Amalfi Coast

We had been looking forward to this holiday for a long time. I was quite fond of Rome when I visited there last year, and heard Amalfi coast is beautiful and there were some great walks. It is in south Italy, where it is sunny and warm – well, could be a bit too hot sometimes!

It was busy in Heathrow on a Saturday morning, there was a long queue for the Alitalia counter, I guess there are a lot of people who want to get away for a real hot summer.
I was reading Graham Greene’s “Quiet American” on the plane. I saw the film a few years ago and like it very much since it unveils both good and bad sides of human beings and it makes you ponder and think. Reading and travelling are the two things I enjoy a lot in life.

The landscape gradually changed from dry plains to green hills on the route from Rome to Naples, when the plane started to descend, we caught a glimpse of blue ocean, shimmering spectacularly in the bright afternoon sun.

Coming out of Naples airport, the air was hot but quite pleasant; we got on the coach taking us to a village in Sorrento. After about half hour, we were driven into a mountainous area with narrow and winding roads built along the mountain ridge. The sun started going down, painting the mountains in orange and red, giving them a bit mysterious appeal. Then I heard someone pointed out to a hill and said in an excited voice, “that is volcano Vesuvius.” There, not far away from us, there is a rocky mountain and its top is rather flat, looks like part of it has fallen off. The sunset casted a warm glow on its greyish rocky face, making it look like a burnt ancient monument. This famous volcano is well recorded in history book for its eruption in AD79 which buried the whole Pompei city.

When we came out for dinner in the evening, the air felt cooler, maybe because we stayed at the hotel in the village Bomerano about six hundred metres above sea level. The hotel treated us with a wonderful Italian dinner, all made from fresh local produce, in fact most of the vegetables are just from their small field behind the hotel. We had a stroll to the village centre, which is just a small square with a few shops around. People were sitting around and having a chat, kids riding their bicycles around.

We did some walks around the coast to Amalfi and Pacitano in the following few days. In our day 5, we walked through the Valle de Ferriero National park, which is a dense woodland up in the mountain range just above Amalfi coast. The walk was very pleasant, going through the woods, savouring the tranquillity and beauty of the nature. We actually spot a snake on a tree, but obviously he was more scared than us, crawling away from the scene as fast as he could. And it is certainly a very rewarding walk. At the end of walk, we started to hear the sound of stream running down, we looked up, there are several stream flowing down from the green hills down to a small pond. We followed the leader, who led us into the upstream of the pond, after a few turns around the rocks, a big water fall came right in front of us. Then we looked around we saw multiple streams dripping through the grass from different directions, all feeding into a big pond. The water is clear but rather chilly, we can see small frogs clinging onto the pebbles. We decided to stay around the rock pond area for a while. We put our feet in the water, it was freezing cold. We sat by the pond, feeling the hotness of sunlight on our back. It was nice to be in a secluded spot away from the crowd for a while. When we carried on, the afternoon heat started to kick in, we passed the old roman channel systems, it was built to divert the streams from mountains to irrigate the fields on the terraces around. Quite an achievement for ancient Romans.

On the way down following the stream, we saw a family doing barbecue, they waved to us and said something in Italian, judging from the body language, we knew they were inviting us to join them. The smell of barbecue chicken was quite tempting, but we had plans for the afternoon in Amalfi, so we thanked them and moved on. We passed by a lot of lemon fields down the hill, obviously benefiting from the streams flowing down from the hill. Most of the fields have water pipes on the side. There are green curtains covering some lemon trees in the heat.

The Amafi coast has a very unique picturesque scenery, with steep cliffs dropping to the oceans from very high up, and the narrow roads winding up and down the mountain ridge to connect the dotted towns around the coast. Most of the days it was hazy along the coast, making it like a true beauty unwilling to unveil her lovely body curves. On a day with good visibility, we could see Capri which is an island within a short ferry ride distance. The last walk was called “the walk of the gods”, it was a lovely trekking through the bushes and exposed rugged trails along the coast. It was an extremely hot day, we arrived at Pacitano feeling a bit too hot. It was certainly baking on the beach. Mark went for a swim in the sea when I was wondering in the shops absent-mindedly. As if we thought the day had not been a good challenge for us, we made a decision to walk back to the village we were staying. It is a walk about three and half hours each way. But we were motivated by the idea that this is our last day walking here so we had to make the best out of it. It turned out to be a rather difficult walk. The first fifteen minutes were steep stairs that look almost vertical, we were a bit out of breath when we got on the top. We carried on for a while, drinking lots of water to keep off the heat. It was only thirty minutes after we started we realized our bottled water was running low. The next shop along the way was still about thirty minutes, I began to get quite worried. Then following a pavement in the narrow alley, I saw a sign in front of a house that looks like a small restaurant/bar. I went in only to find out it is a farmer’s house, well quite a big one actually. An old couple sitting by a table in the courtyard. The man was cutting some vegetables on the cutting board. I gathered my courage and asked them if they have any drinking. The man looked at me, confused first, then said “ah, Aqua, si.” And then turned to the woman and said something in Italian. The woman went into the kitchen and started some work. I waited there, rather nervously looking around. It is a big house with a nice view of the ocean. It must have been 10 minutes also the woman came out with a big jar of fresh lemon juice. I was delightfully surprised as I was only expecting some water. We thanked them and left a few euros and moved on with our journey.

The fresh cold lemon juice did give us a magic boost that we need. We carried on with the walks in the heat for another three hours, when we were finally descending to the village we were staying, the sun started to go down behind the hills, and there was little breeze coming from the ocean as well. It was definitely cooling down quite a bit. When we walked in the hotel, a group of guests sitting in the terrace greeted us and one of them said to us “you guys are mad, do you know it was 42 degree this afternoon?!” well, we didn’t know that, we would not have done it if we knew. But we made it, that is a victory and worth celebrating. Later on in the evening, our guide told us that we were the very few people who ever walked back the trail on the same day.

The hotel kitchen did a pizza making show on one night, Naples is the hometown of pizza, one of the great Italian inventions still loved by millions around the world. To this day, they still use the traditional stone oven invented by the ancient Napleans, and the temperature in the oven is around 400 to 500 degree, so the pizza gets cooked in a mere three to four minutes.

The evenings in the village were generally quite uneventful, we sometimes had a stroll down to the square and had a Gelado (Italian ice cream) treat. We found a place to play table tennis at a local bar, that was a good past time in the early evening. On our last day, we went to the town centre, while having a cold beer at the table outside the shop, an Italian guy came to our table, he is a short man with sun tanned skin and hard wrinkles on his face. We looked up at him, he was smiling, and then he tried to say something but hesitated from a second, then it seemed that he gathered his courage and said to me, “Are you from Japan or China?” I was confused but then understood, I said “China”. Then he was trying to say something about his house I thought, which I could not quite understand, I looked Mark, half confused half embarrassed. After the man was gone, we looked at each other and laughed. That was a strange encounter, “I guess he think I look very unusual, since they don’t see many oriental people here.”, I said to Mark.

It was certainly a memorable trip, when we came back in London, English summer seemed to be in its last leg. I start to miss the sun baked tomato fields, the breath taking coastal line in the mist, the orange tiled houses dotted in the hills and terraced lemon and grape fields. South Italy is certainly an enchanting place that makes beautiful dreams.

War, love and literature

I have always been a fan of Hemingway, I am intrigued by his courage, adventures and drive for a sense of self fulfilment and his unique contribution to the 20th century literature. “For whom the bell tolls”, is one of his finest works and I finished the book last night. Closing the book, I cried in the dark, not only moved by the dramatic sad ending but also by the stark reality it unveiled about war, love, life and death.

As in most of his other novels, his main character is usually a vivid reflection of himself in a lot of ways, not only the events he has been through but also his inner world – his thoughts, his belief and his struggle to find true meanings in life. They are generally strong and self driven characters but they also have a very sensitive heart. Slightly glorified by the heroism, deep down they might be confused, questioning the purpose of his act from time to time; they are also ultimately romantics, they believe in true love and self sacrifice for love.

The book is centred around one big mission carried out by the American volunteer Robert Jordan and his interaction and observation with the guerrilla group and other parties involved in the civil war. Roberto, he believed in fight for the cause, but still he was troubled by what people have to go through in a war which he thinks justifying for his cause. He believes winning the war is important and there is a price to pay, however he is not convinced that being ruthless and brutal is the way to defeat your enemies. He was not so afraid of death as such as he believed his act was the best way to fulfil his vision. But he challenged the notion when he met the love of his life, because spending time with someone he loves gives his life a new meaning that he didn’t realize before.

I have to admit that I was not so excited about the book when I started, it was a rather slow pace in the first 100 pages. However, as a good writer, Hemingway knew how to raise the interests of the story by slowly adding more twists into it. Little by little, we were brought into the whirlpool of conflicts, confrontations, intensive love affair, loyalty, betrayal and climax of the events. The ending, with its subtleness, is sad, however, from heroin point of view, he had accomplished his mission, and as he was lying there waiting for his death, he was content in a way he has had a full life, even that means only three days and nights.

Hemingway was a passionate supporter of republic in the civil war, yet he witnessed the bureaucracy, ignorance and lack of discipline in the army that he had high hopes for. This was very well portrayed in this novel, it is hard to believe, an army and government under the threat of the fascists could be so complacent and laidback. Sad, but it is the truth. He is an idealist, as he could die for his belief but he doesn’t regret this kind of choice. In this novel, we can see the shift in Hemingway from a pure enthusiastic young man (when he wrote farewell to arms) to a mature warrior. Having experienced first world war and Spanish civil war, he started to question the cause for the war, is it ok to fight for its cause when the process itself might be utterly painful and brutal? This is a rather profound question, which I believe we still could not answer today.

War, hunting and bull fight, are Hemingway’s favourite subjects, partly because that when he presents the characters confronting life and death and in the fight to become a heroine like human being. Just recently, I learned, in contrary to my assumption before, He was not particularly strong physically even he liked to be a strong man. But he certainly had a full life given what he was born with. Not many writers in the world could compare with him in terms of the variety of things he had done in life. And that certainly gave him a ubiquitous edge that others find hard to imitate.

Live to the full and express it to the full in writing, which is what he had done, when he realized it was all over for him, he had only one choice. Death is not something he was particularly afraid of, as he is a man with strong desires to explore, when he can’t do that anymore, death is the only exit.

I do believe your best writing come from things and people that you are most close to, that is an inspiration as well as a strong bond and connection. But do people have the same interest on the ordinary drama in a everyday life as compared with the dramatic setting such as war, I am not sure. I think sometimes we are all looking for something more exciting, challenging and fulfilling than our own small world, and literature could be on way to explore it.

Gone are the glorious days of independent journalism?

It has been a rather sad year for proud, independent news agencies who have been around for more than a century. Reuters and Dow Jones, the two well respected companies in the editorial world, have fallen into the hand of media conglomerate, namely Thomason financials and News Group. Both Reuters and Dow Jones used to be an icon in their industry, and they partly formed and revolutionized the modern journalism and news industry.

Money talks these days, and if someone got a deep pocket, that certainly wins a smile and nod from profit hunger shareholders. It was only a matter of time really for these companies to be acquired by bigger media companies. Their operating performance in the past ten years haven’t been satisfying to the shareholders, and both struggling to compete with new rivals. They made themselves a natural and easy target for the conglomerate looking to expand their business and presence.

Big fish gets all, and their ambition and interest will be the commercial value of the business. Editorial independence will probably be kept as long as they are not in conflict with their commercial interest and profit goals. News group is well known for its rather cosy relationships with governments so that they get green lights to run business in countries with strict media censorship.

The truth is though, there are many journalists out there filming and reporting from the disaster hit area and battle fields and money is the last thing they want to think of – who would if you had to risk your lives? The devotion comes from a strong belief and faith in the integrity and independence of journalism.

I see shadows start to emerge under the two bright stars in the news industry, they will still shine but the magic glow around them is fading. There is something money can’t buy.

Canary wharf and Greenwich village

If you really want to get a good feel of a metropolitan city feel in London, then canary wharf is the place. After 17 months since I moved here, I paid a rather belated visit to the area on a fine summer day. And right after I came out of the tube station, I saw the Reuters Square, where they have their logo on top of a high rise office building and the bill board screen showing the stock prices. Such a familiar look, that is the company I worked for three and a half years and it was literally my first job, certainly the first one with a multinational company. So much has changed since 1995 when I joined the company. And Reuters will soon be the Thomason-Reuters, a Canadian-British company. And here I am, standing in front of the building, contemplating life is a mysterious spinning wheel that you never know where you would end up in ten or twenty years. One thing I do know though, I am not back to where I started, I am just passing by my old memory in the unexpected way.

Greenwich village is an interesting place, now with cutty sark being renovated (burnt down with severe damage two months ago), it is a quieter than expected on the street. But it is school holiday time, when I reached the top of the hill in the park where the maritime museum is, I saw the groups of school kids packing out right in front of the entrance. It is a good viewing point on the top of the hill, you get to see the panorama view of the canary wharf.