Augh! Foolish youth!

What I should be doing right this minute - and what will be the very next thing I do - is writing a story about travelling on the Ghan, the train that connects the top and bottom of Australia, running between Adelaide and Darwin. It's an epic trip: 3,200km, three days, two nights, two stops, two engines, 30-odd carriages, and 125 years in construction battling heat, flies, floods, termites and unreliable funding.

The Ghan and I have history - in 1975, on my first solo trip overseas, I travelled on the old one up to Alice Springs, which was the end of the line in those days. I went to see Uluru/Ayers Rock and have a general look around, then a couple of days later turned up at the station to take the train back down south so I could start my holiday job on a sheep and cattle station in the Clare Valley, working as a polo pony groom. Except the gate was locked, the station was empty and there was no Ghan.

Turned out the man in the ticket office in Sydney who'd booked it all for me hadn't allowed for the fact that there's no daylight saving in the Northern Territory, and so I'd got there an hour late. And it wasn't due back again for three days. And I was being met by my boss in Port Pirie. And I was out of money. And then, when I was climbing back over the gate with my backpack on, I lost my balance, fell and took the top off my big toe.

So a passing police car took me to the hospital where they fixed me up, I used the last of my cash to send a telegram and buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, and some nice French Canadians at the Youth Hostel took me under their wing and let me trail round with them for the next few days. And it all ended happily ever after: they even gave me their tent that they didn't need any more, and I've still got it.

Then in 2007 I was back in SA riding along on the Great Australian Outback Cattle Drive for 5 days, having a wonderful time helping to move 500 head of cattle along the Oodnadatta Trail, which follows (or vice versa) the old Ghan narrow-gauge track before it was moved to a less flood-prone route in the '80s. I brought home a dog spike, eaten by rust but still strong.

And then there was this trip, when I was the most comfortable person on the train, travelling Platinum Class in a double cabin all to myself: best sleep ever, in a big bed with fine sheets and the rocking of the train. Except when it stopped, mysteriously, in the middle of nowhere, with a sudden jerk. Turns out an American backpacker had got back to the station in Port Augusta after stretching his legs just as the train was pulling out, ran desperately after it along the tracks, climbed into a stairwell and spent the next two and a half hours clinging there as the train thundered along at 110kmh through the dark - and cold - desert night, before he got someone to hear him. Idiot! They had to peel him off, suffering from hypothermia.

He vanished at Alice Springs, but a week later the peerless Sunday Territorian got the story and splashed it on their front page with a photo of the boy draped with smiling girls under the headline Ghan... but got forgotten.

They're getting the hump over camels

So today I'm thinking about camels. There's an item in the paper this morning about the camel problem in Australia, how they've got a million of them trampling around in the Outback, eating vegetation that the native animals need, making a mess of the waterholes and even wrecking air-conditioning units to get at the water inside them.

I've just been reading about camels, as background to some South Australian stories I'm writing and, like most Australian history, it's really interesting. The camels were brought in from India, Afghanistan and Persia in the early nineteenth century for transport through the Outback when it was being opened up for grazing, the Overland Telegraph line and the railway from Adelaide to Darwin, and the cameleers, casually all called Afghans (hence Ghan, the name of the train) accompanied the explorers on their epic expeditions. Once they were no longer needed, the camels were just set free, and established themselves very successfully.

I saw wild ones once on a 4WD expedition (in brand new Lexus cars with leather upholstery, fridges and 9 cup-holders each - and at the end they were far from brand new any more. My father would have wept) through the Red Centre, but mostly the ones I've got up close to are in the tourist industry. I rose uncomfortably early at Uluru for a dawn ride out into the scrub to watch Ayers Rock blush pink in the rising sun; the OH and I rode one along fabulous Cable Beach near Broome to provide the classic postcard shot against a colourful sunset over the Indian Ocean for heaps of people waiting with cameras; and on the latest trip, it was just the camel guy and me lurching through the bush at Pichi Richi in SA. Graham is a cliche weather-beaten, long, lean, laconic Aussie, but I managed to discover that he's the youngest son of 12 kids, 4th generation cameleer, a champion bronc rider at rodeos round the world and has trained racing camels in the Middle East. He was a bit distracted because his wife was away down in Adelaide with complications in her pregnancy, soon to give birth to their 3rd son, River. Brother to Malachai.

Riding a camel is less uncomfortable than widely believed, though the up and down bit is fairly dramatic; it's quiet, especially if you're used to the clatter of horse's hooves; and it's a good way to get close to the wildlife. And they don't spit - they projectile vomit, it's yellow and sticky, and can stain your skin for days.

>>> I’m trailing, er, behind a movie star’s bottom at a distance of just one metre, but I’m not bothering to play paparazzo. For a start Ned, who is wearing a rather unflattering little pooper-catcher, is a camel; and besides, there are more photogenic sights to point my lens at. The sunset, for one, which in Western Australia can be so eye-poppingly colourful that it deserves a fanfare of trumpets, and here on Cable Beach near Broome is exotically foregrounded most evenings by a string of ships of the desert.

I feel a little like a movie star myself as I sway along the beach high up on Connor’s hump while people from the wobbly line of 4WDs parked along the sand crouch and zoom and click away in quest of the iconic silhouette shot. It’s almost enough to distract me from the blaze of red and gold over my right shoulder as the sun slips away after another busy day of boosting the temperature up to 41 degrees. October in the Top End has even the locals complaining and looking forward to the Wet; but all through the Kimberley this year they are fizzing with impatience for something else as well. On 26 November (not till Boxing Day here in NZ) Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated epic romance ‘Australia’ is released and although it doesn’t get star billing, the Kimberley’s stunning scenery plays as big a role in the movie as do Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman...

[Pub. NZ Herald 18/11/08]

Aw, rats!

I have to do something about the rats. They've been a presence in the henrun ever since I got the hens, and that's only to be expected, but this long, cold winter has had them chewing so many holes in the henhouse that it's beginning to look more like a colander. Not small holes, either: a good 7cm in diameter which, considering how they can elongate themselves to squeeze through gaps, suggests I've been nourishing some mighty rodents there. The henhouse is an old Wendy house I got for free: a pretty little cedar hut with shutters on the windows and a crooked chimney, but the timber is thin and soft, and offers no resistance to sharp teeth. In the past I've painted hot chilli sauce on vulnerable areas (works better than you'd think and has the advantage of satisfying mental images), nailed flattened tin cans along chewed edges and poked screwed-up chicken wire into holes, but I'm beginning to think the whole building needs swathing in metal. I did once, since I have a long happy history of mouse ownership and am reluctant to kill the rats, buy a humane trap which did actually catch one, a biggie too. But then what? I took the mesh box up to the house while I thought about it, and when I put it down on the deck our dog came up for a sniff and the rat lunged FORWARD and HISSED and made us both jump. I put it in the car and took it a couple of blocks to a little service road that leads to a sewage treatment station by a creek, thinking that would be rat heaven, but I was hardly even out of my seat before a busy-body old woman who lives alongside came fussing out shouting, "You can't drive down here! It's not a public road!" I told her I'd only be a minute and she retreated, suspicious, and went back inside to twitch her net curtains at me. I was tempted to say, "Don't worry, I'm only here to drop off a rat," but decided that might possibly inflame the situation. The rat leaped off into the long grass when I opened the cage and I often think of him when the dog and I walk through that way. No doubt his progeny are thriving. Hopefully they'll be boring holes in the old witch's house too. And today's travel connection? Well, in 1980 the OH and I did the overland trail from NZ back to the UK and when we were in Burma (which should never be called Myanmar until democracy is restored there, and shame on NZ for kowtowing to the military dictatorship on that one) we took a ferry down the Irrawaddy River from Mandalay to Pagan, leaving very early one morning and arriving in the evening of the following day. It was colourful, fascinating, thoroughly entertaining at all the stops, extremely uncomfortable even in the cabin of privilege up in the bow, and highly educational as regards the capabilities of the human body in extremis. Because we went all that time without using the loo once. Because the cockroaches? They were as big as rats. >>> It's a feature curiously absent from the tourist literature, that a visit to Burma will leave you with a deep respect not only for the country and its culture, but also for the resilience of the human body. Don’t get me wrong: it's a beautiful country, the people are wonderfully friendly, there's much to see that is interesting, spectacular and unique, and Pagan has to be one of the seven wonders of Asia. Though it was years ago, I will remember my visit for ever – but, it has to be said, as much for what I discovered about myself as for what I learned about Burma. Of course, this is far from being a bad thing: travel has always been as much about psychology as scenery, which is why OE is considered by potential employers as significant a pair of initials as MA. Rather like an Outward Bound course (minus the possums and flapjacks) the trip to Burma pushed my boundaries and made me step way outside my comfort zone. How did Burma test me? Let me count the ways: 1) Courage: Normally a keen supporter of recycling, I'm strangely unenthusiastic about it in the context of air travel. Burma Air’s battered Fokker Friendships, crammed with rickety seats cannibalised from other aircraft – possibly also trains and buses – did not inspire confidence. Nor did the bald tyres and the cracked, bumpy runway. And somehow the steward, fag hanging from the corner of his mouth as he dished out the pallid chicken, cabbage and banana dinner, was not someone whom I felt, in an emergency, would know what to do. These things are important when you are about to fly over the Himalayas. 2) Patience: Burma has discovered the answer to unemployment. It is bureaucracy. Any process involving official forms is split into so many stages that you feel as though you are trapped in a hall of mirrors, with desks and queues wherever you look, and no sign of the exit. Hours can pass as you work through the system, relentlessly sweating and crawled over by the stickiest flies in the universe. 3) Restraint: After a week upcountry where the most memorable meal was in the appropriately-named Soe Soe Restaurant in Pagan where I was asked, ‘You want meat? We have chicken or frog’, we stormed the genteelly decayed (and, we later discovered, bed-bug infested) Strand Hotel in Rangoon, ravenous for recognisable food. We should have been alerted by the fact that each item on the excitingly ambitious (but in practice, almost entirely fictitious) menu was tagged not just with a price, but also with a time: soup 20 minutes, fish 35 minutes. The soup actually took 45 minutes to be brought to us luke-warm, and when we complained that people who arrived after us had been served first, we found ourselves in a Beckett play: ‘They were here first.’ ‘We were at the door when you opened.’ ‘They’re still waiting too.’ ‘We can see them eating.’ ‘They ordered at 6pm.’ ‘You didn’t open till 7pm.’ ‘But look, they’ve got their meal!’ 4) Lateral thinking: In Burma, an alarm clock is no longer just an early-waking device. It's currency, and can be bartered for lacquer-ware bowls, painted parasols or colourful woven silk cloth. A ballpoint pen will deflect knee-high naggers, cute but persistent. Duty-free gin is not for drinking, but for exchanging on the black market for large bundles of kyats. 5) Self-denial: Basic and, on the face of it, irresistible physical urges became optional the moment I stepped on to an Irrawaddy River steamer. The food-type substances that were concocted on a ramshackle barbecue on the deck were not worth the effort of picking my way through a re-creation of the crowd scene from Exodus. The bare boards of the bunks in the cabin, and the whine of mosquitoes, made sleep a fond memory. And rat-sized cockroaches, that gave every surface in the toilet a shifting coat of shiny brown, ensured that going to the loo became dispensable for the entire 36-hour trip from Mandalay to Pagan. [Unpub.]

For the birds

I'm happy to report many enthusiastic customers at my new bird table, whipped up in half an hour yesterday morning. I love doing rough carpentry, scouting round the garage for bits of wood and stray screws from the stray screw container (in which, whatever you're looking for "there's always one more" my dear father told me, and he's right), and whacking in 6 inch nails. Then I made a porridge with oats and old sunflower seeds from the back of the pantry, an elderly Brie, some knobs of dripping dripping with free radicals, and a stale croissant - oh yes, I know how to treat my guests - and slopped it into the former seed tray I'd fixed on top.

Since they discovered it, it's been swarming with birds, mostly twittering little silvereyes, cute but rather drab, and a pair of pretty green and blue peach-faced lovebirds - African imports escaped from someone's aviary, and doing well to survive the winter.

Though I come from a long line of bird feeders and rescuers, I've never been a bird-watcher - but now I've been on so many trips with keen birders, I've become one by association, clocking up wedge-tailed eagles, rainbow bee-eaters and jabirus in Australia; condors, giant hummingbirds, turkey vultures and oropendulas in Peru; and I'm looking forward to the blue-footed boobies in the Galapagos Islands next month.

But the more I see of other countries' birds, the less satisfied I am with our own. For a country that, apart from a couple of species of bat, has no native mammals and virtually no other land creatures other than birds, ours are disappointingly dull - nearly all in shades of brown and khaki, self-effacing, and no great shakes in the song department either. You'd think they could have gone to town with their plumage and behaviour, having the place to themselves. Even the flightlessness is a lack of a feature rather than a feature - it's actually the essence of birdness, to be able to fly, and they don't have it. How odd, that NZ is such easy living, and has so little wildlife, and Australia is so harsh, and teems with interesting animals and birds.

This is not a popular opinion, however - the following column earned me years of internet opprobrium from the Forest and Bird people, who appear to be a humourless bunch.

>>> I’ve been catching a lot of dawn choruses lately, out walking the dog, and I have to say, they would be deeply disappointing affairs if it weren’t for the immigrants.

For all that New Zealand is a country rich in bird life, with umpteen native species, the standard of song here is abysmal. People admire the tui, and the liquid notes it drops into our gardens are certainly striking – but they never add up to anything satisfying. You could grow old and die waiting to hear something connected. It sounds as though the tui is permanently tuning up, waiting in vain for the conductor’s tap of the baton: listening to it is an unrewarding business...

No, for true heart-lifting, spirit-lightening glory, we have to turn to the English songbirds, introduced by homesick pioneers in the nineteenth century – people who have since been vilified for their insensitivity to biological purity.

Well, three cheers for them, I say. What sort of dawn – or dusk – would it be without the blackbird’s professional performance, delivered from the highest branch, or the thrush’s subtly varied triple phrases? These birds know what they’re doing, and they never disappoint. They stake out parks and gardens according to strict avian hierarchies, throw their little hearts into their singing, and fill the air with melody. They leave the silvereye and the fantail for dead...

When we cheerfully and freely pick and choose amongst the world’s best to enrich every other aspect of our lives, why should we stint ourselves with the birds? Racial purity is a thing of the past. Our society is now irreversibly mixed – stand at any intersection in Queen Street and you’ll see every possible nationality scurry past – and no-one would dare suggest that this is anything other than desirable. So why do we have to persist with this avian xenophobia?

[Pub. NZ Herald 31/12/03]

Spring sprung?

It's been a long, cold winter this year, and an eventful one for many people around the country, with floods, landslides, tornadoes and even an earthquake - but this morning it looks as though the end is finally in sight. I took my usual Sunday morning brisk walk (too brisk for the dog, alas - she has to stay behind, giving me The Look from her Mary Pickford eyes) to the dairy to buy the paper and it was just glorious. Blue sky, sunshine on the grass and the flowers that are starting to appear, the air crisp and clear, and everyone I met looking cheerful.

This is a walk I use for fitness, as it includes several hills and a flight of 132 steps up from the beach. I've pushed myself around this route with some specific goals in my sights, like Outward Bound, the Inca Trail, and now the Milford Track - but this morning it was just pure pleasure to be out in the sun, with legs and lungs working as they should, and time to look around and enjoy.

And to remember: this is the path I rode my RDA pony up where we got stuck under a fallen tree that wasn't as high as I'd thought; this is the hill my daughter went down on her scooter far faster than either of us planned; here is where the daffodil fields used to be; that's the hall where I spent so many hours watching tap and ballet lessons, school plays and end of year assemblies; this is the zebra crossing that it was my idea to ask for.

And time too to dream: this is the house I have watched being built, section by section, over the years so that where once a little wooden home stood there is now a unique and distinctive house that takes full advantage of its view north and west over the tree-fringed upper harbour, the island, and all the moored boats, including the yellow one that sets the picture off so beautifully. This is the house where I will go, when I win the lottery, and ask what they want for it. They won't want to sell, because they've built it with love, but I will have won so much money that I will be able to add zeroes until they agree. And then we will live there in that interesting house, with those views, in that quiet street, and every sunset will be an event.

Of course, I'll have to start buying Lotto tickets first.

>>> I’m standing on the deck of a boat tied up to the jetty in Picton, elbow to elbow with a bunch of strangers, changing into running gear in full view of the passengers on the Interislander. A slim blonde called Genevieve waves vaguely at a bay across the other side of the harbour, says “Let’s go!” and runs lightly off towards the town, as we trail breathlessly behind her past bemused tourists and locals. We fetch up in a panting mass on a distant beach where, pointing to a cutter moored out in the bay, Geraldine urges us into the water, still in our clothes. We flail out to where a bearded bloke hauls us aboard and sits us alongside the oars. Grinning cheerfully, he hauls up the anchor and starts calling the strokes as we catch crabs, clash oars and finally settle into something approximating rowing. “Welcome to Outward Bound!” says Bob.

It’s a rugged introduction, but perfect in its way, because the next eight days continue in the same vein. The first chance to catch our breath and say hello comes that night in a little bay in Queen Charlotte Sound where we sit around a crackling fire under a star-filled sky, slurping hot mussels cooked in sea-water. We’re a mixed bunch of townies, late 20s and older, our only thing in common a readiness to have a go — although when I’m woken in the middle of the night by a possum galloping across my stomach, I wish I knew exactly what I have signed up for...

We climb a 25-metre rain-slicked cliff and abseil back down, which Patera finds so easy that he’s made to do it blindfold. We carry heavy packs up Mt Cullen, 1100 metres, and sleep rough at the top, rising in the dark to watch the sunrise. For two nights we camp solo with minimal shelter and food: possums scuttle around in the dark and though I know the others are within earshot, I’m on my honour not to leave my site, and eye them from deep in my sleeping bag.

On the last day the groups come together for a run through the bush, and some people astonish themselves by completing a half-marathon; but not me. I stumble and break a bone in my foot. I hobble the last 10 kilometres, determined not to give up. Back home, my doctor phones the X-ray people: “No urgency. She’s tough - she’s just done Outward Bound,” and I swell with pride. Now I know I can do anything: another OB success story.

[Pub. Women's Health June 09]

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.]

It's llam-entable

I was wearing my other hat today, the relief teacher one, and one of the girls commented on something that I was literally wearing, namely, my llama-patterned cardigan. Yes, it sounds dweeby, but a teenage girl said, three times no less, and apparently without irony, that she liked it, so clearly it's actually a cool thing to wear. Or, given that it's made of alpaca wool, actually very warm. Tch, enough with the word-play.

She asked where I had bought it and I, in a manner that was totally superficially nonchalant, said, "Peru". She thought a bit and said, "Peru - that's in Australia, right?" And while I was still hyperventilating, corrected herself and continued, "Oh no, I'm thinking of Perth."

But she was unperturbed at her lack of geographical knowledge, even going on to say, "I only found out last month that Wellington's in the North Island." Well, she was 14, and I suppose that's excuse enough. I can't say the same for one of the other journalists on a recent famil in the Northern Territory: an Australian woman not in the first flush of youth, there to write a story for an airline magazine, she interrupted me at one point to ask where Auckland was. I don't think I'm being a needy Kiwi to find this shocking.

But then, I'm easily shocked, especially when I'm in school and coming across girls who are not only unbothered about not knowing very basic things, but are also entirely uninterested in finding out. I suppose it's always been the case that older people are shocked by the ignorance of the youth of the day, but lack of curiosity is a sad thing, I think. And it's so unempowering, not to know about the world, not to understand how things work, what's gone before and what's happening now.

I think they see current affairs, geography, history, politics - social studies, in other words - as a soap opera like Coronation Street, that's been going for so long that it seems impossible to catch up on the back-story, so they don't try. It's such a shame, because they'll always feel detached, and when they get long in the tooth like me they'll never experience the huge satisfaction of making connections between disparate facts and topics that they've known for years.

This would be the perfect place for an example, but it's late and I can't think of one, so I'll come back and add it when I do. But I'm glad I've been paying attention all these years.

>>> "How would you like to go see Macbeth?" I asked my stage-struck teenager a while ago. "Ah," she replied, "the Scottish play. Ok."

Although her thespian debut was in the title role of A Tadpole’s Tale (incorporating a tricky on-stage costume change as she triumphantly morphed from eponymous tadpole to full-blown frog, as much a challenge for the wardrobe mistress – me – as it was for the actor), she has done a lot of resting since those glory days; so I was pleasantly surprised to find that she was familiar with theatrical superstitions. "How did you…" I began. "It was in The Simpsons," she yawned.

It is also thanks to The Simpsons that my younger daughter knows about George Washington’s wooden false teeth. Friends taught them both who Joseph Stalin was, and Malcolm in the Middle explained the Doppler effect. Further, we owe it to Seinfeld that neither of them will ever become a social outcast by unhygienically double-dipping the guacamole.

I was reminded of these incidental educational benefits of television when teaching a class of bright fourteen year-olds about the causes of the Second World War. We had read and talked about Pearl Harbor and I had my whiteboard marker poised to dot the full-stop after the summary instruction ‘Briefly describe what happened at Pearl Harbor’ when something prompted me to add ‘in Hawaii’. I turned around to be met by half a classful of waving hands belonging to people who wanted to know what Hawaii had to do with Pearl Harbor. This led, in turn, to a discussion about the stars on the Stars and Stripes that would never have had to take place when I was fourteen: because I, of course, had had the benefit of watching Jack Lord in Hawaii Five-0.

...It should be obligatory for every light entertainment programme shown here to slip in at least six items of general knowledge: a worthy challenge for any writer, particularly those working in Hollywood, who should be contractually constrained from rewriting history to give it a more flattering spin.

Think how the national IQ would rise – and how smug we could feel when, unlike around ten percent of the British population, no-one here remains convinced that Robin Hood was real and Winston Churchill a fictional character, and we all know, at least to the nearest century, when the Great War took place.

[Pub. The Press 4/4/05]