Costa packet, probably

My goodness, that scurrilous Schettino, captain of the liner Costa Concordia, is such a cliché Italian coward that he's single-handedly revived all those old wartime jokes like the Italian flag being a white cross on a white background, and Italian tanks having four reverse gears and one forward in case of attack from behind. So thank goodness for the doughty coastguard captain Gregorio De Falco, ripping into him in such a robust fashion: the man's a hero, and more than cancels Schettino out.

From the details that are emerging of the organisation of the ship, and even its design, Italian cruisers are going to struggle to recover from such bad publicity - but the one I've travelled on, the Silversea ship Silver Whisper, was excellent. Small but perfectly-formed, it carried only 382 passengers, so it was nothing like the vast white bricks - like the Concordia and worse - that seem to be the trend these days, where you could spend a week without sighting the sea. We got on in Hong Kong, a splendid port to sail from, and were cosseted and pampered for the following week until we left the ship, reluctantly, in Shanghai - also an impressive port to sail into, which we could, being so svelte, right into the centre past all those extraordinary buildings.

The captain was Italian, not that we saw much of him, but the cruise director, whom we did, was too, and had such a comically thick accent that the Trivial Pursuit afternoons were especially challenging as we struggled not just to think of the answers, but to decipher the questions in the first place.To hear him mangle Don Quixote into 'donkey shoty' was to be totally flummoxed. But it was all good fun, and the ship was so friendly and luxurious, and the food so good, and the complimentary wine bottomless, and the bed so superbly comfortable, I would happily cruise nel modo italiano again - as long as it was with Silversea. So how pleasing that in a couple of weeks I'll be having lunch on board a sister ship, Silver Shadow, when it visits Auckland. And what a bummer, that directly afterwards I'll have to disembark again.

Before the event

Another of my Downton Abbey stories is out today in the Christmas issue of Next magazine; and in the travel section is a story by another writer about Copenhagen, with the photos showing all of the things I saw, except in a rather better light. The weather was the main disappointment of our visit there - that, and the timing, just a week too early for the Christmas markets, sob - and it would have been lovely to have had some blue sky and sunshine to bring out all the colours. It was lucky, at least, that our first afternoon had a decent gleam of sunlight; and the last morning was getting better again.

Photographing the Little Mermaid against even a watery sun wasn't as easy as I would have liked, though. She's been decapitated twice, poor thing, and has a noticeable scar around her neck. She's got about a bit though: she was in Shanghai last year for the Expo, and I was there too, just before it began, when the city reeked of wet concrete and there were traffic barriers, cranes and big machinery all over the place as they rushed to get ready. It was the same in Delhi when I visited just before the Commonwealth Games - and no doubt it's how London is going to be next year when we go there a few months before the Olympics. It's getting to be a theme.

Back to Copenhagen: despite the whingeing, above, there is still something to be said for misty, moody days, and the view from the hotel across the harbour was positively Turner-esque when the sun rose:

People power

My regular walking circuit includes, just before the dreaded 132 steps, a flat concrete bridge across a small creek that drains mainly stormwater from the hill behind. It's an uninspiring affair, usually clogged with pine needles and leaves and other vegetable detritus which is overlaid each high tide by junk from the inner harbour which includes a dispiriting amount of plastic. The creek opens onto our only beach, which scarcely deserves the word, since it's more mud than sand and is constantly being colonised by mangroves, which get hoiked out now and then by the Sea Scouts whose hut stands over the water.

There are, um, prettier parts to my neighbourhood. But that may change, because this morning there was, head down and hard at work, an Asian man dressed in spotless white shorts and tshirt, busily raking debris out of the bed of the creek. He'd already worked along the scant stretch of sand at the edge of the beach, and made small piles of leaves, pinecones and other untidy things. I was delighted to see such public-spiritedness, even though I imagine he's probably just moved in nearby and is wanting to improve his outlook. I told him what a good job he was doing and that myself, I probably wouldn't have worn white to do such mucky work. He smiled cheerfully but clearly didn't understand much of what I'd said, so I waved and went on my way.

Asian people and rakes: such a busy combination. And so effective! If you include brooms and besoms too, there's nothing they can't leave looking better than they found it.In China we saw them scratching away in parks, public monuments, streets and building sites where here we would break out something macho with a motor, or at the very least an electric plug. It's good to be reminded of what people can achieve with simple tools, if there are enough of them - or even one man, if he's persistent. I'll be trotting down that hill tomorrow, to see what he's accomplished.

(I must say though, I was astonished in Xiamen, a big modern port full of skyscrapers and fancy new cars, to see a trail of little old men with shoulder yokes carrying rubble out of a building that was being altered, and dumping it in a pile on the footpath. Would a chute from the window into a truck have been too high-tech? (And none of this is to mention India, where women roadworkers still carry tin bowls of gravel on their heads.))

Great Expectorations

The travel memories in this blog are stirred by all sorts of things in my everyday life: a news item, the weather, work, a chance remark. Today's madeleine however is a touch unsavoury, taking the form of the noises coming from the bathroom this morning as the Other Half performed his ablutions.

I was transported straight back to China. To Beijing, to be precise: the Dirt Market. That's the name we were given, though guide books more colourfully call it the Flea Market, or Panjiayuan. 'Dirt Market' refers to the goods originally being laid out on the ground, but it was gentrified five years ago and now the stall-holders have proper stalls under a roof, with a concrete floor.

You still have to watch where you put your feet, though, if you go in the early morning as we did because if there's one thing that Chinese men in particular are expert at, it's clearing the tubes - despite the warning signs put up no doubt by the tourism people. Honestly, I'm not squeamish, but it was revolting, especially at a time of day when I'm less robust than usual. You had to be nimble, I'm telling you.

That apart, it was colourful and interesting, and well worth visiting. It's a great place for souvenirs, if that's your thing: a little china (ha ha) Chairman Mao, maybe, or a strange painting of people with rictus grins, or a jade elephant, or some lanterns, or beautiful paintbrushes or an embroidered jacket.

I took photos instead, but there was a lot of vigorous bargaining going on as items were unwrapped from newspaper and put out on display, either on the stalls or outside for the big things like statues of horses and roly poly Buddhas. It's as interesting for the traders as the goods - I spotted Mongols with furry hats - and pretty much a must-see. Just be sure to wear closed-in shoes.

Our soles

Good grief, it's raining again. We've had such a long and very wet winter, and though there are lots of flowers out, the birds are singing, it's generally warmer and officially spring, winter just can't seem to let go of us. Down south they're having a terrible time with snow and freezing winds, and so many lambs have perished, poor little things. Up here we've got strong winds and rain, rain, rain.

I wouldn't mind so much if my shoes didn't leak. My old faithful winter shoes, the blue ones, the black ones and the brown ones, have all sprung leaks. The cobbler laughed in my face when I took them in for resoling, and I can't replace them because the shops are full of summery sandals. Trying to avoid puddles as I walk, but ending up with wet socks anyway makes me feel as though I'm in a Dickens novel.

Shoes are a them and us sort of thing. Have you noticed national preferences? Like the Chinese preferring to shuffle along in scuffs? Or the universal jandals throughout the Pacific? Or the elastic-sided boots by Blundstone or RM Williams they favour in the Australian Outback?

In Peru it's sandals made from car tyres. The soles are cut to shape and rubber straps riveted on, and they last almost forever. There's no support or precise fitting, of course, which makes it all the more amazing that they're what the porters wear on the Inca Trail, trotting up and down that steep track with its uneven steps, huge loads towering over their heads, while we soft tourists lean back against the mountain to let them pass to go ahead and set up our lunch table, all of us togged up in fancy tramping boots with collapsible aluminium sticks and ergonomically-designed day packs to carry our cameras and snack bars.

And when the sandals finally fall off the owner's feet, they're still not thrown away. They begin a whole new life as, for example, a gate hinge. And we in the west fondly think of recycling as a modern notion.

Parky

Cold, cold, cold last night: frost front and back this morning, ice on the hens' water and the trees full of hungry birds. Nothing, of course, compared to the winter they had in the northern hemisphere this year, or even the snows down south, but for us thin-blooded Auckland types, it's pretty brisk. Emphasis on the pretty: clear, crisp, sunny, sharp edges to the trees and their shadows, blue sky and saturated colours. Lovely.

But not much fun for the birds, who fell on my beak-gluing mix of oats, dripping and fruit juice even though it was still steaming: silver-eyes in first, then sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, mynahs and doves.

The silver-eyes are so bold (or hungry) that they flock down before I've even got back through the gate, twittering and squabbling as they feed: it's so pleasing to see them flying free, after finding their poor relations trapped in tiny cages in Hong Kong.

It's really no different from budgerigars: we're so used to seeing them in cages, but in Australia, if you're lucky, you can see them flying in great flocks of flashing bright green through the orange, olive and blue of the Outback. I did once, years ago, from the old Ghan, when it was stuttering its way along one of the many dodgy sections of the track in those days: it was a revelation, to suddenly realise that the ordinary old budgie is originally, and still, as wild and free as a lark.

Though they're rarely tuneful, Australia's birds are certainly colourful, and I was delighted at the Alice Springs Desert Park to see so many of them going about their business right outside the aviaries where I'd just walked through and learned about them.

Grass parrots. Such an imaginative name, don't you think?

Fish and feathers

Every morning, the same: feed cats, feed goldfish, fill wild bird feeder, feed hens - except now not just chucking the chooks some wheat and mash, but dosing each one with a ground-up antibiotic tablet dissolved in Powerade for the canker that so far only one has got. That meant weighing each one to determine the dose (lidded bucket plus suitcase scales) and now grabbing them one by one twice a day for a week to squirt it down their throats. Good fun.

The hen with canker is Titch, the oldest: a bantam who came strolling down the road one day about 6 years ago and was never claimed. Like all bantams, she has attitude, but she's cute and very chatty - or was, till this nasty growth attacked her throat. Now she's settled in the house, in the cat basket with a fresh tin of Fancy Feast every day and looks pretty comfortable, though it's too soon to say if she's getting better.

All this nursing fills in the time while the breakfast porridge is cooling for the doves, silvereyes, mynahs, starlings, sparrows and the once more lone love-bird sitting in all the surrounding trees like a scene from Hitchcock's The Birds. Before I understood the difference between native and endemic, I thought silvereyes (or waxeyes) were only found in New Zealand, but they're also native to Australia and some Pacific islands - not China though, so it was a surprise to see so many of them in cages at the Bird Market in Hong Kong.

From what I could see, the Chinese are very fond of caged birds - the market is big, colourful, and clearly a lot of the birds and fancy cages are pretty expensive. There were crowds of men taking a deep interest in everything on display.

I'm not keen on caged birds but, after 10 days of ships and cities, when I was walking through the suburbs of Qingdao, which were pretty and of obvious German heritage, but not big on gardens, it was lovely to hear one singing in its cage hung outside in the sun (even though it was probably saying "Get me out of here!")

It was impossible though to make any allowance at all for the hideous cruelty of sealing live baby goldfish inside the plastic globes of novelty key-rings being sold down on the pier.

Sailing

Unlike what seems these days to be the rest of the population of the western world, I've only been on two cruises - oh, hang on, three: I was forgetting the fancy catamaran up the Gordon River in Tasmania for a couple of nights. But that's in another class entirely from what most people think of as a cruise these days - and so was my first time really, on a small ship through a few of the Fiji Islands, which was pleasant and comfortable, but, you know, small.

Cruise ships are getting bigger and bigger: 'floating cities' may be a cliche of ad-speak, but it's also totally accurate. And they're already past the point where the destinations are the main focus - really, they could just be moored in some immense swimming pool and most of the passengers would be so caught up in the eating and shopping and entertainment on board that they wouldn't even notice. The latest Disney cruise ship has virtual portholes in the inner suites that are more in demand than those with real views over the real sea, because these ones come with interactive Nemos.

I'm thinking about cruising because my sister's just returned from 10 days in the Pacific with P&O, with what I think are horror stories: a punch-up in the guest laundry over a dryer, with one woman laid out cold; someone stealing an evening gown, wearing it, and challenging the gobsmacked rightful owner to prove it was hers; a family off-loaded in Port Vila after a noisy domestic; teenage lads ditto after tomfoolery in the life-boats and giving the captain an earful. Plus obese passengers super-loading plates at the buffet; and having to miss a port because the swell was a bit too big to risk these top-heavy passengers transferring into the launches. Sounds like hell to me. (And P&O is still struggling to shake off that murder on board a few years ago.)

I've been on board the Cunard liners - not, alas for a cruise, but for a tour and a fancy lunch, and they are very classy, if slightly absurd (waiters with white gloves - how impractical!) Even the new ones, like the Queen Mary, are designed to have an aura of mid-20th century elegance and exclusivity that hopefully discourages inelegant behaviour amongst the guests. (Probably most of them are too old to do more than clash Zimmer frames anyway.) The ships are certainly beautiful to look at, inside and especially out, with those classically raked bows - nothing like the glaring white bricks of the modern jobs.

The only proper cruise I've been on was on Silversea's Silver Whisper, a small ship (maximum 380 passengers, and it was only 2/3 full) and even though I'm still not a convert to cruising per se (too much about the journey, not enough destination, so not very productive for stories - also, very fattening), this was a great experience. Again, there were absurdities - ranks of waiters hovering to seize our filled plates from us at the breakfast buffet to carry for us to our tables, the whole dining room seething with these mini-parades - but besides being very luxurious, it was friendly too. And the bed! Twelve centimetres of pillow-top plus gentle rocking from the ship = best sleeps ever.

Perhaps though what made it seem so very welcoming and comfortable was that the cruise was along the coast of China, and the ports we called at delivered such an overwhelming dose of foreignness that it was a huge relief to return each time to familiar surroundings and cheerful staff who knew our names.

UPDATE: At the risk of discrediting this whole post, I've just remembered the fabulous cruise I went on through the Galapagos Islands - but again, it was a small ship, and it was all about the destination, rather than the on-board facilities (which were great).

One in 20 million

Some wag on TV referred to the World Expo in Shanghai and how the visitor numbers were turning out to be less than expected: "Only a million through the gates, tch!" Although the actual figure is a bit over 200,000 per day, the sentiment stands - this is one huge city, the 10th biggest in the world, and that's a lot of people. They're hoping for 70 million visitors over the 6 months that it's open (to beat the 65 million record set back in 1970 in Osaka, where they also know a thing or two about crowds) - and even if most of those are Shanghai residents, on top of a population of almost 20 million, that's still a lot of bodies in the streets.

We were there briefly last year, when the city was in a frenzy getting ready for the Expo, building the exhibition halls on both sides of the river, knocking down old districts to build new hotels and roads, upgrading other areas, digging up the streets and generally tarting the place up. We were told that China uses half of the world's production of concrete, and Shanghai must have accounted for a fair chunk of that - there was certainly a strong smell of wet cement in the air. Plus dust, the hammering of pneumatic drills, roaring trucks and diggers; and visual pollution too with scaffolding, cones and barriers - yet still, with all the large-scale machinery in operation, swarms of men with wheelbarrows and bamboo-leaf besoms.

And of course, people everywhere - as in all the other parts of China that we visited (our Silversea cruise took us only to cities - if we'd got into the country, we would have come away with quite a different impression, I'm sure). It was pretty exhausting, and though it was always interesting, and I'm glad to have been there, I wouldn't rush back again.

India was horrendously crowded too, of course, but it seemed less foreign there: in China I really felt like an alien, even - or especially - when I found myself in a familiar setting, like on the beach. This is China:
This is New Zealand:
No contest.

Fur coat weather? Depends who's wearing it.

Ok, so now I'm feeling sorry about making fun of Britain flailing about in the snow, because this really is a snowstorm and a half they're suffering through. I have Linton on my iPhone weather, and it keeps showing the snow symbol, plus the temperature seems stuck close either side of zero, night and day. Except when it was -10, that is. Miserable, especially if, as is likely, they're without power too. Same for vast tracts of Europe, and North America, and China.

Tianjin was on the news tonight too - blizzard, harbour iced up, everything at a standstill. It was cold enough when we were there in March...

>>> Old things are still valued in Dalian, however, and on a hill above the city centre I follow a 2000 year-old tradition and fly a kite, helped out in a fickle breeze by passers-by who take this activity seriously. Gazing up at the kite briefly soaring above the giant red and white soccer ball in Labour Park, I don’t notice the snow-melt beneath my feet until my shoes stick fast in the mud, so I’m pleased to encounter the shoe-shine lady later on my way to the Russian Street. This is three pedestrian blocks of incongruous-looking Russian buildings complete with onion-shaped domes, peeling and crumbling in an authentic nineteenth-century manner although most of them are reproduction. Stalls of Babushka dolls and Russian hats are manned by Michelin girls in thick quilted jackets, faces hidden inside hoods, and I marvel that this is spring — how cold must winter be?

Docking at Tianjin, Beijing’s port, I get some idea when we’re warned not to go on deck because of the ice. There is an upside, however: not normally known for its clear air, on this freezing March morning China’s capital glows in bright sunshine. The intricate blue and green patterns of the Forbidden City dazzle against the red and gold of the pillars and massive doors; Mao looks benignly from his portrait at the end of Tiananmen Square over guards in green greatcoats, red banners flapping in the sun and crowds of respectful citizens. At the Temple of Heaven doting parents parade muffled-up toddlers with oddly bare bottoms, and old couples push unwieldy loads on trolleys along the crowded, narrow lanes of the hutongs. At the morning dirt market, stalls of Buddha hands, bizarre modern art and an army of porcelain Maos draw crowds of customers; at night, by the lake, couples dance to piped waltz music. I eat deftly-sliced Peking duck, drink tea in a tea house with my little finger crooked, and am intrigued by shiny red kebabs that I can’t identify and am too timid to try...

[Unpub.]

Meanwhile, I got my flight details today to go to Adelaide to see the pandas the weekend after next - furry pandas, from China, in Adelaide, where it was 41 degrees today. Absurd.

This blue planet should be greener

There's nothing like a neatly-raked, freshly-planted vegetable garden for promoting smuggery: the hard digging done, the plants full of promise, the whole Good Life self-sufficiency scenario. Plus, the eco-halo from the recycling involved: the home-made compost from household scraps and the free-range hens' manure; the plastic pots filched from the return bin at the garden centre, bottoms cut off and then screwed into the soil around each tender little tomato plant, ready to contain the water when they've got big and thirsty. And the re-used bamboo canes topped with drilled champagne corks so I don't put my eye out when bending down to pick myself a sun-warmed cherry tomato.

But the old canes are fragile and likely to snap, so I've invested in steel-cored plastic-coated ones that should last much longer. They're made in China, and I hope the plastic is recycled - who knows, possibly from our own milk bottles and hummus containers that, outrageously, are sent all the way to China to be processed.

Clean, green New Zealand - yeah, right. The 100% Pure image that the tourist people are so pleased with (and that makes their Aussie equivalents so, er, green with envy) is not as accurate as it should be: quite apart from pockets of pollution from industrial processes around the country, it's a scandal that we send our used plastic halfway around the world for recycling because despite the cost, both financial and carbon, of sending it so far, the Chinese can still do it more cheaply than we can here.

It's also kind of ironic that China imports waste plastic when they have so much of their own, blowing about the streets and flapping from the branches of trees. Despite armies of people like this man? woman? here - one of the better-equipped of the cleaners we saw, compared with the guy sweeping up McDonalds wrappers with a bamboo besom - there's still a lot of litter around the cities, which is grieving to see. In Santiago I watched in horror as a street vendor threw a carton of plastic waste over the railing into the river running through the city - a tumbling, rocky mountain river straight out of the Andes, edged with plastic detritus. In the Yasawa Islands of Fiji, the warm water of the South Pacific is so clear you can see through it to the tin cans and bottles wedged into the sand on the bottom. On top of Mt Snowdon in Wales, ramblers who had spent three hours climbing up through dramatic scenery of sheep-nibbled hillsides, distant lakes and rocky summits thought nothing of dropping banana peel and drink bottles.

And my English in-laws, who live just outside a rubbish-recycling zone (although within SUV-range of bottle-banks, etc) blithely throw plastic, wine bottles and paper into the same bag as their food scraps, without a second thought - although when I recoiled in shock, some residual guilt led to a sudden spat of blame-throwing between them. It didn't, alas, lead to a change in behaviour.

The more I travel around it, the more aware I am of how lucky we are to live on such a beautiful planet. I wish everyone would try harder to keep it clean and tidy.

Chinese Whisper

This morning in the staff meeting, the teacher i/c international students announced a visitor next week from Qingdao. I quivered silently for a bit, but then I had to whisper to the woman next to me "I've been there!" She smiled, I have to say, thinly.

Well, what are the odds - it's a small (by Chinese standards) port in the Yellow Sea and I was only there in March. I scored a cruise with the OH and some Aussie journalists on the Silver Whisper, a Silversea small ship, from Hong Kong to Shanghai via several ports plus a night in Beijing. At the Peninsula Hotel there. Which would have been impressive, had we not by then already spent two nights at the original Pen in Hong Kong, where we had a 6-room suite in the tower. Six rooms. With a hallway. Ankle-deep oriental rugs, quantities of televisions (including over the bath) and a telescope. And our luggage in the dressing room, spirited there, we scarcely having seen it since checking in at Auckland. We were met off Cathay Pacific's Business class at the airbridge, people! Then we were wafted through all the tedious airport stuff and conveyed to the hotel in a Roller.

That was the plebian version of arrival, however: the real celebs helicopter onto the roof and disappear into the penthouse suite and it's as if they're not even there.

Different story on the Silver Whisper - everyone knew who we were and used our names from the get-go. Necessarily more compact there, but also very luxurious - bottomless champagne in the free minibar, imagine that - and a great contrast to much of what we saw, a lot of it involving wheelbarrows and bamboo besoms. Qingdao was our last port of call before sliding up the river into the heart of Shanghai on the last morning.

>>> ...A day’s sail south brings the temperature up again and when we dock at Qingdao I’m not shocked to see brides with bare shoulders posing for photos in front of St Michael’s Catholic Church, though when they gather up their skirts to leave, I’m equally unsurprised to see they’re sensibly wearing striped football socks underneath. Draped over a hill, this is a lovely town with a strong German influence, and when I wander through the lanes I could be in Bavaria — until, that is, I pass the hospital where brightly-coloured plastic bedpans are piled up next to buckets of flowers at a stall by the entrance. I visit a cavernous mansion and look at the Spartan bed where Mao slept, sniff the incense at a gaudy temple with fierce statues and a stuffed cat in a basket, duck under washing strung across the footpath and am thankful that it’s two o’clock and not noon when I discover that it’s a clock-tower I’ve just climbed at the Lutheran church.

The people are friendly here, and I receive many greetings, including “Hello, foreigner!” from a party of schoolchildren. They’re chattering excitedly over their day at the seaside: the beach is swarming with people sieving rock pools with tea-strainers, sunbathing on the yellow sand, collecting seaweed and shells. I walk along the pier that stretches out into the bay, past stalls, photographers and magicians, to the pavilion at the end. I can see a pagoda, a cathedral, a communications tower, some skyscrapers, and lots and lots of people. I can see China.

[Unpub.]