My swell day as a bouncing bomb

Jeremy Atiyah jumps into a turbo-charged rubber ring and crashes through the cold North Sea for the funniest five minutes of his life

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 25 October 1998

RICHARD BARRETT gestures at the blue skies, still seas and balmy autumnal sun shining over Lowestoft. "Terrible weather," he grumbles. Terrible, that is, if your favourite hobby requires the presence of mountainous waves. I was in Norfolk for a ride in a Rigid Inflatable Boat (or RIB).

"We like it extreme," adds Richard, the director of North Sea Training Services, a company which trains about 1,000 people a year in sea-rescue, operating in stormy weather off Britain's oil rigs. A sideline of the business is taking tourists out for wild North Sea rides on his training boats. And the higher the waves the better the ride.

The beauty of an RIB is that it is virtually indestructible. Unlike conventional fibre-glass powerboats, which operate only in calm conditions, an RIB can put forth in winds of up to 100mph. Its secret is simple buoyancy. If an 80ft wave crashes over your RIB, you will not fill up with water. This thing is so buoyant it can afford to be open at the back. Excess water simply drains away.

Which is not only reassuring news for those people who have fallen off oil rigs in storms. It also spells joy for people who like the idea of bouncing safely at high speed through towering waves. Richard Barrett, the local equivalent to Richard Branson, is one such person, as is his chief instructor, a character known as Dog. "Dog's mad," Richard tells me. "He'll stand there in a full storm eating fried egg and bacon sandwiches. But I did the Round-Scotland Race last year with him in a boat called Braveheart. A beast of a boat. We came first in our class."

Braveheart, it turns out, is currently being upgraded to a monster vessel which can travel at up to 80mph - the ultimate executive toy. And rugged Richard with his voluptuous girlfriend look just the pair to take Britain's oceans by storm.

"There's a swell from the north," reports a group of incoming trainees in dry suits, just as we are going out. "Mackerel sky. Waves breaking on the bank." That sounds more promising then. After a quick safety briefing, explaining what I should do in an emergency - how to contact the safety boat by radio, how to take control of the boat - we are ready to go. The boat I am testing today is a little one that does only 40mph, though that is fast enough when progress is as smooth as a bouncing bomb.

Richard gives a demonstration in the art of chasing waves. The boat skims right over the top of them, before slamming down wham-ergh! into the water. There is a suggestion that there may be seals on the sand bank, though (wham-ergh!) luckily it is not seals that I am here for today.

Next it is my turn. And happily, learning to drive an RIB is a whole lot easier than learning to drive a plane. There is a steering wheel and a throttle, and that is about it. Nothing to crash into. Beyond the harbour entrance, no rules of the road. Well, none that I have to worry about. What's more, the driver's seat is the most comfortable on the boat. I feel like I have got the whole machine between my legs.

When the new Braveheart is ready, Richard tells me, all the passengers will get to sit in comfortable seats and nobody will feel they are about to fly out of the boat. Not that I am scared of flying into the water, even from this relatively small RIB. I am in a wet-suit, a dry-suit and a life-jacket. In fact, I am so warm that the North Sea in late October looks quite tempting.

Which is lucky, because, RIBs are perfect for water sports. If you thought water-skiing in the Mediterranean was fun, try being dragged through the North Sea in stormy seas.

North Sea Training Services has got various water toys, including the fantastic turbo ring (otherwise known as the ringo, donut or biscuit) which is a tiny, one-man rubber dinghy attached to the boat by a long rope. I swing, bounce, flail and fly at high speed over the waves as Richard spins the boat this way and that, apparently trying to shake me off. After the most hilarious five minutes of my life I finally take off out of my donut, and land on my head several miles away. Or that is how it feels.

As the RIB spins round to pick me up again, it is almost a disappointment to be rescued. Lying on my back in the North Sea in a stiffening northerly breeze has never been so much fun.

Jeremy Atiyah's adventure was arranged by Anglian Activities (tel: 01603 700770). Packages include: Wet Dream Day (steer, practise boat handling exercises at speed, offshore survival techniques, man overboard and ringos. Minimum group size is six, price pounds 140 per person); RIB Excursion (half- day trip on the North Sea, details as above. Minimum group size is six, price pounds 74 per person). RIBs Water-Skiing & Wakeboarding (trip out on the RIBs with water-skiing, wakeboarding or ringos. Minimum two people. Trip lasts about one hour, price pounds 105 per group of two to four people). Anglian Activity Breaks can also organise hotel accommodation.

A long journey through a thin land

Jeremy Atiyah arrived in Chile by tunnel and shivered in the Andes before dropping headlong into lush valleys and on to packed holiday beaches

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 18 October 1998

CROSSING THE longest, thinnest country in the world, you face a very simple choice. You can take the long way: 2,500 miles from the rainless Atacama desert to the mountainous glaciers of Patagonia. Or you can take the thin way: a 100-mile drive from the Andes to the Pacific. I chose the second way.

A lack of ambition? Or the voice of moderation in a country of natural extremes? No wonder Chilean politics gets polarised with geography like that. In the southern summer last December, during my visit, I heard constant boasting about the climatic differences between the Chilean Antarctic and the far north. Luckily for me, I was in the middle, tracing my moderate line.

Not that there was anything moderate about the Chilean Andes. This was indeed summer, but arriving by bus through a tunnel from Argentina, I found a winter's worth of Pacific snow still dumped on the mountainside. Immigration formalities took place in a freezing hanger. And from up here on the top of the mountain, the descent to the Pacific looked almost vertical.

I caught a last glimpse of Aconcagua, the tallest peak in South America, just as a man and guitar was regaling the passengers with a rustic, grating song of Chile. The road plummeted a couple of thousand feet in 10 minutes. Amazing that trains used to clamber up and down this precipice - the old line from Mendoza (in Argentina) to Santiago was still visible, though the service had been suspended years ago. Down in Santiago itself, as I would soon see, the old Mapocho train station had turned into a cultural centre.

It was like driving from Mont Blanc's glaciers to Tuscany in less than an hour. Suddenly this was the benign landscape of central Chile. Rich deciduous trees began to dot golden hills. Crickets chirruped and vines burgeoned under squintingly blue skies. You couldn't fault the taste of those conquistadors who felt more at home in Chile than in the jungles of Peru or on the pampas of Argentina. And for all the country's thinness there was a surprising amount of space. I glimpsed avenues of palms leading to latifundia-style mansions, and peasant shacks with mules tied to gum trees outside. Meanwhile, inside the bus, a fat man kept offering me leaky empanadas stuffed with bolognese sauce. We stopped at the town of Los Andes, where girls in school uniform read comics in silence. Heat and torpor had settled over the land.

Time for something extreme? An hour later I was in Santiago, the middle of the middle of Chile, surrounded by short, stocky people of mixed indigenous and European blood The town centre, the Plaza de la Constitucion, was how Croydon would have looked had Hitler won the war. Lots of people have disappeared from around these streets in the last few decades, but today just one policewoman with a helmet and lipstick was eyeing the traffic. Occasional churches, a pink plaster post office and 18th century posadas - Atlantic buildings wrapped in wooden balconies - varied the architectural menu.

I sat about in traditional bodegas, or wine cellars, drinking iced fruit punch in the company of men wearing straw hats. In the Plaza de Armas where grass was being mown in hot sunshine, snowy Christmas cards were on sale. Dogs slept in the shadows, men with Clark Gable moustaches sat in cafes, kissing lovers canoodled on park benches. And Santiago's big avenue (a mere four lanes compared to Buenos Aires' fourteen) was named after the man for whom Chile's eternal flame burns: the unlikely Bernard O'Higgins, he who liberated Chile from the yoke of Spanish rule. To have chosen the illegitimate son of an Irishman as its national hero will endear Chile to me forever.

And then there was the central market of Santiago, a place to reassure yourself of the pleasures of living in the middle of the world. Fat olives, exotic fruits, strings of garlic and seafood lay about in piles. It was the Mediterranean but not quite as you know it: maduritos instead of apricots; sundried chillies instead of tomatoes.

Come to think of it, was this really the Old World masquerading as the New World? Or was it a third way - something in between? I skidded over the old flag-stones of the central museum, to find the painting which depicted the moment of the founding of Santiago, the moment when Pedro de Valdivia in a plumed helmet and long boots decided upon the spot "with his Indian friends". In the Museum of Pre-Colombian Art, I looked at displays of fishing spears, in use, according to the caption, "between 4000BC and 1900AD". But it did not say what happened after 1900AD.

Well, I still had the second half of my journey to work things out. It was perfect timing for a trip to the seaside: Saturday morning in early summer. The whole of Santiago was queuing at the bus station. The fact that I still managed to reserve a seat for an instant departure reminded me yet again what an easy place Chile was in which to travel. We descended through valleys of vineyards backed by blue mountains. The fact that Valparaiso was Chile's second city did not make it a large place. Nevertheless, the government has moved its National Congress here and it now occupies a handy location outside the bus terminal. Handy for MPs that is.

But I doubted whether fabulous Valparaiso needed those MPs. Why should it? A 16th-century city which resembled a fantasy medieval port town and still managed to act as a large modern harbour? From a waterfront smelling of wet cat fur I was only worried about buildings sliding into abrupt ravines. Colourful streets were piled high in the sky. The way to reach them was via 100-year-old rickety funiculars shunting up almost vertical cliff-faces.

But to round off my thin journey, I was heading for the beach, at nearby Vina del Mar. And here I found myself in the land of the leisured. There were no more short, dark people, but lots of tall, fair ones. Kids were holding surfboards and eating hot dogs with kaleidoscopic layers of mayonnaise and ketchup. The beach was as packed as a beach should be. And the waves tearing in from the Pacific were real rollers - ten-thousand-mile ripples from New Zealand.

From the Andes to the Pacific. Hmm. This thin slice of Chile, I reflected, had been really quite a long one.

FACT FILE

chile

Getting there

Jeremy Atiyah travelled as a guest of British Airways (tel: 0345 222111) and Journey Latin America (tel: 0181-747 3108). British Airways flies daily to Santiago (except Tuesday) from Gatwick. Flights take 16 hours 45 minutes, including one stopover. Journey Latin America offers return flights (autumn season) for pounds 425, including tax, with Avianca, via Bogota, departing from Heathrow. Over the Christmas period prices rise to pounds 724. For those seeking the full Chilean experience, the company also provides a "Penguin" 19-day tour, flying to Santiago with Iberia. The price is pounds 2,177 per person, based on two sharing, and includes flights, tour guide, internal travel, three-star accommodation and excursions to Lauca National Park, the Atacama Desert and the Chilean Lake District.

Where to stay

Accommodation for various budgets can be arranged for individual travellers before departure through Journey Latin America. Alternatively, there is a growing network of Chilean youth hostels which can be contacted through the Asociacin Chilena de Albergues Tursticos Juveniles (tel: 00 562 2333220).

Further information

UK citizens do not require visas to enter Chile.

Tourist information can be obtained from the tourist section of the Chilean embassy in London (tel: 0171-580 1023).

For more comprehensive information, exhaustive Chilean guide books are available from Footprint (pounds 10.99), Lonely Planet (pounds 11.99) and Insight (pounds 13.99).

A valley designed by artists

Jeremy Atiyah walks through the edible landscape of the Tarn River, below France's Massif Central, and tastes the local figs, chestnuts, Roquefort cheese and sage-and-honey vinegar

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 11 October 1998

BEAM ME down into any obscure department of France, and I will show you ancient stone villages, a unique local cuisine, hilltop chateaux, edible landscapes, picturesque bridges and great historic dramas.

Dubious? Well, take a walk through the Tarn Valley then. This is the French Deep South, near Toulouse, where the River Tarn spills down deep gorges from the Massif Central. The river has given its name to one of the departments through which it flows. And it was here that I was beamed down just last week.

A bird of prey in the skies above France could not have landed with such unerring accuracy. From the minute I picked up the route (in walking parlance, this was the GR36), the sun came out and I was surrounded by fig trees and stone houses with mossy slate roofs. A tiny Romanesque chapel emerged from the undergrowth.

Being honest, I'll mention that this first hamlet turned out to be something of an anomaly. In fact, La Maurinie was a place that would have disappeared years ago were it not for the attentions of a family of Russian artists who arrived here in 1946. "It was a very poor, wretched place when my parents came," explained Michael Greschny, appearing with a gigantic key to open the chapel. "This was mostly stuff we saved from being burnt as firewood." The chapel was packed with fantastic religious icons, gloomy wooden Christs and popes in brick niches.

Michael Greschny has created a life for himself that Merchant-Ivory Productions could not have dreamt of. Pushing past plum trees, he showed me his studio, a medieval barn full of dusty canvases, old clocks, half-finished works, cobwebs, skylights, and forests of brushes in jamjars. And this ultimate Bohemian, who lives with a wife and child, even manages to make money by running exclusive art courses and selling handmade jewellery to Faberge.

Time to get walking. With half a jug of wine in my belly, I was soon heading east in the direction of Ambialet. Perhaps the whole Tarn Valley had been designed by artists. Piles of firewood were stacked against old stone walls overhung by chestnut trees. Dogs barked distantly. Rusty, ancient maize- grinders occupied strategically picturesque locations beside geranium pots. By the time I reached the Hotel du Pont in Ambialet, I had been nicely primed to gasp at everything.

But Ambialet is where the Tarn suddenly has a fit and tries to double back on itself. Having achieved an impossibly tight loop through forest- clad hills, it then comes face to face with itself; whereupon it balks, and retreats in the same direction as before. The result is a tear-shaped isthmus, a squeezed hill of schist, surrounded entirely by Tarn.

I took a swim in the hotel pool, overlooked by a stone bridge and an old Benedictine priory on a craggy hilltop. This place is so picturesque that even the local electricity-generating plant has been built to resemble a chateau. The next morning I took a lift up to the priory from where the whole bizarre panorama became clear.

Eastwards from Ambialet, the Tarn throws a few more skittish twists before settling into a smoother flow in the area of Villeneuve-sur-Tarn, where I picked up the path again. But here, on the north bank of the river, I needed to pop in to the local Mielerie et Vinaigrerie - owned by celebrated honey and vinegar producer, Monsieur Richard Marietta.

This valley seems to have the knack of producing well-sorted men. Living in a farmhouse on a mountainside overlooking the river, with his wife, son, horse, dog and goat, Richard Marietta fanatically grinds his own wheat to make his own bread. He also lovingly tends beehives to produce honey which he sells commercially. You thought you knew about honey?

"At 800m, the flowers are very different to those at 200m," he explained. "Depending on the location of the hive, and the time of year, the honey is very different. The honey produced by bees who visit chestnut trees between 20 June and 20 July is dark and strong; the honey from spring wild flowers is light and lemony."

Meanwhile, in another shed, a vast fermentation was taking place: Monsieur Marietta uses tons of honey to produce his luxury vinegar in barrels. An extravagant use of delicious honey?

"Why? People buy expensive cars and travel round the world. Why should rich people drink the cheap, unhealthy vinegar from supermarkets that took one day to produce? If they do, their priorities are all wrong."

At that moment, tasting a golden vinegar infused with sage, it was hard to disagree.

Back on the south bank again, the path was soon running high above the river. I glanced back onto the town of Trebas, a cluster of slate roofs, still the characteristic grey of the Massif Central - though at any moment we would see the first red roofs of the true south.

The path was an autumnal feast of acorns, blackberries, hazelnuts and walnuts. Another bonus was the markings along the way. As well as splodges of yellow paint on tree trunks, ancient stone crosses marked the way, relics from the days when all roads here led to Santiago de Compostela. Grey towers poked out from behind trees; churches hung in the valleys; a hatted peasant was picking fruit.

If you continue along the Tarn towards Millau, the hills become progressively steeper, culminating in the Gorges du Tarn where the valley walls narrow to towering cliffs. I made just one tentative step in this direction, to Brousse-le-Chateau, where the red rushing waters split around an island mid-river, and moss-covered stone houses huddle under a ruined castle.

The chef from a local restaurant, fresh from his frying pans, showed me round the castle, explaining that its old aristocratic occupants had been sadistic paedophiles who had the good sense to sell up before the 1789 revolution - thereby excusing the revolutionaries from having to destroy the property.

Further up-river, the gorges beckoned, but I was diverting to the Rance, a fast-flowing tributary to the south. The town of Plaisance, the first stop down here, was a dripping, tumbling mass of creepers, alleys and horse chestnut trees when I staggered in. Torrential rain was sweeping the valley, and the Rance was flowing red with mud, but I could not have had a better place than the 14th-century Hostellier des Magnolias for a cosy night in. Dinner downstairs by a roaring log fire was an orgy of local specialities, ranging from cock's-comb stew (nul points) to pate de foie gras (dix points). As for the cheese, I have only to tell you that Plaisance is just inside the department of Aveyron where Roquefort is produced. Dix mille points.

The last day of the trip involved spinning back down river to the medieval city of Albi, the departmental capital whose narrow lanes and warm pink bricks offered the best landing place anywhere along the River Tarn.

The pays de Cocagne was what they called this rich trading triangle joining Toulouse, Albi and Carcassonne. It was the land of the coca, the cobs of blue woad which were such a precious early paint.

How attractive can you get: a city built on the basis of trade in painting provisions? No wonder the people of Albi are proud of Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec, their most famous son. Especially when, 800 years earlier, these same people had been responsible for the Albigensian Heresy, no less.

The heretics, known as Cathars, may have been a funny lot, but it was religious tolerance that was at stake. And when Rome and Paris conspired to launch a genocidal crusade against them, a murderous inquisition began. But even from the grave, the Cathars would continue to work their influence. The interior of Albi's colossal, fortress-like cathedral is an improbable riot of colour, designed to reflect local tastes for the bizarre.

Even today, the citizens of Albi gather quietly in their great church on summer evenings to witness son-et-lumiere shows lamenting these horrors of long ago.

FACT FILE

tarn valley

Getting there

Jeremy Atiyah travelled courtesy of Inntravel (tel: 01653 628811), which organises walks for independent travellers in the Tarn Valley between late March and early October. A seven-night walking holiday from Albi to Plaisance costs from pounds 529 per person. A ten-night walk from Albi to Millau costs from pounds 690 per person. Prices include return flights, detailed walking instructions, half-board accommodation in local hotels and picnic lunches. Luggage is carried between destinations by car. Short breaks in local rural hotels are also available.

Daily flights to Toulouse are available with Air France (tel: 0181-742 6600) from pounds 158 return, including tax, and British Airways (tel: 0345 222111) from pounds 142 return plus pounds 17 tax.

Further information

Call the French Government Tourist Office (tel: 0891 244123, calls cost 50p per minute).