Gee!

When you go for a drive into the country, you expect to see sheep (this is New Zealand), cows, cattle and horses; and birds - a few hawks, pukeko maybe; always some dead possums. If you're very lucky, you stop to take a photo of a bridge and there, right above your head in a flame tree, is a tui feeding from the flowers, swinging about from the twigs like an acrobat. Not that the purists would accept this as a valid tui image, since it's not in a native tree. But it is better than my only other tui photo, of one having a bath in the guttering of our house. And the sound track of singing sky lark (another non-native, tch) was just icing on the cake.

I was doing a roadtrip story about SH16 which heads north-west from Auckland straight into the wine country around Kumeu, where serious tasters were solemnly spitting into - do they call them spittoons? Surely oenophiles have a fancier word (like oenophile). Anyway, not swallowing. There are more vineyards around Kumeu than you can shake a stick at, famous ones, too: Coopers Creek, Matua Valley, Nobilo, Soljans Estate... All very neat and flushed with new green, the roses at the ends of the rows just in bloom.

Then it was out into the real country, where the horses are knee-deep in buttercups, the fields are pricked out with curving lines of new crops just sprouting, and the hayfields are long and lovely and lush (thanks, GM Hopkins). I was looking for a private sculpture park owned by a millionaire (450 times over) who likes to think big. The little old ladies in the op shop at the pretty little Kaukapakapa Church told me "You can't miss it, it's just past the concrete bridge. There's giraffes and all sorts!" And you know what? They were right. Giraffes, eh. Not at all what you expect to see on a country drive in New Zealand.

Eleventy-leventy-leventy-leventy-leven

I've just realised, from the information on the camera, that I was one second short of taking this photo at 11:11:11am. Bummer! I wonder how many other anal people around the world are, progressively, taking a photo like this - more than 11,111 I bet. But I must have been one of the first, so yah boo sucks to everyone else handicapped by the International Dateline.

See you back here next year, 12 December, lunchtime. It's a date.

Apples have been around forever

Tonight's TV news report about the parlous state of the Italian economy included a shot of this sign, outside the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, a place I briefly visited in May. It was a strikingly modern sight in a city that's attractively historic - even if much of it is reconstructed history after the, ahem, last unpleasantness.

The city is grander than it should be because in 1949 Frankfurt expected to be made the new capital of Germany and was rather put out when the vote went to Bonn, especially since they'd already erected a bunch of fancy buildings and all. So instead it was made the financial centre, which has been a nice little earner for the city ever since.

The other big event for Frankfurt is its annual Book Fair, the biggest in the world, which it muscled in on claiming Gutenberg as their own, whereas he was actually a Mainz man. (New Zealand, incidentally, is going to be the guest of honour at next year's Fair, which means that there's going to be a lot of German attention focused on not just NZ literature, but the country as a whole.) It is true that he sold his first printed Bible there in the fifteenth century. There's a big statue of him and various city fathers in the main square, featuring bits of printing press, and I was most impressed by the sculptor's inspired vision of the future of books demonstrated by this woman holding an iPad.

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:

One hump or two?

Tomorrow is the big day at the races in Christchurch - or one of them, at least: Cup Day at the Addington trots, and a welcome chance to dress up and have some fun for Christchurch people. I was a bit disappointed in Dubai not to see any horses, other than in statues and sculptures, since Arabs are such a beautiful breed. If I'd had more time, I would have tried to go for a ride. Arab horses have rounder, flatter hooves, you know, to help with not sinking into the sand.

But I did see racing camels. I'd heard about camel racing last year while lurching through the Outback near Pichi Richi in South Australia with Graham, a 4th-generation cameleer who has worked as a trainer in the Middle East with racing camels worth up to $8million, which is pretty rich going for a place (in Dubai at least) where gambling is forbidden. The prizes tend to be luxury cars, in compensation. The camels can go surprisingly fast: I was told 50kmh for the females, half that for the males.

We saw a training session in progress outside the city, dozens of camels loping along, some with jockeys and the rest with the new robot jockeys, that have taken over from the young boys who used to be used, often in less than desirable conditions. Now the camels have little machines strapped to their backs with whips attached that whirl round in circles, radio-controlled from the 4WDs that drive alongside. Modern technology, eh?

Lounging around

I'm back in Dubai's shiny new airport, all marble and stainless steel and reflective surfaces over vast areas of space. There's a separate entrance for First and Business class passengers that's most spacious of all, but they don't tell you that after you've been wafted through check-in, you have an enormously long hike to get where the action, and all the plebs, are.

I had a small stoush with a bolshy young Arab lady who tried to push in the queue at the shop where I was offloading the last of my local currency: boy, did she argue! But I stood my ground and she, in a hurry, eventually stormed off with a lot of huffing. The Brits may have moved out of Dubai sixty years ago, but that's no reason to abandon one of their most useful gifts to civilisation.

And now I'm in the lounge, disappointed that I can't get my iPhone to connect wirelessly (hence no photos), struggling with a public keyboard with most of the letters worn off, and rather tempted to have my shoes shined, for the novelty of it - the last time was in New York, years ago - but anxious that it may involve tipping, and I have no more cash (see above). I do have some Samoan currency that I forgot to put into the big glass charity jars back in Auckland, but pretty though the notes are, I doubt they would be welcomed. Certainly the man at the Dubai Mall money exchange yesterday laughed with genuine amusement at the very idea.

This is a very big lounge, and somewhere in it is a rack of newspapers that evidently includes the Sunday Times, so that's my next mission. I do keep busy, on these trips.

Cosmo diary, with dates

It's been a very cosmopolitan sort of day, literally: Dubai is that sort of place. Only 20% of the population is made up of local Emiratis, and everyone else comes from the rest of the world. My guide Tareq said (but then he would, wouldn't he?) that they all get on famously, and no-one resents the fact that the Government looks after the locals so well, giving them houses, wedding money and children money, free health care and schooling and so on - and, since no-one has to pay taxes here, perhaps they really do.

So this morning's tour took in mosques both Arab and Turkish, and this afternoon I was left to wander in that western place of pilgrimage and worship, the shopping mall. Specifically, the Dubai Mall, with 1200 shops, in which no big retail name was absent - Bloomingdales, Galeries Lafayette and, from England, Debenhams ha ha but also Marks and Spencer - and where the people-watching was epic. Every permutation of the burqa was there, and traditional clothing for the men, as well as the full gamut of western dress. There was a huge ice rink where little boys in what looked like white nightgowns pushed plastic penguins across the ice; an equally huge aquarium with sharks, rays and Kelly-Tarlton tunnels; a three-storey waterfall with diving men frozen in mid-plunge; and outside a vast artificial lake where a fountain show took place at 1pm against the backdrop of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa at 828 metres or 160+ storeys (which no, I didn't go up because you have to book). It was actually so tall that I didn't see it straight away, through not looking high enough.

There were also markets today, fish and fruit and veg (including, shockingly, kiwifruit from Iran), lots of dates - there are 300-odd varieties, all different in taste and appearance, and I also tried the fresh ones, yellow and crunchy. I saw men crouched over big copper vats stirring syrup with a wooden paddle to make a honey and date sweetmeat for the holiday of Eid tomorrow - the same one I was in India for a couple of years ago, that involved very many decorated goats there. Here there were also sheep and cows on the backs of utes being transported through the city centre, looking docile, not knowing that for them, it wasn't going to end well. I feared the doleful-looking fish in the tank beside which I ate my Chinese dinner tonight have a similar fate ahead of them, alas.