Decomposition v preservation

We all understand about fillers in newspapers, that they're just odd snippets poked in when there's a space around the actual news. No-one expects them to be anything especially current, no matter how much they pretend to be announcing something. But this one, today, in the NZ Herald? Tch. This is something I wrote about here almost exactly three years ago when I came across it at Vermilionville in Lafayette - and it was hardly a new development even then. Surely the discovery had already got around, in the scientific/environmentalist community? More than a bit disappointing, if not. Stuff like this should be shared, immediately. Er, like vaccine recipes...?

There was another newspaper connection on Saturday, also in the Herald, but this time of genuine interest. Regular 😃 readers will recall - indeed, may still be traumatised by - my blog entry about my visit to Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok again almost exactly five years ago. Not, thankfully, for medical treatment, but to gawp, as respectfully as possible, at the exhibits in the Department of Anatomy's museum there. It was full of astonishing, horrifying and deeply interesting preserved bodies of people who had been born with, and died of, terrible deformities. 

Most of them, anyway, and many of those, sadly, babies. But there were a few exceptions, and I clearly remember standing in front of the telephone box-like glass case in the photo below, studying the mummified corpse of this murderer/cannibal. Except, now it seems maybe he wasn't - instead, it turns out he was yet another victim of what seems to be the world-wide phenomenon of, shall we say, over-enthusiastic police detective work. So today I officially transfer poor Si Ouey into the same category as the other sad exhibits at Siriraj.

Life's ruff

The cat has lost his ruff again. I'm beginning to lose count, but I reckon that was his sixth since I started making him wear them less than a year ago. I don't know how he does it - on purpose or accidentally, using a tool or his paw - but it's getting a bit wearisome. Now I'll have to go and sew him another one. I actually just bought another length of fabric a few days ago for precisely this eventuality. Did he know, and want a change from the frankly insulting bird pattern of the most recent one - or is it just sneaky coincidence in operation again?

The purpose of the ruff is to make him more noticeable to the birds that I'm ashamed and frustrated to know he still hunts, being ex-feral. I first came across cats wearing ruffs in Reykjavik, and was more amused than anything to see what I assumed was Icelanders' preference for decorated cats - kind of fitted in with all the brightly-coloured buildings in the city. Later, I learned the true reason, and was converted.

Regular 😀 readers will be well aware, since I keep harping on about it, that I should at this very moment be in fabulous Iceland again, about to sail away to new-to-me Greenland, courtesy of also new-to-me luxury small-ship cruise line Seabourn. But instead, here I am stuck at home, being nagged for food by incontinent sparrows and doves outside my window, with nothing to look forward to. 

I suppose I should be grateful to Barney for giving me something to do...

Waddling down memory lane

I accept that it's inconsistent to be snarking about it being so cold today at the same time as wishing I was back in Antarctica, but I answer to no-one here, it's my blog so suck it up. (Sorry, made crabby by internet dropping out, leaving me unable to snap back at some self-important PR man throwing doubt on my having been somewhere I'd just written about because of a minor error that wasn't actually my fault.) (Also, sad because today I should be in Reykjavik about to begin a cruise tomorrow with Seabourn.)

Let's start again. I've been writing today about a visit to Kelly Tarlton's Aquarium here in Auckland. It has been in existence since 1985 and of course I've been several times before, but it was my first experience there getting up close with penguins. Regular 😀 readers will know that I have actually been up close with many, many penguins: in South Georgia and Antarctica, back at Christmastime in 2017.

I had the huge pleasure then, thanks to Silversea, of getting remarkably close to about eleven different species of penguins, in colonies tens of thousands of pairs strong. And boy! The pong sure was strong. It was very noisy too - but I loved it, every moment, watching the birds going about their business, being curious and funny and cute and beautiful, and it was the highlight of a cruise that was already the highlight of all the trips I've done.

So it was just lovely to get a little taste of that again, thanks to Kelly Tarlton's. They have 78 penguins, currently, King and Gentoo, a few of them an amazing 32 years old, survivors from the first birds to arrive here, from San Diego and Edinburgh. Of course I was a bit worried about their mental health, being confined to a space indoors, underground (the aquarium is built inside former sewage tanks). My guides were predictably, but apparently genuinely, reassuring that the birds don't miss the challenges of hunting food, evading orcas and leopard seals, hunkering down through appalling weather, and covering long distances doing most of that. They reckoned that being sociable was much more their style, and they spend their days happily doing exactly that - plus preening, pooing and napping.

I got all togged up backstage in winter gear and gumboots, and went out into the penguin enclosure, which is kept at -2 degrees, with carefully controlled lighting to mimic Antarctic conditions, seasons and times of day. As soon as the door was opened, some curious Gentoo penguins pushed in to inspect me, and all the time (20 minutes) I was in there, there were penguins getting very personal, in my face and pecking at my clothes.

The same thing had happened in Antarctica - no-one told the penguins about the 5-metre rule, and the chicks especially were bored waiting for their parents to return with a feed, and happy to find a diversion - but at Kelly Tarlton's I got super-close to them and was able to inspect and admire the gloriously subtle shading of the King penguins' golden feathers. Ten thousand feathers, they each have, apparently - makes keeping the ice clean at moulting time a real challenge. And that's on top (literally) of the poo that gets hosed off every morning before fresh snow is sprayed in. We were there just an hour after the mucking out and already there were yellow stains everywhere.

Penguin keeper Kristen brought in a squashy ball for them to play with, and they did enjoy it - there was inter-species competition for it, to the fascination of the two downy King penguin chicks. Playing ball with penguins - definitely up there on the travel skite list.

Oh, and KT's also rehabilitates injured turtles, before returning them to the wild. Their latest patient is Taka, an East Pacific green turtle that turned up on Takapuna beach, cold and hungry, and way off course from the Galapagos where it would normally hang out. *cough* I've been there, of course, and seen turtles. Maybe even a relation?

No go

In classic TravelSkite fashion, I have missed another milestone. This time it's the half-million views total, according to Blogger's counter (which I view with some scepticism, as well as with the sure and certain knowledge that a hefty chunk of those views are my own). 

I have no excuse. I've just been ticking along quietly here, not doing anything much, merely existing in New Zealand's weirdly almost-normal bubble with everything pretty much like the old days, apart from closed borders and no tourists. FYI we've currently got 18 active cases, all returnees from overseas, all in isolation, and no-one in hospital. Our death toll is, thankfully, still only 22, and Covid-19 reports of the hellish dramas happening overseas are relegated now to the second section of the evening news, after more important local (non-)events.

I should try harder to be actually thankful - but currently I'm just sad that I'm sitting here at home and not at this moment seated on a plane heading for Iceland. Next week I should have been setting off on a cruise with Seabourn (Silversea's great rival, and new to me) from Reykjavik via north Iceland to Greenland and then the Shetland Islands, Scotland and England, finishing in Southampton. It would have been so good. Small ship, high-end, with all the treats that that means; but mainly yay, Iceland again! And Greenland!

I watched The Story of Fire Saga the other night, which was predictably silly, but with some good music. It was mainly a quiet joy for me to recognise the Reykjavik locations, the classic woollen jerseys, the Einstök beer glasses, and see the new-to-me scenery around Hüsavik, which I would have visited on the cruise. I would have been so happy to be there again - it's such a special, interesting, spectacular and homely place to visit. I bet the locals are even actually keen to have some visitors now (instead of being overwhelmed by two million of them annually, to a country with a 300,000 population). Sigh.

Score!

Today New Zealand has entered Level 1 of our Covid-19 response. It's a triumph for our (cliché but cute) Team of Five Million led by sainted PM Jacinda Ardern with the trusty DG of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, at her side. Jacinda admitted to a brief dance in her living room when she heard that the last active case was recovered, and Ashley allowed himself "a broad smile". 

Here are the main figures: 102 days since the first case; 75 days since levels were imposed; 1504 cases overall; 22 deaths (sad, but all older people with 'underlying conditions'); 17 days now with no new cases; 0 active cases. We spent 33 days at Level 4 in total lockdown, before easing back through 3 and 2, and then, at midnight last night, to Level 1 - which is normal life again, with added hand-washing, and strictly-controlled borders still till who knows when. People can go in and out of the country, but there's a mandatory 14 days of quarantine on return, including two swab tests; so no-one's going to be rushing to do that if they don't have to.

The push to travel domestically - which is hardly a penance - is naturally stronger than ever, and people are out there already, booking up Queenstown and other tourist magnets; and the newspaper travel sections are starting to fatten up again with local stories. All good. What I'm going to do here though is to fill in a rather large gap. My first published travel story was back in 2003, but this blog didn't start till 2009 so, seeing as how I'm anal about such things, I'm going to write about all those trips that haven't featured here. So here goes:

My first-ever proper famil was an 8-day Outward Bound course in 2003, but I have actually written about that several times, like here, but not the next one, to Tasmania. It was such a thrill to write in hope to Tourism Tasmania, expressing my interest in having a look around, and score the offer of an expenses-paid 10-day self-drive tour around the island state - with my teenage daughter included. Amazing.

So we found ourselves in Hobart in December, staying in a hotel on a pier in that historic city's lively and absurdly pretty waterfront - colourful fishing boats, piles of cane lobster pots, floating food trucks - which is surrounded by substantial Georgian stone buildings. We grazed through the Salamanca Saturday Market, wandered the streets admiring the pretty old cottages hung with roses and hedged with lavender, drove up to the summit of towering 1300m Mt Wellington where we found Nepalese prayer flags and wonderful views. We went out to Bonarong Park to get up close with wombats, kangaroos, koalas, emus and Tasmanian devils; and to the museum to see the last ever Tasmanian tiger in a glass case.

Then we headed out of the city on our provided itinerary and discovered the first truth of the famil: that there is never enough time anywhere. Occasionally we literally had to run to keep up with the timetable. We did a towering tree-top walk, and zipped through lovely English-like villages with arched bridges and gorgeous gardens; we stayed in interesting old hotels and one very fancy new one at Freycinet; we climbed up a stony hill (no doubt swarming with snakes) for a classic view over the perfect curve of Wineglass Bay. We went kayaking; found a cute and softly furry little echidna plunging his delicate nose into rough gravel, looking for grubs; and marvelled at the richly varied roadkill we found - and, sadly, contributed to when I hit a wallaby while driving back at night after a ghost tour of Port Arthur.

That former prison was grim and chillingly educational, and also disconcertingly picturesque. Heading from there up the east coast we just marvelled at the scenery. Turquoise sea, white, white sand, red rocks, green blue gums - it was all beautiful. The fields of opium poppies were unexpected - they supply 40% of the world's morphine - but the warning signs on the fences weren't very scary. 

We met Craig of Pepperbush Adventures and bumped off-road into the bush, for a yummy barbecue of wallaby kebabs, as actual wallabies hopped within sight; and after dark and under the stars, he spotlit for us swarms of spotted quolls, more wallabies, plus possums, roos, devils and wombats, and told us stories about them all.

From Launceston we roamed around the countryside and on my daughter's favourite day sampled wonderful local cheeses and chocolate, slurped all sorts of intense raspberry dishes, and had a fabulous chef's tasting menu that night. 

We rode the cable car at Cataract Gorge, slept in a beautiful cottage hotel, and then drove back south down the centre of the island. There was more farmland, more poppies and fields of yellow canola, more dead wombats and wallabies, more little stone-built towns and villages with impressive bridges, all courtesy of convict labour, which we learned about at a stately home where they had done all the work.

And finally we arrived back in Hobart, utterly charmed by Tasmania's animals, people, food and scenery and, loaded with great story material, I was committed to pursuing more of such freebies, and wangling myself another one just as soon as I could...

"Don't leave town...

... before you've seen the country". That was the slogan for a NZ Tourism campaign that ran in the '80s - which passed me by, actually, because I had already breezed off out of town by then, and was living overseas throughout that decade, plus. I had, though, seen much of the country before I left, and popped back a few times over those years to see even more of it, including three months in a caravan touring from top to bottom, literally. So I felt pretty smug, although I was aware that there were still plenty of bits I hadn't visited.

Since I came back home to live, I've been working on that, but even now there are places left to see - Newzild only looks small, the country's actually the same size as the UK, and it's crammed full of almost every kind of desirable scenery you could name - and now that our borders are closed, it seems a pretty good time to fill in the gaps. The Tourist Board certainly thinks so, and is encouraging everyone to get out and support the businesses around the country that are desperately missing all the overseas tourists who normally swarm continuously over the country.

The domestic market has always been the mainstay, though, so what with that, and national pride, independence and mobility being right up there these days, I was surprised by what I heard, eavesdropping on three young women while I was out walking this morning. Well, striding, actually - they came up behind me and I was damned if I was going to be overtaken. Anyway, they were in their late 20s and chattering about places they'd never been to, like Gisborne and - this was pretty shattering - the South Island!

I thought it was an old cliché that Aucklanders were more likely to have been to Sydney than the South Island, and that in these enlightened times, with all the publicity about the scenery down there, the adventure, the food, the wine, there was no way Kiwis would allow themselves to miss out on all that. But apparently not, sigh.

As a Mainlander myself, I am naturally offended, and also minded to sneer at their stupid self-deprivation. Good grief, pre-Covid, you could get Air NZ special fares to Queenstown for absolute peanuts! And crossing the often challenging Cook Strait on the ferry is a rite of passage for any true-blue Kiwi. Granted, the North Island has some good bits - Rotorua, Maori culture, the Bay of Islands, assorted volcanoes - but for real gobsmacking scenery, the South Island knocks it into a cocked hat, I reckon. How crazy that it takes a global pandemic to get Aucklanders to go there.

A gain, and a loss

Well, it's been over a month now since my last post (about, er, hearing the Last Post) so I suppose it's time for another. Quite honestly, though, stories about travel feel both irrelevant and a bit sad during this time of Covid-19 lockdown. Despite having done pretty well here in New Zealand - no new cases today for the fifth day in a row, no-one in hospital, only 21 people currently infected, the same number as have died altogether - travel is still looking a long way off yet. Our borders are officially shut (though essential personnel like those involved in filming the Avatar and Lord of the Rings TV/movies have apparently been slipping through) and trips overseas won't be possible till there's a vaccine.

Domestic travel is now allowed, though, and a trans-Tasman bubble is a strong possibility for the nearish future, meaning we can go to Australia, and vice versa - though that hardly counts as overseas. But the industry is struggling, and freebie trips for people like me will be way down on the list of priorities, even if publications had enough advertising to pay us for the subsequent stories. So, instead, we return to the theme of this post (see upper right) about how travel stays with you forever after, just waiting for a cue to prompt a memory.

The thing is, that would be all very well, if your (my) memory worked as it should/used to. Sprawled on the sofa watching TV the other night, I got a glimpse of a street with umbrellas hanging above it, and thought, "I've seen somewhere like that! Now where was it...?" Drilling down through the brain cells to locate it took so long that, by the time I'd triumphantly identified it as a street in the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires (which those of us brought up with Sesame Street would expect to be spelled rather differently), I'd entirely forgotten where the original umbrella shot was.

Worse, while lying there, another connection to Argentina occurred to me - but I can't now remember what that one was, either. So that pretty much destroys the whole premise, right? Sorry about that. 

Oh well. I've enjoyed remembering about the Sunday market there, in Plaza Dorego, which was classically colourful, busy and varied, and included satisfyingly local offerings like a man in gaucho gear selling terrifying bits, plus bridles, cruppers, martingales, drop nosebands and fancy browbands (see, I can remember all those terms from my distant horsy past). I was amused to see a man dwarfed by the huge bundle of feather dusters he was selling. There was art and food and music, and - oh, yes! I've just remembered! Jewellery, including pendants made of cut-out coins, including one from neighbouring Uruguay featuring a capybara, which I bought because I like capybara and got very close to one called Roderigo, up the Amazon in Peru. And I was wearing it the night I saw the umbrellas on TV. So there you go: happy ending.

Except, looking at my photos, I've just been reminded of the shoes I saw on one stall and wanted to buy, but they didn't have my size. So now I'm sad again. Damned memories.