At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
Or rather, I wanted to make sure that I would be more likely to achieve my goals, so I resolved to be smart and make ’em S.M.A.R.T.– Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Did I succeed? Yes and no.
Chess: ✅ I played every day for a month and got the rating I had set my mind on. (Then promptly lost it.)
Reading: ✅ One non-fictional book per month. Done.
Piano: ❎ I did play, but didn’t learn as many pieces as I had hoped. The temptation is to stick with the ones you know…
French: ❎ I didn’t learn anywhere near as much as I had planned, mainly because I had to focus on Danish.
Travel: ✅ I went to Morocco, Egypt, the Seychelles, Norway, Italy (thrice), and Denmark (plus Sweden), which is less than usual, but still acceptable, especially since Egypt, Italy and Norway was with the kids.
Fitness: ✅ The year was marred with injuries – first recovering after the paragliding incident, then a wonky neck, a messed up Achilles’ tendon, a tennis elbow, and finally a slipped disk – so running and biking and swimming suffered. I did manage the Paris marathon, and a runstreak of 100 days, but I’m nowhere near the distance goals I set myself for runs and biking. Nor did I learn to crawl, but I’ve racked up some 100 gym sessions, including an ironstreak of 40 days or so, which has meant three or four extra kilos’ worth of muscles.
Challenges: ✅ Apart from the aforementioned run- and ironstreaks I’ve successfully given up coffee, tried intermittent fasting for a month, I’ve become vegetarian, and I’m currently on a no sugar diet, so that’s gone well. Less well went my attempt at keeping a diary – I kept it up until Denmark, but then fell out of habit, unfortunately.
Work: ✅ I added Danish to my language combination, and continued working in Communications. In addition to that I MC’d a couple of conferences using participatory leadership, which was fun, too.
Blog: ✅ I increased my readership quite spectacularly this year (from just shy of 3,000 readers to 5,500, and from 5,000 views to nearly 10,000), which is really gratifying.
So. What worked and what didn’t? Some goals turned out to be insufficiently specific, such as “learn a piece of music”; others were unattainable due to factors beyond my control (the fitness targets) or had to be downgraded in terms of priority (French, when I was paid to go learn Danish), but overall it’s a sound principle, and one I will continue to use in 2019.
Now all I have to do is decide what those goals should be…
Everyone likes a nice ass, and no one likes a smart ass, the saying goes. The Danes don’t care. They have a thing for arses. All kinds.
The list of Danish idioms involving your rear end goes on and on. My favourite may be their expression for a job that is particularly badly done, which is then said to move up and down like King Volmar’s arse (gå op og ned som kong Volmers røv). Quite the epitaph.* But then Danes have always had a troubled relationship with their royals (and vice versa).
Getting an arse-full isn’t a quaint pre-metric measure of the kind Americans and Brits are so found of. No, få røven fuld means being taken for a fool. If you are instructed to seal your arse (lokke røven) you are told to be be quiet in the most direct way possible.
But Danes don’t just focus on the behind. They also have a healthy interest in fully frontal parts. This isn’t expressed in idioms so much as a very liberal approach to information about people’s (no longer) private parts. As we have seen, some individuals market their goods in public, but this is just an expression of a more widespread (!) phenomenon: even Danish public television has a series of programmes called “me and my pussy/dick” (“Jag og min fisse/pik“) where you are treated to close-ups of different… er… bits, while the unseen owners regale you with cautionary tales from the netherlands.
So that’s Mor Danmark for you. Unlike John Bull and Uncle Sam (both rather creepy characters that seem hell-bent on molesting you, one way or another), the Danish national character is down to Earth in the extreme, an old lady with a naughty streak, face probably like that of a happy prune, telling you the truth whether you want to or not.
[Tried to find a suitable illustration for this imaginary woman on the Internet. Take my word for it: don’t.]
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*I really hope he was one of those early Viking kings that invaded England, so that he can feature in that famous pamphlet, World’s Greatest British Lovers.
Sex sells. You’re reading this, aren’t you? So this post will be about porn.
Not the fleshy kind that elicits one-handed browsing tho (unless you are very particular in your tastes), but word porn. Specifically, some words and expressions that have amazed me in my efforts to decipher Danish and the Danish*.
First of all there’s swearing. There are two kinds of swearing, of course. The first is utilising curse words to emphasise things. Like all non-catholic countries there’s fewer curse words involving deities (beyond Gud and Satan), and more emphasis on bodily functions. So Danes utilise skidt and pisse (shit and piss) a lot – my favourite being pissegodt (literally tasty as piss) – but have also adopted that most prolific of American curses, the f word; only they pronounce it as fåkk.
The other type of swearing takes place when a mere promise isn’t enough. The Danish language has a peculiar expression here: Amager halshugg. Turns out Amager was the place of execution in Copenhagen; halshugg means decapitation. Interestingly, this expression is apparently very popular with recent middle eastern additions to the population, coming as they do from a culture where swearing of this kind is more prevalent. A Syrian refugee using a turn of phrase that’s shorthand for “may I be taken to the Danish capital’s executioner for capital punishment” – now that’s integration for you!
Overall there are quite a few historical references in Danish expressions, and few are flattering to a Swede: when something går ad Pommern til (lit. “goes to Pomerania” – an area in the Baltic that used to be Swedish), it means it’s going straight to Hell. If someone is being beaten up really badly they are slået til lirekassemænd – beaten until they become organ grinders – a profession associated with war invalids in the 19th century after – you guessed it! – wars with Sweden and others.
Who is to say Danes aren’t longing for revenge still? They might not say it out loud, but there are clues: if you compare, say, a Swedish matchbox – which features an innocent, naked child on the cover – with its Danish equivalent, you will find an old man there instead. Innocent enough, until you realise he is maritime war hero Tordenskiold, responsible for burning the Swedish enemy fleet.
So it all comes back to their history. It may be that the Danish sentiment is best summed up by the undying phrase of former prime minister Uffe Elleman-Jensen, who, after the Danes had voted against joining deeper cooperation with the rest of the EU, and then won their only European Football Championship to date, said: If you can’t join them, beat them.
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*For more word porn, you can read these posts from Germany and Slovenia, you pervs.
Berlin has lured me back. My last visit left me frustrated, with a sense of having left important tasks undone, and so I’ve returned with a mind to fulfilling an obligation. The practicalities of my stay couldn’t be more different from last time – then I lodged in a swanky expensive hotel, now – thanks to the wonder of airbnb – I am sleeping on someone’s couch for the price of box of Belgian pralines. The posh breakfast room of the Hilton is replaced by a rickety chair in the kitchen of my host, but the fair is just as good, and the conversation much better.
My host* is an avid traveller and has friends in Syria, and as I have just read of Ibn Battutah’s travels there we compare notes – her facts vs my fiction, admittedly – but as she moves on to Korea I am left behind.
I do learn a few surprising things about this people, though; their written language is an amalgamation of pictograms and letters, and the South Koreans are the world’s greatest consumers of plastic surgery, with eyes and noses being primary targets for improvement. Alas, only one type of nose job seems to be available, so all recipients end up looking the same, she says. I suppress the impulse to observe that they already did to my untrained eye, and instead bring up the similarities of Korea and Germany, and so on it goes until my host has to leave for a seminar (the topic of which she mysteriously declines to divulge).
I set out to see the memorial to the holocaust victims, which eluded me last time. It’s located underneath the cenotaphs I visited last time, and as the texts and photographs calmly leads me on a path of slowly evolving, deliberate and cold repression, persecution and extermination, the walls crowd me and claustrophobia sets in, as if I was entombed with all these victims of nazism.
Worst of all is the room with scraps of letters written by parents separated from their children, knowing that they are going to their death, without hope of ever seeing their families again. I read until I can no longer see for tears, stay down there until I can no longer breathe, until the horror is racking my body.
I leave with the words of Primo Levi echoing in my head: “it could happen here, and so it can happen again”. It’s not a happy thought.
I continue my pilgrimage by visiting another memorial to those who have died here, this time under the other totalitarian regime to curse Berlin with its presence. The Wall museum at Checkpoint Charlie tells the story of the Cold War in the same unrelentingly factual manner, the story of a failed state resorting to killing and imprisoning its own citizens rather than accept its shortcomings. Personal tragedies aside, it’s hard to comprehend how this absurd situation could continue for decades, with the world in the balance, and the realisation that we may be returning to that state of play (for what is Syria if not a new Vietnam, with the US and Russia facing off by proxy?) is even harder to fathom.
I leave feeling gloomier than the Berlin sky, and head straight across the road into the former US sector and that most American of bastions, McDonalds. Rarely has a Big Mac tasted better.
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*A lady of a certain age who asked to remain anonymous, as couch-surfing – like most good things – isn’t strictly legal in Germany.
Day 2
Heading into town on a Sunday morning you get the feeling Berlin has been deserted. Walking through the largely empty streets it reminds me of a carcass, the many building sites bringing to mind open wounds, the prolific and brightly coloured pipelines thence emerging viscera slithering out of the gashes in the cityscape.
In fact the latter are a necessity in the building industry in order to pump ground water away from the construction sites*. Berlin takes it’s name from the Slavic word “brl”, meaning marsh or swamp, and – like a very slow but persistently vengeful god of the Old Testament – nature is continuously trying to reclaim its own.
In fact I find myself thinking of the city in terms of deadly sins. The pride and hochmut of the German Reich under the Kaisers, expressed in the many classical temple facades and pantheons still dominating the city centre, the greed and wroth of the Nazis, striking out from here for Lebensraum and murderous hearts with their efficient war machine – the bones of which is still visible in autobahns and the Tempelhof airport – and the sloth (and implicit envy) that was the East German reality after the war, in glaring contrast with the lustful, gluttonously hedonistic lifestyle of the inhabitants in West Berlin.
A city, in short, where fascism and fetishism are facing off, and sado-masochists spar with Stalinist-Marxists. What’s not to like?
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*And not for piping beer to the builders, as the jokers would have it.
Flying into Marrakech, the Atlas Mountains loom on the horizon, and it’s easy to see why the ancient Greeks imagined this imposing presence at the edge of their world as a giant carrying the weight of Everything on his shoulders.
Me, I’m leaving the weight of the world behind me for a few days, and I’m doing it at the edge of the Atlas in more ways than one. Like the Greeks of old I haven’t gone beyond the straits of Hercules (Gibraltar) before, and riding into the bustle of the Medina I quickly realise that I have indeed entered a very different world.
My young driver Mohammed enthusiastically extols the virtues of his good Muslim wife and cousin who is never allowed to leave his house, and only breaks off his monologue when he suddenly clips the rear wheel of one of the many mopeds that swarm in front if us.
The car sends the moped and its hapless rider tottering right into the arms of two armed policemen. They witnessed the whole thing, and I fear the worst, but a rapid fire exchange in Arabic is apparently the only consequence this mishap will have, and so on we go through ever tighter alleys, weaving in and out between people, dogs, food stalls, donkeys, mopeds, often missing them by nothing but a hair’s breadth.
When we finally reach the riad I have already come to the conclusion that Mohammed’s wife has got the situation sussed, and that my only hope of surviving this sojourn is to stay resolutely indoors. Luckily my hostess, the lovely Maria, soon convinces me otherwise.
She shows me the beautiful inner court yard with its ornamental pool and sky light, and my opulent bed, which looks like something Scheherezade could have been telling her tales in – the sight of which only strengthens my resolve – but then she takes me to the roof terrace, serves me dates and mint tea, and as we look over the rooftops of this medieval labyrinth and the last call to prayer of the day sounds in the velvety darkness as it has for a thousand and one years, I feel as if the call is for me, and me alone.
Suddenly I cannot wait to go exploring tomorrow, and Maria – who clearly has seen this reaction before – grins as if to say I told you so…
Jalla, jalla!
Marrakech, day 1
After a breakfast for sheiks that included snake pancake (thankfully named after its shape rather than its ingredients), Maria insisted on taking me to the main square of the old town. I thought her care for me rather endearing but a little overprotective. How wrong I was.
The onslaught to the senses as you enter the Medina is difficult to describe. Donkeys bray, music (like bagpipers on speed) plays, mopeds bleat, the perfume of sandalwood and strange spices mix with car fumes and the wood smoke from the hammams, and everywhere you look there are sights to behold, spilling out of the little shops like so many cornucopias; multicoloured earthenware and cloth, even more colourful merchants, wrought ironwork, food (one store apparently sold nothing but lamb stomachs, another had two sets of cow’s hoofs neatly placed in the street, making me wonder if they had sold off the animal piece by piece from the top down), you name it, it was there.
Without Maria I would have got lost immediately. With her assistance we got through the maze without difficulty, in spite of me gawping at everything and putting questions to her every ten seconds like an over-excited five-year-old.
She showed me a donkey parking, caravanserais, shops where they kept live fowl (enabling me to engage in a bit of impromptu presidential turkey-pardoning by not buying one), a man transporting 3,000 eggs on the back of his moped at high speed, a snake charmer and a monkey trainer having a violent argument (or possibly nothing but an engaging conversation, there really was no telling) while their respective wards faced off with an air of inscrutable patience. She taught me the importance of choosing honey patisserie-makers on the basis of how many wasps their wares attracted, and fishmongers on the basis of how few stray cats they attracted. It was all rather marvellous.
Once Maria left me on Jmaa el Fna I wasted no time in getting gloriously, impossibly lost in the souk, where I spent hours wandering about, happily haggling, admiring the architecture, dodging donkey carts, drinking it all in. Souking it up, as it were.
As the sun set, setting the ochre walls of the old city on fire, making it redder still, I found myself back at square one in a manner of speaking, on one of the rooftop terraces overlooking El Fna, watching the space below fill up with people, acrobats, jugglers, storytellers, soothsayers.
Eating my lamb and prunes, listening to the drums and the distinctly Arabic hubbub of the crowd it felt as if Ali Baba and the forty thieves were about to enter the stage, but the real wonder of this scene is of course that – no matter how exotic it is to me – it is real, and not a fairytale.
The sun finally fell below the horizon, and the instant this happened the music and the crowds fell silent as the many minarets called out the believers to evening prayer; a fitting ending to a day that really began last night with that very same call. Allah Akbar, indeed.
Marrakech, day 2
It is amazing how quickly we adapt to new environments; only two days ago the traffic had me petrified, and now here I am in the midst of the hustle and bustle, nimbly side-stepping oncoming vehicles like a lone bull fighter up against a never-ending supply of bovines (the one exception to my keeping my newfound cool was when I unwittingly came within four feet of a couple of rattle snakes and a cobra. I lost it then, and quite possibly a drop of urine, too.)
Of course, some things don’t change. My sense of direction is one of them. Map in hand I think myself on the right track through the contorted bowels of the city only to find myself – infuriatingly – at the exact opposite end of town to what I had planned.
How little the walled city itself has changed was brought home to me upon entering the photographic museum, showing pictures of the town and its citizens from 150 years ago. Apart from the advent of cars and electricity it remains strikingly similar to today.
One picture stood out. Taken in 1912(!), it showed a young Sudanese slave (whether male or female I couldn’t tell) with an expression like that of a beaten dog. It haunted me, and as I had my lunch in the Café des Epices, overlooking the spice market (which also happened to be the slave market), it wasn’t at all difficult to imagine a trader in humans hawking his wares in between the basket weavers and hat makers, and prospective customers lining up to inspect the goods.* Mind you, after two days on foot through the souk a couple of bearers wouldn’t go amiss…
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*Perhaps surprisingly, unlike the prohibition on alcohol for instance, the Quran has nothing to say on the abolition of slavery (in fairness, nor does the Bible). A sobering thought indeed, and a reminder of just how recent our notion of human rights is.
Marrakech, day 3
When you start daydreaming about bearers, you know the time has come to put your feet up somewhere. This I did yesterday.
My winding road ended at what had been described to me as a hidden gem, the Blue Hammam, and it truly was a diamond in the dust. Inside, serenity reigns supreme. A far cry from the muezzin, bathers lead you from one room to the next along a preordained path, bathing, massaging, lathering and ferociously scraping you all over until you emerge on the other side, weak and soft and pink as a new-born.
When at last I left, night had fallen, and I stumbled back towards El Fna to join the locals taking their evening meals at the many temporary restaurants that are set up there every night. These restaurants are really nothing but an open fire and a circle of tables around which families gather, and all the more wonderful for it.
I had minced spleen, lamb’s tongue and cheek, and little sausages – the contents of which I didn’t inquire about (I figured if they listed the previous things on the menu, I didn’t want to know what might remain to make sausages of). You eat with your right hand and a bread and wash it all down with mint tea (“Berber whiskey”). For dessert I had the best avocado milkshake I’ve ever drunk, which admittedly isn’t saying much, and then I staggered back home to the riad, very, very content.
Bismillah!
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Today I spent the morning shopping with intent. Now, I like negotiating as much as the next man, but even though I enjoy the transactions it makes for exhausting work; Feigning outrage at the initial price, displaying disinterest, allowing them to exhort a counteroffer as ludicrous as their starting bid, then walking away only to be pulled back and have that offer be accepted amidst grumbles of “Ali Baba” – a thinly veiled insult meaning thief, and hopefully a sign that you haven’t done too badly – takes more energy than your average shop visit.
Seeking a reprieve I set out for the Badiā palace, having read accounts of how “in Marrakech did El Mansour a pleasure dome erect”. This particular erection was an immense undertaking that took most of El Mansour’s reign to complete, but it was evidently hugely impressive at the time – a showcase of the Great Ruler’s wealth, refinement and power.
When I arrive there though, it’s Ozymandias rather than Kubla Khan that comes to mind. Long gone are the intricate fountains, lush rose pavilions, and the famous harem that used to enthral foreign dignitaries, and in their place are ruins that barely hint at the long-lost grandeur. Storks make their homes on top of the crumbling ramparts, unperturbed by the noise of the kasbah, and the ever-present mangy cats hunt in the rubbish heaps that fill some of the courtyards. How the mighty have fallen!
Hidden away behind an unassuming gate a mere two blocks away, beyond an orange grove alive with the sound of a hundred unseen songbirds, the Bahia (Arabic for “beautiful”) palace is an altogether different proposition. Here, the zelliq (ceramic tiles) and painted latticework remain intact, giving a hint of the opulence and splendour the vizier’s family lived in.
I find myself lingering, not quite able to muster the will to leave this oasis just yet. Haggle fatigue? Post Arabic stress syndrome? I don’t know, but suddenly I feel more than ready to go home tomorrow.
Marrakech, day 4
A storm is coming. I spoke of human rights before, but the great many human wrongs here (to coin a phrase) are casting dark shadows over Marrakech.
It’s a human wrong that the mosque in my quarter is known as the mosque of the blind men, but they have nowhere else to go, and blindness is an endemic problem in a country where everyone has a sweet tooth and no one has guaranteed health care, condemning many poor diabetics to a world of eternal darkness.
It’s a human wrong that there are so many beggars in the street, particularly old women, who – if widowed without children – have no other way of making money than asking for the charity of strangers, since they are not allowed work.
It’s a human wrong that a country that is – ostensibly at least – a democracy should have a level of illiteracy so high that voting is conducted by way of allocating symbols to candidates – more than half the electorate couldn’t participate in elections otherwise.
Perhaps none of this should come as a shock considering the lack of national cohesion in Morocco:
40% of the population are of more or less diluted indigenous Berber stock (the hill tribes and desert clans are known collectively under this name, which is derived from the same Greek roots as the word barbarian (literally “one who speaks gibberish”)), but in spite of their numbers they are being discriminated against. It’s only a few years ago that a journalist was imprisoned for suggesting Berbers were here before the Arabs.
Another 10% of the population (the black part) is known as Harratine (literally “freed slave” or “second rate freeman”), the descendants of black slaves enrolled as mercenaries in the 16th century,* and they are even further down the rungs of the ladder of Moroccan society.
Perhaps surprisingly in a country where 50% of the population is derided as barbarians or darkies, race isn’t the main divide. Privilege is. Once outside of the medina, this becomes glaringly obvious. The new town, built by the French, is much like a western city, and as such completely out of bounds to the poor, who have about as great a chance of making it there as making it to the moon.
The two cities literally rubbing up against each other, it seems inevitable that friction will sooner or later cause the situation to ignite. So as Mohammed the driver prattles away on the way to the airport (with me calmly looking on as he slaloms through the crowds) and the first drops of the winter rains start to fall, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before the Arab spring has sprung here too, in sha Allah.
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*It’s as if the English were to de-pict Scots as troublemakers, difficult to understand, and give the Welsh a name that denounced them as foreign and all swarthy and… Oh, wait.
Marrakech, outro
Leaving Marrakech I feel as if I have barely scratched the surface of this foreign land and outlandish culture, and yet, like Marco Polo on his deathbed, I am compelled to say I haven’t told you half of what I saw.
I didn’t mention the kindness and openness of the people – the three tent-clad women on a local bus who encouraged, nay, pushed their three-year-old boy into the lap of the infidel suddenly in their midst (imagine the opposite happening in your respective home lands – it is unthinkable!) – nor the unlikely spectacles that awaited you round every corner – the man coolly walking down the street, his dozen cocks swinging almost all the way to the cobblestones, contentedly squawking on their way to the butcher’s, or the Berber herbalist who cured me of sinusitis for life with one of his remedies and showed me a root that would give me an erection to rival that of Al Mansour’s (I politely declined, still staggering from the knock-out blow my nose had just taken) – nor the finely chiseled metalwork of the lamps I so desperately wanted to buy – each one of of them casting a thousand lights – nor the Palmerie, where caravans would leave their camels to graze upon reaching the Medina, nor the shrine to Yves Saint Laurent, or any of a hundred other things that would have made good stories.
So my story comes to an end, but like the tales of Sheherazade, I hope it has left you wanting more. Alighting on cold, sodden Belgian soil again, I know I yearn for another yarn.
Arrived at Ljubljana airport only to find that Visa apparently has no love for Slovenia. Not only was my card denied when trying to pay for my rental car, but the ATM told me I had “insufficient funds” (somewhat oxymoronically, since it was a CREDIT card, but never mind.), so there I was, stranded with 50€ to my name, but the lovely Anja at the rental car company didn’t only find me a bus that could take me to my final destination, but actually drove me herself the 12 kilometres to the village from which the bus left. Gob? Smacked.
So I got to Karjanska Gora in the end, but of course I still had virtually no money, and was unsure how hotel management would react. I needn’t have worried. The receptionist didn’t even let me finish before insisting that I get myself to the restaurant and have a hot meal, and not concern myself with such trivialities as payment.
At first glance, not the best of experiences, but on the other hand my faith in people has been given a real boost, and that can’t be bad, right?
Day 1
Travelling up through the country yesterday I had the impression of immense natural beauty paired with a run-down, slightly decrepit society, as if Austria had its own East German equivalent in Slovenia, which I guess is essentially the case. Waking this morning in picturesque Karjanska Gora, that picture was reinforced by the low hanging clouds that shrouded the already muted colour palette in their grey mist, and the eerie stillness of the place, with not a movement to be seen. It was as if I had stepped onto the scene in a horror movie.
As I fiddled with my Garmin to at least let some anonymous satellites know where I were (ok, I know that’s not how it works, but that’s how it felt), a low voice right next to me mumbled something guttural, and I looked up and straight into the face of a gaunt being that shuffled towards me. I fair jumped out of my skin, and it wasn’t at all fair on the poor mailman who only wished me a good morning.
I hurried out of the village and up the valley floor, muttering at the clouds that the forecast for today had read sunny, and didn’t they have places to go? My bad mood (and the clouds) soon dispersed, however, as I walked through a landscape so still and pretty that it felt like moving through a series of post cards.
I had set myself two goals for this first day of hiking. First, following in the footsteps of all intrepid explorers, I would seek to find the source of a great body of water. Here I was in luck, because the great Slovene river Sava – which forms the geography of more that half the country, and is itself a contributory to the Danube, greatest of European rivers – has its source right up the valley, in the shape of a series of natural springs known locally as “toomphs”*.
I made my discovery quite easily by following the many signposts (all intrepid explorers know that the fact that locals have known about the existence of something for millennia doesn’t count), and found myself in the most enchanted setting imaginable. Rainwater flows down the mountains and seeps into the ground only to be forced upwards here, making the bottom of the pools resemble a landscape of miniature volcanos, easily visible through the impossibly clear water. Also, since the water comes from deep underground it remains a steady five degrees all year around, and so the ponds never freeze, but remain azure blue (and full of trout) even in the dead of winter. I lingered here, all alone, pondering how prehistoric man must have marvelled at this natural phenomenon. It was all rather splendid.
Wanting to contribute to this great marvel of nature’s complexity somehow, I added my own little natural contributory before moving on.
My second goal for the day took me past the last village in the valley, which due to the microclimate there is known as the Siberia of Corinthia. Needless to say I didn’t linger, but started my ascent towards Tromeja (“three-borders”), where, you might have guessed, the borders of Italy, Austria and Slovenia as well as the linguistic borders of the three main language blocs – Germanic, Romance and Slavic – all meet. And here my leisurely stroll ended.
The ascent was gruelling. I ran a half marathon three days ago. Clearly the training that went into that was good for nothing here. The trail and I staggered on drunkenly, stubbornly for a solid hour, ever upwards. My legs leaden, my vision foggy, I was close to giving up when finally the summit revealed itself, only…
Every cloud in existence had apparently decided today was a good day to hang out at Tromeja! Possibly vexed by my rumblings that morning, the clouds had beaten me there and lay in ambush on the other side of the mountain. Italy and Austria were probably there somewhere, but of the fabulous view I could see nothing. I was heart-broken, despondent.
What to do? Having this unique opportunity, I went for a game of International Twister with myself. It ended badly. With a solid foothold in Italy I made a grab for Slovenia only to fall flat on my face in Austria. Having thus performed a haiku reenactment of every war in the region from Roman times to World War II, I sat down with my meagre lunch to ponder the invisible and ultimately futile nature of borders. They move like amoebas across maps, crushing people with their impact, and yet up here, they are as nothing.
Looking around me I found a monument with a rather nice inscription, summing up my thoughts: “Finding one’s inner peace is man’s greatest need. Peace does not only mean no war, peace means the rule of harmony, love, satisfaction and unity.”
Yet something was lacking. I thought for a moment, and then got out a magic marker, adding “…and a functioning Visa card!”
And on that somber note, I began my descent.
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*This is a fine example of the Slovene language’s propensity to include words that resemble sound effects from the Marvel universe. The Toomphs are located between the villages of Kablowie and Pow…
Day 2
I sorted out my visa troubles and finally got my rental car yesterday afternoon, so it was with a sense of satisfaction I sat down to have the hotel’s speciality for dinner, a huge plate of assorted grilled animals. The Miklič family and their oft-returning English guests, the self-proclaimed redhead Helen, a cycling champion, her son and mum, really took me to their hearts, and as the conversation and the pils flowed, I let myself sink into the warm glow of heir embrace.
So it was with some reluctance I left this morning, weak-kneed and wobbly-legged, but the sun was out, the air was crisp, and… my personal weather-affront was back again, lurking further down the valley. I had foreseen such an eventuality however, and had planned two alternative (escape) routes for the day. The first would take me up an adjacent valley to the fifty hairpin bends constituting the Vilcič pass road built by Russian POWs at a cost of on average two dead Russians per bend. (This was some time before Slovenia ratified the Workers’ Health and Safety directive). There was a very real risk of the cloud catching up with me that way, though, and I didn’t feel like adding to the statistics by bing mown down unseen by a lorry, so elected instead to move down the valley, flanking the fluffy f****r and hopefully circumventing it altogether in an attempt to reach the double waterfalls (known as Slap* in Slovene) in the gorge near the next village.
It worked like a charm. I strolled through sunlit pastures and forests, watching the cloud bank move slowly in the other direction. So pleased was I with having outsmarted the weather that it wasn’t until I heard what sounded like a calypso-orchestra in disarray up ahead that I recalled the many warning signs I had passed (they had all been in Slovene, so naturally I had assumed that they didn’t concern me). Up ahead on the road were a thirty-head heard of steers, the Milka gel’s grumpy uncles, and they weren’t happy to see me. As the last Glocken came to a clonking end not dissimilar to the “Duelling Banjos” song, they stared in sullen, sour-eyed silence at me, and it was clear that I risked being gorged in a manner quite different from what I had planned. In the end they didn’t gore me to death, taking pity on the two weak calves to suddenly appear in their midst (Bulls having an acute – if underrated – appreciation of puns.).
And so it was that I reached the ravine after all. It was simply marvellous. Entering the canyon the sheer rock rose high above a narrow passage through which flowed not only a lively brook, but the air was filled with water particles from the falls higher up, and as they caught the sunlight they turned to pixie dust, turning the landscape into a golden, enchanted forest. Alas, the same fine mist rendered every root, leaf and stone in the cleft slick with moisture, slippery to the touch, and turned my progress into a series of involuntary tap-dancing solos, as I fought for traction and lost. It also soon became clear that the Russians had been sent here first to weed out the weaker builders, as the rickety structures placed along the way to help visitors did nothing but add to the danger.
The first Slap marked the end of my progress through the gorge. From there it was a mad scramble up the cliffs and into the surrounding aspen forest. How different it was! From the pale golden birches and moss-green firn trees of the ravine to this shadowy realm of Mithril-grey trees like a thousand-pillared great hall, all having shed their russet leaves in a thick carpet on the ground, rendering the path all but invisible. The only way to go was up, of course, but the copper carpet effectively hid all manner of roots and milky-white stones, so the tap dancing continued unabated.
At last the path returned to the gully to find the upper Slap, all 130 metres of it, and finally there were steel wires and the odd crampon to help the weary traveller. They were dearly needed, too, as the final ascent was up a crevice that went straight up, parallel to the waterfall itself. At this height the metal was bitter cold, however, and I began to fear my numbed hands would lose their grip. Icicles adorned the cliff face. Falling here would be fatal. The best I could hope for would be landing in the water – not that I would survive that either, but at least I might be rediscovered in a few millennia as a latter-day Ötzi, and archeologists could make amusingly incorrect assumptions about my life in pre-historic times.
Well, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I did make it, and rarely has tea and strudel tasted as good as it did just now.
*See previous attempt at etymological explanation.
Day 3
So last night I went across the border to pick up my brother who, unbeknownst to me while I was planning this trip, had got himself a job as an apprentice carpenter a stone’s throw from where I was, thus allowing me to use the term “serendipitous”, a word – and indeed a concept – which doesn’t get enough mileage.
We then set off into the night for the village of Bled*, and arrived at the gingerbread cottage of Dom Berc in absolute darkness. The only thing that could be seen was the medieval castle, perched high above the village on an enormous crag and lit up by hidden lights. The door was opened by a hunched man of very Slavic stock who got us inside briskly, showed us our room and left with the words “the master vill vant to visit you… later.” It was time to take stock of the garlic stores!
The night passed without incident, however, and today we learnt just how pretty Slovenia can be. The area of Lake Bled has attracted tourists for hundreds of years, and it was here that all the apparatchiks – who presumably enjoyed a nice holiday as much as the next comrade – would come as well, so the village wasn’t subjected to the standard communist treatment, but remained pristine throughout the Soviet era.
We toured the lake in the morning, taking endless pictures of the little fairy tale island with its perfect little composition of houses and an onion-spired church, and the wooden swan-boats being rowed around it. It was idyllic. Even the castle lost its menacing Hammer-film-prop air in broad daylight.
In the afternoon we drove to a gorge and hiked down its troubled waters on wooden walkways. It was very impressive, but lacked the intensity of yesterday’s adventures. We even had to pay admission, which made it feel more like a amusement park ride than anything else. The whole of Bled, in fact, is a little too cutesy, too boutique, so tomorrow we’re off further into the wilderness in search for the true spirit of Triglav.
*Another peculiarity of the Slovene language is its affinity for words that also exist in English, albeit with a completely different meaning. So for instance “pot” is everywhere to be found, and lake Bled lies in the five o’clock shadow of mount Razor. It’s uncanny.
Day 4
After breakfast we took the car up the curvaceous little road that led into the heartland of the park. We past Lake Bohinj and continued straight up through the beech forest until we reached the Dom Savica, gateway to the most famous waterfalls in Slovenia.
The path wound its way up stairs hewn into the rock, and I was struck by the difference the choice of materials made. Instead of the amusement park feeling of yesterday’s gangways, ascending this stairway felt like entering the kingdom of Rivendell, with wood elves hidden just put of sight. The falls themselves were predictably impressive even without Elrond and his posse, and like the Fellowship we lingered there (if not for three hundred pages), unwilling to face the decent into Orkanc, the suitably orcish-sounding hamlet* where we would stay the rest of the week.
Quite apart from the intricacies of Slovene, I have realised that I came unprepared for mountaineering in a linguistic sense, as there are so many terms I am unfamiliar with. This is of course wholly my own fault**.
So for instance a gorge is a narrow valley between hills or mountains, typically with steep rocky walls and a stream running through it, but a gully is a ravine formed by the action of water – not the same thing. Also, Urban Dictionary adds to he confusion by asserting that the latter term is slang for “gangsta”, as in “I’m so gully”, which only a criminal mountain troll by the name of Scarpface*** could possibly hope to get away with.
But I digress. We eventually made it down to Orkanc, past a hidden farm where the neo-liberal farmer had obviously taken GMO into his heart, and – more importantly – into the hearts of his herd, since the cattle looked more like bear-pigs than anything bovine, and thence to the ski lift of Vogel.
The ski lift took us 1,000 metres straight up, and to the second hike of the day. We arrived at two in the afternoon, and since the last lift down was at six we figured we could go two hours in one direction before having to turn around, which would give us enough time to reach the first of two summits.
Up here the same beech trees dominated the steep slopes, only every single one of them was J-shaped. Brother Carpenter pointed out that the trees looked that way since they were bent down by snow until reaching a certain age, and only then could they begin to grow as they were meant to. I think we can all relate to that. It seems life is a beech, after all.
The beech soon gave way to scree and bonsai and what little soil there had been was replaced by rubble, but we were making good time – or so we thought until we turned around to admire the view and realised that the sun was rapidly disappearing. Only now did it dawn on us that dusk effectively happens around five in the afternoon! The thought of having to get back in pitch blackness didn’t appeal, so down the rubble slope we went like Fred and Ginger, playing catchup with the speed of light.
It was two very tired but relieved wanderers who stepped onto the ski lift back down to Bohinj at a quarter to five.
* It’s not just me saying it, either. Tolkien was first and foremost a linguist and found inspiration in the Slavic languages when creating the Dark tongue of Mordor.
** Fault, n., a crack in the earth’s crust resulting from the displacement of one side with respect to the other.
*** Scarp face, n., the surface of a steep slope just below an escarpment or mountain ridge. Also, a given character in the next Pratchett novel.
Day 5
The day started well enough. Our cottage is built on a scale and in a style that makes me feel like Snow White at the seven dwarves’, and as I went down the stairs to our miniature kitchen / living room and peered out into the fog, what did I see? Three roe deer came galloping out of the mist (possibly chased by the bear-pigs from yesterday). They stopped in front of me, almost posing, but when I tried to get my camera out to take pictures of them they slipped away into the wisps.
This set the tone for the day. We went to the village of Stara Fuzina at the other end of the lake – as beautiful a hamlet as you can hope to find in Slovenia – and from there set out to explore yet another vale. We followed the path upwards, marvelling at how the frothing waterfalls of the gorge cut deep, deep into the bedrock – as much as thirty metres in places – and at the emerald green pools further upstream, so lucid that you sometimes had to look twice to believe there was water there at all. And yet there was a mood of melancholy in the crisp autumnal air, a sense of having but a little time to appreciate all this beauty before it was too late (the fact that we got lost and spent an hour and a half following the wrong arm of the stream might have contributed, too…).
I guess it is inevitable towards the end of a holiday, knowing you will have to get back to the daily grind, but here, with accumulated fatigue combined with the swiftly disappearing sun rendering the beech bronze and the larch a russet gold, it was all I could do not to cry.
To distract myself – and you – from this sorry state of affairs, I thought of one last peculiarity of the Slovene language: They seem to have disavowed vowels. You know how certain letters have to seek refuge in particular countries, like the “X” in Spain, where it still finds employment, or the “Z”, which is found roaming free in great herds in Poland? Well, the Slovenes have decided vowels have no place in their society, at least not in shorter words. So Pr is a cottage, Vrh means summit, and so on. I have no idea how these words sound, but I find it quite innovative, dnt u thnk?
Day 6
And so we entered the kingdom of Zlatorog for the last time. According to the legends Zlatorog, the golden-horned chamois, lived high up in the mountains with the White Women (the Fates) and their white mountain goats on pastures like Paradise, but when a greedy hunter shot Zlatorog in order to obtain his horns, Zlatorog in his fury hurled the hunter into the abyss and destroyed the pastures until nothing but bare rock remained.
I like this story, as it is clearly an ancient tale of caution not to use the natural resources of the region in an unsustainable manner, or suffer the consequences. It seems particularly poignant when hiking up ski slopes, where man has raked the mountain sides clean of all that stands in his way. This we did now, as we were going to make a second attempt on Vogel. So far we hadn’t really made it up the alps proper, but that was about to change.
Up we went, and bonsai and scree gave way to wilted grass, the incline went from unfriendly to murderous to downright psychotic, patches of snow began appearing on the ground, and oxygen started to feel like a distinctly rare commodity. At last there was nothing but the ever-present rubble left on the ground – causing us to take one step forward and two steps back – and the ravens in the sky above us (the Vogel flipping us the bird?), when we reached a cop in the crest, and suddenly it was all worth it! Ahead of us were ridge upon ridge of forest-clad mountains, swept in blueish mist as far as the eye could see.
Swollen feet and howling tendons seemed small and insignificant, indeed, everything was dwarfed in the presence of such grandeur. You could take the great pyramids at Gize and plonk them into the smallest of these vales and they would disappear from sight. It is an awe-inspiring sight if ever there was one. We lunched on top of the world today.
From there it was another three quarters of stomach-curdling climbing up to the top of mount Vogel, along a crest where one false step in one direction would send you down one valley, and a step in the other into another. It was a suitable finale to the week, with views all the way to the Adriatic, 100 km away and 1,922m underneath us. It felt right to end on a high, but just as we congratulated ourselves on our prowess we noticed sheep pellets on the ground, as if Zlatorog himself had left a calling card, saying, in essence: you’re visitors in my world, and while you pride yourself with making it up here I come down to these puny heights to take a dump. Your achievement is my toilet.
After having thus been suitably humbled, all that remained was the three-hour hike back down, negotiating the perennial conundrum of wanting to admire the scenery while avoiding becoming part of it.
At the outset of every year I pause and think about what I want to achieve. This year was different.
Sex sells. You’re reading this, aren’t you? So this post will be about porn.
