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mcmanly mooches and muses
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| The Torres Strait |
[Jun. 30th, 2009|01:00 pm] |
 Thursday Island, from Green Hill Fort.
At the top of Australia, there is a skinny gap called the Torres Strait, where a series of firmer mountain and hill tops make a bunch of islands that run up to Papua-New Guinea. Horn Island is one of the larger ones, and it acquired an air strip in World War II that is still there, now tar-sealed and capable of taking a Dash-8.
With 30 or 40 passengers and two cabin crew, we had good service for the 100-minute flight, and more to the point, two stewards who knew the area and had maps, so we could see where we were, far better than on those stupid little screen displays.
Horn Island has the distinction of being the second-most attacked place in Australia (after Darwin), courtesy of the Japanese, and the area is now being worked as a wartime museum, with good interpretation, though the island's museum was a disaster of poorly interpreted trivia. High on my list of blunders was the uniform, said to be that of a lieutenant, with a captain's pips on the shoulders, but they were trying, and the stuff has been preserved.
Later, we were taken to a ferry wharf and conveyed to Thursday Island. This got its name from Billy Bligh who sailed past here after some problems involving HMS Bounty. There are also Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday Islands, though I'm not sure how many of those were named by Bligh.
Now a note about Bligh's "brilliant navigation": basically, he sailed east until he found Australia (or the reefs) then north until he found a way through, then headed across, looking out for Timor. It was clever, it was ingenious, but it was all very ordinary for a man who learned navigation from James Cook. He had passed through here in 1770, after holing and mending his boat (more of that anon), and so did others. There are still ten ships a day passing through the Torres Strait, all needing local pilots, even in an age when GPS charts tell you what lies ahead. The tidal currents are massive, and getting through safely was probably a greater achievement for Bligh than finding his way without charts.
I'm tired. More later. |
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| Around Cairns |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|12:01 pm] |
Cairns is a fair-sized country town, around 150,000 people, many of them dependent on the tourist trade, but with little of the tawdry nastiness of my own home suburb, the Queensland Gold Coast, or Port Douglas.
Now a word of warning: there are two grouchy bits below, but with the exceptions of an encounter with unschooled military meat-heads and a buffoon, it was a great day.
There is a brilliantly presented local history museum: most of these are little better than a repository of rusted tools, superannuated typewriters, borer-ridden pianos and broken Box Brownies. The Cairns historical museum is one of the gems, and I gained some interesting plot elements for potential use later. There is a delightful boardwalk that runs along the shore. You can wander along, taking in the sea, the mud flats, the occasional mangroves, for about 2.5 km.
Sadly, the US Navy was in town, and several squads of sailors (marines?) in green sweaty clothing were running. Plenty of others were running or jogging as well, but unlike the sailors, they knew that in Australia, you keep left unless overtaking. So it was that we found twenty-odd sailors jogging purposefully at us. They were keeping over to the right, which might be fine in their home ports, but was wrong in Australia.
I am stubborn where manners are concerned. I stood my ground, stared them down, and forced them to divert, but I noticed that they moved right again, forcing those behind us to step aside.
Now I don't blame the enlisted men on board the USS Essex, but I do blame the officers and the entire US Navy command system for this arrogant rudeness. The men should never have been allowed out in such an ignorant state.
The incident shows exactly why the US is good at winning wars and bad at keeping the peace. It takes very little effort to explain to the enlisted men that they are expected to conform to local norms, but this was clearly not done. Stupid, stupid, stupid officers!
After all, if the enlisted men push their welcoming allies around, people who speak English better than they do, how do you think these dumbos will behave in a war situation where the locals are regarded at the very least with suspicion? The only saving grace was that the men were unwilling to run down a white-beard who stood his ground, but their return to the right side of the path as soon as they were past showed that they didn't get the message.
I am exceedingly pissed-off when I see such a simple failure of management and command. The world NEEDS competent and capable US armed forces to maintain world peace, but this was totally bloody incompetent. If the officers were incapable of understanding and conveying this, they should have called in Australian officers to spell it out to them, so that they could pass it on.
Suffice it to say that I was not in a good mood that night when we went to attend a briefing meeting for the tour that began next morning. An idiot called Shirley, dressed in the livery of APT, our tour company, showed up at the appointed meeting place, some time before the set time and whisked those who were there away to a room, where she started the meeting.
Let us just say that Shirley made the US Navy's worst and clumsiest look like an ornament to his or her profession. Shirley was probably an employee of Tropic Wings, which seems to be a local sheltered workshop for the terminally inarticulate. APT has competent staff, so she could not have been one of theirs. I trust APT staff, but I would not rely on Shirley as a stand-in for a decerebrate sheep.
Shirley failed to do a head count when she arrived, failed to wait for the rest of the group, failed to leave a message for the remnants, failed to advise any of us that we should expect to find electronic air tickets at the concierge desk (somebody just happened to mention it next morning as we waited for the overdue coach that was to take us to the airport: I'm not sure if we would ever have boarded the plane without them, but in the final rush, I think we would have got through just fine).
Shirley also ordered those staying at other hotels to make their way to the hotel we were in, but then sent the coach out to pick them up while we were waiting at the place she specified: this is why the coach was late. In the end, we got it found, but the driver counted, found 19 people, and told us that Shirley had said there should be 20.
By now, baggage check-in was closed at the airport, and we were still at the hotel. Because I had sussed that this woman as a muppet, I had counted heads the previous night, and knew that there were just 19 of us, so confronted by my fiercest sailor-diverting gaze, the driver took off.
Shirley had warned us that the airline people were impossible. She was wrong on that as well (what a surprise!). They reopened check-in, got us to calm down, and all was well. We were off to Horn Island, and into the hands of APT. Hooray! |
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| Fleeing Sydney, heading for the reef |
[Jun. 28th, 2009|11:28 am] |
It's winter here in Australia, so just as people in the northern hemisphere flee north to avoid the heat, we head north to avoid the cold. All the way to FNQ, in fact. No, that's not rude: it's Far North Queensland. Step 1 was getting to Cairns, step 2 was settling in, step 3 is something we'll come to in a minute.
As part of our settling in, we headed up the coast from Cairns to Port Douglas, to look in at a tacky piece of ostentation before getting on a boat and heading out to the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef for some close-up viewing of fish. In the distance, we could see the Pacific rollers hitting the outer reef and foaming up, but we were safe inside.
I went on the "advanced snorkeling" which cost $60 and landed me among a bunch of dick-heads who had no idea of steering and kept bumping into me.
The last time I encountered idiots like this, they were foreigners (English-speaking, but that's as far as I will go) on Lord Howe Island who kept trampling the coral and kicking the others in the face. I fixed them by surfacing at the second dive place and asking in my best Strine voice "How big does a reef shark have to be before it's dangerous?" The operator glanced at them, laboriously pulling their fins on.
"About ten foot," he said, and winked.
"Oh," said I, with a doubt-tinged voice, "Well, I suppose it'll be all right then." They stayed on the boat, fear in their eyes, and the rest of us dived down to see the three-foot shark that was under the boat.
Sadly, there were no sharks and no boat, but after a few kicks to the head and fins in the face, the idiots formed a poor impression of me and kept away. We had a guide who showed us "Farmer Joe", a male fish that guards its territory, and moves anything placed on its patch. If only they had a Farmer Joe to remove dick-heads. A 10'1" reef shark would be good.
On the way back, we saw the ostentatious vulgarity of Port Douglas at close range. Ugh. |
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| Melbourne in a time of fire |
[Feb. 10th, 2009|05:06 pm] |
Our first day was largely restricted to the Melbourne CBD. We had arrived at 9 pm on the Monday night, and while we had the option of a coach to Spencer Street and then a tram to our hotel, we elected to have a cab and save the hassle of being in a strange city at night and all that stuff.
The CBD is laid out as a grid, parallel to the Yarra River, with long broad streets interspersed with narrow laneways. Just north of Collins Street, the laneway is called Little Collins Street, and our hotel was in a laneway off Little Collins. Little Collins Street is narrow enough for a garbage truck to completely block it, and they often do, in the night, because Collins Street and the next street up, Bourke Street, are both full of serious shops.
Melbourne's city blocks are pierced by lanes and arcades as well, and these give Melbourne a slightly raffish cosmopolitan charm. There are small restaurants where one can order a glass of wine without having to order a meal--and where a small dish of scrumptious olives may appear without warning. Such an innovation had been suggested for Sydney, but a local pubs-'n'-clubs head honcho said in brutal terms that Sydney people have better things to do than sit around sipping chardonnay and reading books.
Take that to mean that this egregious boofhead had long since discovered that when he read anything more intelligent than the label on a bottle, he had to move his lips, and that made him spill whatever he was swilling. Suffice it to say that change may not be on the way, but it has been promised. Point to Melbourne: the people of Melbourne are often to be seen reading books.
Our hotel was in a little laneway that went through to Collins Street, though another tunnel/arcade came out in Swanston Street, so if you know Melbourne at all, you will realise that we were in the thick of it.
A big block down Swanston Street, we were at Federation Square--or diagonally opposite Fed. Square. At this corner, we were able to catch either the free City Tram that circles the outside of the CBD, but the free tourist shuttle bus also picks up and sets down there.
In most cities, we buy a ticket for the hop-on/hop-off bus, and ride it once around to see what is about, then part-way around again, in order to visit one or more of the attractions. Here, there were no tickets to buy -- hooray for Melbourne! We decided to do slightly less than a circuit and end up in the arts triangle that is Southbank, but before that, I wanted to call in at the Ian Potter gallery in Federation Square.
This is part of the National Gallery of Victoria (the "National" is a hangover from the fierce Sydney-Melbourne rivalry: it is a State gallery, but Sydney was just as guilty), and it harbours some of the best landscape painting of the 19th century. As those paintings are some of the best contemporary records of daily life, I needed to view them again, but some of my favourites from last August had already been returned to storage: this is the nature of galleries, alas. It is, of course, better for the paintings, so you have to live with it.
I'm not sure who Ian Potter was, but he done good. I think he may have been a stockbroker, but he clearly had some useful money to splash around to benefit a city and a nation.
From there, we travelled on the shuttle bus and saw bits of Melbourne we would have missed.
Two notable aspects: there are more heritage buildings in Melbourne still in daily use than in Sydney, and there is a more adventurous approach to modern sculpture in Melbourne. I need to say more on this at some point. |
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| A Sydneysider reviews Melbourne |
[Feb. 9th, 2009|04:44 pm] |
Sydney and Melbourne are the two premier cities of Australia in terms of population, wealth and cultural intensity. Historically, Melbourne got off to a slow start in 1837, after Sydney kicked off in 1788.
Melbourne had a number of major advantages, chief among them being access to sources and markets that Sydney had to establish for itself, so once started, it grew much faster, and soon there was jealousy and rivalry.
The burghers of Sydney were less than pleased when, just around the time that gold was discovered in New South Wales, the ground south of the Murray River became the colony of Victoria. The same burghers of Sydney were cock-a-hoop when the remnant turned out to have gold deposits, but soon after, even richer finds were made in the new colony of Victoria.
While the gold was nearly all taken off to England, where it helped fuel a British surge, the colonies did well, with lots of money for public works and infrastructure. That period, roughly 1850 to 1870, is where I am writing at the moment, so I took me off to Melbourne, partly for a holiday, partly to do some digging.
I haven't spent that much time in Melbourne over the years. There was a conference where I spent a week in 1986, and gave a paper that four other people understood and cared about. They gave their papers to the same small circle, and when we were done, we tried a few of the other papers presented in other sections, and found them to be uniformly pretentious sociological twaddle (unlike our own incisive mathematical analyses), so we enjoyed Melbourne instead. So I knew a thing or two about what Melbourne could offer, and a one-day visit last August had made me aware of other things, so I had a bit of a hit list to follow up on.
Victoria had been beset by murderous bushfires for a week or so before we left, and we flew over a few of them in the way in, last Monday night. On Friday and Saturday, smoke haze gave us a red sun, even in the middle of the day. So far, an estimated 2000 homes have been destroyed, and close to 200 people have died. The toll may reach 300 before it is finalised. That added a sobering aspect.
It also precluded a few of our plans, and left us more in central Melbourne than we might have planned, because day tours were just not happening to some of the prettier areas. So the next few entries feature a very urban Melbourne. |
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| On the road again |
[Feb. 5th, 2009|06:54 pm] |
Edited Sunday 8
We are about to raid Melbourne. That's about 600 miles or 1000 km sort of south-westish. Four days of fossicking around galleries, concerts, shows, museums, almost all of it not work-related, though a bit of it is 'sort of' work-related.
Sydneysiders hate Melbourne and vice versa. They are all idiots.
Why Melbourne? I live in Australia's largest city, Melbourne comes next (which explains the silly rivalry). They are opening a new concert venue this week, we have a grandchild arriving soon which may mean we need to be on call more than right now, but most of all, I am working on what may become a series of historical fiction, loosely aimed at the YA (young adult) market, and I need to spend some time in Melbourne, just to get my bearings.
I also want to see the gold museum near the Treasury Gardens, the Immigration Museum, and a display about a Cornish lugger, 37 feet long, which sailed to Australia in 1855. By chance, these are work-related, but I would have wanted to see them anyhow.
More importantly, I need to slow down the writing: I had started to make a treadmill of it, and that produces bad writing. Quality and quantity are enemies.
Melbourne has trams, great coffee, intelligent signage and public transport, and great galleries and museums. Probably more, but I need to go and look.
I have one great hope. Right now, Melbourne and Victoria are suffering terrible fires. Usually it rains when I go to Melbourne. Good! Let the storm clouds roll!
Hooroo for now. |
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| Passau didactics |
[Oct. 20th, 2008|09:03 am] |
July 31
OK, so the Asam brothers cured me of ABC-ism, but today was Passau, and it brought another drivelling idiot of a primary-school (at a guess) teacher with high qualifications in Germanic Depressive Didacticism. This bloke could have bored for Germany, and within five minutes, I was saying so. He had asked what the group wanted, everybody said they wanted to walk and see, so he stood for ten minutes asking questions and answering them.
There is a particularly insufferable form of teacher who persists in asking "Guess what I'm thinking" questions. I kneecap them with left-field answers, so when he asked his "class" where the Celts live today, I kept saying Australia – after all, I'm a bloody Celt, and that's where I live! No he said, they are in Chermany, Spain and even (wow!!) Ireland, wherever Celtic music is found. We took off.
It was a great town.
This ens my take for a moment -- we had news soon after that about Chris' sister, whose cancer had suddenly gone out of control. We needed to make an urgent flight to Frankfurt, cancel the stopover in Bangkok, and arrived home knackered but in time. I am now, in October, in clear air, so i have taken the time out to post these tales.
But I never did have time to nail that bloody purser's head to the floor, so I guess some good came of it. |
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| Porks and gordons |
[Oct. 20th, 2008|09:00 am] |
July 30
We woke up to find the boat reversing into its berth at the edge of Regensburg (aka Ratisbon). I jumped up and trotted off the boat, past Roman ruins, caught sight of the spires of the cathedral, and went back to persuade Chris to dodge the officious official tour, complete with details of the conjectured site of the birthplace of the grandfather of Napoleon's bootmaker's auntie.
This meant we were away an hour earlier, we saw the cathedral while it was all quiet, but then Chris got it into her head that we should see St Emmeram's church. I was a bit ABC, but I agreed.
We got there the hard way, starting close to the church (as we realised when we got back to it) and going once around the palace of the former royals who used to operate here. That turned out to be quite a large circuit in shady conditions, but we reached the church a bit knackered. As Chris pressed on for what she took to be the church, I glanced in through a side door and declared "It's in here!".
It was a baroque knockout, the work of two brothers called Asam, who specialised in over-the-top baroque churches, all stucco and paintings and stuff. So we walked around, oohed and ahhed, then headed for the room Chris had found, and realised that we had actually been in the chapel, the practice room where they perfected their plans. Pictures will be provided.
In the afternoon, we went on a disastrous excursion to Weltenburg abbey, where a Franciscan church had been fitted out by the Asam brothers. What we saw was great, the problem was with the idiot guide.
She started by assembling us and taking us on a coach trip in which she pointed out the never-used home of a local boy called Ratzinger (aka the current pope), told us all about how hard her day was, but never explained the trip or how it would work. Mistake number one.
She also had an unfortunate accent, and sounded rather like Anna Russell doing a rather soppy Valkyrie on drugs of a soporific kind. A bus was a boss, and when she spoke of porks and gordons, it took some time to realise that these were parks and gardens. "Here comes a core" was a warning that there was a car on the road, but when she declared that John Nepelmuk became a mortar, I thought first that he had been blown out of a cannon before thinking of Masonic rituals. No, he became a martyr.
Then we were loaded onto a ferry, where she became the English-language guide as well as our guide. At the end she declared that we should follow her past the orchard to the courtyard and took off at full speed, not checking to see if we were all there, and knew which way to go along the shore to the invisible targets. Mistake number two: mistake number three was not to count her 41 charges. I found this curious, because she claimed to have trained as a teacher.
Then she gathered those who arrived and told them we would not go back to the boat but "find our boss", and once again, failed to count the party. Then she ushered us into a church for an entertaining talk by somebody else about the Brothers Asam, then sailed off out of the church and off to where drinks would be served, but did not count. Chris and I were caught up in a jam of seething humanity, and it was inly my unerring ability to find beer that got us through. Unlike our guide, I looked behind, but could see no other members of our party.
Then we were rushed from the drinking place, out through a concealed exit, and off along a hot dusty road back to the bus. A few of the less well members rode in a "shottle boss". All through this time, she made no count, so when we got to the bus, I was less than surprised that she had lost two people.
In the end, they were found at the wharf, where they had gone, quite reasonably. This did not surprise me either, though her attempts to cover her arse by blaming them DID surprise me. Still, we had seen some great churches! |
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| July 28, 29 |
[Oct. 20th, 2008|08:58 am] |
July 28
The amazing menu items continue. Tonight, I had curred ham: I thought it would be curried, but Chris correctly guessed it would be cured ham, but until I saw it, I was worried that it would arrive with a dead mongrel on top. There was also minestrone, explained as "vegetable soup with past".
Today we left the Main River for the Main-Donau Canal. The natives here cannot say "Danube" and so they call the river the Donau. Ah well, that's foreigners for you.
The canal is a series of ponds linked by high locks that take us across the European watershed, a miracle of engineering that was first dreamed up in the time of Charlemagne and completed in 1992. A few years later (2001), the cruise boats started.
We raided Bamberg in the afternoon. More cobbled streets and more bloody cathedrals, but this town was a joy. It also has a curious smoked beer called rauchbier. This has been described as "a beer with two fag-ends in it", "drinking beer from an ashtray" and "drinking bacon". It is an acquired taste, but I managed it after two. After the third, I could manage nothing. I think.
July 29
Why was there a coracle-making kit in the cabin this morning? Did it follow me home? We woke up near Nuremberg, a town that was almost completely destroyed in the war. This was because Hitler held his rallies here, so once again, the destruction was political. It was also wanton and thorough. We found a statue of Hans Sachs in Hans Sachs Platz, saw waitresses with socks and sandals, found some memorials to Albrecht Durer and saw his house, consumed more bratwurst and weissbier, in close proximity to a compressor and a jack hammer.
In the evening, we were visited on the boat by a local geography professor who knows the canal system. Somebody commented that some locks seem slow, some seem fast. This, he said, was because they all take 25 minutes: if any one of them went faster, it would generate a bottleneck further along, so a 25 metre lock takes the same time as a 3 metre lock. Freighters pay on tonnage, but a trip like ours, from Amsterdam to Budapest only draws a fee of 800 euros for a boat that is 110 metres long and carries 142 people. It takes trucks off the road, but it isn't as effective as the Rhine system. Did I mention that by now, we were on the Danube? |
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| July 27: Rontgen and Alzheimer |
[Oct. 20th, 2008|08:55 am] |
July 27
Wurzburg was the home of Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, the discoverer of X-rays. There is no statue to him, just an inscription on the wall of the Physics department. Bastards. They are proud of the palace of the Prince Bishop which was a gem, but I shall ignore it until they erect a statue of Rontgen. Double bastards!
Then it was on to Rothenburg, an intact medieval town with intact walls that escaped the bombers, but is now ravaged by tourists. We walked the walls, shopped, ate schneeballen (='snowballs'), a sort of cross between a donut and an exploding macaroon that generates an all-over dusting of caster sugar and drank beer. On the way back to the boat, we passed the former home of Alois Alzheimer, but I forget what it was called. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 20th, 2008|08:53 am] |
July 26
Saturday. We hit Miltenberg and attacked some bratwurst and weissbier. We won. Then on to Wertheim (these are the people who invented blitzkrieg, and we were getting a taste for the touristic version of it. Every town has its gems, its joys, its remnants that were not pasted by allied air forces in the latter days of the war, and after a while, one becomes a bit blasé, a bit ABC (Another Bloody Castle/ Cathedral/ Church), but some towns talk to you.
A side note about the late-war Allied pastings of non-strategic towns: my view of them is that they were basically vengeful attacks on German culture, payback for German bastardry when they set out to destroy towns as they retreated. This pains me: no culture belongs to a single nation, and not all Germans were like that. In Brugges, we heard of a German officer who refused to blow up Brugges because it was too beautiful. Sadly, he was taken out and shot. I hope the bastards who did that were shot and left to die in agony. Cracow was saved, they say, because the Polish Resistance cut the wires that would have set off the charges, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a decent German told them where to find the wires.
Whatever, many towns of no great strategic importance were badly hit, too late to really change the war. Perhaps the aim was to make Germans think twice before starting another war, but the damage was simplistic in motivation and barbaric in its intensity.
Wertheim is close to the river, so we were able to jump off and right into the thick of Olde Stuffe, but there was also a festival going on. I have developed a bit of a sinus infection over the past few days, so when rain came on, we ducked into a beer garden where one of the barmen affected lederhosen, but met my broken German with passable English, and advised us on a choice of beer.
Then the rain went, and we heard drumming, so we drank up, paid up and walked out. To find a bunch of Germans who had formed a Brazilian samba band. They were excellent. No culture belongs to a single nation. We stood, enjoyed, and thought of Richard Feynman. |
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| Mystery bicycles, oompah bands, Hildegard and Gutenberg |
[Oct. 20th, 2008|08:50 am] |
July 25
I have to record a sighting of the rare, mysterious and endangered feral black Bicycle of the Rhine. We were making great speed, and I was dangling in the cabin window, watching the interaction of the wash upon the shore. Most of the Rhine has stone-lined banks, designed to resist the breaking waves of the wash of boats doing about 18 km/hr against the water – ground speed depends on the current, but I think the speed against the water is more important in shore interactions.
The other factor is the slope of the bank, but at this point, there was a tremendous wave running along the shore, and suddenly, from the depths, an abandoned (one assumes) bicycle emerged briefly before sinking below the foam. My day has been given to ideas for an opera. I think the Black Bicycle will be called Porgy, but perhaps it will be Othello. Or maybe Siegwill. Its leitmotif will be played by a duet of unicycles.
Music has been very important to us today, because we passed the Lorelei Rock. I think the popular setting of Heine's poem was Schubert, but whatever it was, the boat's crew treated us to a recorded German oompah beer barrel version of the song. Heine was apparently feeling suicidal when he penned it: perhaps he could see the future and knew what fate, what treatment awaited his words in the 21st century.
Later in the day, we reached Bingen, once the home of Hildegard, but it appears that no German oompah bands have yet discovered her music. I think the opera would be improved by a scooter named Hildegard. She and Sigwill could mate luxuriously in the wild spring melt-waters of the Rhine and produce an offspring named Mudgard.
Later, we hit Mainz, once the home of Gutenberg, and saw two of the early bibles he did. It was a slow start: his process could produce 180 bibles in the time it took a scriptorium monk to write out one, but mass media needed more. Today we left the Rhine for the Main River. |
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| On the Rhine, July 24 |
[Oct. 20th, 2008|08:47 am] |
This is being posted almost three months after it was written. We ran into a small problem involving two deaths in the family, a wedding, a book that needed to be fixed, and i forgot where I had this text stored.
Many minor adventures have befallen us. We have been offered soft-cocked egg, sausage changed daily, crape juice and other delights – and survived, we have survived a complete muppet of a computer-shy cow of a purser who haughtily assured us that we had no booking on her boat. This is, as she has since realised, career-threatening behaviour, because she was equally rude about APT, the people who have chartered the boat, and I am, as Constant Readers will know, a kneecap specialist.
Basically, we were told to bugger off, and left to sort matters out, so I did. Loudly and with maximal fuss. So far we have scored a free bottle of slightly second-rate Captain's bubbly, but the pound of flesh will only be extracted later, when she has no chance to pee in our beer. I have a robust view of service industries, based on having worked in and with them.
The boat is excellent, though it rumbled through the night after detouring to avoid a blockage at one lock. The Rhine is frantically busy with commercial barges, and the skipper had to work the boat hard against currents rather than locks, against a current of around 7 km/hr in places (estimate) and still makes 14 km/hr, measured against distance markers along the river which count back to some mountain freshet where our boat wouldn't go. We have somewhere around 250 people on board, and as far as we can tell, all Kiwis or Australians, which means that civilised conversation is possible – but that number does rule out shallow-water navigation.
We lunch at 1 pm, then around 2.30, there will be a surprise fire drill – it's all a big secret, but looking at the realities of maintaining schedules, it will be around then, and it's surprising what you can pick up with a vestigial knowledge of German.
We are in Cologne as I type this, having tromped around a bloody great cathedral which survived the war and a city that didn't. To the Germans, it is Koln with an umlaut on the o, and the beer is Kolsch (also with an umlaut) and it comes in tiny glasses, so I was forced to have two, much against my will.
I was explaining to a clinical psychologist on the trip that the whole country is twisted because of a fear of paratroops, which we have dubbed parachute paranoia. If we can incorporate this into a diet, we will make millions. |
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| July 20: on to Leyden, back, and a lost tram driver |
[Jul. 20th, 2008|06:56 pm] |
The weather was better today, but the Anne Frank Museum offered no online bookings, so we spat the dummy in a manner if speaking and hied ourselves off to Leyden (or Leiden), which has a pronunciation hat has me foxed. It is neither laden nor lie-den, but somewhere in between. Actually, just about all the Dutch vowels have me foxed. Spui is neither spoh nor spau, but somewhere between, and most other vowels are worse.
Leyden is a university town and most of the nice bits are within 300 metres of the town centre, but that said, there are a lot of them. Walking the Leidse Loper, the Leyden Loop, takes 110 minutes and gets you to see all of them, but we decided to pig out on museums instead. Heike Kammerlongh Onnes is an interest of mine: he pioneered low-temperature physics, and one of the museums was celebrating his family, which includes artists, one of them Heike's brother Menso, another was Menso's son, Heike's nephew. No matter, one of the other Kammerlingh Onnes had the chance to paint Albert Einstein, and did some portraits of Heike with which I was already familiar.
Then hey ho, round a corner and into a whole bunch of Rembrandts. It had occurred to me last night that Rembrandt van Rijn was Rembrandt from the Rhine, but I was not really aware of any connection between Rembrandt and Leiden – it seems he set up as a master painter there before heading for Amsterdam.
The best part, though, was that we were in the Laken Hall (the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal if you care about precision), the former home of the cloth masters of Leiden when it was a world centre for cloth making, and there, on the wall, was a pair knapping shears (I think), used to remove the knap from woven cloth. They were HUGE: 150 cm (5 feet) long and massive. The importance was that back in the 1820s, the fore-runner of the first cylinder mower was invented as a less muscle-mashing way of removing the knap.
The new cloth-mowers also offered less risk of accidentally damaging a length of cloth: I have to write about those shears when I get home, but now I have seen them. Sadly, it was a no-photography museum, so I had cloaked my camera – I have to confess that I would have been tempted to snap this otherwise. The no-photography rule can be frustrating, but having worked in two museums, I know that it is important.
We also wandered around an historical/archaeological museum which gave me a number of ideas, and then went up a REAL Dutch windmill. This was a flour mill that operated until fairly recently and has now been restored as a museum. It isn’t working, but all the bits are in place, and I added some good shots.
Talking of books and stuff, the soon-to-be-published '1859' book has a vignette on celebrity chef Alexis Soyer, who died ( from memory) in 1857, but who was a lasting influence. Chris had the bright idea of trudging through a muddy building site to find a book market near Spiegelstraat – and there I found (and bought) a reprint of an 1859 biography of Soyer. Very few copies were released, it seems, but the reprint is MINE! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Walking across the most touristy square in Leiden, I mused that if this was Leiden in summer, what could it be like in winter? In the end, we decided that two degrees worse than bleak was probably blechh!, but it was just a bad day in a great place. We had a great lunch on a sort of barge thing on the canal, we scored three great museums, we had help from a nice Dutch lady who was walking her dog and saw us puzzling over the map, and the cyclists were far less aggressive.
The only annoyance was that we never saw a Leyden jar. I mentioned this to one shopkeeper who suggested we try Leyden jazz, which was NOT a misunderstanding.
Arriving back in Amsterdam, I had discovered that the strippen karte had extra spaces on the back, so we elected to ride a Number 5 tram to the terminus and back again, to use a few of the available clicks, and to see the 'burbs.
We got there, bailed, looked around, deduced which was the next tram out of the four there, and climbed aboard. Two men followed us, and then we watched as another tram on another line took off. We all piled out and watched the three remaining trams. A driver came out, and like four sunflowers (with a small dash of vulture) we tracked him.
Wilting under our joint gaze, he indicated the tram that he would take, but then decided that this could not be right, so he led us to another tram. Three girls had joined us by now, and the strain was just too great. He excused himself, dashed into an office and returned, looking slightly hangdog as he asked us to return to tram No. 1. We all trooped (without any trace of external risibility) back to that tram, and he took off before anybody could tell him not to.
We have spotted a dinner place, and are off shortly. Posts may become less common after this, as I am unsure of connectivity and costs on the boat. Time will tell . . . |
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| July 19: soggy Amsterdam |
[Jul. 19th, 2008|02:14 pm] |
These people have far too much water. They have canals full, lakes full, seas full -- and skies full, damn them!
Coming through in the train from Antwerp (intermediate from Brugge {an anagram of bugger -- what does this signify?}), we noticed ditches full of the stuff, ponds, puddles and swamps, all implying a water table close to the surface. This is attested to by all WW-I histories, where the trenches filled with water and footrot-feeding mud, as soon as they were dug.
So why is the water table so high? Blame it on glacial planing that produces land flatter than Australia -- and which probably explains why Australia was dubbed "New Holland" by the Dutch navigators. Add to this that the skies are full of cloud and water, and you can see the problem.
Today, the streets are full of water as well, because it is pissing down. We unwisely spent the morning in the Rijksmuseum when it wasn't raining, so now we are sulking in the hotel, waiting for the rain to ease. Chris is upstairs reading, I am in the bar with a Heineken and WiFi.
Sulking is very hard after one has spent a morning in the Rijksmuseum -- across the Museum Plein there is the Van Gogh museum where a guard taught me to pronounce "Van Gogh" in the Dutch way, which makes it sound as though you have a fly in your throat.
I think I will settle for plain old "van-goff". Easier on the larynx than "vahn-xhochxhhh".
Anyhow, the Rijksmuseum (pron Reichsmuseum) is within hopping distance of our hotel, and crammed with Rembrandts which pull crowds like the bloody Mona Lisa at the Louvre, while boring old Titians get ignored and the likes of Frans Hals are treated with contempt. All the better for us. We wallowed in art for two hours. I found a painting that appears to show a backyard in the 17h century which had a lawn: so the trip is now a tax deduction! (Actually, I have been hunting lawns and lawn stuff all over the place, so it was already claimable, but now I have evidence!)
Last night had an excellent surprise: our TV gets BBC-2, and last night, we found that we could get the first night of the Proms -- the Australan TV only ever gives us the last night, which is a hoot.
The CNN weather has just come on in the bar: miserable and raining in Brussels, ditto in Frankfurt, but only cloudy in London. Weather "sort of" comes from there, but I have conceived of a new book today: how people came to understand the weather -- all based on a chat I had with the receptionist who explained how weather in the Netherlands curls around under Britain and then up into the Low Countries. I began to wonder how anybody ever unravelled the patterns.
When I was writing the 1859 book, I dealt with the ways that meteorology arose, starting with the Crimean war. I also mentioned that the US and Australia had the advantages of watching fronts come from the west, over land, but Europe had none of that: stuff just jumped at them out of the Atlantic.
A double tax deduction! |
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| Brussels to Brugge to Amsterdam |
[Jul. 16th, 2008|06:50 pm] |
July 14, Brugge
Travel could hardly be easier. We caught a cab to the station, much to the disgust of a man from the hotel, who assumed we were going for the day and thought we could get the Metro there. He changed his tune when he saw the Suitcases. We are inside 20 kg, but the bulk is impressive.
At the station, we knew from reconnaissance where to get the tickets, then headed for the hidden lift to ride down one floor, before crossing to a second lift that delivered us to our platform. When we arrived at Platform 4 with her, she hovered, deduced from our conversation that we were headed to Brugge, and advised us that our train would make many stops – we had to explain to her that as tourists we were in no hurry and wanted to see.
It had occurred to me that the francophones might be enthused about Bastille Day, but we were heading into Flemish territory, where signs are only in Flemish, unlike avowedly bilingual Brussels. It was business as usual.
We checked at Brugge (NOT Bruges) and found that our onward travel to Amsterdam will be easy.
July 15
The sounds of cities
My feet are tired of the contortions that are caused by walking on cobbled streets, but they add an interesting sound to cityscapes. In Riga, Vilnius, Tartu and Tallinn, we became used to the sounds of vehicle tyres slapping along on cobbled streets, a curious Diesel-ish growl. We even became used to the sound of steel-tipped women's high heels which many brave Baltic women wear on the cobbles, so that they clack-clack-clack along. In a shopping mall in Tallinn, one woman clacked past, while at her rear, a young girl amused herself, stomping on the hard paving with sneakers and making a creditable imitation of high heels clacking to their lost mates.
The cobbles have other effects: here in Brugge, a ride by horse-cart is one of the standard tourist attractions. Common in many European cities, these over-priced commodities involve a cart, a poop-catcher, a driver who talks incessantly to his passengers and a horse that knows the way to go.
Less noisily, the city also offers a bus that winds around the narrow streets, showing people the best bits. We rode one of those this morning, making notes of places to walk back to, then on the advice of the proprietor of our B&B, we went on a canal tour, which showed us new views of mainly the same places. There are twenty of these boats (they say: so how did I manage to see ten of them in one place. Just after we got off?) each carrying about 40 people and a multilingual skipper-guide who can offer views in many languages. The bus had a driver who played a combined video and 7-language tape to be listened to with headphones – the video showed us what we were looking for, but with a mainly Anglophone crowd, the driver added some of the usual funnies – and for once, he had a definite comic skill. It would have been inaudible beyond te bus, but the boats are different.
Brugge was once a major trading port, albeit one far from the sea, where cloth, oil, wine, hides and even exotic pets were stock-in-trade. These days, exotic pests, albeit tourists, are the norm. 4 million of them between April and October, and nobody is entirely free. We are just a spit from one of the canals that once hauled cargoes from place to place, a portion that is prowled by the tourist boats. So part of the background is the sound of the blaring loudspeakers that in Greece would indicate saleable objects or an election campaign.
I will return to the tourist pests – I maintain that the modern equivalent of signing a pact with the devil is to sign a tourism infrastructure agreement.
So street sounds here are the bells of aggressive bicycles launching themselves at knots of befuddled tourists, the clopping of horses, the none-too distant rhubarb-rhubarb of the polyglot boats, occasional street musicians, usually of some skill – if questionable taste – we had 'Lullaby of Birdland', a good start at lunch, followed by 'My Favourite Things' from the Sound of Mucus. It was played well, though.
The other sound is of wheeled luggage being rolled over cobbles, which we will do tomorrow.
July 16, Amsterdam
Made it in one piece, same language as we see it – reading Flemish or Dutch is like listening to a Yorkshire accent while one's ears are stuffed with army socks filled with cellophane. Listening to Flemish or Dutch leaves the impressions of Germans speaking French – a strange sound.
A few, regrettably, take advantage of it. At Antwerp, the woman collecting money for the WCs deliberately ripped me off. She took my one euro and gave me 10 cents, turned away, turned back to see me still standing there with my hand out and announced that she would give me another 50 cents. I know about fraud, and I know how cheats work.
She didn't, so she failed to look at her coin (my euro), yet she knew exactly why I was waiting there – she was clearly 100% a thief, a fraud, a disgrace to the Belgian railways, and this goes also on my blog. It was Antwerp Central level 0, just after noon on July 16, for the benefit of any outraged Belgian railways officials. When I get a response from Belgian rail, I will point to it here. This woman is probably stealing 20 euros an hour from apparently hapless tourists. I'm not hapless – I just look that way.
Amsterdam is better. A Moroccan taxi driver who seemed to be taking us a bit out of the way, but it was so fast that I think he judged well, the room is fine and the Wifi works, but only in the bar, where Heineken is available. We had Grolsch and bitteballs for afternoon tea, found a place that does rijstaffel, so all is well.
We have walked a few blocks, found a nice restaurant, for dinner and two reserves, and we have our bearings. We also have a klippenkarte, which is what you use on public transport here. Tomorrow, we hit the city centre.
Chris is on the public computer on the other side of the bar – the Oz government has upgraded its warning about Thailand, but they failed to see Belgium unwinding, which happened yesterday, so we will probably go ahead. |
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| Brussels, July 13 |
[Jul. 13th, 2008|07:16 pm] |
July 13, Brussels
We made it through the wilds of Saaremaa, visited the giant 15-metre cliff where children were supposedly sacrificed in the 16th century. As usual, it was limestone. The national rock of Estonia is proudly proclaimed to be limestone, and no bloody wonder. Great wildflowers, but once again, no moose.
We gathered for a final meal at 'The Golden Pig' in Tallinn. By chance, Chris and I had dined there a fortnight earlier an found it touristy – and the pork was dry. So it was not our top choice, but the food was good this time. Bizarre elements: the waitress had alopecia of the face or something and had eyebrows put on with a felt pen, in the mode of Frieda Karloff (I know that's not right, but it's close enough if you know your Mexican artists – if you don't, forget it).
Also, the table next to us ordered two jugs of water, and got tap water which was fine, but the bill included vesi x 2, 200 krooni, or around $20! Most tourists would not know what vesi was and might pay it. Note to Tallinn tourists: stay away from 'The Golden Pig'. It's a clip joint.
Our taxi driver to the airport was formerly in the Soviet Army – Estonia was an integrated SSR in the USSR. He said that driving to Russia was far easier in the old days, now they asked all sorts of questions which he seemed too feel was unneighbourly of them.
Catch at Tallinn airport: keep some krooni, because inside, while they accept euro notes, they give the change in krooni. I managed to walk out with 9 cents in krooni cents, plus a single 2-krooni note that features Karl-Ernst von Baer, an embryologist who worked at Tartu University when it was Dorpat (the German name).
Catch at Copenhagen: they accept euro notes but give change in DKK, not much use when one is in transit. Two sandwiches and two drinks cost almost $40, but airport food was ever thus. On then to Brussels, where we had a LONG walk to our bags through passages lined with ads in English only, then out and into a taxi which ZOOMed us to our hotel, on the edge of the old town. He was Flemish but spoke French and managed us in English. There are three official languages here, Dutch, French and German (yup!), but English is very common.
We dumped our stuff and wandered – not too far, but far enough to realise that the brittle British jokes about Brussels as Brasilia with a charisma bypass are bollocks. It is a beautiful town, and we will give it and its environment a week next time. I ate carbonades, a sort of Flemish stew that came with pommes frites and Chris had a mixed grill that came with the same, and having had a white beer, earlier, we had a half-bottle of Cotes de Rhone.
Then we strolled into an African quarter and spotted several prospects for tonight's dinner, though after lunch (Breton oysters, fish soup and shrimp salad, half a litre of sauvignon), we wandered through a park to collect some jazz guitar from the local conservatorium's staff and students, then down to the chocolate area, and we now plan on going back there tonight.
Supper tonight will be Belgian chocolates and Vana Tallinn, a liqueur that nobody in Estonia told us about, but Jean Lowerison told me about it. Thanks, Jean! Mind you, the first taste seemed a bit like cough mixture, but it is growing on us, a bit like a fungus, perhaps.
Anyhow, Brussels is a lot more fun than people say, and the locals are a delight. Tomorrow, we head for Brugge by train, so we checked out the local rail station and got confused without heavy bags. We know where to buy a ticket, know when the trains go, what platform to go to, and where the secret lifts are.
But the British view of Brussels is bollocks. I am SO glad that it has not suffered from German bombings in the World Wars, because the architecture is a delight. |
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| In Tallinn, soon for Brussels |
[Jul. 11th, 2008|06:31 pm] |
Describing a figure-of-eight through three countries and back is a bit of an experience. No sooner does one learn that there are near enough to 10 krooni (Estonia, aka the EEK) to the Oz dollar that we are spending latis from Latvia, each of which is worth 2.4 Oz dollars, and Latvian litas pronounced litres to Brits and Australians, coming in at two to the dollar -- and then we are on the way back again.
At least with kroonis, we don't get confused about half a litre of beer costing fur litas. Talking of beer, there was one place (I ned to reboot my brain to work out where) where the beer I ordered at random was a wheat beer with a slice of lemon. It sounds as terrible as that Berlin concoction of white beer and raspberry, but it was delicious. I had two, QED, but finding out what it was called was more of a challenge.
Lithuanian has the most in common with other Eurish tongues, then Latvian, while Estonian is a Finno-Ugric tongue and completely alien, unless one is a Finn or a Magyar.
The youngsters here in Estonia generally have good English -- they have been learning since Grade One, making me wonder where they got their teachers. In rural parts of Latvia and Lithuania, usually English works, aided by pidgin German. I can relate to pidgin German. Room 12 is Raum-ein-zwei, and so on.
In Brussels, my vestigial schoolboy French means I can read the signs -- I am only just beginning to get a few of the Estonian roots that appear in signs (appetisers are eelroad, and they sell catwees and catpees, but I have no idea what they are) -- but in Belgium, my godawful accent will impell Belgians to clap their hands to their ears and point out that they speak English. Walloons will greet me as a brother for the butchery I perform on the hated tongue of the Francophones . . .
We have been on Saaremaa, an island with 200 mountains, and a highest point just 15 metres above sea level. Just as northern languages have many words for snow, and we have just one, those living on a flat land, planed smooth by glaciers, have only one word for an altitudinal eminence, so a hillock, a hill, a hump and a peak all have the same name. So Saaremaa has 200 mountains.
Not long ago, Saaremaa was under the sea -- this part of the world is still bouncing back after a glacial overload, a thing called isostatic uplift. It's a good place to buy land here, because the sea can't keep up. Contrary to Mark Twain's premise, in some places, they ARE making more land.
They understand global warming here -- the wild moose, boars, wolves and other animals on Saaremaa have all come over the ice from the mainland, but in the last two years, there has been almost no sea ice, and no crossings have been made.
Hey ho, tomorrow is Brussels. All my stressfully acquired Baltic terms will avail me nought. |
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| 9 July, Saaremaa Island, Estonia |
[Jul. 9th, 2008|06:17 pm] |
We have made our way up through Latvia, which I kept referring to as Lithuania (that was the day before) and along the Estonian coast where we took a ferry to Muhu Island, now linked by a causeway to Saaremaa Island. This is a lump of limestone, broadly littered with glacial erratics, granite and gneiss for the most part, all set about with sand and sea reeds, so called. The Baltic is sufficiently brackish that all sorts of unexpected things thrive in it, like reeds.
It is also sufficiently dosed with dioxins and other nasties that we might not. There seems to be a more accepting view of poisons here, which may explain why my history of poisons and poisoners went into Russian and Polish translations – as yet, I have no way of accounting for the Slovak edition. Perhaps they have aspirations.
We heard today that the women of Muhu were able to extra an excellent yellow dye from the explosives that their men took from the mines they recovered from the sea, so long as the mines did not detonate, which apparently happened more than once. One wonders what happened if they ever ironed their skirts.
Much of the roofing looks suspiciously like asbestos cement, and I fear that the Soviet era has left a large number of other time bombs waiting to go off.
The weather has been arranged for us, and it rains while we are between stops, and the sun comes out when we exit the bus. Beer is no longer called alus, we are back to olu again. Still tastes just as good.
Last night, we passed on the opportunity to have "beefsteak with banana in Australian cuisine" and ate beefsteak with blue cheese along with cherries, olives, cucumber, fennel, zucchini, capsicum, tomato, beans, carrots, potato, cabbage, nectarine, broccoli, cauliflower and orange. They held back on the banana because there was a rumour that some Australians were in town.
We are just about castled out, because everybody who is anybody builds a castle here. These are later turned into museums, which are filled with somebody's collection of 19th century novelty pipes. Well, it keeps people off the streets. Today, instead of seeing the ruins of a tower, we visited the ruins of a hole, a meteor crater some 4 to 6000 years old, filled with green water, probably to hide the little green men.
Tomorrow is another day. |
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| All Vilnius drivers are fundamental orifices |
[Jul. 6th, 2008|09:33 pm] |
I stand by this statement, made in more basic form in my last post. We have experienced a motor-cyclist going at speed on one wheel uop a narrow, winding, cobbled street with pavements to narrow to allow more than one sheep abreast, we have had 40-wheel drivers swerving to try to splash water on us as pedestrians, drivers racing at red lights to cow pedestrians waiting to cross in front of them and more.
At home, I would give them the finger and move on, here , I can't be sure they aren't Russian Mafia, but they are most probably just Lithuanian hoons. One part of me will be wanting to cheer when the Soviets roll over them again. Sorry, I mean the lineal descendants of the Tsars.
It's a beautiful place, it's just a pity that any slob who can get a car wants to lord it all over those without cars. Lithianian drivers are the scum of the earth.
We banged around the Old Town today in Vilnius. It turned out to be Lithuania's national day, July 6, so the museums were all closed, including the national museum and the KGB Museum -- which also features Gestapo bastardry, there being little difference between them.
In the end we decided that it was too far out to visit the TV tower, where 12 Lithuanians died from a Russian attack in 1991, but in doing so, forced the Russians to rethink and withdraw -- though my guess is that it will be no more than a hiatus.
In 1945, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia thought the US and Britain would save them -- but they gave in to Stalin, and condemned two generations to living in the "Gulag States". Next time, when the Baltic states are members of the EU and NATO, perhaps they will be safer -- but Russia can still cut off supplies of hydrocarbons. Why bomb people into the Stone Age when you can starve them into it.
Being a national day, one of the parks was taken over by folklorica in the form of a festival called Baltica. Singing and dancing on many stages in many forms, including a choir that sounded rather like some Bulgaian choirs I have heard in the past -- these were apparently singing a song to one of the beer stalls to get beer. Carollers would do well to learn this, because beer is better than figgy pudding. The singers probably all drove there, but out of their cars, Lithuanians are lovely people.
Maybe that is why the Russians keep threatening to cut off their fuel.
We ate boar for dinner, to music supplied by a sort of horn clarinet, piano accordion and inventive percussion. Asterix and Obelix were right about the boar. Chris acquired a nice pair of amber and gold ear rings, i tried to get a bust of Lenin, but all they had was Lenin t-shirts. I want a bust of Lenin, just a small one, to go with my collection of Ganeshes and Buddhas. After all, we share a birthday. |
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