Archive for June, 2009

One thing about being abroad for a long while is you often get asked what you miss from home. Visitors from England coming to Geneva would always ask me what I would like them to bring me to remind me of Blighty. And it was always with slight embarassment that I would truthfully answer, well, nothing. I don’t like marmite, don’t drink PG Tips and like cheese, and there’s plenty of cheese in Switzerland, so really there was nothing I longed for.

I still get the same question here, and in the last few weeks one thing keeps coming to mind, although it’s not something I can get a friend to bring over. Blur have reformed, even though they never really split up, and will be playing in Hyde Park in July and I really fucking want to go. Really. I love Blur. Ever since I saw them play at the Princess Charlotte pub in Leicester in October 1990. At the time as any self-respecting pasty faced indie kid should, I was a regular reader of the NME and they featured a little known baggy (remember that) band from Colchester who were releasing their first single She’s So High.

Blur - She's So High EP

I had never even heard the single, but was at a loss for what to do on a Tuesday in autumn in Leicester, so I went, alone, paid my £1.50 and spent with the evening with the band who would become one of the major UK bands of the 90s. Of course I didn’t know this at the time. Other bands I saw at the Charlotte included the mighty Shop Assistants and Diesel Park West, although I did see the Boo Radleys there too.

10 years laters when the Star-Shaped DVD came out, it featured bonus footage of that very evening. You don’t get to see me  in the video, but at the end of first video it could well be me shouting “Woo!”. Maybe Damon heard me and reproduced that very sound on Song 2. Who knows?

In the 19 years since then I’ve seen Blur more than any other band. At Glastonbury in 1992, in Paris in 1995 at the height of the Britpop frenzy, Brixton in 1997, Reading in 1999 and 2003, Bournemouth in 2003, London Astoria in 2003 and I’m sure a couple of other times I can’t remember.

But above all, it’s about the music and the memories it brings back. A very weird chemically altered night listening to Leisure on the day it came out. Tess, our border collie, howled the whole way through it. Hearing Country House for the first time whilst driving to Saint Tropez. Losing my shoe at the Reading Festival. Falling asleep to This Is A Low. Song 2 live, one the finest live experiences you’ll ever live through. The Coffee & TV video (cajita de leche!).

So, to all of you who will be there in Hyde Park, you lucky lot, enjoy – I’ll be thinking of you…

Blur

Ok, so a little out of synch chronologically speaking, but hey, you get what you pay for right? And you’re not paying for it, so there you go.

After Ilha Grande, we spent 4 days in Rio. Now, Rio is a must-see place, you can’t go to that part of Brasil and not go to Rio, right? I must say, for reasons already mentioned in my earlier Brasil post, I wasn’t that excited about going there. I was enjoying the more rural places in Brasil more than the cities and I was convinced I was going to get mugged or killed or something. But neither happened thankfully. Although my camera died, a freak wave came up over the 5 meter wall i was standing on and drenched me and the aforementioned camera. So, that was the end of that.

With a Parrot

I did enjoy Rio in the end. It’s one of those places you feel like you already know, having seen all the pictures. And let’s face it, it is beautiful. As in stunning. On the first day we caught sunset from Sugarloaf mountain and the next day went up to Cristo Redentor and had a tour of the city.

With Jesus

Laura left on Saturday morning to go back to Buenos Aires and I stayed another day, most of it spent wandering up and down Copacabana watching the waves (and getting soaked by them) and in the evening had a very interesting night at a Brasilian Burlesque cabaret complete with strippers (male and female) and an oversexed Belgian couple. I can’t go into details, but it certainly was memorable. The next day, feeling like death (one too many caipirinhas the night before) I headed off to Petropolis where I bought a new camera and then onto Ouro Preto, the jewel in Brasil’s colonian crown.

Ouro Preto

Like all old, beautiful places I’ve been in South America, these places are not the sterile tourist traps you find in Europe. They are real, lively towns that people actually live in. There are tourists of course, lots, but you meet a lot of people who live there, and have lived there all their lives, and it adds an extra element to the place. I liked it. The buildings were incredibly beautiful, the roads ridiculously steep and history was all around.

After Sucre, caught a good ole Bolivian bus and headed off to Uyuni, passing through Potosi (highest city in the world), getting to Uyuni at about 6 in the evening. Now, the phrase “the middle of nowhere” can be used to describe lots of places, but Uyuni literally is in the middle of nowhere, or more accurately the middle of nothing. As you come over the ridge, an enormous flat open plain opens up with matching mountains in the distance and in the middle of this flatness sits Uyuni. Nothing else is visible apart from the town and desert. The town itself is nothing much to write home about (or indeed in a blog) so I won’t. We sorted out our tour of the Salt Flats leaving the next day, had a bit of llama (not sure which bit) for dinner then went to bed.

The tour was a 3 day, 2 night jaunt around the altoplano of SouthWestern Bolivia. Altoplano means High Plain which is a pretty accurate description of what it is. The town of Uyuni is something like 3600m above sea level and at points we climbed up to 5000m. Which is higher than Mont Blanc. A lot is made of the altitude in Bolivia and I’d heard tales of gringos flying into La Paz (world’s highest capital at 3600m) from sea level and turning blue with altitude sickness and having to be flown out. None of the people I was with turned blue (well not from altitude anyway) but you do feel it. Not when you’re just walking around, but climb a set of stairs and after 20 seconds you’re huffing and puffing away for real.

Anyway, back to our little tour. We were told to be ready to go at 10. Which we were. And at 12 we actually left, this being Bolivia after all. Our first stop was the highly photogenic Train Cemetery, a rusting collection of steam engines from the 19th century. Uyuni is not on a paved road, but there is still a working railway there, left over from the days when the silver from the mines in Potosi was shipped out by rail.

Train Cemetery

After we all took far too many photos there, we headed off to the days main attraction, the Salt Flats themselves. We stopped in a little village which makes a living a from extracting the salt for tables across Bolivia and Peru then drove on to the Salt Hotel for lunch. It’s one of those places easy to describe (it’s flat and white) but impossible to give an accurate feeling of what it feels like. Formed when seawater was trapped by the mountains around rising up, the water has long evaporated away, leaving just the salt. Lots of it. It’s 12,000 km2 and in places the salt is 10m deep. It’s so flat GPS satellites use it for configuration and it apparently contains 50% of the world’s lithium. Whatever that might be.

Salar de Uyuni

And it’s a road. Well, there are roads across it anyway. No signposts but a fair bit of traffic. After lunch (more llama) we were allowed an hour or so to take those pictures everyone takes, using the perspective to make it look like you’re standing on someones shoulder. Everyone else did, not me as my sodding battery ran out.

Isla del Pescado

Last stop of the day was Isla de Pescado (Fish Island, not much of that around) which is an island standing in the middle of the flats. With all the flat around, it did feel like an island, except we drove there. It was stunning.