I don't have the verbal cutlery to adequately dissect for you the five-course banquet that is my stupidity as a traveller. I used to bristle at such a notion, but I've finally accepted this as a sad but immutable facet of my being. By all known laws of logic and probability I
should've been run over, arrested, mugged, raped, swindled out of everything bar my underpants, frozen to a man-shaped
popsicle or been eaten by something large and toothy many times by now. Why? Simply put, I'm about as observant as a sloth on
Qualudes and my mind operates at roughly the same pace (which would also partly explain why I'm so teeth-
clenchingly bad at verbal communication compared to my written vents).
As it is, I've so far managed to survive numerous travel episodes afflicted by things nothing more life-threatening than frigid Zodiac rides through mountainous Antarctic seas, hitching late-night rides home through the deserted French countryside with a garbage truck driver, missing an important (*insert transport mode here*) and having to adjust all further plans accordingly, or walking past the place I'm looking for three times before my turgid brain slowly realises what my eyes are telling it - like a caveman slowly realising the noise that's making his head hurt is coming from the rock wall constantly colliding with his forehead as he tries to walk through it.
This doesn't, however, mean that all my travel mishaps are self-inflicted. Far from it. Take the start of this weekend, for example. After waking at 6:00am and going out into the streets of Paris to ask at info kiosks where my ANZAC Day tour group's meeting place (Rue
Tronchet was located), I was still asking mystified, map-scanning officials at 8:00am. Seeing as we were supposed to be picked up at Rue
Tronchet at 8:45am, I decided to go for option 2 on the itinerary sheet - the Hotel Magellan, where the upper crust tour attendees had toughed it out for a night with their silk sheets and foot-washing coolies.
Ok, maybe the Magellan wasn't that luxurious, but it's five stars was a world away from my
feculent hostel lodgings near Gare
du Nord. The Friends Hostel (alarm bells
should've been ringing when I saw the name, but no, this is Sloth Boy here) was located near Gare
du Nord, would've fallen down if someone ran up the stairs and was one of those places surrounded by streets full of loitering, ever-present, leather-jacket-sporting Algerian and Moroccan males standing in clumps, apparently existing on conversation and Camels alone and calling out to the
Prada-wearing honeys pulling up at the traffic lights on their gourmet
Vespas.
But I digress. After reaching the Magellan at 9am following the usual Paris Metro Fun-For-The-Non-French-Speaking-Tourist
hijinks (with 15 minutes to spare according to the itinerary) the lobby staff informed me in impeccable
Englais that the tour company had changed the itinerary 48 hours earlier and informed only those staying at the Magellan. And that they'd all been picked up half an hour ago.
Ahhh Paris. My
nemesis. A city that lives solely on bread and pastries, with other bits of food inserted as an afterthought (I challenge anyone to find a breakfast in Paris that doesn't contain gluten). A city of stupendous architecture and even more stupendous hairstyles. A city that's picked me off before (City of Love my *
ss), and which now, like the evil sniper it really is, had zeroed in on me trying to slink out before it noticed I was even there. The evil b*
tch.
Numerous phone calls from the Magenta lobby saw me scrambling back towards my starting point to the tour company's offices like a half-*
ssed contestant in The Amazing Race. The tour company staff were, of course, unapologetic, but made up for it by paying for a train to
Amiens for me to meet up with the tour group by 11am. Oh, and for sending me to the station with an
uber-friendly, half-French, half-Cuban stunner named Yvette to ensure I got on the right trains and to smooth the way with the ticket-vendors, the security staff and basically any male within a 2-block radius of us.
In all seriousness (I can accurately recount this because I'm a taken man and was trying not to think about losing over $1700-worth of weekend tour), male drivers would slow down and drift all over the road, craning their necks back at Yvette nattering away to me as we walked, looking like
Ekka ping-pong-ball clowns as they passed us. Gangster-chic Algerian youths would walk past, all swagger and bluster momentarily forgotten, muttering wide-eyed exclamations under their breath as if the Virgin Mary had just descended from heaven in front of them to catch the Number 3 line to Gare
du Nord.
She even batted her eyelashes at a mountainous security guard (I'm sure I saw him in Lord of the Rings) who wasn't going to let me onto the
TGV platform because I didn't have my Metro ticket. Which Yvette had also paid for and which I'd turfed as soon as we'd brought the
TGV ticket to
Amiens, thinking I didn't need it. Sensing a pattern with me here? Needless to say, the security cave-troll was reduced to gormless grinning and fawning under the megawatt glare of Yvette's smile, and I was allowed on the train, finally en route to meeting my tour group with a big hug and good luck wishes from Yvette (prompting a conductor to nearly fall onto the tracks and lose his clipboard). What a start to the weekend.
The rest went fairly smoothly. After I met the group in
Villers Brettoneux and clambered on the bus we went to Adelaide Cemetery and to the WW1 Museum just outside town (excellent), had lunch there, then checked into the hotel up the road in
Abbeville. Being around so many Australian accents again made my head swim a little bit, but I met a nice trio of mid-40's Australian couples at dinner that night. Of course it was our little group who outlasted everyone and stayed up til midnight drinking the local plonk when we had a 3am
wakeup call for the Dawn Service the next day. Smart.
The Dawn Service itself was good, 4000+ people, nice setting, got a bit cold towards the end but was bearable. I checked every name on the walls to see if any ancestors were listed, but nothing. Apparently I was shown live on Australian
tv as the cameras panned the crowd, so now that I've made the Big Time I will be getting a lackey named
Spotswood to write future entries for me.
Following the Dawn Service we went back into little
Villers Brettoneux and waited around for the town's own service in honour of the
ANZACs saving their town in an epic night attack (look up the story if you don't know it, it's a corker). I wandered across the little park to where I thought the ceremony might be happening and ended up being front-and-centre behind the speaker's lectern just outside the fence and within spitting distance of the monument - right in the midst of the action. Could see myself in the reflection on the boots of the RAAF commander. Beautiful little ceremony, short, attended by all the higher-ups who did the Dawn Service, wonderfully green and lush surroundings. Just a nice,
heartfelt little ceremony. And finishing any ceremony with the French national anthem is bound to put a spring in
everyone's step.
From there we went to the Le Grand Mine, or
Lochnagan, which is the hole left by the biggest mine exploded in the entire war (100m across, 30m deep, heard in London) out near La
Boiselle, which was kind of
eerie. Then off to a number of other memorials to the Aussies near
Pozieres - the "Gibraltar" blockhouse, the First Division Memorial etc. Also the Second Division Memorial at "Windmills", where the
ANZACs got the utter tripe shelled out of them (to this day still the heaviest shelling any Australian military force has ever been subjected to) and suffered our heaviest losses ever.
We also visited
Thiepval, which has a mammoth arch by the British commemorating their lost situated in a wonderful planted thicket of trees that turn the light green.
Thiepval also had an outstanding museum with a free
searchable online database where I found a
Bartholomaeus buried in
Courcelle and a Bunt (my mother's family name) in Ypres cemetery.
It was here in this museum at
Thiepval where it all "hit" for the first time. I'm pretty up-to-date with most every detail about the two World Wars, being a bit of a history fanatic of sorts, so sometimes it's hard for me to get myself into the "what it was like to be there", transcendental mindset. But one of the black-and-white movies showing grinning, skylarking ANZAC troops
marching to the front lines for the first day of the Somme offensive made my hair stand on end. Because one of the men on the outside line closest to the cameraman, walking past in slow-motion with a fag in his mouth and his sleeves rolled up, looked almost exactly like my father when he was young (
g'day Dad) - I mean it really looked like I was watching Dad walk past on the screen. And immediately following him was a younger bloke,
blonde, also smiling, cheekily tipping his helmet to the camera, who looked almost exactly like a guy I went to school with in
Longreach, Vance Baker. Again, I couldn't see any differences. My jaw hit the floor and the lady sitting beside me cast a wary glance my way.
The next few scenes showing the utter insanity of the Somme offensive and the entire sorry fiasco that was the war made the impression stick even more, somehow. Young guys in those same uniforms clambering up crumbling, sliding trench walls, staggering forward one or two paces, getting their balance, then jerking and falling out of sight. Others gaining the top, turning around towards the camera, reaching with one hand to help a guy below them and suddenly becoming not even human anymore, just a limp store dummy dropping like a bag of meat with their heads smacking into the dirt at the top of the trench with that horrible speed that tells you there's no muscle control there at all, because there's no-one inside anymore. No big Hollywood arms-out, face-contorted, back-arched theatrics, just instant limpness like their bones have suddenly dissolved, and that sickening drop to the ground. The unbelievable
contrast between those scenes and the ones immediately before, of the happy marching shots of "Dad" and "Vance", provided all the contrast and the reality check I needed.
Sunday we spent in
Amiens, at the huge Cathedral and wandering the even-huger Sunday markets (no I didn't buy anything - an antique chair won't fit in my backpack and a Russian Red Army tank-driver's helmet isn't much use where I'm going). Lunch was had at a nifty little French bar and then we made our way back to Paris in the bus and went our
separate ways. I eventually made my way back here to London for one last night via the now-obligatory British "About-As-Enjoyable-As-A-Red-Hot-Poker-Up-The-Rectum" Airways debacle (delayed, surly service, oldest plane I've ever flown in shaking like a reggae band at a Klan rally) and I've since started packing and washing for the next leg of my journeys, starting tomorrow afternoon.
I've got not idea when I'll next be able to write another entry on here, but rest assured I'll be taking snaps and attempting to write down the highlights of each day as they happen, so I'll have something for you all next time, at least. Unless I lose my camera and notebook. Or wallet. Or my way. Should be right :p
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