Get Lost Issue 39

PAGe 48 for detAils WIN a 14-day exodus adventure for two through colombia see

ISSUE #39//$8.95 GST INCLUDED www.getlostmagazine.com

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2014 road tripping through

cuba MOONLIGHT IN MONTREAL Stepping out after sundown

INTO THE LION’S LAIR South African safari

DANISH DALLIANCE

Aarhus Festival uncovered

GOING JAPANESE

Quirky encounters in Tokyo

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AustrAliA | FiJi | ChinA | nepAl | united stAtes

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2014: THE BUCKET LIST

Our 40 experts and insiders, from Richard Branson to Layne Beachley, reveal the places not to miss this year

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JAPAN

CUBA There’s only one way to get from Havana to Trinidad, and that’s in a clapped-out cruiser

SOUTH AFRICA Tracking the king of the Kalahari in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park #10 get lost ISSUE #39

FIJI

Getting geisha’d and other unusual experiences in Tokyo

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Do good, feel good on a volunteering tour in the Yasawa Islands

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WESTERN AUSTRALIA Diving in at the deep end with whale sharks and manta rays

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NEPAL Spring in Lo Manthang brings with it a festival to fend off demons

get in the know There are often between five and 30 female lions in a pride, and usually all of them are closely related.

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et books, 22 Lonely Plan ggage, 23 Hedgren lu trip, 48 Colombia s, 120 Tamron len

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News & Views The globe uncovered Events What’s going down?

Get Social Join in and win

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Places to Stay The weird and wonderful Top Trips The best we can find Top 10 The world’s quirkiest customs Retro Travel Communism arrives in China

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You Wish Making like a spaceman in Seattle Get Packing An instant itinerary for Kuala Lumpur and Langkawi After Dark Have an art attack in Montreal Festival Getting hygge in Denmark

116 FOOD

126 MUSIC

118 PHOTOGRAPHY

128 LIKE A LOCAL

122 TRAVEL JOB

132 REVIEWS

The hungry traveller in southern China

Expert travel photo tips

A wildlife photographer’s close-up

124 TOP BARS

The world’s best watering holes

get in the know More than 1000 species of insects are eaten in about 80 per cent of the countries in the world.

The new Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville

Discover East 7th Street in Manhattan

Gadgets and other goodies

136 CONFESSIONS

Professional adventurer vs ticket inspector

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lames Flare across a pit oF boiling mud in the heart oF turkmenistan’s karakum desert. derweze, or the ‘door to hell’ as the locals know it, is a glowing 70-metre-wide sinkhole and a sinister legacy to gas mining. The crater formed when the ground beneath a rig collapsed as Soviet geologists drilled for resources in one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world. The pit devoured the machinery and methane gushed into the air, threatening a nearby village. To truncate the flow, geologists set the deposit alight, assuming it would burn off in several days. Fed by rich natural gas, the fire continues to burn four decades later.

• Nikon D700 • Nikon 17–35mm f/2.8, at 17mm • ISO 1600, f/5.0, 1/100 sec Photography by Tormod Sandtorv

Image: Art in the City via Flickr

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get in the know For two months during summer, the night skies light up during the Montreal International Fireworks Competition.

MONTREAL Armed with a French phrase book and the promise of a local delicacy at night’s end, Graeme Green takes in music, art and festival fun in Canada’s cultural capital.

An immersive, temporary artwork called Iceberg in Place des Festivals. get in the know In the 20s and 30s during US Prohibition, many Americans jumped the border to Montreal to drink and gamble.

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Image: Lilli Breininger

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get in the know In 2010 the spelling of Denmark’s second-largest city changed from Århus to Aarhus to make it easier to search for online.

festival: DENMARK In the Danish city of Aarhus, Lani Holmberg puts her nose to the ground, sniffing out the best of the entertainment at one of Scandinavia’s biggest festivals.

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Festival-goers dance with their shadows during a light projection show.

magIne you’re a cHaracter In an alfred Hitchcock movie. you’re running through an abandoned metal factory in the middle of the night. around you shadows jump and your heart beats faster as a sinister figure draws terrifyingly closer. now imagine the soundtrack for this scene.

Hear the screeching, spooky, industrial score as it plucks at the hairs on the back of your neck?

It’s about 9pm, and that haunting soundtrack is echoing across rooftops in the Danish city of Aarhus, as if a train has derailed in the heart of town. I follow the sound as it reverberates through the crowded streets, eventually stumbling upon a huge double-storey pentagonal construction erected in the square next to Aarhus Cathedral.

Made from 10 stacked shipping containers, the contraption is a giant musical instrument, with a 50-strong audience tucked inside its belly. Ten energetic musicians use violin bows, saws and karabiners to play piano strings strung taut between both ends of each container. Lit brightly against the inky night sky, they focus on a conductor standing amid the audience. His nostrils flare and hands fly as he sends the unique psycho symphony vibrating down through the containers, engulfing the crowd sitting spellbound below.

get in the know Danes are among the tallest people in the world, coming in at an average height of 5 feet 11 inches, only slightly shorter than the Dutch.

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Beachside in Trinidad: the perfect spot for a snorkel break. #52 get lost ISSUE #39

get in the know Cubans often refer to their island as ‘El Cocodrilo’, thanks to its appearance from above, which resembles a crocodile.

cuba

On a mission to experience the real Cuba, Guy Wilkinson rents some dilapidated wheels and tackles crumbling roads and a corrupt constabulary on a road trip from Havana to Trinidad.

Photography by Guy Wilkinson

get in the know With one of the best health care systems in the world, Cubans have an average life expectancy similar to Britons.

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lue and red lights flash in the rear-view mirror. On closer inspection, it’s apparent they belong to a police motorbike, one that’s pursuing us like we’re driving the getaway car used during some audacious bank heist. With the wail of a siren, we pull over and i’m ordered out of the car.

The cop is dressed in a tight navy-blue uniform let down badly by a sagging paunch.

He peppers me with rapid-fire questions.

My Spanish – far from fluent – simply can’t keep pace. If I’d been drinking rum, things might be different. Irrespective of the language being spoken, hard liquor transforms me into a gifted conversationalist. Sadly, however, I’m completely sober.

“Sobornar,” grunts the cop from beneath an immaculately trimmed moustache.

“Havana?” I venture hopefully. We back-and-forth like this for some time, until finally, exasperated, he waves me away in disgust, squeaking back to his bike in knee-high leather boots.

Back on the road I fumble for my dog-eared phrase book. ‘Sobornar’ means bribe.

We’re still laughing as we motor down the highway, swerving past cows, lunarsized potholes and 1950s station wagons belching plumes of black smoke. Our stay in Cuba is only a few days old, but so far it’s all been a bit like this. Thanks to the legacy of revolutionary socialist politics spearheaded by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara some 60 years ago, this is a country caught in a bizarre time warp.

There is precious little internet, limited infrastructure and a currency system that rivals Einstein’s theory of general relativity in its complexity. As a result, many travellers opt to be bussed around on mindless package tours, but, along with a close friend, my wife and I have decided to rent a shitbox car and embark on a road trip from Havana to Trinidad.

First stop: Cienfuegos.

It’s dusk when we arrive. We’ve booked into a casa particular – the Cuban equivalent of a B&B – but our email confirmation never arrived. This is not an uncommon occurrence in Cuba. Thankfully, owner Lorayne Sánchez, a beaming lady with an impressive afro, has enough connections to ensure sleeping on the street won’t be necessary.

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Two old-timers serenade us from beneath the bandstand in Parque José Martí, Cienfuegos.

Playing chess in the backstreets of Havana. get in the know Every morning Cuban school children pledge: “We will be like Che.”

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A man and mule wander the streets of Trinidad in the early morning. get in the know Cuba is the most populated country in the Caribbean with more than 11 million residents.

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get in the know Geisha are traditional female entertainers. There are thought to be between 1000 and 2000 in Japan today.

JAPAN

Image: Tomomi Ogawa

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Post geisha makeover, the writer meets the locals.

With just three days and a packed itinerary, Carrie Hutchinson tries to uncover another side of Tokyo without getting lost in translation.

Photography by Carrie Hutchinson

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The bright lights and busy streets of Shibuya.

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OU WILL BE LIKE MOVIE STAR.” TOMOMI GIGGLES AND makes a motion as if taking a photo: “Paparazzi.” In a tiny studio off Asakusa’s market, I am getting ready for my close-up. First the make-up artist and photographer slathers my face with primer that has the density of vaseline. Then comes a thick layer of white powder made into sludge with a little water, followed by a pressing of white powder. My heart skips a beat when Tomomi starts to paint what appears to be bright-red lipstick around my eyes. Then again, she’s the expert.

When she’s happy, she asks me to pick a kimono. From a vast rail, I choose a purple one. She looks at me as if to say ‘really?’, but pulls it off its hanger anyway. For some reason, I thought dressing as a geisha would simply involve slipping a beautiful silk gown over my head. Wrong. First Tomomi straps down my chest. “You have good body, but flatter is better,” she says in halting English. Then she and her assistant Miho begin strapping and binding with sashes, belts and velcro until I can barely breathe. Finally, she walks me towards the mirror and in it I see someone who could not be me. Could it?

Tomomi runs a business called Cocomo, where she adorns ordinary citizens in traditional costume. On her walls there are photos of made-over celebs including Jessica Simpson, Taylor Swift and Betsey Johnson; in her brag book are images of tiny children in beautiful silks, men kitted out as kabuki actors or samurai, and couples posing in traditional garb on their wedding day. The preparation takes about 90 minutes before she takes me to a studio where I pose with parasol and samisen (a Japanese guitar) before heading into the street where I become the tourist attraction.

get in the know In Japanese folklore, earthquakes are caused by a giant subterranean catfish called Namazu trying to escape the god Kashima.

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While island hopping and volunteering in the Yasawa Islands, Pat Kinsella sees a face of Fiji hidden from the big resorts.

Photography by Pat Kinsella

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get in the know The first European to sight the Yasawas was William Bligh in 1789, following the mutiny on the HMS Bounty.

FIJI

Bio pilots the dive boat away from Sunrise Beach, Barefoot Island. get in the know Land-based tourism was forbidden on the Yasawa Islands until 1987.

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The view from the summit of Drawaqa Island, looking out over Barefoot and Manta Ray resorts.

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he bobbing head is barely visible above The waves and i momentarily fear our skipper will plough straight into the body lying facedown in the sea about 50 metres ahead of us. he’s clocked the situation though, and kills the throttle just in time.

The woman in the water barely looks up. She’s one of a group, all wearing rudimentary diving masks and with eyes only for the ocean floor. They form an arc, about 500 metres from shore, and the one closest is intensely occupied with some strenuous-looking activity just below the surface. We pass close enough to get half a look at what she’s doing.

Underwater bagpipe playing is my best guess. Fortunately one of my boat buddies has been here for months and knows better. “They’re hunting for octopuses,” Fran explains. “Looks like she’s got one.”

Pondering the difficulty of such a hunt, which involves padding barefoot across a viciously jagged reef with little more than a stick for a weapon, I wave to the woman. She doesn’t wave back – unusual in Fiji, the most ridiculously friendly place I’ve ever stumbled upon in two-and-ahalf decades of travel – but since her hands are engaged in an underwater life-or-death arm wrestle with an eight-limbed beast, I won’t hold it against her.

The skipper guns the engine and we head further along the coast, where forests of thick palms are punctuated periodically by a scrape of golden sand and a tussock of huts indicating a small village.

Skirting around a section of reef we encounter a man who appears to be levitating just above the water. On closer inspection I see he’s sitting on a kitchen chair attached precariously to a surfboard. He’s paddling this rickety contraption into deep water to go fishing, but pauses mid-stroke to wave.

For Fran and her partner Mike – program leaders with Vinaka Fiji, a voluntourism project based in the Yasawas – this is an everyday commute, but for me it’s a glimpse at real life within the island communities of Fiji.

We’re only a few hours by boat from the heavily visited islands around Viti Levu’s port of Denarau, but this feels a million miles from the scripted and sanitised version of Fiji I’ve seen many times in friends’ holiday photos. While thousands of holiday-makers annually flock to the Mamanuca Islands to enjoy neatly packaged, imagination-light, beach-based breaks, the slightly further flung Yasawa Islands offer the chance to explore a far less predictable, more exciting side of Fiji.

The Yasawa Flyer, a passenger-carrying catamaran, ferries travellers up and down the 20-island archipelago every day.

Accommodation is still in lodges and resorts of varying sorts – rated via a coconut-based grading system (three coconuts being the best, one coconut the most basic) – but many of these are village owned and run, and because the islands are bigger and properly populated, there’s plenty of independent exploring to be done.

Here you can experience a genuine cultural exchange, particularly through Vinaka Fiji, which sees volunteers donate their time and expertise to help raise the standard of living, health and education of the local population. There are 27 villages sprinkled through the Yasawa Island chain, and their residents all exist below the poverty line.

On our boat is Lorraine, a young schoolteacher from South London. For her summer holidays, rather than head to the beaches, clubs and pubs in places like Ayia Napa with her peers, she’s opted to volunteer here in a school and baby clinic. “It’s such a great way

we encounter a man who appears to be levitating just above the water. on closer inspection i see he’s sitting on a kitchen chair attached precariously to a surfboard.

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get in the know The 1980 film The Blue Lagoon, which controversially starred a 14-year-old Brooke Shields, was shot in the Yasawas.

FIJI

The ocean is a communal playground for children of the Yasawas.

The Nacula Caves.

A touching farewell from Barefoot Island.

The landing point at Kese village beach.

get in the know About 50 volunteers from 18 countries have taken part in Vinaka Fiji programs since the first official participant in December 2012.

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In a remote national park on the border of South Africa and Botswana, Ann and Steve Toon stalk the trail of the legendary Kalahari lions.

Photography by Steve Toon

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get in the know The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park is located in the southern Kalahari Desert – kalahari means ‘great thirst land’.

SOUTH AFRICA

get in the know Straddling South Africa and Botswana, Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park comprises a whopping 3.6 million hectares.

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