Don't use Opodo

I am a total6 idiot.

I've used Opodo to book a flight from Bangkok to Yangon.

The flight goes at 1700 today. It's 914 here in Bangkok. And the flight is still "on reservation" and Opodo will confirm "within 48 hours", so they may charge my credit card after the flight has actually gone. And, unbelievably, they don't have 24/7 customer service. Customer service in the UK opens after the flight closes.?I have already wasted stupid amounts of time getting myself fixed after a motorbike accident. Now this.

Frankly I never thought I'd say this, but I just want to go home.

And don't use Opodo. Because trawling the web, I find I'm not the only one.

How not to get bored at the airport

When you travel on a budget, you sometimes put up with suboptimal travel arrangements to save a bit of money. Quite often, I end up taking a flight at some stupid hour, like 4 in the morning, which means I'm going to have to put in most of the night at the airport, or with a ridiculously long layover - 12 or 15 hours between flights - but which isn't quite long enough to get out of the airport and actually see anything.

So, what to do in the airport when you are bored as heck?

• Do your research before you go. Most airports have pretty decent information on facilities available on the web. You can also find useful stuff on where you can sleep at airports (at some, like Athens, you can't: at others, like Doha, there are rooms full of recliners to get a few z's) if you arrive, as I did once, at two in the morning and take off again at five-thirty. I always look for stationery stores and fountain pen retailers; I can always spend half an hour or so in any Montblanc concession and I'm overjoyed if there's a high end pen shop in an Asian airport (for some reason you always find the best stuff out there and not in Europe).
• Look for the airport magazine when you get there. It's not always great reading (though sometimes it can be interesting), but often will have extra information. Some airlines also leave their magazines out in the lounges, and though some are deeply tedious bits of corporate promo, others are well worth reading (I particularly like Vueling's magazine with its fascinating city features and infographics).
• Some airports have fascinating exhibits. Did you know there's actually an art gallery at Charles de Gaulle? It's free (as long as you're checked in) in Satellite 4. There's a Rijksmuseum offshoot at Schiphol, too, and my favourite, in the departures hall at Ibiza, a vast selection of model aeroplanes. Many airports have interesting temporary exhibitions - I found some gorgeous photos from a landscape competition in Doha, for instance, and a flower exhibit in Bangkok.
• Sometimes the architecture can be worth seeing. Madrid airport's curved roofs and swooping support struts are amazing - light-wells give interesting shadows and the patterns and textures are a real delight for any photographer; it's my favourite so far.
• Many airports have an observation deck if you're interested in planes, or simply fancy watching them take off and land as a relaxing exercise that's a bit more interesting than sitting in a chair watching nothing. There's a handy list on the Airfare Watchdog blog. The deck also usually gives you the best view you'll get from the airport of the surrounding landscape.
• Investigate local culture. While most airport retail outlets are either touristy and trashy, or relentlessly global in their branding, you can usually find one or two real local outlets. For instance, in Bogota domestic airport I found a bar selling the products of the Bogota Beer Company - an outstanding small brewer with some really characterful beers - while in Schiphol Dutch beers helped me while away a couple of hours between flights. In Bangkok airport I found a little Thai cafe selling sticky rice and mango, admittedly at a stiff mark-up. In Delhi, alas, the only local culture in evidence was a plethora of rather useless bureaucracy...
• Ride the transit system between terminals. You probably won't see much, but it's a change of scene.
• Walk! If you've been on one flight and are about to go on another, you're doing yourself a favour and reducing your chances of getting DVT. Plus, you've got nearly zero luggage, so why not go wandering? Airports are full of long corridors that you can march along from one end to the other. (Pick one that's not full of people waiting for flights, though.)
• If there's free internet, you've got it made! But check the rules - there may be limits on connection time. If there are, plan your access times carefully and download as much as possible to read offline.
• Check the flight board. That sounds tedious, but it can actually be quite interesting seeing where flights go to from the airport you're in, particularly if it's not your home airport. At Calcutta Airport I first noticed how many Indian airports had regular flights - Bagdogra, for instance, which I'd never heard of before.

If you know you're going to have a long layover, it's worth seeing whether you can exit the airport and visit the city instead. For instance Doha now offers visitors a relatively cheap and easy visa for a short visit. Make sure, if you want to do this, that you check with your airline first.

You *can* always pay money to use a first class lounge. But then that rather destroys the point of accepting that longer layover to save a bit of money, doesn't it?

Travelling back at home... and playing 'Happy Families'

I've only just got round to editing my photos from last summer's trip in France. It's almost as good as travelling there all over again, looking at the photos (at least the good ones).

But a particularly interesting thing happened when I couldn't quite remember a certain motto, that of the Bishop of Comminges, Jean de Mauleon, who was responsible for the marvellous Renaissance woodwork in the choir of his cathedral, and (I think) the lovely stained glass. Was it amor omnia vincit, or amor omnia tecum, or omnis amor tecum? Something like that...

I typed into Google: jean mauleon omnis amor. And what I got was this:

Glorious Renaissance framing. Lovely fresh colours. And naked ladeez.

Well, it's the story of Bathsheba. King David sees her bathing and one thing leads to another... (I think that may be David leaning out of the window in the white gable end in the background.) So there is Scriptural precedent for this naughty picture, but none the less, Jean de Mauleon was pushing the boundaries with this illumination, I think. Not what we expect of a prelate of the Church.

Right opposite is a page with a lovely floral border, and at the bottom, a monogram OAT - omnis amor tecum - which is why I'd stumbled on this illumination.

The book is in the Walters Art Collection, in Baltimore, Maryland. So if I want to see
 Jean de Mauleon's book, as well as his woodwork, I'll have to think about a trip to the States.

I have actually matched works of art up like this before. For instance, a long time ago I visited the Cloisters art museum in New York. It gets it name from the fact that in the days when you could stroll around Europe buying up pretty much damn well anything, someone decided to buy the cloister of the monastery at Saint Guilhem le Desert and have it shipped to New York. (Four other cloisters also got shipped over, but I haven't tracked down their origins.)

Much, much later I walked the Via Tolosana from Arles to Toulouse, as part of the pilgrim way to Santiago de Compostela, and was thrilled to find I'd arrived at Saint Guilhem le Desert. It's a charming village, full of running water, springs, little streams in paved water channels, and low stone-built houses; the sun was hot, the lady at a roadside stall had given me a few over-ripe apricots as I'd passed that afternoon, and the juice that trickled down my face as I bit into them was nicely warm. It was a lovely place anyway, but my joy was increased by the feeling that I'd finally fit together those two long separated parts of a locket, the church and its lost cloister.

The invisible wall

So many places have an invisible wall. You can't see it, it's not mapped in any book, no one can tell you where it is, but it's there. It's definitely there. And knowing about it can make your life as a traveller so much more interesting.

In Bangkok, I stay on Khao San Road. It's the tourist epicentre; full of tall skinny Germans with dreadlocks, Argentinian road warriors wearing elephant-print harem pants, drunken Mancs on a night out. And also full of budget hotels, which are, generally, pretty clean and pretty reasonable to deal with, which is why I stay there. But it's touristy, and tasteful it ain't.

But it's surrounded by an invisible wall. If you walk a few blocks in any direction you will find it; or rather, you will pass through this permeable membrane, and find yourself in another Bangkok entirely.

Wat Chana Songkram is a minute's walk from Khao San Road. Here, at seven in the morning, old men come to sit in the aisles of the temple and read their newspapers. Thai women cook in the open-air kitchen, preparing the monks' breakfasts, each plate identically turned out with a curled fish, a dollop of rice, vegetables, and clingfilm over the top.

Heading north to the market streets I found, instead of pancakes and cornflakes, banana fritters being served up in newspaper cones for breakfast. In the narrow lanes behind the tourist streets there are kitchens, just a shelf with a chopping board and a gas ring working from gas bottles tucked away underneath, where the chefs have to dodge little boys on bikes and smart suited ladies going to the office as well as their own waiters, always on the run.

Head further north, past the boat station and over the next khlong, and you're in a quiet neighbourhood of old houses, and schools, and one of the white-fronted houses hides a music school where students learn the Thai dulcimer and the rippling sound of hammers hitting brass strings shimmers through the neighbourhood.

A chubby middle aged woman brings her aged mother to the temple; mother is still wearing slippers. A Buddhist priest on his alms round shoves his bowl at me, and bursts out laughing when I'm not sure what to do.

***


Rothenburg ob der Tauber is one of those places that was always goig to be ruined by tourism. It's a small town, not much to it, easily swamped. It's on the 'Romantic Road', which means charabangs and tour groups and no one staying longer than two hours. It has an altarpiece by Tilman Riemenschneider (in fact, it has two), an artist who combined great skill and delicacy in woodcarving with a strikingly dramatic late Gothic sensibility; it has a double bridge over the river, the original town walls with their gates, unspoiled old houses.The main street is a scrum; tour groups marching behind their leaders from coach to church, from church to coach, selfie-taking en route, schnell, schnell, don't miss the tour, don't miss the bus.

Yet strangely, as soon as I got off the main road, I was on my own. A crisp, bright day, the snow lying virgin in the back gardens of the town; I got up on to the walls, and suddenly there was that soft silence you get when the snow absorbs all sound, except for the bok-bok-bok of a couple of chickens in a back yard and a dog that barked at me four or five times and then gave up. There were apple trees in back yards, branches black against the snow. There were views of red roofs and dark spires and half timber and stone, all the textures of the town. It takes a good hour or more to walk round, and in that time I saw three or four people.

It was a shock when I walked down a narrow, lonely alley, and came out at the end of it into the crowded press of bodies on the main street, and the noise, the yelling, the talking, the mobile phones, the trampling feet. 

Two worlds, meeting at a junction.

***
There are invisible walls in many museums and cathedrals, too. True, there are 'keep out' notices and chapels that are roped off, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about individual rooms in the British Museum which people don't bother with, because they're up too many stairs and don't have any of the big highlights in and don't have anything to do with ancient Egypt (because, let's face it, mummies are what people go for). The side chapels in Notre Dame cathedral with interesting tomb slabs and sculptures, but which are almost always deserted.

It's less and less easy these days to find 'unspoiled' or uncrowded places. But if you're alert to the existence of that invisible wall, you can sometimes find them in the most unpromising places.

Sparse culture vs rich culture

One of the things I most love about Ladakh is its sparse culture, the slenderness of its means.

Take the village economy. There are three trees, only three: the willow, the poplar, the apricot. The poplar for building. The willow for the roof, for hurdles, for sticks. The apricot for fruit.

There is one crop. Barley.

There are two toilets. Ladakhi toilets come in pairs; one for use this year, one for last year. At the end of its year fermenting, the compost is turned out in the fields, and the last year toilet becomes next year's.

This is sparse culture. It's not just the difficulty of the climate that makes it so; it's the predominance of a single religion, a single devotion (mahayana Buddhism has many deities but in all Ladakhi temples you see the same few - Green Tara, White Tara, Padmasambhava, Maitreya), a single way of life. (Though Leh is something of an exception: I met a number of local Sikhs, and stayed with a Muslim family, and in summer, anyway, the town is as much Kashmiri as it is Ladakhi.)

Music has only five instruments: the drum, cymbal, bell, the shawm and trumpet. Most music is sung: the ploughing song, the chant. A contrast to the richness of Varanasi, where bansuri, sitar, tabla, shehnai, violin and shruti box vary and ornament the two hundred different ragas, and the streets are full of diverse musics.

Iceland also has a sparse culture at its heart. Rich in stories - the Icelanders are great storytellers - but sparing in its food, for instance, sparing in the seasonality of its life, sparing in the lack of ancient history - though it has the oldest continually used Parliament site in the world, Iceland has hardly any buildings more than two hundred years old. Even its rifts, its mountains and its islands are recent, and not just in geological terms: Thingvellir subsided in the eighteenth century, so what you see now is not what the Vikings saw when they held their first parliament there, and the island of Surtsey is a mere half-century old.

The wonderful thing about Iceland, though, is that a sparse culture allows originality and eccentricity to develop easily. A ridiculously high number of Icelanders write and publish books. Bjork and Sigur Ros are just the tip of a huge Icelandic music iceberg. There are no traditions to hold you back.

Rich cultures, on the other hand, surround you with an amniotic soup of tradition, of culture, of music, of difference. This was the type of culture Shakespeare lived in - a mixup of Bible learning, classical myth and history, chivalrous romance, medieval devotion, modern science. While it's possible to maintain that the creator of Shylock probably never met a Jew - they had been barred from England for centuries - there was a Moroccan ambassador at the English court, and Elizabethan adventurers had reached Persia (Shirley), Surat (Coryat) and even Norwich (Will Kempe).

I was thinking of that today reading an article in the Guardian about Ethiopian music. With "80 ethnic groups and 40 native instruments" this is a rich culture - add to that modern tech and western musical beats, and you have something very massive and very rich.

Impermanence

Prayer flags at Pemayangtse, Sikkim

Western culture is all about making things permanent. We create monuments. We carve in stone, in Carrara marble. We build in brick and stone. Medieval masons built cathedrals that would last till Judgment Day. 

Buddhism on the other hand is about impermanence. All things change, perpetually. There is no 'I', there is no God, there is no-thing. Accepting that truth, the Buddhist can go through life unworried and serene. I'm hungry: it will pass. I'm ill: it will pass. I'm angry: it will pass.

Architecture, therefore, means a different thing in a Buddhist culture, and the religion expresses itself in ways that enshrine impermanence.

Prayer flags are left to decay; they tear and shred in the Himalayan winds, the fabric rots and crumbles.

Mud brick returns to earth. The stone buildings of Ladakh often seem as if they are returning to the mountain, or never left it; walls that sag, stones that fall from the dry-stone wall on to the path.

In Japan, the culture celebrates impermanence; viewing the cherry blossom, which is so beautiful because it lasts such a short time; the cult of wabi-sabi, the authenticity which comes with age and use - urushi lacquer that has worn thin, that shows the layers underneath, that develops depth as it ages and is handled.

There are temples of immemorial age, and which, even so, are barely two decades old, because they are rebuilt every twenty years, on the same design. What is new and what is old, in a world of impermanence, flows together and is confused.

(It's intriguing that the values of impermanence - the spontaneous, the limited-validity, the pop-up - are now being re-evaluated in architecture and town planning. We've had too many statement buildings, too many blocks of granite, glass and chrome. In reaction to this, the small-scale, the economic, the limited duration, have come to seem more attractive. But the philosophical underpinnings of Buddhism aren't there: this is more about Schumacher's 'small is beautiful', about self-help, grass-roots, anti-corporatism.)

So travelling in Buddhist cultures, I've found it's not just the forms of religion and its architecture that differ - stupas instead of steeples, butter lamps instead of candles. The whole intention of the architecture is different - the whole intention of the culture is different. You can look at a wheel and see a means of going somewhere very fast; or you can look at a wheel, and see a prayer made captive.

And the trumpets sounded on the other side

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," Keats wrote of autumn, and though by December the French countryside is bereft of fruitfulness, the mist is still here, close and grey and dampening.

At ten to eight in the morning our little group of walkers met by the mairie, under the stumpy pollards and the yellow glare of the streetlight. The forecast was not good; fog, fog, fog. There had been fog on the road driving into the village, so that we had to drive hard up against the verge, following the pale boundary of tarmac and withered grass in the headlights, and the mist seemed to be crystallising above the trees, so that the sky was hidden from us, and the world collapsed into a claustrophobic cocoon of grey.

We were paralysed. Should we set out, and risk motorway fog? Should we choose another walk? What would we do if it got worse? There was checking of forecasts, and checking of GPS, and swapping of mobile phone numbers, and no one was willing to risk saying yes or no. But in the end we went, as the mist lightened. Somewhere, but not here, the sun was shining; here, the mist was glowing, but it never cleared.

At Heurteauville nothing stirred. The bar windows were dusty, the doors firmly shut, a "for sale" notice barely visible in the dull light. The ramp down to the car ferry was empty; we could not see or hear the boat. Eventually, someone found out that we had arrived during the morning break in service. There was nothing to do but sit in the car, or pace the quayside trying to keep warm in the chill damp.

A boat passed. We heard the muffled growl of its engines long before it was visible, and the fog was so thick we couldn't see its whole length, only the blunt, dark prow cleaving the water, and then the long dark line of its side, and then silence, except for the slap of its wake against the concrete landing ramp.

We waited. A single light shone faintly far off, a pallid yellow that stained the white of the fog. I say 'far off'; it felt very distant, but we had no way of telling how far. At last we heard the chug of a motor, and the light divided; a light on the far quay, and a light on the ferry, that angled its way across the current towards us. (And that current was fast, and swirling, and evil.)

We drove through Jumieges, past the two great towers of the ruined abbey barely visible behind high walls; we turned up from the river road into the hills, and parked where a green lane ran off into the forest. Dull red cows turned to look at us, then lowered their heads again to the dank grass.

Mist in a forest is lovely. It turns everything to Japanese calligraphy or sumi-e, with blurred silhouettes and a muted palette of greys and browns, like sepia brushed on to slightly wet paper.


The nearest trees stood dark against the low sun; but further off, the serried trunks faded into grey, and only a sudden blaze of russet bracken enlivened the scene.

In the heart of the forest stands a small chapel, by a junction of grassy ways. Generations of passers-by have cut their initials on the soft chalky stone of the walls; inside, two shelves carried religious statuettes with all the banality of a small collection of garden gnomes or a lifetime's supply of souvenirs from Great Yarmouth. The square stone reservoir close by was almost empty; a single walking boot balanced precariously on its rim.

We came down eventually out of the forest, and on to the road that runs straight as an arrow along the bank of the river, turning back toward where we'd started. The other bank of the Seine was invisible; it was as if we were walking along the edge of the known world. Above us, white chalk cliffs were topped by dark grey trees, dissolving into the mist.

Down in the fields below the cliff, a single tree stood out, its huge limp leaves yellow in the grey. Dogs raced through a field towards us, barking. We'd stuck together in the woods, but now we were strung out along the road, one or two striding out way in front, others dawdling to take pictures, or chatting, or simply trudging along the tarmac. Cars whipped past, headlghts still on at one in the afternoon. In one of the orchards by the road stood a tiny  derelict half-timbered house where a wicked fairy must have lived, surrounded by stunted and lightning-blasted trees and tangles of briar.

A boat passed us, quite invisible in the mist. The sun shone straight ahead of us, diffusing its light through the banks of low cloud and fog. One one side the fields and cliffs and forest, on the other side of the concrete wall with its iron bollards, nothing but the sound of the boat's engines, the wake slapping the shore, a couple of swans in the shallow water. A solitary navigation lamp on its concrete pillar would have made a fine vantage point, had there been anything to see, but the ladder up to the top was missing, and the light was off.

After lunch, in a restaurant just off the main road, in a low, slanted room under heavy oak beams - and a good lunch it was, too - the path headed back up, zigzagging up the cliff through damp ferns and over slushy fallen leaves. The mist was finally beginning to clear; rays of sun slashed through the forest, cold light in our eyes, and suddenly the bracken was aflame with colour. As we came down to the village of Le Mesnil sous Jumieges, the sky cleared, to a deep, clear blue shot through with crinkled contrails and sharp edges of cloud; yet down in the valley, the Seine was still hidden by drifting mists.

In one of the orchards here, a drift of drying, brown apples surrounded a leafless tree; here in Normandy the trees are still ancient, high trees for the most part, not the low-slung trees preferred where mechanical pickers are used, and many of the farms still make traditional cider.

This was an atmospheric day; our risk ofthe morning had turned out well. We strode on, past Saint-Philibert's church, past Agnes Sorel's manor, with its fine Gothic window and a small wellhouse, on through open fields and orchards and past incurious cows and bedraggled horses, and as we did, the day delivered its final surprise, a sunset of
velvety texture and impressive fieriness that glowed like embers under the soft grey roiling of high cloud.