Russell, Don, Petra, John, Snoopy and Thomas

By Neil Matthews

Russell the Wombat

Russell was not expecting us.  This might have explained why nobody was around when Helen and I turned up in the grey-blue of a cool Southern hemisphere winter morning. People passed by, parakeets squawked in the trees and a loud public address system went into action to welcome all visitors, but still there was no sign of who we had travelled thousands of miles to see.

We occupied ourselves for an hour or two, drinking tea and observing the penchant of Australians of all ages for pies and chips. The sun tried to break through the veil of clouds as we returned to the meeting place, more in hope than expectation. But our luck was in. Shuffling forward on his stocky low-slung frame, sleep and irritation in his eyes in equal measure, was Russell.

My effusive cry of greeting received no response. This was for two main reasons. Firstly, Russell had never met us. Secondly, he couldn't speak, being a wombat.  You might ask: ‘If you'd never met the wombat, how did you know its name? Is Russell a common name among wombats?’ Well… Helen had been in touch via the internet with a fellow travel enthusiast calling himself Russell the Wombat. Also, the small toy wombats in the superstore near our hotel were, according to their labels, called Russell. So it seems fair enough to me to call a wombat Russell.

In among the Tasmanian devils scurrying up and down tree stumps, the echidnas shuffling through undergrowth like hedgehog impersonators, the tree kangaroo lounging in the branches and the black cockatoo taking umbrage as we photographed other birds (and eventually being included in a self-portrait aka 'selfie'), Russell was not conspicuous. His fur was an unremarkable mixture of browns, his ears pronounced but not prominent and he had no tail to speak of - a useful defence against predators who might try to drag him from his burrow, but not likely to win attention when ring-tailed lemurs were around the corner. To the surrounding soundtrack of squawks and screeches - from small children as well as parrots - he added nothing.  Russell just sat near the front of his pit.

He was never going to be the star of the show.  Most human visitors were too busy realising that the toilets were built directly adjacent to large parrot cages, and trying to deal with the matter in hand while a macaw or hyacinth blue screeched at them.  Or they were listening, rapt, as a keeper told them about the moodiness of the zoo’s two resident giant pandas, who had either just had a row or were wondering for the umpteenth time how to stop humans from thinking that pandas are cuddly, or men in costumes.  Or, in the case of one small child pointing at a wallaby and telling his parent that ‘It’s a kangaroo, Mummy!’, they were confused.

Perversely, all this noise and fuss endeared Russell to me all the more. With so many of his fellow inmates using their bright colours, unusual shapes or motions or loud calling cards to get an audience - yes, Mr Kookaburra, you and your laugh - Russell seemed to be saying: ‘This is me. Take me as I am.’  He was the solid citizen, an unshowy quiet team member who would do what you required of him (as long as it involved digging, or sitting around blinking into the light).  Perhaps, though, Russell's laid-back demeanour reflected the city in which we met him.

Even the Adelaideans’ greatest religious devotions don’t appear to get them too excited.  Adelaide is nicknamed the ‘city of churches’ and its greatest example, St Peter’s Cathedral, sits neatly near the River Torrens.  We ducked inside to admire the eclectic styles of the stained glass windows. It might have been delayed jetlag, but I swear Mickey Mouse stared out at me from one of the modern examples. 

The wooden pews proclaim the names of worthies past, but the building is not so solid in every other respect.  The last major restoration work took place in the 1990s and, according to the ‘Cathedral 150’ literature I found, that left much more to do.  A ‘scoping document’ had led to various steps being agreed, involving a steering committee and a ‘realistic time-line’.  As the close proximity of words and phrases such as ‘steering committee’, ‘scope of the project’ and ‘realistic time-line’ tends to put my mood somewhere between irritated and homicidal, I decided it was time to leave.  We headed down the road towards Adelaide’s other cathedral. 

Adelaide Oval

This one is almost as old, having been built in 1871.  Its recent redevelopment cost AUS$75 million, which put St Peter’s in its place.  This is the Adelaide Oval, a Holy of Holies for those Australians who follow the country’s true religion: sport.  Cricket matches have taken place here for well over a century, with other sports following, making the stadium an equivalent of Lord’s, Wimbledon and Wembley Stadium combined: a strange notion for us English, who tend to prefer our sports stadia not to mix things up in that fashion. 

My interest in the stadium derived from its cricketing heritage.  The sight of sweaty blokes in green vests and white shorts, trying to kick a rugby ball between tall posts while shouting, seemed like sacrilege to me.  This, though, was the season for Aussie Rules football.  If William Webb Ellis had been an Australian, rugby union might have evolved into something like Aussie Rules: a sporting jazz where, if you’re not sure whether to pick the ball up or to kick it, you just make things up as you go along and everyone else lets you.

Every religion has its doubters.  ‘They could have spent the money on the infrastructure,’ said one man we met, with a grimace.  But a good piece of road-building can’t give the type of primal satisfaction that a sporting spectacle can.  Even sceptics like Petra Starke, a local journalist, recognise this.  She tells those who wish to take a pilgrimage to the Oval to ‘Get an advanced planning degree so you can find your seat… it’ll be worth it when you get to the Oval and are faced with 75 different stands with 32 tiers and 61 subsections each…’  If you don’t want to plan but just to turn up, this is Petra’s advice:

1.       Ask someone in an official looking polo shirt where you’re supposed to be.

2.       Find out it’s the opposite side of the stadium from where you actually are. Sigh loudly.

3.       Ignore polo shirt and sit down in a nearby empty row.

4.       Enjoy six seconds of footy before a big hairy bloke asks if you’re friends with Rob, because these are his seats. You are not friends with Rob.

5.       Get told to rack off.

6.       Rack off and head for the Hill.

The Hill does not have seats, but enables you to ‘join forces with 46,000 others in a primal scream that shakes the very heavens… I may not get football, but I definitely get Adelaide Oval’.  The spectacle infects the rest of the city, temporarily overthrowing its default setting of muted respectability.

We weren’t there for a live game of anything or even for one of the concerts the stadium holds from time to time.  We had come to pay homage – or, to be exact, I had come to pay homage and Helen had humoured me by not going off shopping – to a legend, the closest you could get to a sporting god: Don Bradman. 

I knew that the Oval boasted, somewhere on its premises, a selection of items from the Bradman Collection, a mass of Bradmanobilia which the great man had given to the local museum authorities before his death in 2001.  But finding it is a challenge.  Ticket office staff and other visitors were unfailingly polite in their attempts to help us, but none of them seemed to know for sure. The signage gave no clues either, so we wandered around, marvelling at the small size of the ground.  Chattering schoolchildren crocodiled past us.  Nobody stopped or challenged us.  I’m used to the Olympic standard of jobsworthiness of one or two gate staff at Lord’s, who have been known to refuse admission to the captains of national cricket teams, let alone mere spectators.  Here, nobody could care less.

We located the Collection in the end: in a smallish blacked-out space near the main entrance, unremarkable and unremarked.  A traditional exhibition – most of it behind glass – included a replica of Mr and Mrs Bradman’s living room, one of his blazers, one of his bats and some film footage of the Don (as he was known) in action. 

His cricket career is too well known to need lengthy repetition of the details here: the boy who practised by hitting a golf ball with a cricket stump against a wall; his move to Sydney in order to improve his chances of selection for Australia’s Test team; the tours of England in the 1930s when he redefined the art of run-scoring; the invention by an England team of Bodyline, the most controversial tactic in cricket history, to stop him; and the triumphant 1948 tour, ended anti-climactically with a duck in his last Test. His final batting average was an anorak’s delight: 99.94, almost forty runs an innings better than anyone else in history.  Bradman’s very talent isolated him from his teammates, bringing fame with which he barely coped and a knighthood which he later said he regretted accepting.  His move to Adelaide in 1934 had twin motives: to take up the captaincy of South Australia and a job in a stockbroking firm.

What struck me was the small scale, understated nature of it all.  One elderly man, whose son was asking if he could remember watching Bradman in person, sat agog at the film footage.  A few other families with small children wandered in a desultory way around the exhibition.  This was, after all, the original Australian sporting hero who slew the colonial masters’ teams for twenty years.  Until recently, to criticize the Don was a little like criticising the Queen: it just wasn’t done. 

A few days later, passing a photo of Bradman in South Australia’s state library, also in Adelaide, a middle-aged woman told her son: ‘That’s Don Bradman, he was one of our best cricketers.’  One of?  It seems Australia has grown beyond those interwar years when it boasted of ‘our [Sydney Harbour] Bridge and our Bradman’.  To adapt Clive James’s comment on Sydney, when Bradman was all they had to see, they couldn’t see him straight; but now they can.  Or perhaps this was what Australians call Tall Poppy Syndrome.  Don’t grow too tall or someone will cut you down to size.  You’ll end up as a suburban stockbroker.  Better to keep your head down. Be a wombat, not a parrot.

Hand-feeding a Kangaroo

One place you definitely can’t be a wombat is Kangaroo Island, just a few hours’ drive south from the city.  Wombats dig a lot, which makes them a nuisance the island has chosen to do without, just as it excludes foxes and dingoes, who eat carrion, which makes it harder for young eagles to find food.  Birdlife is one of the attractions of Kangaroo Island.  At the Wildlife Sanctuary, you can feed kangaroos by hand (for several hours on end if they had their way).  Raptor Domain offers demonstrations of the flight of barn and sooty owls, kestrel, wedge tailed eagles, kookaburras and even a buzzard.

Meanwhile, on the island’s northern coast at Kingscote, John feeds the pelicans.  Some years ago, after fishermen stopped throwing away the waste from their daily catch, John felt sorry that the pelicans were missing out on their feed down at the wharf.  So now he spends around AUS$40,000 a year buying fish, feeding them to the pelicans and recouping the cost through donations from an audience. John’s opinions are trenchant.  He told us that little penguins have been eaten by New Zealand fur seals because ‘The government is too stupid and hopeless to do anything about it – like most governments.’  One pelican had eaten a chihuahua, ‘which should earn it a place in history and our gratitude.  Chihuahuas are shocking, terrible things.’  According to John, ‘all a man needs is a boat and a wife.’  We knew he had the first; we weren’t so sure about the second.

If this all sounds terribly ecologically earnest, the island has a quirky side too.  There are six commercial farms devoted to beekeeping.  Clifford Farm, which we visited, breeds Ligurian bees – the only pure-bred Italian bees left, as bees elsewhere have cross-bred.  The farm exports queen bees by post.  In Penneshaw - your first stop once you get off the ferry from the mainland - Penny’s Restaurant tells diners that ‘All unattended children will receive a free espresso and a kitten to take home.’  At the eucalyptus oil farm on Emu Ridge, the shop will sell you a book of roadkill recipes including Skippy the Bush Vindaloo.

Back in Adelaide, there are plenty of other little touches which will draw a wry smile, a gasp or a giggle. In the South Australian Museum, a giant squid squats across several floors in a stairwell, boggling small boys’ imaginations.  The Ayers House Museum, which marks the life of Sir Henry Ayers from his early days as a legal clerk in England to his days as Premier of South Australia, invites you to look round what became a 44-room mansion with exquisite painted ceilings… and to look out for the replica rat in the kitchen.  In Port Adelaide, a World War II aircraft hangar houses the Aviation Museum, with an 80% size replica of the Red Baron’s plane.  When we visited, the pilot’s seat was occupied by Snoopy. 

Aviation Museum, Port Adelaide

Our trip to the nearby Railway Museum must have coincided with the winter school holidays, as the displays of old locomotives and rolling stock became a backdrop for people dressed as tigers and zebras being chased by a policeman with a large net, while a woman did a version of the Indian rope trick on a platform.  The model railway representing the local area incorporated Thomas the Tank Engine chugging round its track and the Batmobile was parked quietly at a station.  If you have a sweet tooth, a visit to the cheesecake shop in Port Adelaide is a must; and chocoholics won’t want to miss a tour of Haigh’s Factory in Greenside Road, with free samples available.

Adelaide may not have Melbourne’s profile or the glamour of Sydney.  But underneath the air of quiet middle-class respectability, there’s plenty going on. Sometimes it’s not what you expected, like the sunny afternoon that our boat ride on the Torrens took a turn for the dramatic when the captain stopped beneath a bridge to help two young lads rescue a drowning man.  But for the most part the atmosphere is laid back, allowing you to take time over your raisin toast in one of the local cafes, to watch the parakeets in the trees or to linger in the Botanical Gardens, as you get to know this very English Australian city.

First published in VISA 120 (April 2015)

Rovaniemi Revisited

By Elizabeth Johnstone

“Next time with northern lights!” 

Those were the last words of my previous article on the capital of Finnish Lapland.  My failure to see the “foxfires” in January 2013 was an excuse to replicate the trip in January 2014.  I flew with Finnair from London via Helsinki. As the City Hotel was unavailable, I booked four nights in the Sokos Vaakuna where I had stayed before.

The weather was cold, even by arctic standards.  On the first evening, the temperature was -20 C, dipping to -25 C and below for the rest of the weekend.

Dressing for the cold is an art and a science. Thick socks and stout footwear are essential and I personally find Wintertrax grippers absolutely indispensable.  I wore long underwear, regular trousers and ski trousers (who knew that Lidl sold such things?) Moving upwards, more thermal underwear, regular clothes and a top-of-the-range Land’s End jacket.  I am not a fan of hats, but suffer agonisingly from cold ears in all weathers, so I used “round-the-head” Land’s End ear protectors.  Some passers-by looked aghast, thinking I was suicidally bare-headed, when the ear protectors were just hidden by my hair.  My expensive John Lewis microfibre and fleece gloves were not really up to the job, even with silk liners, so I treated myself to a pair of reindeer skin mittens, much more appropriate. One unattractive feature of the extreme cold is that it freezes the breath entering your nose.  Many people wrap a scarf around the lower part of the face but I found that a disposable surgical face mask was more hygienic.  Next time, though, I will take a bigger supply, as a mask got sodden in an hour or so outside.

It was so cold that I prioritised indoor activities. On the Friday, I mooched around the shops in the morning then visited the home of a Mensan friend for lunch.  These enjoyable occasions always throw up some cultural observations.  The lady of the house prepared a tasty “makaronilaatikko” which I would describe as a “pasta bake”.  This is a national institution, served with tomato ketchup.  “Laatikko” means “box”, as in “postilaatikko”. Macaroni box?  An analogy might be “casserole”, which can be both the dish and its contents.

I bought a combi-ticket for the three major museums.  First was the Pilke forestry centre where they say “See the wood for the trees”.  Everything you ever needed to know about timber, trees and forestry, in an elegant building designed to showcase wood.  Lots of hands-on activities.  Every young child in Rovaniemi has been here with a clipboard and a worksheet.

Northern Lights projection in the Arktikum

On the same site is the Arktikum, the jewel in the ice queen’s crown.  Fascinating information about the current status of the Arctic with a northern lights display which you view from a lying position.  The Arktikum also contains the Provincial Museum of Lapland with its stunning examples of Sámi workmanship. Films and other materials show the tumultuous history of the Second World War in Finland and its aftermath.

Back in the hotel, I watched some winter sports (or rather “sports”) on television until dinner time.  I had the pleasure of meeting another Mensan friend in the Fransmanni Restaurant in my hotel.  For my starter, they put together a platter of “reindeer treats” including melt-in–the mouth fillet and various accompaniments. 

Next day, I completed my museum tour at Korundi, the modern art museum and cultural complex.  My favourite exhibit was “Lemminkäinen's Mother”, an 1897 Romantic nationalist painting by Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela.  It depicts a scene from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic.  Our hero has been killed, his body chopped up and thrown in the river.  His mother has sewn the pieces back together again.  She is waiting for a bee, the messenger of the gods, bearing honey which will bring her son back to life.  Music lovers will recognise this event from Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite.

Quite enough culture for one day. Lunch was a savoury waffle with the (other) beautiful people at Café & Bar 21, followed by a white tea and macaron at Choco Deli.  After the obligatory break for winter sports on television, we met up again at my friend’s house for a “raclette” supper party. This involves individual grill pans filled with various savoury bits and pieces over which cheese is melted.  Delicious, and great fun.  Another wonderful evening.

A fine, clear Sunday morning (-27 C) was a good opportunity for a scenic walk beside the mighty Ounas river, frozen over except for a patch of open water under the bridge.  A pleasant man of about my own age asked me if I was Finnish and said he wanted to show me something.  Let me re-phrase that.  He had spotted something of interest on the frozen river and lent me his binoculars.  I couldn’t make it out, but he insisted that it was an animal and traced out the word “saukko” in the snow for me.  I pantomimed my thanks (although I did manage to say “the country is beautiful” = “maa on kaunis”) and walked up onto the bridge.  There I saw a group of photographers with long lens cameras. They knew there was something worth snapping.  We could see an animal diving into the water and rolling on its back in the snow.  “Ah, saukko!” I said knowledgeably, and the photographers beamed and nodded.  I can barely tell a dog from a cat, so I wasn’t sure what cute mammal this was.  Back at the hotel, the receptionist looked up the word and explained it was an otter.  These popular visitors to Rovaniemi had even featured on the evening news.

We spent a pleasant afternoon gossiping in the Coffee House then I had the pleasure of being invited to my friend’s parents’ house.  It is always fascinating to see inside a home in another country.  After a light supper and cup of tea there was much mutual demonstrating of knitting projects and I left with two beautifully handmade pairs of socks for indoor wear.  I had spent some time earlier in the knitting wool department of the local department store. The Finns are resourceful and capable.  It is entirely in character for the ladies to create practical and decorative knitwear out of the substantial yarn which is needed in the cold weather.  There is even a specific Rovaniemi technique for knitting multi-coloured mittens, where the main colour is worked in the round and the pattern colours are arranged on a single long needle.  Well beyond my area of expertise!

Rye bread

Next morning, I shopped for fresh rye bread and had a last look at the “saukko” on the river before heading for the airport.  It was snowing lightly, and for the first time in my life I saw a snowplough clearing the runway from which my plane was due to take off. The return flights went smoothly – including the nerve-shredding 35 minute transfer in Helsinki – and I arrived home some seven and a half hours after taking off in Rovaniemi.

Once again, I enjoyed the legendary hospitality of arctic Mensans, several of whom I now count as personal friends. Indeed, it felt as though we had just run into each other after a week or so, not a whole year.

What about the northern lights?  I had always understood that they were caused by a fox brushing his tail as he ran through the sky.  I now know that they could also be caused by ancestral spirits kicking a walrus skull around the firmament.  On the first evening, I saw some orange and green plumes which changed shape and faded as I watched, possibly the remnants of earlier activity It certainly wasn’t the magnificent display which I had hoped for.  In fact, I read a news story on the BBC website explaining that the sun had been uncharacteristically quiet recently.  Just my luck!  However, this is not entirely a bad thing.  I will simply have to go back and hope for a better performance.

Next time, with more northern lights!

First published in VISA 114 (April 2014)

Return to Rovaniemi

By Elizabeth Johnstone

 “Next time with snow!”

Santa Claus Village

These were our parting words to Mensan friends after a trip to Rovaniemi in October 2011.  Being a woman of my word, I booked a long weekend in the capital of Finnish Lapland in January 2013.  I made similar arrangements to the previous trip - an ATOL-protected package booked through Guild Travel in London.  Finnair to Helsinki, then on to Rovaniemi.  The layover of one hour on the way out was worrying enough.  Thirty-five minutes in Helsinki to make the London flight on the way back was nerve-shredding! I can’t say I like the new Finnair uniform whose white bibs have a Star-Trek-goes-Nordic look. Not too flattering to the - shall we say - fuller figure.

My previous hotel, the Vaakuna, was already full when I booked in August.  The City Hotel was a more than acceptable substitute. Triple-glazed windows, ample breakfast buffet, a young and enthusiastic reception staff and a welcome sauna at the end of the day. 

After I had made my arrangements, the Mensa Northern Lights meeting in Rovaniemi was announced.  Neither the local Mensans nor I could change our timings, but it worked out well with me as guinea pig for some of the activities.  And I was just as welcome as an individual.

I went on my own this time. My husband took the view that the girls and I would be sitting around in coffeehouses chatting, Arctic or no Arctic.  Now why on earth did he think that?

I arrived on the Thursday evening to temperatures of -18°.  I had been forewarned about being properly dressed for the cold.  You can hire Arctic apparel from the many safari companies. I soon discovered I had to wear earmuffs, scarf, jacket and gloves (not forgetting long underwear) whenever I stepped outside, even to nip across the road to a shop.  It must make it hard to storm off after an argument when it takes so long to get dressed for the outdoors.  I needed ski-type overtrousers for the snowshoe activity where we were trudging knee-deep in snow and, periodically, falling over into it. Footwear was a major issue.  All pavements and roads are compacted snow, so grippers on the soles of my boots were essential.  I had Wintertrax (from QVC, not too proud to admit it) Yaktrax are a similar brand.  I had sturdy hiking boots, plus a second pair for when the first got wet in deep snow and had to dry out.  I had lovely old fur and sheepskin gloves.  The fur part was perfect, but the cold got in through a torn lining. At least there was no requirement for clothing in the sauna!

I walked down to the river to admire the iconic Lumberjack’s Lantern Bridge in the snow then turned back into town to eat.  Eating out in Finland can be prohibitively expensive, but I remembered Restaurant Martina from our previous visit. On two separate evenings I enjoyed a delicious Italian-style main course preceded by a salad from the buffet with a small glass of wine for about 20 euros. Believe me, that is a bargain.

The next day, I headed out to the Santa Claus Village, using the local bus.  Public transport in Rovaniemi is not great – most tourists are in large groups, ferried around by coach, and the locals prefer to travel by car.  However, the hourly number 8 bus is well used by visitors.  I enjoyed pottering through residential areas, noticing, for example, that a school playground was an ice rink.

The village was quiet after the seasonal wave of Russian tourists. The Russians are frequent and popular (i.e. big-spending) visitors, especially around their Christmas in the first week of January.   The municipality has produced an information brochure for them in Russian explaining, for example, that you do not need to drive in the middle of the road as you would in Russia to avoid potholes.  There is a Russian speaking customer assistant in the shopping centre.  Russia and Finland have a long history but the present "invasion" seems to benefit both nations.

I bought my eight stamps (in Finnish - love that partitive case!) at Santa’s Main Post Office and posted my cards there to get the special postmark.  I had a pleasant discussion with the elves who were busily sorting the mail to the “Christmas goat” i.e. Santa Claus.  If the letter has a recognisable address, the child receives a reply.  After browsing around the gift shops and taking plenty of photos, I treated myself to an Arabia mug as a souvenir from the iittala shop.

I was invited to lunch at the home of one of my Mensan friends.  An interesting phenomenon here and at another person’s house. The lady of the house produced a big dish of delicious food. She looked at me. I looked at her. No-one touched the food. The Finnish lady did not want to serve me and treat me like a child. I did not want to serve myself and look presumptuous and greedy. Eventually common sense prevailed - and we ate.

I tore myself away from a cosy setting to catch the last hour or two of light for photographs – it was all of two o’clock.  I walked through town to the church, then back along the bank of the mighty Ounas River to get different perspectives on the bridges.  I am no expert photographer, but I couldn’t walk past those majestic frozen trees without taking pictures.  A word of warning – I bought a big pack of suspiciously cheap batteries from a pound shop before I left home and had to dump the lot as completely useless. 

Next day was the snowshoe outing, a dry run for the event which my friend was hosting at the Northern Lights meeting.  I am unsporty and unco-ordinated. If it worked for me, it would work for anyone.   We started off from the Santa Sport complex at Ounasvaara.  Unsurprisingly, it has the full range of winter sports activities as well as the normal leisure ones.  I don’t know how many swimmers are brave enough for the replica “ice hole” in the pool area!

We donned our snowshoes, yes, the ones that look like high-tech tennis racquets strapped to your feet, and set off into the forest.  Plan A rapidly turned into plan B or maybe C and, to cut a long story short, we improvised our own mini-campsite in a clearing.  Like a Nordic Mary Poppins, my friend produced a stove, spirit, a pan, a container of pea and ham soup, rye bread sandwiches, teabags and a flask of boiling water from her rucksack.  She announced that we would eat like the Finnish army on winter manoeuvres, and I believed her.   There was much hilarity as members of the party fell over or struggled to regain their footing.  The forest was sparkling white in the mid-day sun but, by definition, we were off piste and this townie was secretly relieved to see civilisation in the form of ski-tracks.  “Ski-ing” to a Finn is what we would call cross-country ski-ing.  They slightly despise downhill ski-ing as being aided by chairlifts on the way up and gravity on the way down.

That evening, a different Mensan friend hosted an event where, after yet another delicious meal, the ladies made soap. This modern alchemy is a scientific process involving lye, fat, scent and colouring.  My contribution was providing moral support i.e. chatting at the table and taking the occasional photo.

Next day, in brilliant sunshine and -10°, I set off on a scenic walk across the bridge to look at the town from the other side. After Rovaniemi was razed to the ground by the Germans in 1944, it was reconstructed according to a “reindeer plan” by the famous architect Alvar Aalto.  Maybe the antlers and back are better appreciated from the air.  Certainly the buildings blend sympathetically into the snow, and provided some stunning images. 

That evening, we returned to the same friend’s house for a gourmet meal of local delights.  A savoury mushroom soup, then whitefish with a chef’s salad, wild mushroom sauce and Lappish potatoes, followed by a fruit soup (a compôte of hand-collected berries) and Chantilly cream, all washed down by a non-alcoholic beverage made from blackcurrant leaves.  By now, I knew to serve myself!

You have to plug your car in overnight to stop it freezing

I was fascinated to see how Finns drove in their winter conditions, which prevail for at least six months of the year.  The municipality sends the snow ploughs out quickly, but there is permanent compacted snow on the roads and pavements.  Finns drive with a confidence brought about by obligatory winter tyres, a three part driving test and long experience.  No wonder they are world rally champions.  In the same conditions, which we might have for a week or two in the UK, we crawl along.  Of course, you can over-do the confidence.  I was slightly nervous as the airport taxi driver chatted away on his phone and looked at paperwork while driving back to town on the frozen dual carriageway. 

All too soon, it was the last day.  My case  was full of bulky winter clothes, so I only squeezed in two tubs of lingonberry and blueberry preserves and a packet of xylitol chewing-gum. I was mildly apprehensive about the return journey.  The day after I flew out, winter struck the UK with a vengeance. Nevertheless, I surmised correctly that winter conditions were nothing new to Finnair and I returned to Heathrow without incident (and with my luggage, despite that 35 minute layover).

All in all, a fabulous weekend.  The Arctic temperatures were melted by the warmth of my welcome.  I was hypnotised by the magical landscape and I learned to respect the cold.  There was only one disappointment.  Not even those resourceful Arctic Mensans were able to conjure up the “foxfires”.  However, there is a simple solution.  I have to go back.

“Next time with Northern Lights!”

First published in VISA `109 (June 2013)

The Rhine is Fine

By David Gourley

Apparently a voyage along the Rhine is the first river cruise that most people do.  Not so in our case as we have previously done cruises into the hinterland of St Petersburg, along the Dnieper in Ukraine (described in Visa 56A-57) and along the greatest of all rivers, the Nile. The Rhine is perhaps less exotic but we wanted to do it nevertheless and finally did so last summer. We started and finished in Cologne, getting as far upstream as Strasbourg.  I had previously been to both these cities but not to anywhere in between.

We started our journey by travelling to Brussels on Eurostar.  We have always upgraded to Leisure Select when travelling Eurostar and did so this time.  I noticed, in the run-up to our trip, that Leisure Select had, rather ominously, been rebranded as Standard Premium.  I was right to be concerned.  The Man in Seat 61 assures us that one is still travelling First Class.  And, yes, the carriage is unchanged.  But in Leisure Select one could enjoy a complimentary four-course meal with a hot main course, all preceded by a glass of champagne.  Not anymore.  In Standard Premium one still gets complimentary wine or beer, but no glass of champagne, and one now gets a cold   “light meal” comprising “a selection of three taster dishes”.  Another way in which the travel experience has been downgraded.  

From Brussels we transferred by coach to Cologne.  This was rather tedious: three hours of pounding along motorways in the dark, for much of the time in driving rain.  The one bit of interest was to find ourselves, to our surprise, in the Netherlands.  When we had travelled by train between Brussels and Cologne, we had crossed from Belgium straight into Germany.  But the motorway is further north so takes one through the southernmost Dutch province, Limburg, which interposes its territory between those two countries.

Just across the border in Germany, we had a comfort stop at a service station.  I don’t much like service stations back home and rather assumed that this was just the sort of thing that the Germans would do better.  Not so if this one is anything to go by.  It was very basic and the toilets were in portakabins outside the main building, meaning one had to go back into the rain. A lady sitting in a cabin nearby expected to be paid for the privilege of using these facilities. Say what one will about British service stations – I could start with the fact that one is charged for using their ATMs – they do accept, at least for now, the obligation to provide decent toilets at no charge.  

Our boat was moored a little upstream from the city centre.  On the whole we were satisfied with it.  We had selected this particular cruise because the boat had hotel-like rooms with a bed rather than bunks and a bath as well as a shower.  Rather luxurious compared to previous cruise experiences.  The meals were generally good.  Our one criticism was that it was free seating, our first experience of this.  To us, it seemed rather impersonal.   And, as a couple travelling on our own, we might find ourselves perched at the end of a table otherwise occupied by a group of friends on holiday together.  But a different point of view was put to us by one of our tour guides.  With assigned places, one can be landed with people one can’t stand.  She recalled a cruise where she had felt, by the end of the tour, like murdering the woman who had shared their table.  

Hardly any of the staff were German.  The captain was Dutch and most of the staff, including at fairly senior level, were from former Communist countries.  In the Cold War era most of these would not have been allowed to travel, let alone work, anywhere near the Rhine which of course flows through former West Germany.

After dinner we ascended to the deck to watch our boat set sail, the rain having finally stopped.  The boat went a little way downstream so we were in sight of the city centre, with its magnificent Cathedral, now floodlit, as we turned full circle.  The first stop was in Koblenz, which lies at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle Rivers.  Some cruise boats turn right here and carry on down the Moselle, which by all accounts is very scenic, as far as Trier, Germany’s oldest city.  A nice story about Trier was told to us by another of our tour guides, who was a WW2 buff.  Towards the end of the War General Patton took the city with two divisions.  Subsequently he received a message from General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, telling him not to take it unless he had four divisions.  “What do you want me to do”, he telegraphed in reply, “give it back?”

It seemed to be our lot that our shore visits coincided with major events.  Koblenz had been chosen as the venue of the Federal Horticultural Show and I am sure it would have been very interesting to have paid a visit.  But the short amount of time on shore did not allow for this and with various streets closed, navigating oneself around the city was not as straightforward as might otherwise have been the case.  

We found our way somehow to the Deutsches Eck (or German Corner), so called because it is at the confluence of the city’s two rivers, an area of great natural beauty.  A massive memorial towers over the site, dedicated to Emperor Wilhelm I, who presided over Germany’s unification in the nineteenth century.  Shortly before the end of WW2 the statue of Wilhelm was destroyed in an American artillery attack.  It was re-established in 1993, following Germany’s second unification.  I was intrigued to see that, around the foot of the monument, the shields of the former West German Länder (including Berlin though much of it was in the East) were depicted, with the exception of the Saar, which was separately listed at the side along with the lost provinces of the East.  Rather odd, I thought, since the Saar was in the West, being indeed the Land furthest away from the ‘interzonal’ border with the East.  The explanation was that the Länder were those that were in the Federal Republic at the time ie the early fifties: the Saar had been occupied by France since WW2 and did not rejoin Germany until 1957, following a plebiscite.  

Our next stop was Boppard.  Here a dilemma presented itself: whether to take a chairlift or go into the picturesque town centre, mutually exclusive options as they were in opposite directions from our landing point.  We went for the former, reasoning that, as it was June, we could still take a stroll into the town in daylight after dinner.  We made the right choice.  We were rewarded with two distinctive views over the Rhine and its Valley.  One is from Gideonseck (Gideon’s Corner) from which one sees the whole of the River as it loops through the area.  In complete contrast, though only a short walk away, is the Four Lakes View, so called because of an optical illusion: one is still looking down at the Rhine but, because of the configuration of the surrounding hills, there is the appearance of looking at four separate lakes.  Our walk after dinner gave just about enough time to take in the historic centre. 

We moored in Boppard overnight.  The following morning we cruised the most scenic part of the River, the celebrated Gorge.  We were lucky with the weather.  Later on during the day the heavens opened up but it stayed dry, albeit very overcast, in the morning.  This really is the Romantic Rhine, towering cliffs and a fair few castles.  A recurring theme was how the castles had over the centuries been battled over by the French and Germans.  Culminating in WW2, France and Germany went to war three times in the space of seventy years.  Germany was indisputably the aggressor on all three occasions but in earlier history the reverse might have been the case.  

The famed Lorelei Rock is passed on this section.  Somewhere on the cliff face is a small statue of said maiden and I looked for it in vain.  My focus is not great.  On a drive round  a national park in Alaska there was great excitement in our bus when a moose was espied.  Rather like elephants in Africa, the moose is the animal everyone wants to see in Alaska.  Trouble was, the animal was in the distance and so small I couldn’t make it out.  The whole bus was willing me to see it.  “You could have pretended to see it”, Cathy later admonished.  (The happy sequel was that a moose wandered across the road directly ahead of our bus; even I saw that one.)

From now on the Rhine is a border.  We had been sailing through the Land of Rhineland Palatinate  and this continues for many miles on the west side of the river.  On the east side one comes first to the Land of Hesse and later on to Baden-Wurttemberg.  Further south again the river forms the international border between Germany and France.  Confusingly some of the territory on the west side, including the Palatinate’s capital Mainz, is known as Rheinhesse, albeit it is not in the Land of Hesse.  Historically though it was part of the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, one of the numerous independent entities that existed before German unification.  Evidently there are some in Hesse who still think the area is rightfully part of their Land.  

Our afternoon stop  was in Mainz.  By now it was pouring and some opted to stay on board.  But we don’t like letting the weather get in the way of seeing new sights.  In particular we wanted to visit the Gutenberg Museum which entailed a fairly quick sprint through the rain.  A good place to go on a rainy day but also one we would have wanted to go to anyway.  Johannes Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press.  Mainz and Strasbourg both claim to be the place where he did this; what is not in dispute is that he was born in Mainz.  The Museum is fascinating.   An original Gutenberg press is there and one is given a demonstration.  Its most precious exhibits are the two Gutenberg  Bibles.

The rain obligingly left off as we were coming to the end of our visit.  So in the remaining time left we could explore Mainz in the dry.  The special events jinx followed us here.  There was some sort of festival in progress meaning that the city’s handsome streets were in part obscured by marquees.  I suppose that visitors should not complain if townspeople want to enjoy a festival but I still wonder why on earth the authorities permitted a marquee to be erected immediately alongside a beautiful and historic fountain, causing it to be turned off.  

The following day we were due to land in Mannheim and from there be driven to Heidelberg.  We were informed however that due to some problem or another in Mannheim, we would instead land in Speyer.  This, it turned out, was something of a bonus.  Speyer is a gem whereas Mannheim, worthy place though it doubtless is, is essentially an industrial city and not really a tourist destination.  

Heidelberg is one of the highlights of any Rhineland tour and one of our reasons for choosing this particular holiday: we had both long hankered after going there.   Sometimes one ends up disappointed when one finally gets to a place that has been on the wish list but not so here.  This is a historic university city that has close ties to Cambridge.  On the way into the city we saw many fine residences and our guide pointed out a couple of these.  One of these belongs to Mannheim born tennis star Steffi Graf and her husband Andre Agassi and the other to Chancellor Angela Merkel.  I was rather surprised for, as is well known, Frau Merkel hails from the former East  and her usual place of abode is near Berlin.  But she has also acquired this bolthole in the far southwest of Germany.  

The main thoroughfare running alongside the Rhine is named from Konrad Adenauer, a Rhinelander and first Chancellor of postwar (West) Germany.  Well into his eighties by the time he stepped down in 1963 – he was known as Der Älter, or the Old Man – he presided over the Wirtschschaftswunder (or Economic Miracle) and, after the horrors of Nazism, played a lead role in re-establishing Germany, in the Western Länder at least, as a peaceful, democratic and essentially decent country.  Some, including the then prime Minister of Britain, feared that a reunified Germany might not be like that.  One French observer opined that he liked Germany so much that he was glad there were two of them.  After all, if West Germany was essentially a Rhenish-Bavarian-Hanoverian republic, East Germany was, well, Prussian.  But the Germany of today is still very much the one that Adenauer founded.  

There was a bit of free time after we’d had a walking tour of the city centre.  We used it to ascend the cable car.  From the top were fine views that inter alia took in the whole of nearby Mannheim.  So we were seeing the city even though we had not actually been in it.  On the way down we paused our journey to look round the castle, or rather the small part of it that can be visited without having a guided tour.  We admired the Heidelberg Tun, a massive wine barrel whose construction entailed the use of 130 oak trees.  

We were driven back to Speyer and had a bit of time to look round this beautiful city.  Most first time visitors will, like us, make for the Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage site.  But there is plenty else here to enjoy.  We strolled down the main street and racked up four churches, including the Cathedral.  Our last one was the Memorial Church of the Protestation, a Protestant church that was constructed in memory of the protest that took place at the Diet of Speyer by the Protestant states of the Holy Roman Empire in 1529.  Despite this early association with Protestantism, Speyer, like the Rhineland generally, is today strongly Catholic.  Due to the Rhineland, and also Bavaria, the Catholic: Protestant split in former West Germany was around 50:50.  In unified Germany Protestants are in the majority due to their preponderance in the Eastern Länder.   

We awoke the next morning in a different country, France, and in the city of Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace.  This province, along with its neighbour to the west, Lorraine, was long in dispute between France and Germany and they have changed hands on various occasions, most recently in 1945 when they were restored to France after having been forcibly incorporated into the Third Reich.  After WW2 Western Europe was blessed with some wise and far-sighted statesmen and those in France and (West) Germany resolved not only that their countries would cease to be enemies, but that they would become steadfast friends.  Germany accordingly renounced any further claim to Alsace-Lorraine whose inhabitants consider themselves to be every bit as French as Les Parisiennes, albeit they might have a fondness for sauerkraut.  They might though call it choucroute.   

Another outcome of postwar statesmanship was that Strasbourg, for so long a symbol of conflict instead became a symbol of European unity.  Indeed it is the unofficial ‘capital of Europe’.  Clustered in an area a mile or so north of the centre are major European institutions: the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights.  

For all that it was fought over, Strasbourg remains a lovely city with a historic medieval centre.   We were driven into the centre and had the morning to ourselves. We immediately went inside the Cathedral and were glad we did for we would have been disappointed if we had left doing so to late morning for the Cathedral closes for  a while as there is a pre-booked demonstration of its celebrated Astronomical Clock.  The Cathedral is massive.  In fact for a couple of centuries or so it was the world’s tallest building until, in 1874, it was surpassed by St Nikolai’s Church in Hamburg.  Johannes Gutenberg is remembered: close by the main square is named from him as is a hotel.

A good way of seeing Strasbourg, if one only has  a short time there, is to take a boat trip.  This takes one through the picturesque Petite France area.  An appealing name though the origin is decidedly unromantic: it was once a place where people with syphilis, or the “French disease” as it was known in German, were treated.  As well as taking one around the central waterway system, the boat diverts north to give a view of the European institutions before returning to the boarding point.  

We then had  a last wander round the centre.  The only thing here that jarred was a group navigating their Segways through the pedestrianized area, looking to a man and woman like zombies as they concentrated on their vehicles, oblivious to their beautiful surrounds.  Is this to be a new form of harassment for pedestrians along with the ‘lycra lout’ variety of cyclists?  I understand though that segways are not allowed in public areas in the UK.  Phew!

After lunch on the boat, we saw more of Alsace, this time heading south to Colmar, for a while travelling along the historic Wine Route, which takes one through delightful villages in idyllic countryside framed in the distance by the Vosges Mountains on one side and the hills of the Black Forest on the other.  On the way in to the town we passed a replica of the Statue of Liberty, the original of course having been a gift from France to the USA.  After parking, we walked through an unprepossessing shopping mall.  Then, as we exited, all changed.  We had travelled not just through space but through time.  Colmar is an unspoilt and very beautiful medieval city.  If a boat trip is the best way of ‘doing’ Strasbourg in a short visit, a noddy train is the way to see Colmar.  An annoying name but they are for adults and the way to see as much as possible of its historic centre, including an area known as Little Venice.  

Our return journey to Cologne now started.  There was just one stop en route, in the town of R?desheim.  Whereas Boppard is just to the north of the Rhine Gorge, R?desheim is just to the south and again we moored overnight.  The special events jinx returned.  We were forewarned that Motorbike Week was in progress.  We were thrilled, not.  Sure enough the place was swarming with bikers.  But the atmosphere was congenial.  Mainly middle-aged men whose pride and joy was their Harley Davison.  No excessive noise and not a Hell’s Angel in sight.  

Rudesheim , with its  picturesque and narrow main street, the Drosselgasse, is one of the Rhine’s tourist hotspots so one can expect it to be teeming with visitors even without the bikers.  Lonely Planet is a bit sniffy: “if you’re looking for a tourist thimble, this is definitely the place to come”.   But we liked it and one can very easily escape the crowds as it small and surrounded by beautiful countryside.  We boarded a cable car which took us over a vineyard and then up to the top of a hill from which fine views over the Rhine Valley, stretching as far as Mainz, could be enjoyed.   Here is located the striking Germania monument, which commemorates the creation of unified Germany in 1871.

Now that we were doing the journey by day we were able to appreciate how beautiful the stretch of the river north of Koblenz is.  Here was the famous bridge at Remagen.   In WW2 the advancing Allies were surprised to find that the Bridge was intact and that they could therefore cross the river unimpeded, hastening their drive eastwards which took them to their rendezvous on the Elbe with the Red Army.  The Bridge is no more as it collapsed soon after capture . Its western end houses a memorial.  

On the final stretch before reaching Cologne, we passed Bonn which was for some forty years the capital of West, and then for a brief while reunited, Germany, before Berlin resumed this role.  There was some surprise that this relatively small city was selected as the capital of the Federal Republic rather than, say, centrally located Frankfurt.  It’s rather as if Britain had been divided in like fashion to Germany and Bath had been made the capital of the non-communist west.  The fact that Konrad Adenauer was a native of Bonn just might have had something to do with it.  But not for nothing was Der Älter known for his shrewdness.  He believed, correctly as it turned out, that the division of Germany would be temporary and he wanted the capital to have a temporary look and feel so not be an obvious choice.  Frankfurt might have settled down too comfortably in the role.  

Finally we came to Cologne but we had one more night on board and an afternoon in which to explore the city.  The city was devastated by WW2 bombing but it was right at the heart of the Wirtschaftswunder and has long been a prosperous place.  Running down to the banks of  the Rhine is the pleasant Old Town area and there is of course the magnificent Cathedral which, like St Paul's in London, survived the bombing.  It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  And it has a tower.  Give me a tower and I want to climb it so I duly bought  a ticket not realizing it involved a climb of over 300 feet and 509 steps.  A bit of a challenge for a sixty something gent but there could be no turning back.  On leaving the Cathedral I espied our three tour guides and, somewhat uncharacteristically, went over to them and announced that I had climbed Cologne Cathedral.  After dinner one called me aside: she presented me with a commemorative scroll.

First Published in VISA 103 and 104 (June - August 2012)

More about Mali

After describing her 1975 visits to Timbuktu in Visa 107, Janice Booth moves on to Bamako

Back in 1975 the Grand Hotel in Bamako was impressively palatial, with masses of marble, a huge gleaming foyer, glossy reception desk and wide staircase leading up to a balustraded balcony. It was the first hotel built in Bamako in the colonial era, in 1952, just eight years before Mali gained independence from France; it had been part of French West Africa. We’d flown in late from Belgium – I was with the MD of a Belgian charity whose husband liked her to have company when travelling – and were glad to arrive. Our room (opening off the balcony) was large and opulent, with king-size beds and thick black curtains. My companion took a strong sleeping pill and went straight to sleep.

         

As I turned off the shower I heard a clunk; and on returning to the bedroom saw water pouring from a sleek fitted wardrobe – which turned out to contain a water tank so old that its bottom had finally rusted away. I piled our bags and shoes up on a chair, then phoned reception. Two impeccably dark-suited, white-shirted Malians appeared, and looked sadly at the flood. I suggested in French: ‘Perhaps one should turn it off at the mains?’ and they brightened.

         

‘Indeed, Madame, one should turn it off at the mains. One will do it.’ And they vanished.

         

Ten minutes later they were back. ‘Very unfortunately, Madame, he who can turn it off at the mains is at his home tonight. We must await the morning. Meanwhile we will transfer you to another room.’

Transfer? At midnight? With me in my nightie and my companion dead to the world? Anyway, the room seemed to be on a slight slope; the water was collecting along the wall furthest from the beds, and running out under the door rather than getting deeper. I declined their offer and went to sleep.

When I woke at 8.00 the flood had stopped and the floor was fairly dry. For almost six hours the water from the tank had continued flowing: under the door, across the balcony, through the balustrade and, in a gentle waterfall, down into the foyer, which surely had never been so well washed. I went back to the Grand Hotel nine months later, and as I checked in I could swear I heard a murmur of ‘cîterne’ (tank) from among the reception staff.  In 2004 it was refurbished and is now the Azalai Hotel Salem – presumably with better plumbing.

On my second visit, an American with a lurid, roughly dressed gash across her forehead came to sit with me in the restaurant, asking me to translate the menu. She’d been knocked down by a 15-year-old on a scooter (her fault, she readily acknowledged: she’d stepped out straight in front of him) and had had the wound scrubbed clean without anaesthetic (ouch...) in the city hospital. The boy then appeared with a huge bunch of flowers – he knew no-one blamed him but was still terribly shaken – and I translated his heartfelt and very well-spoken regret. From the menu, the woman chose hare while I had my favourite grilled capitaine. She received a massive haunch, enough to feed three people, which probably the leftovers would have done back in the kitchen; but to my great embarrassment she asked me to ask the courteous but puzzled waiter for a ‘doggy bag’ so she could finish it later in her room. The experiences of travel...

Bamako in those days was a lively, chaotic, very African capital, with some dramatic architecture, vibrant local restaurants and fantastic live music. The French influence lingered in the food, and the trays of fresh baguettes hawked in the streets each morning. Nearly four decades later I’m left with impressions rather than precise memories – of tall, graceful people, many shades of colour and types of bone structure, from fine, pale Tuareg to much darker and chunkier Moors and Mali’s numerous other ethnic groups; veiled faces, turbaned faces, open faces, stylishly dressed women in rainbow colours and dangling jewellery; dust and noise and the feeling of a confident city at ease with itself. Poor and rich areas, shabby and flamboyant buildings, sleek new-builds and chunky traditional homes, smart shops and outdoor markets all somehow rubbed along amicably together.

The wonderfully atmospheric  Marché Rose, a huge, pink, circular mud-brick market in neo-Sudanese style, with increasingly exotic items on increasingly dark stalls as you wound your way inwards, was destroyed by fire in 1993, but was so popular with both residents and visitors that it has been rebuilt. I bought dress-lengths of printed cotton there, and had them made up and embroidered by a tailor in Timbuktu. There were some pleasant parks and gardens – dusty, but with flowers and birds – and I remember a peaceful walk beside the River Niger, the city’s water-source. All along its sloping banks were small fruit and vegetable gardens, growing well in the irrigated sand. Bamako means ‘crocodile river’ but none appeared...

Traffic was bad, pollution worse. Traffic lights did work – mostly – but the vehicles on either side confronted each other like adversaries, revving fiercely and hell-bent on being first away. I remember once, opposite me across the lights, the nearside wheel of a stationary 2CV gently detached itself and rolled slowly into the cross traffic, causing  no small amount of braking and blaring of horns.

Djenne Mosque

We were heading for Timbuktu, and sadly I’d no time to see more of the country. Borders have changed over the years, but the area of today’s Mali, with the River Niger at its heart, has been for centuries a crossroads of races and civilisations. Many prehistoric remains, including some vivid cave paintings and finely made artefacts, have been found, and first European accounts of its history start around the 3rd century AD. I should have loved to see Djenné, with its massive mosque – the largest mud-brick structure in the world, designated a World Heritage Site in 1988 – and excavations at nearby Djenné-Djeno, possibly the oldest-known city in West Africa, dating from about 250BC.  

Also I missed the Bandiagara area, so-called ‘Dogon country’ and probably the part of Mali most visited by tourists, with its intriguing culture, distinctive art, burial caves and characteristic cliff villages clustered below a towering escarpment. (Remember Robert Temple’s controversial ‘The Sirius Mystery’ in 1973 and the African tribe that apparently knew more about the Dog Star than astronomers did? Rightly or wrongly, they were the Dogon.)

In fact art and culture are fascinating throughout Mali, very often specific to particular areas, and I returned home with far too many souvenirs which, thirty years later, I still had. Through editing Ross Velton’s Bradt Guide to Mali I’d discovered a small charity, the Joliba Trust, based on Dartmoor that was doing useful work (farming, health, livestock, children...) among villagers in central/southern Mali; in 2009 they held an exhibition-cum-sale of Malian handicrafts to raise funds and, as I live in Devon, I filled up a box and drove over. It was lovely to see a display of the bright colours, fine weaving and characterful carvings that I remembered – and even better to see mine being sold to Joliba’s profit! They work on a narrow shoestring. As I watched, a small, carved wooden door from a Dogon grain-store went for £75...

Joliba have kindly provided some of these photos and some updates about the present situation: life in the south of the country seems tense but fairly normal, while in the north prices of everyday goods are rocketing and there is still sporadic violence – today a suicide bomb has killed a Malian soldier in Timbuktu, and Gao is a target of rebel attacks. The Joliba website includes a heartfelt letter from a Timbuktu inhabitant, written during last year’s ‘Islamist’ occupation. In Bamako and other towns there’s suspicion now among the inhabitants, as lighter-skinned and darker-skinned wonder who may be supporting whom. Although the French intervention in January did (vitally) drive the insurgents from the northern towns and prevent their further advance, not much is solved in the long term by killing a few dozen ‘Islamists’ and destroying some of their hideouts; it’s the very, very rich pickings offered by drug trafficking in the desert that need to be tackled, internationally. Meanwhile, the insurgents will simply return and the country can’t stabilise; also its tourism income – particularly important in Djenné, Timbuktu and Bandiagara – has been stripped away.

As always in wars, it’s the ‘little people’ who suffer, and Mali is already a poor nation. Some governments have withdrawn much-needed  development aid from the north but NGOs such as Joliba are plugging away throughout the country – and Mali is so rewarding in that respect because, as I’ve seen for myself, its people are happy to organise themselves and work energetically on projects that provide the basic finance or materials they lack.  It’s a beautiful, fascinating and very varied country, well worth considering as a destination once the unrest is over. In fact – Mali needs you!

First Published in VISA 108 (April 2013)