aggienaut: (Numbat)

Tuesday, February 20th, Dismal Swamp, the Tarkine Wilderness - "Wait, which way is it?" asks dad, looking from the small map to the junction in the boardwalk "this junction isn't even on here!" I look at the map myself and as far as I can tell this junction is indeed not on the map. We are lost literally and figuratively deep in the dismal swamp!



   The day at begun at our little airbnb bungalow outside of Stanley. We had only been working up the plan for this day since yesterday and as soon as I saw "dismal swamp" on the map I knew we had to go there. I didn't really care what was or wasn't there, just, why WOULDN'T one want to visit a place called "dismal swamp??"
   The weather was sunny, with a cool breeze, which I realized with alarm reminded me of Autumn! If one accounts for the flipped year, February does equal August, so indeed the summer is coming to an end! Mom was eyeing some wild birds out the window "those look like chickens, are they chickens??" they looked just enough not like chickens to make one wonder. Mom got out the bird book and determined that they were in fact some kind of native bush-chicken, I believe?

   Our first destination was a coffee shop and bakery in the nearby town of Smithton (once again small, built around an estuary, with a busy little mainstreet), where the woman behind the counter was remarkably friendly. Smithton also had a small museum, which was closed, but we could see through the window the (plastic casts of, presumably) bones of a prehistoric giant wombat (a diprotodon I believe?) , and read the informational sign about it. Also, I think it was in the dismal swamp we learned about it actually, but while I'm on a paragraph about ancient megafauna: you've undoubtedly heard of the Tasmanian devil, you may (should) have heard of the Tasmanian tiger, but did you know there was also a Tasmanian lion (Which for some reason has a separate wikipedia entry under the name thylacoleo! The Tasmanian Lion is believed to have been extincted (extunck?) by the arrival of aboriginals around 60,000 years ago. The last confirmed living Tasmanian Tiger of course sadly died in a zoo in 1933 due to neglectfully being locked out of it's shelter during extreme weather ):< ...and I just learned just this moment that the closest living relative of the Tasmanian Tiger is the NUMBAT, which is the adorable little critter in my default icon!

   Next stop, Dismal Swamp!! --Or, as they're making a vague effort to rebrand it, "Tarkine Forest Adventures!" ...what's wrong with "dismal swamp???" Anyway the Dismal Swamp is a privately run "eco adventure" thing. There's 40 meter deep sinkhole (I can't find a good "about" page on the internet but the area of the sinkhole is hundreds of hectares actually I think? its big anyway). One drive up and parks in the car park, surrounded by walls of forest. From the gift-shop / cafe / ticketing area one can take "the longest slide in the southern hemisphere" (110 meters) down to the bottom ... for a hefty $25 roo-bucks. Or one can walk down via the lovely and well-maintained boardwalks, which we did.
   Down at the bottom there was a network of these nice boardwalks and it was really lovely being deep in such a delightful swamp. They had lots of informational little signs about the trees and plants, which mom in particular was really excited about. Another remarkable thing I learned from the signs was that there were crayfish who lived on the muddy swamp floor here and made themselves little crayfish towers. We saw their towers but not the crayfish themselves. We enjoyed strolling around the swamp for maybe two hours before dad started to get antsy that we needed to keep a move on for the rest of our planned perambulations. As noted at the beginning of the entry, we found we got a bit lost trying to navigate the unintentionally labyrinthine boardwalks on our way out, but not too badly. All in all I loved the dismal swamps, they were every bit as delightful as I had expected, and more!!



   From there we booked it to the west coast of the island, through mostly bucolic farm countryside. Visited the coast itself and beheld an isolated and idyllic surf beach, but being pressed for time we only looked at it from the car park and got back on the road. Headed south down the coast it was clear this is not the highly populated part of the island, as for miles and miles we saw nothing but brush around the road, and the roadkilled-padme-per-kilometer index was at almost zero. Despite this we saw fairly regular signs advising to be careful not to run over devils from dusk to dawn, as well as signs that appeared to warn of kangaroos lifting one's car, no doubt after having become addicted to human-introduced crossfit ::shakes head sadly::. On our whole coastal drive we only drove through one tiny micro-townlet, it really felt like a very remote and unpeopled coast.

   After half an hour running down parallel to the coast we turned inland (apparently the road continues to a miniscule former town that was once the port to a now closed mine and is now "just a collection of shacks." Our journey inland back into the Tarkine Wilderness led us into alternating forest and cleared land, with signs proclaiming we were witnessing managed sustainable logging or some such. Eventually I believe we entered a protected state forest and the huge surrounding trees were uninterrupted. We also passed several turnoffs just off the road with pallets of beehives on them, which of course we were intrigued to see. The hives had a lot of supers (additional boxes) stacked on top which would seem to indicate they were doing really well, and indeed they all seemed very busy at the entrances. Interesting to note, I'm not sure if anyone reading this is interested in the obscurities of comparative beekeeping, but I was interested to note while most commercial beekeepers in at least the states prefer to give the bees about two "deep" boxes before stacking shallow honey supers on top these operations seemed to use entirely shallows. I've been thinking about doing that if I were to god forbid restart, since I don't like having differing box sizes and am currently using all deeps, which get gosh darn heavy when full of honey.

   There were many many short walk options within the Tarkine Wilderness loop, but we had to zip right past most of them due to our ambition drive plan. Maybe some day I'll get back! ::looks off whistfully into the distance:: We managed to stop at a nice lookout point, and planned to stop to see a "flooded sinkhole" but accidentally zipped past it and there was nowhere to turn around. We did stop at the "Trowutta Arch" though. It consisted of a pleasant half hour walk through what an informational sign described as, I swear, "calidendrous," but I'm feeling a bit consternated because I wanted to double check the spelling and no variation comes up with ANY hits of any kind on Teh Google. But according to the sign this word means "beautiful or park-like forest" and referes to the wide airy space between the trees here under the canopy high above. It was indeed well beautious.


If adventure games taught me anything it's that I need to stand under that vine and type "climb vine"

   The "arch" it turned out was two side-by-side sinkholes which were connected by a big hole. One sinkhole was filled in allowing access and the other had a pool of water in the bottom. Pretty neat!

   From there we more-or-less hoofed it back up to civilization back at Smithton, and used main roads (such as they are in Tasmania) to get to our destination for the night about two hours away. First we traveled east along the coastal road we had come west on and then turned south, and noted that the padme-roadkill-per-kilometer was extremely high (like double digits) on this main corridor in the "relatively" densely populated north. When we got further from the coast it got less populated again and finally just as the sun was settomg we rolled into the little mining town of Waratah which seemed a bit isolated in the mountains. It was both cute and visibly run down, and had pleasant looking ponds right in the center of town. After we established ourselves in our airbnb (a little house that had been brought up to good repair and set up seemingly expressly for this purpose), inspired by platypus crossing signs we went out to see if we could see platypii in the ponds. Sadly no luck, I think the moon was mostly behind clouds again, I remember it being VERY dark. We stumbled through the darkness back to the house to watch some Olympics instead.

   In the morning would we discover we had been on the edge of a precipice? Would we figure out why the famed "Cradle Mountain" is so called? Find out next entry! :D

aggienaut: (Numbat)

Monday, February 19th, Devonport - the sky is slate grey and casts a dreary industrial look on the town around the waterfront. Across the estuary the Spirit of Tasmania ferry we'd recently debarked looks like a giant toy with its discordantly optimistic red and white. I'm standing under giant bronze statues of flowers. There's a nearby explanational sign, and informational signs always attract me like bees to a flower. These poppies, it informs me, are a monument to the importance to the local economy of legal poppy farming -- under close government regulation they raise opiate poppies for use in commercial pharmaceuticals. "Such sauce!" I say to mom. Dad returns from his quick dash to a better vantage point to photo the ship.



   Next stop, Ulverstone! Mission: Scallop pies! My coworker here (not Cato, though I'm sure he'd loorve a scallop* pie) is a native** Tasmanian*** and had informed me the first thing she always does when getting off the ferry is proceed straight to Crusty's Bakery in Ulverstone for a scallop pie. Ulverstone is only about twenty minutes west along a coast dotted with little seaside towns interspersed with farmland. We found Ulverstone to be another one of these little seaside towns built up around an estuary (at a population of 6,985, wikipedia informs me it's "one of the largest towns in Tasmania"), with several bakeries on the main street buzzing with business like a beehive on a sunny morning. Beside Crusty's was one of those grand old hotels with beautiful gilt second floor wraparound verandas which we would see many of throughout the island. At Crusty's we got one scallop pie and two pasties ("pahsties," a thing I fondly remember from Ireland but Not A Thing in the States). The scallop pie was.. interesting but not my favorite.

*As noted last entry, they say "scallop" not as "scahl-op" as god intended but more like ::does some green room voice exercises before coming back:: "skwau-lope." As the week went on we found scallope pies weren't just a specialty of this bakery, rather all of Tasmania seems to have a thing for them. Later, I asked my friend whom my other friends always bag out for being Tasmanian if he secretly craves scallop pies while living on the mainland, he admitted he didn't actually, to which I declared he was not truly Tasmanian, and he then admitted to being born in Bendigo on the Australian mainland, thus proving the efficacy of scallop pie love as a test of someone's true Tasmanianism.

**My coworker was born in Tasmania, which is not to be confused with being aboriginal. The plight of the aboriginal peoples of Tasmania is truly appalling. By 1876 the last full blooded aboriginal was declared to have died and the government declared they were an extinct peoples and "the aboriginal problem" was over. To this day the perception prevails in Australia that the native people's of Tasmania were entirely wiped out. As it happens wikipedia informs me that one full blooded aboriginal did live till 1905, and of persons who are partially aboriginal the last census indicated there were 23,576 in Tasmania at the 2016 census.
   Considering the genocides and forced migrations of the native peoples of Australia happened around the same time as the same was happening to the native peoples of North America, I find it interesting to see how different the cultural awareness of it is. Everyone in America is "aware" that terrible things happened to the native Americans, but its not like here where it is mentioned all the time, most events open with an acknowledgement of the "traditional owners of this land," the local mall has a plaque to them, etc etc. Conversely, I think 99% of the people living in Southern California haven't the faintest idea what the name of the native tribe of their area was (Tongva in OC, though I cheated and looked it up just now, I thought it was the Chumash, who are just north, but vaguely remembered enough to suspect that wasn't exactly right) and probably think of amerindians as something that happened somewhere else.

***While I'm on Tasmanian history, the island was called Van Dieman's Land until 1856, until they changed it partially (largely?) as a branding/marketing move to get away from the terrible Vandiemonic reputation as a harsh destination for convicts (which had just been discontinued). Early references to people living there referred to them as Vandiemonians though, which I think is a fun demonym (a van diemonym?? ohohoho okay okay I'll stop).



   From Ulverstone we set out to continue west through more farmland and seaside townlets until we came to "Fossil Bluff" and "Table Cape," and mom does love a good fossil. We turned off the highway (which was only a curvy two lane thing anyway) to proceed down a windy country road along farms and coastal bluffs. Had to stop at a beautiful field of sunflowers. By now the sun had come out to make for a beautiful scene of sunflowers fields draped over the slopes by the coast. Neighboring fields had already been harvested of a flower crop, but the big signs on the gate declared:
      WARNING: DO NOT ENTER.
      THIS CROP HAS KILLED PEOPLE!!

   O_o. Reading the smaller print one learns that these are the commercial poppy fields! The wording of the sign makes one picture man eating plants in the field but I suppose they mean if you steal poppies to make and use heroin you might die? I feel like the wild claim that the crop will kill you draws more attention to it than a simple "DO . NOT . ENTER" sign would.
   Continuing on the pleasant winding road to the table cape we also saw signs for the nearby allegedly famous tulip farms but I don't recall seeing them. And there was a deer farm!! Golly, Tasmania has the most whimsical industries!!
   Went on a pleasant walk along a precarous seaside cliff from a lookout point to a lighthouse, but as admission was ($20?) which we felt was steep and we decided not to go in. Then drove down to fossil bluff beach and saw some of the usual million year old embedded shells. I think a sign indicated the actual fossil bluff was a ten minute walk from there but we were getting antsy to keep on moving west at that point.

   I almost forgot one other very strong first impression we got. Plastered on walls in the towns, and showing up in the most unlikely places among sunflower (and opiate) fields, there was an overwhelming number of election campaign signs. I swear I've never seen such concentrations of them. And the viciousness of their declarations on rival parties! Sure US state and national elections get nasty but the local elections usually keep the slander to a background whisper, but despite population levels more akin to most place's town elections, it was clear these politicians were out to gouge eachother's proverbial eyes out with their proverbial thumbs. "Liberals" (whom I had to keep reminding my parents are actually analogous to Republicans in America) seemed to have the most signs, but even between Labor and the Greens there seemed to be no love lost, with one memorably sign by Labor saying they promised not to work with the Greens. Anyway, as I said I almost forgot this except just now I checked my newsfeed and saw that the Liberals had won the election and the Greens declared it "the most bought election in Tasmanian history."
   I think the vehemence of the politics may stem from the fact that you have this small island with beautiful pristine forests full or rare species, but also logging is the major industry, so the conservatives really really want to support the logging industry and the liberals people-on-the-left really really want to protect the forests.


View looking back from atop "The Nut" at the narrow isthmus connecting Stanly to the Tasmanian mainland

   Only about an hour west we reached our destination, the town of Stanley, situated out on a peninsula that had formed behind a volcanic plug known as "the nut." The town itself was really cute, reminded me of a New England fishing village. Apparently a major film meant to be set in the 1800s was recently filmed there since all the buildings downtown look period appropriate.
   We took the chairlift up to the top of the nut and went on the very lovely walkabout around the top. Much of it was covered in sort of heath, but one low part was forested and within this beautiful forested bit was saw our first pademelons -- basically smaller more rounded wallebies. Sadly the pad-melons most commonly are seen smashed by the side of the road and as we continued to drive around Tasmania one can gauge how much nighttime traffic a section of road gets by the smashed-padmé-per-kilometer ratio.
   At the base of The Nut I had some lavendar icecream which I found remarkably good, and now I wonder why one doesn't see more of this delicious flavor.

   That evening we ate at the Stanley Hotel as it was the only place open (I think my parents would have preferred somewhere cheaper, it was a bit fancy, but it was good!!). Also, being the only place open on a Monday night the place was reservation only and after initially showing up at (6?) we had to come back at 7:30.
   That evening we went out to see the penguins -- on our earlier penguin adventure we had caught a mention that penguins also show up on the shores of Tasmania and a bit of research had revealed that this was one of the places! The beach did have designated penguin viewing locations and signs once again admonishing people not to take photos of the poor little penguins since the blue light in flashes hurts their wee little penguin eyes. As it happens we were staring into the inky blackness (moon largely obscured by clouds) at a designated location with about a dozen other tourists when a series of bright camera flashes down the path caught our attention. We ventured that way and found a little penguin paralyzed in fear on the path as some ill behaved tourist took a few more pictures.

   We then managed to run over no padmes at all on the return to our little airbnb (a custom made airbnb bungalow outside a main house) just out of town. And thus ended a delightful Day 1 in Tasmania!

aggienaut: (Numbat)

Sunday, February 18th - In the dark evening with a smattering of raindrops upon the window (just enough to make pictures come out really badly) we drove up the tall narrow ramp -- more like a one lane bridge really. The lights of the classic Titanic-esque hull of the Queen Mary II are just off to our right and a little further forward, making it seem smaller than the red and white Spirit of Tasmania II that looms up right in front of us. While the whole front of the Queenscliff ferries opens like a whaleshark, the Spirit of Tasmania seems to suck them aboard with a straw, into a narrow one-car-wide entrance at the very beak of the prow.

   Once aboard we were directed up a ramp to park in one of three lines of cars on the port side .. it took awhile for me to orient myself since we had driven in from the front and were facing aft -- it being already dark even once we were moving one got no sense of direction looknig out of the windows so I kept having a hard time keeping track of which was port or starboard or fore or aft. Once parked we took everything we'd need for the night (no vehicle access during transit) and headed to the central stairwells. I was excited because I haven't ever been on a cruise or overnight ferry (except this one time in Sweden in 1999 which is longer ago than I can remember). Family cabins hadn't been available anymore when dad booked most of a week previously, so mom was in a four person women's cabin and dad and I were in a similar men's cabin. The hallways were so narrow one had to back up against the wall to let another person pass. The rooms were of course small but comfortable, with two bunkbeds, a desk that I can't imagine anyone using since it would obstruct everyone else and the llight wouldn't be appreciated t night, and a bathroom. After putting our stuff on our beds we went upstairs -- our car was on deck 6, rooms on deck 8, most of the length of deck 7 was "lounge," chairs and TVs. Deck 9 was crew only and 10 was also sort of lounge style but mostly deserted -- maybe it's more popular on day transits. There was of course a bar on the main lounge deck, but they had a very very small selection, not one beer remotely resembling craft and didn't even KNOW what a the traditional sailor's drink the "dark and stormy" is (ginger beer and rum), which is weird because its not nearly as obscure in Aus as in the States, most bars in Australia seem to have it in can. There was also a restaurant which we didn't partake of outbound but on our return we did and some of the buffet style food was pretty good. At the front (or was it aft, I really don't know!) was a room that was kept dark and full of recliners for people who didn't want to fork out the dough for a cabin -- I'm told it's really uncomfortable, and really, after paying $100ish (AUD, so like $75US), it seems silly to balk at paying another $33aud for a bunk in the dorm style cabins. Another economic mystery is it seemed like some people do this transit all the time, but flying costs abut HALF AS MUCH (google search just now is giving me $89 and $112 round trip options) and takes a fraction of the time. Obv the ferry is the only option if you want to take your car but seemed like some of the regulars take the ferry to commute regularly for work between Melbourne and Tassie and you really don't need a car to get around Melbourne.


Web photo since I don't have any worth posting from this episode but believe every entry should have a picture.

   We settled down to watch the Olympics, which fortunately was on about half the TVs in the lounge. As I mentioned before, we as a family don't watch much TV, but we have always watched the olympics. To me the Olympics is a special family tradition that feels almost like Christmas, since I can remember even as a very young kid getting to stay up later than usual to watch the olympics with my parents. We also none of us follow team sports at all, personally I can't even begin to comprehend how people can get excited about teams that really just represent a brand name, none of the players come from the city they "represent" and get traded around all the time, and one pointless season of pointless sporting and appalling scandals follows endlessly on another. But things like the Olympics I feel represent inspiring acts of true sportsmanship and striving for excellence, as well as national honor in fun way which allows one to get excited and root for countries one has a connection to.

   My parents being early-birds as usual went to bed much earlier than me, but I was enjoying the Olympics and wanted to still be up when we crossed the bar out of the broad bay Melbourne is at the back of. I believe we had departed around 9pm, and for the first few hours there was no feeling at all of wave movement. Finally, around 12:40am the vessel began to noticably buck a bit. I went out on deck to find the air warm despite the brisk ocean breeze, and we were just passing the Queencliff lighthouse. I walked through to the port side and saw the darker Point Nepean sliding past with the Sorrento lights further down the peninsula. At this point the boat had enough of a galloping motion that one stumbled around like a drunkard. Most of the rest of the passengers had gone to bed and crewmembers were cleaning up the lounge area. I've had a few locals ask me since if we had a "rough passage," and I'm never sure what to say, was this rough? It's relative. I've sailed in gale conditions with 18 foot swells in a 100 foot schooner, when even the most experienced crewmember kept a barf bag at hand any time they were belowdecks -- THAT was "rough." This was just enough to be fun and make me nostalgic for my sailing days.

   Made my way to my cabin happily bouncing off the walls like I was in a pinball machine. Tried to enter the cabin as quietly as I could and climbed onto my bunk with just the light from my phone -- apparently not the norm of courtesy here: my mom's roommates apparently routinely turned on the lights when they got up (and one was in the bathroom for two hours in the morning!), and when one of my roommates (who had a remarkable ability to loudly mumble profanities in his sleep) got up at 5am he had no compunction about turning on the blazing lights. The ship's announcements gave everyone a wake up announcement 45 minutes from arrival, I think around 7:15, using nice non-jarring tones. Dad and I talked a bit to the fourth member of our cabin, a regular on this route, who gave us some tips to see in Tassie. I forget exactly how we found mom, maybe she tapped on our door, anyway it turned out she'd already been up for some time (see also roommates turning on lights in her room). We went up to deck 10 to get some coffee and watch Tasmania approach. At first it appeared as a series of mountains with golden light shining down upon it through the clouds. Gradually it got closer and bigger until the town of Devonport lay around us in the dull grey morning light. Drivers were instructed to board their cars deck by deck and presently our call came. Recall we'd gone up a ramp to park, we appeared to be on an entire deck that would elevator down when the deck below cleared, and from a few cars ahead of us one could see the cars exiting below out the big opening in the back. A car near the very front of one of the rows below us (with door open here), an elegant classic car of some type, was unable to start and holding up the whole row behind it. After some ten minutes a RACV (Australian AAA) car came on on the ramp and jumped it -- I was really surprised the ferry didn't have portable jumping kits itself considering that out of a load of 700 cars at least one probably won't start every time. Finally our deck lowered down and we were off down the ramp and onto Tasmanian soil. I kept asking my parents "can you believe we're in Tasmania?? Did you ever think you' be in Tasmania??" Would we see the famous Tasmanian Devil? Maybe discover the last Tasmanian Tiger?? Tasmanian Lion??? Visit dismal swamps? Drive into a mine shaft? Eat scallop pies*?? All that and more will be answered in future entries!!

*just last night my Australian friends laughed at me for the way I say scallop ("scah-lop") and instructed me it's, let me see if I can get this right, ::does jaw excercises::, "skwau--loup?"

aggienaut: (Numbat)



And Pictures up from Nicaragua! Above, boat traffic at the end of Somoto Gorge. In other parts it looked more like this.




There were many quaint tile roofed houses like this in the rural areas! This one I guess is a sort of rough adobe brick and timber? But many were covered in plaster with just a bit of brick peeking out where the plaster had coyly chipped off in places, just like in gosh darn Zorro or something!




This imposing fortification with it's bellicose mural is just beside the central square in Somoto! I suppose it's part of town hall or something, and I guess town hall is meant to possibly serve as a citidel.




An idyllic crossroads on the outskirts of Somoto.


More pictures on Flickr


I've gone back and integrated pictures into the entries as well.

aggienaut: (Numbat)


Okay finally finally went through and sorted through and posted my pictures from Kyrgyzstan! Unfortunately my external hard drive having died made it a little more tedious since I had to re-download them from google photos, and one whole day for some reason had failed to backup and is now lost forever.

In theory I might go back and put pictures in the entries I wrote about Kyrgyzstan. Maybe.



I was staying and primarily working in the valley just behind this rock, known as "broken heart rock," because, yeah. Also you often see those little gypsy cart looking carts, especially by bee yards since people keep them manned 24/7 against theft.



This yurt is a restaurant, but people actually live in yurts that aren't too dissimilar:



"Son, saddle up the donkey I have to go to work"



That's one gosh darn big lake (Lake Issyk-Kul)



Oh hey I hadn't posted this one yet? Gosh darn eagles!!!



Dancers at wedding.

Anyway the rest can be found here, and I might sprinkle some more around when I need a picture for an entry that doesn't lend itself to any particular picture (for every blog entry should always have a picture). Also, coming soon, pictures from Nicaragua!

aggienaut: (Numbat)
Apparently that's the 'Murray River Flag'

Last Sunday, November 5th, Echuca, Australia - Woke up in a swag on the banks of the Murray River. The Murray River is the border between the states of Victoria and New South Wales for much of its 1,500 mile length. Looking at a map it looks like it empties on the eastern coast but it actually begins in the "Victorian alps" over there near the eastern coast and flows across almost the entirety of the south-eastern bulge of Australia to empty into the Great Australian Bight. In the great age of steamboats it was navigable way past the point where I was encamped, and yet it looked to be no more than maybe 200 feet across here. It flowed slowly, a thick milk chocolatey brown, though I think Billie or Lek had noted reading an account from an early settler of the water having been very clear in days of yore.

   After a quick breakfast of oatmeal we packed up camp and headed into town. We headed across the Murray River Bridge to the New South Waleseran (New South Welsh?) sister city of Moama. Moama is contiguous to Echuca but it definitely seems most of what's going on is on the Echuca side. We perused a farmer's market which was afoot there and much to my surprise I found a magic artifact of at least +3 enchantment on a table of knick-knacks -- labelled as a "cannibal fork" (I apologize for picture quality, I think part of it's magic is defying attempts to get a decent picture of it). It looked to be just over a foot long, a glossy ebony colored wood, with a head on the top with African features, a twisty looking shaft, and then it flutes out to four spikes. There's intricate carving where the twist changes into the fluted part, as well as some inlaid mother-of-pearl. And the person only wanted $15 for this artifact of power?? Clearly I had to get it!! It would go great wit the cannibal spoon I already have!

   And then we went into a nearby "Op Shop" (Thrift / Antique store) and I was eyeing some clay goblets. There were 6 of them and they were $6 each, so I asked if there'd be a discount for the lot of them and the lady sold me all six for $12!! This was quite the unusual amount of shopping for me! But I'm very pleased, and last night back home here I drank mead from one of the goblets and verily it was good! (And in related news I drank mead out of my new drinking horn the other day, the only horn I have that's actually a drinking horn actually, and it definitely affected the mead taste negatively. ): ): Hopefully I just hadn't cleaned it thoroughly enough and it had chemical residues in it or something (it did taste chemical-ly))

   We went to book a ride on a steamship but the only sailing left in the day didn't have enough spots left for us so we booked for the next morning. Walked around downtown Echuca and it was touristy in the best way, if that's not an oxymoron. It was busy with tourists and everything downtown seemed to cater to tourists, but they had not lost site of the old timey quaintness that draws people, nor did they have to fake it, because it was already there. So they kept their stately buildings from a bygone era and didn't besmirch them with neon signs, but just filled them with nice restaurants, pubs, antique stores, candy shops and a camping store or two. By the steamboat dock was a working recreation of a steam powered saw mill which was cool. I wish I had a cool picture of the mill but my phone was dead at the time.

   Then we proceeded to an RV campground just outside of town to camp so that people could use the showers. We were able to get a campsite at the other end of the field from nearly everyone else which was nice, but still, the vicinity was just a perfectly flat field which wasn't very scenic, and the wind came in across it pretty wicked cold in the evening. River wasn't in sight from where we were but I think it may have been near the other end of the field where everyone else was.

   We went back into town for dinner to a Greek place that Lek remembered from an earlier time she was in Echuca for some work related purpose (she's an irrigation consultant or something along those lines), and it was actually extremely good.

a kookaburra looks on as the Pevensey begins another cruise


Monday - After a quick breakfast at a restaurant across the street from the steamboat dock we went aboard the Paddle Steamer Pevensey where she was moored up to wooden landing on the steam riverbank. The bank being relatively high, the top of the landing was actually way above us and yet we came aboard the Pevensey on its top deck. As much as I'd like to think my writing skills can entirely paint a picture I'm not sure how to quite give you the idea of the size and shape of the boat but hey here's a good picture of it. One thing that surprised me was just how many boats there were. There were three more similarly sized paddle steamers moored up in front of us, one behind us (and I'm not sure if the Canberra in that picture is yet another or one in the previous picture), and one more a little way up the river. Just about all the boats were authentic 100+ year old boats with some degree of restoration, though only one was noted in the captain's running commentary to have never been on the bottom of the river. The Pevensey itself, which we were on, was built in 1911.
   Until eventually replaced by modern trucks, steamboat river trade on the Murray and other major Australian rivers was a major Thing, as they carried timber and wool from the interior to the big port cities on the coast. Apparently there have been two Australian TV miniseries about the steamboat era, All the Rivers Run, and "All the Rivers Run II."
   The boat was just over a hundred feet long on deck, with the main deck originally have been entirely space for wool bales, other than the engine, and in the middle a second floor housed the crew cabins and wheelhouse. In the middle under the superstructure was the magnificent steam engine, which I took a video of here and I rather fancy is worth a gander. The original engine! It was hypnotic to watch the thick gleaming pistons chug along. The engineer was happy to answer all our questions expansively. I asked if there were practical differences between stern-wheeler steamboats and side-wheelers such as all of these, and he said why yes, the stern-wheelers of the American West never pulled barges so the stern wheel wasn't a problem --"oh the stern wheel gets in the way of the tow does it?" I eagerly interjected,
   "Well, no, it's not that, it's that the load will be pulling right from the back where your propulsion is so you can't turn, and you can't put the towpoint forward for the propulsion or it will keep pulling you around ... with the side-wheelers the tow point is actually the very center of the vessel" and he pointed to the very sturdy supports that converged above the engine and connected to a very sturdy tow point above the deckhouse in the center of the vessel, "so we are very well balanced and can turn just fine with a load." Now that's a thing you know.

   We cruised up the river and back for a total of about an hour. The weather was nice, and because the front was entirely open (though covered against rain and sun) even standing next to the engine we got the nice breeze, and I think I did spend a significant portion of the time talking to the engineer and appreciating this beautiful engine.

   After we finished our cruise we strolled about downtown just a little bit more and then I bid my friends adieu -- they all had Tuesday off but I did not!



   This time I didn't go as far off the fastest route as I had coming up, but I did get on some country roads north of Melbourne (I could have stayed on the relativley freeway-like B75), and found myself going over rolling hills in which several times I wished I could stop and take a picture but there wasn't a turnout in the right place. Sometimes the road went through forests and sometimes it was mainly pastureland (though never without a fair sprinkling of grand old relict trees), and I stumbled upon another piece of Australian history, I found myself on a road called "Burke and Wills Track." The Burke and Wills expedition had been an early (1860-1861) attempt to cross the continent, but Lewis and Clarke they were not and after many many misadventures only one of the 19 men who had set out made it to the other side and returned alive to Melbourne.

   Skirted the outskirts of Melbourne and then was on the major M1 freeway from there to home (though it becomes slightly less obnoxiously big after Geelong, changing from the M1 to the A1, and actually has stop lights in Winchelsea). Stopped at my favorite Moriac Pub for dinner as I passed by (Moriac is near work and where I used to live) and half an hour later I was home in the early evening with the sun still shining gloriously!


   Altogether, I found Echuca, and especially the steamboats, very enjoyable. Because it's several hours from anywhere else I'm not sure I could recommend it as a destination for someone on a whistle-stop tour of Australia but if you've got time and/or maybe are making a roadtrip down from New South Wales into Victoria the steamboats are pretty cool.

In France!

Sep. 29th, 2017 08:35 pm
aggienaut: (Numbat)

Monday, September 25th, Paris, France - I'm staying in the neighborhood of Argenteuil since my one friend in Paris lives here. While it's currently just an urban suburb of Paris, the name comes from the latin for silver + a celtic word for glade, so I like to picture it having once been beautiful forest glades beside the silvery shimmering surface of the Seine. In ye days of yore it must have been quite far from the ancient city of Paris, as it takes an hour by metro to get to the city center, crossing the Seine twice as it makes its big curves.

   Arrived Monday morning at the Charles de Gaulle airport at the other side of town, took maybe two hours to get to Argenteuil after some mild but not insurmountable confusion trying to figure out the public transit.

   Now, I don't know if I'm just particularly inept at booking things or this happens to everyone, but when booking things online I find often when I change one detail another changes without me noticing, or I click submit, page reloads notifying me there's a missing bit of information I have to fill out, which I do, but don't realize that when it reloaded the page, it reset the month. Twice I've had flights in or out of NY that I had very consciously tried to get out of JFK but it had switched to La Guardia on me (much harder to get to by public transit); once I booked a flight up to see a friend in Washington only to arrive at the airport to find out I had booked it for the wrong month (couldn't reschedule or even get a refund!!). So now when booking flights not only do I very very carefully scrutinize all the details before clicking submit, I always send the details to a friend to have a second pair of eyes confirm I'm not glossing over something myself.
   All this is to say that after lugging my gimpy luggage (one wheel is broken) all across town I finally get to my hotel to find... I had booked it for these dates in October rather than September. The hotel did not currently have any rooms other than for nearly twice as much at €140/night. And to my utter horror my hotels.com confirmation email had the words "Cancellation policy: non-refundable" on it. After all the traveling I've been doing, with reimbursements yet to come in, I'm not feeling exactly flush with cash and losing around $300 over such a stupid little mistake would make me want to hyperventilate a bit, but fortunately the hotel staff was very nice, I talked to the hotels.com people on the phone, they talked to the hotels.com people on the phone, and we got the whole amount refunded.
   But now I had to find a new hotel. After some googling and asking around I ended up at a nearby "Ibis Budget" hotel (€65/night) with a 2.7 stars review average and the gist of the reviews being basically "surely you can cough up a little more money and go somewhere else." The floors were stained and the tiny room reminded me of a hospital room (light lime green walls, does anyone, even those dying in hospital rooms, really want that?) but it wasn't THAT bad really.
   The next morning (Tuesday) my friend Chantal met up with me. She being a native French speaker and actual former professional hotel booker (that's what she did in the airport in Cote D'Ivoire when/where I met her, while I was stuck in the Cote D'Ivoirian airport for three days of airport hell) we were now able to call hotels for more efficient investigation.
   As it turns out, the "hotel" just beside the cute little restaurant I had discovered turned out to have a decent room for €40 a night. It's maybe not quite 5 stars but it's bigger, better, and cheaper than the Ibis Budget had been. I say "hotel" in quotations because it appears to just be a number of rooms upstairs in this building, which seems to be a standard thing, with locals during our hotel search referring to any hotel that was a dedicated hotel building as a "hôtel moderne" vs the many little "traditionnel" hotels.

   Now, I went to Versailles and the Louvre and I'll get to that in a minute, but I think the cute little restaurant beside my hotel was my favorite thing in France. It was just a cute little place with one three course set menu every day -- for €13, an appetizer, main, dessert, and a _carafe_ of wine! I remember last time I was in France I encountered the single set menu thing as well, I think its cute. The place seemed to be mostly frequented by locals, and it sometimes took two of the employees working together, combining their meager English and my meager French, to get my order across but they seemed not the least bit bothered by this. After eating the first day I discovered they don't accept cards and I didn't have any Euro cash yet ... but the (manager?), Hamid, said "you'll be here a few more days? pay tomorrow, not a problem!"
   On my last evening I came in around 8:30 in the evening, I asked Hamid, who appeared to be off duty but hanging out there, if they served dinner, he communicated that they did not but after I asked if anywhere else nearby might be serving dinner he thought about it, seemed to conclude there wasn't, and was asked me if I'd like some beouf et pomme frites, and then he scampered off to fire up the kitchen and ended up bringing me the whole three course meal, wine carafe and all, for the same €13!
   In Australia for that price (19.58 Roo Bucks equivalent) you could get maybe the wine carafe.
   And in general, this little restaurant being just beside my hotel and the staff all being super friendly it was just a joy every time to pop in and see them.

Tuesday, September 26th - After getting my hotel sorted out Chantal and I proceeded to Versailles (about an hour away, it seems like through something like relativistic physics everything is an hour from everything else via the metro system). There was a huge line to get in. Once inside it was pretty cool though. There's plenty of writing about Versailles around so I'm not going to spend time on a detailed description of it here. Sadly after having spent the morning chasing after a hotel we were getting too tired and hungry to really explore the extremely extensive palace gardens, I suppose I'll have to go back.



Wednesday, September 27th - Went to the Louvre (by myself, Chantal unfortunately had her first day of classes for the semester in a local uni). About an hour on metro. Fairly long line at the main glass pyramid entrance (though it was just after opening at 9am on a random dreary weekday in September so it wasn't as long as it could be I think), but I didn't even bother with that as I'd gotten a pro-tip from the internets that there was a secret underground entrance with no line. Verily, I found said entrance and there was no line (pro tip, when visiting the louvre, find the secret underground entrance ;) ).
   Previously I didn't actually know what the Louvre was other than a big museum, presumably underground. It turns out it's in another former palace, mostly aboveground, and parts of the original medieval fortress can be seen belowground, who knew!

   They always say it takes days to see the Louvre, and, keeping this in mind, I maintained a pretty fast clip throughout and avoided me usual reading of most every description (avoiding the temptation was aided by the fact that many of them were only in French). I'm not sure but I think I managed to see all the major areas, though in the end I found myself in a hall of rugs and feeling delirious and hungry I may not have seen all the rugs.
   Part of the problem though is that it's not really a museum that has a single logical path through it but you have to kind of backtrack and and circle back through areas to get to places you may have passed the first time through.
   Saw the Mona Lisa, sort of ... this was as close as I got. Saw the Venus de Milo behind a forest of selfie sticks, and a lot of less famous stuff, like this cool grave-related thing (sits on top of a grave or sarcophagus?). A hall of statues, three muses, a centaur and stuff.

   After becoming deliriously hungry I finally stumbled out to go find food (there's cafes inside but they all looked extremely unsatisfying and overpriced). At this point I was feeling too hungry to even make a decision about food but I wanted to eat at one of the cute sidewalk cafes Paris is known for. Ordered a "confit de canard" or some such, precisely because it seemed very French. Thats duck confit but I don't know what confit is still. It was alright but not really amazing.
   Then I just wandered down to the cathedral of Notre Dame on its wee little island in the Seine. I found the scenery and architecture very beautiful in this area, and there were some quieter cuter sidewalk cafes here I rather wished I'd held out for instead of stumbling into the first one I came to outside of the Louvre, but as mentioned, was deliriously hungry at that point. Reflected that though I wasn't quite sure I wanted to like Paris since it seems a bit over-romanticized in the world's collective imagination, this area is indeed quite charming and beautiful. And on the subject of collective impressions, I've seen no evidence of the "french people are rude" stereotype, as mentioned the people at the restaurant by my hotel were super nice, as was the woman at the booked out hotel, and during my previous visit while in rural france the hotel manager drove me to the train station since no taxis were to be found, altogether my experience has been of exceptional nice-ness in France.

   Obligatory picture of Notre Dame Cathedral


Thursday, September 28th - Departed via the Orly airport south of the city. I still haven't seen the Eiffel Tower up close (did see it at a distance, it sure looms over the city!), also I really wanted to see the catacombs. Next time!

   Am now in Turkey for the beekeeping conference. More on that of course in another entry!

aggienaut: (Numbat)

Wednesday, September 6th - around 10am the same driver who had brought me up from Managua to Somoto arrived in his red corolla to take me back down. He's a nice professional fatherly sort of figure named Luis. Doesn't speak terribly much English so we don't talk alot but he's very nice.

   Coming up, as we drove through the town of Esteli he had pointed out the cigar factories, apparently the major local industry. And he claimed they were as good as Cuban cigars and a lot of Cubans had fled the revolution there and brought their cigar making to Nicaragua. Since I wanted to get gifts for my friend Ben (for driving me the two hours to and from the airport), and Mick for his tech support, and they both smoke, I figured some high quality cigars would be just the thing! So I asked Luis if we could stop by a cigar factory.
 "You want tour of cigar factory?" He asked. Why, yes, sure, why not! Luis immediately set about calling a guy who arranged tours.

   Arrived in Esteli just before noon, and since the cigar factories are apparently all on lunch break till one the tour guide showed me around downtown a bit. Saw one building with a mural of rebels fighting during the civil war with raged 1978-1990 in Nicaragua painted the side of a building that was pockmarked with bullet-holes from that same fighting. While we were in the central cathedral the howling wail of an air raid siren began just outside, which I found quite startling. The news these days has been saturated with North Korean nuclear ambitions but I immediately dismissed my immediate area as at all a plausible target for North Korean nukes, but maybe they were volcano alert sirens??
   The tour guide seemed unperturbed as he continued to walk up the aisle toward the altars and many surrounding statues. "Uh, what was that?" I asked as soon as the siren had stopped.
   "Oh, that" he chuckled, "they do that at noon every day day so everyone knows to go to lunch. Noon at 6am"
   "They blow that thing at 6am???" I asked in shock, "it's so loud!!"
   "Yes, so everyone knows to get up for work"
   Then the church bells began to toll. "They also do that" he said nodding upward
   "It's much nicer I think" I said.

   Presently it was time to visit the cigar factory. We drove past a few of them before coming to the one we were to tour. I had kind of pictured there'd be cigar making machines in it, but instead there was a big room full of people sitting at desks making cigars. One thing that particularly impressed me was that the tour guide nodded to a guy who looked indistinguishable from everyone else, sitting at a desk busily folding leaves together, with a lit cigar in his mouth, and said, "that's the boss."
   The tobacco starts by aging for (six months?) in a room adjoining the assembly area. They say it ferments but I'm not sure if this is in the same sense as beer/yeast fermentation? Either way apparently they heaps of tobacco get extremely hot and have to be overturned every now and then to prevent the stuff in the middle from getting burnt.
   People at the first few tables were sorting leaves according to how dry/dark they were, then at another set of tables they were actually rolling up the cigars. I'm told one person can make 350 cigars in a day, and gets 1 cordoba per cigar (30 cordobas = $1, so they're making around $11 a day), but between the drying and aging and all each cigar is about a year in production. After watching the cigar maker make a few I was given a chance to try my hand at making one ....... I'm not about to make it rich as a cigar maker.
   From there they go to a shaper who smooths them out into the perfect shape and then to people who put the little label rings on them.

   Now of course after all this I was offered to try a cigar. And now, I'm quite proud to have never smoked a cigarette or... anything else except the nargile hookah things in the Middle East, but I figured since one isn't supposed to actually inhale cigar smoke it's not the same as smoking a cigarette so I thought I'd give it a go. I was also not terribly good at this, though someone took a picture of me and I like to think it at least looks relatively suave. The owner took a break from his work to come over and give me some cigar smoking pointers, as did the one security guard, whilst casually wearing his shotgun slung around his neck, and I have to give everyone in the room credit for not falling over laughing at my difficulties in sucking in enough air to keep it puffing without coughing on it myself. I'm sure they had a good laugh once I left.

   Continued on to Managua, with a stop at a grocery store to buy some of the Nicaraguan Flor de Cana rum. Got to the hotel around 6pm, which was after the hotel store had closed which made me very sad because I had rather fallen in love with a small painting of a toucan there that I had intended to buy, and since my flight was early the next morning before the store opened, I'd have no chance.

   That evening in the hotel bar there were a bunch of disgustingly wholesome looking young men, they type who look like they're all named Chad and play guitar at their church youth group, and they were enthusiastically comparing eachother's churches and discussing the pros and cons of churches charging for parking. I'm assuming they weren't drinking alcohol.
   At the airport the next morning another group of young men in suits with name tags approached the gate area and I at first assumed they were the flight crew but nope more religious missionaries. The power in the terminal went out for a good ten minutes. Beyond my airplane through the windows a large plume of white smoke rose from a volcano. While I waited I read the latest hurricane news, hurricane Irma had broken all sorts of records for size and scale and just mauled Puerto Rico.



   During my flight to Atlanta they served us a pitiful "ham sandwich" (just some ham in a beat-up looking roll), and my stomach, having survived the local water in Kyrgyzstan and Nicaragua all this time, had a bit of trouble with this questionable parthian shot of a sandwich -- such as that when I arrived in Atlanta with two hours during which I could have eaten at the Five Guys there I couldn't muster any appetite.
   Continued on to San Francisco and... that's another entry!


[in other news, posting this from back home in Australia! Where I finally arrived today!]

aggienaut: (Numbat)

Sunday, September 3rd - In the early afternoon Alex the Spaniard went to go play futball with a local team and the girls invited me to go visit a friend of theirs with them, which sounded dandy to me. After just two blocks we reached the end of town and proceeded on a cow path a very short distance onto a forested hillside, some of the foliage underneath smelled of mints, and it was a nice sunny day.
   Their friends turned out to be a young couple, Emma and Norbit (?) with three young children including a precocious little toddler girl who delighted and amused one and all. Apparently Emma works with the girls at Fabretto. Emma and Norbit were very nice and even though the only person present who could translate for me was the French girl, Emma and Norbit occasionally directed questions my way and seemed very friendly and hospitable. They gave us tamales. We all sat in a sort of semi enclosed space beside their house, walled on three sides with the fourth open to the clearing in front of their house. The other sides of the clearing consisted of tall flowering plants, it was quite beautiful in the warm afternoon sun. Chickens pecked about the ground, a small dog (Lucy?) snoozed nearby, and a small kitten meowed quite piteously if anyone was eating anything and not sharing it with her.
   Presently I was asked if I'd like to go horseback riding, which of course I would. Arrangements were made and some twenty minutes or so later Norbit led the three of us down the path leading from the front of the house down across a small stream and up again to a dirt road, where three saddled horses were waiting for us. We saddled up and set off trotting only loosely guided by the horse's minder on foot. Now, as someone who does not own a horse, the opportunities to ride a horse are usually severely limited to mere "trail rides" where the horse proceeds along a course so familiar to it it may as well be asleep; and most of my interaction with horses these days is limited to them trying to bolt out of farm gates I'm trying to drive into to go see some beehives. So I greatly enjoyed this rare oppotunity to take a horse on a free ranging meandering course. I found my horse to be extremely responsive, unlike some previous horses I've been on, and was pleased to find I had no trouble at all turning it this way or that, stopping, starting or speeding it up. Somewhat restored my faith in horses which of late has been badly shaken by the horses that when not trying to bolt out the farm gate are trying to bite me. i couldn't recall my horse's name but one of the others was apparently something like "Cinqua Carmella" which everyone who heard it thought was quite a hilarious name, if someone who speaks spanish could explain the joke to me I'd be interested.
   We ranged along "roads" behind the village which can only be traversed by foot, horse, or maybe some sort of tracked vehicle. I continue to marvel at the cute adobe houses with pink tiles that just look so much like the stereotypical latin american rural adobe that it almost feels like it shouldn't actually BE that way.
   After we'd gone a little ways up and down some hills (up and down the tops of the hills anyway, the bottoms were WAY down) our guide instructed us we should turn around and I was told "it's just two more hours down this road to Honduras"
   "By car?" I naively asked
   The French girl laughed and said "no, by horse. There are no cars here."

   On the return we left the guide (on foot, recall) behind, and got somewhat lost upon reaching town, trying to find where to return the horses to, which was actually kind of fun because it gave ample opportunity to confirm that the horse wasn't merely following the road but that I could take it down this road or that, or turn it around, and just generally wander around the quiet cobbled streets on the horse.
   When I was considering moving to Ethiopia and maybe doing some work at the university in Bahir Dar I had asked an Ethiopian friend if it would be weird if I just used a horse to get about and she kind of laughed and said maybe a little but they'd forgive me for being a ferengi. I've always quite liked the idea of getting around on a horse. In Cusmapa there were definitely more people getting around on horse than by car, the wide open cobbled streets are mostly traversed by pedestrians but you can't go ten minutes without someone clip-clopping by on a horse, maybe with a hoe over their shoulder or a bag of groceries. I actually saw a small boy on a horse with a brightly colored backpack on his back, apparently headed to school!

   Arriving at our destination, Emma's parents house sits on the ridge at the very top of town commanding a magnificent view. Her father confided in me (through translation of course) that he had bought it (14?) years ago for $300.

   Leaving the horses there we walked back to Emma and Norbit's place to wyle away the afternoon. At one point there was a brief thunderstorm and rainshower but it quickly passed (the weather report for Cusmapa lists every single day in range as thunder showers). It was dark by the time we made our way back to our own house, the moon being fairly full lately it was bright out and the streets shone white in the night. I noted there didn't seem to be any street lights.



Monday, September 4th - Marcus fetched me and we switched out his toyota hilux for a land-cruiser because we were to do some very serious driving. It took about 40 minutes of driving down VERY steep roads, and occasionally up them. At first the road was "paved" with nothing more than two concrete lines for the wheels, which I've seen in someone's driveway before but never for much of a length, and then even that ended. At the end when I saw how completely bald the tires were I was even more amazed. We arrived under a canopy of tropical trees, surrounded by a lot of banana or banana-like trees, just three adobes near the road. The end of the road. Some young men were there to greet us and Marcus looked up at me with shock after briefly conversing with one of them:
   "This guy says he knows you!!"

   I was amused by how unlikely that seemed to him, but at the beekeeping workshop at the national university on my first day in Nicaragua I had been informed there were two young men from Fabretto, and lo, verily, this was one of them.
   We looked at the beehives, they were pretty good, they'd had 27, but ten appear to have absconded due to lack of forage in the area. Biggest issue was that they said they had a lot of problems with small hive beetles and on examination most of their comb was very old and dark -- hive beetles aren't really an issue if you switch out your dark comb regularly (they don't like the honey or pure wax but rather proteinacious materials such as pollen and the build up of stuff that's in dark comb). That's your beekeeping wisdom of the day. Of course I instructed them how to do this. Also "El Gato" kept coming up as a sort of paradigm of good management (and he's only 18!). I kept picking up "el gato" in conversation and asked Marcus why they called him El Gato. Marcus told me its because he has blue eyes ... seeing him later I determined they're actually kind of a yellowish green, which is striking and cat-like enough.

   Fast forward through returning back to Cusmapa, walked about town a bit and read a lot, and then the three volunteers returend home from volunwork in the early evening, and barely had they popped in than Shannon (the French girl, pixie-cut hair) told me they were going to Emma's sister's birthday and would I like to come along. Which as you may have gathered it's always my policy to say yes to this kind of thing.
   First, in the early evening and comfortable refreshing air, as drums beat methodically from somewhere nearby, we walked a few blocks to someone's house whom they had apparently commissioned to bake cakes for them. It was a grandmotherly lady, I suppose maybe she's a baker, but it appeared merely to be her house? It being a tiny town, of course on every block the three volunteers greeted someone familiar to them cheerfully and often with laughter. I can see how living in this cute little town could really be delightful.
   Returning to Emma's parents house at the top of the hill, we spent the evening sitting around in their livingroom, which though it had a bare concrete floor and walls and the ceiling was merely the underside of the corrugated metal roof, it was filled with warmth and seemed in no way lacking as a home. A small chicken spent most of the evening under my chair. Emma's father was a jovial friendly fellow, Emma's sister and her pretty teenage friends were rather shy and Alex, the Spaniard, often made them blush with his boisterous joking antics. A small child apparently thought I was Alex's father, which, I suppose we're both lean, pale, and bearded, and I suppose I do have rather a fair bit of grey in my beard whereas he does not have any, but it made me feel rather old. (he's 27, I'm 35).
   When I felt the need for fresh air I'd step out front, where the two volunteer girls were hanging out because they were smoking (because they're European, after all), and noted the constant flash of lightning in the distance.



Tuesday, September 5th - I was awakened in the early hours of the morning by a loud bang, like a cannon shot, nearby. This was NOT another mango dropping on the roof.
   A second bang came from much further off. The dogs began barking, the roosters crowing, and somewhere either a car alarm or police siren started to sound.
   Then tehre was another nearby bang. Another further bang. Was this... a shootout??
   A further bang (sounded like it was coming from a few blocks down the street) ... a nearby bang which sounded like it was just beside the house. Well, maybe this town isn't so innocent after all I thought to myself lying in bed listening for any other telltale signs. After ten to fifteen minutes the explosions stopped, and I fell asleep again.

   In the morning my housemates didn't know what it had been about. Alex had apparently been inspired to evacuate from his bed near the streetside wall to a couch in the living-room (I wasn't in a street-side room, and did reflect that bullets probably wouldn't travel through multiple adobe walls). Alex questioned some people that walked past our front door and all he could gather was that people said it was a celebration, something to do with the church. I don't know. Didn't sound very festive to me. When Marcus came to pick me up I asked him and he claimed to have heard no sounds at all, which I find rather disingenuous. But I do still want to believe in the fundamental innocence of the little town of Cusmapa. In favor of the celebration theory though I later heard similar loud bangs during the middle of the day in Somoto from just beside my hotel and it didn't seem to be a gun battle in that case so there's that.

   Marcus fetched me and we drove back to Somoto. Met up with El Gato and inspected some more beehives that Fabretto is thinking about buying from another company. Tried not to look too weird as I tried to ascertain his eye color. FINALLY got a bee sting, was beginning to be concerned I'd not get a single bee sting here but one got me in the sock since my current interim pair of boots aren't as high ankled as my normal boots. Altogether I'm surprised I was prepared for wild wild africanized bees here but the bees do not seem as bad as the africanized bees I was accustomed to in California. Could it be that the bees I grew up with are actually some of the meanest in the world?

   And now I'm in the hotel El Rosario again. Tomorrow I head back to Managua and the next day I leave Nicaragua, will be in the states a few days for my brother's wedding and then on to Australia. I don't generally get "homesick" but working all these other bees I've begun to quite rather miss MY bees, plus of course, Cato, King of Cats. But less I start to miss it too much I check the weather back home and its all highs in the fifties and raining.

aggienaut: (Numbat)

August 28th - September 1st, Somoto, Nicaraugua - The Hotel El Rosario feels like a sort of cross between a hotel and a bed and breakfast. The rooms are all in an L shaped row around a small courtyard in which they park cars at night, they are sparce and business-like. At the front the building is two stories tall with the office and possibly store rooms on the bottom floor and I think some rooms on the top, and in the fourth side the dining area and kitchen are kind of enveloped by a beautiful lush garden, and it is over here it seems more like a bed and breakfast. The staff seems to be all one family, the grandmother presides over the kitchen I think, assisted by her granddaughter and another woman or two who look like they are probably relations. The Middle aged maternal character seems to run the hotel. There is also a man of the younger generation, maybe around thirty, who is the only one who speaks English, and in fact the first time I met him I had to inquire,
   "Excuse me but you speak English with almost a perfect American accent, if you don't mind my asking did you spend some time in America?"
   "Oh yes," he laughed, "I lived in New Jersey ["New Joysey"] until six months ago." He wears a a thick silver chain around his neck which plays into my New Joysey stereotypes, but heas actually very friendly and nice. He commented that my hat looked jewish. I guess it's official. (I also find it a bit funny, that my mom just the other day completed the process to formally convert to judiaism, and this seems to coincide exactly with everyone mistaking me for a Jew, like there was an immediate cross-generational fundamental effect)

   Another funny noteworthy thing about the town is every evening there's constant drumming. The first evening I thought maybe there was a parade or event and followed the noise to what appeared to be the local high school a few hundred yards away where it looked like a drum-line was practicing, but the enthusiasm seems to go beyond simply a nightly drum-line practice. The next evening I was walking downtown and a smaller different group of very young kids seemed to also be having a drum-line practice in the central square. I've seen kids walking with drums out in the countryside. They seem to absolutely LOVE their drumming. It's funny because I've read accounts of traveling in rural Africa that described hearing nightly African drumming from the villages, but I've never heard it there. In general I've been having odd little bits of this-isn't-Africa culture shock since most of my projects have been in Africa and when there's no people in sight the scenery could totally be Africa, and I forget where I am until someone comes around a corner and they're not an African in colorful fabrics.



Saturday, September 2nd- Saturday morning I checked out of the hotel and Marcus picked me up in his blue toyoto pickup for the drive to the mountain town of San Jose de Cusmapa. His father was in the back. First we swung by his house on the outskirts of town and picked up his 12 year old daughter, who also hopped in the back, and as we were just leaving town he received a call and returned to town to pick up a friend who also wanted a ride to Cusmapa, commenting "it's a small town, everyone knows what's happening, and they hear I'm going to Cusmapa they want a ride because it's a very long slow journey by bus, taking three hours with many stops."

   The ride to Cusmapa took about an hour along a narrow winding road through the mountains. The road wasn't cobbled, per se, as that implies a bumpy road, but I suppose made out of paving stones? Flat concrete hexagons anyway. Much prettier than asphalt. The countryside was verdant and green, full of dramatic valleys and steep little mountains and pink tiled roofs among the trees. Marcus's old truck seemed to have a good sound system and his preference seemed to run to 70s rock ballads with the bass turned up beyond all ordinary preportion. We passed over one particularly high mountain pass where Marcus informed me "you can see the Pacific from here... or you could if there weren't all those clouds," and I noticed that almost immediately there began to be pine trees on the mountains, and wondered if they particularly liked salty air.

   Cusmapa is a tiny town draped over a mountaintop, with cute narrow roads also made of the hexagonal paving stones. Marcus delivered me to a guest house run by his organization, and sitting at the table just inside were two Spaniards (one male, one female) and a Frenchwoman, volunteers. They looked in their mid to late twenties, the Spanish girl (from Barcelona) was reading, the French girl (from near Bordeaux) was on her laptop working on her thesis, and the Spanish guy (from Mallorca) was strumming a small guitar in classic bohemian volunteer fashion. They were very friendly and Spanish guy (Alex, short dark beard (no hot water to shave anyway), lean, very friendly) showed me around the house, which is quite large, with several rooms having half a dozen beds in them each. They must bring quite a few volunteers through here some times! There was one small room with only one bed in it and what really appealed to me was a window that lit it well (some of the others seemed fairly not well served by windows) that I'm surprised no one else had occupied and claimed it. I'm told they call the house "the Mango House," from the large overhanging mango trees, and indeed every now and then through the night a mango would fall on the corrugated metal roof like a random hammer blow (fortunately my superpower is not losing sleep over random things that wake me up briefly in the night)

   After some initial conversation I settled down to read my book in the front room where the others were continuing to do what they'd been doing. In the early evening I set out to walk about town and struck off toward where a viewpoint ("Mirador") had been described to me, walking up the narrow streets. There's many pedestrians walking about in this tiny town and the occasional person on horseback comes trotting by with that delightful sound of hooves on stone. In the background there was the sound of ... drumming. Even in town you feel you are in a forest, the houses not being thickley set and big banana leaves overhanging them. Passed a building with a sign declaring it to be a "Ferreteria," which I had seen before and glimpsing the contents it seems to mean hardware store, but the name makes me whimsically think of a place that sells ferrets.

   I was almost to the Mirador (and the drumming, getting louder, seemed to be emanating from there) when a pickup pulled up beside me and the guy inside said something to me in Spanish. At first I thought it was someone offering me a ride and tried to motion to them I was fine but then I recognized that it was Marcus' dad in Marcus' truck, so I figured maybe Marcus had sent him to fetch me for something and got in. He drove me a few blocks down to the lower end of town to their house. When I got out Marcus was there but he was just like "oh hi. I'm about to take a shower." So I was like "oh, okay, I'm going to the mirador." ...apparently his father picked me up just because he saw me? I felt a bit like when you see a beetle walking and pick him up and put him somewhere else, and he must be like "uh wtf okay great."

   He did give me directions for another mirador on this end of town so I walked down that way until I came to where I'm pretty sure there would have been a great view if the valley below wasn't filled with cloud, and started heading back. With a crack of thunder it began to pour down on me, and while around me locals ran for cover I just took my hat off and held it over my camera, soon I was soaked but my clothes are all made of that stuff from REI that dries out ultra fast so I wasn't concerned about getting wet (and indeed I was mostly dry by the time I got back to the house). I did stop under a thick overhang of banana leaves during the heaviest part of the downpour, but it only lasted a few minutes.
   At the mirador at the top of the hill, which I had originally been headed to (and arriving there confirmed I'd been picked up 50 yards from it to be deposited a few hundred yards down the hill), I found a wet basketball court, gaudily colored playground equipment (see my instagram), some people still hanging out under the eaves of the bathroom and a small hall (though it was no longer raining), and what looked like a glorious view of cloud filled expanses. The sun appeared to be just setting, as far as I could discern from a golden glow in one part of the clouds. Despite the clouds obscuring the view it was still a beautiful view. Also, like all parks apparently in Nicaragua, this park had wifi (Alex mentioned it kind of eyerollingly as a colossol waste of money, and indeed I doubt wifi is the very highest thing on the pyramid of needs that the money could have been used for. Kind of like that "Akron Light Up Africa" charity that's been wasting millions putting lamp posts throughout West Africa (and what gets my goat is there was a meme going around about how "if Akron could light up X cities in Africa in X amount of time what have the other charities been doing all this time??" and when I see it I comment "actual useful things"). So while enjoying the view I took the opportunity to post some pictures to Instagram as well as directly to my parents and other interested parties.

   Arriving back at the guesthouse i found it dark and deserted. The three volunteers had invited me to play pool with them in the evening and I feared I had missed them. I found a lightswitch and read for an hour or two (found a book of Hemingway's collected short stories, I really love Hemingway!), and then walked to the bar that had been mentioned just down the block to see if they were there. They were not but there were at least half a dozen people at three different tables who seemed to be having quite a good time, one of the tables even seemed to have two cute girls hanging out by themselves (another difference from West Africa, where you never see women in the bars), but after quickly scanning the room and not seeing my friends I left and returned to the guesthouse.

   The three eventually returned, I never did catch where they'd been, but then we all set off to play pool at another bar two blocks down! This turned out to be a plane adobe-brick building like all the others, without even a sign over the door, but inside was a big room with two functional pool tables and two that appeared to be in disrepair and were now being used to sit upon and set drinks on, and as well some of the pool-cue racks on the walls seemed partially destroyed, giving the whole place this weird sort of post-apocalyptic-pool-hall feel. Some local guys were playing on the one functional table and the other was open for our use. We were joined by some locals they seemed to know. The game of choice here wasn't the pool I'm accustomed to (not that I play that much at all), but a game called "21" where you try to get the balls in the holes in the order of the ball number, and have to hit the next-numbered ball first. Since instead of having all of stripes or solids to choose from as pool is generally played in Southern California, one only has one ball one is aiming for so a lot more skill is required to get at it around any intervening balls.

   After a bit of this and of course some beers (local beer "Tona"), we went to the house of some friends (/coworkers with the organization?) of theirs for dinner and more beers and the local rum (Flor de Cana) and had an enjoyable sociable evening that went on into the early hours of the morning (well like 1, but I've been going to bed early so it felt pretty late). Alex apologized to me several times since everyone was speaking Spanish and it must be weird not to understand but the truth is that I'm very accustomed to being surrounded by people speaking languages I don't understand, but usually my projects are more of a solitary affair and I was greatly enjoying the opportunity to actually hang out with people in such a casual social and festive setting.

aggienaut: (Default)


Wednesday, August 31st - "They call him Elgato"
   "El Gato??"
   "Yes El Gato"
   "The cat??"
   "Yes the cat" says Marcus, chuckling.
   "El Gato" is a young man, who I suppose did have watchful intense sort of eyes. Also he seemed to have a passion for beekeeping, and needless to say, we got along great. I've often remarked before on these projects, there'll be those people whom you don't share a language in common with, but you just look at eachother and you know you get eachother.
   The beehives were had visited the day before were jointly owned by several people, badly made, and clearly hadn't been inspected in far too long. El Gato runs more hives by himself (I think like fifteen) and they are all perfectly maintained, I think he says he inspects them all every eight days, which if anything might be excessive, but I admire his enthusiasm, which he clearly has. After we looked at his honeybee hives he showed us two hives he has of local stingless bees of the Melipona genus (see pictures on my instagram) which I find very interesting. Its interesting how their honey, which presumably comes from the same nectars as honeybee honey, tastes so different, definitely an indication of how bees are not merely dehydrating nectar but doing SOMETHING to it.



Thursday, September 1st - I first mistook them for swallows flitting low above the milky azure water, wingtip to wingtip like stunt pilots at an airshow, but then after they attached themself to the canyon wall I realized they were bats. I was floating down the famous Somoto Canyon in a place where I couldn't touch the bottom and the grey stone walls rose above me maybe 200 feet. The warm sun was able to filter all the way down through the narrow canyon and the water was a bit chilly but not uncomfortably so.
   The day before while trying to decide whether it was best to schedule a canyon visit before or after our days beekeeping visits Marcus had called the community we were going to visit and was surprised to learn they had no beehives at all, so he declared we'd just see them at the training workshop we'd put on on Friday, leaving me completely free Thursday to go on the longest version of the famous canyon tour.
   We (guide and I, I forget his name but he was a nice young fellow) began mostly walking along the river but soon were up to our waists and deeper. Wearing lifejackets, it was fun to just let the current push oneself along. In addition to the bats I saw two feral beehives hanging in nooks well up the cliff-face, a large solid sided wasp nest in an overhanging tree ("we call that a 'pig's head' because it looks like one," and it does), and two more German girls jumping from a 60 feet ledge on the cliff. At one point where another river came in my guide pointed to a yellow marker just a few hundred meters away and said "see that, that's Honduras" I was sorely tempted to go visit Honduras (I've been as close to Poland too) but it was just far enough away to be inconvenient.
   A fair bit of the middle was mostly walking again and more open, and then the last bit, after another place where you had to jump from a ledge to continue, was a long deep channel that people on "the short tour" reach from the downstream end, and I'm told the lazy sometimes just have their guide pull them along on an innertube. The very last 600 meters one travels in a rowboat rowed by a boatman waiting for said purpose, then we walked along a delightful path for two kilometers along the riverbank, at one point a local man riding a horse at a quick trot passed us on some business. Had lunch at a little restaurant (just a motherly figure and her beautiful daughter and one table in the shade beside their pretty house) near the trailhead, which was absolutely delicious, and took the local bus back to town.



Friday, September 2nd - "We.. don't have any students actually" says Marcus, chuckling perhaps a bit anxiously, at the appointed time of 1:30 when we were supposed to have that training.
   That morning he had told me there was a bit of a fair ("I think that's the word for it?") at the headquarters of the local host organization, and that I didn't need to come until we'd do the workshop at 1:00. Going sounded more interesting than sitting around at the hotel all day so I went, and I'm glad I did!
   There was first a bit of a talent show thing with students performing some traditional dances, which I thought was interesting to compare them to the traditional dances performed by the similarly aged Dungan dancers in Kyrgyzstan last week. But then even more exciting, they had a sort of food contest where the competing teams apparently made local dishes completely from scratch, I'm talking they milled the corn themselves. By strategically following close behind the judges I was able to be offered a sample of many different interesting local dishes. Many were similar yet different to familiar Mexican dishes, for example they had two tamale-like things, with names that sounded almost but not quite like tamales, that tastes almost but not quite like tamales. Also tacos here are always rolled into a tube and cooked such that the tortilla is crunchy.

   When it finally came time for the beekeeping workshop, Marcus explained that the students had supposed to stay after the fair but in fact had all gone home ... BUT I could train the organization's teachers, of whom there were I wildly guestimate around 20 in attendance, so that was an alright turnout after all.
   And then Murphy's Law of Electronics struck. Really this should be it's own law. And I'm surprised by how often this happens, my electronic devices will behave for months at a time in normal life without a hiccup and then when I'm out in the field and need them to work almost immediately things start going sideways. Last year my phone suddenly lost its ability to save pictures (similar to what it did actually when I was on vacation earlier this month), and the year before that my laptop actually locked myself out of my own username on the computer, where all my stuff of course was.

   In this case, all my presentation materials are on an external hard-drive. There has never ever been a problem accessing the external hard drive, and I was using it just that morning before leaving the hotel to make sure I had what I wanted at hand. But then a few hours later I get my laptop out again this time in front of twenty people expecting a presentation from me and... it doesn't work. It will NOT read the external hard drive. It makes a connection noise and the connection light comes on on the drive but it will NOT find the drive in file explorer. I tried different USB ports. I tried resetting the computer. Nothing would work. W T F. Seriously it's eerily like the very act of having a whole room full of people counting on me being able to make it work made it not work!!!

   So I made a presentation without the benefit of any visual aids, which seemed to go over just fine but I feel like it must be pretty boring just listening to me ramble with no visuals.

aggienaut: (Numbat)

Wednesday, August 23rd, Melbourne, Australia - "Where are you from?" I ask the taxi driver in Melbourne, since he's mentioned his wife immigrating
   "Africa" he says as if that should be a satisfactory answer
   "Where in Africa?" I ask
   "East Africa" he says as if he doesn't know why I'm bothering to inquire further
   "Where in East Africa?"
   "Ethiopia" he says like it's an "I told you so" that it wouldn't mean anything to me
   "Where in Ethiopia?"
   "Addis Ababa" he says as if this is starting to get a little weird.
   "How do you like the new light rail in Addis?"
   "Oh. oh. .. Uh ... They should have repaired the roads first" I relish the look of shock in his eyes that I'm current on Addis happenings. Anyway it turns out he thinks the rail system is poorly planned. He thinks they should have improved the roads first. I think getting people off the roads and onto mass transit should be a priority in every big city.

   During my 14 hour overnight layover in Melbourne I crashed at the place of an American couple I know from the Americans in Melbourne facebook group.

Thursday, August 24th - Departed Melbourne for a (two?) hour flight to Sydney at 8am. Short layover there and then 15 hour flight to LAX. Flight very empty, had a whole row to myself (cue angels singing). Even though it was an entirely daytime flight they had everyone close all the windows and tured the lights way down to simulated night mode. I understand flights are more bearable if you're asleep and we bother flight attendants less when we're asleep but I hate it when they do that.
   Watched several not-very-memorable movies and The Accountant which I rather liked, it's like Rainman if Rainman happened to pick up being a badass cold blooded killer as a random hobby. Watched Episode 5 of the current season of Game of Thrones on my laptop and would have watched Episode 6 but apparently the version I downloaded turned out to be unreadable.

   Flight arrived late into LAX so I had only an hour to catch the continuing flight, and of course had to go through passport control, collect my luggage, go through customs, drop it at the transit luggage window, find ourselves popping out on the curb outside the terminal, go back through security again, and get to the gate. Those of us with flights in the next hour were given priority passes through passport control and customs but no help getting through security. My backpack got flagged for additional screening and as it sat getting ignored on the side table with fifteen minutes till my flight was supposed to LEAVE I implored a TSA agent if they could at all prioritize clearing my bag and they semed to relish giving me a very abrupt and cavalier "NOPE!!" I swear the US TSA is the worst and rudest in the world.
   Literally ran from there to my gate and found the aircraft had had a delayed arrival coming in from Sydney so it was still boarding .... it was my same plane!!!
   Also I was a bit confused to find the gate alternating listed destinations between "Managua" and "Atlanta." My ticket and itinerary hadn't listed Atlanta as a stop so this was the first I was aware I'd be going there.
   Also it was during this flight that I discovered the fatigue of this arduous journey had rendered me no longer able to read even with my reading glasses for more than five minutes at a time before my eyes hurt too much. Hopefully it was just the extraordinary fatigue but I also fear my eyesight it going fast. ):

   I don't know, some number of hours flight to Atlanta, also had empty seat beside me. It was only like a three hour flight but the guy with the window seat (I was the aisle) got up to use the bathroom like four times. Jesus people don't drink so much coffee, or whatever you're doing.
   Did have to change planes in Atlanta. Just enough time in Atlanta to get to the gate. I think there were only two of us from the LAX-ATL leg continuing on to ATL-Managua, if its not the same plane, not really the same passengers, I'm not sure why it even is "the same flight."
   This time didn't have an empty seat next to me, and having been traveling for over 65 hours, no longer able to read, no movie screens in this plane ... it was several hours of relative hell..


Managua, Nicaragua - first impression on stepping out of the aircraft door and being hit with the warm humid nighttime air (it was around 8pm) was that it smelled like a hedge. And then inside the terminal it somehow smelled like a winery. And out in front of the terminal it smelled like steaming spinach. Shuttle from the hotel picked me up for a humerously short trip to the hotel literally across the street.
   This area of town doesn't seem to have anything else in walking distance so anything I can't get at the hotel I trot across the street to the shops in the airport terminal.


Friday, August 25th - I had been recruited a few years ago for a project in Nicaragua I didn't end up doing, but I emailed the guy that runs that little organization before arriving and especially when I learned I'd have Friday free made plans to meet up with him. He happened to be going to the National Agricultural College just outside town for a beekeeping presentation being put on by a Dr Van Veen out of Costa Rica, so he picked me up in a pick up truck driven by a friend of his. He and I sat in the back -- Which I'd never actually done before since that's generally illegal in Western countries but it was really nice! Who needs a convertible when you can ride in the back of a pickup!
   The city doesn't seem to have any highrises that I've seen but kind of seems a vast sort of not quite suburban but, light-urbam? small urban? is there a word for this? Small cinderblock houses that barely have enough open space around them to call it a yard, but with trees and bougainvilleaa climbing the surrounding walls. We went down a bunch of residential roads rather than the bigger seemingly arterial road, I don't know if htat was to avoid traffic or what. There were a lot of little sort of bicycle-powered taxi vehicles where the driver sat behind a seat with room for two. The kind of thing you sometimes see on tourist boardwalks but this seemed to be a major source of local transport.

   Agricultural campus out outside of town to the north. Some thirty or so students in attendance in a building with lots of ceiling fans, while outside other students herded cattle past. It was pretty hot except directly under the fans. Presentation was in spanish so I could only barely get the gist of it by typing the words on the powerpoint slides into google translate. Seemed interesting, especially since he had a whole segment on the native stingless bees which I'd have loved to be able to understand.

   On our way back into town on the main highway traffic came to a complete and utter standstill. We were given Dr Van Veen and a colleague of his a ride to the airport so we were about anxious about this traffic. I'm told there was another highway they knew was also at a standstill and the only other way around would be an 80 mile detour. I don't know what's normal around here but I noticed a dark black plume of smoke had emerged from a nearby volcano, and it seemed ominous and possibly related but no one mentioned it so maybe not. After about an hour people had all gotten out of their cars and were talking to eachother and our driver got the down low of a secret route through back streets and we drove on the wrong side of the highway a few hundred yards (not a problem, no cars were coming from that way and plenty of others were doing the same as us) and drove into a narrow alley where we just barely barely fit after folding our mirrors in. Other cars had gone ahead of us and it seemed even more were coming behind, apparently word had just gotten out. There followed another interesting hour of proceeding down labyrinthine narrow back streets, sometimes having to back out of an impassible route. It was certainly interesting. Finally we got out on wide open back roads back out in countryside, where there were eerily few cars on the road, and always that thick black ominous plume of smoke ahead.

   But finally we came back into the city and actually got to the airport in time for the flight!!



   That evening I finally downloaded the most recent (Episode 6) episode of Game of Thrones and, not to spoilerize it, but I felt like it was markedly more badly written than previous episodes/seasons, in my opinion. Like nothing surprising happened, and that cliche thing where you think a main character has definitely died but it turns out they didn't happened several times (also happened in Episode 5 a lot). Later I came across an Onion article saying they basically no longer are following any script at all so I guess I wasn't the only one.
   After this my laptop battery was pretty much used up and I once again am unable to charge it since I still don't have a universal plug converter for the Aus plug on my laptop and now it needs to plug into US shaped sockets here!

Saturday, August 27th - The plan was that I'd meet with the country director on this morning and find out what the plan was. When he arrived I was surprised to find him to be a young fellow looking to be in his mid 20s -- usually the country directors are older and I imagine the job description calls for a masters degree and ten years of management or something like that, so I assumed he must be a real whiz-kid. As it turns out, I have no reason to doubt his competence but I guess it's just that they don't actually have an actual country director at the moment at he's the senior staffmember (of two, where there should be four) and therefore acting country director. Found out I'm not going to the Field till Monday. On past projects I might be upset to be cooling my heels for three full days before going out but I felt and feel like I needed the time to recover from that ordeal of a trip here.
   Apparently I'll be going north and it sounds like a nice area. I'm looking forward to it!

   I was also introduced to two volunteers who he had jut brought back from the field. An older woman (fifties ish?) and a younger woman who had actually just a few months previously finished her Peace Corps posting here in Nicaragua. They were working together on some marketing related coconut oil project.
   Spent most of the rest of the day with the women, in particular the former Peace Corps Volunteer (Eliana) was a wealth of knowledge about Nicaragua.

   Also of note, in the afternoon while I was swimming at the hotel swimming pool I made my 101st rescue. Having been a lifeguard through high school, I am forever imbued with an urge to yell at kids for running on the deck by the pool or diving in in the shallow end, and catching the merest hint of the distinctive jerky wallowed flail of a distressed swimmer out of the corner of my eye grabs my full attention and sets me to red alert. A "distressed swimmer" (ie someone who is attempting to drown), isn't like they are in TV with big splashes and calls for help, and as is too often the case even though she was in many people's field of view no one else seemed to take notice. I was swimming laps at the time and got to her just as her head disappeared below water, pulled her up, put her arms on the pool edge which was actually just right there, she slipped off again, put her back and held her there ... and several minutes later her family actually noticed and hurried over, got her out. Another misconception perpetuated from Baywatch: people NEVER shower you with gratitude for rescuing them. I think something that sounded vaguely grateful, in Spanish of course, but it might have just been "I just need a minute" or something.

   Last night at 11pm, an hour after I'd gone to bed, there was a pounding on my door like a god damn stormtrooper was there. As I pulled on some pants and opened the door I found someone from the hotel bar trying to explain to me I had to pay for the margarita I had had that afternoon that I thought I'd put on the room tab. I don't know why they couldn't have made it more clear at the time that I needed to pay it off that afternoon, or couldn't sort it out when I checked out like normal hotels, nor do I understand why this hotel seems to have nearly no english speaking staff despite being the premier tourist hotel in the capital. I found this nocturnal payment demand quite irksome. I'd complain to the front desk but... even the front desk guy doesn't speak English quite fluently enough that I'm confident I could make my complaint clear to him.


Sunday, August 28th - The two other volunteers left this morning and it turns out the older one was borrowing a laptop from the Organization, so now I'm borrowing the powercord from that laptop. Just taking it easy today, but starting to get my fill of "taking it easy" and really looking forward to shipping out for the field tomorrow!!


PS: I almost forgot, but for posterity, I find it's often interesting to recall what world events are going on at the time, because at the time it feels contemporaneous events are indelibly linked but of course they are not. So for the record, lots more people fled Trump's White House in the last week due to his bizarre support for white supremists, and just the other day he apparently pardoned the controvercial Arizona ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio and even a lot of Republicans seem pretty upset that he skipped the usual review process, that this seems to condone racial discrimination, and that Arpaio being a friend of his this seems pretty shameless abuse of power. Every week there seems to be more opinion articles claiming "this is finally impeachmentworthy."

aggienaut: (Numbat)
Writing this now while in the air over Turkey bound for Abu Dhabi. My time in Istanbul definitely warrants it's own entry (taken into custody my plainclothes cops!) which means I've gotta knock out what comes first first.


DAY 7 (Saturday)
Was in the midst of the drive back to the capital when last I wrote. The journey was uneventful but I think I forgot to mention the peculiarity of that both on the way back and the drive out the first time there were cops with radar guns every few kilometers. It seemed to be a permanent0thing, our driver appeared to have a radar gun detector that kept going off to warm of them ahead. Reminded me of the alarm buzzer in top gun like movies that goes off when someone's getting a missile lock on you.

Arriving at the hotel around three I made a serious effort to try to get my computer0to charge (I think I mentioned, my new laptop has an Australian plug and all my plug-shape-converters are for US to something else). Strangely I could get power when I plugged my phone via US plug to my US-to-Aus converter to my US-to-Kyrgyz converter to the wall, those proving that an Aus plug could get power through that converter but my computer just wasn't having it.

Talking to my tech-savvy friend Mick in Australia he graciously volunteered while I'm in Australia for my brief layover to go to my house (40 min away from Melbourne) after getting off work at 11pm, to get my other plug (getting in my house by way of keys I left in a beehive ;-D yes fully occupied by bees) and then bring it to me two hours away in Melbourne (I'm not going home during my 14 hours in Melbourne between projects). We eventually decided to see if I could solve it by simply buying locally the length of cord from walk plug to the three pins that attach to the power-brick.

That evening I met up with my friend Valerie ("Lerchik"). We'd "met" on tinder when I was last here over a year ago, though too late to meet up, and become friends0in the intervening year. Who says Tinder is "just for hookups?"
Ironically it was looking like I might miss her again by the coincidence that she was possibly traveling to Issyk-Kul for a work meeting the very day I was coming back from that same place! Fortunately she ended up going the following day.
Taxi fare downtown was about a dollar each way and the drivers seemed to have no interest in trying to overcharge or scam me (having visited Egypt I'm now forever wary). Dinner was lovely (Italian place) and I'm sure Lerchik and I are even better friends now that we've confirmed eachother's corporeal existence.  Evening was quite pleasantly warm for walking outside,, which coming from Melbourne daily highs in the mid 50s (/ less than 10c) I relished.


DAY 8, Sunday
Debriefed with the headquarters staff and found out they want me to come back for additional projects in both May AND August 2018. Funny how often I start a project feeling like it's a wild presumption that I'm even qualified for this and I'm the end find they all want me to come back even more.

While in HQ I tried borrowing the piece of questionable cable from another laptop and confirmed mine charged fine with a different cable.  So went into town with my translator (Hamida) to get a cable and some souvenirs. Somehow this took nearly all day but it was fun. It was a warm sunny summer day, we took the local minibus "taxis" that I find can be found in most developing cities without public light rail networks. They always lack posted routes so it takes a local to get around. Bishkek is a nice town to explore on foot though with lots of people out on this nice Sunday afternoon and tree lined streets downtown.

The cable in question was acquired for two bucks and my computer henceforth was a productive member of society.

Went to bed early, had to get up at four to begin the 73 (SEVENTY THREE!!) hour odyssey to Nicaragua. And that's a good place to start next entry ;-)
aggienaut: (Numbat)


Day 4 - as I lay in bed in the morning (updating LJ in fact) there was a steady roll of thunder outside and heavy thrumming of rain against the window and roof. I actually really like this weather.

Went out to meet Hamida at 8:20 but she didn't appear. Tapped on her door and I could barely hear her over the sound of rain even as she shouted through the door but I was able to gather that some relatives of hers invited us to breakfast at 9:30. So I returned to my room.

At 9:30 when we went to get a taxi in front of the resort the rain had petered off though the clouds still looked heavy. It was now that I learned we were going to a wedding! If I'd known I would have put on better clothes! Why am I always being tricked into underdressing for weddings??

It was about half an hour drive to the town of Karakol. Along the way I observed that Kyrgyz towns seem to have really extensive suburbs. Like there's barely a town center, no apartment blocks, pretty much0the towns entirely consist of suburb like cute houses set in quarter to half acre lots with a white picket fence around it. Frequently there's a thatched shed in the back, not infrequently there's pretty wooden scrollwork just where the walls meet the steeply angled roof. Also I saw a number of grain harvesters parked in front driveways. And then two ten wear olds would come down the road on a cart pulled by a horse like this is 1870 or something -- except the cart has rubber tires

I wonder if the reason their towns are so spread out is0because of the ubiquity of horse transport. Walking distance constraints tend to constrict housing in places where not everyone has cars but here you can always hop on your horse.

Arrived at a big house with many cheerful people in the front yard and festive decorations up. I felt a bit awkward at first being the only non dungan walking in and not actually knowing the wedding party, but almost immediately the groom greeted me and made me feel welcome. He was wearing a suit and red and green sashes crossed across his chest. He was very nice. He wasn't quite expansive in English but seemed able to say anything he wished to. He's apparently a dentist

Hamida explained to me that women and men eat separately and left me in the care of her ten year old brother, who soon escaped and spent the whole wedding out of sight in some interior room, apparently bored with it all. But I was quite alright everyone was very friendly and there were0two or three other people who spoke perfect English whom I met at various points.

First order of business was sitting down to a meal of meatballs in "Durgan vinegar" which were actually really good. None of the young men I was sitting with0spoke English but they were very friendly. I discovered that durgans, being a Chinese ethnic group, eat with chopsticks ... but this is a skill I have never been able to master and was provided with a fork.

The bride had a beautiful red Chinese style dress (see my instagram for a picture or two). Apparently they had fetched her from her family near Bishkek the day before. Though no one mentioned it this year I recall last year being told that brides are traditionally "kidnapped" by the groom, even if (fortunately) in modern times it is merely going through the motions.

The brides family and friends arrived in mid afternoon and then there was another round of feasting and dancing. MD particular note there were four teenage girls performing traditional dances that were very interesting. I got one picture up on instagram, but mostly I was taking them with the DSLR so you'll see them in a month.

Altogether the wedding was very fun and interesting and I was extremely grateful for the opportunity

Returning to Djety-Oguz, in the early evening we walked over to the Russian's house to talk about bees and all. After about half an hour the grandfather joined us exclaiming "why aren't you drinking?!" And immediately pouring everyone some homemade raspberry cider which was actually quite good. They kept refilling my glass but have yet to get me drunk! I fear soon they will break out the big guns and ply mewith vodka. We had dinner there, lagman, a noodle dish. Noted it was fairly different from the lagman I had in Bishkek, more soupy. By the time we left it was entirely dark but we only got a little lost crossing back to our rooms.

And now we're entirely caught up here!

aggienaut: (Numbat)
At a traditional Dungan wedding, later on on Day 4 / Thursday. As things are at a bit of a lull while we wait for the brides family I thought I'd keep on hacking at this

Day 3: Hamida and I have been sharing our table with two old men. One has a brilliantly white goatee and his eyes twinkle with mischief. The other is broad and quiet and because he sits just beside me I don't even get a good look at him. They are both always wearing the tall white felt traditional hat, the kalpak.
The man with mischievous eyes appears to make a short speech to people across the room before sitting down with us. I asked Hamida what he said and she said he was telling them he'd host a party this evening and everyone who didn't sing would have to pay 100 soms (just over a dollar, a dollar is some 72 som) and with the proceeds he would buy a lamb to roast. Somehow gathering we were talking about it he conveyed through her that I was invited. I'm always down to party with the locals but Hamida seemed very skeptical.
"You know they will make you drink so much." She warned. Ah well some times you have to live dangerously.
He also overheard me use the word Bishkek several times as I was telling Hamida about a friend in Bishkek I hoped to see and asked her if I was composing poems about Bishkek.

Okay now here's a funny story I totally forgot from day 1. Everyone's worst dear happened to me: I used the toilet here in my room at ye crumbling soviet report and only afterwards did I realize there was no TP. not in a closet around the corner, none. Nowhere at hand. Nor were there napkins or tissues. There was nothing for it but to immediately take a shower. And THEN I discovered there was no soap and no towel!!!

Anyway after breakfast this day we met with Sergei in his comically small soviet car (I was actually impressed the tiny thing was four wheel drive and didn't feel cramped) and proceeded down into the valley to visit their bees. It seems the practice around here is invariably to keep hives on a trailer, or possibly unload just a few of them off the trailer and leave most of them. And the trailer must be manned 24/7 to prevent theft. There's a little sleeping cabin on the trailer. I tell you what if _I_ had to pay someone to watch every hundred or so of my hives 24/7 I would be soo deeply unprofitable! Though it seems they keep it all in the family with Andrei and Anatoly trading off days there, but still.

I'll skip over all the technical observations about their beekeeping operation except to note that they dribbled vodka mixed with honey I'm the hives to encourage acceptance of the new queens they were introducing. OF COURSE the Russians give vodka to their bees!!! This just fit the Russian stereotype far too well!!!

After Sergei prepared us all a nice lunch of soup and pilaf (which I think he was laboring at for an hour making it all from scratch right there) Sergei, his nine year old daughter Vika, Hamida and I proceeded to the lake shore



Lake Issyk Kul is so big you can barely barely make out the massive mountains on the far side. It has sandy beaches and little waves even. I assumed it was fresh water, Hamida said it was salt. I don't know, I don't have data to go googling everything nor did I fancy having a taste. I did go swimming though and found the water quite nice. It was impressive to swim out and see snow capped mountains just beyond the beach. Also there were some yurts at hand because Kyrgyzstan. With nothing modern in view just the yurts and mountains it was easy to think what a lovely place this would be in ancient times, to set up your yurt right by the beach here. The surrounding countryside is green and fertile.


That evening the old man didn't mention his party so I suppose it was cancelled, much to Hamida's relief!
aggienaut: (Numbat)
Lying here the morning of Day 4 listening to the rain and rolling thunder. Lots see if I can make a little more progress on updates before breakfast:

Day two, August 15
Morning perusal of tho news reveals Trump blamed both sides for the rioting racists in Charlottesville, but the silver lining is that it was nice to see even all the hard core republicans condemning his remarks. Also what the hell did he mean with that "not Obama. Not trump" part

Breakfast here is served in a canteen in one of the other buildings at 8:30. The building has some clearly once-grand ornamentation but now plaster is0peeling and bare bricks show through the wall in places. We found that inside it was assigned seating, which struck me as a totally soviet useless bit of authoritarianism. We had to sit at separate tables (the driver, interpreter and I), so I was seated with two babushkas whom I of course couldn't communication with. Everyone here seems to be just your typical Kyrgyz family, maybe with a slight bend toward the older. Lots of babushkas in headscarfs and old men with tall white kalpak hats.
Breakfast was porridge that was quite good and a chunk of fish in some soup, which we were apparently expected to pick up0and gnaw on. I really don't like fish but I gave it a bit of an effort. Drank the soup. The porridge was good though as was the fresh bread.



After lunch the driver departed and one of our local hosts (that is, the target group of the training) led us the short walk a few hundred meters to where their family cluster of houses was0piled up near the sandstone rock formations.
It turns out the hosts are a Russian family. The head of the business is a middle aged man (Sergei) whose face has kind of a sour look to it and eyes like dark blue marbles, but despite this rather intimidating countenance all evidence is that he's actually quite nice. His two son in laws look to be in their thirties, one is broad and stout with reddish hair and a perpetually cheerful expression (Anatoli, hobbies: wolf hunting) and the other (Andrei) has the lined and droopy face of a man thirty years his age. This latter fellow was the most proactive about talking to me and showing me things though. Also at the house was the patriarch, grandfather of these young men and father in law of the older one. He looked just like an older version of the red haired fellow.

They showed me the beehives around the house. They'd recently built an enclosed "bee pavilion" and we're particularly hoping I had wisdom on the finer points of running such a thing but I haven't worked with one. The grandfather's eyes lit up when I mentioned mead and once we had seen all the beehives around the house he beckoned us in to have some mead. Keep in mind it's like ten AM!

But it was a good time to sit and talk about their issues. They seem thoroughly experienced beekeepers and unfortunately the issues they want help on aren't things I feel I can particularly help with. Their main problem is finding buyers for their honey. With the collapse of the Soviet Union it involves a lot of red tape and corruption. They had buyer in Russia but the middleman / shipper adulterated their honey so they lost the contract and $105,000, which is a fair bit round hereabouts. They can't compete in the markets in Bishkek because the market owners all have friends they buy it from who adulterate it, and they don't care because hey it still sells and is cheaper than unadulterated honey. I think the family may also be at a disadvantage being Russian. So they appear good at beekeeping, are admirably dedicated to making a good pure honey, but the problem seems to be in actually selling the stuff.
This is where I start to feet a bit anxious since the Organization paid $3150 for0the flights to get me here not to mention everyone's time and other costs for the project and I feel like my principal recommendation would be "you should have brought a local market expert not a beekeeper." But oh well I'll do what I can.

Meanwhile grandfather kept refilling our glasses with mead. If they were interested in making mead commercially I could probably really help them but it became apparent they just think of it as a novelty that would never really be good. It was very sweet with a strong almost sour flavor. I asked how much honey to water they used and they said "oh its mixed to take" I asked them how long they fermented it and they said "not too long or it will become vinegar." This fear of vinegar making I've seen among homebrewers in America too with just a vague superstitious belief anything left long enough will become vinegar. However that would require either0the intentional introduction of acetol making bacteria or catestrophic failure of maintaining a sanitary seal. I wish I'd brought a bottle of my mead to show them what it could be.

We broke after lunch and had the rest of the afternoon off. I was extremely keen to go hiking in the mountain forests that directly abut the resort but Translator (Hamida) having had too much mead was set on taking a nap (with no obvious trailheads it would have required asking around), and left me with a warning not to go wandering in the forest because bears.

So after lunch (a thin borshkt with a hunk of unappetizing meat in it, plus the usual porridge, yogurt and bread) I poked around on my own and as I was walking down the road toward the sandstone rocks I found a group of young men with GOSH DARN EAGLES letting tourists pose with them for pictures for a small fee. I of course inquired about this and the youngest eagle-hawker communicated to me 200 som, just under $3. So of course I went for it and next thing I know I had thick leather gloves on each hand and an ENORMOUS FRIGGEN EAGLE on each one as well as a third eagle held up behind me as the kid proceeded to take 114 pictures on my phone and tho guy with my DSLR failed for five minutes to realize he had to take the lens cap off and I could neither communicate with him nor gesture with my hands since I had a motherfuckin EAGLE on my hand. Shortly my phone was complaining it was full up and because I'm OCD like a vampire I had to spend half an hour carefully determining which pictures to delete.



Of course my 200 som became 600 som ("because there were three), which I didn't terribly mind because I felt it was worth0it and basically 100% expected some pricing shenanigans like that) and then the kid was for some reason trying to wheedle yet more money out of me so I briskly walked awkward. Later I saw them putting the giant eagles in the trunk of their car and it made me a little sad, but the kid was sitting in the front seat with the smallest eagle on his lap, which was cute and I'd have liked to take a picture but then he'd probably be after me like a harpy for money again.

Later I mentioned these eagle kids to the Russians and they commented "yeah most people don't even use them for hunting any more."

But anyway. If I ever move to Kyrgyzstan I am absolutely getting a pet eagle. And a yurt.

Once Hamida awoke we walked around a bit more. Dinner in the canteen, like all the meals began with a bowl of porridge, then of yogurt (keffir), then a main course. I'm this case spaghetti noodles in chicken broth with beef. I ate my bowl and the bowl the old man next to me didn't touch.
aggienaut: (Numbat)
Hello from Djety-Oguz, in the Issyk-Kul Oblast, Kyrgyzstan! I am for the first time ever attempting to write an entry right on my phone (I brought my laptop but realized I only have plug-shape-converters for American plugs and my new laptop is Australian!)



Anyway let's start at the beginning:

Day 0: flight out of Melbourne Saturday evening at 10:15. Etihad Airways. They annoying car commercials that play on the screen in front of you before the safety briefing that can't be turned off or silenced, and more ads before you watch a movie. And their movie selection was dismal. And for that matter their safety video was a pitiful badly rendering computer generated person. With so many other airlines having funny or creative safety videos they're really behind the times. In sum I was rather unimpressed with Etihad, and I thought they were supposed to be a classy airline

I did watch this movie Free Firing which I'd never heard of previously but actually quite liked it. It's kind of one giant "Mexican stand off" but tho characters are all really well done and it's entertaining and well done

In the Abu Dhabi airport the TVs were showing riots in Charlottesville. Coincidentally LAST time I passed through here the TVs were all showing cars burning in Ferguson.

Five hour flight from there to Istanbul, eight hour layover in Istanbul and The Organization was good enough to put me in a hotel. I'd already been traveling about 24 hours by the time I got there anyway (15 to abu Dhabi, 3 on the ground there, five to Istanbul)

Back at the airport I found 45 Peace Corps volunteers milling anxiously around the gate, all on their way to be deployed in Kyrgyzstan! I was kind of absorbed into their group - I love Peace Corries!

Another five hour flight, Turkish Airlines this time. Funny safety video (hosted by a magician with lots of slights of hand), very large selection of movies.

Arrived in Bishkek around 5am. Already sad to part ways with the Peace Corries. And the one I'd been talking to most doesn't even have Facebook, weirdo! Armed soldiers in uniform can be found in almost all airports in the world now but in Bishkek they were wearing balaclavas, which seemed a bit full on.

Last year I was unimpressed to find The Organization's driver nonchalantly leaning against a back wall instead of standing with a sign near where we emerge. This year at least I knew where to find him

Interesting cultural note we were talking about unusual foods during the half hour drive into the city and I asked if they ate horse meat at all (being as there's horses everywhere), and he said only for like weddings and funerals and maybe big birthday dinners or things like that, and in that case the horse meat is placed in the middle of the table and not eaten there but everyone takes some home. Interesting. Well there's a thing you now know

Slept a few hours in the hotel (same hotel as last year), went to lunch to a nearby place I remembered from last year (had lagman which I guess is like a really glorified chow mein. Noodles deliciously loaded with lots of stuff). At one the Organization's country director came by to brief me, and as well I met my interpreter -- a young lady named Hamida, who is skinny, with bangs, and large round Harry Potter glasses. I only found out much later she's not actually Kyrgyz, but Durgan, an ethnic group that emigrated to the area from China in the late 19th century. I'd link to the Wikipedia page but that's tedious on my phone, so no links for you.

And then we were off driving to the project site about six hours east. The road skirts Kyrgyzstan's northern border with Kazakhstan for the first bit, with the surprisingly jagged mountains to the south and flat steppes to the north. Then I fell asleep for a bit and when I awoke we were traveling along a mountain valley, which we continued for most of the trip. About an hour from our destination we entered the expansive valley of Lake Issyk-Kul. Skirted the lake for a bit, with waterfront yurts and beachgoers visible frolicking in the water (there were mountain valley yurts earlier. Kyrgs LOVE their yurts). Finally in the last half hour turned down the small southern valley to our destination.



All of a sudden around a corner giant red rock (like hill sized) with a split down the middle emerges, and I'm told this is "broken heart rock" because it looks like such. Around and pastit there's a particularly large number of yurts. But just about half a kilometer further on the road ends at a gate, which we proceeded through and across a bridge over a rushing stream. Looking back at the rock from here it looks like a long string of red sandstone rocks. Weird though because it doesn't resemble the rest of the countryside, just this one giant vein of sandstone. But across the bridge are several massive decaying once-grand buildings of a soviet era resort. It's actually not bad, between them is practically a forest of trees through which quiet sidewalks run. It is here that I am staying

That evening we had dinner in one of the yurts [the in the picture I added at top of entry]. Manti, which in Turkey is ravioli floating in yogurt, but the Kyrgyz take on it is more like giant perogis (think pot stickers if you're still drawing a blank).

And that's Day 0/1! Wow in my head I had like five lines to write about that. I'll post days two and three in a separate entry.

Check out my instagram for pictures -- I hoped that worked, this is tedious by phone. I'm such_sauce on instagram anyway, and posting pictures there fairly regularly
aggienaut: (Zia's Sailor Kris)
   ( Beginning of This Adventure )



Tuesday, May 30th, Charleston, Oregon -The magical power of deep paranoia woke me up. Which is to say I woke up and looked at the time every ten minutes till 6:40, and then every two minutes until it was finally 6:50. Since I was sleeping in the crypt-like darkness of a ship's forecastle, a dozen sailors crammed in a space the size of a walk-in closet, I had a terror of my alarm going off.
   Despite my great efforts to get up without using the alarm, to my great horror, I apparently forgot to actually disable it and while I was getting dressed it started to go off at 7:00 and I leapt through the darkness like a blind cat to shut it off as fast as possible.
   Said goodbye to my dear friend Kori, who was of course asnooze and barely woke up enough to mumble goodbye. I covered her cheek in kisses until she chuckled sleepily and told her I'd swing by on my way back in the afternoon for a proper goodbye.

   And then up the ladder, pushing open the heavy wooden hatch and wiggling out with my backpack. The couple who was giving me a ride was there waiting in the fresh morning air. Surrounding us was a marina full of fishing boats and a thickly forested shore. We hopped precariously over the side to the dock -- the gangplank wasn't rigged, tossing our bags to eachother over the chasm. And then we were up the gently swaying floating dock, passing, as I mentioned, a salty former captain of mine coming the other way, who gave me an icy look and merest nod, as he secretly brandished his proverbial knife to figuratively slaughter the current captain of the ship and take over.
   Short taxi ride from Charleston to Coos Bay, past cute wooden houses and blackberry brambles. Rental car from there to Newport two hours north, along the coast but mostly you're not right on the coast so the sea isn't visible. Mainly thick pine forest and occasional bridges over rivers or big inlets from the sea, occasional small seaside towns. The couple was youngish and from Portland. The guy was an army reserve nurse, about to be sent to Korea to train people there, I think the woman may have been a teacher?

Newport - The couple dropped me off by my car, which to my relief had not been towed or ticketed, was left where I left it just beside where the boat had been docked. Had biscuits and gravy at the adorable little cafe that's right there. It's one of my favorite places, I guess I could literally say in the whole world. Just a really cute little cafe in what sort of looks like a little victorian house, right on the waterfront, with really good biscuits and gravy.

   Then I went to Englund Marine, a marine supply store, to get a ten pound spool of seine twine, a tarred twine I've been wishing I had for some time A sailor can fix absolutely anything with seine twine! It's the duct tape of the sea! Also from seine twine you make your Turks-head bracelet that is the secret sign of belonging to the ancient fellowship of sailors. I've had sailors randomly greet me in all sorts of places including once on a bus between Tanzania and Kenya due to the turks-head. It is said you earn the right to wear a turkshead by climbing to the very very very top of the mast, but I think it's also just as much also being able to make it yourself. And because you weave it directly on to your arm it cannot be removed unless cut off. I had removed mine a few years ago over fear of my hand swelled due to bee stings it could be very bad, but since my hand doesn't really swell at all any more I'd been wanting it back, and so as soon as I had a moment wove on the one in the previous link. I'll have to take a new picture tomorrow when the lighting is better, because now that it's not quite so brand new black it looks better I think.

   Does your occupation have any secret signs by which you can recognize a member out in the wilds?

   And then I retraced the trip back down to Coos Bay in my own car (which, I haven't mentioned in awhile, so I'll note I was borrowing me dad's prius). Unfortunately, when Ii got down there, the Lady Washington was out doing maneuvers so I couldn't go make proper goodbyes. But in Coos Bay town itself the other tallship, the caramel-and-blue hulled ketch Hawaiian Chieftain was moored up behind "The Casino." There was a little festival afoot, which is what had attracted the tallships, and also "the world's largest rubber duck" had been conjured up. It's about as tall as maybe a three story building, and the were in the midst of filling it with air. I took a picture but of course my phone later lost it.
   The Chieftain, as it turns out, was actually rafted to a barge thing that was moored to the pilings behind the Casino, but no gangway had been put in place yet and the gap was way too far to even contemplate jumping it. The crew was very busy up on deck doing various things and I happened to see the current captain, Gary, whom I had sailed under on a different vessel (the rather large brig Pilgrim). I called out to him and he came over onto the barge to greet me and express surprise that I was in the country. Two other sailors I've sailed with also came to greet me across the chasm, "Mr Sunshine," a thoroughly amiable older fellow (who's last name is Ray, which combined with his sunny disposition gets his name), and Shane who I think is maybe just a little younger than me and is also pretty nice (and at one time had an LJ even!).


Ugh look at that ten hours of driving and that's not counting the additional two hours of going between Coos Bay and Newport twice.

   From there I had to hoof it down to Davis/Sacramento in the middle of California, so I was off again! Would have greatly preferred to continue down the coast through the redwoods but was pressed for time at this point. Followed pretty much the route in the above map. I've described driving through Oregon a lot in this roadtrip so I won't spend much time on it suffice to say southern Oregon is mostly a land of thick forest and constant big hills / small mountains. Small highway is fun and swings through the landscape, then onto the Five which is more boring. Close to the border the landscape gets quite mountainous.
   Got off in a small town in the mountains near the border to get gas. Since this was still oregon an attendant came out to pump my gas, and she was so extremely cheerful about it and squeegied my windows as well, I felt I should tip her but wasn't sure how much was appropriate nor did I have anything smaller than a ten so I ended up not doing so, and she didn't seem the least bit phased by not getting a tip, cheerfully waving goodbye.
   And then once again a pulled an Australianism. The worst! Everyone's greatest fear when traveling between the countries. I stopped in the gas station driveway to look at my phone, then realized a car was behind me so quickly pulled onto the road and immediately onto the shoulder ... but what I didn't realize is doing this quick unthinking manouver I had pulled on to the LEFT SIDE OF THE ROAD, the side one drives on in Australia. Fortunately I was off on the shoulder but it was disconcerting to find cars passing me close head on! Quickly got to the correct side when a signal gave me a window of no cars on the road.

   Passed Mt Shasta in the waning gloaming light of evening, proceeded along the boring straight road betewen Redding and Davis in the dark -- and I had finished my audiobook so I was bouncing between unsatisfactory radio stations (even with the XM radio the car had!).

   Stopped in at Davis, where I had gone to college, solely to get delicious pizza at Woodstocks pizza there. Verily it was extremely delicious, and packed with students and many drunken students were hanging around outside since the G Street pub is right there. I looked at them all and found it hard to believe I had once been one of them. It seems so long ago now.

   From there I proceeded to Sacramento, just 11 miles across a causeway over rice fields. My friend Gabi is now living there with her mom and stepfather in the suburbs. Gabi (half Uruguayan I believe? Slight of build. Also a former LJer), has taken the unusual step of getting herself artificially inseminated, purposefully not wanting to have some guy have any claim on her kid. It was 9 or 10 when I get there so pretty much we just said our hellos and she showed me to the couch I'd be sleeping on.


Wednesday, May 31st, Sacramento, California - In the morning I met Gabi's little one, still less than a year old. She took about thirty pictures of me awkwardly holding said child and somehow my phone decided not to delete them. Gabi's mom made us breakfast and she kept referring to being part of the resistance to Trump with as much enthusiasm and sincerity as if she was spending her days engaged in partisan warfare. "Yes, but there's still us in the resistance! ... we will resist! ...we're gaining momentum you know! ...he can't keep us down!"
   She believed the repubicans would never ever ever impeach Trump, somethnig I've heard a number of people say, but I think when the republican members of congress realize that no part of their conservative agenda is going to get through with his blinding incompetence AND the stink of corruption is like that of a rotting whale (have you ever smelled a rotting whale? it's pretty bad), they'll absolutely cut the anchor chain on him.



   From there I got back on the highway for the straight boring shot down the central valley on the five. Once again the dried grass was like the fuzz of a freshly shorn golden sheep. Once again I stopped at that roadtrip holy site, the In-N-Out in Kettleman City. Once again I got bogged down in absolutely shocking traffic in the LA area. And finally, as the sun was once again setting, arrived at my parents place in southern Orange County.

   Now hopefully I can knock out my younger brother's wedding in one more entry and be done with this last trip!

aggienaut: (Numbat)

   ( Beginning of this Adventure )



Friday, May 26th - Up in the back of town, where the houses are big and old and built on hills, near a cemetary, I park by what my GPS indicates is my friend Maureen's house. And lo, verily, there she is.
   Maureen, AKA Reen, has auburn hair, blue eyes that sparkle with delight and/or mischief, and a big delightful smile, and an arsenal of expressions that seem vaguely a satire of 50s culture. As I mentioned, I met her the day I got off the boat, and I think I had probably last seen her in Sacramento in 2013 or 14, whereupon we had briefly caught up for coffee. She now works as a lemur at a funeral home in Bellingham, and as such, having just come from work, she was wearing a black or dark blue dress with what we decided to call "a serenity stripe" down each side (apparently it's difficult finding the appropriately somber but not TOO somber clothing for her job).
   "Wait, what!," you might be saying, "lemur?!" Picturing a furry thing with saucer eyes and a barber-pole tail. But you see Lemures in Roman mythology are the "spirits of the restless dead," and since one of her duties is responding at all hours to go retrieve just-deceased persons and "take them into our care" it seemed appropriate and a lot more adorable than calling her a grim reaper. Also there was at one time a lemur snapchat filter which she used which was the best thing ever and I really hope they bring it back.
   She lives in a big decaying old house (I tried to lean again a column by the doorway and realized it wouldn't hold my weight, and in fact the portion of the porch by the door that overhung the hillside didn't quite look safe at all) up in the hills above the center of town, and just around the corner from the cemetary and funeral home where she works. We had to tiptoe through the common areas of her house lest the vengeful spirits housemates be disturbed, and despite our best efforts I believe one of them later griped.

   We immediately proceeded downtown, got an outdoor table at a little restaurant on State Street. Here I pulled another really glaring Australianism. In Australia "entrees" are appetizers (which I've gotta give it to them on this one that does fit the meaning of the word better), and so I was looking at the menu assuming everything under the entree heading was an appetizer and tehre wasn't much left that otherwise looked like a main (maybe some things under "specials?"), and I was just saying "well I don't mean to be a weirdo and order an entree for my main but... [pause in which Reen looks at me a little perplexed] OH MY GOD THEY ARE MAINS"
   Alas I forget what I had but it was quite good. Then we strolled about town a bit. It was fun because I particularly fondly remember Bellingham from when I came here aboard the Chieftain. The marina had been haunted by what we called "demon birds" due to their unearthly screech, next to a park with a memorial to lost fishermen/sailors, which Reen remarked had been sponsored by her employer!
I was in Bellingham on my birthday in 2010 (28th?), and it was quite like that movie Memento -- One minute it was only halfway through the evening, I was getting another drink in a bar on State Street, and then suddenly it was morning and I was in my bunk on the boat, in the blink of an eye, as if I'd been teleported! The rest of the missing evening slowly came back throughout the day as I interrogated people.
   And now seven years later here I was again walking these same streets! Alas we were unable to work the dumpling (perogi) restaurant into the weekend, but that evening we did hit up a MEAD BAR (!!!). They had several meads on tap as well as some weird jazzy-folksy-hippie music act on and lots of people of the grey haired elder-hippie variety, were swaying to and fro and for some reason knew when the right time to clap was even though there didn't seem to be any corresponding stop, pause or crescendo in the music.


File footage of Reen doing a numbat impression

Saturday, May 27th - This day began with this utter deliciousness from local place the Mount Bakery (a nearby snow capped mountain looming up over the city at a distance is Mt Baker). The menu had numerous delicious looking options, but I had the "blackwood benny" (smoked bacon and black pepper among other things) and Reen had the biscuits and gravy. Back in 2010 I visited a very similar restaurant called "Bayou on the Bay," which ALSO had delicious eggs benedicts and omelettes and things. Clearly this is a very good city.
   Other activities in around Bellingham which may or may not have been Saturday or Sunday including walking about a nice forested park just above down (Whatcome Falls), through which a river ran in a deep gorge. People were bathing under a waterfall and then a lot of swimmers were gathered in a swimming hole. I got some pictures I thought were pretty nice but my phone immediately deleted them (and yeah-no I do have the google photos auto backup setup but it deleted them before that could even happen).
   Just south of Bellingham is a state park (Laramie) of trails through a forested bit of the coast, which was nice but had a HECK of a lot of people out enjoying the summer afternoon. Also in the category or Just South of Bellingham is a town called Fairhaven, which when I was on the boat I was completely unaware of since again when boat-bound land distances are insurmountable. Fairhaven was a lot like Bellingham but without stoned grunge-hippies hanging about everywhere. While poking around Fairhaven we found the schooner Zodiac at her moorings, which was yet another reminder of my sailing days since we used to encounter the Zodiac in all sorts of obscure parts of the Puget sound, for example looming suddenly out of the morning fog off San Juan island like some kind of predatory privateer.
   Both Saturday and Sunday we stopped at a dogpark/bar in the afternoon to pet the doggies whilst having a beer or two.
   Saturday we had mexican at a place in Fairhaven. Normally I hold myself to vows to have no Mexican food north of San Francisco, but compared to "mexican food" in Australia I felt anything in America would be thoroughly satisfactory.


Schooner Zodiac in Bellingham Bay, 2010

Sunday, May 28th - Reen dragged me into the underworld along to her work. I saw dead people! Fortunately no one made me pet them, and there wasn't any gross embalming stuff going on. One of the dead people was wearing their nice suit and pink striped socks.

   Then we, with Reen's coworker / best friend Alexandrina and her husband ?? went to poke around Fairhaven again -- this time there was a sort of festival on -- Ski to Sea, some kind of race? ("A 2017 Ski to Sea team consists of eight racers competing in seven different sports: Cross Country Ski, Downhill Ski/Snowboard, Running, Road Bike, Canoe (2 paddlers), Cyclocross Bike, and Sea Kayak.") so there was a festive atmosphere about. We ate at an Americana themed restaurant (burgers of course) in Fairhaven that was also totally delicious.

   I'm sure I'm forgetting things we did, but long story short Bellingham is a delightful place with nice long summer days, delicious food, heaps of delicious beer (there's like at least three little craft breweries in town), and lots of beautiful forest areas to explore in the immediate vicinity.
   Monday may have been a holiday for most of America, (Memorial Day), but turns out people in the memorializing industry have to work that day! So Reen had to work and I had to rush down to catch the boat! Although at this point it was proving a serious problem that I'd be catching the boat in one small seaside town (Newport, Oregon), and riding it to another (Coos Bay, Oregon), and from there I'd need to get to my car but apparently there's NO bus service directly between neighboring seaside towns on the Oregon coast and I'd have to take a bus way inland to Eugene and back out again and it would take something impractical like 24 hours of bus limbo hell. Obviously this is a subject for another entry but I'm mentioning it now to leave it hanging in suspense because at this point I myself was quite in suspense about how this could be done if at all.

   And so, Monday morning, I bid adieu to lovely Bellingham and dear Reen my favorite lemur and began the journey south.

aggienaut: (Numbat)
   ( Beginning of this Adventure )


Friday, May 26th - This morning my plans experienced a last minute change. My dear friend Koriander was finishing a short course in the nearby town of Edmonds at 11 and proceeding immediately south to go get back aboard the Lady Washington, and I was going to catch up with her there on Monday, but since I was literally going to be passing right by Edmonds right when she was getting out we made plans to at least briefly meet up.

   Edmonds turned out to be about half an hour from my friend Mike's place, where I woke up. The entire trip was through urbanized space on raised multi-lane freeways full of morning traffic. I had been in Edmonds with the boat in 2010, and I recall people asking "so how do you liked Seattle??" and thinking "we're not IN Seattle, weirdo" ... it IS practically in Seattle if you have a car, but when we were boat bound with only our two feet for shore transportation Seattle may as well have been on another continent.
   I rather fondly remember Edmonds from my earlier visit. It has a small-towny little downtown of the seaside-tourist-destination variety, surrounded closely by sleepy suburbs. Perusing my 2010 entries I said of it "[it] isn't a miserable soulless place like Everett" (next town up the coast and previous place we'd been on that journey), and there was one bar we really liked of which I wrote "...and the bartenders consist of the owner, his wife, and his son. The bartender informed us 'treat this place like your livingroom and we'll treat you like family,' something that might seem like trite crap at a corporate chain but it feels pretty accurate here." I would have liked to pop into that bar this time but I couldn't remember and hadn't recorded the name, nor could I remember quite specifically where it was. Notable events of our stay here in 2010 were the boat's birthday, a zombie attack, waking up in the middle of the night and bolting out of my bunk as a crewmember screamed for help only to find he was having a nightmare, and one of our returns to dock, which required coming in in reverse was accompanied by the distance being called by crewmember Noah standing on the aft rail: "30 feet, 25 feet, 20 feet, 15, 14, ... 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 GET DOWN GET DOWN ::CRACK!!::" as we all dove for cover as the mizzen boom which overhangs the back shattered against some structure behind us.
   It was a beautiful sunny summer morning and as I came into the suburban streets of Edmonds the snow capped Olympic Mountains stood out clearly across the sound. Parked downtown around 10:50 and then googled "maritime training Edmonds" to try to figure out where Kori might be, and when Compass Courses, with whom she'd taken some of her other maritime license related classes (she has the 100 Ton Master's License! She's no longer merely "Sailor Cilantro," she's "Captain Koriander!") I knew it was the place so I started to walk that way. As I walked by a shop downtown a really cool map caught my eye that looked like a marine navigation chart very elegantly all decorated up (the above picture of the map portion showing Seattle and Edmonds is from the very map), but I had to keep steaming along to meet Kori.


I swear I parked and walked into the middle f the street to take this, really

   Kori claaims we haven't seen eachother in three years, I find that hard to believe but have been unable to remember a meeting that would contradict that timeline. She is Hawaiian, shortish, with large brown eyes. I was waiting for her in front of the place but she snuck out the back and caught me by surprise with a flanking maneuver. Greatbighugs ensued. She really was in quite a hurry so we hopped in her car, the SS Minnow, and proceeded to a Hawaiian fish/sushi restaurant nearby where she was gonna get lunch for herself and her grandparents whom she'd be immediately going to see. I really don't like fish and was sure there'd be something non-fish there despite her doubts ... yeah no she was right, there was no non-fish option so I decided just to eat later. The offerings looked very good though if one is into fish! So if you're ever in Edmonds looking for good fish... I can't for the life a me remember the name of this place and even googling and looking at maps isn't helping.

   All too soon she had to run, but we had plans for me to join her on the boat on Monday so hopefully it wouldn't be long. I then went back to the store where I'd seen that super keen map, and I purchased the heck out of it! It now graces my wall here and I am endlessly pleased with this reminder of all the beautiful places in the Puget Sound area that I've sailed to.


Picture from 2010, would have liked to see this statue again

   I had wanted to drive down to the marina to see the exact area I'd lived for a week or so aboard the Hawaiian Chieftain but for some reason there was insane traffic down there and I saw that it looked like if I went all the way to the marina it would probably take me half an hour to slog back out in the line of cars barely inching out of the marina dead end for whatever reason. So instead I got back on the freeway to slog through freeway traffic that was even at noon pretty congested. Headed north just a little bit, I think I was in Lynnwood which is also on the above map portion, when I saw the answer to my lunchtime stomach growling prayers ... FIVE GUYS burgers!
   People from the northwest are often heard to utter such blasphemy as that Five Guys is as good as, or ::gasp:: "better" ::crosses self in the manner of the In-N-Out arrow:: than In-N-Out. I will grant that Five Guys is extremely good, but my burger, fries (an obscene amount thereof!) and drink I think ran me like $18, whereas the same at In-N-Out would be like 5 bucks. So this is like comparing apples with ... much more expensive apples that are almost as good. That's almost as expensive as a burger in Australia! (But infinitely better than any burger I've ever had in Aus).



   Then I finally got some distance under the wheels. Google maps is now telling me the total distance of this day's routing should be two hours of driving but the freeway traffic was pretty bad until I was probably halfway to Bellingham. It was the Friday before a three day weekend so I suspect maybe a whole lot of people were trying to make an early escape and headed north to Canada.
   Anyway I zipped up about 2/3rds of the distance to Bellingham, to the Skagit River Brewery in a little inland town once I had finally broken out of the extended urban sprawl of the Seattle area. It was mid afternoon by now, still a nice sunny summer day, and I had a few hours to kill until Maureen got off work, so I settled down on their nice outdoor seating area and had a beer or two. The food looked pretty good and I was almost regretting I was full of Five Guys, though 5G isn't something to terribly regret (except maybe in the wallet!). Now I feel my journalism is really falling short here because surely I owe you a detailed beer review but I can't find any indication of what specifically I had other than that it was an imperial stout that was either made with maple syrup or simply alleged to have "hints of maple" in the taste. Clearly I need to go back.

   And then it was time to continue on up to Bellingham! Skagit River Brewery is just half an hour from Bellingham and this time there wasn't traffic. Before I knew it I was no longer in open flatlands but surrounded by forests and hills, and after a turn or two I was coming around the back of Bellingham, or so it rather felt. Past a cemetary and one more turn into a neighborhood to Maureen's place and ::fades to black:: TO BE CONTINUED! Somehow just getting there took an entry length of writing and Bellingham is so awesome it's not gonna be any shorter.


The brig Lady Washington comes in to Edmonds marina, 2010

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