Travel Sound

27/06/2022

South America's unknown ancient path!

Overripe star fruits and guavas stuck to the soles of my boots in a sweet, fermenting mess as I strolled out of the sleepy town of Peabiru. I had travelled to Brazil's Paraná state, not too far from the Paraguay border, in search of the remains of the Caminho de Peabiru – a 4,000km network of pathways connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, made over millennia by South America's indigenous people.

The Caminho de Peabiru was a spiritual path for native Guarani people in search of a mythological paradise. It also became a route to riches for European colonisers looking to access the interior of the continent. However, most of the original paths have disappeared, consumed by nature or transformed over the centuries into highways. It's only in the past few years that this intriguing route has begun to reveal its mysteries to a wider public, thanks to a growing network of new tourist trails.

It's easy to understand why the cross-continental trail is so quick to capture people's imaginations, and that's due to the story of the first European known to have walked its length: Portuguese sailor Aleixo Garcia. Shipwrecked in 1516 on the shores of southern Brazil after a failed Spanish mission to navigate the River Plate, Garcia and half a dozen other sailors were taken in by the amenable Guaranis. Eight years later, after hearing Guarani tales of a path that led all the way to an empire in the mountains rich in gold and silver, Garcia travelled with 2,000 Guarani warriors all the way to the Andes, nearly 3,000km away. According to Brazilian researcher Rosana Bond in her e-book The Saga of Aleixo Garcia, he became the first European known to have visited the Incan empire, in 1524, nearly a decade before the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro who is widely believed to have made that "discovery".

While it connected to the highly engineered and widely visited Incan and Pre-Incan road network across the Andes, the Caminho de Peabiru itself has few visible remains. This lack of physical evidence has not only led to diverging theories in academic circles about who created it and when, but also wild speculation about it being created by Vikings or Sumerians – or even Thomas the Apostle on an evangelising mission from India.

27/06/2022

The Outback Way: Is this the world's emptiest road?

Laverton is the kind of outback town you might expect at the end of an epic desert road trip, not at the start of one. Marooned on the edge of Australia's two largest deserts – the Victoria and the Great Sandy – Laverton felt like the last outpost of frontier civilisation, a 12-hour drive from Perth, five hours from already-remote Kalgoorlie.

Whenever a road train rumbled through town, Laverton rouses into life. Otherwise, it is eerily, gloriously quiet. Tarmac roads disappear beneath the red sand long before they reach the town's outskirts. When the wind picks up, the sand turns to dust and blankets the town with a fine, coppery sheen. After the dust settles, when darkness falls, the stars come out, more stars than seem possible.

Laverton, founded on the traditional lands of the Wongutha and Tjalkanti people, marks the starting point of the Outback Way, also known in Western Australia as the Great Central Road. One of the world's great transcontinental traverses, it was laid out by Len Beadell in the 1950s in what was surely one of the road-building achievements of the time; from 1947 until 1963, Beadell forged more than 6,000km of outback tracks for the Australian government. The marks his bulldozers left behind in the desert sands terrified desert peoples who wondered what great animal had passed this way.

27/06/2022

The UK's haven for alternative thinking!

Amid the mist-cloaked, forested slopes of the Dyfi Valley, outside the Welsh market town of Machynlleth, is a remarkable sight: a seemingly ramshackle collection of log cabins, old wind turbines, thatched huts, steel tubes and funicular railways, rising from the banks of a former slate quarry. It looks at once incongruous and perfectly at home; both organic and man-made, as if it had grown there like a strange bionic jungle from the seeds of industry long abandoned. Perhaps that's appropriate, given that the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) has spent the last half a century redefining the relationship between nature and humankind.

As it prepares to celebrate its 50th birthday in 2023, its work has never been so urgent.

CAT was founded in 1973 by an eclectic, experimental community of architects, engineers, builders and organic growers, led by businessman and environmentalist Gerard Morgan-Grenville. They felt compelled to seek alternative ways of living in response to an international oil crisis, ignited by the Yom Kippur War in Israel, that saw governments across Europe ban driving on Sundays and impose rations on heating. In 1975, a visitor centre was opened to increase public awareness and engagement, setting the tone for CAT's unique identity: part research centre, part tourist attraction and part educational hub.

Today, the centre offers master's degrees in fields such as green building, energy provision and sustainable food; many CAT alumni have gone on to be leaders in the sustainability field, such as architect Kirsty Cassels, voted Social Entrepreneur of the Year at 2019's Scottish Women's Awards, and solicitor Sonya Bedford, awarded an MBE for her contributions to community energy. The centre is marking its half-century milestone by embarking on an ambitious redevelopment project, modernising and scaling up both its visitor experience and educational offerings, while remaining open to the public. Visitors can get hands-on with workshops in sustainable building materials, woodland management, organic gardening and more; children particularly love the wildlife activities, such as pond-dipping, monitoring nest cams and laying moth traps.

I was met at reception by Rob Bullen, CAT's marketing manager, and Eileen Kinsman, interim co-CEO. We climbed aboard the funicular railway – one of the steepest in the world, with a gradient of 35 degrees. As a tank at the top filled with water, one at the bottom was emptied; gravity did the rest, and we were pulled up a sheer cliff with hydropower.

27/06/2022

The resurgence of Venice's prized dorona grape!

Long thought to be extinct, the dorona grape was prized above all others by wealthy Venetians. Now, its chance rediscovery has ignited a revival in Venice's wine.

In the garden of an abandoned monastery, on an ancient cemetery island in the Venetian Lagoon, I found myself surrounded by life. A man bustled past with a wheelbarrow full of brambles; two women sat on the ground, tending to flowering grapevines about to burst into fruit. Preparations were afoot on the Isola di San Michele for Venice's festival season, and Laguna nel Bicchiere, a non-profit organisation devoted to the propagation of Venetian viticulture, would be providing the wine.

"In late spring and early summer there are quite a few festivals," explained Colleen McCann, a long-time member of the organisation, as she showed me around San Michele's vineyard. "Each campo [city square] has its own different celebration, and on the solstice in June there's three days of festivities at the [Church of San Giovanni in] Bragora. We go there and offer people an ombra [small glass] of wine, with the idea being to let the city know about Venice's historical vineyards."

In addition to the vineyard we were standing in on San Michele, Laguna nel Bicchiere currently preserves three others – with origins going back centuries – on the Venetian islands of Giudecca, Sant'Elena and Vignole.

27/06/2022

A 'blue hole' to the Northern Lights!

A little-known meteorological phenomenon makes a tiny village in Arctic Sweden one of the best places on Earth to consistently see the Aurora Borealis.
"I'm not so sure we'll see them," said my videographer colleague Erik Jaråker, as he looked at the fog all around. I was driving us up the single-lane highway towards one of Sweden's northernmost villages, Abisko, located 250km north of the Arctic Circle. We were caught in the middle of a snowstorm with zero visibility, and all around us, the mountains of Abisko National Park had become a sea of white.

We were heading up to photograph the elusive Northern Lights – nature's spectacular light show, also known as the Aurora Borealis. The displays occur when explosions on the sun's surface, called solar flares, collide with gases in the Earth's atmosphere to create shimmering bands of red, green and purple. To witness this Aurora activity, we needed frigid, clear, cloudless skies, not the winter storm we were currently slogging through.

"Trust me," I assured him confidently. "We'll see them."

I'd been here before under similar storm conditions, and I'd quickly learned that Abisko is home to a "blue hole", a patch of sky that extends 10 to 20 sq km over the village, Lake Torneträsk and Abisko National Park and that remains clear regardless of surrounding weather patterns. This phenomenon makes Abisko one of the best places in the world to consistently witness the Aurora Borealis.

"Abisko, and northern Sweden, is indeed an ideal place to watch it," said Erik Kjellström, professor in climatology at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, in an email. "This is due to the fact that it lies within the Auroral oval and it has a very long dark season – auroral observations are reported from mid-August to April – so there are plenty of Northern Lights around. The only thing needed is cloud-free conditions." And, he added, Abisko has those in spades thanks to its position on the eastern side of the Scandinavian Mountain Range, which runs along the Norway-Sweden border.

27/06/2022

27/06/2022