day trip #1: el chorro de girón

who likes going to see waterfalls? not me. i have the same ambiguous relationship with them as i do with live music. i like the sound of it, but i don't want to just stand there and look at it. i need to move. perhaps that's where i've been going wrong: i should have been dancing at these waterfalls.

ivan and i headed out to girón, a town ~ 35km from cuenca, from where we took a little truck up to the 'chorro', or 'jet'. a fat bastard at the entrance charged us $2 each to get in, and made us sign documents waiving our rights to any form of compensation if we got injured, in addition to making us promise not to go swimming 'because the water was over 5m deep'. i couldn't understand the link between depth and danger, but when i think about it, i've never seen an ecuadorian in an international swimming competition, so perhaps these people just sink.

a few minutes' walk through some scrub and we were there. it was pretty, and to spice things up a bit (much to my friend's delight/distress) i tore off my clothes and cast myself into the dangerously deep (and freezing) waters of the waterfall for some ecuadorian FKK. ahhh...it's good to get back into it...

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after playing with some llamas back at the entrance (or were they alpaca? i can never tell), we headed up to the second waterfall which the fat bastard said was inaccessible, dangerous, and couldn't be done without a guide. we must have done something radical by following the track that led us straight there. this track was much longer, a good hour or so, and passed over sweeping green fields of alpine goodness with panoramic views of the valley and beyond. it was lush, beautiful perfection. it's so damn good to get out into the mountains. and that's it for day trip #1. one thumb up for el chorro of girón.

i'm still walking

i always have mixed feelings about beggars in the first world, especially in australia. i'm stuck between that sense of empathy/compassion for someone whose life has gone pear-shaped for reasons beyong their control (whether they be socio-economic, mental health or otherwise), and that shirking-responsibility feeling of 'wft is our rich government doing with our tax money, surely they should be doing something rather than leaving it to chance generosity?' (with the emphasis on they should so that i can continue my day with a clear conscience)

developing countries, including ecuador, are different. i saw a woman in a mingy old half-broken wheelchair, stuck on the side of the road trying to shield herself from traffic because there was no graded entry point for the opposite kerb. i saw a young man with dense congenital cataracts who, for lack of a simple operation as a baby presumable spent his life singing for food on the trolleybus that i found him on, and then there was this (incredibly good-natured) man with dysplastic legs sitting on a skateboard at an intersection begging for money, because....what else can he do? the options aren't great. one realises that there's not a lot of cake in this country, and whatever cake there is, these guys are certainly not getting a slice. here you can unbridle your compassion, here you can not give enough, and whatever inadequate amount you do give (less than you could have given...less than you should have given...), you can still feel pretty good about it.

meeting people like this whose circumstances are so awful and whose only recourse is to beg on the street is the most powerful reality check you can get. here i was, a stupid rich gringo walking down the street, but when i met the guy on the skateboard, and crouched down to shake his hand, he took it with a firm grip and put his other arm around me and looked into my eyes with the biggest, most beautiful grin on his face and said 'buenos dias', and i just melted into a puddle right there and then, right there in front of him on the kerb. this man's reality cast light on my own, and helps me remember that despite my stupid weak leg and pain problems, not only am i still walking, but i've got it good. oh man: i've got it really, really good.

fear and loathing in quito

chewing gum vendor, quito

who sat next to the psychopath who got arrested as soon as we touched down in miami airport? i did!!! damn he was sexy though. i found myself fantasising about him between his crazy outbursts.

ice-cream vendors, quito old town

i tell you what though, 3 hours transit in miami were more than enough for me. perhaps it was the fact that i had just come from paris, but looking around at a terminal full of obese people with mismatched clothing and bad haircuts who simply didn't care what they looked like precipitated an acute episode of culture shock. i wanted to get one of those massive portable loudspeakers to make a general announcement "can i have your attention please americans! for the love of god, will you please just tidy yourselves up".

where's the fucking chicken?

through airbnb.com i had rented a room in the apartment of an ecuadorian lady living in the heart of quito new town, mariscal sucre. she was fun and lovely, but there was no denying she had a personality disorder. i arrived on a saturday night, but my bags didn't, so i reshuffled the clothing on my body to minimise the stench and after a few drinks with a swiss gringette, i headed out to dance all night at balzac, a gaybar packed to the rafters with ecuadorian faggots. it was a damn good night.

quito is not my favourite place in the world. it seems that everyone i've talked to has either been mugged there or had a good friend of theirs mugged. though nothing happened to me, after hearing all the stories and talking to locals, i quickly developed the fear. the streets, especially at night, are just barren and unfriendly, and you get the feeling that the city itself hates you. fucking ugly city. at one stage i walked a few kilometres north of my apartment to catch a film at a local cinema. i was actually stopped on the street by a local who told me that it was too dangerous and that i had better take a taxi or i'd be mugged, before wishing me 'good luck'. how reassuring. i took to stomping around like a psychopath in order to make people more afraid of me than i was of them.

but it wasn't all bad. once i had reined in my jetlag i was able to have some fun with gringos and locals alike, including the gay ex-pat cuban community which is so big that they've even got their own club for gay cubans (club magenta). who would have thought? shit those boys can salsa. you could break an egg on their buns. or fry one. i also got in some good hours of spanish study, and explored the old town, whose spanish-colonial architecture left me singularly unimpressed. the second best thing about quito is the geographic setting - a high valley between two mountains that have a suburban sprawl clinging to their bases and green cloud-covered peaks above. every morning i would look out my window at those wonderful peaks just before the clouds came rolling in over them. it was truly beautiful. for reference, the best thing about quito is the road out.

and so week #1 is over. i was about to take a 10 hour bus ride from quito to cuenca until i realised that i am a (comparatively) rich gringo with chronic back pain, and paying $30 more for a 50 minute plane ride was right up my alley as far as transport was concerned. my plan is to put my head down and study spanish 24 hours a day for the next three weeks. little success so far, but more about that later. i'm posting photos on instagram for all of you who have this iphone app (hello_ondrej is my name!), and am trying to post a photo a day to facebook, so watch out for those and let me know what you think!

hasta la vista baby

mediterranean

i'm lying here in my bed in the apartment that i've moved into in quito, ecuador - an apartment owned and shared with an ecuadorian woman that i enjoy and fear - and i've got pause to consider the last few weeks that i spent in europe.

2 weeks ago i made a snap decision to go to madrid. it turned out to be a good one - as these snap decisions usually are - and i spent 5 days basking in the hot spanish sun, eating tapas with friendly tourists, and hanging out with some beautiful spanish boys. i eschewed tourist sites in favour a people and squirrel-based approach to tourism and it was a winner.

the classy highpoint was a night of fever, vomiting and diarrhoea from the comfort of someone else's bed. the poor dude thought he had a hot date coming over and ended up nursing me all night as i staggered between his bedroom and his toilet. ondrej: 'the worst date you've never had.'

still nauseated and slightly thinner, i flew to lyon to meet g. we stayed with his cool friends cécile and laurent, and their even cooler children nils and cassandra (who i enjoyed so much i forgot to take any pictures of and will regret that until the day i die).

we drove down through walnut orchards (who knew that freshly stolen walnuts could be so moist and delicious?!) to the french alps and down into the ardéche region, where the earth is dry and the villages are made of ancient stone buildings all huddled around tight networks of lanes, and fields of orange and yellow are sundrenched and beautiful. we hiked along canyons and swam in the cool streams at their bases. it was life-affirming!

g had always told me about the towns he used to live in, and i got a good sense of them on googleearth, but i was finally able to walk the streets of these places - aigues-mortes, montpellier, sète when we hit the coast and spent our days snoozing nude on mediterranean beaches during the day, and eating exquisite food in restaurants hidden in the labyrinthine streets of historic old towns at night.

if amsterdam had been a celebration of the end of an amazing relationship as boyfriends, then the south of france was a celebration of the debut of its successor: an amazing relationship as ex-boyfriends! and hot damn we had a good time :)

i amsterdam

in what turns out to have been a celebration of our relationship, last thursday g and i jumped on the 07:25 train from gare du nord to amsterdam central for a few days of cavorting in the dutch capital.

who thought we could get a really cheap place to stay at the last minute? me. who ended up staying in an overpriced hotel because there was no room anywhere else? we did. we stayed at hotel adolesce just south east of the centre, and once we got over the price factor, it was a damn good place to stay. we felt more at home in our room there than we do in our shitty little apartment in paris that we continue to evolve new and previously unknown levels of hatred for.

anyway, you know those loser tourists who go to amsterdam for the first time and they just want to get stoned and then stumble around the city like fools? that was us. after a bit of research on the net, it seemed that the best joints in town were being sold at a place called het ballonnetje, (roetersstraat 12), so off we went. the dude at the counter pulled out a menu with the different types of joint you could buy on it and asked us which ones we wanted. after about 30 seconds of careful consideration, i realised that i had no fucking idea what any of it meant. g's face betrayed similar confusion, so i swallowed my pride and said 'i'm sorry but we're a bit amateur...what are the differences?' at which point he launched into a small marijuana-afficionado monologue that left us none the wiser, so we just randomly picked two to be done with it. when he pulled out the first baseball bat-sized joint (with its own plastic carry-case would you believe), i thought 'WTF?' and said that one would be more than enough.

after climbing up into a treehouse that we found in a park to smoke our joint, we decided that it all simply wasn't enough. the old adage 'moderation means stopping just before it gets fun' seemed pertinent. so off we went to coffeeshop basjoe (kloveniersburgwal 62) for their highly-reputed slices of cake, which we split in half and gobbled down with some surprisingly delicious iced coffees (these only took ~30 minutes to arrive. i believe the problem was that the waiter couldn't work out which side of the cup to put the coffee in).

the beauty of amsterdam's criss-crossed canals was something quite unexpected for both of us. the city had such a friendly and laid-back feel to it, and the dominance of bikes and pedestrians made it feel like a city built for people (rather than cars), which i love. remembering our canal cruise in copenhagen (which was a bit of a highlight in the otherwise dull (as dogshit) danish capital), we hopped onto a boat near central station and off we went.

i place a very high premium on oral hygiene and can gag at the sight of food stuck between someone's teeth or dirty tongues and the like. and so i realised that the cake was working its magic when i had an incredibly enjoyable conversation with a charming lady on the boat that was so fucked up that she was literally foaming at the mouth, with saliva dripping down her face that she would occasionally suck back up. even now my stomach turns to think of it but at the time i was quite literally captivated.

we spent the rest of the day wandering around looking at the pretty city and devouring dutch specialities: bags of fries drowning in mayonnaise, and raw herring with pickles and onion. yum!

on both evenings that we were there, we headed out to explore the nightlife, but were thwarted in our attempts to have a wild time by the lack of...nightlife. apart from the prostitutes in the windows and the young, straight, drunk and drug-fucked tourists hanging around the centre of town, the many gay clubs and bars we visited were on the boring side of the spectrum. perhaps we've been spoilt by the packed clubs of le marais in paris? or perhaps the netherlands have liberal soft drug laws because there's simply not much else to do...?

now i'm not sure about you, but in my mind denmark and the netherlands are so close geographically that i was expecting the people to look quite similar - and given that the dutch are the 2nd tallest people in europe, i was very much looking forward to some big beautiful boys to stare at. the danish men are so hot there's not even a word in the english language to describe it. you feel like your brain is going to explode just from looking. the dutch, however - and this was the shock - were extremely average, perhaps even slightly deformed. it got the the stage where g and i were convinced that we were on the set of yet another harry potter film (god forbid).

and that's about it. we hired bikes and rode around the streets and parks of the city, we took ferries out to nearby islands, and we checked out a bit of art while we were there. we both fell in love with amsterdam and its positive vibe. at the end of the day, what could be better than being with someone you love in a beautiful city and spending two days just shitting yourself laughing? not much :) peace!

big s in the city of lights

i do not labour under the delusion that only i know the 'true me', and that others can only ever understand a sub-total reality of ondrej that is privy to my own perception. how can 'i' exist anyway, if all of my thoughts are just a temporary chemical flux in a bunch of neurones? and how can the thing that is doing the perceiving also be the thing that is to be perceived, particularly if there's no real reference point? in contrast, if i meet someone at a party and talk to them for 5 minutes, how can they then not know me? who, otherwise, have they been talking to?

i think it is difficult, if not impossible, to perceive yourself in any relevant way, and if you then go and isolate yourself on a different continent, well...then your brain just goes and eats itself and you've got no fucking idea.

and so it was my great pleasure that my favourite sister in the whole world came to visit for a fortnight from japan. if anyone out there has any valid conception of who i am, it's her, and now, one week later, i'm fully reaping the benefit of her visit. i've been de-fragmented, re-booted, cleaned out and recharged, and now i'm grounded, motivated, and skimming ever so gently over the quagmire of european living.

what did we get up to? not much really. we ate macarons, we visited some parks and funky parts of paris, we spoke english, we picnicked, we ate macarons, we played petanque, we field-tripped out to the french countryside, we did the obligatory kiss of oscar wilde's tomb in the pere lachaise cemetery, and we ate macarons. in fact we didn't do much at all, but it was good.

iva's coeliac, and with all of its baguettes and pains de chocolat and what-not, paris is not the most friendly place to go gluten free. neither is it great for vegetarians, and when you combine the two, you either eat in a supermarket or not at all. and so it is time for me to confess that during iva's visit, g and i fell from the green tree of vegetarianism into the blood-red river of animal slaughter below...and it was good. g in particular came back with a vengeance, and seeing him lose himself in a juicy steak, i feared that he might start baying at the moon. maybe it was having two saskas in his face all the time that drove him to the edge.

and that's all there really is to say about that. for those of you out there with siblings, i hope they're as cool as mine. (though in our heart of hearts we all know that they're not, and that's just the way things are.)

for more images click here!

vespa

the other morning, i was sitting on the back of a vespa with one arm holding onto a fresh baguette, the other holding on to g as we zoomed through the cobble-stoned streets of the city of lovers, and i thought: this is paris. there's no other way to explore this wonderful city. the vespa is a metaphor. paris is a metaphor. and in those metaphors, you will find love.

lucky faggot

i met someone yesterday who was 47 years old, with a wife and two children and a well paid, professional position in a pharmaceutical company here in paris. this man was handsome, funny, well travelled, and seemed to have a perfect life. except that of all the people in his family, his workplace, and all of his close friends, not a single one of them knew that he was gay.

and it made me reflect upon my own life. i came out in my late teens, and for the last decade, i have never hidden my homosexuality from anyone. i have never, ever, felt that i were less than anyone else, i have never, ever, felt that any love that i felt for someone were not 100% valid. i have never questioned it. it would never even have occurred to me to question it. i have always felt like a complete person, and have always felt comfortable pursuing my dreams in life - whatever they may be - with a rock-hard sense of self. i cannot remember having a conversation with any family member or friend in the last decade in which anything gay was treated differently to what it would have been had it been straight. it's a complete non-issue, none of us even thinks about it any more - why the hell am i even wasting time writing about it?!

because it's not like that for everyone. and when i get reminded of those people out there who are hiding, or ashamed, or are getting discriminated against, i realise how lucky i am to be living exactly the life i want to live without ever even thinking twice about it. i am a lucky man. a lucky gay man! and though part of that is having grown up in a wonderful open city like melbourne, and a lot of it is due to my wonderful friends who support me in whatever i do in life, the basis of any gay person's happiness - and i cannot understate how important this is - is how their family accepts them. and that's where i struck gold, because my sister, and my mum, and my dad, have always, always been unquestioning and unwavering in their love for me. always.

thank you all for loving me for who i am. thank you!

cultural revelations #5: waste

Q: what's the one thing seen by everyone who visits paris, but photographed by almost no-one?
A: rubbish!

with 22 million visitors per year, the earth's number one tourist destination certainly generates its fair share of waste. sometimes the 50 metres between bins is simply too much for people buckling under the weight of a chocolate wrapper, so a lot of rubbish ends up on the ground (or perhaps it's a case of people imitating the locals who don't seem to give a shit). so, how is it that paris is not being smothered by its own refuse?

it's because of the secret army! that's right: there's a secret army of rubbish collectors who groom the main tourist districts at dawn before the hordes arrive, and make everything just perfect for the photo of your authentic parisian experience. it turns out you can have your cake, eat it too, and then just discard the box it came in on the grass somewhere, assured that by doing so you're keeping people meaningfully employed.

but surely they can't pick up everything? what about the cigarette butts? we all know that there's an international smoking convention that bans smokers from properly discarding their rubbish: as if choking on noxious fumes wasn't enough, these poor people are obliged to flick their cigarette butts onto the street and pretend that they really don't care. that's where the paris street wash comes in, and this is seriously parisian stuff: twice a day at intervals, spouts along almost all parisian streets vomit out water from the seine to wash away all those nasty cigarette butts, dog shit, and whatever else is lying in the gutter, so that people don't have to be harassed by the presence of the incriminating evidence of their negligence, and can continue on with their wonderfully chic, cigarette butt-flicking lives in comfort.