Blogger has an acute lack of acutes, alas

I'm writing about Mare, in the Loyalty Islands near New Caledonia, today, and wondering if Henri is still with us since that was in 2005 and he was 75 then. He was a character, but a scary driver, hurtling us around the narrow roads with cows wandering along them, waving hello to people and dogs and keeping up a running commentary all the while. He was very proud to serve us this - well, it looks exactly like a giant orange head-louse, doesn't it? - but it's a coconut crab, the world's biggest arthropod and able to take off a man's finger with those fearsome pincers. They live to about 60 and can reach almost a metre across, claw to claw, and really, since they're getting rarer, we shouldn't have been eating it at all - but what can you do? Rude not to... It was absolutely delicious, coconut-flavoured, with grated green pawpaw "for the digestion" and a dollop of glistening home-made mayonnaise. Mmmm! (Not such a great fan of the next night's fruit bat casserole, however.)

I was thrilled to come across something even rarer the next day as we did a bit of beach-combing: these nautilus shells just lying there surrounded by the much less welcome plastic rubbish that washes up everywhere these days (though nice Boniface, who was guiding us and pointing out the coconut crab bait in the woods - they live on land, you know, and only go to the sea once a year to lay their eggs - was delighted to score a fishing net float and a face mask). The water in the lagoon there is gin-clear, truly, because there are no rivers flowing into it, and it's so shallow that even the aquatically-challenged (or those the worse for wear after a long outdoor lunch with plenty of French wine) can snorkel safely to their heart's content. Which, on a day when a shark-attack fatality has been reported here in NZ, the first confirmed death since 1976 and only the 14th ever recorded, makes it seem even more appealingly safe.

Small city, small world

Had I realised I would be photographing my bag today, I would have taken the fancy cork one I bought in Portugal and not my battered old faithful. So disregard its tatty lack of style and focus instead on the rectangle of carpet beneath it: "a shag for your bag" our cheerful waiter said, as he went around the table putting down these little mats so our handbags needn't sit on the bare concrete of the terrace. What a sweet little touch! We were at Cibo for a long lunch hosted by Rail Europe, RailPlus and Switzerland Tourism, a jolly tableful of 8 pleased to be there on a balmy afternoon.

The food was interesting and delicious, with lots of unusual ingredients and combinations - like this chilled lettuce soup with prawns, tangy and refreshing, and leaving lots of room for the main course of scallops with dehydrated mandarin and other good things that the equally good pinot gris is preventing me from remembering. And then there was dessert: pavlova for which the Aussie in the group made no historical claim (he was outnumbered) with passionfruit sorbet, and other small sweet treats.

Although we were on the other side of the city from the Tourism Tasmania event two of us attended the previous evening, our hosts from that were at the next table, which made the travel business seem a very small world in Auckland. And so it is - though you can hardly claim the same about LA, which makes it extra astonishing that one of today's group, while being driven around there in a bus, spotted another of the group walking along the footpath, there on a separate trip. Now that was amazing - and so, on reflection, was the fact that anyone was using their feet to get about that car-focused city.

Miranda means admirable, you know

We took a drive south to Miranda today, to have a look at the godwits before they depart in a couple of weeks' time for their long, long journey all the way to Alaska to breed in the northern summer. The world is full of mysterious, idiosyncratic and perversely long migrations of birds, but the bar-tailed godwit has been shown to make the furthest non-stop journey of any bird: 11,026 km from here to the Yellow Sea in China, in 9 days. Later, a tagged female, the inspiringly-named E7, was recorded as flying for 11,680 km from Alaska to the Firth of Thames - but, of course, that's downhill, so pft.

It's the most astonishing journey for these otherwise fairly nondescript waders to make, and it's really hard to imaging them flapping and flapping for so long and so far, over all those seas and the Pacific, through wind and storms and baking sun, without stopping. And that makes it so heart-breaking to read that China is so busy expanding and reclaiming land and building on it that they are destroying the wetlands where the birds stop for their desperately-needed rest and refuel before resuming the flight to Alaska. Sigh. The godwits, and other migratory birds, do have their champions there, but it's a very one-sided battle.

We sat in a hide and watched them, out on the flats in their thousands as the tide slowly pushed them closer towards us. It was another hot day, and it was very pleasant to sit there with a warm breeze in my face, bringing the smell of the sea and the sound of the waves beyond the cockle-shell bar, and waving the bunny-tails growing along the edge of the beach. All neatly facing into the wind were gulls and oyster-catchers, some herons and a pied stilt, a black-backed gull and lots of red knots in amongst the godwits, prodigious migrators themselves, despite being half the size. And I think I'm a traveller.

Life of P

Saturday again, so it's photos: this time, since I went to see Life of Pi today, one of the tigers at Dreamworld on Queensland's Gold Coast (and an emu, just because). Dreamworld is mainly a theme park, one of several, with some seriously scary rides, but it does have a bit of a zoo attached. They have dingoes and cassowaries and koalas and roos of course - Aussie creatures are always guaranteed to get me gawping, though the young boys I saw in the well-filled reptile house were more fascinated by the fact that someone had put a $10 note in the perspex collection box.

It was a busy trip, with all sorts of activities, to which I added some unwelcome excitement by flushing my hire car keys down a public loo, but there was time for quiet contemplation at one of the GC's many classic beaches.

In-gene-ious

Here's a first: this week's NZ Herald Travel containing my (cut) Easter Island story on page 5 - and then, on page 10-11, the Firstborn's account of her junket last year to China. Yes, yes, she has stories in the main paper all the time, and frequently on the front page, but that's what she was trained for. It takes a different set of skills to write as entertainingly and informatively as this about a destination, and that's why I'm unfairly claiming some DNA-based credit for her story about channelling her inner shopper in Shanghai.

I have been to the city myself, but only for half a day at the end of our cruise with Silversea up the coast from Hong Kong, so the visit was tinged a little with regret at leaving behind the friendly luxury of the Silver Whisper. It was also shortly before the city hosted the World Expo, and it was full of road diversions, bamboo scaffolding and the smell of wet cement as it raced to get ready. Even so, it was an astonishing place, especially to arrive at along the river one murky morning, under elegant suspension bridges and past all those bizarre skyscrapers on the Pudong side (so many of them now, and so heavy, that apparently the ground is cracking under the weight - which hasn't stopped construction on the Shanghai Tower, to be the second-tallest building in the world after the Burj Khalifa).

We just had a quick look around and visited some character buildings, and then caught the Maglev train out to the airport. That's as in 'magnetically levitated' off the rails so there's no friction slowing it down. We waited for the boring 300kmh train to go so that we could catch the fast one, that went 434kmh at its fastest - so fast that by the time I got my camera trained (ha!) on the indicator, it had already started slowing down again. It was super-smooth, quiet, really tilted on the corners, and got us to the airport in just 7 minutes. Shame the flight home couldn't have been equally quick.

Stalking la Condamine

This is a book that I reviewed for the Press back in 2004 - not something I would ever have thought to read, otherwise, and what a loss that would have been. I enjoyed it so much that I've re-read it several times since, and become a huge fan of a French scientist with the girly name of Charles Marie de la Condamine, who died in 1744. 'Scientist' is a bit vague - he was an explorer, geographer and mathematician, and in 1735 sailed to Ecuador to spend what turned out to be 10 years there measuring the length of a degree at the equator so that it could be compared with the length of one further north, and so test Newton's hypothesis that the Earth wasn't a perfect sphere. Dry stuff, you might think, but it's an absolutely ripping yarn, with swaying liana bridges over chasms, icy hurricanes trapping the team in a reed hut on a mountain top, crumbling paths along precipices, swamps alive with mosquitoes that could bite through clothing, and muddy slopes so steep they slid their mules down them like toboggans.

When I went with World Journeys to Ecuador in 2009, I got a real buzz from reading the book on the plane and landing briefly at Guayaquil which was featuring in the story right at that point. But that was nothing compared to when we took the extraordinary Chiva Express north from Quito and spent a night at the hacienda San Agustin de Callo. It's a marvellous place, originally built as a palace by the Incas in 1440, used subsequently as a monastery, and later as the residence of a twice-elected President of Ecuador. Our hostess, Mignon Plaza, was his grand-daughter, and the daughter of a bull-fighter.

It was a colourful evening, starting with hand-feeding llamas before a lovely dinner in a room with Inca walls, live music played on Pan's pipes and an armadillo guitar, singing and dancing, a cooking lesson in the kitchen learning how to make Mignon's signature potato soup, and finally a bath in my room in front of a roaring fire, with hand-painted cherubs on the bathroom ceiling. It was an amazing day, full of marvels (did I mention the gaucho on the high chapparel with the ocelot chaps?) - but the most wonderful part of it all was discovering that Charles Marie had slept under the very same roof.

This little piggy went to market...

I'm happy to say that I don't have dentures, especially not the sort that would prevent me from feeling the joy on the back of a motorscooter as shown in this inspiring ad in today's paper. I do though currently have a chipped filling in a molar, thanks to a particularly resistant bit of pork crackling yesterday. And - ooh look, a coincidence - pigs are looming large with me at the moment, because I'm writing about Ecuador. Now don't get the wrong idea: life in the cities like Quito and Guayaquil can be pretty sophisticated, and in the country we stayed in some fabulous lodges.

But we also went to village markets, and that's where we saw our most memorable sights (Galapagos excepted). Talk about vivid! Not just the clothes, though there was a lot of indigo and bright pink and yellow; but the bustle, the animals, the heaps of fruits and vegetables, the mouth-watering smell of roasting and frying food, the music and chatter and laughter. You tend as an outsider to think that everyone around you knows what's going on and what they're doing, but the lady above seems a bit nonplussed by her newly-purchased pig; and the man who's beginning my story for me clearly hadn't realised what even I knew, that pigs and horses don't mix. Good luck getting his pig home. I think he's going to be walking...

But the most startling pigs that we came across were in a little town where a festival was in progress, with the main square and the streets around filled with stalls selling balloons, toys, flowers, with music and fortune-tellers, the church full of people holding candles - and of course food everywhere: doughnuts and sweets and other treats, plus yummy empanadas; and then this, which made even a life-long crackling fan like me think twice.