Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in tanzanite's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, January 2nd, 2011
5:27 am	The Last Great Wild Places Tour 3: Antarctica: The Greatest, Wildest Place on Earth I don't think I've ever planned a trip in as much detail as I did this one. I've been to sea, and I know the most basic truth of cruising: if you forget it, you do without it. So we did ok, thanks to REI, and backup systems for everything. Well, Matt only brought one pair of sunglasses, which are absolutely essential in Antartica. And of course, the earpiece broke off one side. He wore them anyway. We had balaclavas so we wouldn't have to wrangle separate scarves and hats. That, and the trekking poles I'm carrying, below, earned us the nickname "The mountaineering bank robbers" from the staff. You can see the cruising yacht in the background, showing that there aren't too many places you can't go if you have sail and an adventurous spirit. And a spare pair of sunglasses, of course. We can't help thinking that we have control - over our lives, our environment, Nature itself. It's the lie everyone tells themselves, because the truth is so terrifying. Because Nature is slow to change we can hold on to that illusion, for a while, at least until we discover that we don't have an unbroken pair of sunglasses. But in this, the wildest of the wild places on Earth, we can't deny the power of the changeable and extreme Antarctic environment for long. It always has the last words: water, wind, earth, fire, ice. In Antartica those words confront you every day. We heard a lot of lectures on our ship, the M/S Expedition, below at Neko Harbor, about the ecosystems, the animals and the history of Antarctica. Everyone is fascinated by the penguins, seals and whales. We go to the places they live, see their teeming colonies, and falsely believe that Antartica is full of life. But after you see thirty colonies of gentoo penguins, you have to start wondering: where is the diversity? It isn't there because there is no terrestrial food web in Antartica. This continent, that once supported forests, is scoured by ice, wind, and volcanic eruptions. As soon as something gets a foothold, a glaciation or a storm wipes it clean, and the continent starts again. Below, at Telefon Bay in the caldera of Deception Island, lichens, nesting birds and visiting chinstrap penguins constitute the only visible living organisms. There was once a whaling station here. It was destroyed by a series of volcanic mudflows or "lahars". The tank, below, once held whale oil. The lahar has nearly buried it. This must be what the planet looked like four billion years ago. "Who do you think you are?" Antarctica let us know over and over that we were not in control. Twice we tried to sail through the Lemaire Channel to Peterman Island, and twice we failed. The first time, the wind had pushed ice into the Lemaire Channel, and we had to turn back without even attempting the Lemaire. Below, you can see the ice front at the entry to the Lemaire Channel. The next day there were enough leads in the pack ice that the ice master took the ship all the way through the Lemaire before we had to turn back. The picture below, taken over the bow of the M/S Expedition shows the ice master's idea of "enough leads." The Lemaire Channel is a drowned glacial valley; it is a fjord. It seems a little strange to think of drowned glacial valleys in Antartica, but it too saw a retreat of the ice at the end of the last ice age, and a return of the ocean. One difference between the Lemaire and a typical fjord in, say Scandinavia: the Lemaire has never suffered the erosion caused by organic processes and running water, and the walls rise sheer and straight above the ship on either side. You will see that nowhere else on earth. Snow showered down off the heights in constant, soft streams, as though a waterfall had frozen into ice crystals and continued to flow. In the photo below you can see the smooth, uniform slope of the sides of the channel, mostly unchanged from its appearance when the ice last retreated eighteen thousand years ago. The rock face on the left shows layers of sediments deposited here millions of years ago when this place might have been a beach or a river valley. The water in the Lemaire was almost glassy, and the sun shone brilliantly. Such a combination of calm and sunshine is rare in Antartica, and we made good use of it, as the ship plowed through the brash ice and the grumblers, and overrode ice floes that shattered beneath the bow. A couple of icebergs rolled as we pushed them aside, and their keels scraped the paint off the hull of the ship, upending brilliant blue and red streaks as we passed. I'm almost surprised that the crew didn't run out and wipe it up. Other than that paint we left nothing behind. If you had to pee while on a shore excursion, the crew took you back to the ship, and the sewage was offloaded in Ushuaia at the end of the cruise. A passenger dropped her glove down the side of Neptune's Window, a passage between the interior and exterior of the Deception Island caldera. Out went a crew member with a grappling pole who fished it up and returned it to its owner. At the far end of the Lemaire, we could see Peterman Island, but the pack ice, visible below, was so dense that only an icebreaker could have gotten through. So said the ice master, the ship handler who thought it was no big deal to hit icebergs, so it's hard to argue that he was too timid. The Lemaire is famous for whale sightings, but we saw only one Minke whale in the channel. Perhaps they don't like the ice either. We saw only four whales total in nine days, but many many whale bones like those the little gentoo penguin, below, is hopping over. Whales once teemed in these oceans, their past abundance now only visible in the bones that litter Antarctica. Whale populations collapsed long ago, saved from final extinction only by the spread of electrical power that made whale oil obsolete. It's easy to say that the whalers were greedy for profit, but the whaler's graveyard at Deception Island tells a truer story of desperation. Who would undertake such a harsh and deadly profession without great need? Some day soon another lahar will bury the remaining graves, and Antartica will, once again, have the last word. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010
11:37 am	The Last Great Wild Places Tour 3: The Longest Day of the Year at The End of the Earth We are at El Fin del Mundo, which is what the local people call Ushuaia, Argentina. It is the capital of Argentine Patagonia, and the jumping off point for excursions of every sort in Patagonia and the surrounding ocean. Adventure travel is advertised on every street. Even though it's well into summer here, it's cold, and rain or hail spatters down from time to time. The influence of the winds that blow off the Antarctic Ocean is visible everywhere. You can tell the direction you're facing by looking at the directions of the elongation of islands, the travel of waves and the bend of trees before the wind. It was light until 11:00 pm last night, and light again about 5. It more than makes up for the cold, which doesn't bother me anyway. It's less cold and rainy than Seattle is right now. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 19th, 2010
2:24 pm	The Last Great Wild Places Tour 3: A tale of two cities Behind the counter at Kokush deli, Mikhael, who has a heavy Noo Yawk accent, says something to a colleague in Hebrew, then tells a busboy in Spanish to get some glasses. It feels like Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, but it's actually the Once district of Buenos Aires, the center of Jewish life in this city in which one in fifteen occupants is Jewish. It's pretty obvious when you arrive in the Once. Almost every man you see wears a yarmulke, and the stores have signs that advertise phone calls to Israel. Mikhael laughed when Matt said it was just like Brooklyn and gave us an advertising magnet with his phone number. It now adorns our refrigerator. So how is it that this city, so tolerant of its lively Jewish community, also tolerated Adolf Eichmann? Even before we got here, it was obvious that Buenos Aires has some of the most pleasant, friendly and helpful people around. Everyone raves about service at the hotels, and with good reason. The service is wonderful: personal without being intrusive. If someone can help you, they do. So how is it that the people of this city, so delightful and charming, so tolerant of the obviously touristy (that would be us) also tolerated a repressive and murderous regime that brought the Nazis to mind, and then tolerated the cover-up by the succeeding Menem government? The Menem government was democratically elected, responsive to the will of the people, and completely uninterested in justice. Argentines seemed to want to put the Dirty War of 1976-1983, with its disappearances and murders, behind them. From whence comes this paradoxical national character that embraces courtesy and thoughtfulness, and brushes off mass murder as inconsequential? After having spent some more time in Argentina, I can only say that I don't know the answer to that question, other than the sense I get that Argentines really don't care about anything much. Argentina was an odd experience for me. I've travelled a lot in the developing world, and I generally love it. Argentina is much more developed than, say, Algeria or China is, but it lacks the distinctive character that those countries have. Even though I found the people to be among the most warm and helpful I have ever experienced in my travels, it's too apathetic for my tastes. That apathy is expressed in all kinds of ways. Among other things, you almost never see excellence, and it isn't because of poverty. It's because of indifference. The food is boring and unflavored, like an unhealthy version of the plain food I make at home. Every decent restaurant we ate at was a barbecue place at which grilled slabs of meat and lettuce salads were the main offering. Nearly all desserts are based on dulce de leche, the most sugary and uninteresting of flavors, which, at least, made it easy to avoid sweets. Breakfast equals medialunas, a greasy and dense version of a croissant. Medialunas are proof that simply using butter does not equal good baking, and apparently it's not possible to send a few bakers to France - or just to foodtv.com - to learn how to bake better. Sloppy workmanship is everywhere. Poorly half-built structures litter overgrown, weedy lots in the small towns, and no one seems to be working on them. In every city the sidewalks were so badly constructed that they're falling apart. In the wealthy Palermo neighborhood there's a lovely walk along the street beside the Botanical Gardens, where Portenos (the people of Buenos Aires) walk their dogs. We had to go across the street to the other side because it was such a minefield of abandoned dog poop. The park itself was a mess, weedy and overgrown. One bed, a display of the mate herb so beloved of South Americans, had recently been replanted. The bed hadn't been well prepared, as the weeds show, and the plantings were sparse and had apparently just been stuck in the ground any which way. Lots of the well-to-do inhabitants of Palermo strolled the park, but apparently it wasn't possible for these wealthy people, who command so much of Argentina's resources, to form a committee to maintain their capital city's botanical gardens. And this is one of the best neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. You also see this apathy in stores, in design, and in the arts and sciences. We visited the art museum, which charged a hefty admission fee. It was unimpressive. The National Museum of Sciences, in the nearby University town of La Plata, was filled with uncurated materials. Display cases contained cardboard boxes of dinosaur bones, just shoved in. The front of the display case would then be covered with a bright, semi-educational banner talking about dinosaurs. Do they not have money to do the studies and curation? Let me introduce La Plata to the concept of "graduate students," the ultimate cheap, skilled and knowledgable labor. Almost all the exhibits in the museum had a very 19th century feel, and based on the scant interpretation available, that's when they were collected. So Argentines could do science in the 1800s, but it's no longer possible? I do understand that not everything is possible in a country like Argentina, which has economic problems. The difficulty I have with Argentina is that it seems that nothing is possible. They can't seem to do anything about anything. Egypt is far poorer than Argentina, and its people have a far worse quality of life on average, but they have some of the world's best cared for archeological sites and museums. Egyptians decided that they had this one remarkable thing, and they were going to hang on to it and do their best with it. What does Argentina have that is the equivalent? The picture below is of the Recoleta Cemetery, the top tourist attraction in Buenos Aires. Consider that, and then consider that even Cleveland has the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This waste and sloppiness in Argentine workmanship is evident in the Recoleta. Despite its value as a tourist attraction, much of the Recoleta is weedy and dirty. Many of the mausoleums are falling apart, even though they aren't very old. As this fascinating (ok, fascinating to me) photo shows, expensive materials, like this marble facing, were used in slipshod workmanship. The marble facings were secured at the top and bottom, where they are still attached, but the mason didn't bother to secure them on the sides. Facings generally cover brick or stone, but this column was filled with packed dirt and rubble. The rubble pressed outward on the slab causing this beautiful example of plastic deformation. Burials in the Recoleta appear to be on a decline: I saw almost none dating to the 21st century. Perhaps that is a sign that Argentina is changing. In 2006 its late president, Nestor Kirchner, reopened the trials of participants in the Dirty War. The newspaper here has daily reports of long prison sentences handed down to them, and a few days ago, the U.S.extradited a major war criminal of that era to Argentina at the request of the Argentine government. I was pleased to see that Jorge Vidala,the architect of the Dirty War, subsequent to the overturn of the amnesty granted him by former president Carlos Menem, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. Good for Argentina. It has a lot of potential. Let's hope it does something with it. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 21st, 2009
10:54 am	The Last Great Feral Places Tour: Asia and Wilderness for Dummies Matt and I went hiking on the Maclehose Trail yesterday. Navigating public transit without much guidance or any Cantonese was something of a struggle, but in the end it worked out really well. On the way to the trailhead we ran across a local street market not listed in any of the tourist guides, and were able to buy a Calvin Klein watch for only $4! Yes, I am aware that it is not a Calvin Klein watch. I really didn't want a Calvin Klein watch. I wanted something that keeps time, since the watch I bought in SFO a couple of years ago quit working. I also found a couple of other things in the market, in particular, some of those cool paper New Year's decorations, and the Latest Thing in Hong Kong; a single large jade bead worn on a string around the neck. I'm sure that the bead is not really jade, which explains why 1) everyone wears them 2) I'm willing to put it on a string and wear it around my neck and 3) it was only 10 kwai (about $1.25). We hiked about 15 km total, including the walks to and from the trailhead. The trail itself was about 2/3 paved concrete road, and even the unpaved part was not exactly stressful. The biggest danger was the more-or-less wild life: This county park is heavily infested with aggressive rhesus macaques. They're feral: released when their owners discovered what bad pets primates are. The local people feed them, even though to do so is against the law. They're afraid the macaques will starve. The predictable result: Lots and lots of macaques behaving badly. The hike traveled along what was called the "Gin Drinker's Line," which is a set of fortifications, tunnels and lookouts in the mountains above Kowloon. It was put in place after the invasion of Nanking in late 1937, and persisted until December 9, 1941, when the Japanese overran Kowloon. Apparently it wasn't much use considering that it was so easily overrun, but it's still extremely interesting. The tunnels contain numerous signs forbidding smoking, using the fortifications as a toilet, war games, and, oh yeah, being in the tunnels. The following web page for the "Hong Kong Society of Wargamers" was the first google hit on "gin drinker's line." I have a feeling that people aren't reading the signs. http://hksw.org/Shing%20Mun.htm This morning we went to an open air/indoor market I discovered one day long ago when I was looking for something to eat. You can get a wide variety of goods of all kinds, including live fish. We did not get any fish, live or otherwise, but we did get an offering box containing fake dentures, a fake toothbrush and a fake tube of toothpaste. You can get boxes of all kinds of fake things, including fake McDonald's food, fake beer, fake clothing, fake gold, and fake money...lots and lots of fake money. There is also incense for sale. I'm pretty sure the fake stuff and the incense are for shrines to ancestors, but I'll have to ask. I plan to offer the box of fake dentures to my household god: the god of Bunny Hating, whose festival I celebrate every spring by casting bird netting over my flowers as I chant strange and strong words of worship. How you know you travel too much: 1. You've been quoted in an article in USA Today on what business travelers want. http://www.usatoday.com/travel/columnist/baskas/2008-01-16-travel-wish-list_N.htm 2. You bought your watch in an airport. 3. You can't do without a watch. How will you tell time on the airplane, or in other countries? 4. Most of the haircuts you've gotten in the past year have been in other countries. 5. You live in Seattle, but you get all your t-shirts at a craft store in a suburb of Boston, because they have this outstanding midnight madness sale on Sunday evenings. 6. The restaurant you go to most often is in DIA. 7. Your main geographical reference points are all three capital letters long. 8. You regard a trip to Hong Kong as an onerous burden. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
10:51 am	The absolutely last fried dough entry I'm in Hong Kong, in Fresh Cyber Cafe, suite 2C, looking down through the plate glass window to Lockhart Street below. This is a nice little cyber cafe, in a filthy, run-down tenement that looks like people should be shooting up in the hallway. My kind of place. We had to punch in "2C" at the security door and get buzzed in. The cafe itself is very attractive, pleasant, and more or less clean. The proprieters are not wasting money on the entrance. What good is that? Those who know come upstairs. Those who don't aren't worth the bother. I chose this cybercafe of the many on this street because it wasn't 24 hours, and it didn't offer Thai massage (45 minutes for 75 HKD, which is about $10 U.S.) Like so much of old Asia, there is no distinction in Hong Kong neighborhoods between the upscale and the down. There are strip bars (Pussy Bar is across the street), massage parlour/cybercafe combos, fancy night spots, and restaurants all jammed together in one block, which is about two short blocks from the Hong Kong Convention Center and some very nice hotels. This morning we started out at a restaurant on this street that I frequent for breakfast whenever I'm here. It is grimy, run-down, rude (actually that is unusual) and very famous for its deep-fried dough stick, on the subject of which I have previously waxed absurd on this blog. Like everything else in Hong Kong, those who know will come, so it is quite typical that the best restaurants are really dingy looking. Why bother wasting money and effort if you don't need the custom? I didn't start going there because I knew though. I'm not sure why I went there. Perhaps because "Pussy Bar" didn't sound like the food would be any good, or maybe it was the glimpse of bakers folding and cutting dough inside that made it clear this place took the art of the fried dough stick seriously. I recognized kindred spirits, because I, too, take fried dough seriously, perhaps too seriously. The hardware install at the customer site isn't until Friday and it's only Wednesday, so I'm as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. It always feels odd to me to have free time in Asia. To me, Asia equals work, and starting Monday, when I move to the customer site full-time, it will be nothing else. The work site is in Sha Tin, which is to Kowloon what Redmond is to Seattle: it's a technological nerdistan, too far from the bright lights of Kowloon for it to be sensible to head out at night. There's nothing to do but work, which is good, because this customer is demanding. The first time they tried to get me to come, they jerked me around, demanded proof of my expertise, complained about how much I cost, then delayed on a decision. Eventually I told them I had better things to do than hold time open for them. They ended up having to get the software architect to come out instead, which was about 3x as expensive as it would have been to have me (although in my opinion he's worth every penny). The next time they were more respectful, although if there was anyone else, I'm sure they wouldn't have come to me. But there isn't. Matt is having his usual great time. He's relaxed, enjoying life, and making plans to visit the open-air markets. Of course, he has a knowledgable guide to things like the location of ATMs, subways and coffee so he doesn't have to stress. If I sound bitter, it's a reflection on my lack of character, and perhaps his lack of appreciation for fried dough stick. He said it was "disappointing." I have a mission for this trip (besides making money.) I am going to get Chinese language tabloids. It's given a special and gossipy zest to my time. Today I went into the Dymocks and asked the clerk if there were any Chinese-language tabloids in the store. He looked at me as though I was crazy and I said happily "Not for me. For a Chinese-speaking friend." It takes a lot to shock a Hong Konger, because they're all so jaded. I felt a real sense of achievement. Here's one I found at the 7-11. So girlfriend, tell me. Is this the real thing? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
4:05 pm	Return to Tullamarine We spent the last five days wandering around the Flinders Ranges of South Australia, and now we're in Melbourne again, wrapping up our time in Australia with a touristy bus ride down the Great Ocean Road. It should be beautiful and of course, we don't have to drive, which is extra good. There wasn't much screaming on this trip when we had the rental car; it was actually pretty easy to drive on the left side of the road, in Tasmania, anyway, which has very little traffic. Apparently we got used to it two years ago. I refused to actually SAY that until we returned the rental car. It's superstitious of me, but anyone who is critical should try driving on the left side of the road for a while. It makes you want to take up prayer. We joined a guide last Saturday in Adelaide who had a remarkable ability to see animals. We never saw a kangaroo in the wild on our last trip. This time, we had seen yellow-footed rock wallabies, euros/wallaroos, Western grey kangaroos and a red kangaroo by the time we had been out for a day and a half. The guide also took us to a little-known location called Chambers Gorge, which has a huge amount of aboriginal rock art of great age, as well as a fabulous canyon. In shape Chambers Gorge is a box canyon, that is, a steep-sided, relatively straight, river-cut canyon. It was far better than any box canyon I've ever walked in the southwestern U.S. though, and I've walked quite a few. The rocks around it were mostly slate of varied colors, so the river valley was floored with a natural mosaic of green, red, white, grey and blue. This valley was also remarkable because it contains a perched water table - essentially a sheet of water that forms springs every place it intersects the land surface. In various places there would be a seep that would cascade down a few pools and then disappear. I've never seen such a thing before. There were two other groups of people camping in the Gorge, but we had the entire canyon to ourselves for hours that morning, unless you count the feral goats, and the emu that left a clear trail of footprints. Of all the rare things in the canyon, that solitude was the most wonderful. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 27th, 2008
1:53 pm	The wombat was crashing around again We are in Adelaide, Australia now. We arrived yesterday, after a week in Tasmania. Tasmania does not have a whole lot of the things that I'm used to. As the absence of blog entries indicates, network connectivity was approximately zero. You could log in on "pielink" for 15 minutes with a two dollar coin. It typically took several minutes for a web page to load, so that was limited. There was nothing you could call good coffee. No one was open for anything on Christmas Day, making me glad for the Emergency Noodle Cup supply. We stayed most of the time in a little cabin in Cradle Mountain-Lake St. Clair National Park, in an area of Tasmania that has not been logged, mined, or otherwise ruined. The cabin had a little heater, which was good, but at night it got down to about 7-10 C., that is around 40-50 F. There was no toilet or shower in the cabin. That was available only in the "Amenities Block" across the way. That wasn't heated at all. Using the bathroom during the night meant putting on shoes and a jacket, and running outside into the freezing cold night. We only showered a couple of times, because even during the day it didn't warm up that much. There are no groceries for about 50 miles, so we brought all our food with us. That consisted mainly of healthy cold cereal, milk, juice, vegetables to steam, peanut butter sandwich makings, and noodle cups. Eventually we were reduced to something we call "Eat it. It's good for you." after what Matt said when I complained about it. Eat it. It's good for you. is a slice of whole grain bread with steamed vegetables on top and vegetable steaming water poured over it for warmth and added nutrition. I believe it needs no further description. I find myself returning in my mind's eye to that freezing little cabin over and over, because we traded an en-suite bathroom and warm temperatures and a luxurious bed, and any coffee at all, never mind good coffee, for the family of pademelons that breakfasted outside the window every morning, for the glorious sight of Crater Lake set in its crags like a jewel; a sight hard-won up a long, steep trail, and for the wombat that tied my tongue the first time I saw him scratching himself by the side of the cabin. Pademelon, enjoying the delicious grazing to be found in the car park adjacent to the cabin. Crater Lake I blame the wombat for the ruckus that woke me at 5:30 one morning. I went outside after much crashing to see him looking guilty next to the cabin. It may actually have been the possum's fault, but the possum wasn't there any more to be blamed, and that wombat does crash around. The Wombat,fleeing the scene of the crime. Was it worth the price in comforts to see these things? Aldo Leopold's said: "Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings. Perhaps such a shift in values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free." Tasmanian Devil - unusually, standing still. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 10th, 2008
9:44 am	Two Beijings I've been back from China for a week now. I didn't post while I was in China because livejournal is now banned in the PRC. On the other hand, the geocities webpage that I use for work is now unbanned. Since I was working, that was probably better than having livejournal. Better, but I missed the opportunity to gather my thoughts. As usual my plans to do a little touring were waylaid by my need to deliver work, and so my only entertainment was an accidental one. On Friday night, I ventured out into the streets near Tsinghua University to buy some food from what appeared to be a grocery store. That entailed crossing the third ring road, from the side on which I lived and worked, to the side opposite, which was lined with restaurants and other businesses. That's not something you do at street level and at night if you value your life. Happily for me, there was a pedestrian overpass right in front of my hotel, so I climbed up the steps and passed over. The stairs of the overpass are very narrow: too narrow to allow two people to pass, because 10 inches/25 cm of both sides of the stairway is a smooth ramp. I realized why on my way back; the stairs are for you, and the ramp is for the bicycle that you push on your right. The side of the ring road I worked on is very modern. Google was right across the street from my hotel, and just down the street were Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. I was adjacent to Tsinghua University, China's version of M.I.T., and to numerous other universities, which crowd the area. The store sold the combination of food, clothes, electronics and household items typical of large Asian markets. I got some food that would pass muster with United, any seatmates and U.S. Agricultural Inspection, but once again I could not understand why people go crazy for shopping in China. China is madly manufacturing the world's stuff, and it all ends up in Chinese stores, certainly at cheap prices, but nothing worth lugging home with you. What I miss being able to buy are the little, ordinary, unique things that people of a land have always made for their own use: the hats, clothes, decorations, and religious and household objects. These are things of interest and often beauty that illuminate a culture in a way that art and architecture cannot. They are inexpensive by nature, simple and durable, and unlike art, they are a tiny porthole into everyday life. It's hard to find things like that in the modern, outsourced, consuming, highly-entertained, Wal-Martized world. So far, in China, it's been impossible to find anything ordinary and Chinese. I used to go to Mexico and buy handmade leatherwork, embroidery, and pottery. Those were things that I took home and used myself, but it's been a long time since I walked over the Tijuana River to go shopping for a chiminea in the stalls of the mercado, so I don't know if you can still find traditional Mexican crafts in Mexico. Maybe they, too, have been supplanted by polyester blouses and aluminum cooking pots. I could have brought home a flyer advertising a Halloween party at one of Beijing's nightclubs. Halloween seems to be catching on over there. I supposed that would have been at least unique, if not terribly Chinese. After I got my food, I walked on a ways, just to see what the rest of the shops sold. As I passed an alley, I glanced in, then stopped and looked harder. The tiny alley, too narrow to permit a car to pass, was lit up with signs and thronged with people. I started walking down it, and an entirely different Beijing appeared. The alley was jammed with tiny restaurants whose illuminated signs had caught my attention. Old, rickety tables were perched on narrow terraces that edged worn brick houses a few feet above the street. Men sat and drank beer and ate dinner at these tables, and few stared at me, an unusual event in cosmopolitan Beijing. Inside the rooms adjacent to the terraces, two or three more ancient tables would be filled with prosperous-looking people eating, while the proprietor cooked on a propane burner or a charcoal brazier in the corner. Other shops offered haircuts, and in others well-dressed and beautifully groomed young people sat on peeling wood stools in full view of the world, and shouted into 1980s-style telephones in makeshift booths. Fruit and vegetable stands filled in any unoccupied spaces along the alley sides. Even smaller alleys, barely wide enough for one person, branched off the main alley, allowing glimpses of more ancient brick homes. Everywhere people walked, chatted, and browsed. Eventually the alley widened at a T with another alley, and there, an enterprising person had created an outdoor pool hall, complete with weathered easy chairs and three standard-sized pool tables. There was nowhere for them to go if it rained, and by the looks of them, they simply suffered. On my way out of the alley, I stopped and bought a steamed bun from a woman of about my age, with open, intelligent eyes and a worn face. She was standing under a lean-to behind a house, tending a large pan set over an open fire. I said "ni hao" and held up one finger. She bagged a bun, took my 5 yuan note and gave me 4.8 yuan in change. Fifteen cents for a steamed bun. I carried it carefully back to my hotel room and ate it while it was still hot. It wasn't the best, but then, I'm not looking for the best. I'm looking for authenticity, and it was definitely the most authentic steamed bun I've ever had, and that gave it added character. So all is not yet modernized, technologized, commercialized, and bored out of existence, but go to China while you can and follow your feet to somewhere unexpected and unplanned. The modern world is coming fast, and soon you won't be able to play pool in the rain, get a haircut, have a beer by the side of the street and eat a fresh steamed bun, all in the same narrow alley of an old Beijing neighborhood. Everything will be clean, modern, plastic and new, and the baker with her ancient steam table, her unsanitary open air kitchen, and her clear hazel eyes will be gone. I wish for her and myself that we may never have to make a living as greeters in the United World of Wal-Mart. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
2:58 pm	The Hong Kong Street Scene, with a focus on fried dough My husband has a co-worker from Hong Kong named Edmond. Edmond has assured my husband that my intense interest in the different forms and flavors of fried dough is not only proper, but extremely educational and highly culturally sensitive. He congratulates me on the speed of my assimilation and encourages me to explore additional forms of fried dough. Thanks Edmond! I have found two forms of fried dough: the long, thin, salty fried dough, which is light and crisp, and the shorter, denser, slightly sweet fried dough. As a long time connoisseur of fried breads, I believe that the Chinese fried dough is probably derived from the same root culinary tradition that gave rise to Navajo Fry Bread. I bow in amazement at the tenacity of the earliest Americans, trudging across the frigid wastes of the top of the world with their jugs of oil and their deep fryers. The dedication of humans to preserving culture in the face of overwhelming privation is amazing! The purveyors of fried dough are part of what make Hong Kong such an extremely lively city. So many of the world's great cities shut down the streets at night. Downtown Chicago clears out when businesses close. People going to cultural events or eating out drive into parking garages and whisk into buildings without ever setting foot on the street. A few cities have some street life: Manhattan is pretty hopping in the uptown area, and it has a lot in common with Hong Kong in other ways as well. But no place is as active as Hong Kong at night. I am in an area called Wan Chai, but I think it's pretty typical of Hong Kong Island. The days seem to start rather slowly, but they wind down equally as slowly. The streets are absolutely thronged with people, and stores of all kinds stay open until late in the night. There are lots of young people everywhere in punky hairstyles, staring intently at cell phone displays as they and their hordes move along the street, half on and half off the sidewalk. Every twenty feet someone thrusts advertising leaflets at passers-by, and music blares. Restaurants abound, many of which sell food out front or over counters from stalls built onto the side of larger buildings. Business and housing mixes in the streets of Wan Chai, storefronts below and apartments above. If you look up, you will see laundry and small gardens leaning precariously out of windows, livening up the industrial concrete housing blocks. I'm only here for one more day, after which I will return to Seattle, mundane life, and the stale, soggy excuse for fried dough one finds in the United States. I will gaze at it with dull pity, and remember the oleaginous pleasures of Hong Kong. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
1:29 pm	The world below I had a really interesting flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong. Everything was just right for me to see the tundra in its full glory as we passed over Alaska and crossed the Bering Straits into Russia. There had been snow, but not recently, so it stuck on the frozen ponds and rivers, and on cleared ground, but it didn't stick on the tundra. The contrast highlighted every detail of the landscape. The tundra is an expanse of slight hills, separated by the most sinuous rivers I have ever seen. Based on the sinuousity of the rivers, this must be the flattest landscape in the world. Every river had cut-offs within cut-offs. Ranks of oxbow lakes floated away like bubbles from every bend. The hills looked very strange to me. They were drained by these sinuous rivers, and I could not understand that. Surely hills mean straight rivers? Then it hit me. The hills don't control the rivers: the rivers control the hills because they aren't hills: they are living things: mounds of whatever organisms make up the tundra. Lichens? Moss? Whatever they are, they grow up in these strangely striated humps, separated by the winds and bends and oxbows of the tundra rivers. The only trees in the landscape are along the rivers. I assume that is because the rivers drain the land enough that trees can grow. Everywhere else is the endless frozen swamp. I kept thinking: human beings moved, fairly rapidly, into the new world across this landscape. I can certainly understand why they moved fast. I would not want to be on foot there, trying to cross rivers that looped back into my path over and over like frozen serpents. I'd get out as fast as I could. I can't understand why they even braved the crossing at all. Historians focus on how people got across the straits: did they walk on a land bridge, or did they take a boat? Having seen what waits on both sides, I think the real question is: how did they cross that wasteland? You have to wonder what even drove them onto it. It's now been demonstrated that humans in North America have only aboue 12,000 years of genetic isolation from humans in Asia, so the weather and landscape were, if anything, worse at the time humans walked across. On the other side of the Straits, we flew amongst the islands of Russia, where the snow on the sea ice is formed into great stripes by the kadabatic winds. Another treat for the crossers; horrific icy winds in the winter blowing at a hundred miles an hour. Did they wait until summer to cross to avoid the wind? But the swamps would have been thawing then and the rivers running. So did they cross in winter, in the icy winds and the blizzards? I didn't see any indication of human habitation or other human activity now. I imagine the Inuit might call it home, but oh I am glad I don't. Well I am in pleasantly warm (and disgustingly smoggy) Hong Kong now. The newspaper said yesterday was the worst air quality on record in Hong Kong. I could see it as we landed in Hong Kong Airport. The smog looked like Beijing's. I have a room on the 23rd floor of the Park Lane Hotel, overlooking Victoria Park. Right below my window there is an abandoned-looking amusement park and a playing field. Every morning I look out the window on groups of people on the playing field. Yesterday one group practiced with the katana, and another did judo. This morning it was tai chi near the road, and people with brightly colored fans practiced a dance further on. That seems to be the unifying theme in China, wherever you go, communities of people are drawn together in public spaces to move in unison. You want to go down and join them. I found the fried dough stick shop this morning, and recognized once more: there is no better food on earth than fried dough. It IS the perfect food. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
10:44 am	Never enough China I'm in Hong Kong working once more. I was really surprised when Hong Kong booked me, because my impression was that the money wasn't there for an overseas trainer. I had also trained the in-house instructor in Hong Kong, Eric Chan Siu-Ming. I'm trying to lose the weight I've gained from being sick, so Hong Kong isn't the very best place for me to be right now. Tokyo is way better, because no one speaks English and so I end up missing a lot of meals because I can't figure out how to order. I'd starve there if it wasn't for Starbucks and this little low-class noodle shop who want my money bad enough to let me point. Well. It's just one week, right? Hong Kong has the best food in the world in my opinion. The best Chinese food? That too. The best food in general though. Eating here completely changed my perspective on the role of freshness in food quality, and I say that as someone whose cooking is, um, generally really bad. I can do things with sugar though. Before I came to Hong Kong, I used to buy raspberries from the farm market, and turn them into a sorbet a few days later, which I served the following Friday. Now I get berries, process them, churn them, and serve them at most 36 hours after they leave the plant. It makes an already delicious dessert transcendent. For the block party our neighbors gave, I made a grown-on-the block dessert: raspberry-redcurrant sorbet from the canes and bushes in my front yard. Picked, cleaned, turned into puree, frozen and eaten within 8 hours. My neighbors were blown away, which I fondly believe gives me leverage in the neighborhood, all due to the Hong Kong philosophy of eating. So my working hypothesis is that Hong Kong has the world's best food because they are completely fanatical about freshness. Now my job is to make every meal here a meaningful test of the hypothesis, because I have neither the money nor the appetite for unlimited testing. This makes eating stressful. Am I really getting the maximum experience per bite? Would the restaurant across the street have been a greater cultural and gastronomic experience? And what is the waiter saying to me in Chinese? But I will soldier on. It's hard work, but someone has to do it. All those in Redmond wanting a Hong Kongian moon cake, drop me a response and I will do my best. It is the wrong season for moon cakes, but Matt said the moon cake I brought from here last time I taught in Hong Kong was the best he had ever had. I thought so too, though my opinion is suspect as I don't like moon cakes. I objected to the one from Hong Kong less than I usually object to moon cakes: let me put it that way. Those outside Redmond: I'm sorry, but I would not think of shipping you a moon cake. It would not be fresh and that would just be wrong. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
1:13 pm	On the road again... I'm in Heimstetten Germany, which is a not-quite technological nerdistan of Munich. It's just outside Munich, among the cow pastures and it's boring as anything. I've got five people in my class, two from the Czech Republic, one from France, one from Germany, and one from Switzerland. The only thing they have in common is English, which works out well for me, as I have that in common with them too. The local German citizenry isn't very serious. They stay up late partying. That wasn't my image of Germans, even Bavarians. Because I am here on business, I take everything seriously, so there's some incompatibility. I'm much too German for them. I want things done in a timely way, properly, the first time. Nah. We'll get around to setting up your classroom one of these days, they say. Why do you think I sent you my requirements in email, in plenty of time! Because I wanted my classroom set up *when* *I* *arrived!* Yet more proof that only bunnies live up to their stereotypes. They really are dumb. People don't. In reality, long-time Southern Californians are perfectionists, and Germans are partyers. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 30th, 2006
7:54 am	I'm not going to look at my ankles! Update from the Last Great Wild Places Tour: I Yesterday was the high point of our trip: a day in the Last Great Truly Wild place on Earth: The Southwest National Park/World Heritage Area in the South Western corner of Tasmania. It would have been the ends of the earth, had it not been so much like no place on Earth. There are three ways in: Light plane to the Melaleuca airstrip (made of crushed quartz, it will land nothing bigger than a 6 seater, cruising yacht (risky, since the weather is very unpredictable) and a five day trek through the peat bogs and their assorted inhabitants. We flew. Bush pilots are crazy. Ours had just gotten a digital camera and at any time would just let the plane fly itself so he could take a few pictures (also, answer his cell phone, fix someone's lap belt, get a map). "You can go ahead and use your mobile" he said cheerfully. "We don't use any navigational instruments!" Our pilot estimates that around 1000 people a year enter the park, which includes the only pristine estuarine system in Australia (and probably the world) and is extremely strange and beautiful. The land is covered with peat bogs in most places and sits mainly on quartzite rock, with some clayrock. Stark white layers and pebbles are everywhere. We got on a small boat and motored through the waterways of the estuary. The water runs the color of coffee from the bogs and the tea tree that grows on it (though it is more of a tea shrub). We also walked on some of the hills and the tide was low enough for us to get off on an island and walk around the tidepools. There was very little diversity and the organisms are very small, because of the poverty of the underlying geology. Quartzite and claystone contain no phosphate to speak of, and plants need phosphate. It is an essential nutrient. Plants get carbon dioxide from the air and nitrates from the air via nitrogen-fixing bacteria, but phosphate has to come from the rock and the rock doesn't HAVE phosphate in it. So all the plants are very low-phosphate and low-nutrient, since all phosphate will have to come from sea birds that eat fish that get their phosphate from run-off from better lands. It's essentially a phosphate desert. It was like being on the moon - I had just never seen anything like it in any way. Some people had scratched a living out of it in the past - a very hard living. Their remnants were the only signs of humans with two exceptions: a small piece of bottle glass with markings probably left by researchers AND! a piece of toilet paper. (waves her ziploc, meaningfully). Not mine. I pack mine out. Everyone in Australia thinks that is extreme. Obviously not. Our pilot stepped off the trail in one place to show us a Huon pine. I looked down at his shoe and saw a little worm on it. It was only an inch long and segmented, and a dark brown color. I interrupted him as another crawled up his shoe and asked if he wanted me to knock it off because it did seem like it was heading for bare skin. He looked down. "Oh, those are leeches" he said with distaste. He took a little stick and knocked off the leeches. After that I kept moving, and resisted the urge to constantly check my ankles. To me, venomous snakes are a photo op, and seeing a crocodile is a rare treat. I'm ecstatic that a coyote hunts in our backyard. But leeches. Oh my god. Leeches. Leeches and all, it was something that will stay with me forever. On a planet of six and a half billion people, I have known true solitude in a place humans have scarcely touched. It was the highlight of an astonishing trip. Today we see a bit more of Tasmania, though nothing so splendid. That's pretty much it for us: We are traveling back home via Sydney on Saturday and Sunday. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 27th, 2006
7:44 am	That was when the screaming started We're now in Tasmania and have had our first encounter with death in the form of a left-hand-drive automobile. Well, really, multiple encounters with death. Swimming with sharks on the Great Barrier Reef? A centipede in the sleeping bag? Nothing compared to the internal combustion engine, as always. We just got here from Melbourne yesterday, and immediately picked up a rental car from Hertz at the airport. The person who waited on us was friendly but seemed surprised: Why on earth would we want the optional insurance if we had car insurance ourselves? I drove about 200 yards before the wisdom of getting it became obvious to me as I made a left hand turn into the far lane and started driving into incoming traffic. Frantically I signalled to pull off the road by switching on the windshield wipers! It takes two Americans to drive in Tasmania: One to drive and one to scream. We are going to have to do a lot more driving as well, because our B&B is in Hobart and the places we want to go are all over. There will be much more screaming before we are done in a week and head back to Sydney and then home. Stay tuned... (Comment on this)
Friday, November 24th, 2006
3:06 pm	Queensland Holidays I'm actually not in Queensland any more. I'm in Melbourne at an Internet cafe with a very slow connection, sending annoying jpgs to our friend JJ because his name popped up on an exhibit in San Francisco International Airport. The exhibit was about Karlheinz Brandenburg, JJ's collaborator in the invention of the MP3 standard. This is JJ's favorite of our photos. Take that, Karlheinz! We felt very proud and honored to know someone whose name had been put on public exhibit in an airport breezeway. Literally thousands of people with briefcases and bad moods run past it every day! We left Queensland this morning after three days of snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef. That was all we did in Queensland. It wasn't really enough reef, but Queensland is a little like Disneyland. There isn't a lot to do that's worth doing, and you find yourself ekeing the good stuff out of the dreck, like Al Hackett's Bungy, and Cane Toad World. Our tour booker tried to entice us to go on one trip by describing a visit to an ice cream factory with SAMPLES! Damn! We don't have any ice cream in the United States! Better get us a taste of that while we can! The real reason to go to Queensland is to see the rainforest (which we did on Hinchinbrook Island) and to see one of the last great wild places on Earth, the Great Barrier Reef, before it is gone, a victim of reef smothering, overnutrification and planetary warming: in short, of Too Many of Homo So-Called Sapiens and too few of everything else (except as previously noted, annoying species like termites and groundhogs). We did get out on to the reef on a couple of boats that go to multiple sites. One featured an excellent marine biologist who goes by the name of Mr. Fluffy. I've had shipmates with some unusual nicknames, but no Fluffies. He wasn't intellectually fluffy, in any case and I learned a lot from listening to him. We also went out on a little boat called the Wavelength which took us to some rarely seen areas of the reef that were just awe-inspiring - sea turtles, polychaetes, tunicates, schools of huge buffalo fish...the water was rough and definitely could have been clearer, but it was so spectacular. They pull up the boat in a shallow place, shove you out the back, and off you go. Matt was, predictably, extremely excited. He kept saying how healthy the fish looked. Healthy compared to what? I thought. Compared to the fish he is so used to seeing in fish stores. Now he's seen the real thing, and understands why I see no point in having marine fish tanks. Seeing a Moorish Idol in a fish tank is like looking at a rock from Mount Fuji. It's a thousandth of the experience of seeing a Moorish Idol in nature. Melbourne should be low-key. I've been here before for work so we'll walk around and see the sights. I also have friends in New Zealand who are here for a vacation so we will get together tonight for dinner. Tomorrow I'm getting a really original haircut. Next stop: Tasmania, another of the last great wild places. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 16th, 2006
1:58 pm	Turtles and Crocodiles Matt and I have moved on to Hinchinbrook Island Resort which is an eco-lodge on Hinchinbrook Island. The entire island is a National Park in Australia as well as a World Heritage site. It's a giant rain forest, crocodiles included and the only development is the resort, which has things like no air-conditioning to make it an eco-lodge. It's also pretty hot and humid and there are certainly times when I long for my own cold bed in Woodinville where no air conditioning is needed to make a huge pile of comforters seem very cozy. This is however, a magnificent place and we have been hiking since we got here. Yesterday we went to Turtle Bay. Green Sea Turtles make their homes there. After we watched for a while, we started to see them surfacing to breathe and occasionally surfing a wave. Seeing them in the wild was just an incredible experience. Today we hiked across the island through the rain forest, and also through about a thousand spider webs strung across the trail, down an empty, mile-long, golden beach, and to Macushla Bay which had stern warnings about the prevalence of crocodiles, the risks of becoming involved with crocodiles, and the stupidity of getting close to the water. Naturally we wanted to see a crocodile, but there weren't even any tracks on the beaches. I did smell reptile must at one point on the trail, but we were much too far from the waterline for it to be a crocodile, so it was likely a python or a goanna. We saw, and heard so many birds, epiphytic flowers, fungi and other rainforest organisms that I can hardly process it all. It's the opposite of the Red Centre, where hardly anything lives and diversity is low. I also know why it's called "rainforest" now. The sweat rains off you when you hike in it. By the time I got back, I felt like someone needed to take the top off my head and pour water into me. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 12th, 2006
4:58 pm	Termite City Matt and I are now in Darwin - the city completely flattened in 1973 by Cyclone Tracy and subsequently rebuilt as (as far as I can see from my limited position) a giant economy-traveler bar. I've been told now many times that over 30,000 people (of Darwin's then 43,000) were evacuated after Tracy. I had actually heard that before, because I was in Australia when Hurricane Katrina hit. The Australians were aghast at the United States. Their government mobilized the bush pilots and completely evacuated Darwin within 24 hours of the passage of Tracy. This is what Tracy left of Darwin's Town Hall. How could we be so pathetic? The news crew from ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Company) dropped by the Superdome and gave a ride out to the Aussies trapped there, so apparently that robust sense of civil duty still lives in Aussies. The roar of laughter that went up when Bush came on TV in Sydney and said he was never given any information about how bad it was really embarassed me. Sydneysiders knew how bad it was. How could Bush have missed it? By now Matt and I know that Americans figured it out too. I think Lincoln said "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time." I guess that time has come. Late, people. Very late. The ride north on the Ghan can only be described as uneventful. We saw cows, horses and a pig. No kangaroos. I'm starting to realize that my fantasies of Australia as an unspoiled land are, in fact, just fantasies. It really is just like the U.S. in terms of land use. All the land is fenced and overused except the National Parks. If you want to see native animals and vegetation in more-or-less pristine state, that is where you must go. Everywhere else the only animals are domestic (or feral) or pests. While we saw no kangaroos, we saw incredible numbers of gigantic termite mounds. They range from small modest termite hill homes to pretentious Termite McMounds. This photo was taken from the Ghan and isn't very clear, but you can see the termite mound in the center. It figures doesn't it? The only animals still widespread are the pests. In the U.S. that means deer and groundhogs. In Australia, termites and crocodiles. It may be a while before I'm back blogging. We go to Cairns in 2 days, then to a remote wilderness reserve where I hope to see something other than termites in the wild there, but we may not have connectivity. (we have seen wallabies and a crocodile in the national parks, so all is not lost). We'll be back in Cairns in about a week and I'll blog more then. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 11th, 2006
12:01 pm	Standards Must Be Maintained I've already been in Australia with Matt for an eventful week, and I'm seeing a very different side of it than I do working in big cities like Sydney and Melbourne. One of the most remarkable things I've seen concerns the resilience and dignity of the people who live and work and survive in the Australian Outback. Matt and I arrived in Sydney November 3, spent a day seeing some sights and left November 4 for Alice Springs where we were to meet a tour. November 5, very early, we left for four nights camping in the outback. The people of the outback are tough, and life is often minimal. It's hot in the summer and never less than warm the rest of the year. It's bone-dry and the sun is relentless. If you walk around under a layer of sunscreen all the time you get nothing else done, and so people don't, and they're browned and weathered. Major highways are two lanes of dirt. Red dust is everywhere and in everything. But no matter what, certain civilities are observed. Even in the outback there are flush toilets everywhere. This bemuses me extremely. In such a water-deprived place, why flush it down the toilet? Apparently Standards must be maintained. We camped in a site way out on a cattle station - a long drive from anywhere. There was a bush toilet there. It had a roof and three sides made of corrugated steel on a cement pad, but by god, it was a flush toilet! I don't know how they got the water out there. There was a shower as well, equally as plain. To my chagrin, I got lost on the way to the toilet after dark and ended up having to use the OTHER bush toilet. I felt like such a barbarian. I did pack out the paper. Australia's outback looks superficially like a lot of semi-arid desert lands I've seen. It has all the fragility and the obvious overuse issues as well. Close up, it's disturbingly different. The dominant vegetation is a plant called spinifex. Spinifex is a grass that grows in circles. It is harsh and spiky and very few things eat it aside from one species of kangaroo and termites. It is also extremely oily and flammable, so it plays the role of creosote in the southwestern U.S. - it provides fuel to brush fires which then recycle nutrients into the soil. Unlike the southwestern U.S. the Australian outback is still in play as a source of animal protein for people in the cities. Cattle stations run cows on land that has very little vegetation and no water. Water is pumped from the ground to water the animals. Prior to groundwater pumping, cattle stations routinely failed when one or another of the persistent droughts hit the outback. Groundwater pumping has allowed cattle to run on cattle stations long enough to cause a slower form of damage: soil erosion. The hooves of cattle are hard and sharp. As they walk across the brittle crust of soil atop the land, their hooves break it up. As long as wind storms don't follow, the crust reforms in the next rain. When drought comes, so do long periods with no rain and high winds, and then the soil goes up into the atmosphere. If too many cattle graze the same land, the number of plants also decreases and their roots no longer hold the soil - or the water - in the land. The result: semi-arid lands become desert. We stopped to gather wood on a cattle station on the Giles highway (which is a two lane dirt road, though quite a good one if you don't mind some washboard). There was a dead steer under a tree and every eatable plant had been stripped of its leaves. Between the remaining eucalypts was broken up soil and blow-outs, where dust devils had carried off the soil. All along the highway we saw dust devil after dust devil. The light strip on the right of the photo is hardpan, where all the dirt has been blown away. It seems like I cannot get away from this issue lately. I never wrote in my blog about the desertification I saw flying into China, but it was shocking. Now, in Australia, I see the same process. The Southwestern deserts I've wandered for so much of my life went through this hundreds of years ago when the Spanish ran cattle on the semi-arid deserts to provide a source of easy food for the Indians. Now I see it in its early stages in Australia. Otherwise Matt and I are well. Nothing bit us, though I came back to our ultralight shelter one night to find Matt asleep, partway on to my sleeping bag, and a centipede rapidly swarming its way towards him. That was exciting, more for me than for Matt, who required multiple shouts of "Matt sit up NOW" to sit up so the centipede could be tossed out the door. I am told they aren't very poisonous, though no one in Australia can blame me for acting as though they are. Every Australian I've known has told me Most Poisonous Animal In The World stories. We did see a Moon Snake in that same campsite, which is venomous, though not extremely. We got to camp offroad in some remarkably beautiful places. We started at Uluru (Ayre's Rock), for which there is only a commercial campsite, but after that we were pretty far out in the wilderness. There aren't many insects at night or much else, because there just isn't any surface water to support them. We also walked our way around Kata-Tjuta, King's Canyon (that's sort of the tourism trifecta out here) and also went to the West McDonnell Ranges - the fabulous Palm Canyon, where cycads still survive in a tiny pocket, Ormiston Gorge, Ellery Creek BigHole and many others. Here are two pictures, one of cycads and palms in Palm Canyon, and the other of Lindsey, our fearless leader, waiting in the vehicle, on the road (yes, that is the road) for us to finish photographing cycads. Today we leave Alice Springs on the 'Ghan - the train that goes from Adelaide to Darwin on the north coast. We join it midway and will spend the next 24 hours riding north through the desert center of Australia. The Ghan replaced the camel trains of the 1800s and early 1900s, moving goods and people from Adelaide to Darwin. Those camel trains were driven by Afghans, hence the Ghan. Next blog post from Darwin.... (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006
12:14 pm	Time to fly...again. Two perspectives on the same month-long vacation trip to Australia: "Whee!!!! I'm going to Australia!!!! I'm so excited!!! Kangaroos! Wallabys! Aussies with knives!" versus "Long-haul travel. It's a dream come true. Swollen ankles, luggage you hate so much you want to dump into the nearest trash can, and uncooperative taxi drivers. Whoopie." For someone who travels for a living, a good time is a spa at most a 10 minute drive from your home, with no telephone, no mail, and no network access while someone else is living in your house, doing your paperwork, paying your bills, arguing with your corporate overlords, tearing their hair out in your place, and weeding. Add a split of champagne and a novel by a really mediocre writer. THAT is a good time. I know I'm not ready because I do this often. Matt is completely ready because he has no idea that he's not ready. Nonetheless we are going tomorrow, ready or not. Stay tuned for more from Australia. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 28th, 2006
2:48 pm	An old lady dances in China This is my last blog from Beijing. Tomorrow I get on United 888 and fly back to the United States. I haven't had much free time since I got here. I'm here to work, not to sightsee, and especially sadly, not to shop. I haven't spent a cent on food and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the money I brought with me, but hey...there's always the airport. Today I walked through a city park and saw some people I had noticed were missing from Beijing's streets: the old. They were dancing and exercising in groups in the park. Some were doing Tai Chi, but a lot were just moving around in little choreographed dances. I don't know why these 8 or 10 or 15 people got together and decided to do the hustle or the wiggle or whatever en masse in the morning, but they do. Some other people were waltzing to the same, traditional Chinese music that served as background to the hustlers. Others sat, smiling, watched the dancers. Many of these people were middle aged, but some were old enough that they had stopped dyeing their hair and were grey, though none were quite as white as I am. All the women were wearing loose, tailored blouses and trousers and I thought "no wonder no one stares at me. I dress like an old Chinese lady." I know that in many ways the Chinese are very concerned about their status with respect to other people, but to me they seem very free. They don't seem to worry about what other people will think about their clothing, hair, appearance or actions. Americans are so guarded and watchful in that way. They don't just go to the park in the morning and dance. They don't sing as did a young suit-clad businesswoman I passed. China is an extremely complicated, contradictory, delight-filled, extravagant and rich land. I love it, but I don't think I'll ever feel at home here because it is so hard for me to learn the language. Even in Japan I start picking up Japanese phrases and using them intelligibly. I can't even say "thank you" in Chinese in a way people consistently recognize. I also recognize that the friendship that people have extended to me is just one small facet of their culture, and that other faces of that gem are invisible to me. Still, to see only this much of this ancient people is a privilege. Now, off to spend my money. Tomorrow morning, back to Seattle. (5 Comments |Comment on this)