Let me state right now that I’m not a religious person, and that I’m not anti-religious either.  I wanted to photograph the pilgrims, because I knew that they would be colourful subject matter due to the fact that many of them had wrapped themselves in their country’s flags, and it would be interesting to document the phenomenon.

I have to admit that my preconceived ideas, led me to believe that I could go and look at the pilgrims dispassionately as though they were just some picturesque folk who follow some anachronistic dogma rather than decent people with deeply held beliefs.

On the television news, I had seen a few reports showing the pilgrims playing music and it all looked a bit lame. So when I went down to Hyde Park near St Mary’s Cathedral in downtown Sydney it came as quite a surprise to me, how much I enjoyed the music and watching the people dance to it. 

As I was watching a Spanish group of pilgrims playing the guitar and singing while about 50 people danced in a circle around them, a young neatly dressed Spanish woman came up to me and told me in broken English, that she was part of that group and that she wanted me to know that Jesus loved me the way how I was. I have a standard reply that I tell such people so that I don’t get involved in some long and tedious discussion about the Bible.  I always say, ” thank you, I know”. That always puts a smile on their faces, and they leave me alone because they think I’m one of them. All the same, it did it gave me a warm feeling that someone wanted to share some joy.

Strangely enough, later on, I found myself thinking about why she had said what she had, to me, and the thought occurred to me that maybe because I was unshaven and sporting the generally unkempt look that I cultivate, she might have thought I was some kind of bum, full of despair and she wanted to up-lift my spirits. 

This thought occurred to me because I know that in Europe most people take pride and care in the way how they look and they tend to dress a lot more fashionably and neatly than many people here in Australia. To compound matters, I tend to dress even more casually than most other Australians.  I can imagine that many of these straitlaced young Catholics from Europe must think we’re so poor here, because so many of us just don’t bother spending that much money or time and effort on our grooming.  Sydney is a generally a very relaxed and casual place, and many people have transcended the need to dress up all the time.

In my travels to various parts of the world I have seen series of painted statues on display in cities.  In Denver, USA, a couple of years ago there were differently painted fibreglass cows, all over town as part of a series called “cow parade”. In Vancouver, Canada there are painted orca all over the place. The cows in Denver, were quite interesting, but the orca in Vancouver were lame, lame, lame!

Here in Sydney for World Youth Day, much in the tradition of the cow parade, there are Jesus Christ statues all over town that have been painted in various ways.  I found that most of the painted Jesus Christ statues weren’t very well done, but I did find one that I thought was fantastic. 

 Covered in mirrors, this statue was called “Reflection”.

I suppose it is trying to communicate that we should reflect upon the life of Jesus Christ and the Scriptures.  As I looked at this mirrored statue, I found myself thinking about how we as human beings tend to project our own concerns on the world. Although the Bible says God created man in his own image, I have a sneaking suspicion that man created God in his own image, and the mirrored statue seemed to be a metaphor of how our religions reflect who we are and how we see our place in the world.

Not very far from the reflection statue was a group of Filipinos who are being led in song by a Spanish priest, who played the guitar.

The priest had a beautiful voice, and the Filipinos sang along with him with a result that wasn’t as polished but not too different to the video below.

If the city of Sydney is to be inundated with large crowds of people from overseas, you really couldn’t pick a better bunch than young Catholics. So very different to the hooligan English soccer fans that plague continental Europe every year.

Designed by Australian architect Lionel Glendinning, it’s an architecturally striking and perfect solution for a nightmare design brief. 

Situated between two overhead freeways (the red area on the satellite photo below) on an oddly shaped block of land usually wouldn’t help most architects come up with such an amazing design.

Glendinning has created a building that not only serves its purpose as a large screen cinema he has also designed a landmark that just yodels with the rapturous joy in amongst all the other bland buildings downtown.

It’s a masterpiece of aluminium cladding and a brave colour scheme. The building seems to be a combination of an aeroplane’s wing and a commentator’s stand at a motor-sports event. It looks fantastic as you drive by it on the overpass, and it almost makes you feel like you are on a race track on your way to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Every time I see this building it puts a smile on my face to think that such courageous and inventive design can occur on such an ugly and difficult site.

This first example is of a Persian style, moraq tile mosaic from the front of the excellent Islamic Arts Museum in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

Just about everywhere you look in Thailand there is a temple adorned with mosaics and tilework made up from porcelain, mirrors and tiles. The most stunning examples can be seen in The Temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok.

Below is a close up of the patterns on the corners of the columns created with mirrors.

Below is an example of the Thai use of purpose made ceramic tiles.

In Vietnam much of the mosaic and tilework was made with broken porcelain and glass.

As part of the Chinese pre-wedding ceremony tradition, Claude had to bargain his way into Jade’s family home. This involved arriving at Jade’s house with his groomsmen to haggle with her bridesmaids for entry through the front gate. The bargaining began with Claude, saying that he wanted to marry Jade, to which the bridesmaids began their demands.

Claude is a very quiet and thoughtful person who doesn’t have an extroverted bone in his body. The bridesmaids knew this about him and required that Claude declare his love for Jade at the top of his voice in five different languages. Claude was fairly easily able to comply with the language component of their demand but the bridesmaids like sharks sensing blood in the water kept calling on him to declare his love louder and louder. Whoever said that Asians are inscrutable and quiet doesn’t know Asians.  Jade’s Chinese bridesmaids were howling with laughter, with each attempt by Claude to satisfy their wishes and they raucously cajoled him into greater heights of embarrassment. The bridesmaids were merciless.

Finally, the bridesmaids relented and let Claude and his grooms through the front gate only to stop him at the front door. Jade was behind the closed front door and the bridesmaids told Claude that he would have to answers questions asked by Jade, and that if he didn’t get them correct, his best man had to apply make-up to him. Needless to say Jade asked so many questions that Claude was eventually covered in very badly applied makeup, accompanied by the very delighted shrieks of the bridesmaids.

The girls were loving it! Claude looked like he was going through a trial by ordeal.  It was very hot and humid and Claude was being dragged way out of his comfort zone.

The next step in Claude’s trials was to cross the living room to the bottom of the stairs, where he was once again stopped by the bridesmaids with their new demands.  I could see that Claude was starting to flag, and his spirits really dropped when he was told that he would have to sing a love song in French at the top of his voice to get up the stairs.

Luckily, Claude is a Francophone (which the bridesmaids knew) so he knew the words of a French song. The bridesmaids really enjoyed themselves as poor old Claude embarrassed himself once again at their pleasure.

After the song Claude and his entourage were allowed to the top of the stairs to the door and outside of Jade’s bedroom. The next demand by the bridesmaids was for money.  Basically they didn’t stop until they had everything in his wallet and only then did they let him through to see Jade.

The actual Chinese wedding ceremony was a surprisingly simple and brief affair.  The father and mother of the house, lit joss sticks and made offerings to their ancestors after which Jade and Claude did the same thing.

Tea was then made and Jade and Claude offered it to each other and then to Jade’s grandmother.  After tea, Jade’s grandmother then presented Jade with some gold, and that was it, they were now married.

The wedding reception was another thing altogether. It was held in a very grand hotel, and there were about 300 guests.

In February this year Claude and Jade had a lovely western civil wedding here in Sydney

The menu for the evening was:

Celeriac Bisque as entrée
Poulet Chasseur on a bed of English spinach with Gratin Dauphinoise as main
Galettes aux Pomme Flambé with Calvados Sorbet and crème Chantilly for dessert

Everbody brought along a different bottle of pinot noir so we were able to get a wide tasting range.

For dessert we set up an electric crepe maker at each end of the table so Mark and Sebastian could make the galettes (crepes made with wheat flour and  buckwheat flour) whilst I  flambéed the apples in calvados in the kitchen (I didn’t do it at the table as it was too crowded).

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I also saw some excellent stencil graffiti in Puebla and San Cristobal de Las Casas in Mexico two years ago in 2006.

If you’d like to see some interesting stencil graffitti in Slovenia taken by Grasswire click here

One of my pet peeves is the way how Italians crap on about food and their mother’s cooking.  So many Italians, I have met seem to think that not only their mothers are the greatest cooks in the world, but also that Italians are the only ones who know how to cook.  I am so over the idea of the integrity of ingredients and the simplicity of flavours that I hear so many celebrity chefs on television harp on about.  This Eurocentric chauvinism about food seems to deny the validity of complex flavours developed in the east, such as Indian and Thai cuisine.  I just won’t have it.

To all you Italian guys out there, who were always going on about your mother’s food, get over it and move out on your own!

This now brings me to the French. Sure enough, some French food is fantastic but to be quite honest, I’m not interested in eating so much offal and saturated fats.  I remember being quite shocked when I first looked in the bible of French cuisine “Larousse Gastronomique” at how much butter, cream and guts there was in so much of the so-called traditional French cooking. 

I keep on hearing about how the French eat these high saturated fat meals, and that they have a low incidence of heart disease in their country.  Some say it’s the red wine that is drunk with the meals that is helping ameliorate the effect of such a high-fat diet.  I think the reality is, that years and years of eating high fat food has killed off all the generations of the people who can’t metabolise so much fat and what is left is a country that is populated with people who are genetically engineered to efficiently process fat.

As for me, I have been genetically engineered to efficiently accumulate fat so my body can produce cholesterol and store it for hard times by lining my arteries with it.

Since I am getting together with my friends for, what is essentially a French celebration, I thought I’d put aside some of my fears and prejudices and cook them a French meal.

Whenever I cook a dinner for a large group I always test the menu two or three times beforehand to make sure I don’t have any surprises on the night. Since I wanted to avoid fatty foods I thought I’d cook fish dish of John Dory with shellfish, saffron and merguez broth. Sure enough there was cream in the recipe, but I used about a quarter of what was specified.

Quelle horreur!

The end result wasn’t bad, but I felt that merguez overwhelmed the lightly flavoured fish.

Since trying my hand at the French sea food meal, I was asked by a friend of mine who is a professional chef to help him with the preparation of some Indian dishes that he wants to serve at his wedding in November. So I spent the whole of Saturday with Mark at his place, cooking enough food to totally stuff 20 people.

 The idea of the dinner was to trial a variety of foods and then give a questionnaire to our 20 guests to see what they liked and didn’t like.

 There will be about 150 guests at this wedding and it looks like Mark has made quite the rod for his back considering that he wants to do all the cooking. I have foolishly offered to help. It looks like it’s going to be one hell of a day.

On Sunday, my wife and I had a really lovely day sitting out in the backyard reading the weekend paper and drinking vodka martinis. Although it’s winter here in Australia, it’s not that cold, and since we light up the chiminea, it’s quite comfortable to sit outside all day.

Because I have discarded the idea of serving fish for my French friends, I’ve latched on to the idea of preparing poulet chasseur (hunter’s chicken). I spent Monday, trying out a combination of recipes, and I think I’ve come up with something that my guests will hopefully like. I’ll post photos and the recipe after the dinner.

Over the weekend I’ve been listening to Bebo & Cigala on their album Lágrimas Negras

This last picture is in response to Pat Coakley’s question, What’s On Your Refrigerator?

The stuffed toy is the amazing, everlasting and very cantankeous “Magic Pudding” character from Norman Lindsay’s children’s book of the same name. The black dancing figure, magnet, is of Kokopelli a South Western American fertility deity, usually depicted as a humpbacked flute player who is also a trickster god and represents the spirit of music

Years later I read The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski and I felt that I wasn’t alone. In the book a love sick game warden captures birds and paints them whenever the mad woman of the village he loves, will sleep with anyone but never him. The painted birds were released and the game warden gained some sort of solace as all the other birds would attack them.
 
I can remember my first few days at that school being quite miserable, as it seemed though the other children were competing with each other to see who could be the meanest to me. I guess one day, I just snapped. I had enough of the ill treatment and I turned around and started hitting back. I remember on one occasion, I walked up to a group of boys who are playing and asked them if I could join in.
 
My request was met with an aggressive push and a snarling, “NAH!”
 
Before I could even think, one of my fists had knocked out one of my antagonist’s front teeth.  He ran off screaming with his tooth in his hand and blood running from his mouth to tell the teacher what I had done. 
 
The teacher wasn’t interested in hearing what had happened and I was taken inside and caned.  For those unfamiliar with corporal punishment in the school system in Australia during the early 1960s, I will explain what caning is. The pupil is told to hold out his (girls weren’t usually caned) arm outstretched with his hand open and palm up to receive up to six strokes with a length of rattan cane about a half an inch (about 12 mm) in diameter.  Failure to do so would lead to a quick smack around the legs with the cane until the hand was held out to receive punishment. Boy-o-boy, I can tell you, it really hurt! I wouldn’t like to get caned as an adult, never mind being a little child.

There was also a code of honour in regards to being caned. It was considered to be unmanly to flinch and you were considered to be weak if you cried. Weak kids got picked on so it was not a good strategy to show how much it hurt. As soon as one is hit with the cane the automatic reaction is to shake your hand in the air, and quickly sit on them, which was bit problematic sometimes because more the one stroke was often administered. After being caned you were usually sent back to your seat, where you sat on top of you hands for an hour or so.  There was no point in trying to write because it was impossible to hold a pen and control it until the pain went away.
When I look back on my early days in primary school, there weren’t very many days I didn’t get the cane.
 
My time at Mosman Infants School consisted of being terrorised by my teacher, the very butch and cane wielding Mrs Davies and fighting with my fellow classmates during recess.
 
There was one kid in particular, whose last name was Rose, who used to cause me non-stop grief every time we came across each other’s path in the playground. For reasons that I still can’t understand Rose used to attack me (not once did I instigate anything with him) every time he saw me, and by then I used to automatically fight back. He seemed to have it in for me and I in turn, hated him right back. The teachers constantly had to pull us apart.
 
On one occasion I was walking along when Rose, who had been waiting behind a corner, jumped me and started pummelling me.  He got in a couple of good shots before I was able to smack him a few back. Before long we had our arms around each other’s necks in headlocks, and we were rolling around in the dirt by the time the teachers turned up. One of the teachers grabbed a hold of Rose, who was on top of me, and lifted him up off me. As soon as I was free of his grip, and I could see that the teacher was holding him, I ran forward and kicked him in the stomach. The teachers gasped at my un-sporting opportunism.
 
Rose was instantly released and I was dragged indoors and caned once again, and then told to go to the library. I was later told that day, after recess, that I was not allowed to play with the other children any more, and that I had to spend all my recesses for the next six months in the library.  Every time I attempted to explain why I had been fighting so much I was told to be quiet.

Although the situation seemed horribly unfair, I soon grew to love my time in the library.  I spent my time looking at books about submarines or aeroplanes and drawing pictures of them.  When I wasn’t sketching war machines I experimented with various forms of calligraphy.  It was a good day, when I could knock over a U-boat and some old Gothic script during lunch.  Because I used to also read quite a few of the books in the library my reading skills quickly passed everyone else in my class.

By the time my six months in the library was up, it was the end of the school year.
 
I was looking forward to my second year in primary school. I wouldn’t have to spend all my time in the library and I might have a chance to make some new friends. But alas, that wasn’t to be as my bright red hair acted as a magnet for more teasing and bullying.  I just kept on being picked on and as a result, I was involved in a lot more fights again.
 
I was never asked why I was in the fights and it was just assumed that I was a troublemaker. 
 
Again, I was sentenced to six months in the library, for the safety of the other children. My sister and cousin also went to the same school and I can hardly remember ever seeing them in the whole time that I went there.
 
Another six months of drawing and reading in the library during recess, passed.
 
I was finally allowed back into the playground with a warning not cause any trouble. Needless to say nobody had spoken to that miserable little shit, Rose.  Sure enough Rose attacked me once again and this time I got the upper hand and beat the crap out of him.  Once again, the teachers were not willing to listen to what had happened and I was sent to the library again. When it came time to go home that day, I was presented with a letter from my teacher saying that I was to give it to my mother, and they expected her to sign it and I was to return with it the next day.
 
The letter was a summons for my mother to come into the school to discuss my behavioural problems. Poor old mum was told that I was an uncontrollable danger to the other children and she had to take me to a Department of Education psychologist to be tested.
 
That was all fine with me because it meant that I didn’t have to go to school and I’d get a trip into the city instead.
 
I enjoyed my time at the psychologist because I got to play with blocks and answer easy questions.  It was a piece of cake and I thought I’d done well. The psychologist told my mother that I had the intelligence to be anything that I wanted to be, but I would never amount to much because I didn’t have any discipline.
 
When the psychologist heard from my mother about all the other troubles I was in outside of school (a story for another time) he suggested that I’d be put in a borstal (reform school) for two weeks to give my mother and the school a break.  I was told years later by my mother that the psychologist asked her out for a date. Mum thought he was a creep and declined his offer.
 
I was sent to Cronulla Boy’s Home as a punishment, but in fact, it turned out to be the best two weeks of my first two years at school.
 
The age of the boys at the home was between six and about fifteen. Whilst it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that such homes were full of incorrigible juvenile delinquent brutes, my fellow inmates were in fact; all decent guys and they treated me well.  Not once, was I bullied or picked on in the whole time I was there. The older boys either ignored me or treated me like a little brother.  It was the first time I’d ever been in an environment where I wasn’t being subjected to constant harassment.
 
It wasn’t all light and sweetness as the boy’s home was run by very scary matrons (the only male staff we came into contact were the ones we saw during our daytime classes). The matrons wore starched white nurses uniforms, and they enthusiastically wielded metre long (about 1 yard) rulers constructed of a leather, steel and leather laminate. In hindsight, I suspect that these were some kind of tradesmen’s straight-edge used for guiding blades when cutting things like carpet.
 
The matrons and their rulers terrified me.  I had seen them hoe into some of the boys with such gusto that they had me fully convinced that I didn’t want the same treatment.  The nearest thing I can think of that comes close to describing the matrons is the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”. They were the sort of people that one would paint a bush pink for, so as not to come to their attention.
 
Every morning began with a bed inspection and woes betide any boy foolish enough not to have a perfectly made up bed. The beds had to have the sheet pulled down to exactly the right place and the blankets had to be tucked in, neatly with what were known as “hospital corners”. The matrons had me so frightened that I didn’t dare ask them how to do a hospital corner so I used to just fake it and I would to spend a lot of time and effort frantically trying to make the corners of my bed “look” exactly as they wanted them. I never learned how to do it properly, until years later.
 
Aside from the scary matrons, the only other thing of my whole time in the boys home that I didn’t enjoy was after dinner when we got to watch television. All the older boys insisted that we watch “I Love Lucy”. I hated the show as a child and I still hate it to this day.

As is usual, when one is travelling, I had met up with a couple of other guys, and we were knocking around town, when eventually ended up at the zoo.  As could be expected from a country that didn’t have too much excess revenue to spend on the welfare of animals, the zoo was a pretty ramshackle affair. Many of the cages made out of a light-gauge sheet of welded mesh that you see used in concrete slab construction, held together with thick wire.  Health and safety issues were merely an afterthought, as you could walk up to any of the cages and stick your hand in for a mauling if you so desired.

I made the mistake of shaking hands with a cute baby orang-utan, that had its arms outstretched through the rebar. It had the saddest most soulful eyes I’d ever seen. 

Almost human. 

The little orang-utan was about a half my height, but it had hands much larger than the average man.  I was totally misled by it’s placid demeanour, so I reached out to touch it’s hand. It softly and gently closed its hand around the mine, and we stood their holding hands looking at each other, when I felt its grip tighten and it started to pull me towards the cage. That hairy little thing was so strong, and with one arm it effortlessly pulled me closer to the cage as I struggled without success to resist. 

Like any little child, my hairy friend was trying to put the object of it’s curiosity, into its mouth.  Luckily, the two other guys I was with were able to pull me back just before my hand went into the gaping maw pressed up against the wire.  I won’t be doing that again!

The tiger cage was downright dangerous.  It was basically a large wire mesh enclosed area. The wire was about 6mm (about 1/4in) diameter and the spacing of the verticals and horizontals was about 20cm (approximately 8 inches) apart, so the tiger could stick its arm right out if it wanted to.  To ameliorate the chance of a tiger pulling a child through the rebar, there was a 1 m high galvanised pipe about a metre and a half away from the front of the cage. The side and back of the cage had sheets of recycled roofing material made of corrugated galvanised iron about 8ft (about 2.4 m) high, all around the perimeter except the front. To enable people to see over the corrugated iron there was a berm about 2 m high, built around the sides and back of the cage.

In the middle of the cage was a tiger, laying on a large log and it seemed to be asleep. One of the guys was I was with, an Englishman called Andy, for some reason I can’t understand, walked down the berm to the side of the cage and stuck his face up against the old corrugated iron roofing to look through one of the nail holes.

I was standing at the front of the cage when I saw the tiger, that we thought was asleep, which was facing in the opposite direction to Andy, suddenly, with amazing speed and agility spin around and leap the 6 or 8 m (6 or 8 yards) between it and Andy, to come crashing with an alarming bang, down on the flexible corrugated iron, smashing into Andy’s face and knocking him to the ground. Luckily, the welded mesh held and the tiger casually turned around and walked away after having made its point.

RESPECT!

Click here to see a small animation, I have made demonstrating what happened.

We rushed over to the fallen Andy to see that he was as white as chalk and in a state of shock with a bleeding nose. The poor guy was in a dazed and confused state for the rest of the day.  I bet Andy won’t ever do that again.

Sumatran tigers are the smallest tigers, but they still weigh about 300lbs (about 136kg) and I can tell you from personal experience, they are FAST!

When I was a kid and I saw those old Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller, I thought with my childish imagination that a fully grown healthy man would have a chance against a big cat but what I saw at the zoo that day, changed my mind forever about such things. In a contest between tiger and a man, my money will always be on the tiger as it would be no contest. I don’t even care if the guy was Chuck Norris. He’d be cat food.

Travelling in Sumatra at that time was an absolute nightmare due the state of the roads. To get to Bukittinggi I had already been on two, agonising 36 hour long  bus journeys. The roads were just dirt tracks with deep water filled holes in them that you could lose Volkswagens in.

The buses were very similar to the school buses that they use in North America, and as such, they have an extended rear end that hangs away over the rear axle, which of course increases the amount of movement one experiences when one is at the far end of a lever.

Being foreigners, we were always given the worst seats in the bus at the very back and because the seats had been designed to fit tiny little Indonesians there wasn’t enough space between the seats for us to put our feet on the ground.  To compound our discomfort our knees were permanently pushed up against the back of the seat in front of us, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but there were hand rails exactly where our knees met the back of the seats.  So for 36 hours at a time, we had the crap beaten out of our knees.  It was unrelenting torture.

I was absolutely dreading the two more trips, I had to make by bus to get to Medan to get out of Indonesia in time to avoid jail due to overstaying my visa.  I wasn’t the only one who felt this way about going on the buses again.  One of the guys that I met up with suggested that we both hitch hike up to Medan.  Any vehicle would have been better than one of those buses.

Hitchhiking was way better than the buses. Not only was it free, it was 1000% more comfortable. We followed the coastal road up to Sibolga, and then we had to head inland over the mountains to go north east to Medan. Just outside Sibolga, we were picked up by a small furniture removal truck. The seats of the truck were filled up with Indonesian so we had to lay down in the back on top of a load of empty acetylene bottles.  The road out of Sibolga climbs into the mountains up a very steep road, and the poor old truck that we were in, really laboured and struggled its way up. As slow as the trip was, at last we were moving forward, and laying on top of the empty acetylene bottles was way more comfortable than being in the back of one of those horrible buses.

Late in the afternoon and about three-quarters of the way up the mountain, we heard a loud bang and a truck came to an abrupt halt.  When we got out we could see a lot of oil on the road. When we looked underneath the truck, we could see one of the con rods had broken and had smashed through the oil sump.

The truck was cactus.

There wasn’t anything my travelling companion and I could do to help, so we thanked our driver and headed off up the road trying to get another lift.  Slowly, we walked up hill through the jungle as the sun went down. It got darker and darker as we walked through the night. The cars just passed us by without picking us up. We were starting to get a bit worried as we were out in the middle of a jungle wilderness. 

My thoughts started to turn towards my memories of the tiger in the zoo at Bukittinggi. If I had been in a vehicle and saw a tiger by the side of the road I would have been thrilled, but after seeing what had happened at Bukittinggi I didn’t want to meet a tiger out in the open.

After walking for about three or four hours our hopes were raised by seeing a hotel at the top of the hill.  Unfortunately, it was a hotel that was under construction.  We were getting a bit desperate for a place to stay, so we went into the unoccupied building site. None of the rooms had doors or windows, and much of the structure didn’t even have a roof on it yet. We found a covered concrete patio with about 30 or 40 cane chairs covered in plastic stacked neatly to one side.

Although the covered patio gave a shelter from any rain that might fall during the evening, it was still out in the open looking directly into the jungle. Both of us were getting a little bit freaked out by now at the thought that there might be tiger a short distance away, stalking us. So we decided to make a pile of all the cane chairs and crawl into the middle of them to sleep. Needless to say we didn’t sleep too well, as every little noise coming out of the bush made our hearts leap with terror.

All our panicky fear was misplaced, because in the morning, we woke up in one piece and still alive.

When I got to Medan I read in one of the English language newspapers about two old men who had been found dead in the jungle in Sumatra next to the dead carcass of a tiger. According to some of the local villagers, the two old men were expert exponents of the Indonesian martial art of “pencat silat“, and it would seem that they had been attacked by a tiger, while out in the jungle collecting wood. I find it absolutely amazing that two old men would be able to kill a tiger with their bare hands, feet and perhaps a machete.  Needless to say it is not much of a victory if you die from the wounds that you received, but they must’ve have been some really tough old guys. They’re probably in Valhalla now, sharing a drink with Ragnar Hairy Breeks and Egil Skallagrimson.

Nine years later in 1983, with the girlfriend from hell in tow, I arrived at the border between Guatemala and Mexico (between La Mesilla and Ciudad Cuauhtémoc), just as the sun was going down. Back then (I don’t know how the situation is nowadays) there was no public transport between these two towns at night. The distance between La Mesilla and Ciudad Cuauhtémoc is only about 4 km and since it was a beautiful warm and starry night we decided to walk along the road through the jungle. It was quite a nice walk, and the first couple of kilometres were very pleasant……. that was until we started hearing, a jaguar roaring in their not far distance.  I nearly soiled myself as memories of Bukittinggi came rushing back. I’m pretty sure we covered the last 2 km of that walk in record time!