bazaar, treated them to gosleme and humous because they are poor students, and came back to my lovely Star Hotel very happy indeed, wondering how I could ever have been lonely!

The following morning I cruised up the Bosphorous, to the Black Sea, on a small cruiser. I stood in the street, waiting for the bus, drinking in the early morning of Istanbul. The muezzin wailed, and got wailed responses in return. Men carried hundreds of loaves of fluffy Turkish bread into the popular Sultanahmet restaurant adjacent to the Star holiday Hotel. Men washed windows, and sprinkled rose water outside their doors. Men carried bunches of flowers. Newspapers. Clean towels were delivered to the hotels. Everybody was happy, patient, friendly. A stranger offered me a complimentary cup of coffee from his trolley because he saw me waiting. Another man sprinkled fertiliser on the potplants outside his shop. The trams clattered by, filled with sleepy Turks. Dazed tourists started their tours, following numbered flags. The cobbles in the renovated square are almost in place .. I've watched their progress. When I arrived, black tulips were everywhere .. now there are pansies and snapdragons and beautiful bounteous bushes of roses. Herbs grow everywhere. The blossoms are replaced by leaves that shade the wide streets. The watermelon seller has replaced the chestnut seller - the sock knitter has moved on and there is an umbrella seller in her place.

The amazing sights of this city surround me every moment: I have visited them before, and this time just wanted to BE here, surrounded by it all, rather than hassle my way through crowds and wait for hours in queues. Most of my days here were overcast, so I spent them deliriously happy in the Karpali Karsi, the Grand Bazaar. I think I visited almost every one of the 4000 stalls - at least it felt that way.

My taxi awaits. But from my next stop, I will tell you the story of the Guide on the Bosphorus. He's worth his own entry. Till then.

WHERE'S WALLY OFF TO NEXT?

2011-05-27T02:59:00.003+10:00

I am doing a wild, random turn on my travels. Instead of returning to Australia yesterday, I've stayed in Istanbul. Waiting to go ... somewhere else! I know where .. but you don't! So play this game with me!

See if you can guess where you'll find me from Saturday.
Post your ideas below: just click the comments. You can be anonymous if you want, but let me know where you are. Or not. Or whatever.

AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

2011-05-26T14:49:00.001+10:00

Cappadocia, it's fascinating history and it's wierd, other worldly landscape, is itself an out of body experience. To walk through valleys of thousands of pinnacle shaped geographical structures that have been hewn and chiselled from rock by people using sharp stones or rudimentary metal gives a real understanding to the notion of terror that caused them to live so hidden from their marauders. To see their religious beliefs painted on the domed ceilings using natural pigments, still softly intact in the low light, garners much respect. To follow their carved trails through underground tunnels and see where they cooked, made wine, filtered the smoke, taught, washed and toileted is humbling in the extreme.

But to fly over all this in a hot air balloon, as silent as a cloud, is something I will remember for the rest of my life. In a life filled with magical experiences, from helicoptering through canyons, paddling kayaks to see subterranean Etruscan pots, to a giraffe giving birth, this was the tops. I am still emotional thinking about it, and seeing the photos renews the experience, if only marginally. I was caught between wanting a full bodied out of body experience and just watch, but my skook shouted and prodded and nudged that I must record it all, and I'm glad I did for the seconds passed so slowly but still there was so much to absorb. My camera saw things that I was too blissed out to see.

Click on the image to see it in larger format.

The sky was purpling, streaks of grey cloud rose from damp bushes. Spring flowers wilted in the dew. Pink tipped the peaks of the ancient stone dwellings, and from behind them rose giant bubbles of various coloured silk. Every few seconds the roar of methane, like a hungry animal at dawn, was let loose into the quiet, and a giant orange and purple flame lit the dawn. Enormous bubbles of silk began to inflate from behind bushes, until the landscape seemed taken over by them. Cars were dwarfed. People were silenced. The balloons had a life of their own, taking up so much sky space. A fog competed for attention, only adding to the mystery when it swirled around the ground.

Soon, the balloons were up. We jumped into our baskets, and before you could worry about fear of heights, or falling out, or being cold ... we were up. Up. And away.

Below, other balloons rose gracefully to glide over the ancient civilisation. The sun came and went. Fog curled around rocks. The ground changed colour. Clouds licked my face. The sky was silent. The sky roared. The fires warmed my skin. My hair stood on end.

No words can describe the next hour.

I cried.

Bucket List Number One

2011-05-23T15:44:00.000+10:00

I have just had the most amazing, uplifting, breathtaking experience of my life. I hot air ballooned over Cappadocia. I flew in the clouds. I cried. I'm still beside myself, not quite back in my body, so I will write about it on the overnight bus back to Istanbul tonight.

IT'S A HARD ROCK LIFE

2011-05-23T02:24:00.002+10:00

Four breakaways let loose in the caves ... One Polish, One Brazilian, One Spanish, and one mongrel.

Amazing how a change of scenery can banish the blues. I was lost in translation in Istanbul, flattened in the crowds. Today I have three new friends, with whom I have just spent many hours exploring the ridiculous geography of northern Cappadocia. And laughing ourselves silly. We all spent the night on the bus from Istanbul, so we are bonded in indefatigable spirit and bodily torture.

I've travelled so far and so wide, you'd think I'd be wise to the incantations of the tour operators who promise "modern, comfortable coaches". But then they're sitting in their offices, wanting to bring in tourists, and we want to get to our next destination, so it's a toxic combination. Suffice to say that I am already dreading the journey back to Istanbul, but fortunately between now and then there will be a hot air balloon ride over this troglodyte landscape, which is the reason I'm here.

Cappadocia is a strange valley in Anatolia, inhabited by the Turks since the 8th 10 centuries. They burrowed into the limestone to make impenetrable fortresses where they could be protected by the invaders along this busy spice route.

The only good thing about the bus was that it got me and fifty others here, (and my three new friends - above) and that it had wifi. We were promised only two stops - but the clanking monster stopped every hour right through the night at brightly lit service stations where the driver had lengthy noisy chats with his compatriots in adjoining buses.

Moi in Cappadocia cave

Ours had an hour and a half's worth of engine trouble which necessitated much clanking and bashing with a spanner on the sides of the bus between 2 am and 4 am. Every time we stopped all the lights inside went on. When we started up again, the seat back tv's went on. I slept with my jumper pulled right over my head. When I finally escaped the confines of having the head of the man in front of me practically in my lap when he reclined, I didn't recognise my feet. Or my ankles. Or my calves. They were enormous, swollen balls and I couldn't bend my ankles. My feet looked at if they were going to burst at the seams. I've never seen anything like it, and I would have been quite fascinated if only they weren't so sore. Everyone complained about their swollen bits, as they hobbled off the bus, two hours late for all our tours, sore and buggered beyond belief.

I'm staying in the Nomad Cave Hotel. My room has been excavated from the rock, about a thousand years ago. There are no pictures on the walls, but when I open my tiny wooden door, I look out onto hundreds of other openings in the rock. The travel agent asked if I wanted a more up market room. I replied that if I wanted the Sheraton, I'd stay in the Sheraton! As I arrived late, crumpled and buggered from the bus ride, the tour guide who was to take me exploring North Cappadocia and it's amazing limestone creations was waiting to take me into this fascinating landscape. I grabbed a roll, cheese, cucumber and tomato from the breakfast table and rushed out into it.

Sore feet notwithstanding - we spent hours and hours exploring various parts of it, from the decorated churches to the mushroom towers and the green valleys. The scale and complexity and other worldly quality is difficult to comprehend, so here are some photos instead.

The Nomad Cave Hotel ... www.nomadcavehotel.com is off the main "square" of this strange little village, up a few rocky stairs, under a low hanging rock. It really is a cave. My first thought was that I should have opted for something more upmarket. But then I wouldn't have the chance of sleeping where people slept a thousand years ago. What did they wear? How did they keep warm? How did they keep clean? Cook? Did they sleep on the floor or on straw matting? How many to a room? Because it snows here in winter, and it's approaching summer now and I'm under two doonas with a heater large enough to warm a restaurant, all to myself. What an experience - alone like this I like, I enjoy. I think if I was here with anyone else they'd complain about something. So being alone here in this room tonight suits me.

My cave was chiselled out of rock two thousand years ago. You can still see the chisel marks. I think they used obsidian. I'm not alone, really, for there's a powerful wifi from the low bench with carpet cushions, just outside my door, where I had a small glass of apple tea as the sun cast a red glow over what looks like giant toadstools or something out of The Wind in the Willows, or Middle Earth. Some rain splattered down, then a rainbow arc stretched right the way across the rocks. Once inside my cave, the outside world ceases to exist. Nothing can penetrate these "walls", certainly not wifi. So I write what I want, rush outside into the cold for a few seconds while it saves, then scurry back in again to the warmth. It smells like a cave, sort of damp and cold, and the walls are grey mottled stones. They look as if they are made of raw concrete and the shape is so odd. Imagine if you had a shoebox, and you sort of mangled it and pushed and pulled the equal sides until nothing was equal in size or shape. The back wall is fifty percent longer than the front wall, where there's a tiny window. The door locks with difficulty because in those days, there weren't doors, never mind locks. What was there to steal? Hemp? Sackcloth? Ashes? A sheep? All cables of course run along the outside of the walls - remember they're made of solid rock! There isn't a bedside lamp or table, and I'll just pretend I'm in a monastery for the night! Other cave hotels are called Flintstones, Stone Cave House, Hard Rock .... but I'm sleeping in a cave. I'm very warm, I have very hot water, the outside world doesn't exist.

Borak, our guide for the day, told us that men have to be able to throw a decent pot here, and women must know how to make carpets before they can marry as both are essential for economic resources in this part of the world.. I know plenty of women who are very good at throwing pots, and many men who wish they had a flying carpet to escape them. How our cultures differ! We went to see demonstrations of both being made, but escaped the carpet seller's schpiel that involved tea, entreaties of poverty stricken girls who have to sell a carpet in order to finish their schooling, to go to our respective hotels and soak our feet in a hot apple tea. The last rays of the sun lit the ancient limestone houses as if there was a fire inside.

I limped into the square to get something to eat for dinner. A few cold tourists straggled around, putting their noses to the windows of the pide restaurant, seeing if the fires were still on. Bales of hay were bunched up against an ancient wall. A stuffed scarecrow was tied to a tree, hat tipsy, "drinking" a beer. Three tractors, painted with wild scenes of Turkish country life, were hitched to a fallen log. Some sunburned carpets hung from eaves and over chairs and on rock walls. A man led his donkey away from the square, I heard braying, and saw the man kicking his donkey in its stomach. I wanted to kick him. Then I had the strangest deja vu - and remembered walking down this road, and seeing the donkey, and eating with a group of friends I was travelling with, carrying on even then about some awful man that I was running away from!

I ate alone, and tucked into a boiling brew of lamb, tomato and onion, mopped it up with Turkish bread, listened to the muezzin echoing across this pre-historic town, and went next door to buy a chocolate, hidden amongst the turnips, brooms and eggs. A very large, ruddy woman, as creased as the earth, dressed in a smudged, faded floral apron, a tight scarf pulled over her chin and forehead, a voluminous floral woollen skirt, thick home knitted socks and sandals, clutched a long gnarled forked stick as she scratched around in the biscuit bowl making her selection. I smiled at her. She looked at me as if I'd fallen from Mars, picked up her lollies, swept outside and wheezed and sputtered away in her big green coughing tractor. Who needs tourists? she muttered in Anatolian as she chugged away. I went back to my cave, and slept until the muezzin woke me for my balloon ride. I prayed for sun. I'll do anything for sun tomorrow morning.

FROM THE WILDERNESS

2011-05-22T14:41:00.001+10:00

TO so many of my beautiful friends and goddesses, who wrote immediately to ease my loneliness, thankyou. I picked up your messages via the wi fi on the overnight bus to Cappadocia. The landscape is bleak, overcast, endless, velvety hills and crumbled houses: the bus crowded, smelly and filled with tired passengers communicating via their iphones, ipads and wi-fis. But I don't feel alone today. I have the love of all of you, all around me, and an adventure today. I am so glad you're travelling with me. I love you, one and all.

Here's my ha ha for the day: Your key planet Venus has been cavorting with noisy Mercury and pushy Mars, replacing sweet romance with tough talk. Fortunately, you can reclaim your sensuality now by shifting the focus to nebulous Neptune. Let go of your personal tastes and specific desires by detaching yourself from what may happen. Don't waste time by letting others know what you want. Instead, surrender to the flow; you can always check your GPS tomorrow and then decide where to go next.

I have posted some of the comments in the appropriate blog. You are the most wonderful support network.

Missing Links

2011-05-22T01:07:00.001+10:00

Last night I caught the high speed tram, and a funicular to see Brother Steve, on a conference in Taksim. At first I didn't want to leave the safety of Sultanahmet, where people now greet me on the street because they recognise me, not because they want to sell me a carpet. But he'd been in conference all day, and I had time to spare ... and it would be an adventure. I changed my shoes and headed into the madding crowds.

Catch from Galata bridge

The crowds are insane - 12 million people inhabit this city - we are like herring finding a spot to move - and because I have become totally invisible, am pushed and shoved and knocked and bruised and elbowed and stomached out of everyone's way all the time. I have pedestrian rage. I'm petrified that at any second the skook within me will shriek from my bruised shoulder - Out of MY way you fat Focker! - are you blind? Nobody steps aside for me. I've tried looking people in the eye, but that's difficult when everyone walks head down, either on their phones or because they're partly hidden under a hideous polyester scarf and long coat. I've tried to stand firm, to make those pedestrian waters part for me, but I'm just a narrow little stream trying to make my way into the dead sea. I've tried to broaden my shoulders, increase my aura - nothing helps. I'm totally invisible. If I were to collapse on the street, I'd be stepped over. A frightening thought! I had a narrow escape with my next life when, to avoid being mangled by the crowds, I stepped into the road, right onto the path of the high speed tram, only to be yanked off and rescued by someone who did notice me.

Hagia Sofia

But to meet my brother in this wonderful city, even if I had to travel across it? Priceless. So I manoeuvred my way through buying tokens, using the machines, facing the right way in the crush so that I faced out, and not in, held onto the poles as I couldn't reach the straps; and watched Sultanahmet, its mosques, balloon sellers, carpet carriers and garbage porters, flower beds, music, ice cream vendors, fortune tellers and fountains vanish as we approached the Other Side, place of conferences, tall hotels, insane traffic and people in a hurry. On the way down, past the Ottoman houses and cobbled streets, I was already glad I made the journey as it was in the opposite direction from the Kaparli Carsi, the Grand Bazaar, where I don't get lost anymore and where I am invited most days to lunch with the dealers I've come to know and trust.

Blue Mosque from Galata and Red Fisherwoman

Crossing the Galata Bridge at dusk, populated by fishermen and strolling lovers, where a flotilla of ships, tugs, cruisers and yachts churned up the Bosphorus, I promised myself a walk across there the following day. I'm feeling a bit blue, as the weather has been cold, and I've spent a lot of time silent, on my own, just Be-ing, but it can be draining, and alienating. Visiting Steve was a great idea, once I'd got over the can't-be-bothered-to-go-out-my-feet-are-sore syndrome.

Loaves and fishes

Taksim is nothing to write home about: the most exciting thing there was that I bought a new wardrobe! A lime green tee shirt for $8 as I'm so - like - OVER black! And a few loquats as I'm starved for fruit here. It's a ghastly place for those unfortunate enough to be stuck there without realising that This Side has it all. Steve can't understand why I love Istanbul - wait, I said, until you see Sultanahmet and all that history. He walked me back to the train late at night, and I was less fearful here than I was in London, where I had awful attacks of acrophobia and insecurity, even though I'd lived there and I was surrounded by the love of family and friends.

So, another plug where it's due. When Luda was here, I was hotel door knocking, looking for a centrally located, reasonably priced, clean hotel to stay after she left. I wore my soles to my skin. Then I saw a lovely old wrought iron gate, buzzed, and to my delight, there was room at this inn, when I was due to return from London. The rates were the best in town - and yet again, I'm treated like family.

Star Holiday Hotel, Sultanahmet

Star Holiday Hotel I've been staying here ever since: the room is minute, but the view is unsurpassable, the location the best, and the double glazing stops me being woken every five hours. Brother Steve complained about his Taksim breakfast of watery gruel ... I now get my early morning tea from the breakfast terrace before I go back an hour later for the full plate of olives, cheese, cucumber and fresh breads. I'm sitting in the lounge now, as I wait for my bus to Cappadocia, and without asking, I've been brought a plate of pastry and cheese, and a glass of yoghurt. The muezzin has just called, from the windows along the busy promenade, I can see young boys dressed in the white fluffy capes of their circumcision ceremony; a pirate and his long-black-haired-maiden dressed in green satin with gypsy earrings, hoards of women in robes and scarves, bearded men on their way to prayer.

Aphrodisiacs in Egyptian spice market

A friend wrote yesterday, asking what I'd learned about myself, so far, on this journey. I've been considering this for days now, following the warmth of family in England. My experiences have been filled with marvel, and wonder, and a blissed out feeling of inordinate good luck that I can be here. But what I miss most is human contact; a loved voice in the morning, or shared laughter. As I'd promised myself, I walked down Sultanahmet today, to the ferries and the Galata bridge, and I was acutely aware of couples - everyone holding hands, laughing with each other, helping each other, everyone having someone to love. Children, parents, lovers, friends. I don't need expensive carpets, or silks, or jewellery (!) I don't need to eat in fabulous restaurants (the best meals have been in little hidey holes at the back of the markets) I don't need flashy hotels with hot and cold running bidets.

Bosphorus Asian side

I need someone meaningful to share this with. Someone who, when I return, will understand each of the phases of the journey, and remember them with me. My journeys have made my character. How I push my boundaries to their outer limits at times, how I face into the wind when I have to. But who I am as a woman is defined by the intimacy and intensity of sharing my life with others. Yes, now after several tough months, I acutely miss being in a relationship. I'm getting lonely. I long for calls, and texts and emails that go beneath the surface and understand that I may not be as I am writing. Am I needy? I wouldn't like to think so as I'm so fiercely independent, but I'm getting over having meals on my own and talking to myself, and waking up not knowing where the fook I am. Because if anything happens to me, who, really, will know, or rescue me?

Eating, roadside, Sultanahmet

To rub salt into the above wounds: this is my horrorscope for today: You may be feeling pretty confident now about your current plans, but something is still gnawing away at the bottom of your imagination. You might be limited in what you can do today, especially if you're obsessing about a relationship from the past. Don't try to escape your history, rather, dig into it. After you can find your way around in the shadows of your subconscious, you'll also be able to navigate better in the light of reality.

Yeah, yeah, all very well ... and once I've dug around the shadows of my subconscious?

View to Galata Tower (I think)

I walked down Sultanahmet, to the ferries, across the Galata, for a few kilometres on the Asian side, then back again, where a Ugandan man asked me for directions; he wanted to buy white wedding dresses in Turkey to take back to Uganda. Why? I asked him. Look around, nobody wears this stuff, they wear raincoats and doeks. I steered him to the Grand Bazaar and suggested he buy wedding dresses in China (after he'd asked me for my email address) then wandered into the Egyptian market, the Spice Souk, where again I was almost trampled to a powder. I had a hilarious interaction with a Turkish woman in a pharmacy as I tried to mime what a comb was - I was offered brushes, and nail brushes and scissors and we both clapped when she realised what I wanted.

Lace bouquet

I found what could have been a wedding outfit shop, filled as it was with white satin negligees and flowing white gowns, and bouquets made out of satin and lace but I imagine that these fashion fripperies would be reserved for the boudoir. The children's shops were monuments to strange tastes with miniature ball gowns with layers of flounces in purples, cerice and deep red. A disturbing phrase on a tee shirt for a seven year old read "Yes I am girl, I am available for the love" ...

I ate on the rooftop of a restaurant. The views were breathtaking, the weather warm, and the waiter looked behind me and said You are Alone? Sigh. Yes, I am. So I occupied myself reading the menu. And I laughed aloud, alone. This was compiled by a seriously sad fook.

Drunkin chicken, fried with blambeed whisky in high heat.
Battered chicken with smashed potatoes.
Marooned chicken and collapsed potatoes.
Ball of repressed fried spinach, collate with basil.
Shrimps in the small bags.

I chose the Tuna salad, and used the menu as a hat. I did. The sun was beating down and I wasn't about to move out of it for anything.

Even bread rolls snuggle up ...

I'm leaving now for an 11 hour overnight bus drive to Cappadocia. Alone. If no more is posted on this blog, you'll know that something happened to me to make me permanently invisible, but nobody will report it! I'm hot air ballooning. Alone. I'm walking through a strange valley of strange limestone towers, and I'm sleeping in a cave hotel. Alone. I'll eat alone, and I'll stare out of the window alone, and I'll shower alone, and if I run out of loo paper, well, then I'm in trouble, because I'm alone.

Being alone sucks. Even if I'm surrounded by fantastic beauty. And friends from afar who do love me. Because if it wasn't for this blog, I would have sat alone, for the past few hours, watching everyone holding hands. That sucks too.

Prophets and Losses

2011-05-18T17:14:00.000+10:00

A caller woke me early this morning, asking where I was. I had no idea. Struggling from a difficult sleep as I was severely jetlagged, I tried to put my geographic pieces in place. Could I hear dogs barking? The rustle of oaks against my window? Smell smoke? No. But tracks rattled. Five spires glowed in the pre-dawn, through my curtains. Then I remembered: Ah, Istanbul. The muezzin began, calling to his cohorts across the city, a magnificent sound, whatever world sentiments. It raises goosebumps. I lay in my big soft bed, warm, smelling coffee, thinking how lucky I am.

I've just had my Istanbul breakfast, of olives, goats cheese, yoghurt, cucumbers and grated cheese. I've discovered the best tea anywhere, is a cup of strong Turkish brew, with a bit of long life milk, sipped slowly and meditatively while overlooking the Marmara sea and the Blue Mosque, where trams clatter below and blossoms blow like snowflakes onto my rooftop. And a day ahead of me, surrounded by everything I can think of.

I'm happy and blissed out. My heart no longer hurts like I'd been stabbed through the ribs. I'm calm. I'm patient. I can sit for hours and just ... be. I am no longer a human do-ing. Everything will happen in its time. I've stopped worrying about money, and direction. My children's father told me a long time ago that all one needed in one's life is the ability to get out of a tricky situation if necessary - whether it's a busfare or plane ticket or night at a hostel. I have that. I've also made some very wise, educated - read museum quality - purchases which will (I entertain the hope) - buy me back my car.

Since I left in January:

I have lost -
1 hat
5 kilos
3 pairs of sunglasses
my haunted look
1 Primark jumper
Flab
My agoraphobia.

I have found -
My photographic eye
Peace
Treasures
Amazing friendships
Smatterings of new languages
Myself, of course - but that's not first on the list!
Ways to eat cheaply
Cheap places to sleep but still keep my princess integrity
that I like coffee
that I don't like meat or ice cream
Time to read
Confidence that I'm still okay
That 15kg is more than enough clothes to own at any time
That I can't do without industrial strength moisturiser, Argan oil shampoo, sunglasses, my passport, my phone, my mac, earrings.
That exfoliation is an extraordinary rejuvenator.
That my temper is the worst thing I can lose, anywhere, for whatever reason.

That it doesn't matter if I break a nail, or a lock, or a heel. But it does if I break any sort of personal convenant.

What hurts:
My feet. Oooh, my feet. I'm still battling the friggin' diabetes as a result of the African virus, and oh, how my feet hurt, burn, swell, itch, twitch, ache.
Seeing women my age, in rags, begging in various cities.
Seeing donkeys in Morocco, dogs in Nepal, caged tortoises and birds, glue sniffing children and adolescents with babies.
My shoulders, sometimes. My stomach, when my sugars are raging.
My bank "balance". But I don't care because -

What doesn't hurt:
What my mother did with G.
My heart.
All the rest of what led me to here.

It was going to be a sun and camera day, but guess what!!! Sun's gone! And so to chai with Basir in the Grand Bazaar, who will teach me more about Turkmenistan today.

TIP TOE THROUGH THE TULIPS

2011-05-17T22:40:00.004+10:00

OMG! What beauty surrounds me! And I'm warm!

I am back in Istanbul. I am deliriously happy. The sun is shining like has a point to make. It is 29 degrees! Purple tulips tremble amongst pansies and waterfalls of wisteria that tumble over ancient crumbling walls. Ferries churn the Marmara sea. The minarets on the many mosques glitter and every tree bursts with new leaves and flowers. People carry balloons. The sock knitter has had a really bad day. Men play chequers on the footpath. The icecream vendors are getting rsi. The last chestnuts of the season roast side by side with crisp corn, a girl carries a rose, there is a lot of uncovered pink skin. My new room (with bathroom, floors, windows and doors renovated since I booked it two weeks ago) at Hotel Star Holiday faces right onto the Blue Mosque and I'd try spitting on it just to test my ability if I didn't fear a religious reprisal. There's a WARM breeze! I truly, madly, deeply, love this city.

I left countryside Kent at 2am, standing in Steve's driveway under a big bleary moon. I wondered briefly why I hadn't done more country walks but then I reminded myself that most of my days there were spent wrapped up in every blanket I could find and I couldn't face the cold.

My driver talked non stop about Coronation Street, MG rallies, chocolate, accidents, big trucks, his children, Americans, French, Eurovision ... trying to keep himself awake, I am sure, all the way to Heathrow as we followed the trucks driving to Poland, Bordeaux, Spain, Morocco. I was sad to leave England - it's always been another home to me, and more so now that my family ties are greatly strengthened. We flew low, over the Channel, over green France, into green Zurich with its rooftops that touch the ground, where we landed in what looked like a paddock: curious sheep gazing upwards as we grazed their backs. Then back up again, right across Europe straddling the snowy Alps, across Italy, across Croatia, across Poland.

Musing on the skies, I started doing some maths about how much actual luggage weight I have carted with me since I became a professional journeyer. 20 kg minimum, each leg. 20 years travel. On average six trips a year. Tons, to be sure. I'll do the math on this one when I'm finally home.

And so to Istanbul, where I was met on time, assisted, and brought out into the sunshine, blinking and dazed with delight. Pomegranate juice and it's power kick awaits. I think I'm going to make some adventures. Hot air ballooning in Cappadocia, anyone?

Here's some more maths: what I'm doing is far, far cheaper than what I was doing in Sydney: running my car, insurance, public liability, mortgage, electricity, phones, decent clothes, makeup, doctors bills. I'm living light. And I feel light. Earth with a bump will call out soon. Meanwhile ...

Stay tuned for sunny photographs! My camera has missed me.

SCHOOL'S OUT

2011-05-17T01:07:00.000+10:00

For all those who are interested, I have refunded the donations received for the Nepalese school as all enthusiasm fizzled out once I left. The only funds not returned were given by Yvonne who helped 83 children have a crazy day out at the zoo. Please don't say I told you so ... sometimes a butterfly just has to flap its wings, even if there is no tsunami at the end. At least I tried.

THE BEAD MOVES ON ... AGAIN

2011-05-17T00:54:00.001+10:00

I FORGOT to photograph the last but bead swop - in Istanbul, with Basir, with whom I've spent many hours learning about Turkoman jewellery and eating kebab with our fingers on his round brass table, baskets and buckets piled to the ceiling with Afghanistan treasures. He took the Amazonite from Marrakech, and gave me two Turkoman silver beads - one to keep for the treasure necklace, one to pass on.

Fittingly, Sarah did the next swop - one double Turkoman silver bead from late 1800's for a 15th century beautiful opalescent Moon bead, and an 18th century unusually shaped chunk of Moroccan fossil amber. She used her bead as a tie on a piece of Algerian silver. One of mine will pass on, one will stay. EEuw. I want to keep them both!

MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN ....

2011-05-17T00:41:00.000+10:00

It seems the magic number 6 has been following me around - never mind the 6 degrees of separation that led me to there and not here! It was 6 degrees in Nepal and I felt it after midsummer Perth. Ditched my winter clothes for Morocco and froze there too as the temperature plummeted under desert winds. Turkey should be warm .. ooh yeah! But guess what? Everyone was wrapped to their eyeballs in pashminas, leather gloves and blanket coats and six was tops. Oh, it's spring in London, I'll go there for some Vitamin D and warmth. Cor blimey and bleedin' nonsense and all that; my first stop after a hot shower at Sarah's Norwich Five Star on my personal trip advisor, was a hasty sortie into that font of all nasty Chinese high fashion label rip-offs was Primart or mark, all the same to me, for some leftover winter clothes to clothe me against 6.

The sun doesn't come out here - now, anyway - long enough to thaw wings. And certainly not enough unless there's a wedding to clear the air - take decent blue and light photographs. But I love the country. I love the long and winding lanes, the verdant greenery, the quaint Victorian houses and grand Georgian ones. The spires, churches, steeples and graveyards. The blossoms and soggy marshes and fields of yellow and splotches of red and the mad blue nosed drivers who careen along country roads with their tops down, scarves blowing into watery eyes.

I loved being at Sarah and co. The warm, mad, delightful family where nothing is predicted and where everything happens and everyone pitches in and nobody minds and a nobody quickly becomes a somebody who will never again have nowhere to sleep.

When idle time happens and a foot or wrist is available, out comes the henna and deep Sarah goes into concentration, into her world of amazing designs which are transmuted onto skin. Children materialise from extended families, expand and contract and levitate the house, a thousands tons of washing are done, a thousand loads of dishes, but there is always time for a hug, a kiss, a smile, a beam of love across a room, an occasion to make fairy wings or tempura or toast marshmallows.

Thus armed, I took the train from Norwich to see my Bloom cousins, in Hampstead Heath. Racing through fields and past tiny blurred villages, past hills and dales and dazed cows we gobbled the countryside faster than an Australian can warm up beyond 6 degrees. I moped a bit on the train about things and ifs and whens and whatevers and being cold; then we slowed, and the driver announced in a sombre voice befitting the occasion that "There is a fatality on the line, the lines have to be cleaned, we apologise for the hiatus in your journey." And I got to thinking about how I'd left this happy home bound for London cousins and more bonding, and someone else woke up and thought Friggin' 'hell, I can't do this any more and leapt into my path. Life Over. In 8 seconds. We were delayed an hour and I arrived in London in one piece but sombre.

I took the tube to Holburn, clattering down the crowded stairs and up the packed giant escalators and through the creepy wind tunnels and onto the narrow, dim, dangerous platforms, and the smells and whooshes and buskers and head down leave me alone commuters in suits and hats and stilettos were the same: only the posters had changed. Osibiso and cheap pub meals in my day, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and ads for cheap phones now. Halfway somewhere I thought I was on the Blue Line instead of the Red Line, or the Jubilee Line instead of the Central Line or Northern instead of Ealing. I leapt off at the next station, feeling whirled around and disorientated, stopped a hurrying man in a bowler hat who looked blankly at me when I said, Please, Sir, Hope you Don't miss your Train, I'm Australian and haven't a clue about anything that goes on in the Northern hemisphere, but how do I get to Holburn? "You're standing in it", he said, walking away in a hurried huff.

Cousin Matthew collected me on a street corner, and I climbed into his sleek black Saab eating a sharp English apple, much as I probably would have done as a kid. Not a nannosecond had passed in connection time although it had been 15 years since my last visit and soon the mob arrived with shrieks and hugs and kisses and exclamations of You Haven't Changed A Bit! (Which is an older way of saying, my how you've grown!) We sat in his and Viv's English garden, bursting with lobelias and pansies and stocks, herbs and hidden walkways and bounteous lavender. I spent a few nights there, communing with my wonderful, excitable, interesting and talented cousins: checked out their African mask collections, their ethnic jewels, remembered the spinning wheels and paintings of shared childhoods that now graced their London homes.

A funny thing, this family business. Viv explained it on a "visceral level" - there'll always be the connection between family. I realised how sorely I missed them over all these years and again wondered about the what-ifs, and sliding doors. And how different my life would have been .. but I'm here again, and circles have a habit of revolving like doors. I tubed to Bond Street, walked aimlessly around the shops apart from a short sortie into Marks and Sparks for some of their divine undies; musing at myself for being not the least bit acquisitive as I don't have a home, or a cupboard, or a bookshelf or soapdish to put anything in. Even at 19, and 21, and 23, I had a hook for my hat. My only possessions are in a locker in Istanbul, with my nametag, tied to the metaphorical toe. Travelling light gets easier - if only it weren't so friggin' cold! Viv liked my earrings - she's now wearing them. I gave her a lavender bush to plant so that there would be another bloom in her garden ... when we tramped across The Heath where dog walkers ran amok with rent-a-poo, Viv told me about the father I never knew. He used to shout a lot, she said.

Sarah and Sean in loving parental mode (!) drove from Norwich to fetch me from Hampstead Heath to drive me to Kent and to my brother and his family. For those who don't know this is one hellova ride of love; negotiating ridiculous London inner and outer rings. We stayed overnight at their friends; deep in the countryside of Plaidstowe where oasthouses reach to the sky, rabbits run wild and red breasted robins sit on chestnut trees. We traipsed down muddy lanes and across stiles and through paddocks to eat at a local 15th century pub where we talked about That Woman and the Black Diamond and nipple piercings and whether, now that they'd moved away from Big Smoke to Little Apples, would both these gorgeous men enter the local cake baking competitions. All that was missing were the toffee tins to put these images in.

Sarah, Sean, Sue

And so through to Kent and more family. Gardens of vines, roses, olives, daisies; a greenhouse of vegetables, a conservatory in which I am now sitting, mohair blanket on my knees, thermal underwear in layers, another cup of tea to warm my fingers as I type, too friggin' cold to go outside and inspect the asparagus, or berries or tomatoes, while my family rush around full of the joys of spring, mowing lawns and planting kohl rabi and picking freeshias for my bedroom in sleeveless shirts - they're still marginally African after all and do like a good dose of serious sun to thaw them. The rest of England has stripped down to their undies and are sitting on desolate windswept beaches eating soggy fish and chips and mopping their melting icecreams. Bleedin' cold blooded loonies! I know, because we drove to Whitstable and tried to do the same but had to leave when there was danger of my sticking to the metal railing. In between, a drive to Canterbury, where my stepmother lives; to her old house next to a pub where the drunk patrons used to pee through her letter box and where she had a bucket of cold water ready to staunch their willies, and where she tried to resuscitate her frozen goldfish by pouring water over them and giving them cpr with her forefinger. I kid you not. I seriously Kid you Not.

Canterbury Cathedral and Dan

I have a mad family. They live spread out like a fine tablecloth around England. One of them lives next door to the current squeeze of Pippa Middleton, in a house so large you need a telescope to peer down the avenue to the front door, across the acres of fields and wild flowers, through the wrought iron gates and cottage size ornamental urns. Others live in frightfully alright terrace houses with five floors and lofts and attics. Others live in houses with Japanese gardens and raked stones and bridges. There are ties, made and broken and mended and stripped and torn apart and disowned and denied. After all the years of trauma with The Mother, my brother and I sat down and corroborated our childhood abuses. He remembers being taken out of school for good and threatened with self education at the age of 13 when he asked for a ride to school in the snow; I remember being locked in the roof for interrupting; he remembers being alone in hospital at 8 post tonsillectomy; I remember being alone in hospital between iron lungs and oxygen tents. We both remember a woman who wore a white fox fur and wielded her ivory cigarette holder like a whip and used her tongue like one on her babies, but was obsequiously wonderful to all else. He remembers a father who went nuts when he was called by name and not "Dad", I remember a woman I never felt deserved to be called "mom" and never will again now, especially after finding The Secret that slammed shut that sliding London/Cape Town door. Come in, spinner, come in ... your time is coming.

The night grew long and the tales more disturbing and tragic as we ate home made bread and blackcurrant jam, apple juice and fish from Whitstable. Steve's wife became Lady gaga as the tales deepened, but as they did, we both let go of all the wrongs of the past. Do you remember the fights, he asked? Yes, some, I replied, especially the one where She threw a bedside lamp at Him and it couldn't reach its target because it was still plugged into the wall. Do you remember that you and our daschund Lulu used to hide in the same spot when in trouble? Did you know, I added, that when she died I found a spreadsheet of all the men she was concurrently shagging - names to the left of it, dates at the top spanning 30 years?

Steve's led a stable, happy life with his wife and boys, travelling a lot, spent looking through a lengthy lens; I've kept running on wide angle. But we grew up as orphans, paving our own way on all levels. And I got to thinking that nomads never made stable societies or communities, they couldn't acquire; they weren't literate. They had to be stationary to grow the crops and reap the seeds and bake the bread and make the paper and tell the tales, and acquire the land to increase the cattle ... and then I had a panic attack about not having a home, a car, books, a cupboard of clothes, a warm body and close giggles when the ceiling closes in.

Brother Number One and I - now that The Mother is dead, said we should Do The Book, bugger the consequences, now that we're old and wise enough not to be victims. We thought we'd use Za Za Gabor as our womb donor; Arnold Schwartzenegger as her long time younger lover as the former needs a job now; I'd be played by a young Shirley Temple, then Jessica Lange in King Kong, then Merryl Streep with a better accent, then Helen Mirren in Calendar girls. Woody Allen would fit in there somewhere too. The missing sibling link and the Story Thereof would be played by himself, Mr O. Bride of the Father would be played by a motor bike riding, vidal sassoon cut, golf playing, pipe smoking, hollywood den mother with a bad memory who would have to pass all auditions. The Lodger would be played by Alan Bates. The house would be the one used in the Shining. Queen Latifa would be the one person I loved who rescued me from roof spaces and had a lap bigger than the Transvaal.

Brother Steve found a book on the internet called "Meet the Czechoslovaks", by Walter and Beryl Storm. It's a story of my parents years long stay in Czechoslovakia; of the fascinating neighbours and life in the country post war, and the 2 year plan and the places they ate and the fields they helped their neighbours plough. It's also the story of my brother's parents, but while in Czechoslovakia - long before he was born - they'd changed their names from Harry and Beryl Bloom to the above, to protect themselves in a communist, Jewish-suspicious Europe. Hence Susan Storm Bloom. All the years of asking our parents about our heritage, our history, our links, and it took the internet to fill in the blanks of childhoods past. I was conceived during the writing of this book, but perhaps they thought I wouldn't "take" as The womb donor had lost seven children by the time my seed was planted. I was just a hypothesis, I suppose. They were busy socialists in an exciting, troubling time: I do remember their tales of living in Europe and being invited to every cocktail party and art gallery opening they could so they'd get free food.

And cousins make connections - my daughter skyped cousin Dan like they'd lunched together yesterday. There is something special about visceral connections.

I am almost warm, thinking about it!

So, tonight, back to Istanbul - via Zurich. I'm looking forward to less introspection and more SHOPPING!!!!!!! And temperatures above six degrees!

GODDESSES AND FAIRIES AND HAGS AND PRINCESSES

2011-05-07T19:31:00.005+10:00

Goddess Sarah, finder of stones, in a museum quality Uber expensive Moroccan headdress

Ha Ha Fibula, worn to secure scarf

HA HA HA!!! Number 5000 is Sarah, who kicked me out of my bead doldrums into an exciting new world of antiquities, collections and covetings. Thankyou Angel Goddess for this magnificent journey you have led me through ... from a late night Bella through Niello pendants to holey haggish stones. I love you forever Soul Sister!

Silver Bella, depicting life of wearer

Ida Ou Nadif /Arkhass silver fibulas

WHO WILL BE NUMBER 5000?????

2011-05-07T18:52:00.002+10:00

In the next few minutes, some reader out there will be number 5000. If you're reading now, please tell me who you are!!!! You may be the lucky reader!

Stone circles

2011-05-07T05:29:00.002+10:00

I'm in England, in Sarah's house a half hour from the wonderful 14th Century city of Norwich, place of churches, crumbling walls, narrow lanes, tea shops, antiques, and rickety and stately homes. I feel very content, very balanced, very ordered. It's strange to be "civilised" after so long; strange to walk into a clean, sanitised mall even if the youths here have hair like toilet brushes and a man had a spider web tattooed over his face. I needed a little sidestep from my Istanbul adventure, and I wanted to see my family who have been living the English life since we all left South Africa in the seventies.

I did too, as a young woman with a lot of hope and adventure in my heart, but I also left behind G, my soul mate, the love of my life. I left behind my mother and grandmother and the mountains and street dancing and proteas. Every other member of my family had joined the ranks of rats leaving a sinking ship as we fled the dangerous South African political and social regime. My entire family went to England. So I saved up my own fare to England from my job as a medical secretary, where I spent most of the time sitting on the floor reading medical books as I had no idea how to work a switchboard so seldom answered the phone. I booked a ticket on the Pendennis Castle to Southampton. I was already packed, with a new, crisp passport and visa, before I'd even had the courage to tell my mother I was leaving her own scary regime. I was twenty one. The ship pulled away, the streamers snapped, and I was free.

My father had a rambling old house overlooking Canterbury with fields that stretched down to the village. I went to high table with him at the university where he was a Law professor. I walked the Kent countryside. I collected daffodils. I ate chestnuts. I saw my first snow bound mole. I plucked pheasant. I wore big coats and bellbottoms and white plastic boots. I met my stepmother who smoked a pipe and had a Vidal Sassoon haircut and argued ferociously with me because I liked to bath every day. I slept upstairs in the loft and when I woke the windows were frosted over and the ground cracked under my feet. I had a job in television, I was moving with the groovers, wearing hot pants and white lipstick and enormous hats and green suede platform shoes. I knew the innards of the underground like my own arteries. Until a man in the tube, standing behind me, opened his coat and plonked his willie on my shoulder. Then I took buses for a while. I went to Osibiso at Crystal Palace. I shopped at Wallis and Marks and even did nervous sortiesf into Harrods. I lived in a marvellous old flat in Knightsbridge that belonged to the Peruvian consul. I learned to say *u&k in a frightfully posh accent.

One day G phoned and asked me to come back to South Africa to him. My father said don't go, you'll never get back here and there's going to be a blood bath in South Africa. G must come to England. But I didn't listen to my father. I went back. And everything collapsed. There was a different sort of bloodbath. I married someone else quickly, and landed up in Australia, astonished.

And now I'm back here finally, amongst the blackberry hedges and the rapeseed fields and wonky houses. I have such a sense of familiarity in this country. I have a flotilla of cousins here who I will see next week. And my brother and his family lives here. I've spent most of my life an orphan, living in alien lands away from family. Here, in Sarah's house which is filled with much laughter, major interaction, everyone working and relating as a cohesive unit into which I'm immediately absorbed, I can't help wondering how different my life would have been had I not sailed away on that ship or married G.

But I did, and I didn't. Instead, I've filled my life with travel and adventures. I'm proud of my journeys, and that I can face anything now. T.S. Elliott wrote - The aim of all our travelling is to return to the place and know it for the first time. I wouldn't be the me I am now if I hadn't pulled up the known and filled myself with the unknown, the scary, the challenging. One one level while I yearn for stability and the security of a solid family life, I'm also so much more because I haven't had it. Sometimes I don't know where I belong; I've felt more alive in a circle of Samburu warriors than I have at my local supermarket.

Travel allows one to be anonymous. Impersonal. We don't have to reveal; our commitments have to do with timetables, not emotions. On a train of strangers, we're less vulnerable than when we're sitting with a significant other, trying to make a point. We can be impulsive, inventive, invisible. Or highly visible. Since Luda returned to Sydney, I am so invisible that people have tried to walk through me, never mind walk over me! Together we were a dynamic force to be reckoned with. She agreed: "It takes 2 forces to produce energy and thats what made us so visible. Even when we were buggered we still hit the streets lit up like Christmas trees with the knowledge that magical finds would soon be ours.... we were happy.....our eyes were the windows to our soul.....we were like that saying in When Harry Met Sally...'I'll have what she's having' and that's why we were like a giant honeypot attracting many bees.............oh I miss it! "

Wandering around the shops of Norwich, I had no desire to buy anything besides that which would keep me warm. It's a strange sensation to know that everything I acquire, I have to carry with me for the forseeable future. In Turkey a man tried to sell me a pair of summery platform sandals. I'm going into winter, I told him. I have to fit them in my case, I told him. No problems, he kept insisting, they make you taller. Unh huh. THAT again! So instead, I bought two beautiful little Southern Indian beads that I can take everywhere and that don't weigh much.

And this got me to thinking about my obsession with beads. I dream about them. That I find beauties in dark souks. That I'm creating jewelery. During the day my head is full of new designs and I read books of bead history and culture when I should be watching the news of an insane, angry world. I scheme with Sarah how we can do our own book - and the delights of heading back to Morocco to the festivals and the people wearing those astounding designs of astounding components. I see beads and jewellery in their cultural context, so photography is of major importance to me now. I thought I'd want to give up the jewellery thing, but I'm delighted I have a whole new path with a new way of seeing. I thought I'd lost the pulse racing, heart hammering sensation when I found something I really connected with: now I can find that certain piece buried in buckets, with my skin as a treasure geiger counter.

Sarah, doing Abbey Road

My special collection has grown in leaps and bounds since being under the subtle tutelage of Sarah. We marvel at the mysticality of these little pieces of art, at the creative secrets they contain. So what's their allure? Every one has been created by a person, so there's a soul connection. Whether it's been carved, washed up on a beach, annealed, excavated, blown or hammered - someone in a foreign culture, many long before recorded history, has had a vision which he has brought to life with his hands. The source of every bead is evidenced in its shape, form and design. Beads outlast cataclysms, famine, floods, wars and they've been currency from the beginning of mankind. Tiny, beautiful, transportable and always growing in value, they tell so much more of a culture than a five carat diamond. Trace the history of a bead and you have a history of the world. Put a string of diamonds around a neck, and comments will be made about its financial value. Put a string of beads around a neck ... each one collected from a significant point, or each one with a significant history, and a story begins.

So if I hadn't slipped through my sliding door all those years ago when I returned to South Africa, I most probably wouldn't be involved in the passing around of stories. Bead stories.

So I read this to Sarah while I'm writing. And she asks me if I've heard of Hag stones, the ones in which witches used to tunnel and hide when bad spells were being thrown about. Hag stones? are you for real? You've been living in Norfolk too long! They're for real, she says, running around the house to gather her collection and returns with a handful of marvellous pieces of rock in wonderful shapes, which she's tied in bunches to window sills, door handles and uses as a key ring.

Yesterday Sarah was dressed in a very revealing bustier, a red frothy skirt with roses and skulls, with a pinkish petticoat, high red leather boots with diamante horse shoes, and bunch of red flowers in her mad flowing hair. Today she's in various shades of grey, layered like the colours of the rocks she's showing me and tell me about evil witchery. Which one do I believe?

Hag stones, freshly harvested

Norfolk legend has it that when witches were dancing and throwing around evil spells, the only way to hide from the spells was to tunnel into a stone. When it was safe to come out, the witches escaped, leaving a hole right through the stone. These stones have long been used as amulets: putting a piece of string through the hole releases the spirit of the witch and the wearer will always be protected from evil and negativity. They're also gifts from the Goddess Gaia, the Earth Mother, to remind us of the divine feminine, and the wonder and magic of creation and the protective element of the circle.

And Sarah found them on her local beach. Beach? In England, there's a beach? We do an immediate about turn for the day, and in five seconds I'm in my hiking boots and dressed for hag stone fossicking on a beach in England.

Sarah, looking for hag stones

Two goddesses, out on the prowl, looking for hag stones while a watery warm England strips off their clothes and heads out for fish and chips in old villages. The beach is grey, bleak looking, with slippery stones under my feet and nobody daring to go in the water. Old folk with dripping icecreams totter down the pier to the Folk show at the Pavilion; some folk singers entertain the elderly. My eyes are peeled to the ground looking for these rare pieces which I'm determined to find to add to my "treasure necklace" of beads found on this trip.

Moi, with found hag stone and new fake Fendi bag

I spot one immediately - as easily as looking for treasure beads in brimming buckets. We find another and another and another .... but I have to be selective as they weigh as much as ... rocks. I'm as happy as a hag on a free spirit day ... it's warmer, I'm on the beach, I've added to my bead collection, I'm having fun with Sarah, and I'm learning quickly that many of the pieces I bought intuitively while in Morocco are museum quality.

Oh yeah! Who cares if I'm invisible. I can find rare hag stones on a long stretch of beach if I ever needed somewhere to hide.

WOMEN WHO STARE AT COATS

2011-05-05T01:05:00.000+10:00

SO, back to Istanbul, and what took me away from the blog for ten days. Shopping. Shopping, shopping and more shopping. The Devil Wears Prada. And handmade ancient kaftans. Sex in the City didn't have time, in spite of a thousand propositions, as there were wallets to be emptied and bags to be filled. "I'll have what she's having!" became our catchcry. Magic carpet rides were sniffed at with disdain as the two Pretty Women practised their seriously obscene fossicking techniques in minute shops tended by dazed keepers from Afghanistan and Anatolia.

Aromatic sheesh kebabs were gobbled from low tables with an eye on the ticking clock in the ancient souks as Confessions of a Shopaholic were shared over fresh pomegranate juices. When we lost track of time and how quickly we could spend Brewster's Millions, the accurate muezzins pulled us into line. Over piles of silk scarves, old ikats, Turkoman, Uzbekistan and Bukhara bounty, we linked pinkies and promised this was not to be our Last holiday as we ensured Wall Street wouldn't collapse. Arms breaking, legs buckling, we wished more than any handsome Turkish boys for some Blank Checks to help us kick The Habit. Nothing worked. There was so much to buy. So much to see. So many ATM's to keep warm.

Istanbul is gorgeous, exotic, exciting, mystical, crowded, religious, serene, insane: one of the most ancient and also busiest ports in the world, the heart of the Silk Route, it's a conduit for everything you can imagine from culture to history, beauty and arts and back again Beds of voluptuous tulips burst from the cracked soil into the marginally spring days as people buried deep in scarves, coats and gloves rush from mosque to church to bazaar or restaurant and hotel. From every visual point on the compass there are spires, pinnacles, domes, minarets .... and people. Istanbul is a river of people, a tide of humanity, and over 400,000 of them enter the Grand Bazaar ... every single day.

We stayed initially at the quaint Hotel Niles

Watching the world outside Hotel Niles

http://www.hotelniles.com/the_suites.shtml in the suite pictured, as we'd had BIG problems finding accommodation before we got there: Anzac, Gallipoli and Easter combined to fill every room in the city. The room was enormous and even though we had our own hamam in the bathroom, we had no idea how it worked, and besides, we were too cold to undress and hang around scrubbing our toenails while there was shopping, shopping and more shopping to be done.

Marrakech's medina is shadowy, aromatic, noisy and chaotic with donkeys and peanut brittle sellers and toppling carts of dates. The Capala Karsi is, in the main avenues, like walking down some very ritzy streets in Paris, lined with exotic shops with famous names. Then down the side lanes, past the fountains where men wash before prayer, are the smaller, older shops, crammed to knee level with buckets and barrels and containers of jewellery - from alpaca to balouch to bukhara and Turkoman, in such abundance that it's mind boggling. Always, in amongst what looks like rubbish, are the fabulous pieces, the really old, and fabulously worn pieces ...and we immediately get the story of high silver prices, and difficult to get pieces, and lessening availability and how far their family had to go into the villages to get these unusual pieces ...

And although we'd donned black armbands in a futile promise NOT to buy anything on the first day ... Luda found some glorious children's tunics, adorned with mangled and battered pieces of silver, tassels, buttons and beads, which are worn to give the children strength. She also found an Uzbek headdress, equally adorned with baubles, tassels, pendants, coins and embroidery. The carpet shop owner swore they came from his village; the headdress was worn during weddings and ceremonies, and his uncle went back every few years to get these pieces which were becoming more and more scarce and valuable. How fascinating we exclaimed as he wrapped them up, wiping mock tears from his eyes and tearing his own sleeves as he parted tragically with cultural icons of his village - whose name had temporarily fled his memory. I was muttering along the lines of ... I don't have a HOME, never mind a SHOP! Where the flotsam am I going to put these? But they're rare, he silently sobbed, bundling them into newspaper and a garbage bag. I've ruined myself giving them to you for such prices! I wouldn't even consider this discount to the traders of Turkmenistan!

Well, la di da! Carrying our KILOS of trashed silver stitched to polar fleece and rayon- obviously invented in the late 1800's in Uzbekistan, but not having reached civilization until the 21st century, we looked up to the carved, painted domes, the Arabic calligraphy, the thousands of stained glass lanterns, the hanging carpets, and the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of jewellery emblazoned rare and wonderful and culturally extinct children's tunics and wedding crowns.... down every lane and on every corner. STUNG! But we were laughing. Wherever we went, we were laughing. We were like two man magnets, drawing them to us in droves, like wasps to honey pots. They grabbed, they held on, they nuzzled, they whispered throatily of their desires.

And I got my ear tongue washed by the Turkish Delight who sold me a pair of knock off Valentino jeans that seriously did have the best fit in the world, as the vendor tried to show me as he ran his hands over my bum, his hands up the insides of my thighs, and tried to show how little space there was in the waistband. How he got his sloppy tongue into my ear while I was fishing for Lira in my purse is a mystery ... but the hand sanitizer carried for this whole trip quickly had a whole different use.

Three days and three nights of space at the Niles, then we had to move hotels. We were shipwrecked in a hideous dive, sister to the Niles, where we barely made a dent on the beds before we rushed out into the streets to find one more suitable .. this time the contemporary Hotel Faros

http://www.faroshotelistanbul.com

right on the main road, with mosques in every direction, and the tram line on our doorstep. And a waiter who took one look at Luda and decided she was The One. And he never left his post until she left for Sydney a few days later, hoping she'd give up her worldly goods and fly off with him somewhere. When he tried to get her alone, I told Luda to tell him that I was epileptic and that she had to look after me.

Let go of pasts and take up new opportunities - so Saith The White Rabbit

The weather was freezing; the skies grey, the air drizzly, the bazaars packed. My camera didn't come out of its bag. I managed to drag Luda from shopping for long enough to get to Topkapi Palace but the crowds drove us away - queues that would take hours to clear, and on the way back down the ancient lanes with the Bosphorus to one side and the Hippodrome to the other, we had our fortunes told by a rooster and a rabbit. Look, okay, perhaps it was the apple teas, or the muezzins, or the wintry air, or the novelty, but the rabbit nibbled a piece of paper for each of us and told Luda something along the lines of letting go of the past, and I was advised to take up new opportunities.

We lived on sheesh and gosleme and kebabs, and watched the Whirling Dervish Mevlanas in the Old Printing Building. I found a marvellous place to have tea, but didn't get further than the entrance when Luda realised it was a graveyard. She's SO not a sightseer .. sigh! So back to the bazaars for more fixes.

After trudging bleakly from hotel to hotel looking for accommodation after Luda was due to leave for Sydney, I finally found one on line ... a bleak little place quite a walking distance from the main sights, but at least I had a place to rest my head if not hang my hat for a few nights. We'd dispatched another parcel of treasures via TNT to Sydney. Sarah asked me to come to England to spend some time with her family. A few clicks, a few skypes, and I had my ticket. The hotel was creepy, with a creepy manager, but I watched the Royal Shindig, then I trudged the streets yet again knocking on doors until I found one more suitable. I left some luggage here until my return. I bought a small case and some thermals as my clothes were getting stinky and when I did find a laundry to wash them, I threw them away after they returned as I was sick of them. I went to England, via Frankfurt, in the Princesses new clothes, driving in a Mercedes to the airport at 3.30am, watching the medieval walls that protected the city crumble past me; happy that when I returned, the weather would be warmer, I'd have a nice hotel, and I could get back into the souks with a renewed eye.

And so I'm here in England.

Ours is not to reason why ...

2011-05-04T21:49:00.003+10:00

It is odd to be writing about Istanbul when I'm now in a gorgeous English village with Sarah and her family. But let me fill in details.

Two weeks ago I woke in a riad in the medina of Marrakech. The day was chilly and grey as we wove our way through the deserted souks, trundling our luggage, for the drive through magnificent, orange countryside, to Casablanca and the airport. From the train blog, you'll remember that Lu and I would rather have eaten sheep intestines than take that train ever again.

As I write, the most iconic restaurant of the Djma el Fnaa has gone in a terrorist attack, as well as the many tourists whom I may have passed, or smiled at, or spoken to, or stood behind in the ATM line, who are dead. I wonder about the waiter there, too, whom we teased because he was slow, and I've been looking for the photos of the mosaics I took that are now a pile of rubble. Bari, with whom I traded the last bead, has his shop stone throwing distance from the restaurant. He fetched me my pamplemousse juice every time we fossicked in his buckets. I hope he's okay.

Two days ago I woke in Istanbul, in a really creepy minute room overlooking the Bosphorus where tankers and ferries sped to Greece and Venice, to the calls of the muezzin, goosebumpy in their devotion and melodic beauty. In between watching the Royal Wedding, punctuated by the Calls, I managed to get flights to England. I'd been wearing the same clothes for days and days as I didn't have anything warm to wear (and all on sale besides jewellery were Turkish slippers, pashminas and Russian fur coats) so when I finally found some thermals in a supermarket, I had my stinky clothes laundered but I hated the sight of them so much when they were returned that I threw them in the bin. When I left Istanbul for London via Frankfurt, I'd left behind my main suitcase in the hotel I'll stay in when I return; so I strode through airports wearing a soft suede coat, a new pair of jeans, some platform boots, my thermals, and my hair two inches longer than when in Nepal.

Yesterday I woke in Norwich, England, in a marvellous rambling house with low ceilings of black aged beams, of staircases that lead to hidden fairy rooms, with a view to a 17th century church from my large iron bed with triple doonas and my own bathroom and Sarah's constant offers of tea. At border control at Heathrow, I was asked who I was staying with and how I met her: I should have said On Line.

Yesterday I woke to a changed world hysterical that Osama has been killed and tossed into the ocean before you could say Bin laden. Yesterday I peeled off the chilly Istanbul coat and under the tutelage of Sarah's 11 year old daughter Charis went shopping for end of season jumpers, socks and a new toiletry bag. I came back from Sainsbury's with a bag of English cheese and Italian bread and Chinese knock off fashion labels and some Badedas and exfoliating gloves to try and remove the remains of those bloody Ait Ouzzine fly bite scabs. We celebrated the evening with a friend's birthday and a cake and candles and whisky and storytelling and Mauritian breyani and samoosas. And I woke in my leggings and thermal top, feeling rested and family orientated, which I need.

And wondering about the sensibility of returning to Turkey, and the Capila Carsi and it's 400,000 visitors a day, and the security guard asleep on his feet when he should be scanning those who enter the grand bazaar.

In spite of everything I have written and said and felt, in spite of the months of misery and sadness about What Happened, I am feeling better, and there is a lift in my heart and in my eyes again. It doesn't matter the questions of what the future holds or where or when or how and what of? I'm doing what I have to now. I'm tired of questioning myself and my attachment and my motives and issues ... I'm water (! ;-)) flowing where my spirit takes me. And I'm not stopping this journey .. there is more to do ... so much more underfoot.

What a topsy turvy world I'm inhabiting.