June started with two warm sunny weekends in a row. Realizing how rare this is, I headed out of town each Sunday. First, I took the c2c train to Shoeburryness, a small town on the northeast side of the Thames estuary. It is next to a British Navy firing range and even though I believe they do not use it for target practice anymore, there are plenty of signs warning about unexploded shells on the mud flats. I hit the area at low tide and the tidal flats were fully exposed, looked like they were more than 1 km wide. I found there was a nice walking path along the coast and I started walking back. During the 12 km trek the mud flats on the left were more or less the same but the scenery on shore kept changing. From the distinctly rural Shoeburryness, through a resort town feel of Southend to the final stop, where the fishing fleet docks and store sell fresh fish, stalls have east London delicacies like jellied eels and you can observe the tide coming back in while sipping a pint in the comfort a pub.

(Click on the picture to see it full size, use a back button to return to this spot.) Next Sunday I was able to convince the rest of the family to come along and we headed a little bit further up the northeast coast to Walton on Naze. Nice yellow beaches which grew wider with receding tide. Little bit further up the coast are low cliffs which are being eroded away yielding fossil shark teeth. I walked up to the cliffs to look but did not find any. By the time I returned Kumiko and Alice had already found a full bag of them. I kept looking but it was not my day – I could not find a single one. The unintended consequence of this day out was that both I and Alice got a little bit more sun exposure that we should have and our back ended up quite red. But this is how everybody else looks like.

In the meantime, England is in the full grip of football fever, literally. Not only are English flags in windows, on cars and on shirts, but there are noticeably fewer people on the streets. The only comparison I can make are the few weeks after the tub bombings last summer. Part of it must be that lot of European tourists are staying home for the duration of the cup, but since the company dining room is also rather empty, lot of people are obviously affected by mysterious illnesses on the days of important matches. The general consensus is that England has a reasonable chance of winning the cup. I hope they can stay in the tournament as long as possible, just to observe the temperature rise. Meanwhile it is fun to watch two games per day, the first match starts at two in the afternoon and since I am working, I always miss it. Perhaps the best thing is that I can watch 180 plus minutes of football, uninterrupted by commercials and even more importantly, without the moronic “vignettes” showing the goaltender’s mother or the left wing kindergarten teacher, which always pollute international sports events on North American television.

About a year ago I conceived a master plan. I thought that if we go back later than May, I will go back by taking the Tran Siberian railway, then get to Tokyo and fly to Houston from there. Since our move is scheduled for the end of July it was time to put the plan into action. Unfortunately, as I was reading the company relocation manual it became clear that under Exxon rules this was not going to work. While side trips are in principle allowed I had a sense that this would probably not qualify. Rather than face the prospect of interminable discussions with HR and due to a need to book the trip early, I decided to make the trip anyway and then simply fly back from Vladivostok. Unfortunately, by the time I called all the June-July trips were already booked and the plan had to be scuttled. Maybe next time.

While I was not able to take a grand trip, I seem to be destined to see Russia in little bite size pieces. I made another one night trip to Moscow. At least now the days are longer and warmer and it is possible to do a little bit of sightseeing in the evening. Moscow is changing at a very rapid pace. There are huge numbers of cars on the streets and despite of the very wide Stalinist boulevards the traffic is no faster than in Houston rush hour. There is a certain attraction to these short trips: I get to see the same places few months or weeks apart and it makes the changes stand out even more. The communist monster-hotel Rossia (just outside of the Kremlin wall) is being torn down while the little churches (which were torn down earlier and recently rebuilt) are looking on. Marx is still looking down from his pedestal, beside which are idiotic, quasi-religious words by Engels: “his name will live for eternity”. To some extent he was right, DHL is now using Marx’s name on its advertising.

The amount of construction going on in Moscow is impressive. You should go and have a look, because it is your money they are using. Russia’s current well being is mostly financed by $ 70 oil, so every time you fill up you are contributing to the Moscow building boom.

This time I had a hard time booking a flight back from Moscow. BA was full, I then suggested Transaero, they were full too. It was only when I told the travel agent to look for indirect flights, that she was able to book me on Lufthansa through Frankfurt. Everything was full, because it was a long weekend. On Monday, Russia was celebrating the “Independence Day”, a new holiday commemorating the collapse of the Soviet Union. Impressive PR move, Austria, Turkey, France should also celebrate the day when they were finally free of their empires. Full planes on Friday of a long weekend are another indication of sudden Russian wealth – Russians flying for a few days to London to shop at Harrods. The change in routing had two interesting consequences. I came in through the Domodedovo airport and left through Sheremetovo and so I was able to compare the security procedures. While they insist on everybody taking their shoes off at the first one, you can keep them on at the second one. Well, either shoes are a serious threat or not, there cannot be a difference between two airports in the same city. Security “measures” vary so much from place to place that they are more a reflection of the personality of the local bureaucracy rather than an intelligent way of dealing with a problem. In addition to being annoying, it is scary: our fate is in the hands of people whose job satisfaction is based on confiscating nail clippers.

I never rush to stand in line to get on a plane and this time I was again one of the last. As a consequence by the time I got to the free newspaper bin, all the English papers were gone. I picked up a copy of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung and I was quite pleased that 30 years after my German lessons I could still read it – well, lets not exaggerate, get a gist of most of the articles.

While I was re-assessing the situation, when it looked like I will have to undertake the Russian trip totally with my own resources, I went through a little exercise, evaluating what else I could do with the money and time it would take to cross Siberia. There was a long list of things I still wanted to do in Europe and it was clear I was not going to be able to manage it all: take a multiday walking trip instead of my weekend excursions to see how far I could get; see little bit more of France, but off the beaten track; travel through what used to be Yugoslavia and listen to the different languages; sign up for a full immersion language school to try to get some French back.

On the Italian trip last month I met a French geologist and in passing I asked him if there were any marked paths in France for “infantry” tourists, like there are in the U.K. and Germany. He assured me it was a very popular pastime and the following week sent me a couple of internet addresses of groups which organize these types of trips. Realizing that this would in one stroke satisfy two of my wishes, and having a hard time resisting a good deal, I signed up for a one week tour in the SW part of France entitled: “Les citadelle du vertige en terre Cathare”. Instructions arrives several days later: “meet us on Sunday at 9 a.m. in front of the Perpignan SNCF station. Keeping in mind that Salvator Dali declared the Perpignan station the center of the Universe, these were instructions with cosmic undertones, in the same league as when Svejk said “meet me at the ‘U Kalicha’ pub after the war”. I took another cheap flight from Stansted and arrived in Perpignan on Saturday afternoon, early enough to have a little walk around and see Czechs loose to Ghana. At that point I thought it would be a good idea to get away from football for a little while.

Since there were no agreed signals or more detailed instructions I was not quite sure how I was going to find the group. It turned out that several companies decided to meet at the same time and at the same place, but the guide simply walked around talking to people who looked like they were ready to go hiking, until he found all the participants on his list. Our group consisted of 7 plus the guide. He drove us to the village of Comus and we spent the next seven days hiking through the departments of Aude and Arriege, visiting 13th century castles connected with the Cathar crusades. Cathars (also known as Albigenois) were an evangelical Christian sect whose doctrine was in several points significantly different from the catholic one. Above all, they believed in the clergy working for a living instead of collecting a 10% tax from everyone. That is simplifying it quite a bit, but if you have read the Da Vinci Code, you will know what I mean. In very basic terms there was a doctrinal difference, an economic element and a nationalistic component, because the area, which was at the time populated by people speaking not French, but Occitan, a different romance language, was coveted by their northern neighbors who at that time had no access to the Mediterranean. So that when the pope Innocent III declared a crusade, several decades of nasty warfare (French crusaders) ensued, with lots of burnings at stake, massacres in 10’s of thousands, mutilations and a lot of general awfulness. To mop up after the military victory, the RC church introduced a new institution: The Inquisition, which continued to ferret out heretics and burn them at stake for another 100 years. Most of these elements are very similar to what happened 200 years later in Bohemia (hence my interest), with the big difference that for once the Crusaders lost.

Our guide was not only extremely knowledgeable about Cathar history, but he was also a graduate of a forestry school and so when we were not walking or listening to history lectures, we were getting refreshers in botany and zoology. Since I walk to and back from work two hours every day, I though I was in a pretty good shape. I was wrong, flat lands are a poor preparation for walk up narrow paths at 45 degrees and 800 meters of climbing and then, just as hard, going down. But by the end of the week my conditioning improved significantly. Interestingly, in spite of spending 6 hours plus every day in fairly strenuous hiking, I did not loose any weight. In fact, apparently, people tend to gain 1-2 kg. The reason is that the French know how to eat. We stayed in mountain hostels, nothing fancy, bunk beds, 8 to a room, bring your own towel, your own sheets, that sort of stuff. But the food! Wonderful, lots of if, and not careful with fat. How about, ‘canard confit’ a cut up duck cooked slowly in the oven in its own fat, or stuffed quails the size of small chickens. And I am not talking about the appetizers before, or the obligatory big plate of 6 cheeses after, followed by a desert, such a walnut pie with whip cream. Lunches were not bad either, the guide prepared a different salad every day ( how about lentil and smoked salmon with cream sauce?), plenty of bread, cheese, mountain sausage and wine. (The only downside was that we had to carry all that stuff in our backpacks.) My favored meal was on the last day, an Occitan specialty – casoulet. This is pork and duck and beans casserole slowly baked in the oven. May not sound special and does not look great but it tasted divine. Must the be duck fat! Since this dish was followed, somewhat puzzlingly, by a desert consisting of cooled prunes and ice cream, I was glad this was one night when we had our own rooms.

While in the hostels we met a lot of interesting people, serious hikers, not like us, who had everything but our daypacks transported by car every day. There was a group of 4 in their sixties, who walked (camping all the way) from Holland to the Mediterranean, last year spent 6 weeks in Patagonia and this year were planning 3 weeks of hiking in Borneo.

Even though I originally though I was getting a 2 for 1 deal (multiday hike and travel through a part of France I did not know) it turned out to be even better. Not only was it a culinary tour without regrets (because we burned off all those extra calories the next day) but it was also better than any language course – total French immersion. My passive knowledge came back better than I expected, not problems there, but one week was clearly not enough for the active part – still quite rusty and slipping into Spanish constructions when not careful. Obviously, will have to do this again.