Lights, Camera...Travel!

by Lonely Planet

  Los Angeles, 1982. I was there to direct a film and suddenly found myself, because of a sudden coup in the studio hierarchy, with a spare week. My film was put on hold while the new heads decided (a) whether to proceed with it at all and (b) if the decision was made to proceed, would there be, perhaps, a change of director?

  I decided that this was an ideal time to make a visit to Guatemala. I had long wanted to see the Mayan ruins at Tikal. This was before the days when travel bookings were laboriously made on the internet, so I visited my local travel agent and bought three tickets for the following day – for myself, my son (age thirteen) and my daughter (age fifteen).

  We turned up in plenty of time in an obscure section of Los Angeles airport. All went smoothly until I was asked for our visas. I had been told, I explained, that visas weren’t necessary for Guatemala. Quite wrong. Could I get the visas here at the airport? Impossible. They could only be obtained from the Guatemalan embassy in downtown Los Angeles.

  Back to our house in Los Feliz. The next morning I was given the address of the embassy and drove downtown early so that I could be there when it opened at, I assumed, nine o’clock.

  The address turned out to be in a particularly run-down part of the city. Every second store sold liquor, the streets were strewn with rubbish and the passersby were sadly down-at-heel. It took me some time to locate the correct number of the embassy building and, when I did, it proved to be a huge hole in the ground. I stared at it for some time in an understandable state of bewilderment as this was unquestionably the address given to me by someone on the embassy staff.

  After a few minutes a Latino man passing by asked if I wanted the Guatemalan embassy. Many people, he said, came to the address of this huge hole. He couldn’t understand why this was when the embassy had moved two years previously. Luckily, he knew the new address and wrote it down for me.

  The new ‘embassy’ was a few streets away. It was just one room in a broken-down office building. Although the room was full of what looked like very disgruntled Guatemalans, slouching in uncomfortable chairs, the visas were stamped into the three passports within a few minutes.

  The next day we flew to Guatemala City, rented a car and drove to the old capital of Antigua, which proved to be one of the world’s most beautiful cities, having the stunning architecture, gardens, churches, houses and squares characteristic of so many Spanish colonial towns.

  I kept hidden from my son and daughter a printed warning I had picked up from the Australian consulate in Los Angeles, urging me to ‘exercise a high degree of caution. Guatemala has a high crime rate. Criminals have targeted tourists arriving at the international airport and traveling to hotels in Antigua.’

  After a couple of glorious days of sightseeing and meetings with nothing-but friendly locals, we drove back to Guatemala City and caught a small plane to an airport near Tikal. Both the plane and airport reminded me of Howard Hawks’ 1939 masterpiece Only Angels Have Wings, with its unflattering but vivid recreation of a banana republic. I realized that the Hollywood version of Central America wasn’t too wide of the mark.

  The one-room arrival lounge quickly emptied of the few passengers, leaving us in the company of a louche black girl. Intending to phone to check on our hire car, I asked, ‘Do you have a phone?’ (This was the pre-cell-phone era, of course.) Lazily, she reached under the bench she was slumped across and produced a vintage black telephone, covered in dust. There was no dial tone. ‘This phone doesn’t seem to work,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘but you said, “Do you have a phone?”’

  The hire car arrived a few minutes later. With my son navigating, we headed down an appropriately potholed road towards Tikal. My daughter read from the guidebook a section which strongly advised against staying in the huts at the historic site itself as they weren’t clean, the food was terrible, the organisation a shambles etc. I’d decided to risk it regardless as the nearest hotel was so distant.

  As is so often the case, the guidebook was in error. The accommodation, though not luxurious, was clean and comfortable, the food plain but tasty and the English-speaking lady who seemed to be in charge of everything associated with Tikal was delighted to have three such enthusiastic guests.

  After a few days clambering over the ruins – pretending to my children that I was not terrified to follow them up steep narrow staircases and then to walk along narrow crumbling brickwork with a sheer drop on both sides – the lady in charge of everything asked if we’d like to visit another Mayan city a few miles away. There is no other Mayan city nearby, I smugly assured her, having read all the material on the Maya I could find. I backed this up by producing a local map, which showed no other Mayan city.

  She put the three of us in her Land Rover and headed off along a jungle track. An hour or so later we emerged into a large clearing with huge and totally unrestored ruins. A number of men were idly sitting around on the remnants of temples. ‘What do they do for a living?’ I asked. There were no towns around and no farms. ‘They rob tombs,’ was the answer.

  Friends greeted us back in Los Angeles a few days later with screams of relief. ‘We’re so glad you’re safe,’ we were told. ‘The coup in Guatemala has been all over the papers and TV. The country is in uproar. Thousands dead.’

  Evidently someone with the suitably sinister name of General Efrain Rios Montt had taken over the country, an event that managed to bypass me. We saw nothing.

  I seem to be able to march obliviously through turmoil. I was on holiday in Paris during the 1968 riots and was unaware of anything amiss. I was in Enugu, Nigeria, during a military coup in 1966 and noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

  Perhaps I have a strange gene from my father, Leslie Beresford. I was told that when he was called up for military service at the outbreak of World War II in 1939 he was stunned that a conflict was imminent. His interests were almost solely Australian Rules Football and cricket. He read only the sporting pages of the newspapers.

  Whatever the reason, our introduction to Guatemala was blissfully benevolent and peaceful. Everyone we met had been friendly – except the lady with the phone.

  Kala

  JIM SHARMAN

  Jim Sharman is a stage and screen director of over eighty stage productions, most recently Così fan tutte (Opera Australia 2009 and 2012) and films, including the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and currently Andy X: An Online Musical. He is the author of Blood & Tinsel (Melbourne University Publishing, 2009).

  Sydney 2011. Eli and I sit quietly on a garden step in silent conversation. We often do this. I’m sixty-six and he’s six. I’m looking for a point of contact in faraway eyes. I enquire of my godson what he remembers of our shared holiday in Galle Fort on the southern tip of a teardrop in the Indian Ocean known as Sri Lanka.

  ‘The sea turtles …’ Eli recalls, shyly. ‘And …’ with a roar ‘… Kar – luuu!’

  Sydney 2010. My own recollections of this trip began with the news that greeted me on arrival at Sydney airport on June 24, a day of political drama. After an overnight coup, Julia Gillard had replaced Kevin Rudd as the prime minister of Australia. Fellow travelers greeted this turnaround with uneasy silence. As opinion pixelated across plasma screens, one commentator slipped in a sly aside: '… they’ve thrown another leader on the barbie.'

  I’d scheduled a Bangkok stopover before meeting up with Eli and his mother, Aline, at the Galle Fort Hotel. The trip was intended as a triple-treat: it offered respite to Aline, my neighbor and film-producer friend, and renewal for me; for young Eli, it was a free pass into a world beyond his own backyard.

  Bangkok. The view from my hotel room in the newly minted Le Meridien on Surawong Rd was contradictory: ochre-tiled pagoda temples on one side and the eerily deserted twilight zone of neon nightlife on the other. Spirit and flesh were Bangkok magnets, but the city was recovering from riots by red shirt supporters of exiled prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and even sex tourists were in short supply. I’d flown from an
overnight Aussie political coup into the aftermath of a military coup-d’état.

  Tom Vitayakul, a friend, an art-lover and a restaurateur, revealed another Bangkok. He guided me through the vertical labyrinth of the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre gallery, a soaring atrium that housed beautifully curated modern art. And we ate. A traditional Thai meal at Tom’s Ruen Urai restaurant and, after a market quest seeking hand-sculpted toy animals for Eli, he introduced me to the delights of thousand-year-old Chinese duck eggs. A wave from Tom: ‘There you go!’ His farewell take on the Thai Buddhist adage, mai pen rai – it’s nothing.

  Galle. As my flight disembarked at Colombo’s Bandaranaike Airport, I was reminded of tropical North Queensland. At 1am the airport seemed provincial, dowdy and slow. I met with Amahl, the perky hotel driver, and we embarked on the three-hour drive that would deliver us to Galle Fort Hotel at 4:30am.

  Amahl steered his four-wheel-drive along dimly lit and often potholed roads. Sri Lanka was devastated by a tsunami in 2004 and by a thirty-year war with Tamil separatists that had only recently ended. It was a post-tsunami, postwar reconstruction zone and soldiers had been redeployed into a nocturnal army of road workers. There was a shantytown feel to the place, enlivened by bursts of light from luxuriant temples. Amahl explained that they’d just celebrated the poya (full moon) festival. Illuminated temples and the murmur of revelers returning to their villages punctuated our journey.

  The shanties soon gave way to the ghostly ocean and the realisation of being on an island under the dominance of the sea. It was easy to imagine ancient deities rising out of these tempestuous tides and demanding worship or sacrifice. We passed Sinhalese revelers partying on a black rock, their flesh silhouetted by glinting moonlight as they swayed and weaved around waves dancing at their feet. I was reminded that islanders know all about the sea – its beauty, bounty and random fury, while tourists simply enjoy the view.

  The Galle Forte Hotel is used to nocturnal arrivals and the friendly manager ushered me into a spacious apartment. I unpacked and slid under mosquito netting into the comfort of a four-poster bed. Morning revealed a beautiful sunlit room with a high ceiling; it’s fashionably sparse, elegant and meditative. There was a walk-in shower, a desk, discreet wi-fi but no distracting television. It seemed the perfect place to turn thoughts into ideas, and so it proved to be.

  Daylight encouraged a post-breakfast stroll to explore Galle Fort, with its trading history stretching back to the Greeks and Arabs and encompassing a succession of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial eras. They’d all left their mark in blood, stone, culture and architecture along the walled ramparts, narrow mediaeval streets, and terraced cottages housing today’s religiously diverse Sinhalese.

  The afternoon heralded the arrival of Aline and Eli. The handcrafted wooden giraffe and silk elephant from a Thai market excursion worked their spell. Eli was up and away, brandishing his complimentary ice cream. A relieved Aline relaxed by the pool, reclaiming some of the sensuality that she’d sacrificed to work and child care. Eli, meanwhile, established diplomatic ties with the youngest of the hotel staff, the two As: Arjuna (whose name means ‘dawn’) and Ahmeel (‘invaluable’).

  At dusk, Eli murmured a reluctant bye-bye to the As and accompanied Aline and me on a hike around fortress ramparts at the magic hour, that ultramarine moment before night’s curtain envelops black rock promontories and the velvet sea. Scanning this southern ocean, I was reminded of a song: ‘Antarctica starts here.’

  In the respite days ahead, Aline read, relaxed, swam in the hotel pool. I paced and ruminated in my sun-filled room. Eli treated the Galle Fort Hotel like an adventure playground and, with balloons supplied by the playful As, he was chased, captured and cosseted. There were day excursions where hillside meals alternated with Eli stick-fishing, suspended on wave-defying stilts. Eli was at his happiest releasing baby turtles back into the sea and on twilight rampart strolls, where his tiny footprints landed lightly on ancient battlegrounds. There were wide-eyed stares at death-defying cliff dives by athletic locals and we were joined in nightly meals on fan-cooled verandas by Eli’s new best friend, Kala, the hotel dog – lazy, but loved.

  Kala, pronounced kar-lu, means ‘black’; it’s the old Arab word for Galle, named after the harbor’s black rocks. Kar – luuu! It’s a primal yodel, and the word throbs in your throat. It became Eli’s banshee cry as he clambered over ramparts and chased balloons around the hotel before being corralled by Arjuna or Ahmeel and settling into angelic sleep on a foyer sofa.

  Eli had two default states. One was as sweet and engaging as the hotcake butter from a Galle Fort breakfast, while the other was full warrior mode: loud, attention-seeking, destructive. His child’s world was a silhouette in black and white; more subtle colors would wait in the shadows to be etched in by time.

  The sunlit room, the fort, the island: they ruffled my imagination. It’s twenty years on. Eli is twenty-five. Aline is my age. I’m gone. Eli returns to Galle Fort Hotel to relive the sensation of his first encounter with the wider world. Arunja and Ahmeel now run the modernized hotel. They’re middle-aged. The two As try to recall a rambunctious kid they once chased with balloons. They can’t. Galle is now a busy town and the once shanty-strewn road from Colombo is a neon-lit, apartment-flanked highway. Galle Fort is an international tourist mecca.

  Sydney 2011. We sit on a step in a Sydney garden and Eli’s cry jolts us back to teardrops past. Adventurers return with treasure from their travels and Eli’s bounty is a single word – Kala. It conjures distant forts, enchanting hotels, animals, rocks and sea; its sound throbs and pulses across time … 'Kar – luuu!'

  Goods and Chattels

  JOHN SEALE

  John Seale, AM, ACS, ASC, was born in 1942 in Warwick, Queensland, and now lives in Sydney, Australia. He has worked internationally as a cinematographer for over thirty years. Three of his films, Witness, Rain Man and Cold Mountain, were nominated for an Academy Award, and a fourth, The English Patient, won an Academy Award, a Bafta Award and a European Film Award. His other films include Gorillas in the Mist, The Talented Mr Ripley, The Perfect Storm and Prince of Persia. He has been awarded an honorary master of arts from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and an honorary doctorate from Griffith University, Queensland, and in 2002 he was appointed Member of the Order of Australia (General Division).

  For over thirty years I have traversed the world – visiting all its continents and crossing all its oceans, making camp in remote corners and drowning in the excesses of its biggest cities.

  Seldom have I had any destination choice. As an Australian freelance cinematographer working mainly on international feature films and with the insecurities of continuity of work, I felt compelled, every time the phone rang, to say ‘Yes’ to any job offers. Locations for filming are usually selected by the director and/or the producers and their choice is quite often determined by costs and production budget.

  My wardrobe was always on standby to ‘snatch-and-go’ – from arctic subzeros to searing desert highs, from muddy campsites to five-star resorts. I learnt early to minimize my pack of clothes and possessions – difficult when sometimes the film schedules could extend for six months or longer. And particularly difficult when you decide to pack up and take your wife and children too!

  In the early ’80s I was working on a film that was being shot around Saint John, New Brunswick, in northeastern Canada. The location was selected for its superb fall colors and we rented a log cabin there on the Kingston Peninsula. As the weather cooled down and the trout lakes froze over, our ‘Australian’ wardrobe was subsidized with layers of Canadian warmth. The children were attending the local elementary school and, as it was hunting season, they had to wear bright orange Day-Glo vests to walk through the woods to their school bus. During our months there they found many treasures they loved and just had to keep.

  We left Saint John in a severe November snowstorm and flew directly to New York.

  New York was having
an unseasonal heatwave. We had to attend a black-tie function and the airlines had lost one of our bags. Of course it was my wife’s, and the children were complaining loudly about the New York heat. Then it was on to Miami for gear checks for the next movie, which was being shot in Central America. With no time or funds to return to Australia for a repack, we ‘filled in’ ten days on a rental yacht out of Hopetown in the Bahamas and then flew on to Belize for the next five months.

  By now we had accumulated many bags with schoolbooks, souvenirs and treasures, snow gear and hunting vests, black tie and glam gowns, Christmas presents and snorkels and flippers, violins and light meters, jungle boots and sandals, fishing lines and maps and malaria tablets, lots of suitcases and lots and lots of dirty washing. A mountain of possessions – a nightmare!

  That was when we brought in the family ‘you can take whatever you want – but you have to carry it’ rule.

  Our children are now adults and flexible and confident travelers of this earth. Their years of struggling with gear and complaining about the weather and wanting to be at home for a friend’s birthday party are over. They know how to pack in a hurry, to minimize and to anticipate what gear will be required. They have tasted and enjoyed foods from many cultures and have the extraordinary ability not to get lost in a strange city. I guess these are lessons that can’t be learnt in a classroom.

  Meanwhile I still drag home too-full suitcases from around the globe. Another coat when I am cold, a bundle of scripts to read, my treasured yachting magazines and, of course, the odd piece of boat hardware – a bargain found in some dusty corner of the world. I have been known to leave out a bag of dirty laundry to make room for these treasures …