A Whale of a Time

Back in 1984 I was sent for a month to a remote airbase called Learmonth (sounds like a prison sentence and it was – the base is located in the desert (Google Earth 22°13’22.43″S 114° 5’12.81″E) with no nearby townships) for a combined military exercise with the USAF 8th Tactical Fighter Wing out of Kunsan, Korea. They came down and flogged their aircraft around in glee at the wide open spaces. We enjoyed the spectacle. In the slower moments of the exercise we took our police dogs down to the crystal clear waters of the Exmouth Gulf but they came out of the water pretty quickly after a few minutes. Nothing we could do could convince them back into the water. After scratching our heads for a while we saw why, when shadows of sharks started drifting up and down off the beach, about thirty metres away. Big sharks. The dogs knew long before we did. Any ideas about swimming went straight out the window.

The Little Guy Holds Out – Forever?

This afternoon I was prompted by the question, “why no accounts about travel in Australia?” I had no sensible answer for that, except perhaps that I have not kept any diary or log of any domestic travel. Other than the 6000km return trip into the depths of the tropics in a Suzuki van powered by a tired 900cc engine. In midsummer. 90km/h downhill only. Windows wound down the whole way. That was the the backbone of our honeymoon – some trips are best forgotten.

Berne Bear With Humour

I caught the train down to Switzerland today from Bonn. The weather along the Rhine was a little clearer than it was when I came up from Frankfurt but it was still overcast and thoroughly miserable. The Bridge at Remagen drifted past on our left, a very understated monument to a significant and strategic point in 1945. (Even more important to my officer training when a screening of the movie of the same name allowed me to catch some sleep in the back of the theatre). While the remains of the bridge were interesting I was more intrigued by the very small plots of garden that people toil over, each having various vegetable or flower crops, but each also having a small hut on it in which people clearly live. I guess it is a temporary arrangement – the living in the hut that is. The plots are half the size of a normal house block at home, sometimes smaller. All tucked between the railway track and the river. If you live in one of these German city apartments a small garden down by the river may well be a godsend.

Blogger’s Choice

There is always a degree of scepticism in the blogging world which is always healthy. Well, skepticism in my own blogging world at least. Competitions and promotions are as much about feeding someone else traffic as getting exposure for yourself and more often than not they are promotional tools that take you up the same filthy dead end track that we used to find out the back of Trotters Gorge (NZ). (Google Earth 45°24’14.83″S 170°46’49.99″E. You can see the open camping area. The trout, lazing in water as clear as your bottled distilled stuff, and in the shade of the foot bridge, are just out of view. Clear in my memory though). If you had told me in 1970, as I ran loose in this Gorge, that more than 30 years later I could “walk” up it via satellite (or other) imagery and from a desk in Australia I would have thought you insane. Who wanted to live in Australia?!

I digress, though I dip my lid to “travel”. Like a good security plan any online strategy has to be a consideration about trade-offs that you have to make. So here we go – Pickled Eel is out there with nomination for the Best Travel Blog in the Blogger’s Choice Awards. To vote, and I would love it if you did, you will need to go to Blogger’s Choice site, create an account (basically user name and password), log on and vote for this Blog. And if you can’t be bothered doing that, at least get into Google Earth and have a fly around Trotters Gorge. You might see a bunch of ten year old boys in long shorts and no shoes having the time of their lives.

Inspired by Xian Sketches and Sketchers

Along the main street in Xian, OK, along one of the main streets in Xian, just near the Bell Tower roundabout, dozens of artists sit along the kerb and entice passers by to pose for their portraits. Sure you see plenty of these sorts of guys around town, hanging out at train stations and tourist spots, even in this town. Funny how they all seem Asian. Maybe they have come out of Xian! Not likely since the teenage artists sitting along the sidewalk in Xian are, without exception, seriously talented. That they can take any person, in half light and through pressing crowds at that, and sketch an uncanny likeness had me transfixed for, well seconds. Stay there any longer and they are wanting you to pose and before you know it you have a bunch of sketches in your bottom draw you will never do anything with. But they did not need my business to stay in business – parents with cute toddlers with braided hair and ribbons were the models of choice and like young parents anywhere they are happy to cough up for a cute picture of their children. Dozens and dozens of them.

However what these artists did do was prod me to get the old HB out and to get sketching again. That creative urge ties in nicely with the blogging. But there is nothing quite like a soft pencil on quality paper. Except perhaps a nice viscous Indian ink used for painting Chinese characters, and the soft, smooth paper they practise on. Now I did take some instruction on that in Xian, some of which I will get up on the site here some time. In the meantime here is a quick “one sitting” sketch from last weekend’s paper of Catherine Deneuve. Scanner did something neat with the highlighted look – I can’t take credit for that.

Global Bedouin’s Oasis: Marhaba – مرحبا – welcome

global bedouin’s oasis: marhaba – مرحبا – welcome

747 Action Shot

And while we are mentioning the 747 here is a gratuitous shot that really stands out from the cloud of other excellent shots you can find on Airliners.net. We used to look for “action shots” of aircraft when we were briefing the generals, and the rule of thumb was simply this: “It is not an action shot if the undercart is down.” Well, this is an action shot we would have been happy to have break that rule. Photo by Stuart Yates who clearly was in the right place at the right time.

The Brakes Were Glowing Red

I had just endured one of the least pleasant aspects of travelling from Australia to Europe with QANTAS – the stopover in Bangkok. It is a tired airport that offers poor respite. But we were back in the plane and thundering down the runway heading for Frankfurt when suddenly we were thrown forward in our seats as the reverse thrust came on and the brakes were applied. The complete inability to do anything except hang in the seatbelt was remarkable. The g-forces were probably not that great but were sufficiently strong to overcome any ability to sit upright or move your arms. Turns out the fuel pump on one of the engines had failed so the crew elected to stop and replace it.

Via Dolorosa

It is Good Friday and thoughts turn to things related to Easter, as they should. I am not a Roman Catholic but sometimes I think they have something in some of the traditions they wrap around themselves. A few years ago (1999 actually) I visited Jerusalem and wandered around in some wonder at where I was, pausing at some distance to get this photo of the Wailing Wall. While plenty will tell you that Jesus was here or there, the fact of the matter is the current city sits high above the streets which existed in Jesus’ day. You can walk down through some excavations near the Wailing Wall and through a colonnaded sidewalk of Roman times, it all being set down 10-12 feet below the current street level. Despite the displacement in elevation you still have a powerful sense of place and occasion.

I stumbled over some powerful sites in that regard. I was not on any crusade to find holy sites, since in many respects they are meaningless in terms of my faith. But you’re caught in the moment as you sit in a small, smoke stained (from years of candle smoke) cave in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and wonder if this was in fact the place Jesus was buried. Who knows, but the possibility grabs you. And it grabbed me in a way I was not expecting at all.

Neanderthals are Your Neighbours

They might even be you!! If you think that is going too far think about this. In an upmarket suburb of Sydney, in which the residents no doubt view themselves as having arrived – at least in society, wealth, education and status terms – she sat down to have lunch. After a little while the cafe owners sidled up to her and asked her to remove her scarf from off her head, there were some other patrons who felt the headwear inappropriate in their polite cafe. After complying to this odd request (count me strange, but these days I thought a scarf on ones head would be fair and reasonable basis for assuming an illness) she revealed her hairless scalp, the symptom of various cancer therapies. That was too much and shortly thereafter those same patrons asked her to cover up her head, her baldness was too affronting. She left without combating them, but also without telling the patrons she was grabbing a bite to eat after coming from the funeral of a friend who had succumbed to cancer.

Ecoli noted injustices to the handicapped make him wild. I have the patience of Job (a “flat liner”) but this sort of unenlightened small mindedness and sheer, unadulterated selfishness makes me wild. The same response is evoked when I hear someone in the street tell me my daughter should be locked up. Enough to have me secretly wish a retarded kid on their own families. The behaviour in the cafe recounted above would be enough to have me wish the same illness on those smug apes who found her baldness too confronting. And the cafe owners should not get off blameless either. Just as well I am not God or there would be some smoking patches of cinder around Sydney right now – blasted to oblivion with not a scrap of remorse.

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