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travel, at a tangent


Bye Bye Bangkok

So, I left Asia on July 10th and spent the following ten days in Holland, on my friend Ansfried's ship, having spent my last week in Bangkok rushing around, getting tattooed (you'll see, if you haven't already), laid, and ready to leave. I'd booked a flight back on Kuwait Airlines (with a stopover in Kuwait - it's the world's most boring airport, with an expensive and badly-stocked duty free, and not much else.(during peacetime)) to Schipol, (for £225 from Bangkok- a bargain) with the intention of having a few days of hedonism in Amsterdam and visiting a few friends in other parts of Holland. None of this happened. I flew as far as Kuwait with Natasha, a Swiss woman who'd been my next-doorneighbor at my Bangkok guesthouse and had supervised both the healing of my tattoos and my packing. She very kindly kept time for me as I packed, minute-by-minute, Swiss-style. I could tell she found me infuriating, but she was very good-humoured about it all, and made an excellent traveling companion. We parted at Kuwait airport the next day, having shared a couple of hours' conversation and some awful food at the transit lounge, and I flew on to Schipol, on a packed Kuwait Airlines flight to Chicago that stopped to refuel and swap a few passengers over in Holland.

High Noon

The Netherlands are unexpected beautiful from the air. Not nether at all, in fact. Being so flat, of course, you never get to see much of it when you're at ground level. Even those shots of flower-filled fields are always taken from a roof, the top of a crane, or up a ladder. From above, it's a modernist, Mondrianesque grid of multicolored rectangles and squares, bordered by strips of silver where sunlight reflects off of the canals. The coastline, on a sunny day, is spectacular, the sea a vast canvas of light divided into sections by the famous dykes, some of which have roads built along the top. As I watched, a plane flew into my view, a few thousand feet below ours, and moving much faster. The effect was incredible, bringing the entire scene into scale - zooming my view about a thousand-fold. By the time I landed, I was high on the view alone.

Take Me Higher
What to do in Amsterdam? After finding myself (accidentally) in the duty free shop (it's next to passport control - why? So you get so excited you run down and book a flight back out a.s.a.p!) where everymarvelouss gadget you can imagine was in there shouting "Come into the light, all are welcome" at me. Fortunately and unfortunately they refused to sell me the digital camera with my name on it, and suggested I pick it up on the way back out. But I returned by Eurostar (another adventure) so will have to wait. But when it happens, totallygone.com will be ILLUMINATED with images. So I satisfied the itch to shop by paying ten times more for a little black T-shirt than I would have done a few hours earlier (it was still only 10 euros), and waited in the futuristic atrium of Schipol for Ansfried to turn up. Holland is socivilizedd. Everyone is fresh, clean, self-controlled, self-contained, self-conscious, like characters in a sci-fi movie set in a utopian future, where everything's new and shiny and square. Schipol is one of these spaces. If I could live there, I would. Ansfried and his friend Joop duly turned up, and the whole place took on a much more lively air. Joop is one of those graceful beings who seem to glide through space, his eccentric tastes in sheer, slinky clothing, satins, and silks and stuff like that, contrasting weirdly with his height (six foot and then some) and strong, almost Slavic bone structure. And Ansfried was wearing one of his Mad Max outfits, looking as though he'd just jumped off of an Enfield, fresh from a desert storm. Ansfried, you may remember, I met in Rajasthan and again, by chance, in Delhi. We went up to Rishikesh together, rafted down the Ganges, jumped over corpses, hiked through the forests, frolicked in the waterfalls, and had an all-roundfabulouss time. So I was delighted to accept his invitation for a spot of decompression between Asia and the UK. It was priceless - arriving directly into London from Bangkok would have given me the psychic bends in a major way.

After an afternoon of sampling the delights ofHolland'ss most famous crop, and sunning ourselves in the Vondelpark, which was just like this, we went back to Joop's for dinner and to freshen up in his Hollywood-style bathroom, fitted with one of those huge glass-walled tubs that Sharon Stone sexed her self up in (see, I'm with the latest lingo!) in Sliver. I managed to resist his charms,thougho it was hard indeed. He cooked us the most delicious Japanese fish soup, substituting melon for fish (it works - try it) and sent us home to Ansfried's boat.

The Adventurer is a 33m barge, pieced together from sheets of iron and moored on a quiet and picturesque stretch of canal in Zwolle. Words fail me. But, if you can imagine what that mad professor's shed from Back to the Future would look like if encased with metal and filled with deceased members of P.T. Barnum's Circus, the occasional skeleton, various paraphernalia raided from markets and sales, lots of velvet and gilt, and on either side hatches that open directly onto the canal, so you can fall straight out of bed and straight into the water. And I did - it was fabulous. The views from the boat are extraordinary - the world floats past slowly - ducks and moorhen float past, dodging teenagers kayaking along the canals, families who slow down to wave through the hatches into the boat's huge hold, where Ansfried cooks, entertains, paces, smokes, listens to music, and behaves like an all-round amphibious genius. Which, of course, he is. On my forays around Zwolle, where I managed to meet almost every gay man in the space of ten days, I discovered that he's something of a local celebrity. "Aahh, you're staying with Ansfried!? On his boat!!! Ahh, yes. He likes to travel in India!!!" If you've ever seen Babette's Feast, you'll remember the expressions those old girls made when they were served Cailles en Sarcopages. Indeed, Zwolle is a bastion of Calvinism and other conservative attitudes, so you'll have to imagine "likes India" uttered in the same tone as "has strange sexual tastes."

So, I had lots of mini-adventures in Zwolle, and made a friend for life. Keep the place a secret - if anyone asks you what's there, say nothing. The Dutch look down their noses at it because they see it as provincial (and they're so progressive with their porn and their puff). But their's gold in them there parts....


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