Greetings from BOLIVIA’S Carnaval

Here’s me with Bolivian president Evo Morales in Oruro, Bolivia. To my left, my friend Annabel is receiving a neck full of soapy foam courtesy of Bolivia’s vice-president Álvaro Garcia Linera.

Annabel’s a Bolivian-born Brit whose family comes from Oruro. We’re at Carnaval, a cacophonic kaleidoscope of dozens of brass bands accompanying groups of fabulously costumed dancers. They dance in a 20-hour-long parade in homage to the devil. Then they fall to their knees and crawl into the church to ask blessings from the Virgin.

Tens of thousands of spectators join in by randomly flinging water bombs and spraying foam, often directly in the faces of their victims — it’s easier to pick their pockets that way.

Notice Linera and Morales went with the foam. See them giggling like schoolboys playing tricks on the girls. In this case Annabel. She swore she’d get revenge. I didn’t believe her.

Later I watched as she avenged the foaming. She had two girlfriends in tow. They acted as decoys, sitting on the Bolivian president’s knee while a bodyguard snapped photos. The dancers and brass bands whirled and clashed by them in a chaos of bodies and noise. Water bombs whistled through the air, spanking the ground as they landed in front of the presidential party.

Annabel used the melee to position herself, pull out her arsenal and ambush the vice president of Bolivia with a prolonged blast of stringy foam. Linera quickly recovered from the attack and retaliated, pulling out his foam and spraying her right back.

El presidente laughed amicably. The two babes on his lap laughed. It looked like a security nightmare. But the bodyguards were laughing, too.

Can you imagine the humourless Stephen Harper in that situation? Methinks his RCMP security would wield taser guns, not cans of foam.

Ciao,

Anita

Anne Georg

WAREHAM, ENGLAND’S SAD MACAQUES AND SHORTBREAD

Being a primatology lover, I visited the Monkey World ape rescue and rehabilitation centre outside of Wareham, England to see a few species that I’d only ever seen on television documentaries. I was super keen, even after a painfully long bus ride from the neighbouring county of Devon where I had been staying with my cousins. In hindsight, I’m not entirely sure what I expected — I was fully aware that these animals had been previously abused and wouldn’t be overly rambunctious, but I thought the place would be more like a nature preserve than a nursing home on visitors’ day.

Once through the gates, I made my way through the children’s play area and picnic tables to the monkey enclosures, which were fairly open and grassy, surrounded by wire fencing. I first encountered a sad macaque who had apparently been recovering from obesity, dragging his ponch of excess skin along the ground as he shuffled over to his food. Moving along, I found orangutans and chimps listlessly laying about, no doubt driven to insanity by the crowds of people standing at the fences, smoking cigarettes and cracking horny monkey jokes while children ran around freaking out. I had been looking for a Jane Goodall-esque ape encounter, and this couldn’t have been further from the mark. I quickly toured the facility in the hopes of finding something more inspiring and ended up making a hasty exit through the gift shop (where one can purchase Monkey World brand marmalade, pencil sets and T-shirts, but sadly, no T-shirts picturing the obese macaque. Now that would have been good), promptly heading back to the bus station, disturbed, disenchanted, and dreading the long ride back to Devon. In the end I suppose I learned a couple of things: monkeys and apes are best seen in wildlife documentaries, and Monkey World shortbread is delicious.

KARI WATSON

Happily stranded in Singapore’s international airport

After 14 hours pressed up against a plane window, a layover in a Southeast Asian airport looms like a purgatory, a limbo between disembarkation and destination. Unless the flight lands at Changi International: instead of chaotic purgatory, Singapore airport is a jackpot paradise of precision.

The hub of Asia, Singapore links the developing continent to established western sensibilities. The port of entry mimics the efficiency of the city-state’s manicured infrastructure, from the 10-minute immigration wait times to the complementary city tours for those on a layover of five hours or more. A high-speed monorail zips business suits and backpackers between terminals so no one misses a connecting flight. Shops sell $1,000 perfume and kitschy souvenirs. Ten dollars buys a dip in the rooftop pool and a lounge under the palm fronds. A no-cost rest area offers a dimly lit doze in reclining chairs instead of the usual plastic-handled models. Xbox terminals await gamers in the iConnect section of the airport’s third level, just around the corner from an art exhibition on cultural interpretations of beauty. The movie theatre screens free films, and a garden of sunflowers decorates the smokers’ patio. Ubiquitous Internet terminals provide high-speed connections free of charge, keeping all passengers connected to whichever part of the world they’ve left behind.

Unlike other Southeast Asian airport purgatories with their buzzing fluorescent lights and cramped waiting areas, Changi turns a layover into a luxury.

ANDREA CAMPBELL

The royal city of Yogyakarta

Globalization has made the world smaller but the crowds larger. The ruins of the ancient world in countries once seen as less than ideal tourist destinations — such as Machu Picchu in Peru or Angkor Wat in Cambodia — have seen a deluge of visitors in the last decade. Machu Picchu has seen protests and structural damage due to the mass influx, and a visitor’s experience in the high season can be marred by tours and crowds that make photography near impossible. One solution to this issue is to find attractions that have yet to find their way onto the beaten path.

The royal city of Yogyakarta in the central part of the Indonesian island of Java is surrounded by an astonishing number of ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples that have yet to receive the international attention they deserve, with about 80 per cent of visitors being domesic Indonesians. The city has two separate UNESCO World Heritage Sites just beyond its borders, the Hindu Prambanan complex to the east, and the world’s largest Buddhist monument Borobudur to the north, as well as a number of smaller temples and ruins. Borobudur is an immense structure, resembling a squat pyramid studded with stupas, decorated with 2,672 narrative relief panels and over 500 Buddha statues. The structure guides visitors through the three levels of Buddhist cosmology and past the overwhelming number of sculpted panels that enact Buddhist teaching. While not as large as Borobudur, Prambanan is still one of the largest Hindu temples in Southeast Asia, and is initially more spectacular as visitors are greeted by a complex of stalagmite temples, jaggedly jutting towards the sky.

Yogyakarta is an excellent base and itself a worthy travel destination, with a white-walled and still-used royal residence, a busy art scene notable for its Indonesian gamelan music, batik painting and Javanese dancing, as well as some interesting architecture from the Dutch colonial period. There is a wide range of accommodation, and no shortage of restaurants serving spicy Indonesian cuisine.

JESSE KEITH

RIDING SHOTGUN ON A GUATEMALAN VOLCANO TOUR

There are 30 tourists, including two Calgarians and one French girl with a shotgun she doesn’t know how to use, standing in the dark in the rain on the side of a volcano, waiting to be robbed.

Let me back up. My friend Meg and I are in Guatemala, in a little colonial town called Antigua. On the advice of a friendly Aussie, we’d booked a tour to a nearby volcano. The trip was supposed to include transportation, an English-speaking guide and “protection.” It turned out the “transportation” was a massive Greyhound, perfect for narrow mountain roads, and “protection” meant the non-English-speaking guide carried a shotgun.

Poking the lava with sticks once we got to the top of the mountain was pretty neat, but the real excitement was on the way back down. It had started pouring rain when we were about halfway up the volcano, so there was almost no visibility for the drive down. The road was really narrow, and eventually an old “chicken bus” came up towards us. Both buses moved as far to the side as they could so the other could pass, which was when our front tire went into the ditch on the side of the road — putting us precariously close to toppling down the mountain. The other bus still couldn’t get by, so we moved over further, and the rear tire left the road. At this point, our driver thankfully mustered enough English to say “everyone move to the left side of the bus.”

We evacuated out the bus’s rear door, since the front one was blocked by dirt and trees, which turned out to be the only thing keeping us from rolling down the side of the volcano. After numerous failed attempts to get our bus back on the road, the “chicken bus” that forced us into the ditch came back down the mountain. It didn’t have enough room for the full tour group, but the driver offered to take our guide to the nearest town for help. Of course, they couldn’t leave us without protection, so our guide left his shotgun with Emily, a little French girl who’d never handled a gun in her life.

An hour later the bus driver returns with a police car, a van and a flatbed truck. After three attempts, the truck finally pulls the bus out of the ditch, and we all get back on board for the two-hour, police-escorted drive home, cold, wet and happy to be alive.

HEATHER MORRIS