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text: janine israel images: janine israel & various

24hoursin

buenosaires Janine Israel discovers that slumber is not a high priority in the humming Argentinean capital.

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ORGET NEW YORK. BUENOS AIRES IS TRULY the city that never sleeps. The Big Apple’s saucy Southern-Hemisphere sister is a dizzy, dynamic party hub that throbs 24 hours a day, fuelled by an intoxicating mix of caffeine, beef, dulce de leche (milk caramel), maté tea, beer, tango, passion, vanity and an overactive imagination. Geographically in South America but culturally in Europe, Argentina’s capital is a city of wide, tree-lined boulevards, grand colonial buildings, impossibly hip boutiques and so many tango halls, theatres, galleries, museums, markets, restaurants, bars and nightclubs, you’d need a thousand lifetimes without a wink of sleep to do them any justice.

Midnight Ice-Cream With fourteen million people living within 1,400 square kilometres, sleep was never going to be high on the agenda. Instead of fighting the noise, porteños – as residents of Buenos Aires are known – embrace the night. And midnight, even mid-week, is considered a perfectly good time to stroll the streets en route to the ubiquitous neighbourhood heladeria (ice-cream parlour). Waiting around in long queues is part of life in Buenos Aires, and the heladeria I find myself in is no exception. The menu on the wall tempts with more than 50 tastebud-tantalising flavours. Perhaps it’s all those productive cows #30 get lost! ISSUE #17

chewing away in the pampas, the Argentine love of sugar or the sticky hot summers, but Argentina produces the best ice-cream in the world. Any Italian tourist will grudgingly admit that. Finally my number is called and I sidle up to the counter like a delirious lottery winner. “I can’t decide”, I blurt out to the amused ice-cream scooper man, before adding, “Just give me your two favourite flavours”. He shoots me a flirtatious grin before scooping up a decadent base of dulce de leche and then tops it off with a sculpted crown of chocolate suiza. I walk into the night, clutching my cone, lost in creamy bliss.

get in the know! In July 2007 snow fell in Buenos Aires for the first time since 1918.

image: vincent chong knight

argentina

12.45am Drinks With The Beautiful People

By Buenos Aires’ standards the night is still embryonic, so I don a silver lurex dress and blue high heels and head out to meet some traveller friends. Our plan is a sedate, pre-clubbing tipple at Milión, the city’s swankiest bar. Jumping into a cab (they’re ridiculously cheap – you can cross half the city for around A$7), the driver squeals to a halt just north of the city centre at Paraná 1048. I walk through an unassuming entrance and find myself inside a converted three-storey mansion with a ground-floor restaurant, a landscaped back garden and a sweeping wooden staircase that leads to a bar fit for a seduction scene in a Bond flick. Scanning for my friends through the mood lighting, I make out dozens of gobsmackingly gorgeous people with angular mullet haircuts sprawled elegantly on couches, clutching cocktails, deep in gesticulating conversation.

2.15am Hitting The Clubs

image: nicolas ferraro c

get in the know! Tango originated in the working-class districts of Buenos Aires.

After draining the last of our pricey drinks, we agree it is now a respectable hour to hit the nightclubs.

Leaving Milión, we pile into a taxi. “To Muesum”, we tell the driver. There’s no need for further instructions, he’s already driving south towards the San Telmo neighbourhood. It may be a week night, but Museum, a three-storey club in a building designed by Gustave Eiffel (the same bloke who changed the Parisian skyline) is rammed to the rafters with 20- and 30-something office workers, all scoping each other out and shaking their perfect backsides to a medley of cheesy pop. How they plan to get up for work in a few hours is anyone’s guess. I can’t help but wonder: does anyone in Buenos Aires actually do any work? An hour later, when the dancefloor is still a heaving, sweaty mass of suited bodies locking lips, I begin to get an insight into why Argentina’s economy might have crashed so spectacularly in 2001.

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tanzania

...they found a place that seemed to fulfil every cliche of the exotic, hidden paradise.Perfectly white, flat beaches studded with palm trees stretched for kilometres, coral reefs undulated under crystal-clear turquoise seas...

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text: gemma pitcher images: justin jamieson & gemma pitcher

talesof the

Whether it’s getting lost in Stone Town’s tangle of narrow streets or enjoying the pristine beaches,Gemma Pitcher finds Zanzibar to be anarresting place.

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S EXOTIC NAMES GO, ZANZIBAR IS UP THERE with Samarkand, Marrakesh or Timbuktu.

Plenty of people don’t think it exists at all, that it’s merely a made-up location straight out of an Eastern fairytale.

But Zanzibar is a real place – or, rather, places.

Zanzibar is actually the name given to a cluster of islands that nestle in the waters of the Indian Ocean just off the coast of mainland Tanzania.

The two principal islands in the group are Unguja, also known as Zanzibar Island, and Pemba.

When most of the Western world was still grubbing around with primitive tools in damp fields and learning how to write, Zanzibar was

already a meeting place for the well-developed cultures of China, Persia and Arabia. It sat in the middle of its own trading empire, stretching from Somalia in the north down the coast of east Africa to Mozambique in the south. This kingdom and its inhabitants were known as the Swahili – ‘the people of the coast’. They traded gold, ivory and cloth with visitors from across the Indian Ocean, built handsome stone houses, minted silver coins and wore fine silk clothes.

Envoys, merchants and even pirates from as far away as Japan and Russia came to Zanzibar in sailing ships blown in by the north-east monsoon and returned, their holds laden with skins, ivory

get in the know! Freddie Mercury, lead singer of rock band Queen, was born in Zanzibar.

and slaves, on the south-western wind. Over the centuries that followed, Portuguese soldiers, Indian traders, Omani sultans and British colonialists took it in turns to occupy the islands.

Today’s Zanzibar wears the mark of its past.

Wander through the markets, for instance, and you’ll see black-skinned ladies wearing the flowing black robes of the Arabic world, buying Indian spices and dried Chinese noodles.

They haggle with the stallholders in a language called Kiswahili, a blend of African, Arabic and Portuguese words developed since the tenth century to help dozens of different nationalities do business with each other.

The Zanzibaris gained independence from their final occupiers, the British, in 1963, and the socialist government that followed discouraged visitors from the West until the early 1990s. When the first backpackers started trickling in, they found a place that seemed to fulfil every cliche of the exotic, hidden paradise. Perfectly white, flat beaches studded with palm trees stretched for kilometres, coral reefs undulated under crystal-clear turquoise seas and Stone Town itself was a mysterious tangle of narrow streets, spice markets and whitewashed mosques.

Naturally, the Zanzibaris themselves didn’t see it that way. After years of grinding poverty,

everyone who could start a beach bar, a taxi service or a guesthouse did so and then waited hopefully for the tourists to arrive. Word of Zanzibar’s charms leaked around the world and larger resorts for package tourists began springing up. Long-time travellers of Africa moaned that the island was being ruined, and in some ways they were right – topless Italians in G-strings paraded through strictly Muslim villages, souvenir shops lined the once-pristine beaches and fleets of minibuses buzzed through spice plantations.

Fortunately, however, Zanzibar has been adapting to foreign cultures for centuries and the

get in the know! Scottish explorer David Livingstone wrote that Zanzibar was “the finest place I have known in all of Africa to rest before starting my last journey”.

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astalkonthe

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get in the know! The Indian elephant is considered endangered and the current wild population is numbered at somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000.

india

wildside text: david stott

images: david stott

An Indian safari doesn’t have to mean inhaling dust in the back of a jeep. David Stott meets the unlikely new heroes in Kerala’s war on poaching during a unique trek into tiger and elephant country.

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HE GUIDE LEANS IN TO WHISPER, SO close I can almost feel the whiskers of his moustache brush my ear: “Shoot the tusker first”. A hundred metres away, the herd of wild elephants we’ve been tracking all day browse placidly at the edge of the forest. So absorbed are they in their afternoon snack that the sudden arrival of a large number of men in camouflage appears not to phase them. I too am caught gawping for a moment, but dutifully raise the barrel and take aim at the bull elephant.

His leathery grey flank fills my sights.

Then something – a note of tension carried on the air currents – gives us away. The great male’s head turns. His eyes glare straight down the sights into mine as he begins throwing his trunk from side to side, one massive foot stomping in the dust.

“Quickly!” hisses the guide. The herd tenses and

their hunting parties, long before the existence of commercial safaris, mass tourism and any concept of public liability.

The most remarkable part of the tour is the story of the camo-clad leaders. They are members of the 23-strong Ex-Vayana Bark Collectors – Eco Development Committee (EDC), a snappy title for a band of former poachers who gave up their illegal livelihood of stripping bark from cinnamon trees ten years ago to don the boots and khakis of law enforcement. Now they patrol the forests in search of poachers, as well as taking on the even more fraught role of guiding tourists through tiger-infested jungle.

“These fellows have been living in the forest for years. They know the trails better than the park rangers”, brags CA Abdul Bashir, the reserve’s ecotourism officer, and a leading light

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They’re justifiably wary of leading us into a head-on encounter with a pack of four-tonne ivory bearers who might recognise a former foe when they see one.

starts to break for the tree cover, and I know that if I don’t get my trophy now, I never will.

My shoulder braces, my index finger cocks, and SNAP – I get half a dozen shots in.

It’s no coincidence that elephant tracking in Kerala’s Periyar Tiger Reserve carries more than a hint of the hunter’s sport, even if the armoury being toted by most of our band consists of zoom lenses rather than blunderbusses. In contrast to every other national park in India, where wildlife is most often glimpsed from the back of a jeep – or at best, from the back of a lumbering elephant – Periyar’s Tiger Trails program allows a limited number of visitors each day to infiltrate its lush forests on foot. It’s a rare taste of how life in the jungle might have been in the days of princes and

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in the sustainable development project that has changed Periyar’s social and economic landscape beyond recognition since its inception in 1996.

Before the project, the park and its wildlife were in trouble, threatened by animal poaching, illegal gathering, slash-and-burn agriculture and a culture of corruption that turned a blind eye to violations of the reserve’s legal protection.

Preserving the park’s natural assets was never going to be a matter of simply shutting people out of the protected area. Bashir estimates that 35,000 families depend directly on the park and its natural resources for survival.

Patrols and fences would have hardly stopped them from finding ways of getting at the materials they needed.

get in the know! Kerala is India’s most progressive state in terms of literacy (90 per cent of the population can read and write) and access to healthcare.

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Instead, the Kerala forest service embarked on a participatory management strategy that aimed to reduce the impact of the park on local people as much as to reduce the impact of the locals on the park. This meant giving locals ownership of the conservation process, making formal arrangements to support growers and gatherers of marginal crops and, most importantly, proving that conservation could put rupees in local pockets.

A chain of more than 70 eco-development committees sprang up around the park, some working to stop tribal fishermen being ripped off by middlemen, others to gain organic certification for their members’ spice crops. The cinnamon poachers, with their advanced knowledge of secret forest footpaths and animal behaviour, had all the raw material to become highly effective gamekeepers; all that remained was to train them as guides. By opening the forest patrols to tourists, the EDC has been able to ramp up its income from ecotourism while allowing visitors, by virtue of their presence in vulnerable areas of the park, to play a cameo role in the battle against environmental piracy.

To get a foretaste of what’s to come, Bashir arranges for me to join that evening’s night patrol, one of a series of walking tours run under the Tiger Trails program. At 10pm I’m standing outside the park gates with a trio of jumpy Americans when three uniformed rangers stride up, two armed #56 get lost! ISSUE #17

with high-powered torches, the other with a rifle that by all appearances dates back to before the Second World War. We soon leave the road for a leafy path and begin to wind downhill through denser forest. Adrenaline flows every time twigs crackle, though the most threatening creatures that cross our path are a black-naped hare, a tiny mouse deer and a possum-sized malabar giant squirrel dropping nut crumbs on our heads. The trail levels out by a small lake, where the spotlight picks out a nightjar posed in a bush, as motionless as a museum stuffing, and far away on the opposite bank, a smudge of black that the guides insist is a porcupine.

After a shade more than two hours, we’re back in the village, and I feel like I’ve barely seen any of the park. In the context of Periyar’s 777 square-kilometre expanse, I feel like a soccer referee that has merely stood next to the corner flag for an entire match. I struggle to conceive how our impact has been anything more than symbolic but can confidently report that no poaching occurred on my watch.

The next morning, after far too few hours of sleep, I head through the park gates again. Expert wildlife guide Syam Kumar accompanies me.

A former hotel manager, Syam first came to Periyar in the early 1990s and after begging the park rangers and biologists to teach him everything

there was to know about the ecology of the forest, he spotted a niche for himself as India’s most enthusiastic wildlife guide. He had proved his mettle the previous afternoon by sprinting across a field full of water buffalo, hauling me back across it by the camera bag, and taking me on his motorbike to show me a pair of snakes he’d discovered entangled in a writhing courtship dance.

At the rangers’ office that overlooks Lake Periyar, we join a handful of fellow trekkers trying on standard-issue khaki gaiters (to keep ticks off, Syam explains, though he doesn’t bother putting any on himself), and then wander through crowds of Indian families to the shore, where bamboo rafts wait to ferry us across a narrow arm of the lake.

Getting our trekking party away is no small exercise in logistics: our modest group of eight walkers requires a support staff of four Ex-Vayana men plus one rifle-bearing guard.

Our precarious ferry transports us an easy stone’s throw across the water, but when we disembark we’ve already left the realm of milling daytrippers far behind. We slip from the shore into lush rainforest where trees tower skyward from mighty networks of buttress roots, and Nilgiri langurs hoot from out of sight in high branches.

A party of tribal fishermen pass us heading in the opposite direction, carrying their catch in rough canvas sacks. They are the last people that we will see until our return to the boat ramp in the evening.

get in the know! Poacher guides in Periyar earn around A$160 a month. A native bison poached from the reserve for meat would sell for around A$220.

india

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We walk through rolling savannah-like grassland, punctuated by islands of trees and fingers of rainforest with frequent appearances of the lapping contours of the lake. It’s not long before we find the first evidence that elephants have passed this way before us: the grass has been trampled flat, deep footprints puncture the soil beneath and, most telling of all, great cannonballs of moist, strawy elephant dung lie in heaps on the ground.

Having hitherto kept to themselves, our guides – Team Camo – now get forensic. They’re justifiably wary of leading us into a head-on encounter with a pack of four-tonne ivory bearers who might recognise a former foe when they see one. Syam, however, doesn’t seem too worried – the poo has long since stopped steaming – and he swiftly resumes his role as David Attenborough crossed with Sam Gamgee, leaping off the trail to demonstrate a tiny frog concealed in the hoofprint of an antelope, gleefully mugging for photos holding balls of elephant shit, then wiping his hands clean, picking up my tripod and toting it for the rest of the day without a word of complaint.

The sun’s high overhead and beating down harshly when we emerge by the lake’s edge.

With the heat becoming unbearable, it’s a welcome surprise to round a headland and find three bamboo rafts moored on the shore.

We climb aboard, four to a boat, and I let my feet trail in the cool water as the rangers strike up a steady rhythm, paddling through a skeletal woodland of trees drowned when the valley was flooded in the 1890s. As well as providing Periyar with one of its signature images, the dead trees make a useful perch for cormorants, swallows and dapper black and white kingfishers, which obligingly demonstrate their hunting technique, hovering in the air before arrowing into the water from a prodigious height.

We come ashore after an hour’s hot paddling, desperate to flop down in the shade and go for a swim – a prospect that would be easier to achieve without the confounded laces of the army gaiters.

I’ve finally defeated them when a bugle call from the ridge behind us signals that we’ve caught up with the elephants. Everyone stops for a second.

Syam cautions those of us in earshot to stay near the water, then bolts towards the trees with one of the anti-poacher platoon.

They’re gone for a tense quarter of an hour, during which the rifleman periodically toys with his safety catch and the rest of us edge surreptitiously closer to the trees and the source of the sound. Then a black shape emerges from the forest edge: it’s Syam, frantically waving for us to follow. By the time we can catch up he’s already bounded out of sight to check the way ahead. A V-formation of craning necks, we line up behind the gun and creep uphill into the woods.

From somewhere above and to the right comes an almighty crashing. The elephants are hooning through the forest, apparently only metres away from us, yet somehow contriving to remain invisible.

From somewhere above and to the right comes an almighty crashing. The elephants are hooning through the forest, apparently only metres away from us...

get in the know! The Sabarimala temple in Periyar attracts up to five million pilgrims a year.

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ISSUE #17 get lost! #57

confessions

images: donall o cleirigh

RABIDINDIA Tom Maclachlan dodges monkeys, dogs and raging torrents in north India.

The Town In the year 2000, two friends and I sat in the cafes of Dharamsala, the adopted hometown of the Dalai Lama in India, and listened to visiting Western Buddhists discuss matters of importance. Their concern was not enlightenment, but how to trick the local monkeys. “Always carry an apple with you”, they would say. “If you see a monkey, throw it. They always chase apples.”

This was not idle chat, but a matter of life and rebirth. Monkeys had been attacking tourists and it was said that some had rabies, a fatal disease spread by animal bite. These Buddhists had come to Dharamsala to inch a little further down the path of enlightenment. They knew that a single nip from an irritable monkey would stop that holy trip short. “Goddamn monkeys”, they would blaspheme. “They don’t like us.” If monkeys didn’t like devoted Buddhists, we reasoned they’d hate backpacking Aussies, so my friends and I fled for the unmapped villages of north India. It was here that we discovered monkeys were not the real danger in the area. That honour went to the dogs.

The Trek For a week my friends Olly and Jonno and I wound through the lush hills of McLeod Ganj.

Each day curious schoolchildren would lead us into their houses with the promise of salty chai and a bed. Inside, warm-hearted mothers who spoke no English would feed us curry until we could no longer return their smiles. Each morning #96 get lost! ISSUE #17

we would give the family a fistful of rupees before setting off into the arms of the next town’s schoolkids. Thus we travelled, happy and listless.

On the fifth day we heard an echo in a valley that filled us with dread. Barking. We had seen vicious dogs in the past, but these sounded different. Crazed. With no other path to follow, we dipped into the town and immediately found ourselves surrounded by snarling dogs snapping at our feet. My friend Jonno is a calm man, so when he kicked a dog I knew something was amiss. He showed me blood on his fingers.

“This dog bit me”, said Jonno. Our true Indian adventure began.

The Retreat Dogs are the other great rabies vessel of north India and the one that bit Jonno had the typical characteristics – unbridled aggression and no vaccination. Our job was to find a hospital within 24 hours where Jonno could get an inoculation. We followed a farmer’s directions through jungle and river to a dirt road that would apparently lead us to the hospital.

Things got difficult when storm clouds dumped an unholy monsoon on our heads the minute we stepped onto the road. We rounded a corner to hear another frightful sound – gushing water. A river had broken its banks and washed out the road to the hospital. It was running onto a 15-metre drop onto rocks below. Standing at the edge of the torrent was a stunted old schoolteacher named Amil Su.

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text: tom maclachlan

Dogs are the other great rabies vessel of north India and the one that bit Jonno had the typicalcharacteristics – unbridled aggression and no vaccination.

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“A hospital is indeed at the end of this road”, he said, before pointing to the rocks below.

“But you will not be passing here! We must wait until the storm does subside.”

The Crossing The storm only got more ferocious but on the other side of the river we noticed a pair of schoolchildren unsteadily making the crossing. Jonno, Olly and I nodded at each other. “No!” screamed Amil as we started to cross. The old man stormed ahead of us.

“I will go first!” Amil inched towards the middle of the river. Growing impatient and buoyed by his relative success, I charged.

Then I stopped. Metres from the end, Amil had slipped and was rushing towards the precipice. Here would be our first death then.

But as he reached the edge, some watching locals lunged for Amil’s arm, caught his shirtsleeve and pulled him to safety.

No sooner had Olly, Jonno and I each safely navigated the crossing in Amil’s wake, but the clouds parted and the first car we had seen in five days was waiting 100 metres down the road ready to take us to the hospital. There, the doctor had good and bad news. She did not have the vaccine. But Jonno, in her opinion, did not have rabies. How she knew, we don’t know. But to this day Jonno remains a healthy young man and the Buddhists in the Dharamsala cafes now recommend carrying sausages along with the apples.

get in the know! Although rabies is usually associated with dogs, among domesticated animals in the US rabies today is more likely to be found in cats.