Flaneur

The 'Durban Disaster'

2010-07-12T10:55:00.000-07:00

As it was dubbed in Oz was Germany's trouncing of the Australian Socceroos 4-Nil in their World Cup opener in Durban, South Africa.

And then the knives came out.

Forget about kicking the team when they were down, this was a blood bath. Incompetent coaching, unfit players, poor training, ill discipline, lack of spirit, you name it and the team was guilty. Radio talk shows poured scorn on the Socceroos, callers lambasted them and their World Cup merchandise was knocked down to 50% off in the shops. The team had not so much lost a game as disgraced a nation. Australia had been mortally wounded on the international stage, nay, far more importantly, on the international sporting stage. How, people asked, was this possible for the 'Lucky Country'?

Most telling was that for the first time in two months the 'Super Profits Mining Tax' proposed by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd [who as I write this has been removed as PM by in a backroom coup and the Super Profits tax has now been dropped] was knocked out of the top news spot.

Surely Australians didn't actually think they'd beat Germany? And surely they have more important things to worry about such as why mining companies virtually run the country, dictate policy and believe they should pay less for the people's resources? Or for that matter even the appalling quality and price of beer in this vast nation of thirsty people?

'Number D3, that's D3'

2010-07-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

Whoohoo! I grabbed the ticket off the table and went up to claim our prize in the meat raffle of the Northern Hotel in Byron Bay.

The prize table groaned under the weight of heavily laden BBQ trays of steak and chicken, lamb chops and burgers and artery clogging breakfast trays of eggs, bacon and sausages. A carnivore's delight, a meat eater's Garden of Eden laid out on the table, ours for the picking.

Our tray was piled high, but sadly not with ground offal and rump or wing and topside or ribs and legs but rather with oranges, kiwi fruit, apples, grapes, avocados, tomatoes and corn on the cob. Yep, we'd opted for one of the maligned 'fruit and veg' trays of the meat raffle.

An oxymoron and the carnivore's curse of living in a tent with no fridge.

'Hold it, hold it! I call this scraping the bottom'

2010-07-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

Jamie 'The Tactician' of Double Time, our racing yacht, was on the helm, well lubricated by pre-race beers in the pub, a can of XXXX lager balanced on the compass housing as we bore down on the seawall adjacent to the Cairns marina.

I was on the starboard winch ready to haul in the foresail sheet as soon as we tacked, one eye on the depth sounder. 4.0 metres, 3.5 metres, 3 metres, 2.5 metres...'maybe we should tack...' and still Jamie pressed on. Jean, the owner of Double Time started protesting in her Indiana-Australian drawl, Charlie the normally calm Australian navy man on the main sheet began tugging at his beard and the early evening strollers on the seawall, now 10 metres off the bow, raised their eyebrows in anticipation of our imminent wreck.

How did this happen? Hours before we had woken up in a tent in the ancient Daintree Rainforest at Cape Tribulation 120 km north of Cairns and now here we were manning the winches in a Cairns Yacht Club race on a boat with three skippers ploughing their way through a fridge full of beer.

Then Jamie spun the helm, Karen let go the back winded foresail, I hauled it in and we were off on the opposite tack, clearing the rocks by 5 metres and now bearing down on a forest of sailboats and mooring piles. Jean took a verbal strip off Jamie about it being her boat, rocks, burning in hell and all sorts. Jamie waved her off and promptly cracked another can of XXXX while pontificating about the need for smoother transitions on the winches when tacking to keep our speed up in the hope of catching the lead yacht.

An hour later, with a little surreptitious help from the engine, we drifted in fifth, boat and crew intact, beer fridge empty. It had been a heady day of America's Cup high drama on the seas, ducking and weaving amongst the competition, fast tacks and gybes, cutting angles, stealing wind and clashing egos all at a blistering 3 mph.

'Ever since that foreign girl was taken a few years back

2010-06-03T19:25:00.000-07:00

Parks doesn't let anyone up the road until they are sure .'

As I forked over $20 for a bush campsite in Kakadu National Park in the Top End of Oz, the warden explained why Sandy Billabong [a permanent waterhole left behind by a drying river] road was still closed to the public this season.

Late, heavy rain this year in the north meant that our campsite had been under water only a few weeks before and the swamp edge was now just past the legal 50m limit on camp proximity to croc habitat.

Known up here as 'salties' - the estuarine crocodiles are at the top of the food chain. They can grow to 5 metres plus, weigh 700 kg, see in the dark feel, have no natural predators, and since hunting was banned in the early 1970s their numbers have exploded. Salties are assumed to be in all waters not above a waterfall [crocs can't climb] and designated waterholes are only opened to swimming once they are cut off from the main river flow in the dry season and a croc management plan and trapping has ensured the water is croc free.

As the sun set we heard them come. I started a fire, frantically spread flaming branches around our campsite and even deployed chemicals to keep them a bay but it was futile. We should have known camping beside a World Heritage Area wetland, and the recent high water ensured that there were too many to contend with. We finally beat a hasty retreat to our tent, unable to leave for ten hours even to use the toilet.

In the morning the damage had been done. Twenty-one bites on my right elbow and ten on my finger from where they rested against the tent mesh as I slept.

The salties can be deadly up here but they have nothing on the Kakadu mossies.

A cramp in my right right index finger

2010-06-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

necessitated a switch from raising one finger to two, sometimes even three off the steering wheel. It was like clicking a computer mouse all day.

This is the Stuart Highway slicing through the red heart or Oz, 2,834 km from the last fish and chips of Post Augusta on the south coast of Australia to steamy Darwin on the Timor Sea in the north. On 'The Track' as it's known, you are either going north 'up the hill' or south 'down the hill'. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of dirt roads lead off The Track east and west, 200 km to a cattle station here, 500 km to a mine there or simply 1000 km to nowhere enroute to somewhere else.

There are a few rules on this highway. Carry enough water for two or three days, if you break down stay with your car, give way to the 'Kings of the Road,' the massive, wobbling three or four trailer, 54-metre long, 150-tonne Roadtrains, don't drive after 4:30-5 pm unless you have a bush bumper, comprehensive insurance and a hankering for roo steaks and above all other rules, bar none, you absolutely must give the Outback finger-lift-off-the-steering-wheel wave to every single oncoming vehicle.

That's 2,834 km worth. But to not do it wouldn't be very 'stralian would it?

Glancing over my shoulder, the large, sweaty man was closing the gap.

2010-06-03T18:12:00.000-07:00

We were rounding the path on the lip of the Henbury Meteorite Craters in the crushing heat and we could feel his heavy breath on our necks. It seemed a rather isolated spot - 140 km south of Alice Springs and 15 km up a red earth road from the Stuart Highway - to be nabbed from behind by a bare-chested Russian wrestler.

Then he was on us as we reached the car park and honesty box for the gravel campsite where his vast Governator Hummer dwarfed our hobbit-like Corrola.

'Do you have change for a $10?' - Slavic but encased in a light veneer of broad Aussie. 'No worries mate.' I forked over two fives and retreated to our rocky campsite while 'The Bear' unfolded his Hummer-top tent, wheeled a quad bike from his trailer and zoomed off down the road, shirtless, long hair streaming behind.

It seems Russian oligarchs have spread beyond Chelsea.

Later, as the sun set into the desert and Venus shone in the west, The Bear stopped work on his quad bike and appeared at our campsite with a stool and two bottles of chilled New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc courtesy of the fridge in his Hummer. As The Bear hydrated with a bottle of white over ice we learned that he was Polish, not Russian, and a doctor not a wrestler, who hailed from Sydney where he'd emigrated to from Poland in the late 1980s. He'd recently sold a large medical practice and had driven up to Alice Springs [$2000 in petrol for his Hummer] on an Australian national Medicare contract to provide medical service to isolated Aboriginal communities. Clearly a man of the people.

We offered him dinner but he waved it off - 'I ate sushi for lunch' - and he quaffed a second bottle of white.

For fun he was racing in the Finke Desert Rally on his quad bike - 500 km of sand dunes in one day - and between diagnosing diabetes and sewing up wounds 1000 km from nowhere his other passion was poker and his greatest joy, empty the bulging pockets of payday miners on the lash in the Alice Spring Casino.

Perhaps a Bear after all.

While noodling I felt the pull

2010-05-06T00:03:00.000-07:00

It's hard to identify the physical location in my body, harder yet to pin down the sensation itself. But there it was driving me to chip away at the building-sized pile of rubble with a broken prospector's adze.

Karen must have felt it too. She's hunched over a gravel outcropping, green hat pulled down against the white-hot mid-day sun, batting away the hundreds of bottle flies swarming around and digging away with a hand-sized stone.

Coober Pedy does this to you.

It's about the most God-forsaken wasteland imaginable. A treeless town of 3000, the largest in central Australia between the coast 500 km south and Alice Springs 1200 km north. Built with bare hands out of rubble and without a water well on the driest, rockiest plain in the Outback. Hundreds of thousands of piles of mine tailings encircle the town and the subsurface is a Swiss cheese of shafts and tunnels where every year they lose the odd tourist or late-night drunk.

The town site is filled with abandoned cars and apocalyptic film props and the people here are all a bit nuts. Mind you, except for a few hundred Aborigines, nobody seems actually to be from Coober Pedy. Half the population lives underground in houses and mines and we even pitched our tent in an underground campsite. Few would want to visit, let alone live here but everyone is digging

I look down through the chalky dust blowing in my face, my hands are caked with moisture sucking grime and then I see it. A little spit and I see a multi-coloured glint in the sunlight. I dig around and come up with two bits of a fossilized seashell the opal veneer visible where the adze cracked it. I can feel the pull now.

I hear a shout from Karen that she has found some opal chips. Sure it's all worthless 'potch' as the locals call it, not the rare 6% of opal that is precious. Still I see her go back to the digging in a swarm of flies and can see that she's got the opal fever too.

Wilpena Pound

2010-05-05T23:26:00.000-07:00

is a vast 80 square kilometre natural amphitheatre ringed by the mountains of the Flinders Range of South Australia. It was used by early settlers to hold thousands of sheep and cattle [hence 'Pound'] but after a few droughts and severe land degradation from grazing it was abandoned.

This is dramatic country, a few hundred kilometres from somewhere and a couple thousand from nowhere. Despite the heat in the frying pan of the Pound the clouds rolled in and by the time we summitted St. Marys Peak, the highest mountain, it was decidedly Scottish on the top.

Twenty-three kilometres under the boots and a few dozen wallaby encounters later the sky was cloudless again and it being a rare night with ice at our campsite, we sat by a large stone slab under a graceful eucalyptus with its smooth white skin, drank cold gin and tonics and, as you might expect, listened to the Hair musical soundtrack while watching the waxing moon cut a swathe up through the Milky Way.

From driving to sustainable agriculture in 10 minutes

2010-05-05T22:38:00.001-07:00

A random right turn off a corrugated gravel road onto a white sand road in the Grampians of Victoria took us unexpectedly to the delightful oasis of Mount Zero Olives in the middle of the bush.

Contrary to all expectation, in the farm shop we got a frosty reception from the proprietor. Short, choppy answers to our questions and a sharp half-already-answered-for-you-in-the-negative question about whether we wanted to taste any olives followed by an intake of breath when we said yes.

Ten minutes later after we'd munched some olives and she'd established that we weren't Americans nor supporters of GM crops and Monsanto and after I started to talk about the problem of Roundup resistant Canola in Canada, Saskatchewan farmers, gene flow, the evils of terminator seed technology, sustainable agriculture and the growth versus no-growth paradigms in the economics of sustainability, Jane as we now knew her, had backpedalled to the point of graciously inviting us for a coffee in her delightful cafe converted from an old one-room school house

A WWOOFER [organic farm volunteer] from near Padua, Italy made delightful espresso [in the bush it's important to have both a photovoltaic powered espresso maker and an authentic Italian to operate it] and we talked about solar power, sustainable architecture, Mount Zero's olive production, Mount Zero's cooperative venture with the Aborigines to produce pink salt from a nearby lake, her interest in distilling eucalyptus oil and soap making and her activism against GM seed companies and for local, sustainable agriculture.

We happily left with a bag of Jane's bio-dynamic oranges, a jar of olives, some falafel mix, a bag of organic red lentils and an offer to stay and volunteer on the farm as WWOOFERS. In turn, Jane waved us goodbye with an Earthscan reading list in hand for Agri-Culture, Prosperity Without Growth and Factor Five and my promise to send her [which I later did] the link to the website of our our Kiwi friends Shay and Jo who are building a zero energy house in Auckland.

Great coffee and conversation and to think I could have driven straight on.

The waning sun above the mountains

2010-05-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

lit up the red earth of the dusty, pot-holed track we drove up in our 'not-to-be-taken-off-sealed-roads' rental car. Eucalyptus trees with their characteristic peeling bark draped over the red strip ahead of us. As our bush campsite in Victoria's Grampians National Park loomed on our right, without warning it was all action up ahead.

Out of the bush and across the track raced a 5-foot emu, head pulsing forward and back, eyes wide as it fled into the gum trees. Then another right behind, feathers ruffling and three-toed feet kicking up the red dust in frantic wait-for-me strides. Not to be outdone by his flightless mates, further down the road a kangaroo hopped out of the trees, across the track and back into the bush near the entrance to our campsite.

It seemed that after nearly two weeks in Oz, we'd finally found 'The Bush'.

The comedic value of animals with bodies so ridiculous to northern eyes induced cathartic belly laughs in our car. Only the night before we camped in a loud urban caravan park in Warrnambool at the end of the Great Ocean Road after a long escape two days before from the sprawling suburbs of western Melbourne.

And now here we were, finally. Two people, four wheels and a tent on the inward looking edge of this vast continent. Poised for the first step on the very margin of the place I'd come looking for.

When I was 14 years of age

2010-05-05T19:25:00.000-07:00

I pinned a massive National Geographic Society physical land form map of Australia above my bed in Calgary, tracing obscure Outback tracks and roads with my finger and wondering what the vast salt bed of Lake Eyre looked like. I subsequently read quite a bit about the country and coming from southern Alberta, endowed as it is with big landscapes of prairie and mountains, I focussed on the landforms - the Outback and the coastlines - and I built up both a powerful mental profile of Australia and a desire to visit it more than any other place in the world.

My first attempt to travel there was scuppered in 1992, the early 90s recession kicked a plan to go to Oz on a one year working holiday visa into the long, dry life-choking grass of the doldrums of prolonged unemployment. I didn't have the $1200 bond the Australia government required for a visa to be processed let alone the cash for a flight. What I did have was a massive student loan and no job and no prospect of a job.

So Oz would have to wait 13 years until I was in London and working at Earthscan where I managed a week-long editorial and promotional work trip to attend the huge IUFRO World Forestry Congress being convened in Brisbane with a three day holiday excursion to Noosa and Fraser Island tagged on the end. This trip was more of a sweetener - I was there and gone before jet lag subsided - than the satisfying long drink from the well demanded by two decades of travelling the dusty tracks of this vast sun-scoured desert land in my imagination.

It was thus, you might imagine, a bit of a jab in the solar plexus to finally arrive in Melbourne on 2 April for a trip of real duration and unlimited prospects and to not really like the country all that much.

The problem, as it turned out, wasn't Australia but rather a misalignment of the fantasy of youth and the reality of modern Australia. That is to say the idea of an almost unimaginably vast, thinly populated country of rugged geography and unforgiving landscapes, inhabited by odd, unique characters, much like my own country, crashing headlong into another reality. A reality which is that for the 80-85% of the population of this country that lives in five large coastal cities and a number of smaller cities and towns, much of everyday life in Oz is a circumscribed existence in a sprawling belt of interchangeable suburbs. These are flanked by big-box stores and shopping centres and choked by the freeways of busy, stressed people carting home mountains of stuff they don't need to an overpriced, cookie-cutter house they can hardly afford in a neighbourhood that isn't as good as the one they really want to live in but is better than where their friends live. And then every night they turn on the television and have this same world reified in a shower of mass media.

So, in other words, it seemed that I'd waited 25 years and travelled to the other side of the world to arrive back in the city - or more to the point, what that city represents in Anglo-American Western society - where I pinned up my National Geographic map of Australia in 1985.

Over the past month, much has changed though and this initial disappointing view of Oz has been being eclipsed by a vivid, engaged experience that has matched, and indeed has begun to exceed, the imagination of a 14 year old. And all it took to kick this off were four wheels, two emus and a kangaroo.

NZ by the numbers

2010-04-21T00:39:00.000-07:00

We are now in Australia, where the sun is shining and summer is still holding on. Before my first Oz blog, here's a quick recap of NZ by some of the numbers for the anoracks out there tracking us on Google Earth and probably compiling spreadsheets.

Time in NZ: 71 days
Kilometres driven: 9135
Litres of petrol/gas burned: 635.21
Cost of petrol/gas: NZ $1142.76
Cost of car hire: NZ $2000
Total car cost [including NZ $16.50 in oil]: NZ $3159.26
Cost per kilometre: NZ $0.35
Nights in a tent: 44
Nights in mountain huts: 3
Nights on a sailboat: 5
Nights at friends': 19
Cost of accomodation: $1305 [45 paid nights and 26 free nights]
Friends from London days visited: 11
Hitchhikers picked up: 2
Hitchhikers passed in guilt: 4
Animals hit: 1 seagull [poor bastard]
Hawks almost hit: 3
Terriers almost hit: 1
Dead possums on the road: too many to count
Days spent tramping/hiking: 13
Mountains summitted: 4 [plus a couple wee ones]
Breweries / brew pubs visited for tastings: 8
Wineries visited: 5
Seal colonies visited: 2
Fish caught: 1
Fish and chips eaten: 14 [I'm guessing here, it could be more]
People who asked if were we were going to stay in NZ: 17

Cheers to all you Kiwis for one hell of a trip!

In the cold air

2010-03-30T21:47:00.001-07:00

the crack and deep rubble was unmistakable.

It was 2am at the White Horse Department of Conservation Campsite at the end of the Mount Cook Road. Penetrating cold leaked in around the neck of my two season sleeping bag as the bellows effect of rolling over expelled my hard won body heat. I lay still, tuque cinched down, as an icy breeze from the Mueller Glacier 2km above wafted in through the fine mesh of our beach and barbie Australian-made tent and stripped away the last veneer of warmth. Beside me, Karen slumbered effortlessly, snug in her superior down bag

Then I heard it again. A sharp but distant crack followed by the throaty rumble. The sound of huge, possibly building-size, seracs peeling off the face of a hanging glacier on Mount Sefton and falling a thousand metres or more onto the Mueller Glacier with the rumble of a carpet bombing sortie.

It's an awesome spectacle and one that I had the good fortune to witness in early July 1996 while climbing in a short-roped team on Vantage Peak in British Columbia 25 km north of Whistler. A huge crack had our team swivelling heads to witness a house-sized serac detach itself from adjacent Mount Joffre, tumble gracefully end-over-end through the early morning air, and then explode in a shower of blue ice shrapnel on the surface of the Twin One Glacier half a kilometre below.

Here again at Mount Cook the sound induced the strangely compatible urge to go up high into the alpine danger-zone coupled with the slow churning in the gut around a hard knot of fear induced by objective dangers of a scale that only towering mountains and the deep sea can produce.

It's a feeling to contemplate, fear, perhaps even savour. It's certainly one to warm you to life in a cold tent below an unforgiving peak.

Slamming on the brakes

2010-03-23T13:22:00.000-07:00

as we came around the curve, the end was nigh.

We were about 80km south of Queenstown, NZ bombing towards Te Anau in Fiordland on State Highway 6 enroute to a four day tramp on the Kepler Track. The sun dripped behind the western mountains and the inland ranges behind were blanketed in a soft golden light. We hadn't seen a car in 20 minutes until a reddish van with tinted windows slowly stalked us from behind, eventually settling in a wee bit too close on our tail on this empty road.

The highway here is narrow and shoulderless and as we rounded a curve to the right I caught a familiar glimpse of roadkill, probably possum, on the centre line. And yet there was something else on the road. Something entirely out of place.

Standing, happy-as-hell over the flattened roadkill, tail in the air, was a Jack Russell terrier. I slammed the brake pedal through the floor and wrenched the wheel towards the long grass on the left, screaming by, two wheels off the road. In the rearview mirror I saw the panicked dog bolt behind us towards the grass and then it was too late. Smoke billowed from the van's tyres as the driver braked and I saw the dog go under the passenger side wheels, come out the back end and spin off into the grass in slow motion, brown patches rotating on white fur, its head pirouetting perfectly, like a spit roasted hog. One, maybe two seconds and it was over.

As the van stopped we briefly debated going back but the thought of the flattened dog was too much so I floored it, and slightly stunned, we turned right on SH 97 and accelerated towards the reddened sky.

A tale of two volcanoes

2010-03-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

The North Island of NZ is a volcanic powder keg. But one that begs to be be tampered with.

A few weeks ago, after three days of waiting on the rain, we threaded a weather needle and made a dash for the summit of Mount Taranaki in the southwestern north island. Taranaki is an achingly perfect volcano with rich green native bush skirting the flanks of a deeply erroded summit dome capped by a snow-filled crater. At about 1500m elevation we came through the cloud layer into the rarified world above where the sky is cobalt blue and the skin comes off your nose in 15 minutes.

Up another 1000 metres of scoria and slabs and we stepped into the icy windtunnel coming off the permanent snowfield in the crater. It was blowing a hooly when we topped out two metres below the summit, touching the top rather than standing on it out of respect for its sacred place in Maori culture. The views were tremendous. All the way to the South Island and to Mount Ruapehu, Mount Tongariro and Mount Ngauruhoe in the east.

Forty-eight hours later, after driving half way across NZ delerious with summit fever, we topped out on Mount Ngauruhoe [really a giant vent of Mount Tongariro and probably known to some of you better as the stand in for 'Mount Doom' in Peter Jackson's cinematic Lord of the Rings trilogy].

Ngauruhoe is a perfect volcanic cone of pumice and scoria devoid of vegetation. Looking into the crater is an eerie exercise in human insignificance as vents spew steam along the crater rim. To the west, the massif of Taranaki dominates the skyline halfway across the country.

When the sail blew out

2010-03-13T23:04:00.000-08:00

Captain Shay was so nimble on the helm I hadn't even realized the sail was loose until we'd come through the wind onto the starboard tack. The monumental multi-ton load on the sails of a 13 metre catamaran in 15-20 knot winds wiped away the easy, breezy confidence accumulated over five days of ghosting along in light winds. No harm done though.

The culprit was a dodgy bowline knot I'd used to fasten the sheet to the foresail. The bowline had a tail that was too short and under the immense loads and constant whipping in the gusts as we crested 10 knots of true velocity - the fastest I've ever experienced under sail - the knot came undone and the sail blew out. Loud, momentarily brick-shittingly-unsettling but ultimately there was no damage and nobody was worse for it. Perhaps the opposite.

It was the fianl day of a 6-days odyssey in the Hauraki Gulf off Auckland on a yacht often discussed over pints or a late night single malt in London when we lived with Shay in Shepherds Bush.

How to describe a better week in life?

Take a heady dose of good mates: a couple of renewable energy engineers building their own sustainable house, a former marketeer-turned-author dissecting the role of marketing in manufacturing wants masquerading as needs, an environmental policymaker, a hard man from BP, a mechanical engineer who designs operating room equipment, a money man who buys corporations, a couple of unemployed bums [you can guess who they are] and a woman working on a Swedish-Kiwi fusion cookbook. Add a gracefully-lined, ice-breaker strong sailboat, plenty of sun and swimming, a dash of fishing, a dusting of seabirds and a big slug of eating, drinking and launching water ballons from a catapult at neighbouring superyachts.

Shake it up and what you get is about the most sublime cocktail imaginable to enjoy the sunset over the volcano of Rangitoto.

Sign me up for a life of this.

'Can you hear me in the beck?'

2010-02-17T19:11:00.000-08:00

Standing in back of the crowd at the Doubtless Bay Fishing Contest, Karen turned around to see if anyone was standing in the stream behind us? 'Nope, definitely nobody in the beck.'

Assured the crowd was with him, the the MC then got on with it, handing out fishing rods, lifejackets, nets, GPS units and fish finders from the local tackle shop for monster kingfish, bluenose and a huge cheque for $2500 plus a circular saw for the largest snapper.

The intangible culture was palpable. Plenty of big sunburned boys with rod calloused hands knocking back Red Lion, nodding in appreciation and filling us cultural interlopers in on the state of affairs. One turned to his mate: 'those are some beg fush, eh Bro?'

I lent my helping hand to the locals by scooping up two snappers weighing in a total of 10 or 12 kgs at the charity auction of the contest catch. That was enough to feed seven at a BBQ, plenty for breakfast, some to leave with our friend Rob, who lives in Coopers Beach, and a thick fillet to take on the road.

Some very fine, very beg fush, and only $28 for the lot. Not bad, eh Bro?

While the endangered, noctural, flightless kiwi is the national animal

2010-01-31T12:47:00.000-08:00

here in New Zealand, and there are lots of signs for them - 'kiwi crossing,' 'kiwi habitat, keep dogs on lead' - there are few signs of the long-beaked wormeater themselves. We've seen one so far, stuffed and under glass in the Auckland Museum.

However, the kiwi aside, the real star of the New Zealand animal show is the possum, introduced by the British from Australian in 1837. With 30 million of them now roaming the land - about 7 for every person - possums are the scourage of the country, chewing their way through native bush, including kiwi habitat, at a ferocious pace.

In some countries distances are ticked off by mile markers, however in New Zealand road distances are counted off by the bodies of fresh possums strewn across the highways and tufts of possum fur fused to the road from the passing cars. Up in the north where we are right now, the possum roadkill is thick and fast with a fur blob or fresh carcass every hundred metres.

And running down a possum on the highway here is national pastime sandwiched somewhere between rugby and cricket in the sporting heirarchy. Indeed it borders on being a national duty to swerving across the oncoming lane to bag yourself a fur ball and to don possum gloves and hats in the winter. It's good eating for the birds of prey too.

The Future of Asia is Huge

2010-01-17T18:42:00.000-08:00

I’ve seen it firsthand.

America and Europe don’t stand a chance in this battle for future global dominance while Canada and Australia best keep their heads down and continue to supply the fuel for the fire. I’m not talking about foreign reserves, trade balances [though how Australia has a negative trade balance is worth a separate post] and national and personal debt loads. No, I’m talking about BMI, girth, flab, middle spread, the battle for the widest people on the planet.

As one travels from Laos through Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia to Singapore, incomes and waistlines expand with each border control. From the 50kg subsistence farming wraiths of northern Laos and Cambodia, to the ballooning urban populations of Saigon and their newly forming paunches, to the fast-food gobbling masses of the swanky half of Bangkok down through the Malay peninsula to the Singapore mum-cramming-it-in her-8-year-old-son’s-bursting-balloon-like-face, big change is afoot. Orchard Road in Singapore is like Grafton Street in post-Celtic Tiger Dublin on a Saturday afternoon. Strapping well-fed under 30 giants towering over their diminutive everyday-was-like-the-Great-Depression parents and grandparents.

To be sure, as with financial power, the lipid shift from West to East can be greatly exaggerated and the West hasn’t lost this eating contest yet. Singapore’s still got nothing on Chicago and its deep dish pizza, BBQ smokehouses and 3-metre sidewalks for double-wide pram pushing couples walking hand-in-hand. Or for that matter Shepherds Bush with its pint guzzling fireplugs downing fried chicken before a Queens Park Rangers match. But as with cars, electronics and IT-technology, in the battle for girth, Asia looks posited to leapfrog the West provided it can get an expanding leg over, and soon enough those circus big top relaxed fit Old Navy trousers won’t need to be exported to the American mid-west.

All eyes to the East – there are big things on the horizon.

It took a dump on me

2010-01-17T18:38:00.000-08:00

Off Gili Menos, a tiny, 1 km wide island, ringed by a coral reef and white sand beaches off the NW coast of Lombok, we plunged in from the outrigger with snorkels on.

Gliding 8 or 10 metres above the reef – the closest thing to flying except for this being water and probably nothing like flying – there it was at the edge where the reef plummeted away. A sea turtle. Graceful, green, reticulated, with flipper wings, turning slowly and fading towards the relentless blue of the deep off the reef. A few hard kicks with the fins and its back was only a body length from me – one more kick and it’d be able to touch it. And then it took a shit on me.

Lurid green, perfectly formed like a dog turd, slowly tumbling towards me like a depth charge off the stern of a WWII Corvette. A few slow motion underwater evasive manoeuvres and I was clear, the turd tumbling off below. But it was too late. The sea turtle was gone, fins flapping as it ghosted into the blue pixellated haze of the deep.

Gunung Rinjani

2010-01-17T18:35:00.000-08:00

It’s a sacred beast. A monster of a volcano, the second highest in Indonesia, and comprising the beating heart of Lombok. Sacred to the millions of Balinese across the Lombok Strait as the seat of the gods and a beast to anyone aiming for the summit.

At 3726m, the summit is a volcanic rock pyramid marking the highest part of the crater rim left behind when the 6 km high volcano exploded a million years ago. Hiking it is a 52 hour knee grinder if you are quick and the upper elevations a heart stopper for sea level dwellers.

For those who enjoy this sort of thing [you know who you are], below is the hike by the numbers. For those who don’t here is a short summary:

Short summary

Sembalun village, a guide named ‘Full,’ two men in flop flops with bamboo baskets carrying food and tents, 7 relentless hours up through savannah, heavy rain, cold wind, camp on black sand, eat, sleep, 2:30 am wake, contact lenses like glass shards in eyes, dark, still air, black sand and pumice treadmill to the summit, lava flowing in crater, glorious sunrise, Bali to west, shadow of Rinjani on the sea, elation, high fives, rapid plunge step decent, rest, eat, knee buster down to lake called Danau Segara Anak [Child of the Sea], hot sulphurous shower in hotsprings waterfall, rain, grunt up to crater rim, volcano belching ash on tents and food, full rainbow above, spectacular sunset lighting up the mountains, thunderheads over Bali, ‘Happy New Year’ at 8:30 pm and eyes closed, wake, eat, rainforest decent, temperature rising, 2 vertical km down over 8 km, relentless 25% grade, tree roots, weird fungi, park gate, coffee and banana plantation, Senaru village and a chair to sit in.

By the numbers for the hiking nerds

Day 1, 30 Dec 2009
Start: 9 am Sembalun village elevation 1000m
Camp: Crater rim at 2639m
Time: 7:06
Elevation gain: 1639 m
Elevation loss: nil

Day 2, 31 Dec 2009
Start: 3 am [up at 2:30 am - ouch]
Summit: 3726 m
Time: 4:58 [3 up 2 down]
Elevation gain: 1087
Elevation loss: 1087
Hike down to lake in crater: 2:20
Elevation loss: approx 600m
Hike up to crater rim to camp at 2641m: 2:36
Elevation gain: approx 600m
Total time: 9:55
Total elevation gain: 1687 m
Total elevation loss: 1687 m

Day 3, 1 Jan 2010
Start: Crater rim at 2641
Finish: Rinjani Park HQ, Senaru village at 600m elevation at 1 pm
Time: 5:23
Elevation gain: nil
Elevation loss: 2041m

Total trip time 52 hours, total hiking time 22:24
Total trip elevation gain: 3326 m
Total trip elevation loss: 3726 m
Total hours of rain: 5
Temp high: 29C
Temp low: 5C
Number of full rainbows: 1
Number of spewing volcanoes: 1

The Dancing Midget of Lombok

2010-01-13T18:59:00.000-08:00

Lombok, the volcanic island east of Bali in Indonesia, has many sights to behold. It has villages of bamboo huts shaded by palm trees and fronted by beaches of multi-coloured outrigger fishing fleets. It has a huge, smoking volcano called Rinjani and apparently it also has rampant ‘illegal’ gold mining.

Lombok also has a beach town called Sengiggi, home to an open-air pub called Papaya with 2-for-1 Bintang beers during ‘Crazy Time’ from half nine to ten pm, and the tightest 7-piece cover band I’ve heard in years. The pub also has a dancing midget.

As the hulking Samoan keyboardist belts out Irene Cara’s Flash Dance hit ‘What a Feeling,’ all three and a half feet of him carves it up on the dance floor, cigarette in one hand, a fluttering bank note in the other and like a bandage, his head encased in a wide white headband emblazoned with the Japanese rising sun. The only other moving thing on the dance floor is a greying blonde perm in a black, bat-winged one-piece jumpsuit with a low V-neck framing a heavily wrinkled tan. With dance moves birthed when even I was wearing a narrow leather tie, from behind a pillar he’s playing ‘come-hither’ with a top heavy post-war German bombshell across the bar.

Next up for the 7-piece is Kool and the Gang. The midget slides effortlessly into a Usain Bolt running-on-the-spot move complete with cigarette and flapping bank note and the greying blonde perm is spinning his captured prey like a top.

It’s five minutes to ten and time for more Bintang. Crazy Time indeed

The happiest Christmas of all

2010-01-13T18:57:00.000-08:00

In mid-December, while we were eating our way through the famous chicken rice emporiums of Melaka, Malaysia, the happiest Christmas of 2009 was, without a doubt, shaping up in Columbia, South Carolina.

How happy and why Columbia half a world away from SE Asia? Well, 4565.08-pounds-Sterling-on-my-Visa-card is how happy. Charged by a Columbia shopper giddy on the heady buzz of buying unaffordable big ticket swag on my stolen card number.

Twenty-three transactions on the 19th and 20th of December, just in time to pile the presents high under the tree. My personal favourites [aside from the 155.36 quid spent at the Ralph Lauren Factory outlet and two trips to the Polo shop which speaks volumes - what kind of try-hard-down-in-the-dumps Yuppie wears a stolen golf shirt?] are the nerdy 469.09 and 305.06 Gamestop purchases. How much Wii hardware does that buy?

But best of all though, the shopping spree was capped off by two ‘Food Fair’ transactions for 25.64 and 19.24. I hope they supersized the orders – it’s damn hungry work maxing out somebody else’s credit card.

The handless bookseller of Siem Reap

2009-12-21T01:43:00.000-08:00

has been on my mind since I sliced my right hand open [sutures are out and it's healing well] and spent a week using only my never-the-most-coordinated left.

Last month on the streets of Siem Reap, the Cambodian city launch pad to the temples of Angkor, I bought a guidebook to the archaeology from a man with no hands pushing his wheeled bookstall. With the sensitive skin of his wrists he removed plastic wrappings so I could browse titles and when I paid he whipped out his wallet and counted out my change without a pause.

How'd he end up handless and selling me a guidebook? While in the Cambodian army in the 1980s fighting the Khmer Rouge, his hands were blown off by a mine while he was setting up camp in long grass. Prevented from killing himself with a grenade by a brother-in-arms he spent years languishing on the streets of Phnom Penh as a begger before an NGO fronted him cash and support so he could set up his mobile book stall a decade ago. He's now, he told me, master of his own destiny with a business and a wife and son.

A damn good book too.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Angkor-River-Michael-Freeman/dp/0500974853/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261390078&sr=8-6

So once again I find myself on a hospital bed.

2009-12-11T04:28:00.000-08:00

This time I'm staring out at a glorious day and the low curve of sand that comprises the isthmus on the island Phi Phi, Thailand where the town of Ton Sai has been rebuilt after the Boxing Day tsunami obliterated it five years ago. It's idyllic, except for the nasty 2 inch long gash in heel of my right hand, close to the bone, gobbules of yellow fat shielding the full depth of the cut. The doctor has a look inside and tells me she can see the artery pulsating away but fortunately it's unsevered and as a bonus I can move all my fingers. Aside from repeated jabs to freeze the tissue and the odd needle through unfrozen flesh as she puts 7 sutures in, it's surprisingly painless though watching Karen's not-so-poker-face made me think I was having an ampution. An hour and 2200 baht later and I'm back walking the beaches of this Garden of Eden. How did it happen? Flippers, a stumble in a foot of water and a very sharp barnacle or piece of coral.

This wasn't the blog posting I was going to write about Koh Phi Phi, which truly is paradisic, but as that one would have bordered on gloating to those trappped in offices with the winter sun setting at 3:45 pm, I think I got my karmic feedback ahead of the act of blogging vulgarity or else it's a twist on that old favourite Biblical plot of bissful lounging in the Garden of Eden always being buggered by the hand of man.

No gloating here.

Children's excercise equipment and whips made of electrical wire

2009-12-07T06:24:00.001-08:00

are but two of the implements of torture on display at Tuol Sleng, a former high school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia converted by the Khmer Rouge into their chief centre of torture. Known widely as S-21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum, a visit is a full frontal visceral assault. A guantlet of burned and disfigured men, many with missing limbs, begging for US dollars flank the entrance. Inside agitated vistors with tight faces and crossed arms shuffle from one classroom to the next reeling in the full horror of the Khmer Rouge killing machine that cut down a quarter the Cambodia's population in just over three years. Rounding out an afternoon of misery is a trip to Choeung Ek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choeung_Ek, the closest 'Killing Field' to the capital of some 200 execution sites established by the Khmer Rouge and where some 8,895 S21 and other prisoners met their end. It's an awful, chilling place with the skulls of the murdered housed in a glass fronted Buddhist stupa. Walking the paths amongst the excavated pits, fragments of bone and clothing still poking out of the earth near the 'killing tree' against which babies were beaten to death, is a putrid tonic for idealists of all political stripes.

As I write this the trial of 'Duch' who ran S21 is coming to a close.

The hammer and sickle, the five pointed star and the swastika

2009-12-07T05:44:00.000-08:00

are the three most prevalent symbols in Vietnam after Uncle Ho's ubiquitous smiling face.

Like a familiar yet foreign montage of misplaced World War II symbols to a Westerner rubbernecking from the back of a motorbike. But clearly WWII has nothing to do with any of this. Rather than symbolizing the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle is the emblem of the Vietnamese Communist Party, which has seen its earlier Russian counterpart off into the history books. Instead of the stencilled logo for the the US Army, in these parts the five pointed star [yellow or red] is of course the international sign for communism. And the swastika, typically positioned above the gateway to a wat [temple] or emblazoned on the chest or forehead of a statue of Buddha, is an ancient symbol from India and associated with Buddhism and other Eastern religions for two-and-a-half thousand years before the Nazis hoisted it over Munich and changed everything.

Still, even with all of this in mind, swastikas are not something you get used to seeing anywhere let alone framing the entrance to a tranquil Buddhist wat.

Three men and a coffin, a refrigerator and a 100 kg pig in a bamboo cage

2009-11-28T02:56:00.000-08:00

are but a few of the things spotted on the backs of motorcycles during a 4 day motorcycle tour we took through the central highlands of Vietnam on the backs of the rides of a couple of Nha Trang 'Easyriders.'

In country where there are 30 motorcycles for every car (Saigon alone has 5 million motorcycles), two wheels is the way everything gets moved. Other freight spotted on the backs of 'motos': a dozen live ducks hanging from their feet, 10 boxes of Budweiser beer totalling 240 bottles, a queen sized mattress folded in half, 60 litres of water (I know because I drew 30 litres out of a well for the driver), two dozen durian fruits, several hundred bananas, a 50 litre bottle of compressed natural gas (yikes!) and even worse, 50 litres of petrol, a couple of dozen coconuts in massive panniers, a 4-inch wide giant bandsaw blade slung across a rider's shoulder, various families of five with two kids wedged between the parents and the baby holding the handle bars, two sheets of plate glass 1.5 metres by half a metre held by a passenger, a freshly born calf in a wire cage, a half dozen five metre long pieces of rebar over a driver's shoulder, a cage crammed with piglets, 10 metres of air conditioner duct, bundles of giant bamboo, 200 pairs of trousers folded and stacked, a cubic metre of firewood and a glass-fronted wood credenza.

Ok, to be fair the motorcycle with the coffin and undertakers did have three wheels and the credenza driver was pedalling...

2.9 metres is the high water mark

2009-11-27T07:33:00.000-08:00

on the walls of the riverside cafes of the UNESCO World Heritage city of Hoi An http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoi_An in central Vietnam from the tidal surge of the 30 Sept 2009 typhoon. Possibly the highest ever recorded. A beautiful place and once the most important trading port in Vietnam and known for its historic Chinese trade association halls, these days this town is in trouble. Only 4 km up river from the South China Sea and with minor street flooding at every high tide, it reminds me of Chiswick on the Thames in west London. Except unlike London there's no flood barrier in Hoi An and given the vast flat estuary surrounding it, little likelihood of one being possible if even remotely affordable. With polar cap ice melt and thermal expansion of the oceans, by IPCC www.ipcc.ch/ reckoning on a good day diners will be up to their knees by 2050. When the ever more volatile typhoons of a warmer era start rolling in this historic town could well be resigned to history.

With a golden statue of 'Uncle Ho' looking on, the guide slid back the display case cover and handed me an AK-47

2009-11-17T01:42:00.000-08:00

Safety first. I popped out the magazine and slid back the bolt to make sure it's unloaded before handing it to Karen. Why don't they let you do this at the British Museum?

A few days ago were were in the so-called 'Demilitarized Zone' or DMZ which was the heavily fortified border between North and South Vietnam from 1954 until 1975 along the Ben Hai River. Its now a rice growing area strewn with Vietnamese war graves and the odd burned out shell of a US tank. This was a US 'Free Fire Zone' so everything standing is post-1975. There aren't many sights here, simply locations of death and destruction including Khe Sanh Combat Base, the Rock Pile and the human meat grinder known as Hamburger Hill.

Buried beneath the overgrown jumble of bomb craters from B52 heavy ordinance is Vinh Moc, the only remaining tunnel complex beneath the DMZ of the many dozens built by villagers and the Viet Cong. Twenty-three metres underground in the low unsupported earth tunnels, where several hundreds lived, dozens of babies were born and uncounted surguries executed in the makeshift hospital as napalm and 500 lb bombs rained down, is a sobering experience.

She said take 1000mg of Amoxicillin twice daily and and the juice of two coconuts

2009-11-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

So the other night I was laying in a Lao hospital bed on a Sunday night watching a lizard eat insects off the wall near the light and waiting for the results of a bood test for Malaria and Dengue Fever. As luck would have it I had neither and my 8 day headache and 2 day fever were chalked up to a random infection and the muscle spasms in my legs to dehydration [partially from the aftermath of a dodgy tuna sandwich] and low potassium from sweating while hiking. 270,000 kip ($40 US) later [it being Sunday night and all so double the regular rate] and the solution was evident - a prescription for Amoxicillan, 5 packets of World Health Organization hydration salts and direction from the doctor to drink the juice of two coconuts every day as cocunuts are high in potassium. Problem solved.

Laos and the World Food Programme

2009-11-08T06:49:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago we were in in Luang Namtha in Northern Laos, a town strangely familiar with its dusty, empty main road, reminicent of say Vulcan, Alberta yet completely alien. The people here are wee in the sense that they are exactly that - 5 feet tall and 50 kilos for the men. Tucked away on a side street is a small World Food Programme (WFP) compound. A week later we were in Luang Prabang, a few hundred kilometres to the south and as we stepped out of our guest house there was a WFP truck as parked out front. A quick chat with the two WFP staff revealed that they are surveying the food security of Laos in the aftermath of the fifth typhoon to sweep in from Vietnam and the South China Sea in 7 weeks.

This country is poor with 80 percent of people living in rural areas in bamboo or wood huts and only a failed rice harvest away from severe hunger and the need for WFP food distribution. Two thirds of the population lives under the threat of food insecurity and half of children under 5 are malnurished. To cap it off a sizeable part of eastern Laos is unfarmable because of an estimated 30 million cluster bombs and other bits of unexploded ordinance (UXOs) strewn across the countryside courtesy of 2 millions tonnes of bombs dropped in 580,000 bombing raids by the US over a 9 year period during the Vietnam War. Shame Laos was 'neutral.'

Check out the WFP and the situation in Laos

http://www.wfp.org/countries/laos

Not another bleeding travel blog...

2009-10-26T01:21:00.000-07:00

Hello all

Here is the beginning of my long promised and not yet delivered blog.

I won't bore you with my usual diatrabe against travel and most other blogs [self-aggrandizing rubbish nobody wants to read] as that would be hypocritical and I willing to be anything most days except that. I will promise, especially to those who have in the past had to read my work emails, to keep postings short [250 words max] though as usual sentences may be Germanic in construction. I will also strive to make the postings topical. Spelling might suffer sometimes partially becasue I'm not a proofreader and partially because of SE Asian keys.

We are currently in Hanoi, Vietnam, having arrived a few hours ago. I won't bore you with every dusty detail of the bus here, bus there tedium. Suffice to say we got here by flying from London to Bangkok on 12 Oct, a week later we took an overnight train to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand stayed for a few days, bussed to Chiang Khong on the Mekong River, crossed on a fast longtail to Huay Xai on the Laos side of the river and then a dusty mini van up a half built or half disintegrating road to Luang Nam tha, down a worse road to to Luang Prabang then to the Laos capital of Vientiane and then a short 1 hour turbo prop flight to Hanoi [instead of a ball breaking 32 hour bus ride].

My posts will start from here. Please feel free to comment or email me - rwestinlondon@gmail.com and to pass this link to anyone you want.