Travels with Stephen Part 2

 

Against fearsome odds King Stephen had defeated the massive armies of the Ottoman Turks but he knew they were likely to return.

In the aftermath of his extraordinary triumph, a campaign of building monasteries emblazoned with richly coloured paintings from the Bible commenced.

At the same time, Stephen demanded that the monasteries also be able to resist invading armies. Orthodox Christianity had no choice but to become a warrior faith and it certainly couldn’t rely on the Catholic Christians to come to its aid.

And so the odd combination of beautiful biblical scenes painted in bright colours on churches and buildings surrounded by high solid walls, the only point of access a narrow portal with enormous, heavy doors.

In this, the painted monastery at Tagu Neamt was no exception.

From the monastery we planned to walk back to the town following a trail marked on our map of Moldovia. Arriving there early in the morning, the place was deserted (the pilgrims were due to arrive later in the day) – except for one other person: an elderly monk.

 We communicated in German. He was a bit of a character. When we asked him about the trail from the monastery to the town, which was marked on our map, he told us that it was no longer used.

‘It goes through the mountains. You will have trouble finding it. Many years ago we monks used it because this was the quickest way to reach the town, but with the roads now, no one needs to do that anymore….’  

 He was right about the trail. 

After tracking up a mountain side and looking around we gave up and instead followed an unsealed road which hedged along a river.

It was a remarkable journey and I found myself on a kind of pilgrimage….

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Vortex of Madness

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When we left the town Gladstone, we had it all worked out.

Leastways we thought we did.

Gladstone was a small nowhere town in the what was known as the mid-north of South Australia – where there was an awful lot of ‘north’, like about 500 kilometres of it.

Anya and I had pitched our tent in a caravan park and were planning to ride our bikes to another nowhere place called Port Broughton, which was situated on the coast about a hundred kilometres south west of Gladstone.

The weather report forecast a light northerly wind in the morning which would blow up around midday and increase during the afternoon, ahead of a cool change in the evening.

Studying our map, we found a series of back roads which would take us south to a town called Redhill and from there, another unsealed back road heading west to a place called Port Broughton. In this way, we would ride south with the northerly behind us to Redhill and then in the afternoon, head west to Port Broughton when we would have the northerly as a side wind.

Distance wise, 70% of the trip was to Redhill. We calculated that the rest of the trip to Port Broughton would take at the most, around 2 hours.  

But the weather report was wrong and we found ourselves heading into vortex of madness. The last leg of the journey which was supposed to be the shortest turned out to by far the longest….. 

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Ozymandias

 

All day I travelled through a wasteland: once fertile agricultural lands destroyed by decades of foolishness, now just empty fields filled with weeds and drift sand.

The beaten up bus I travelled in was forced to stop for a few hours. 

´Mechanical problems´. Wouldn’t have been the first time.

At one stop, an area of asphalt, there were the remains of a bus which had been burnt out – or bombed.

I missed my connection to a distant place well known for its historic ruins and had to spend the night in a slum city –  another very different kind of ruin.

A monstrous place, an urban nightmare: rows and rows of flaking, decrepit apartment blocks. Old run down factories filling the air with thick black smoke. Crowded streets pot holed, littered with plastic bags and gaudy foil wrappings. Trucks and old motor cars leaving behind them clouds of dense fumes.

People walking passed like zombies, grim faced, dour.

 

Accommodation was hard to find especially for a foreigner. I walked into a dingy excuse for a hotel only to be dismissed with a wave of a hand. Then another, then another.

Eventually I found a soulless, run down room. A dungeon.

What did I do to deserve this?  

 

 

As the sun neared the horizon and darkness enclosed the city, I walked the streets in search of a meal.

And walked, followed by furtive stares, derisive laughter.

Foreigner.

One of them.

On my part, one thought occupied my mind as I ate a greasy excuse for a meal: 

What it would it be like to live here?

 The country I had come to in search of difference, diversity, had never had a free and fair election. It produced nothing. Beyond its borders, its currency was worthless. Corruption riddled it at every level. Its human rights record was scandalous. It’s prisons crammed with those suspected of not being totally loyal to a brutal dictatorship. Minority groups were living a precarious existence. The role of women was to bear children, cook and submit. LGBT’s didn’t exist. Whilst gladly accepting foreign aid, the same regime blamed the rest of the world for its poverty. There was only one source of information, the state controlled media.

The people were told that they were blessed, never had it so good.

Did they believe it?

Did they have any choice?

The truth was: this  place was hell on earth.

Then again, who was I to judge?

Me, a foreigner, with my ideals of freedom of speech, social justice and human rights?

When I went traveling, I wanted to see another way of life, to experience strange sights, to be disorientated, culture shocked. To escape the feeling of being one of ‘us’.

Well, here it was. I was amongst ‘them’ and the view was ugly.  

What the hell was I doing here?

 

On the following morning I got a bus out to the ruins of an ancient empire. Stone walls, columns, statues chipped and pitted, lines of script which had only recently been deciphered. All of it unearthed and given importance and meaning by foreigners. Now a handy cash cow for the government.

It was incredible. I walked around as if in a dream. I was suddenly transported miraculously, as if on a magic carpet, to a time long ago, when a civilization, an empire, rose out of the earth like a vigorous plant, bloomed, and then died.

Yesterday I´d wondered what the hell I was doing here, in this hell on earth, and today, that question was far from mind.

Overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of being alive, I knew why I was here.  

Walking amidst stone relics, some of them bearing the symbols of a strange script, Percey Shelley’s famous poem echoed in the desert:

 

‘I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…..Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round that decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

 

 

The Flood Part 1

We had arranged to stay at Francine’s place for the night.

We were on a bike ride through Zeeland, a province of The Netherlands which lay west of Rotterdam.

Francine was a member of a Dutch organization called ´Friends of the Bike´ (Vrienden van de Fiets) and so were we. It worked like this: people offered to put up bike riders for the night and provide breakfast the following morning for a set fee of 45 Euros. The bike riders paid a nominal fee to be in the organization and received a book listing places to stay all over the country. Friends of the Bike was an inherent part of a national bike riding culture – and a country with the best system of bike tracks in the world.

Sometimes the people offering the accommodation were themselves also bike riders and felt obliged to contribute to the system they used. Sometimes they liked to meet strangers and talk. Over the years we had met some amazing people via ‘friends of the bike’ and had some memorable conversations – and Francine certainly fell into that category.

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The Inland Sea

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In 1802 a ship called ‘The Investigator’ captained by a young man named Mathew Flinders left England on its way to Australia.

Flinders was assigned with a special mission: to find out what Australia was.

No one knew. All was speculation.

No one had ever circumnavigated Australia.

A hundred years before, the Dutch had mapped the long western coast of Australia. James Cook had mapped much of the eastern coast. But there were still many bits of the puzzle to be filled in, the major one being the enormously long southern coast stretching from the tip of present day Western Australia to Melbourne; 7000 kilometres of it. 

There was intense speculation of there being a vast inland lake or lakes in the centre of the Australian continent with a huge river – a Ganges, an Amazon, a Nile – connecting it to the coast. For Europeans the idea of a huge continent with no major rivers or lakes was inconceivable. Their experience was that large continents and mighty tracts of water went together. 

 Flinders was charged with sailing along the southern coast of Australia and finding the mighty river – and then sailing into the centre of the continent and mapping the inland sea. 

He was in for a surprise and not the pleasant kind….

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