Category Archives: Travel Writing

Throwback Tuesday Payback

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Lost and alone, I relentlessly haunt my own back catalogue, visiting and re-visiting the failures of my past. This piece – The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture – was first printed in the pamphlet Necro-Tourist from 1999.

The Global Underbelly of Mexican Culture

Coyacan suburb, on the edge of Mexico City, was about the most unMexican place I’d seen in Mexico. In contrast to the crowded tumbledown streets, alleyways and markets I’d seen around Alameda Park and Zocalo, streaming with people, Coyacan was all lawns and driveways, villas set back behind flourishing palm trees, hardly any traffic here, hardly any people. It felt spacious and wealthy and paranoid. Like the British Ex-Pat barrios of the Spanish Costas, Coyacan had the same sense of furtively concealed lifelessness about it. Like photographs of Beverley Hills, or TV.

The Metro journey from the station in central Mexico City, across crowded town and through her endless undulating outskirts had taken almost an hour.  The Metro finally coughed us up right deep in the centre of shiney, Americano chain-store shopping mall. Here the incurable cyst of corporate-branded consumerism bubbled forth its phosphorescent plate-glass pus, depositing in the wake of its rancid slipstream, inter-continental brand names, sportswear, fast food, Wendys and Fucking McDonalds. All over again, just like anywhere. O Hell.

From here we consulted our guide book and scuttled our way through the network of dull closed-curtain unpromising Coyacan suburb. We were looking for The Blue House, home to the Frieda Kahlo Museum, housing the largest collection of her works in the world.

Magically, we found the Blue House. We also found the Blue House was closed for the next eighteen months for essential repairs. As we consulted our guide book again, without much hope for other interesting places in Coyacan, it began to spit rain. After some serious trawling in the culture section, the guide book threw us the Trotsky Connection…MORE

Extract from Necrotourist – originally a limited printing of a hard-copy A5 folded stapled photocopied pamphlet produced in 2001.

Sunday Flashback

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Here is a reprint of a piece I wrote, as Jean Dark, back in 2012. I am astonished by how the memory still makes me feel happy and fulfilled.

Gaunt’s House Labyrinth

In December 2012 I took this series of photographs of the stone-laid labyrinth at Gaunt’s House in Dorset.

The Labyrinth at Gaunt’s House is a classic seven-circuit labyrinth in turf and brick, laid out in the private grounds of a Dorset Retreat Centre. It has been used for meditational and spiritual purposes by visitors to the house since it’s construction around the turn of the millennium.

In December 2012 I was staying at Gaunt’s House for a fortnight volunteering. We were painting and decorating a cottage on the grounds, in exchange for bed and board. The food was good and wholesome, the company, my workmates and fellow volunteers, were generally cheerful and uncomplicated. My accommodation was a sparse but comfortable single room in a converted stable block, it was called a “Meditation Cell”. I was at a difficult time in my life and I was struggling at home to regain my composure and maintain my solitude – I had been tempted to take a Vipassna Retreat. Obviously the Meditation Cell felt like a miraculous gift.

Meals were served four times daily in the dining hall of the main house, and the walk from my cell to the dining hall could be prolonged and enchanted by taking a long route through a pond-ridden wooded area to the back of the labyrinth at the far end of the lawn. As I was still waking in sweaty panic early in the dark in those days, I would get straight up, put jumper, trousers, waterproofs and wellies over my pajamas and walk, ramble, explore, what you will until I had to go in to breakfast. Along hedgerowed field-side paths glimpsing a wren, across sloping green meadows to a cluster of Ashes, through thick untrammelled unhunted woodland alone, over swollen winter streams following Fallow Deer, in a circuit around the artificial lake. I tramped in the morning half light, in frost, fog and ice. It was a gloriously empowering start to the day, giving me a gentle daily dose of solitude and contemplation.

I always ended my walks by stopping off at my cell, changing into workclothes and detouring through the woods to the labyrinth. Outlined permanently in bricks it remains imprinted on the earth even if no-one walks it. I walked it daily for a fortnight in December 2012, kicking through frozen woodland leaf-litter, marking out the spiral path, moving inwards to the centre, inwards and then outwards. Then breakfast, refreshed.

One afternoon towards the end of the fortnight, I had a block of freetime and decided to spend that time working with the labyrinth. I spent the dull-lighted December afternoon throwing, sweeping, raking, kicking leaf litter off the paths, to the sides where they marked out the ‘walls’ covering the bricks with moist fecund leaf mould. The path was revealed as a swathe of soft green grass.  I was finishing the centre as the sun set and I walked the newly cleared labyrinth at twilight. Managing to make it across the lawn to the main house in perfect time for tea.

The photographs

Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

In December 2012 I took this series of photographs of the stone-laid labyrinth at Gaunt’s House in Dorset.

Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

 I spend the dull-lighted December afternoon throwing, sweeping, raking, kicking leaf litter off the paths, to the sides where they marked out the ‘walls’ covering the bricks with moist fecund leaf mould.

Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

The path was revealed as a swathe of soft green grass.

Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

I was finishing the centre as the sun set and I walked the newly cleared labyrinth at twilight.

Next morning the scene was bejewelled with frost.

Gaunt's Labyrinth
Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012
Gaunt's Labyrinth 2012

One More Cup of Coffee For The Road

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Self-portrait 2017. photo by Bella Basura.
Self-portrait 2017. photo by Bella Basura.

It seemed never to be quiet, at that time. We were on the move for sure, from cafe to cafe to bar to hostal to cafe around and around, radios playing loud in every place. Noise and radios, chatter and clatter and noise and songs on the radio. For some reason we had gotten superstitious about Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World”. It was on the radio a lot at that time, and everytime it came on we fell into a weird ritual heralding departure. First we had to listen in silence to the song all the way through. When it was over we would immediately stand and leave. That song was our cue to get back on the move. Once we were back out on the street we were guided by whatever we found out there. Most times we found nothing much and so bought a newspaper and sat in a park. But if we saw a red car we went to the next bar, if we saw a telephone box we had to look for a hostal. If we saw a junkie, we scored, if we saw a copper, we fled the town. And so it was that we found ourselves in Andalucia, by the side of the road, hitching down to Morrocco, we told ourselves. That was the plan, I think.

We got picked up by an inter-continental mega-truck just outside Cordoba, and we pounded the freeway like kings, high in the cab of this mighty ride. The road rose and fell for dozens upon dozens of miles through foothills and moorlands until after a few hours the road reared up and topped out at a roadside bar, and that’s where the trucker left us. Lorry drivers and travellers and holiday makers meandered in the wide carpark. I guess it was some vista viewing point across the mountain range. We sat in the bar drinking tap water until Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World” came on the radio.

That’s how we hooked up with a man in a red Mondeo, shirt sleeves and tie, suit jacket hanging inside the passenger door. He was clearly a business man or travelling salesman, he seemed grateful for our company. In fact he spoke incessantly, speaking over the sound of the car radio, except when a good song came on, then he would listen and do drums on the steering wheel. As I zoned him out, gazing at the grassy hillsides and wild mountains, I wondered what we were doing, where it would end, this compulsive running to the sea. And that is when I first heard Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” on the radio, although it would be many years more before I was able to name it. The road curved down around a peak, sweeping in down flowing loops, the huge rocky scree pebbled slopes of the mountain looming above us as the road bottomed out into the wide green-carpet of river basin. Bob Dylan and EmmyLou Harris sang on “One more cup of coffee for the road, One more cup of coffee before I go, To the valley below”. It was a message, an omen. We were tumbling down into the valley below, we were running free now, onto the sea, and the straits, to Morrocco.

Inevitably, as we approached Malaga Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World” came on the radio. We listened in silence all the way through the song, and then we asked Shirt-Guy to drop us off anywhere here. We landed by the big circular wall of La Malagueta. We watched the red Mondeo weave off into the early evening traffic and superstitiously headed for the next bar.