The Agrinautica

Tuesday, November 28th - Woke up realizing I'd made a classic mistake. I'd plugged my phone in overnight but in Australia there's often a switch by the plug to turn it on, which i had not done, so i was beginning a planned long day of sightseeing with a 2% battery! Left it charging while we had breakfast at a bakery down the street and it was up to 60% by the time we actually left the hotel, which was better but i still felt i couldn't use my phone much.

We walked from our hotel about a mile and a half to the ferry stop at the waterfront. The old downtown fremantle area near the waterfront was very nice with classic old buildings with wraparound balconies. It looked clean and renovated and altogether like probably a nice area in the evening with all its bars and restaurants.

The colloquial shorthand for Fremantle is apparently Freo, and we saw some plays on the Spanish frio (cold), i suspect, in signs for "Freo ice cream!" and "Freo cold beer!" (I suspect it was influenced by the Spanish in that signage that didn't reference coldness didn't tend to use "freo")

In my in depth research (by which i mean reading the history sections of both their Wikipedia entries) I'm still sort of unclear on the relationships of Fremantle and Perth. Apparently they were both founded as independent towns within months of eachother in 1829; Fremantle at the mouth of the Swan River and Perth about ten miles in. At some point they grew large enough to merge and now the metropolitan area is referred to as Perth, with me course a Perth proper CBD, and Fremantle as the river mouth neighborhood.

There seemed to be four different ferry companies offering transport to Rottnest Island ("Rotto"), with departures at least every half hour and possibly every ten minutes at peak times. Our 9am ferry seemed to be bracketed by other ferry traffic impatient to use the dock.

Weather all day was nice, mostly sunny but a few very brief smatterings of light precipitation. Temperatures in the 70s f / 20s c. Trip to Rottnest Island about forty minutes.

The first Europeans to come to Rottnest Island were the Dutch in 1619, and the name that finally stuck was given by a Dutch captain in 1696, bestowing upon it the beautiful poetic name of "rat nest Island" in Dutch. The "rats" in question are quokkas, adorable little round cat sized marsupials who lack the good sense to fear humans.



Immediately upon reaching the island these adorable things could be seen hopping about, and truly lacking instincts for self preservation one put its head right under my slightly upraised boot to snuffle at a leaf. Fortunately i saw it. We sat and had lunch and a nearby toddler tried repeatedly to jump on one's tail, but this one did have the good sense to seek shelter under me. It was sorely tempting to pat them as they look so soft but signs warn this is strictly forbidden. Though again small children seemed to take no notice and in most cases their parents seemed to take no notice of their children's activities.



There were a number of ravens (?) perched in the fig trees around the eating area, "practicing their Norwegian vowels" as mom cleverly described it.

Another fact we marveled at was when the guide at the lighthouse told us Rottnest had been connected to the mainland only 7,000 years ago. And aboriginal artifacts dating back 30,000 years have been found on the island. They used to walk here. They saw the sea levels rise to separate the island. Well it was probably imperceptibly slowly but at some point in some aboriginals life time it was possible to walk there and then it wasn't.

The guide also said the sea levels rose higher than they currently are since then and only the tops of the hills were still above water. I'd never heard of a global higher than now sea level, and google just now says the last time that was the case was 130,000 years ago so as I've often found take what guides say with a grain of salt. But other sources do bare out that the island was connected to the mainland 7,000 years ago.

"Aboriginal prisoners contributed to agricultural development of the island" a sign says. Wait what. We all know European prisoners were sent to Australia and did a lot of the manual labor of the early colonies, but "aboriginal prisoners contributed to" sounds a lot like a nice roundabout way of saying "we enslaved the locals." I noticed numerous references to aboriginal prisoners on various informational signs but if there was a source of broad overview information on the island i missed it. But let me quote wikipedia for you:

Between 1838 and 1931, Aboriginal prisoners held on Rottnest Island were held in deplorable conditions and subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment. [...] Although slavery, as legally defined, never existed in Western Australia, the "assignment" system effectively implemented a system of forced labour, and was condemned by Reverend J. B. Gribble and the Anti-Slavery Society. Aboriginal people who refused assignment were sent to Rottnest Island to be "civilised", and were used in chain-gangs to perform hard labour including farming, quarrying, and collecting salt.[35] Most of the island's historic Settlement – including Government House (Hotel Rottnest), the church, Salt Store, museum, gift shop, original waterfront cottages and The Quod – was built by forced Aboriginal prison labour working under extremely harsh conditions.[36]

Apparently 3600 aboriginals came through the island.

Exploring the island by bike seems immensely popular, with mass bikes coming over on the ferry and bicyclists all over the island. Also there's a bus that goes around clockwise, $25 per person for an all day pass. It occurs to me just now i should try to describe the size of the island but as I've discussed with my friends none of us has a very good sense for measurements of surface area. It's 19 square kilometers, which is 1900 hectares, or 4695 acres or 7.3 square miles. Perhaps the important fact is it takes the bus an hour to circle the island.



The island is hilly, and covered with variously low shrubby trees or heathy bushes, and crisscrossed with trails. We proceeded about a quarter way around the island on the bus and got off by the lighthouse, which is near the center at the highest point. On neighboring hills there's a WWII lookout tower and gunnery observation post. The lighthouse is a nice tall white tower, still in use, a tour was beginning in five minutes but we didn't go on it. Went for a walk back from the tower towards the main settlement where we started. It was pleasant. Found very little tourist traffic away from the bike trails, in fact I'm not sure we saw anyone else on foot in several kilometers of walking. Saw some more quokkas but i think they're definitely concentrated by main settlement. Walked past some salty ponds where they used to make the aboriginals mine salt.



Got back on the bus and this time rode it all the way around the island. While at the far end of Rottnest Island we were 15,104 km (9,385 miles) from my parents home address in Southern California. This is certainly the farthest from home they've ever been. This is further than even my travels in Uganda, Ethiopia and Nairobi, though Zanzibar was 16,145 km (10,032 miles). (If you're curious, the furthest you can get from Los Angeles is the French island of Reunion, 18,501 km (11,496 miles) from my parents home address). Incidentally, my dad having grown up in Rochester New York, this is very very close to the furthest land from there in the world he could possibly reach. The exact furthest point is 100km from where we are now. For any other Americans from the east coast who want to go as far from home as possible, Cape Leeuwin in West Australia is it.



Then we returned to the main settlement and dad went for a brief swim at a nearby beach. Then to the ferry landing and left via a 4pm ferry. If you wanted to stay on the island there's plenty of holiday cottages, though i don't know how much they are.

Walked back to our hotel. Either people are very friendly in this area and I'm too cynical, or lots of people are on drugs because once walking to the dock in the morning and twice walking back wild feral looking people greeted us in a friendly forthright manner like they knew us, to which i responded with a somewhat brusque "how's goin" as i steamed past careful not to get drawn into a conversation.

The hotel restaurant was open and we went in there for dinner, which was actually extremely good (traditional pub fare w a bit of an Irish leaning as it was an "Irish pub"). There was an Asian woman who appeared to be on drugs dancing by herself by what looked like an ATM for placing bets on the races on the TVs. Eventually she left but was replaced by several similarly disreputable looking guys hovering around the machine as if it was a warm fireplace in a frozen winter.

Continuing the Apinautica from Dubai

Marooned in Egypt
   Up at 3:30am for the 5am departure to Egypt. After four hours of sitting on the floor by the gate we finally board and take off at 0900. This of course causes us to miss the Cairo to Nigeria flight by several hours, and I find myself sitting on the floor at the Cairo terminal for several more hours, along with the surprisingly large number of other Nigeria-bound passengers effected. A fully stocked concession kiosk stands tauntingly near us, but only accepts Egyptian pounds. None of us have Egyptian pounds, and so we can just gaze hungrily at the snacks we can’t have as we uncomfortably wait for the airline to tell us what they’ll do about us.
   “There’s not another flight until tomorrow, we’ll put you up in a hotel until then, when you hear your name called please come up to the desk” they finally announce.
   “Oh no you don’t!” a British citizen immediately approaches the desk, “I’ve been through this before and don’t want anything to do with it again, give me back my passport, I’ll make my own arrangements!” The rest of us looked at eachother, this is a bit ominous.
   I’m developing a headache and general achey feeling. They take us to a hotel, which actually seems fairly nice. They want to put us two to a room but Nigerians in business suits strenuously object with the battlecry “I am a business owner!” until the hotel relents.
   I fall into my hotel bed and sleep till dinner time, at which point I wake up feeling thoroughly awful but drag myself down to the restaurant not wanting to miss dinner. There’s a buffet but nothing to drink, not even water, is provided. The Nigerian business owners, complaining that their business class tickets entitle them to more than this, refuse to pay for water, but eventually a friendly young Pakistani-Nigerian fellow pays for all their waters. I’m barely able to pick at a fruit salad as raging indigestion has joined my ailments.
   Four hour flight to Abuja, during which I have to get up and go to the lavatory at least every half hour, unfortunately for the two people who had to get up every time to let me outt.
   Arriving in Abuja, my luggage of course does not arrive. At the lost luggage desk it’s like a reunion from Cairo, all of us from the previous day’s missed flight hadn’t had our luggage arrive.


   While traveling internationally one seems to enter a strange dimension where time and date have little meaning – is it the time in the place where I left or the time where I arrive or something in between? When I reorient myself in Abuja it’s April 4th, I had left my house in Australia on Monday morning and now it’s Thursday afternoon, it had taken 70 hours of travel.
   Though I felt too unwell to properly appreciate it at the time, when I arrived in Abuja I had actually completed a circumnavigation of the world, having the been there the previous year, and having since then kept traveling west to the US, west to Australia and west again to arrive back at Abuja.

Chapter VII - Nigeria III - Sakiland
Thursday, April 4th, 2013 – “The King of Saki is looking forward to meeting you! He had heard many good things about your previous project in Ibadan and has been looking forward to your arrival for months!” John from The Organization tells me as we drive from the airport to the hotel. John is the same age as me, 30, and will accompany me on this project. He mentions that he had had to work as a volunteer at Non-Profits for many years before his resume was impressive enough to get this job.

   I feel very flattered that a king should want to see me, and in the mean time, here is the literal princess still working in the hotel lobby. She is looking gorgeous in her elegant clothes, glittering gold jewelry, broad smile of brilliantly white teeth as she greets me and brown eyes sparkling confidently. She remembers me as if it had been just yesterday we’d last met. “We should hang out … maybe when I’m back from Saki” I say, I still feel too unwell to contemplate socializing even with gorgeous princesses. My friend the security guard appears to no longer work here, and the receptionist doesn’t know his number.

   The next day John picks me up to take me to the airport for the domestic flight to Oyo State. He’s running on Nigerian time, which stresses me out but surely he knows his country – we get to the airport at 3:00pm for the 3:00pm flight. Nope the flight has left, and there’s only one a day. But on the bright side, here’s my luggage arrived!
   I’m very frustrated, this project is sandwiched in before a project in Egypt so there were only 9 training days but now that’s been reduced to 7.
   “The King of Saki is really looking forward to your arrival!” Yes well. But there’s a bright side to another evening in Abuja, Princess Nwaji is keen to hang out, though I still feel very unwell. She’s happy to come chill with me in my room and watch a movie, though I still feel like an invalid and still have to keep running to the bathroom. I fear I’m not at my most charismatic.

Saturday, April 6th - We once again arrive at the airport 5 minutes after the flight’s scheduled departure but that’s okay because it doesn’t depart for another hour. From there it takes four hours to travel 100 miles north through Nigerian scrub, zigzagging across the road to avoid the enormous potholes. Finally we arrive in Saki. The guest house is in a quiet government compound surrounded by lots of space and trees. There’s a small welcoming party is waiting outside the guest-house which includes two or three people I had met last year in Ibadan.
   “The King of Saki has been greatly looking forward to meeting you … but he died yesterday.”

Week 4 - November
   The sun, quite impertinently, refuses to set over the ocean. This is contrary to what I had grown up accepting as the only proper solar behavior. In California it’s taken for granted the sun retires for the night beyond the briny deeps – but not here, here it hides its colorful daily finale behind the tangled branches of mangroves and eucalypts.
   Not one to be out-witted by a giant ball of gas, I swim out beyond the waves, and watch the sun set from there. As I slowly backstroke through the warm water, the sky fades through ever darker blues. The silhouettes of large fruit bats flit about, before it fades entirely to black and a stunning array of sparkling stars in unfamiliar constellations. Finally I reluctantly leave the balmy water and walk the hundred yards to my empty house.

   I try to outwit the sun by getting up early enough for sunrise, darting out to the beach in the grey pre-dawn light, the sand soft and cool around my bare feet, but, one step ahead, the wily bastard actually rises, slow and yellow like an egg-yoke, over a headland which curves out into the Coral Sea. The sun always wins here.

   By 6:30 every day I'm headed to work, sweating, with the windows down, already too hot for hot coffee. The first and often only human interaction of my day would be at the bakery, where I stop for a meat pie for breakfast. “How are you?” I ask the proprietress.
   “Thanks,” she says.
   “How was your weekend?” I ask,
   “Thanks” she says.
   “Hear about the storm they say is coming?” I ask.
   “Thanks” she says.
   During the rest of my day I likely won't talk to anyone. I don't know what my phone's ringtone sounds like, no one has ever called me.

   The beehives are mostly among the cane fields. Twenty-one trailers, just the skeletal frames of trailers really, each with a row of beehives on each side. They're parked in twos and threes, surrounded by solid walls of sugarcane like a hedge maze. It's rather like giant grass, like perhaps you've been shrunk to the size of a bee. Every few weeks they harvest the cane and burn the debris, so the fields become walls of flame, and then you're surrounded by open space again, until the cycle repeats. In some places the fields are bordered by impassably thick forest, in which insects make a constant loud buzz like high tension wires. There's a bird that makes a sound so much like someone whistling for my attention that I turn around every time. There's nothing there but a four foot goanna lizard giving me a wry look from the scrub as if to say, “As if there's anyone else here, mate.”

   Twenty-four beehives per trailer. Five hundred hives altogether. Approximately thirty million bees. Commercial beekeeping smells of diesel and is caked mud on your boots. It is hard work in the hot sun. It is working for crotchety salty bosses as you slowly become one yourself. It is getting stung until getting stung is the normal condition of life. My predecessor in this job had to leave after he lost his eye and half his sanity. I'm told he's still seen around town on occasion, randomly, like a restless ghost.

   My boss, the farm owner, reminds me of Steve Irwin -- he has the same short boxy stature, the same exuberance, except rather than for animals and conservation his enthusiasm is entirely directed toward profitably growing vegetables. Everything he says is peppered with the most shockingly profane analogies, of a sort that will leave you pondering for the rest of the day if it's anatomically possible and the epistemological implications. Despite being one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area, I have never seen him wear shoes. He has this unnerving propensity to appear like an unholy genie the moment anything goes wrong despite his properties being spread over thirty kilometers. Someone rear ends my work truck? Oh there's Trevor coming around the corner. Truck gets stuck in the mud, oh look Trevor is just coming along.



January 2013
The rain is pounding on the pub's roof and cascading down in waterfalls in front of the large windows.
   “Last run of the courtesy shuttle!” a staffmember announces, even though it's only mid afternoon. I hurry outside and climb into the van waiting under the covered pick up area.
   “They think the road out of town is about to flood so I have to get out before then if I want to get home to Bundaberg” explains the driver. The van plows through water like a motorboat, and in front of my house I slide open the door and jump out into about two feet of water before climbing up my driveway. I assess I have another foot or two before it reaches my house.
   For three days I can do nothing but watch the rain coming down diagonally in front of the windows, mop up the water coming under the door, and nervously check the water level in the street. Debris and branches flow down the street like a river.
   I'm alone with only the radio news reports to connect me to society.
   “Water is over the roof of the Bundaberg grocery store”
   “17 helicopters working overnight evacuated 7000 from rooftops in Bundaberg”
   And then the power goes out. Now I'm alone with the pounding rain and the rising water, no news.

   I'm jarred awake in the night by an ear piercing alarm, I tumble out of my bedroom in the dark fearing the worst, only to find the smoke alarm has chosen this moment to run out of batteries.
   I wake in the morning to sun streaming in the windows. Some neighbor kids are swimming in the street. Power is still out. I go walking around “town” to survey the damage. Moorepark was never much of a town at the best of times, two blocks of suburban houses wedged between the beach and a lagoon. Many residents are out walking because there's nothing else to do. Helicopters land and take off on the grassy central square. We're still completely surrounded by water. I grab the last three cans of stew amid the bare shelves of our small grocery store, and then collect coconuts on the beach.
   Every evening I walk to the edge of town and watch the sun set in an orangish-red fireball into the vast inland sea where the surrounding cane fields and road to Bundaberg had been. For three days, under blue skies the waters around me continue to rise, as water continues to flow down from a vast inland catchment area. When the waters finally fall, it's all at once overnight like a plug being pulled. One morning at 6am to my utter surprise someone is pounding on my door. I jump out of bed to answer it, and there is Trevor, shoe-less as always, grinning at me.
   “Mate, the water's receded, time to get back to work! I checked on some of the hives already and they seem alri--” and then his eye fixes on the smoke alarm hanging open “--mate, mate! Your smoke alarm ain't got no bloody battery in it! You can't have it hanging open like that! You know what's going to happen?” he pauses for just a moment as I stare at him blearily trying to catch up with what he is on about, “you know what? Your house is gonna catch fire and you're not going to realize because your alarm ain't working, and then the fire brigade is going to come, and you know what, they won't care a fig about you because you didn't have a working smoke alarm, and neither will I! You're going to die and they're just gonna go out and bury your body out back like a dead wallaby and that'll be that.”
   I had been awake for thirty seconds. Last I knew I was on an island, and now it’s 6am and here is Trevor with some fascinating extemporaneous speculative fiction I am totally not prepared for yet.

   A surreal scene awaits me in the formerly flooded lands. I drive past tin skiffs tied to telephone polls. An entire house sitting in an intersection. Dead fish laying around my beehives. By a miracle all the beehives survived.

   Soon life is back to normal. Sixty hour weeks in the bee mines. In the evenings the sun slants sideways through the forests, bathing everything in a warm golden light. Sometimes the summer sun is already setting by the time I head home. When I'm running the honey extracting machinery in the corrugated metal extracting shed, it's an eighteen hour day –because it takes the machinery over an hour to heat up it's inefficient to do less-- so I emerge long after dark, into the fresh night air covered from head to foot in honey, to find the world illuminated by the moon as if by a floodlight. Just the cane fields and the metal shed under the moon and stars, it might have looked the same a hundred years earlier.
   At night the narrow muddy tracks amid the cane truly feel like a labyrinth. When I get home to my empty house, I make myself something quick to eat and walk out to the beach, where I sit in the sand under the stars, watching the lightning on the horizon as I eat. Sometimes I think I have it pretty good. Sometimes I feel I am serving a sentence of exile.



February 2013
   I’ve been working hard, getting paid well, and being responsible for an entire 500 hive operation is fairly accomplished for a beekeeper, but I can’t help but wonder, is this what I want to be doing with my life? I had once dreamed of a career in the public sector benefitting society in a greater manner than simply producing honey for profit. Now I worked 72 hours a week the same thing day in and out stretching to eternity.
   A job posting came to my attention, someone sent it to me. A “crop protection agent” ‘working for a national organization in the United States, attached to a university, inspecting beehives, liaising between commercial beekeepers and university labs to help improve bee health. Must be an experienced beekeeper, willing to travel. It sounds like my dream job. I apply.
   The next morning I have a response, they think I sound very qualified. They’ll call next month to interview me. I spend the next month daydreaming about this upcoming job. I must get it, it would be too heartbreaking not to get.


March 2013
   They’ll interview me by skype at 12 Eastern Standard Time, which I triple check to be sure it’s 4am my time. A panel of literally the half dozen biggest names in beekeeping in the United States!
   I test my internet connection 12 hours earlier and it for some reason isn’t working at all. Finally it begins working with no particular reason why it didn’t. I hope it will be working at the time of the interview! I get up at 3am and make coffee and breakfast, put on a dress shirt and tie but retain the pajama bottoms. I didn’t know if it was going to be a video call or not, as it turns out it wasn’t.
   It seems to go very well:
   "normally we ask how people are with lots of travel but...",
   "normally we ask if people think they can handle working in inclement conditions but...",
   "normally we ask if people are sure they'll be able to handle the hard work involved in lifting beehives and working in an apiary but..."

   And its over. I think it went well. They’ll interview the finalists in Chico California in May. No problem I’ve got a project in Nigeria (I am told the king of Sakiland is eager to meet me) and in Egypt in April; instead of returning to Australia I’ll just travel from there to California if invited. I thoughtfully sip my coffee as outside the darkness slowly lifts towards morning.


April 2013
   I leave my keys and the remaining rent money on the kitchen table and head out barefoot down the beach on a journey to circumnavigate the world, from which I may or may not return. Not without boots of course but carrying them so I could feel the sand here for potentially the last time. Some coworkers from the farm who give me a ride to Bundaberg town joke “if I were you I wouldn’t return!” and I just smile, I’ve left everything in order in case I don’t but as far as my boss knows I plan to return.



###

   Having now about 46,000 words written, which I think will be about a third of the total, I sent a link to what I have so far (in one consolidated google doc) to a publisher of beekeeping related books yesterday. This morning he had written me back asking for an outline, which I'm sending him so we'll see how it goes. I'm not sure what I might hope to get back from him at this point other than possibly encouragement.

   In Theory on Monday I'd take the train to Albury, 7.5 hours, and then drive from there to Euston (5.5 hours), and that would be that. Not so simple it turns out.

   In the morning (6:11am!) I found googlemaps directing me not to my local train station but bus stop. I don't know how it knows when the train has been replaced by a bus (or "coach" as they call it to sound more classy) but all one can do is trust google maps implicitly. So road the train-replacement-bus about forty min to an hour in to Waurn Ponds on the outskirts of Geelong, where we were all able to transfer on to a train. Train from there to Melbourne's Southern Cross station (1 hour, 25 min). Had about 40 minutes there (8:45 - 9:26) which was perfect for grabbing a hot cheese-and-ham croissant at a station cafe for breakfast. Then train another hour and a half north to the town of Seymour (10:56). It seemed like half the train's occupants got out here, but a lot of them must have been ending their journey there because only two v-line (train company) coaches were boarding passengers for onward journeys, and the Albury bound (pronounced Aubrey) bus was less than a third full, one person per row-side. Two hours on this bus headed east north east to Albury.

   I thought I'd be popping in to the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) office there to get oriented/inducted/whatever but clarifying it via email I was informed I was just to go to the car rental place there to pick up a car. Which, being as Albury is a substantial distance the wrong direction from my final destination I thought the whole reason I was coming here was because it was the closest DPI office to me. Anyway, walked from the train station to the downtown area to have lunch at a Vietnamese place. Seemed like a nice town, weather was pleasantly in the 20s/70s c/f. Car rental place was 3.1 km out of town, I didn't feel like walking it, for one thing that would add time I couldn't afford to add on to an already long journey. Uber didn't come up with anything so had to call a yellow taxi. The journey up to this point had cost me $18 in train fares, this taxi cost me $23. Hopefully I'll be reimbursed -- the DPI had said they couldn't cover my travel outside of NSW but Albury was in state so..
   Taxi driver was an immigrant from Pakistan (15 years ago). It's funny, being a fellow immigrant, I always get a happy feeling of comraderie from fellow immigrants whereever they're from. We're a secret club.

   Got the rental car, and then it was a 5.5 hour drive from there west to the final destination of Euston, through small towns and small rural highways. I was surprised by how few other cars were on the road, even passing through the small towns the streets seemed deserted. Sun set. I was afraid of hitting kangaroos but didn't see any, just a fox that cheekily crossed the road just in front of me.

   Arrived at the hotel at 20:24 -- 14 hours after setting out! I've been on plenty of 14 hour flights, people act like thats a shocking and miserable amount of time to be on a flight -- I can tell you 14 hours on a flight is sheer paradise compared to 14 hours of coach-train-coach-taxi-car.

The hotel here is gaudy like a casino, and indeed has a section off the spacious restaurant portion full of slot machines (it is after all the "Euston Club Resort," though we're staying in the "Euston Club Motel" section).

Checked in to my room and then returned to the restaurant as i was by now very overdue for dinner. Kitchen was closed of course but there was a very decent large meat pie on a warming rack i was able to get -- but not before being sternly chastised for wearing a hat. I don't know if it's a literal law that hats can't be worn in "clubs" or this is just a piece of etiquette Australians feel very strongly about but, while i don't think it's enforced in pubs or restaurants, anything that quantifies as any sort of "club" will remind you to take your hat off in a tone dripping with poisonous disdain.

And my "schooner" (half pint?) of (alcoholic) ginger beer cost $13 (roo bucks), which i felt was a bit high!

And that was my Monday. Having called and texted our team leader with no success in attempting to find out what we were doing the next day or when and where to meet, I went to bed without having any idea what was in store the next day.

Sunday, September 10th - Let us begin with the traditional in-flight movie reviews:

17 Again - The fact that I watched this movie at all and moreover kept watching it is a testament to the poor movie selection on the Latam Chile to New Zealand flight. That and the movie it was supposedly similar to "Big" had been a good classic, but hey it had Tom Hanks who can do no wrong. Anyway this movie was supposed to be like an inverse of Big, where the protagonist becomes 17 again. Every aspect of the plot was cheesy, every point it tried to make was exaggerated to the point of eyerolling. I thought this Matthew Perry was supposed to be a good actor but he was shit, everything about it was shit, F

Sisu - On the Qantas NZ - Aus flight I first watched this film Sisu about a man prospecting and digging for gold in northern Finland in 1944. He finds gold but then runs into a band of retreating Nazis who want to kill him and take his gold. We find out that he is a legendary former Finnish commando and what follows is sort of like Inglorious Basterds in that its a fun sort of revelling in Nazis getting the shit killed out of them. The story moved along, the specific developments of the story (how he kills nazis and evades them) were often interesting and creative. My one quibble was that towards the end (spoiler alert) it seemed increasingly like literally nothing could kill him, until he actually survives a plane crash that utterly destroys the plane but he somehow climbs out of the crater relatively unscathed. THAT was a bit much, and made me wonder if they actually were trying to convey that he actually _was_ immortal (they had earlier said that the Russians called him Koschoi the Deathless). Despite that I give it an A-, it was fun.

"Guy Ritchie's The Covenant - okay first off I feel like prominently putting the director's name in the movie title is an incredibly wankery move. All I know about Guy Ritchie is that he made a terrible King Arthur adaptation I had the misfortune of seeing and that plus his name being in the title of this movie makes me suspect he's a total douche. But despite that I watched this movie and it was very good. It reminded me of some other movie I saw I can't quite remember where American soldiers had to escape from Taliban pursuers in Afghanistan after a raid went awry. Anyway thats what happens here plus at the end then the protagonist, Jake Gyllenhall, needs to go back and rescue his translator but we landed when I still had half an hour left so I missed that part. A-


   Okay so landed in Melbourne at around 8am. Proceeded through passport control to the baggage claim. As bags kept coming out mine didn't come, I joked with my parents via text that of course mine is always last. But then there were no more coming out and mine still hadn't come. Round and round the conveyor went but no more bags came down. There were about ten of us still waiting which gave me hope that maybe there was a whole cart still waiting to be unloaded to the conveyor but the time stretched on without anything else coming out, 9:00 9:10 ... on a hunch I asked the other people still waiting where their flight had originated -- "South America .. Chile." Yep, all of us were from the Chile flight. But I don't think it was everyone from the Chile flight, black hearted as I am I would have liked to have seen that couple that had been in a hysterical hurry and cutting through lines in Auckland, but sadly they were not among us. Finally (at 9:40) as a group we went to the baggage complains window. That also took forever as there was one person to help us and each person seemed to take 10-15 minutes.
   At least the mystery seemed to have been resolved, as one after another the employee confirmed people's baggage hadn't been registered as loaded on to the airplane. Except! When it came to mine, it was listed as having been loaded on our flight! I went back and looked, the employee went back and looked, it was not there. So now we really don't know where my luggage is. Fortunately there's nothing hugely valuable in my luggage except it's nearly all my "socks and jocks," I might have to go to K-mart and resupply to make it through the week if it doesn't come in a day or two.

   And with what seemed like a cruel irony, the line to get out of the baggage claim had grown quite long with some other flights so after finally finishing with the lost luggage claim I had to go wait in a long line for biosecurity could inspect the luggage I don't have (there's no skipping this). Fortunately though that line looked real long it only took about fifteen minutes, but it was 10:24 now by the time I finally got out of the baggage claim. Took the direct bus that runs between the airport and the central (Southern Cross) train station in Melbourne. Arrived at Southern Cross around 11:00, but there wouldn't be a train going to my village until 13:00. But that would be a perfect window to get lunch. Asked google for "burgers near me" and I noted that while I was primarily looking for hte best star rating, one that was close with a high rating I felt disinclined to go to solely because google had served me up a "sponsored result" for it at the top of the page, and thus I realized I'm actually biased _against_ something I see an ad for. But I reasoned it DID have the highest star rating of anything nearby so I'd try to overlook the fact that an ad for them had been put in front of me. It was actually quite good, though $27 for a burger, fries and drink, yikes, we're not in [Colombia] anymore Toto!

   Back to the train station waiting room, where despite charging during the flight my phone battery expended itself with my phone only at around 30%, and no charging plugs here in the waiting room (looks like they'd purposely covered over all the plugs lest riffraff charge things here), so this would have to last me until I got home! Train departed at 13:00, arrived at Geelong station art 14:00, whereupon I had to change to a train-replacement-bus and that got me to my station right at 15:00 (I swear all these things were in fact on or within a few minutes of such round numbers), walked from there to my house whereupon I arrived at 15:24, 7.5 hours after my plane came in!

   Well now it's 21:16 and I'm exhausted. I sure hope my luggage comes tomorrow!!