Morning and Evening

 

Dabhad, Maharashtra, India, 1981

There are two times of day I love in the village. I wake early to the sounds of buckets rattling down the wells and cattle stirring just outside the room. Men already stand between the houses chatting, wrapped in blankets if there is a chill, their wives inside cook breakfast. And in the evening, as the heat of the day is beginning to break, the setting sun sends golden light through the soft haze from cooking fires and the dust from returning cattle. It has been like this a long time.

One morning Jaiswal, a young villager, asks me to take a look at his sick sister. We walk together to their home, one of the dwellings with a walled mud yard, cows on one side and various family rooms on another two sides built against the walls. His sister is in a small windowless back room, lying on a wooden charpoy in the dark. She is moaning, her breathing rasps. I feel the pulse in her thin wrist, it is racing insanely. I ask Jaiswal what medicine she is taking and he shows me a brown bottle of herbal cough syrup provided by the local Ayurvedic practitioner. Get a motor rickshaw, I tell Jaiswal, and take her immediately to a doctor or hospital in town. I am not forceful enough.

I catch the bus to the town on business and when I return late that afternoon, I am told immediately that she has died. I go to the home. Several women in the yard are holding a sari up to make a box-shaped screen while others inside wash the body. Water is trickling out of one side of the screen and slowly soaking into the packed mud and dung floor of the compound. Jaiswal had not heeded my warning.

That evening I walk with the procession through the village, the body held high on a litter and decorated with brightly coloured powder and flowers. A pile of wood and dung patties lies waiting in a corner of a field and after a brief ceremony the pyre is torched. Sudden flame, smoke. We do not wait longer, there is nothing to wait for. One person is left to watch the fire. I walk with the villagers back to their home, they are quiet and calm, perhaps they do not believe in tragedy. 

On my way to another village the next day, I pass the spot, now just an area of black ash.

How Was Daytona Beach?

 

In 1965 my friend John Mckibbin and I decided to hitchhike the fifteen hundred miles south to Daytona Beach, Florida.

Fifty years later, I can only guess as to why we picked Daytona Beach. I imagine we saw it as some sort of youth mecca with cool to spare, and any amount of cool was something both John and I could have used.

Although this was not a common activity for the summer vacations of teenage boys in Southern Ontario, I can remember no discouragement from our parents. President Kennedy had been assassinated less than two years before, and the Selma march was only four months previous, but our quiet town was a safe place, and it was hard to believe the rest of the world was not the same. Had we waited a few years, the southern States would seem too dangerous to thumb through, convulsed with riots, more racial unrest, marches, more assassinations, mass murder and the controversies of the counter-culture and Vietnam War .

Our trip was, however, a first encounter with racism. In our town of Whitby, one Chinese family was the extent of our diversity. I don't know if I'd even talked to a black person, which may explain why the strongest visual memory I have of any of the drivers who picked us up was of a soft-spoken, well-muscled black man in denim overalls who said he was a wrestler.

And so, in possession of a letter on church stationary signed by John's father, the Reverend McKibbin, assuring everyone that we were youth of character, we faced south-bound cars and stuck out our thumbs.

We became acquainted with the proud, desolate landscape of the US Interstate. I remember the trip in details only.

The first night had us winding through the Pennsylvania Allegheny mountains, while the headlights of our host's car kept going out, leaving us momentarily in high speed blackness.

Attempting to get out of Washington, we were informed by a pedestrian that we were not likely to get picked up at our location, (in her drawl) “On accounta r crime”.

A driver who, on seeing hitchhiking blacks, muttered, “Put your thumb back in your pocket, nigger.”

A few rides with the sort of guy who asks if you have girlfriends, and on negative answers, then hints by saying, “Guys can always help each other out, right”.

Signs indicating that many people thought someone called Earl Warren should be impeached, whatever that meant.

One white man explained to us why the Nigra were physiologically different for whites and so should be kept separate.

Signs for unheard-of products like Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew, Marlboro, Budweiser and South of the Border.

When one of our drivers stopped at a gas station, I found three toilets marked Men, Women, Colored.

Getting picked up by the cops one night on a lonely Georgia main street, sitting on the bench in the station until we were finally told to go (maybe the letter did help, or maybe we were obviously just what we were, a pair of hopelessly harmless Canuck boys).

Rebel flags on front bumpers.

During this time I was excited, unaware that I was not sleeping at all. Everything began looked too American, and too strange.

The first appearance of spanish moss, and then a palm tree, seemed like a dream. This was the tropics. People were playing something called Jai Alai.

Finally we were dropped off in Daytona Beach and I saw the ocean for the first time in my life. It had taken us three days. I no doubt would have been disappointed by the wide, flat endless beach and steady surge of small waves but for the crowds of young, tanned, white Americans playing on the beach, with the women in bikinis, and the guys drinking beer and leaning on their cars. I remember being intrigued by how casually one lounging couple kept their pelvises pressed together.

We lay on the sand and got out our bottles of Coppertone, trying to look like it was something we did, until I began to feel really ill. John got a taxi, we headed to emergency, and I remember losing consciousness going up the steps. The diagnosis: sleepless exhaustion.

I remember nothing of our short time in the city except the name of a black and white B movie we took in, called I Saw What You Did and I Know Who You Are, about two teenage girls who prank-call the wrong person.

Leaving Daytona Beach, we visited two nearby tourist attractions, Weeki Wachee (a spring with an underwater auditorium looking out on choreographed mermaids) and Silver Springs, where I did a little snorkeling in the crystal-clear water.

Then the return trip. I think we were just into Georgia when we spent a night of drizzle sleeping in a wrecked car lying in a yard. The morning revealed the cracked windscreen still laced with blood.

We got a ride in an old car (I like to think a 56 Chevy) with a young fellow called Tom. He was heading for Baltimore, was that good for us?

It seems in the State of Maryland fireworks could not be sold, so Tom was stocking up enroute. Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, I don't remember which states sold them, but there was no lack of stores right on the interstate. Soon Tom dumped the contents of his small suitcase into the trunk and began, while driving, unbraiding and otherwise separating his various new packages into the suitcase in his lap. Once and a while, to amuse us, he would light a Cherry Bomb or M-18 from the cigarette he had going and throw it out the window. Even fleeing them at highway speed, these things had such power that we always heard the explosion behind us.

At some point we picked up a young soldier on leave, since neither John or I could drive, this gave Tom a chance to sleep in the back, and for some reason also curtailed his fun-loving attempt to blow us all up.

Later Tom bought some cough syrup and drove through Virginia one night sipping the bottle casually, then nodding at the wheel, while I tried to keep him in conversation. It came out that I still had not “had a girl” and he promised to rectify that when we got to Baltimore.

And so we got to sleep early next morning at his mother's place in Baltimore. Tom had disappeared when I awoke (his promise forgotten), and we stuck our thumbs out for the uneventful last leg back to Whitby.

To face the question, How was Daytona Beach?

Newfoundland Returned

A First Visit - August / September 2014

Every place has it’s history, but Newfoundland has had more than most. 

The Twentieth Century has been a constant stream of dramatic, often tragic events for the Island.

Independence in 1907, the two sealing disasters of 1914, the 1916 slaughter in one day of most of the young men making up the volunteer Newfoundland Regiment in France, the collapse of self-government and establishment of the Commission in 1934, the contentious Referendums of 1948 and Confederation with Canada in 1949, the Resettlements of outports in the Sixties which are still continuing today, the devastating Moratoriums for salmon and cod fishing in the early Nineties.

It is remarkable the little sense outsiders such as ourselves have of Newfoundland. We were not sure what we would find. Would we be welcome dropping in on any little harbour? Would we be able to walk along the coast? What would the inhabitants be like. As per those fantastic television ads, would we find the quaint harbours surrounded by box houses, the dramatic coastlines (but wait, no helicopter!), the old men building wooden dories, the smiling locals with their strange speak? How could we check our email?

I went to Newfoundland having read books set on the island, and with some idea of what I thought Newfoundland was. The typical tourist hodgepodge of romantic images, which tourists then seek out with disregard for what’s really there. In a way, it felt as if I just missed the place I most wanted to find. As if it had just ended yesterday. The sea, the coast, the islands, the inland is of course still as stark and beautiful as it ever was. The people were unique, even if they were mostly seeing us as tourists. A few boats still chug out of harbours, although the only dories we saw looked like someone’s hobby. 

I must say the business of tourism is well developed, without seeming over developed. We had no lack of activities in any location. Coastal trails were well mapped out and maintained. There were historic homes, museums, churches and lighthouses to visit as well as more advanced interpretation centres. There were boat excursions for sightseeing, whale watching, or iceberg viewing (although the icebergs and whales stayed out of our sight without fail). Even puffin colonies were accessible. All of this was offered without undue hype and by people who were genuinely friendly and interested in helping us experience their home world.

Indeed the people we encountered we liked immensely. Our hosts in the five bed and breakfasts we stayed at invariably made us welcome, and in two cases, there was no doubt that we were literally in their home, passing through the kitchen as they ate their supper, or invited to watch TV in their living room. That these homes were not typical, for obvious reasons, did not detract.

The one issue we faced was food, having some strong dietary preferences. I suspect this has knowingly or unknowingly been an issue for Newfoundlanders as well. The poor soil, low standard of living and limited exposure to other cuisines meant the ubiquitous restaurant sign “Specializing in Fresh Seafood” usually referred to seafood any way you wanted it, as long as it was cod, fried. We noticed immediately the tendency for Islanders to be of a generous weight.

In the old world, you lived by the sea, you travelled by the sea, and almost everything came from the sea. One look at the interior and it's obvious why roads took so long to develop. But this year we drove from end to end on the Trans Canada Highway in only about nine hours. Everyone seems to have a car (or usually an SUV, reminding us that we were seeing the Island in the most favourable season).

Newfoundland is today part of the modern world, but the past and the uniqueness of the island can still be sensed. In the farthest corner of the farthest offshore island we visited, a woman asked us, “Where are ye from?”. I had the feeling that the Island was completely different just 50 years ago, that so much had changed just before I got there, and I had to be careful not to miss the present because it didn’t fit some romantic image.

Perhaps the most poignant images of Newfoundland I have seen online are photographs of houses being floated and towed, somewhat precariously, across the water from an outport as part of the government resettlement process. An older world almost literally moving unsteadily and perhaps reluctantly closer to the new.

And we found email access everywhere.

The White Man in the Cinema

Village Basket Weaver, Deccan Plateau

Maharashtra State, India, 1980

Her name was Pushpa and I first saw her at a seminar the development institute I worked for was holding in Nagpur.

The amazing density of India's population means that a city of over three million, like Nagpur, can be virtually unknown outside the country. And were it not the centre for a region of exceptional orange production it would have little fame within the country. Sitting on the Deccan plateau in central India, the area is so far removed from the tourist track that a farmer told me one day I was the first white man he had ever seen.

She wore the black bead necklace that proclaims a Marathi woman married. Her husband was a top official in the district government. Although she wore the traditional sari, she didn't cover her head with the end of the garment and her hair was loose and shoulder length in the western style. Other than a few pleasantries nothing passed between us that day.

We met next at a similar function in Sevagram, a village near Nagpur and the site of the last ashram that Mahatma Gandhi called home before his death. The seminar was held on the grounds in a large open-sided hall surrounded by Neem trees. A Coppersmith Bird could be heard keeping up it's penetrating “tock tock” call in the afternoon heat. We ended up on a planning team together and our mutual attraction was soon mutually obvious. During a break we talked for a while and then I said softly, ”You're very beautiful”. She let out a little gasp and whispered, “I love you”.

At that moment I should have realized I was in trouble.

Before she left she offered me her telephone number, creating a tacit understanding between us. As soon as I could get a short leave I took the bus to Nagpur, got a room in the best lodge I could find, and went out to a Hindi movie to finish what was left of the evening. The next day I phoned Pushpa. She came over immediately. She told me one of her children had spoken of seeing a white man in the cinema the night before and she had been hoping it was me. We made love. Afterwards she put on my shirt, perhaps wanting to hide her baby-softened belly while still revealing her slim brown legs. We lay on the bed talking. She told me of her childhood and the Brahmin family she came from. The arranged marriage that left her living with a man she had no feelings for. Her children. Her trips to England. The guru she was following. I ordered tea up to the room and then sat and watched as she showed me how a sari is put on. When the pune came with the tray she sat stiffly in a chair until he was gone. In our parting the intensity of her language surprised me.

The next time I could get away we spent a day in a different lodge. She gave me a prayer medallion of Sai Baba, a popular local saint. We were very happy together but I began to wonder at her dramatic outpourings of love which seemed more theatre than honest emotion.

A month later I was resident in a rural project some distance from Nagpur. The village of Dabhad was the usual haphazard collection of mud houses closely packed together to save arable land. In India there are three-quarter million such places. Over my two years in Dabhad I would experience the festivals, feuds, weddings, tragic accidents, cremations, religious devotions, hard labour and summer drought that is the villager's world. I would eat their monotonous food, suffer some of their diseases and dance in their celebrations. No matter how completely I have since re-entered the modern Western world I know something in me will always remain connected to that one village and those particular people.

One afternoon as I was returning to Dabhad from another village across the fields of sorghum and cotton I was met by a youth who announced that “a lady” had arrived at the institute residence. I expected it to be an American associate but found Pushpa standing in the front room with my young Indian colleagues around her. The house was a simple village structure. Sparrows flew in and out of the ventilation gap between mud walls and tin roof. The floor was treated with a solution of water, mud and cow dung to keep down the dust. In this humble setting I was surprised to find beautiful Pushpa standing in a bright sari of the best cloth.

I was not happy to see her. In the village culture I was worried disclosure of our clandestine relationship might seriously jeopardize my credibility and our work. I could imagine all sorts of consequences stretching back to Nagpur or Bombay, and she must have known this even more than me. We provided her with a tour of the project and a room for the night.

The next day was a holiday. After breakfast one of the young Indians talked about everyone taking Mrs. Deshpande into town that afternoon for dinner, but he was quickly shut up by the others in a way that told me she and I were not fooling my colleagues. I had no choice but to make the offer myself.

In town she asked to make a brief return to a room she had taken in a lodge but once there I refused to accompany her further than the lobby. I was unsure of what eyes were watching us. After waiting a half hour I realized I had been out-manoeuvred and she wasn't coming down until I went up. The meeting in her room was unhappy – the bed beckoned us and although I refused her advances, it was impossible to do with tact. With nothing resolved we left for dinner and afterwards took a pedal rickshaw through the little town to the river. I remember the two of us up on the open seat, as if on parade for the crowded street.

We sat on some stone steps leading down to the Godavari, one of the five sacred rivers of India. The landscape was soft with haze from evening cooking fires. Summer had greatly diminished the river and small children drove herds of cows and buffalo home along the dry bed. We watched the sunset and talked. I felt more and more alienated from her. I realized she was using the relationship as something around which she could fabricate a romantic fantasy limited only by her imagination. I was the seed of reality she needed to maintain her illusion. We took a rickshaw back to the bus station and I waited there until she left on the Nagpur bus.

Watching it drive away into the night I wondered if she would see, that although I refused to be an actor in her cinema, there was a real alternative.

The last time I saw her was back at the Sevagram ashram. I was sitting on a stone step leading into a garden, enjoying the calm of the evening after the day's heat. She appeared on the path, stopped, and asked me coldly where Mary Da Costa was. She listened to my answer and then without another word walked away into the fading light.

Leaving for the Rock

A friend and I leave tomorrow for two weeks in Newfoundland. My interest has had me reading here and there, including one novel and two memoirs about Newfoundland (Proulx, Mcfarlane, Johnston) and talking with another friend and Newfoundlander Brian O'Dea (who, having been born in Newfoundland in 1948, was not born in Canada).

My initial impressions, soon to be given reality...

That Newfoundland was its own country from 1907 to 1949 with its own flag, currency and government ( and it drove on the left). That this country sent voluntarily a regiment to fight alongside the British, Canadians and French in World War One. These young men were almost totally wiped out on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 at a place called Beaumont Hamel. And the Newfoundlander patois, almost on its way to a language, is another example of its uniqueness.

That Newfoundland joining Canada in 1949 was not eagerly jumped at, and probably a mistake (many thought so at the time and later). Britain applied pressure for confederation, and one of the options was joining the United States. In the first referendum the Confederation side actually had fewer votes than the anti-confederates. In the second the Confederates squeaked through. Many Newfoundlanders had their hearts broken by the event.

That the country always looked to the sea, there were few roads until recently (why bother when everything was on the coast and you could sail there), the life was fishing and boatbuilding and sealing. It was the sea, the sea, the sea.

That Newfoundland has been a place of severe poverty, isolation, disease, tragedy and hardship resulting in problems like incest and alcoholism. Nevertheless a place of spirited people and vibrant culture and natural beauty. A place of stark simplicity and dramatic contrasts.

That it's pronounced New-fn-land, not New-found-ln.

“The Rock” that sat on the edge of the world, largely unnoticed, for centuries, becoming more and more what it was with a vengeance without anyone interfering or caring. Becoming popular now that the global culture craves romantic novelty.

That Newfoundland stands as a demonstration of a people, and its culture, grappling with huge and rapid change. That confederation and the almost total disappearance of the cod has so changed the place as to render our trip in someways perhaps thirty years too late.

That I can't wait to be there.

Chatwin

Now reading Bruce Chatwin’s first book, In Patagonia. 

Chatwin is great! He just had this talent for going to a place, and then really exploring it on all levels. 

The man noticed things. And he made the most of the things he noticed. Not that they were always the most significant details, or the truest ones (he had an imagination), or the most dramatic ones, but the sum total of all his observations amounted to the sort of fascinating story only he could tell.

He had great powers of observation, but also such a sense of history and art and architecture and culture and natural science that he always dug out the most fascinating angles on a locale. He had a nose for ferreting out the bizarre. He could connect everyday details in with history, personal anecdotes with literature, things happening on the street with items in the museums, the sacred with the profane. His stories are told simply, by means of perfectly chosen details.  A wonderful example of a man of culture, learning and adventure.

I've heard it said he was a very physically beautiful man, maybe one of several reasons he seems to have had no trouble making connections wherever he went in Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, Australia. 

And he was a maniac about hiking! Moving! A man intoxicated with places.

Like Hemingway, a writer he admired, Chatwin makes you want to leave it all behind and be somewhere new, with new landscapes, with new people, listening, watching, touching, smelling, feeling, and walking, walking, walking.

Terrigal Sandstone

Currently on display at Arcadia Gallery, about 25 photos I took one afternoon near Terrigal Beach, north of Sydney. I'm really pleased with all these photos, nature did an amazing job of weathering the sandstone into some amazing shapes and colours, and I just ran around for an hour at low tide snapping it, all in one location. The only difficult part was later, dealing with the sunburn I got while I was having so much fun.

Newfoundland

Just finished reading The Shipping News. Great book.

It was recommended to me by a cousin I met recently in awesome Tasmania, that being an island off the main continent of Australia. Seems my cousin is fascinated by Newfoundland, that being an island off the coast of my continent.

Never thought that much about Newfoundland, although I did notice that all the Newfies I met in Toronto seemed to be lively types with a good sense of humour.

So I've been thinking about the island, and discussing it with a Toronto room mate of mine from a long standing Newfoundland family of Irish origin.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism ads are quite something, and my friend raves about the beauty of the land. But he calls the society "dysfunctional and fucked-up"  and says he'll only go back for funerals. He talks about alcoholism, rampant sexual abuse and back stabbing. Blames the isolation, poverty and extreme conditions (oh, and the Catholic Church).

So which is it, the smiling people making wooden boats in the ads, or the haggard faces in David Blackwood's prints? 

Not sure I care right at the moment, think I'll read some novels by Newfie writer Wayne Johnston and The Outport People by Claire Mowat, while I save some money to head out there myself.  I sense something awesome right on my doorstep.

A Month in Australia 3 - Yollie and the Joeys

Beck and the oldest Wallabie

Susie Q and me. I'm in love!

1/29 The day is mostly rain. Despite this, and perhaps because we did nothing the day before, Jan takes me out to visit South Head, ont of the three promontories that mark the entrance to Sydney Harbour. The other two are called, strangely enough, Middle Head and North Head. We cross uner the harbour through the tunnel, past the CBD, Central Business District, and into what’s known as the East Suburbs.Our route takes us past various bays such as Rushcutters Bay, Double Bay and Rose Bay. At Rose Bay I see something I like and Jan stops so I can photograph a long line of Moreton Bay Fig Trees, sitting with huge trunks black with rain.

We visit the peninsula of South Head and identify the headlands of Middle Head and North Head, covered with trees and houses,  that mark the entrance to the huge harbour. A large tanker sails out. On the way back we stop on the seaward side and I find a huge rock cliff in the rain with high waves coming from the ocean and breaking on the rocks in white fury, then pulling back in jade green and white mass. I keep my camera in a plastic bag and get some shots even with the pouring rain.

1/30 Jan drops me off at the central railway station and I’m on the train to Melbourne, a twelve hour ride. This gives me a look at a good amount of Australian countryside. I see my first Kangaroo, standing nonchalantly at the edge of some scrub, unaware it’s a first kangaroo.

                The land is quite hilly coming out of Sydney, but flattening out toward the Melbourne end. It consists of vast expanses of pale brown lifeless grassbroken by solitary trees. I see little cultivation but sheep sheep sheep everywhere, grazing or sitting in the shade of a tree.There are cows and horses too. The ranchers single story houses look basic.

Austarlia seems to have not tried to modernize itself in quite the same mindless, ruthless way as North America. There are still lots of Victorian facades around and the tramcars in Melbourne seem to come in four versions, from huge streamlined new to a modle that looks to be from the 30’s or 40’s.

2/1  The next day I walk along the wide Yarra that flows through the town. The water is full of boats, sculling teams, and black swans.There are some wonderful large modern sculptures in all the park and public squares I go through. I visit the cottage of CJ LaTrobe, an ancestor who was the first Leautenant Governor of the state of Victoria. I wander around the huge Royal Botanical Gardens. I’m hot because it was cold and windy in the morning, so I took a rain jacket over my short sleeved shirt, but now I’m afraid to take the waterproof jacket off because of the brutal U- charged Aussie sun.

2/9 We visit Hobart at the south end of the island

2/10 Beauty Point, Tasmania

I go for a 5 hour hike along the coast by myself and visit a place called Copper Cove.

After dinner we are visited by Yolanda (Yollie). She comes in with two plastic cages, and a large bump in the middle of her bosom. One cage contains a baby wombatcocooned in several flannel pouches. I similar arrangement in the other cage contains two baby wallabies. The bump in her bosom contains a “pinkie”, a baby wallabie so young as to not have hair yet, and just two days out of its mothers pouch. They are all marsupials found in the pouch of their respecitve dead mothers after the mother was killed by a car.  

                I hold the wombat, then the pinkie. All the animals are unsure of themselves in the bright light and unconfined space. The wombat twists and turns against me and moves up my body. It has serious claws. Yollie says she knows its stressed because the pink soles of its feet have turned red, it goes back in a pouch. The oldest wallabie seems more relaxed than the rest and keeps its head out and give my finger a sniff. I hold the pinkie, it is almost fetal, with dry and loose skin. It continually twists and turns in the flannel with its long hind legs, with a huge middle toe,  vigourouly poking in all directions. Yollie later lets me name her Susie Q. I try unsuccessfully to give it a bottle, Yollie takes over, having to feed pinkies every 2 and a half hours, 24 hours around the clock she’s good at it. Beck,, my cousin’s daughter, feeds one of the older ones and Jo feeds the wombat.Then Yollie double wraps them all in tight flannel, the pinkie immediately stills against her bosom.

A Month in Australia 2 --- Bush Walk

My Cousin's eco-home in Tassie.

1/24 Sydney  My Sister Jan drove me 76 km up the coast to a beach town called Terrigal. The country north of Sydney was beautiful, often very hilly with green bush covering the slopes and vistas of the Hawkesbury River. We had lunch on the beautiful beach, full of families on vacation, then we climbed out on rocks at one end. It looked like low tide, and a large plateau of sandstone lay exposed to the sun, with only a few deep pools still full of water. I had a marvelous time photographing the soft rock, which water had sculpted into fascinating shapes, often given interesting variation by veins of harder rock or rows of small white limpets hiding in the shade.

1/25 Nephew David and I visited the Sydney Bridge, first underneath the North end at Bradfield Park, then along the harbour in both directions to get a view, then back and up and over the bridge. An amazing structure, at 3770 ft long and 440 ft high at the apex. Afterward we walk into the Rocks, the “old town” with narrow streets full of old buildings now shops cafes and very elegant. I take the double decker computer train back to Artarmon, noticing how the stops look like English train stations. Australia seems like a young, extroverted country, with lots of innovation going on. I learn one of the train station in the downtown has been kept in its Victorian décor, even to the extent of the advertisements.

I find Australians very friendly, architecture and design seems very bold and inventive, and I see some high tech solutions unknown in Toronto. At the same time there is a sense of the past being cherished, both pioneer origins and British origins, that seems more evident than any in Canada I've seen at least. Australians seem to love good food (I mean really good food), festivals, sports, outside activities, the arts (especially music and sculpture), and social events.

1/26 Train to Melbourne, 12 hour ride

1/27 day in Melbourne, meet Cousin Lou at Airport, flight to Launceston, Tasmania

1/28 At Lou and Jo's place in Beauty Point, a day in Launceston, meet Cousin Robyn, headache

1/29 Shopping for sleeping bag in Launceston, Tasmania

1/30 Bush Walk      Cousin Lou and I drive several hours up onto the central highlands. Lou has equipped us with a lot of fine gear, and I realize that you can have five thousands dollars easy on your back as you hike.

We reach The Lake St Clair national park center as it rains. and book a boat. This twin outboard, 15 seater takes us up the lake (one of the deepest in Aus) to the other end and a dock where we find a hut. Many of the surrounding peaks have received names from an early explorer who was an enthusiast of Ancient Greece, so there is Mount Olympus, Narcissus Point, etc.

From there we hike inland for four and a half hours. The trail is nicely laid out and includes boardwalks over swamp areas and suspension bridges over larger streams, but still involves constant stepping around rocks, puddles and snarls of tree roots. The rain comes and goes. We pass through several meadows of button grass ringed by gum (Eucalypt) trees that remind me of some of the terrain in The Hunter. An old injury on my left shoulder causes me considerable discomfort because of the pack load. We pass into an area of forest called a Myrtle forest, with huge old trees, mostly not gum, thickets of striking Pandani (Giant Grass Tree, a palm-like rainforest plant endemic to Tasmania (like countless other things)) and lots of green moss on everything. A few Pademelons (small Kangaroo-like Wallabies) peer at us from the bushes. We arrive at the hikers hut and Lou decides not to pitch a tent because of the wet so we claim the lower teir of one of the sleeping shelfs and cook our dinner and try to dry some gear. I am exhausted. There are perhaps ten other hikers in the hut.

The next morning we leave most of our gear in the hut and head up the Pine Valley trail around nine, its cold and I thankfully wear the gloves that seemed overkill as we packed two days before. We get a lovely view down Lake St Clair at one point with some blue sky patches, then some rain starts again The track up is steep, at one point we are climbing up an old rocky stream bed. I find having a hiking pole very handy to maintain balance. As we get higher the Gum trees reappear with some alpine flowers. We finally come out close to the top, with huge lichen covered boulders in an endless field and short gum trees shrouded in a fog. This is The Labyrinth and as we move around to the back the weather clears up and we can see mountain peaks with dramatic pillars of basalt, and two tarns below. Then as we stop for lunch it begins to snow, followed not long after by sun again. A pair of Wedge Tail Eagles fly high overhead and a Skink basks on a rock. By the time we get back to the hut, it is six and we repeat the routine of the day before and end the day.

The next morning we head back to the boat pickup point, the load is lighter and Lou has taken some of my camera gear, so my shoulder suffers less. Then into the boat and down the lake for a cappucino at the Park Center and the drive home. Lou points out an Echidna by the side of the road and we get out and investigate, it looks like a cross between an anteater and a hedgehog or small porcupine, but is actually from a unique order of mammals, Monotremes, that it shares with only the Platypus. We finally approach it, it digs its front into the bottom of a bush, and we touch it briefly. On the way back Lou pulls over across from an area burnt-out by fires a month before and I spend an hour stumbling around in the black debris taking photos.

I feel fine the next day and am amazed at the amount of rough terrain I have covered with a pack, it seems far beyond what I thought I could do, and the only explanation seems to be that I was enjoying myself and surrounded by beauty. The three days are a thrill and I feel very grateful to my Sister and Cousins.

A Month in Australia 1

A Lorikeet demands food on my Sister's balcony.

A Flickr slidehow is found here.

1/19/2013  My Sister Jan’s family apartment in Artarmon overlooks North Sydney and a wonderful assortment of trees, palms and other tropical growth. Because of the recent heat, I expect a brown, desiccated landscape, but it rains the first day, the temp is low 20’s (it was 46C the day before, I luckily arrive with a “cold” front) and the vegetation is green, the recent fires apparently being caused by the growth of grass and underbrush after two years of abundant rainfall (and often started by young pyromaniacs). The trees are rich with avian life including hysterically laughing Kookaburras, Rainbow Lorikeets, Willie Wagtails, Noisy Miners, Pied Currawongs, Friarbirds and let’s not forget Galahs. A pair of beautiful Lorikeets land frequently on the balcony or window sills noisily demanding handouts.

1/20  The second day My Sister takes me to downtown Sydney, an area Jan lived in for several years.

The city is huge, modern, affluent and sophisticated…and spectacular. Several long bays crenellated with coves brings sailboats 20 km inland before meeting a fresh water river. The past is well preserved in old colonial buildings and parks and it all reminds me more of London or Paris than New York or Toronto.

We visit the Rocks, a downtown area of old sandstone 19^th (and one 18th!) century buildings, and some cobblestone streets, now full of businessmen, shoppers and tourists. Sydney is well preserved, and they claim to know the exact spot where Captain Cook planted the English flag in 1770. There are many beautiful parks full of palm, fig, banyan and eucalyptus trees, numerous huge old colonial buildings and vistas of the water, Opera House and Harbour Bridge.

I don’t know why, but I never realized how huge the iconic Opera House is, or realized that the roof is distinctly patterned with tiles. Funny how these ubiquitous travel mega-symbols like the Eiffel tower, Statue of Liberty, Acropolis, Big Ben, Forum, Taj Mahal, Giza Pyramids or Mount Fuji seem somehow hyper-real when you first see them.

1/21  Today Jan took me to Ku Ring Gai national park.  A boardwalk led us over some mangrove swamp and then the trail headed up into the bush along the heights on both sides of the tidal river. I fell in love with the open forest with Gum and Eucalyptus trees. Lots of rock and vegetation, but always open to the sky. The trees often in convoluted shapes and sometimes appearing to ooze out of rocks. We see a beautiful black and green Goanna lizard, about four feet long, and find the huge pile of leaves that are a Mallee Bird nest. The bush is loud with cicada and shrieking Cockatoo and the continual lovely spicy scent of eucalyptus in the air. A sign points out an area of flat rock, where 23 axe-grinding grooves have been made by Aboriginals, with two bowl shaped depressions they used for water to wet the axes.

There is still some traces of an English orientation here. The row of little shops across from our local rail station have an English feel, although they have substantial marquees for shade. Like the British, the traffic system often uses roundabouts and drives on the wrong side of the road. Local names on the map are old country, Epping, Chipping Norton, Liverpool, Penrith, Paddington, Habersham. Of course other local names are Turramurra, Wooloomooloo, Wahroonga, Woy Woy, Kirribilli or Toongabbie. The suburbs we drive through remind me vaguely of Orange County or Millbrae in California, or maybe Etobicoke with palm trees.

1/22  I spend the day downtown taking photos in St Andrews Cathedral and the Queen Victoria Building, which looks suspiciously like the inspiration for the Eaton Center.

1/23 I walked through Hyde Park again and down into the Royal Botanical Gardens, a huge park near the harbour where I found a vast assortment of tropical trees of amazing shapes. What a city!! Then I walked back taking the main drag, George Street, through all the office buildings and skyscrapers. The streets are crowded, a mixture of business dress, surfer casual, or European chic in the case of many women. There are many Asians, but I only see about seven aboriginal faces all day. As befitting the major city in the country boasting the worlds 12^th largest economy, Sydney is impressive, but still has charm and great style. I’m impressed, it trumps Toronto in many ways for sure.

A flickr slideshow is found here.