At Oulu, on Bothnia Gulf, sitting on a wooden pier, while midnight sun hung low, we heard German campers playing violins and flutes, and sotto voce singing...
At Gallivare, Sweden, beyond the Arctic Circle, we saw reindeer on railway tracks. In northern Sweden, elbowing our way through a crowd, our backpacks cleared a path. We climbed into a first-class compartment, while second class passengers barged through. I smiled at an old lady, who sniffed when I sat next to her. She wanted us ejected. When we waved our first-class passes at the inspector, she frowned.
At Oslo's Bygdoy Museums, we saw Viking ships and Thor Heyerdahl's balsa Kon-Tiki raft and papyrus Ra raft. I remembered, as a boy, making a poinsettia-stick model of Heyerdahl's Kon- Tiki raft. We admired wooden farmhouses and a stave-church at the Folk Museum. I was reminded of Ibsen's Dolls House when we saw a replica of his study. We then strolled amongst Vigeland statues in Vigeland Park...
On the Oslo-Bergen line, snow speckled mountains.... From Flam waiting-room, we saw fjord walls and green water. We brewed tea on our Gaz stove, and kept warm in our sleeping-bags... Our train cog -railed past waterfalls, back to the main line...
Bergen: Summer, but citizens wore mackintoshes, and dogs wore rubber boots...
To Munchen: In a compartment, a Hamburger described WW2, allied -bombing firestorms: "Flames reached the sky, sucking air away, leaving thousands of German civilians dead. After the war, we rebuilt copies of Hamburg and Munchen. There must never be another war."
Customs officials were discriminatory and racist, embarrassing us by leafing through our SA passports, and glancing at other foreigners' passports. When I used my British passport, there was no discrimination.
Munchen Hofbrauhaus: Beers-Cheers-Oooompapa, and sweaty Germans. Leah and I sneaked into Munchen station Super-Loo, past Fat-frau guard. When I was seated, Fat-frau threw my door open before grinning, schadenfreude passersby. "Jy moet betalen!" yelled Fat-frau.
En route to Italy, a Kiwi passenger said, "In NZ, Kiwis are protesting against your racist Springbok rugby tour..."
"Maybe that's because your PM Muldoon encouraged the tour in an election year," I said. "Yet in 1977 Muldoon signed the Gleneagles Agreement discouraging Commonwealth countries, including NZ, playing sport against SA. Why've All Black white teams toured SA for years?" I asked, "Without Maori team-mates, who're anathema to SA racists? Perhaps the real issues are anti-cop thugs and crims amongst real protesters; or Kiwi embarrassment at African countries boycotting the 1976 Montreal Olympics due to your racist Kiwi rugby support of SA; or Kiwi unemployment; or dispossessed Maori protesting about former land-grabbing Pom settlers, after your 1840 Treaty of Waitangi."
Kiwi squirmed.
"You Kiwis haven't sorted out Maori dispossession grievances. Are your self-righteous rugby protesters training future SA black leaders to successfully govern SA?"
Stunned Kiwi. He wasn't the first or last sanctimonious foreigner to bollock us about apartheid.
In sweltering Italy, Leah disliked Italian men leering from street cafes, and lounging against walls, making soliciting remarks. Annoyed, I wondered if Italian men were as uncouth to Italian women as they were to tourists. After frenetic Venice, Pisa, Florence, Rome, on the way to Pompei, we relaxed on the Circum-Vesuviana train...
Tanned men rowed us to Capri's Blue Grotto... At Sorrento we bought an inlay-wood clown-carving to hang on our toilet door...
< 1981. Wooden inlay clown, Sorrento, Italy. Hangs on Esslemonts' toilet door.
Southwards to Reggio, cackling peasant women, wearing black dresses and scarves, admired Leah's wedding-ring and diamond engagement-ring, while fondling Leah's hands. Southern poverty reminded us of puppet Transkei...
After the Sicily ferry, we trekked through WW2 battlefields from Messina to Palermo. Seated on a doorstep, we scoffed pizza, drank wine, and fed polony to a cat...
After the Brindisi ferry, we toured Corfu on a hired 50cc Honda motorbike. Leah burned her calf on the hot exhaust. At a northern lookout, we saw Albania beyond calm water. Leah liked Paleokastritsa's bare boobs...
Greece: After Patras, touts embarked our train yelling: "Byron Hotel in Athens - excellento." Byron Hotel was crap, its toilet fulla shit: piled solid in the toilet-bowl, dribbling on the floor, smeared on walls, door, ceiling. We slept on the flat roof.
Touring Greece, we scoffed souvlaki, donner-kebabs, wine, retsina, ouzo. We saw Peloponnesus sights: Corinth, Mycenae, Nauplion, Olympia, and tanned naked on beaches. Lingering in Greece, we visited Delphi, Meteora and Marathon.
We over-night trained through eastern Italy, through Switzerland to Paris, where motorists accelerated when we stepped off shitty pavements. At a cheap Left Bank restaurant, a waiter placed newsprint on our table, then wrote our orders on the newsprint. Much later, we observed Montmarte artists, while I practised French.
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