Here, there and everywhere

TIRED OF THE RISKS OF BEING A PEDESTRIAN IN KENYA.....Ida and I decided to find somewhere really dangerous to visit....Having rejected anywhere in South Africa as being just too fraught with crime and tinkering we went thru our collection of old 7 singles and VHS flicks & came across 'Midnight Express'.Made sometime in the 70s, this tale of a young American caught smuggling hishhash out of Turkey, scared the living daylights outa me and I not only immediately gave up coffee but decided to never ever visit Istanbul. However, some years later (actually last week), I read a review of the movie which made me reconsider taking up the old beans again.

To quote: In Mary Lee Settle's 1991 book Turkish Reflections, she writes, "The Turks I saw in Lawrence of Arabia and Midnight Express were like cartoon caricatures, compared to the people I had known and lived among for three of the happiest years of my life."

Add to this the fact that my daughter, Sarah, had been not once but twice and returned only with tales of apple tea and sunsets, I decided to 'go and see for myself'.

So, we said a cheerful farewell to our pet giraffe and headed off to the place

where East meets West.

Part of the deal when headin' out to Attaturk country is the optional cultural immersion course provided by Emitrates Air.

We learnt 2 invaluable lessons:

(1) Islam and High Fashion can co-exist and

(2) Musgrave Centre in Durban is cheaper than the duty free section of Dubai International Airport.

Arriving at Attaturk International Airport I have an uncanny feeling that this is like home...with some crucial differences. Basically everything here is called after the Big Guy, Attaturk and it seems really justifiable as we discover later. The terminal, the customs, the friendly officials, functional and bright lights...all tell of a

functional society.

I am addicted to airports, besotted with aeroplanes and would be quite

happy to just stay there all week, but there is a strange calling deep inside

DO they drive on the left or the right? Can't say yet as all seems so fluid and

me that says, 'venture forth in the name of the African Explorers, venture forth into the land behind the veil.'

smooth, an antidote to the last few days of frustration at the chaos of

the Kenyan driver mindset. On a beezlebub scooter 2 chaps, one with helmet, the other, dark hair in the sun.

This is a sexy country full of sexy people, some behind the veil and others in gay abandon. Hippies, punks, burkas, apricot sellers, technofingers, waterpipers galore, tea drinkers, silver sellers, pedestrian cobbled lanes, pavement cafes, trams and prams. Seemingly no agro, crime is not a concept in this part of town, Taksim Square, where restaurants and sexy people radiate out into the East of Western Europe and the west of the East.

Sarah, my somewhat

traveled d

aughter still has some apple tea left in Cape Town. But clearly needs more.

' Ok sooooo! ISTANBUL!!!

Places you must try an

d go to.... :

The Blue Mosque of course

The Hagia Sophia

Topkapi Palace and the gardens surrounding it

Dolmace Palace

Buyuk Ada Island (beautiful little island in the Marmara sea, no cars only horse-drawn carriages and bicycles... and horses roaming free everywhere)

The underground wat

The Egyptian spice market

er chambers in Sultanahmet - its very close to the Hagia Sophia...

The Grand Bazaar, of course...

Take a ferry to the Asian side and just walk

around and explore, especially around where the train station is... just further on from there is also where you take the ferry to the island...

At the end of that long shopping street in Taksim that i was talking about, there are lots of very cool little shops and cafes and allyways.... just explore around there!

Go to the University grounds... they are close to the Grand Bazaar

Go and eat LAHMACUN - you will find

it almost everywhere!!!! Its

sooooo yummy :-) Also have lots of sutlac (rice pudding) and really good baklava... and drink lots of tea and apple tea... Ooooooh, im so jealous!!!!!! Please bring me back as much apple tea as possible :p

Have and amazing time, if i think of anything else, ill email you!!!!

Lots of love xxx

Sarah

Okee, now I have a mission! Tomorrow I will take an arb direction and walk for an hour. Stop,

Take a 2 minute video clip of whatever it is I am looking at and then trot home. Maybe I will find

a cycle shop en route. Then the next day I can cycle for an hour!

"On a clear day you can see Mt kilimanjaro...and Mt. kenya."

Nani Croze stood and turned her sunblued focus from horizon to horizon. As if for the first time. We were 6 dogs, 2 tennis balls, several piccaninis and a golf ball on an evening walk.

Squinting at the one mountain we can see, Nani asks a small boy attached to a large Rotweiller what mountain that could be...."Longonot", he replies, confidently.

As if it were the only mountain, magnificent, melancholic. In Africa we can be everywhere and nowhere.
Unless you once had a farm. Then it's home.

Somewhere en route we divert to visit an exhibition of art, pinned up on bushes and the wire cages of 3 sweet-smelling camels.

The artist and camel herder turn out to be the same person, Hassan.

18 hours later we are still at Kitangela Glass. Take the first turn left after the Nairobi National Park and follow the signs.

Some folks get horribly lost and give up. Bad move. Even the right road is way out of synch with the average macadamized adventurer. It's times like this I am happy to be South African. The worse the road, the more my instincts tingle.

So stick in there and get there. Even if you are a travel weary Kalahari First Person who survives on the smell of a root and the thirst of the hunt, you cannot be prepared for what you will encounter in Nani's world.

The closest I have come to the feel of this unsolicited Eden was my first time in Piccadily Circus. 1977 and Londoners were looking decidedly different. Malcolm Maclaren had opened a shop called SEX in Kings Rd and a swathe of red was about to sweep the world.
That it had a short and sharp life as the pure knee jerk of a frustrated generation was inevitable, but for a brief time it gave colour and voice and a vivid alternativeness to a world tired of tired hippies and undisciplined children.

Punk never was a particularly great idea, hardly a movement of the people, but in Piccadilly Circus that 70s day I was forced to engage with a chaotic mix of pinstripe suits, art for revolution, colour for no reason, body piercing unimaginable and by simply standing in one spot, a world passing around me.

It is lunch time. Nani's husband , Erick, thought he would retire in London one day, but didn't. He doesn't quite know whether he is actually retired yet or not. "I am waiting for this lady..." he points warmly to Nani. I have only eyes for her strong working hands, an equally strong gold band on her right ring finger.

She is on the phone to a French woman who is lost, coming to buy a pig. It turns out...as a pet.

In the small of my back a sharp pain tells me that Vultjie, a 31 year old Egyptian Vulture wants more custard.

A man in a harlequin boiler suit is reprimanding a Sikes monkey, a big bugger who, despite having had half our breakfast, is still waiting for his gap to grab our freshly baked bread.

OK, so take all the aggression, frustration, pinstripes, buses, taxis, grey skies, bobbies on the beat, safety pins away, replace Piccadilly Eros with a 25 metre rust and glass crocodile with a barbeque in its gaping mouth and that's where I am, facing due south.

That is if Heaven has directions or Eden a magnetic field, because it seems that Salvador Dali died and woke up here....sort of in my body.

Alice couldn't make it to tea but Dr Suess and Doolittle did. The horses smell of lanolin and the swimming pool of jasmine.

A pair of star-scrossed starlings bathed furiously in the shallows behind the dragon's tail this morning, unable to distinguish between me and the baboons who occasionally sit and on the swimming pool wall and watch Mzungus swimming.

This all works, I think, because no living creature here tells another to 'Get outa my country'. This is Eldorado, Naniland and like Piccadilly Circus, is a chaotic mix of a well kept secret garden and a shared public space.

Once upon a time, a dashing German named Ludwig, left his piece of Africa to his equally dashing cousin, Nani.

This was all she needed for her artist's heart to explode into abundance, a little like they say our universe did.

There have been, from time to time, other minor universes bursting into existence. the Owl House in South Africa, Barcelona, Macchu Picchu. But Naniland is the real thing.

You have a few options once you get here. Arrive, be blown away, see the glass blown, see the blown glass and buy a memory.

Or, book into one (it really does not matter which one as you will certainly return to try the rest) of the Suessy, dangly, mother Hubbard houses and work your way from the heart of this alternative universe back to a life that can simply never be quite the same again.

Oh yes, you will have to pay for the privilege, but that, like any real artist knows, is never the real deal. If the great creator within has half an eye open you will leave here with a deep desire to find your own creative way of paying back Nani, Erick, Mary, Savannah, Tolstoy, Vultjie, Monkey, Askari, Hassan, Kilo, etc etc etc etc for allowing you to feel that it's A OK to wear pink pyjamas to .... well....wherever.

p.s. Even if your religion forbids dogs you will find yourself totally comfortable with sharing the dinner table with other animals...and delightfully, Nani and Erick.

Before sunset worlds collide and once again upon a time, 8 varied sized homo sapiens shared a water hole on a cliff with 8 baboons.

Never have 2 South Africans, 1 Londoner and 6 yelping children got into the drink faster than after the arrival of 1 very commanding and distinctly aggressive Alpha Male.

That, of course was not Erick, who however did arrive a little later for his daily exercise. Or, as he said in a soft voice, "All I wanted was a swimming strip and this is what Nani gave me."

Nuff Sed!