Yours in a Trulli

What's a Trulli. It is a traditional cone shaped stone building found in the countryside around Ostuni in the heel of Italy.

I arrived late to the old white town of Cisternino. With small labyrinth streets it felt similar to the Medina towns in Morocco. Walter my host met me and took me to a bar for a panini dinner. In the bar was a small group of woman who Walter new as he seems to know everybody in this small town. Despite being in the town for only 20 minutes, one of the woman already knew all about me. My home country, my profession and my alternative method travel. It turned out a man I hitch hiked with was her relative and had already passed on all I had told him half an hour earlier. Walter, his Ukrainian partner and 2 year old son, live in a trulli in the country side. My bed sat beneath the cone shaped ceiling and I slept with the strange sensation that I as a dream inside the head of one of the aliens from the movie "The Cone Heads". Walter and his family lead an interesting alternative and creative life, with many friends and an open sociable home. There was little work for me to do other than a bit of sanding and painting and playing with his curious energetic son Yan. Walter has some great Ideas. One of his projects is to set up an area of land where people come to take workshops on various methods of alternative construction. The buildings can then be used afterwards as accommodation for guests or the workshop participants and to exhibit local crafts. This would then slowly from into an alternative little village. Well this is my interpretation of his Idea as explained through broken English. His first workshop has left him with an interesting skeletal like structure on his property made from ribs of bundled cane. Just visible behind Walter in the picture below.

 I was able to meet many of his friends, see inside a trulli in the process of being renovated and get lost the valley by bicycle. The surrounding fields are scattered with ancient olive trees., some up to 1000 years old. These old trees are incredibly thick and deformed, creating a scene beautifully grotesque as a field of obese naked woman. Another of Walters great ideas was to travel the world couch surfing with a piece of sourdough bread known as "Pasta Madre", or "Mother Dough". In each home he would mix the culture, imparting a piece from all of the previous destinations and taking away with him a piece from the new destination. As a result he was able to send me on my way with a small marble sized lump of dried dough containing flour and cultured dormant bacteria from all over the world, some hundreds of years old. My destiny is to return to New Zealand and awaken my sleeping blob, thus releasing the bread leavening epidemic into the far reaches of the southern hemisphere.

I left Walters trulli commune and hitched to Lecce where I would be staying with the Auntie of Lucca, my host from Florence. Carla and Lorenzo were wonderful people. Very nurturing and generous, despite never having children of their own. Carla is a Biology professor at the local university and researching genetic modification of food crops. This was an interesting contrast after coming from the house of her nephew Lucca who passionately played me documentaries slandering the industrial food industry. Carla is not a filthy capitalist hell bent on inflating chickens, embalming calves with corn syrup and luring humanity into obese McDonald's addiction. As far as I can tell, she and many others in her profession are akin to the GE activists, trying to work towards a more sustainable, healthy, pesticide free world where food is readily available for those who need it. Lorenzo is a Civil engineer and tutors high school aged boys at the technical college. He is a gentle paternal and methodical man, and I enjoyed our mutually frustrating conversations in which I tried to improve my Italian and him his English. Both Carla and Lorenzo felt it was there duty to educate this scrawny traveller with every one of the traditional dishes from the Puglia region. Night one I was exposed unashamedly to the regions proud dish of Horse Meat Stew. Sorry to those of you who thought I was a gentle creature loving person, but curiosity won over compassion and Italian cuisine is deficient in moral fibre. Perhaps consequently, I was very sick the next day. I did not want to put anything in my mouth so had to miss a day of my food education. My hosts took me for a day driving down the coast to see small harbour villages, rocky aqua inlets and the south of the boot heel known as the end of the earth. I was able to explore alone by bicycle and train the fishing village of Gallipoli where the thick armed fishermen sprawl out on the pavement to mend their nets or weave cane basket traps and swim in the white sandy beaches near Tore Cesario. Most of all I liked the yellow fields of wheat and the red fields of poppies.

Carla's Niece took me out at night with her friends to the bars in Lecce to try Martini's and listen to live music. The old town of Lecce is very beautiful with many of the buildings ornately decorated with the soft sculpturable pale stone which glows in the street lights. Thank You again to the Perrota family for showing me the best of Italian hospitality.

Soo Sorrento

Napoli. I devoted an insufficient amount of time than required to appreciate the misunderstood city of trash. After 2 hours roaming the clay figurine cluttered alleyways and the African street vendor cluttered streets, I was happy to board a sardine packed train of pick pockets bound for the ancient city of Pompeii. Standing amongst the mob of  passengers with my back pack protruding obscenely out behind me, I could only imagine the many fingers having a field day within its pockets and submit to feeling as vulnerable as a man with a willy on his face. Never the less I was able to enjoy an enriching afternoon walking through the preserved streets of of Pompeii, dug out from its protective capsule of ash to reveal itself in a state minimally unaltered to that of 2000 years ago when the nearby volcano erupted and buried the living city. Many of the roofs collapsed under the ash but walls, courtyards, frescoes and mosaics can still be seen and a feeling of the city imagined. There is also a family of ancient inhabitants on display as plaster casts taken from cavities left by the ash buried victims in excruciating poses as they tried to shield themselves from death.

I was very happy to receive a last minute couch surfing acceptance from Paolo, a professional photographer in the nearby seaside town of Sorrento. This turned out to be by far my favourite couch surfing experience yet. Paolo had to work this night at a private dinner party function, but decided he could take me with him posing as his photography assistant. So cleverly disguised in his much too large spare formal shirt and pants with a camera over my shoulder, I mounted his motor cycle an headed off into the starry Amalfi sky to the fancy hilltop party venue. I spent the first hour awkwardly wielding my camera lens at the mingling party goers, taking terrible under exposed, headless snapshots while trying to look invisible as to avoid anybody asking to preview their precious memory. After this delightful trauma I was free to enjoy the 5 course meal of top Italian cuisine, watch the traditional performance of guitar, mandolin playing and dancing, and experiment with my alternative cocktail recipes at the open bar. I was then asked to assist with the fireworks display which involved  placing 5 suitcase sized bricks of explosives at the edge of the roadside while hoping they would be avoided by passing traffic. The next morning Paolo gave me directions to a very special swimming spot. It was a large hole in the ground , where I was able to climb 8 meters down to have a secluded skinny dip in the christal aqua water then swim through a tunnel in the rock out into the open Mediterranean sea. Which found me floating in a soup of rubbish so I quicky retreated to my hole of purity.

I was Paolo's first couch surfer so perhaps a novelty, but he was incredibly generous and put lots of effort into giving me a great Sorrento experience. He took me out to a restaurant specialising in Buffalo milk mozzarella for lunch, then cooked me a delicious meal which consisted of my life times cheese consumption all squeezed into one bowl. The following day we cruised around the coast on his motor bike to the postcard town of Positano and home to the worlds most visually grotesque lemon, then in the afternoon I was granted free entry into an extensive luxurious underground thermal spa where a friend of his worked.

 I was completely alone and free to douse my body in a smorgasbord of hot water, ice and steam while sipping on mint tea and listening to ethereal music until I too became a floppy piece of mozzarella's. I told Paolo I would cook him a tarjine one night for dinner. He then invited ten of his friends, so I had to take out his biggest cooking pot. Although Italians seem to believe they have ascended their cooking skills close to that of culinary heaven, I was relieved to find my meal was accepted and consumed passionately. We spent the evening drinking wine, talking and playing music with me on guitar and Paolo on his box drum. It was sad to leave Paolo with his gentile, genuine personality and loving friends, but the Italian Mamas of south Italy were calling me soflty like a moaning wale in search of her calf.

The Maskless Man

Like a bubble in the breeze, I float over country roads. Through a web of houses, cars and moving people. To some of these people I collide and stick, such that I am temporarily carried through their predefined passage until shaken loose and swept away. To others there is the sensation that I collide and envelop them. They continue through their environment and activities as usual, but isolated within my translucent film such that we move as a single entity. Their scene of familiar routine is hazed through a lens of a piece of a transient world. Rarely does a car pull over before I have had a chance to even extend my thumb. This however was the case on the day I met Francesco. While hitching between Sienna and Sere de Rapolano, I was picked up by a kind but completely hairless man who took me all the way to my desired location and gave me his details so that I could stay with him when I came to Rome. So two weeks later I arrived at his apartment and was happy to be greeted by Francesco and his son who then took me out for pizza in one of the pizza places in the narrow cobbled streets of Romes Trastevere. I spent 3 days in Rome with Francesco. I was able to explore the ancient ruins of Palantine hill and the Roman forum, enter the Colosseum and visit the beautiful plazas and fountains throughout the city. Francesco is a cabinet maker and took me into a fancy renovated city apartment in the heart of Rome where he was working on the new kitchen. It was not my preferred homely environment, but modernly sterile and decorated with discomforting large pink cow shaped silhouettes on the walls. Never the less it was interesting to see what I think is a good example of the Italian taste in design. Having his own business, Francesco is a busy man, but always seems to have time to spare, for a complete stranger like me. We had a few interesting conversations, one of which was about dreams and Francesco's multiple experiences of dreaming things before they happen. He was apprehensive to tell me that he had in fact dreamt my face the day before we met. He saw my back pack and the back of my head at the roadside and not until I was in the car and looking at him did he realise, "ah hello, the face from my dream." I am unsure whether he is convinced of any Divine purpose behind these premonitions but accepts them as unexplained phenomenons within the workings of time. His theory is that time is formed like a mesh with many intersections at which we may glimpse other streets. Indeed I felt as if our bubble moved through the ancient Roman streets on a path predestined yet unconstrained, old beside new, the now inside forever, time precious yet not held futilely with selfish anxiety. I hope that I too can learn to take passengers in my time travelling bubble.  Due to a medical condition, Francesco is completely without hair. No eye brows, lashes or whiskers. "It is like I am a blank page", he tells me. A page without a pencil must find alternative means of expression, but always the viewer is exposed to the raw material. To be involuntarily unmasked, perhaps psychologically provides a unique opportunity to be exposed and yet real to the people you meet.
Any way that's a deeply dramatised attempt to profoundly express yet another of the friendly and interesting people I continue to meet. I was also very pleased to re meet a friend of the family I stayed with in Florence. Tizziana gave me a bed for the night and took me out to a small intimate bar to see her boyfriend Roberto perform Brazilian music with his guitar and another man on percussion. Tizziana is an actor and is never without her talkative little stuffed kangaroo friend who is an extension to her persona. Together they are a very friendly and generous woman, living wholesomely within her means. After 4 days of roaming Rome I attempted to hitch hike my way out to Naples the city of trash. Given that all roads lead to Rome you would expect an easy exit. This was not the case, so after a day of flaunting my thumb at a busy motorway on ramp, I relapsed and ashamedly slid into the pit of society with those who indulge in the grotesque practise of public transportation.

My House in Umbria

Upon an ancient rock on a little hill in Umbria, within a bright clearing amongst the trees, sits a vast marble court yard. Cracked and overgrown with weeds and wild flowers, it  leads to a giant stone building laced with hanging vines. In this this structure, built as a monastery, known to be at least 700 years old dwells a small inhabitant who has settled a bed in one of its 30 rooms. And for 30 years she has been mistress of this monstrous paradise, until the now sweet age of 78. Rosamonda is a petite wide eyed white haired wonderment junky. Time has not seen her grow stale but quite the opposite. Each morning she watches her educational documentary on Steven Hawking, before preparing a blended breakfast of carrot and fruit juice which is dotingly shared with her 4 pet turtles and 3 cats. Aside from her pets she is seldom alone. I am one of the many travelling helpers who have come to work for Rosamonda in exchange for her hospitality and the chance to stay in this beautiful place. It seems to me,her main reason for hosting helpers is to have them make strange new artistic creations in her yard and thus fuelling her thirst for the wonderful things of life. Previous projects include an elaborate fantastical tree house with and inbuilt indian shrine and Egyptian pyramid,  a yin yang garden and a giant eye on a stick. My creative attempts were sadly unsuccessful with my short time trying to make a swing in which the user envelops their head within a glass bell. The result was "heading" more in the direction of becoming a messy device for decapitation so it was better the project was aborted. I did tidy up the "bits and pieces of wood" shed and made a storage rack from a couple of old beds, so that was satisfying.

During my stay, the place was port to many an interesting passing traveller. The place was overlooked by a stereotypical,  disciplined, methodical German but with the unexpected addition of a giant heart and vast emotional capacity. I had some wonder full conversations with a talented sculpture from the alternative, dread locked, new age back blocks of Australia who challenge my assurance in my judgement of what I may typically interpret as air headed thinking. Rosamonda is a great believer in the power of the Pyramid. She has great confidence in its ability to heal the body, charge batteries, purify water and preserve food. We did not find the time to affirm her claims experimentally, though my back ground reading on the subject gave me only claims of well conducted experiments unsuccessful in proving any supernatural power from the pyramid shape.

Highlights included a breakfast of banana pancakes 8m high in the tree house which was loaded to its unnerving volumetric capacity of 6 people, the night of sharing our own music and art from each of the creative travelling inhabitants and inflicting them all with my experimental ice cream flavours. Black Pepper ice cream, being my proudest new invention. Another gastronomical adventure was a brew of cherry bark tea which Rosamond claimed would cure my flemmy lungs. After stripping a branch and boiling the bark I was left with a potent bitter red liquid. The Australian sculptor suggested I tested the solution by placing a few drops on my elbow pit, close to the blood. I placed a few drops here then continued immediately afterwards to drink the full cup. No obvious positive or negative effects were experienced in my lungs, though a minor rash had developed in my elbow pit by the evening. According to my background reading, cherry bark is widely accepted to contain medicinal substances helpful for many ailments including flemmy lungs, but also an acid which can be harmful if you drink more than the recommended dosage of three cups per day each containing a tea spoon of the bark.

Rosamonda gives you the sensation of being very special to her and the estate despite its vast extended family. I left with the understanding that the Sasso is home to everybody in the entire world, those who continuously return to the safety of its timeless reviving walls and those who will never know that it even exists. 

under the tuscan rainclouds

I now stand in the lengthy que for the Ufizzi gallery in Florence with potentially 4 hours to spare for me to update my blog.

A very nice woman named Rita picked me up from Trento with her car full of other hitch hiker girls, and I was thrilled when we were all invited to her home in Verona for pasta lunch. I ended up staying with Rita and her two children for 2 nights. She gave me  a private tour of Verona, took me out for Italian coffee and cake and gave me a lesson in chanting yoga on her lounge floor. This was very interesting. According to the anatomical books she showed me, when you chant the "ong" sound you send vibrations up into a little blob of brain located in the centre of your head. This blob of brain happens to control a number of bodily organs I think including the liver, heart and even the genitalia. No wonder yoga is so popular. I strutted the streets of Verona pretending I was Romeo as I gazed up at Juliet's balcony. After 2 nights I caught a train to Montelupo Capraia near Florence to meet my next Helpx hosts, a professional street clown named Lucca and his partner Suzana who paints. They have 2 energetic affectionate boys aged 7 and 10 who I am supposed to be imparting English to through interactive osmosis. They are not that interested to learn but their parents are good students. I have been helping Lucca to free his strangled dieing vine plant, repair his bicycles and revive his wooden stair case. They are a wonderful family who are trying to make their lives more sustainable and organic by growing their own vegetables and collaborating with neighbours for food, transport and child care. I have watched baby chickens hatch from Luccas incubator, seen Ricardos circus rehearsal, joined in with he children's circus lesson, bicycled through the Tuscan country side adorned with vineyards and terracotta villas and been part of a dinner party for Luccas birthday party where many dishes of lazana, meetballs and tirimasu were abundant as well as jovial company. They have beautiful and interesting friends and being a family of performers and artists naturally there was balloon swallowing and dirty joke telling around the table. An Italian proverb says  "non si vecchia a tavola"; in Italy, one does not grow old at the table.
Indeed the food and time move slowly with possibly intentional rebellion towards the American fast food culture.

I spent one day in Pisa and was not disapointed to witness the leaning tower glowing like a sleeping ghost. I could not resist but give it a kiss.

Unfortunately the Tuscan sun has not been frequently present but the rain clouds pinched themselves this morning allowing me dry travel to Florence 1 hours bicycle ride away.

After passing through the natural cycle of ascending antipipation then down the slope of deflating enthusiasm into the troff of boredom 3 times, I was finaly granted access into the popular Uffizi gallery 3 hours after ariving. I have now seen enough disfigured representaions of baby jesus for my lifetime but was captivated by the "Birth of Venus". My highlights of Florence were the climb up the Duomo church  dome for a great view of the city from the perspective of an ant on a boiled egg, the exhibition of machines made from Leodardo Davinici's drawings and the statues on steriods in the Main square.

Dollomites

I arrived in cortina to find it a lot colder than anticipated and many of the hikes shut due to snow. Never the less i found one which sent me trudging through a white out snow storm to what i expected to be a free rough muntain hut. It was instead a luxury-ish ski lodge and restaurant so i booked their cheapest room and enjoyed the now clear view of the sharp pink and white mountains from my table adorned with 2 plump bacon dumplings. The blizzard returned for my descent the next day and continued for my painfully cold hitch over the mountains to Ortesei the land of little wooden jesus's. Well they actually had many different sculptures all very intricate and delicately painted. My night was spent shivering at -5 degrees with my tent perched on a tree covered slope out of town. Today I hitched as quickly as possible down to the lower warmer environment through the town of Bolzano or something similar on what may be the most beautiful road i have seen. It streams through the green valley with vineyards and church towers backdropped with giant cliffs. I am spending the night in Trento with my tent tucked up next to the motorway ready for a speeding getaway to verona in the morning. See the yellow blob bellow.
 I think i have found a rather good spot tonight. The rapists must cross a polluted creek to reach me and the police need to cross a motorway and descend a wall. I am so looking forward to treating myself to a hostel and some good food in verona tomorrow as the last few days of cold,discomfort and shut supermarkets due to Easter have aged me 10 years.

inside the man lies the animal

Inside every man is a file. And inside this file lies the animal with the desire to wrestle. If the man does not want to wrestle,he is sick, he is pussy. Well this is what I am told anyway by my couch surfing host in venice who imposes that his guests wrestle for his hospitality. This is not as perverted or disturbed as it may sound. In fact I found it a very healthy experience and a great way to use couch surfing to greater potential. Perhaps I was lucky that my oponent for my 3 day stay was a docile 5 foot mexican with no desire whatsoever to wrestle. Consequently I spent my evenings unleashing my inner animal on his placid body which lay limp and lifeless beneath me,tangled in the limb locking formation which massimo had taught me. To be honest I was a terrible wrestler, probably alikened to the the convulsive twitching of a halfe squished spider as i tried to hook my oponents legs into an imobilized state. To improve your healthy perception of the event i should probably not go on to tell you about the old sock blind folds and the video camera which were both purely tools to aid our learning of this sofisticated art form.

When not wrestling on massimos living room floor we were loosing ourselves in the beautiful laberynth streets of venice and preparing/sharing meals with our host. Masimos job was in security and crimonology at the airport and  he loved to speak about the mentality of people from diferent countries and share his knowledge at having obseved 700 different couch surfers wrestle and stay in his home.
Masimo dropped me off in the direction of the dolomites and i hitched away from venice. One driver took me home for my first lumch within an italian home with an italian family. They were very loving and i left  well fed feeling like I already had found my Italian Mama. The night was spent in my tent on a grassy hillside below the dolomite mountains gently tapping the keys of my much loved new travel companio,the kindle which enabled me to write this blog in a remote location free of charge straight to the internet.

Henry the Homeless awakes from his Slumber

My traveling Alias

Henry the homeless was bored of his bench
Tired of the traffic and sick of the stench
Then one day in may when he'd had quite enough
A wonderful thought was caught in his tuft
Here he was homeless in the land of his birth
Yet no homes existed all over the earth
So he strapped up his trolley like a pack to his back
With all that he needed, well all that he had
He threw back his whiskers and smiled with his charm
Put up his thumb and pushed out his arm
A car soon pulled over and opened the door
Henry the Homeless was homeless no more
For when he climbed in Henry became
Henry the Homeless on holiday

"Bang". That's a completely out of context piece of onomatopoeia quoted from my 10 year year old sisters creative writing but possible to grab your attention. My pack is back on like a long lost nose and set for episode 2 of a Homeless mans Holiday. Next stop, Italy with a few interesting plans in the pipeline. Firstly I shall take to the arena in Venice to represent NZ in the world couch surfing wrestling championships. Well perhaps not as prestigious and Honourable as it sounds but a worthy experience for a complete novice. Stay tuned for the Gorey details.

Shasa AKA Henry T.Homeless