The Cavalier Guide to..

[Azraq]

The Cavalier Guide to is a world famous journal exploring the dark underbellies of Europe's cities. Starting off as an obscure Cussian blog, over time it has grown a worldwide following, especially in hedonistic Engelsh circles, where the focus on food, sex and drugs appealled.

In recent years, it has expanded to include the weird and wonderful as well as vices, suggesting museums filled with oddities to visit or bizarre local traditions to observe.

The Cavalier Guide to will also frequent territories most tourists won't visit for fear of danger.

Banned in some jurisdictions for its promotion of criminal activity, the Cavalier Guide to promises only one thing: to show people where to have a good time.

 

[Azraq]

The Cavalier Guide to... Jugol part I

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say Jugol is unlike anywhere else in the world. On the edge of Himyar and a stone's throw away from Toyou, the Azraqi capital is a place of mindboggling diversity. The food, the people, the architecture - all reflect the influences of two continents.

However, it would also be fair to say sometimes Jugol doesn't feel of this world either.

***

Flying into Jugol is like having a bird's eye view of a gigantic crop circle your weird neighbour claims was made by UFOs but you all know was him really.

Jugol apparently comes from an ancient word meaning 'walled city'. It seems the inhabitants of Azraq's largest city were unimaginative. From above, Jugol seems little more than concentric badly drawn rings. Nerdy types will tell you the inner walls date back thousands of years, to before Jesus. I don't really care.

Landing in the main airport - Boqor Libaax Waylo International (no don't ask me how to say it) - you feel like you're moving from a UFO conspiracy doc to sci-fi film set.

The airport is out in the middle of nowhere. Literally nowhere. Nothing but desert and the odd tree. In the haze on the horizon, you think you can see a city but you're never too sure.

The terminal buildings are a weird jumble of bizarrely shaped glass-and-steel structures yet still manage to be boring. They're also empty. Very empty. Barely 100,000 tourists visit each year. I'm about to find out why.

After getting passed a very suspicious border guard (probably the only country where a white man is more likely to be searched), I manage to haggle with a local taxi driver to get a lift into central Jugol. By haggle I mean we yelled at each other until I just threw money at him and jumped in the car, which was actually a lot nicer than expected.

The driver jabbers on at me (apparently they speak a language called Dawamali in Jugol, not Azraqi) until we arrive to my destination, an apartment (if we can call it that) in the oldest part of the city.. Mud Town.

Yes I was really staying in a place built from mud. Well rather sand and stone but whatever.

Mud Town is a sensory overload, and I've not even taken any drugs yet, or eaten.

There is constant noise, day and night. The place smells. Really smells. It's either hashish and spices or piss and shit.

Failing to get some sleep after a long uncomfortable flight, I wander out.

First, food. The staple of Azraqi cuisine is the canjeero, a sourdough flatbread that various maraq (stews) are spread over. The stews vary wildly in colour but they all taste broadly the same: spicy and over-seasoned. I'm not even sure what meat is in there half the time. Unsurprisingly, I later spend a good few hours glued to the toilet.

I can't remember the name of the place I ate - not sure it had one - but if you're walking around Mud Town, keep going passed all the shops and houses that look like an ant or termite nest until you come across an old lady making canjeero out front. It doesn't take too long.

It is traditional to finish a meal with local coffee. There's an elaborate ceremony and apparently it's some of the best in the world. Given how tired I am I probably should drink it. But something else is tempting me.

Being a Muslim country, Azraq consuming alcohol is frowned upon although not technically illegal. Probably because everyone is getting secretly pissed.

To really sample Azraqi beverages (and because my feature couldn't just be on the Mud Town) I need to leave where in staying and grab a cab to the shanty towns on the fringes of the city.

With the homes made from corrugated iron and bits of wood rather than dust and spit, I felt less like I was intruding in on an alien nest and instead was dropped into a dystopian movie about overpopulation. There are people everywhere. My taxi barely moves for minutes at time the roads are so clogged.

What I'm after is a local beer called farsoo brewed from sorghum and buckthorn leaves by the Shamo people, Azraq's second largest ethnic group. Like everything here, it is flavoured with too many spices. Being no stronger than 6% (at best) it takes a while to get going. The raw, unfiltered taste only prolongs the process.

Finding it is hard. It is not easy to tell what's a house or bar here. They all look equally unsafe and uninhabitable. Following the trail of drunken men, I eventually stumble on a watering hole.

Conversation goes down almost as badly as the beer and in the end I just stare blankly at my translator, who I feel is as lost as I am.

Soon enough, another drink comes out (finally): khamriga malab or honey wine. It's mildly nicer than the beer I was downing. Served warm, it's like gulping sick sprinkled with sugar.

By the time I've finished a few glasses, day has turned to night and I am craving something else. Something a bit stronger than booze. But to get it I have to travel to yet another bit of Jugol.

Article by Quentin Walker. Part II will be published shortly.

 

[Mazidia]

The Cavalier Guide to... Prosperitas

Coming down into the city airport gives you a real Miltonian feeling. A literal and metaphysical descent, from the fluffy clouds and wide happy azure into the grey thick smog that blankets the city, a sprawling serpent that engulfs the wide river Lethe that flows through it.

Prosperitas is the capital of the Mazidian Dominion, a large confederated empire that dominates the soutwestern corner of the Occidental continent. The city is in many ways a microcosm of the country it commands, a weird chimerical ouroboros that girdles and devours all that it comes into contact with.

My descent into this city would be accompanied by many rises and falls in mood, the drugs I'd taken from my lawyer's travelling case to calm me on the flight beginning to wear off in the muggy, sub-tropical heat.

Here in the equatorial nation, the seasons are different. There is no winter or summer, only wet and dry. We were heading into the wet season, and so leaving the air-conditioned airport was like entering a world-sized shower. I could almost feel the ambient moisture, mingling with the salty tinge of my sweat.

The city itself is an assault on the senses. A druggee like can get used to many things, like seeing your dear grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife. But noone should be asked to face Prosperitas alone, a virgin, and sober.

Fortunately my lawyer was with me, and he had on hand medicines for all ills, including sobriety and easing our temporary celibacy. The former we aimed to solve at once, the latter would wait till the evening, though not long.

For a nation with starving millions, food and alcohol of all kinds is plentiful on the streets of its capital, a nightmarish polymorph of old Mazincan style with riotous colonial and post-modern influences. It was on a paved boulevard we had our first anticuchos, the signature street dish that has begun to be exported to the drink-soaked corners of many a first world nation.

Crossing the paved boulevard into the first of many slum districts, we found a distinctly Mazidian innovation parked crazily in an alleyway. A mobile street-bar, selling cheap wooden beakers full of foaming pisco to anyone with a handful of coins or a crumpled note.

The local paper currency is almost worthless in its lower denominations, but copper and nickel currency always has weight. But don't go flashing any fancy silver or gold-edged hundreds and five hundreds, or you're asking for someone to take your shoes.

We drank the local high-proof grape juice, and marvelled at the strength of this instant cure for our sober state. Mazidia is clearly a nation of hard-drinkers, I thought, as I saw even dirty street-children with these beakers, quaffing back the amber-coloured spirit.

But then I remembered the water here, and realised it was better to be drunk than to be diseased.

Our thirst quenched, we made our way deeper into the slums. The city has many distinct quarters, rings spiralling outwards from a central square, the Sol Plaza, which sits at the foot of a Great Stone Pyramid, which is in turn surrounded by vast, gleaming sky-scrapers and fortress-like walls of adobe.

The Pyramid is not ancient, but a more modern approximation. Prosperitas was built by Aurarians and the Engellish, and the Pyramid was moved from the old native Imperial Capital in the heartlands to serve as the focal point for the Sun King's new empire and state religion.

The square is closely monitored, and outside of official holidays is often kept reasonably empty. We saw fine-uniformed soldiers in 19th century braid and and pantaloons marching up and down, and shivered at the sight. This was the closest we would come to the degeneracy of bourgeoise normalcy.

Not for us the photo-tour of stepped pyramids, parade drill and the anodyne comfortless spectacle of mainstream tourism. We scuttled back to the familiar chaos and havoc of the first slums, the so-called Maize District, or maybe its the Maze.

The lower-orders of the Dominion are divided into race and class. The wealthy half-breeds encircle the whites, and are in turn encircled by the poor half-breeds, who are in turn encircled by the blacks, who in turn turn their backs on the very poor natives, who live in shacks outside the city proper, a part of it and apart from it.

Fleeing the insufferable light of the Dominion's gleaming syncretic religion and modernity, we found refuge in the gloom of adobe-bars and street-cafes. In the Maze, the distinction between outside and inside, street and home, white and black, are all completely blurred. There are no straight boulevards, no wide roads, only meandering pathways, up and over buildings, through alleyways, down crazy steps and through wide halls and choked hearths.

We found ourselves almost by accident in the Night Market, a roaming, semi-subterranean collection of stalls, selling everything from opium to cotton to a good time with girls too young even for my lawyer. We sampled some of the fresher delights, gleaming hand-picked fruit and chewable pharmaceutical nuts, and steered clear of entanglements with the locals as best we could.

The haze in my brain seemed to grow thicker, or maybe it was just the ever present industrial and swampland miasma that hung over the city. Nothing is ever seen clearly beyond the maze. Life is one big instagram-filter for people in the Favelas, the true slums beyond the Maze.

There are no city walls to Prosperitas, but the dense row upon row of corrugated iron and scavenged plastic that make up the sprawling slums serve as a ring of steel against the encroaching jungle, spilling even onto the wide Lethe itself, crazy-legged bird-huts hanging precipitously above the rushing effluvium.

Moving beyond pisco, anticuchos and chewable coca, we entered a yet more dangerous world, where everyone wore baggy wife-beaters, blue shorts, and carried clubs and knives openly. A boy blacker than mother of pearl gave me a yellow smile and pushed a handful of beads into my hands as we passed. He seemed to be even higher than I was.

Ayahausca and other, stranger herbal remedies are obtainable and almost omnipresent. Food is scarce, but weapons, drugs and cheap imported clothing and electronics are everywhere. Every so often an armoured truck guarded by the local armed and armoured pigs rolls in, throws out wrapped packages full of bread and plastic bottles full of water.

Every so often a mob tries to slow the truck, only to be beaten back by the pigs. This is every-day life in the Favelas. We hurried on, even deeper into the sin, as night began to draw on, and the gangs of boys on every street corner gave way to gangs of older men, who watched us with hungry eyes.

We came to the River at last, and the crazy-legged floating town of shacks, boats and house-boats that make up the edge-dwellers of Prosperitas. This river brings all things to the capital, cargo, industrial pollution, and scant eating in the form of piranha, caiman and perch. Often as not the wildlife eats you, even here on the edge of the city, as anything else.

We found cheap lodgings in an old mama's swamp-side hostel, where she sold bowls full of ceviche and stuiffed peppers to the river-men and their many, many children. The family unit does not exist in this riotous land, despite the omnipresence of both Catholicism and the state syncretic sun-worship. I asked the old mama how many children she had via my lawyer, and she said at least nine living that she knew of. I asked how many fathers, and she gave a toothless smile, and said nine.

But there is no animosity or tribulation- all nine fathers pay mama tribute, and give her a cut of whatever it is they earn, hauling cargo, scavenging junk from the river, or selling opium leaves they hack from the plantations scrub, deep in the thickening jungle on the farthest outskirts.

I found my bed almost comfortable, and my lawyer found one of mama's older daughters, and soon the space next to mine was shaking and rocking with their evening relaxation. I pulled a cardboard box over my head, took a deep sniff of my adrenachrome, and retired to the cathartic dreams of Nod.

Prosperitas was named as such by the Aurarians. Port Prosperity to the Engellexic. But the city belongs to neither. It is a creation of the slave and tribe-descended masses, who weave an insane order out of the refuse of modernity and the savage scarcity of the jungle itself. It defies easy description and summation, and is a place to be experienced, like a haze-induced dream, before waking once more, to a cold dawn in civilisation.

For those who live there though, there is no waking. There is only the dream, and then there is the hereafter. And the hereafter always comes sooner than you think, for young and old alike.

Whether I will write more of my journeys in this vast and troubled land, is down to whether my lawyer can extricate himself from the locals for a little while and work instead to extricate more funding from our publishers.

And whether they consent to that, dear reader is down to you.

Article by Raoul Baron

 

[Natal]

The Cavalier Guide to... Gay life in Caledonia
Part I

Caledonia has been a nation that has gone from a progressive and liberal first half of the 20th century, to the complete opposite. Yet, from the point of view of gay liberation, Caledonia has acted completely strange. While other integralist and catholic kingdoms, like Gunnland are outright oppressing the gay minority, or others like Elben are really pushing them into the closet, Caledonia's gay associations have a long history, and have been around for the last 40 to 50 years, even if they have been at times completely invisible.

I for one, managed to get my hands on one of the 200 copies of a most interesting pamphlet, as it is too small to call it a book, though officially it was been referred to as a "report". Gràdh Pinc fo Bhratach an Obsidian, or in Engelsh, Pink Love under the Obsidian Banner is the closest thing you can find to a gay themed tourist guide from the early 1980s. The history of the book is interesting, as it comes from the criticism many liberal democracies like Auraria and Eiffelland were throwing at Caledonia for oppressing the gay community. The response to that criticism was interesting. The government simply ignored it, whereas the gay community responded with this pamphlet, stating that they do not want to be used as a political tool to be used against national-syndicalism, and that in reality they have a good life in Caledonia. They thus marked the gay bars in the whole country and now, what I want is to go on this gay trail, to see if they are still standing and what do they feel about this report.

I first arrive in Dun Eidyn on a trans-thaumantic flight from Roanoke City on a very snowy and cold day. Back in Beautancus we've been told to expect potential delays or even cancellations, but it seems that Boreal Airways wasn't afraid or snow, and after a 7 hour flight we manage to arrive in the eastern end of Celtic Scania.

After I manage to leave my stuff at the hotel I take out the report, or how the Caledonians are abreviating it, the Pink Love and and start creating a route for this evening to see what survived of the 80s gay life of Dun Eidyn. We first go to An Riaghladair. As I simply cannot be sure that I pronounce the name correctly, I simply write it down to the taxi driver, who lets out a brief but complicit smirk. It seems that the name of the bar is The Regent.

The taxi took me from my hotel in the west end of the city into the city centre, a 20 minute ride, costing me 120 tasdain, less than 10 Cussian Pounds. Knowing Caledonia, as a place described as utterly conservative, extremely machista and prejudiced, I was literally expecting a shady basement in which a small establishment that resembles a speakeasy was situated. I was wrong. The Regent was huge and it was very out. Two rainbow flags were adorned at the entrance. The barman later told me that I have seen them because it is past 8 pm and hence, they are allowed after those hours to be out and proud, as the ruling regime, the Nationa Union feels that after those hours, they have less chances to destroy the morals of the youth.

When I take out the Pink Love, the barman, who I later find out that it is one of the owners, starts to laugh and tells me that he was one of his authors. He said that he felt that at that time, the gay community had to choose. Either let the Aurarians and Eiffellanders further criticise Caledonia and thus the gay community continuing to be oppressed under the infamous article 200 in the penal code (which condemns same sex intercourse with 5 years imprisonment) or defend the country and be rewarded. They decided to make a deal with the government. Thus, the Pink Love is published and article 200 is changed to make homosexuality legal (even it states that it must not be in public and it still condemns what it calls "gay propaganda"). "Hence we can do everything inside the establishment, from dancing to orgies, but if teen comes to me and tells me that he was kicked out of his house because he was gay, I cannot legally tell him that it will be ok, that it will get better, because that falls into the 'propaganda' element of the law..." stated the barman.

Pretty quickly, the bar fills in and alcohol starts to do what it does best: making conversations flow easier. After a glass of the Caledonian Whiskey Uisce Dubh, which I learned that it means black water, and two pints of 5 Degrees stouts I decide to ask the barman to point me out to the next hotspot. While I finished my beer, he ticked the establishments that still exist and marked with an x the defunct ones.

As I left The Regent, I felt that it was your typical lounge, targeting a gay audience. Nothing special, but again, seeing that Caledonia describes herself as a catholic, corporatist and integralist state, I feel that there is a revolutionary act behind simple things like holding hands, kissing and sharing a drink in those establishments.

Even so, looking at the comments the barman wrote, I am now heading to the Humpbacked Unicorn, which the guide states, is the oldest still functioning gay bar in Caledonia and the whole of Scania. Opened in 1959, the Humpbacked Unicorn was the centre of what is now slowly becoming Dun Eidyn's gay village.

As I enter its premises, a huge poster showing the overly orange and ginger drag queen Morrigan Glitz and promoting a concert of her that will start later tonight. The atmosphere here is completely changed compared to the Regent. I observed that there is a bit of segregation, as place in the club, closer to the stage is labelled as "leas", which one of the partygoers I started talking to, told me it literally means lezzy. Even so, I really like that you can see people of all shapes, sizes and ages coming together. Some of the men have taken their tops of, some having piercings, some having their bodies completely covered in blue tattoos. "They are Caitmen. The tattoos are traditional," explains one to me. As the show was starting, the bar filled, giving me a bit of a claustrophobic feeling.

As she sung, Morrigan Glitz was surprisingly good. Considering that my idea of Caledonia was mostly a dreary land of old people singing on bagpipes and flutes, I was really surprised that many Engelsh songs were extremely popular in Caledonia, and I'm not talking here only of imported music from Beautancus, Sylvania or Engellex, but a whole array of Caledonian artists preferring to sing in Engelsh. As the concert ended and the stage was transformed in less than 10 minutes into an extension of the dance ring, the party really started. A second dance ring was opened on the upper floor to accommodate everyone.

As we started singing an dancing, alternating on the pop tunes in Gaelic of Utter Fiasco and Lyr, the Aurarian Tiburano* sounds of Paloma Sabina and Engelsh singers like Me-Donner, the crowd grew thicker and thicker, that we mostly transformed into a dancing amorphous mass. At the beginning it felt again as your typical gay club that you would find in Engellex, Beautancus or Auraria, but when guys wearing only kilts started to appear, it reminded me where I am.

It was already half past 2 am, and the party slowed down as there is a nation wide curfew after 3am so that was when all clubs in the country were closing. A huge mass of people was invading the streets as the clubs were closing. When I asked another party goer if it is like this every evening, he told me that it usually is, but now with the extended weekend for the celebration of Saint Aindreas of the North, many of the people went out and hence the whole commotion. While I've had my chances to have a one night stand and I've been groped too many a times while dancing, I had to return to my hotel, as tomorrow in the morning I still had to visit a literature circle and then hop on the train to Langaim, to visit the gay capital of the high north.

Article by Calum McDermot. Part II to be published shortly.

*by Tiburano I was trying to say our world's version of Latino