Sleepless and Seattle

Lying awake and idly Googling through the stilly watches of the night, I was minded to check up on Professor William R. Catton. Of course I knew he was American, but out of all the universities in all the states in that great Union, where do you think he was from?

The University of Washington in Seattle. That would be the very U-Dub I kayaked past on my afternoon of full-body work-out with Evergreen Escapes, after the three-hour bike-ride around the city. Another coincidence - or is it? No, honestly - is it? My grasp of the coincidence theory that he demonstrated to us in that lecture was sufficiently co-disciplined with mathematics that it slid through my meninges like mercury through my fingers, back in the days when broken thermometers were given to me as a child to keep me amused, with who knows what consequences for my future, ie present, health.

So I don't know whether I've just proved or disproved what he was talking to us about. But it's a connection, and that'll do for me - between, this time, poor rattled Christchurch (still getting big aftershocks: 5.1 the other day) and the sunny day I spent in Seattle with Eric pedalling along the waterfront and through its quirky suburbs past ships and statues, a lock and a troll, and then kayaking with him past gently swaying houseboats including the one from Sleepless in Seattle, under bridges high and low, and past the university's stadium to Washington Lake where I might have caught a glimpse of Bill Gates's house on the far shore. Or possibly not.

There were lots of rowers out, sweating away, making a mockery of our watery ramble: obviously taking to heart the sanctioned annual row-team graffiti on the concrete banks. We got back to the landing place just as the sun was setting, spotlighting the city skyscrapers and the Space Needle. Excellent day out.

Star-tling!

Now see, if I were one of those super-well-prepared travellers, like the one who lives not a million miles from this house, who swots up all the travel books before a trip and assembles a labelled loose-leaf folder with dividers with notes and addresses and opening times all printed out in colour and punched and filed, I wouldn't have had the fun of today's surprise to enliven my work.

No deadlines at the moment, so I'm flitting on sheer whim from country to country writing stories, and today it was Queensland again, specifically Charleville. That's a little town 760km inland from Brisbane in the south-west (that I hope escaped the floods this time) where there's a surprising amount to see and do. One of the major attractions is the Cosmos Centre where we went to see the stars in the inky Outback sky, natch, but also, astonishingly, the surface of the sun next day through the telescope. Heavily filtered, of course, but scarily orange and shimmering in the solar wind. Amazing. And they had ancient meteorites there from China and more recent local ones, prettily known as 'sky stones' by the Aboriginals. And I found out my age on Venus (83!) and on Jupiter (4!); and my weight on the moon (10kg!); and I ate star-shaped biscuits.

But that's not the surprise. We went to a park and looked at tall funnel-shaped things that we were told were Vortex Guns: invented in Italy to disperse hailstorms over vineyards. A self-taught meteorologist called Clement L. Wragge thought they would be the answer to the long and disastrous 1902 drought, and got backing to have some made and fire them into a likely-looking cloud. It didn't really work, and the second time they tried, two of them blew up and nearly took out a couple of spectators, so Wragge slunk away in disgrace (the drought broke a couple of weeks later all by itself).

But Wragge (who, incidentally invented long-range weather forecasts and first thought of naming cyclones after people - actually politicians, ha ha - so he wasn't really a failure) left Australia and ended up in Auckland some years later, supplying the NZ Herald (for which I was writing that particular story) with forecasts. And, even more surprising, he lived in a suburb not far at all from where I live in this very spread-out city, and is buried there.

So that was all fun to find out about today, instead of just churning out a dutiful story of known facts. Moral: leave yourself stuff to discover later.

PS One of the few things I remember from my mid-seventies trendy but useless sociology paper at Canterbury University was that coincidence is much more common than people think, and the prof demonstrated it by finding several sets of birthday twins in the lecture hall before he'd even got halfway up the side section. That lecture hall? Shown on the TV news last night as an example of earthquake damage in the city, its turret dangling from a crane. That turret? This one. Explain that away, Prof Catton!

Not my fault

I would like to make it clear that I take no responsibility whatsoever for the terrible floods in Brazil. I have never been to Brazil. The nearest I ever got was eating a fresh Brazil nut in the Amazon jungle in Peru; but the young people flaunting their perfect bodies in front of us last Sunday at Palm Beach were, I thought, Brazilian (on the basis that I couldn't understand what they were saying so obviously it couldn't have been Spanish) - does that count?

Seriously, tragic stories from Brazil. And seriously bad ones still from Australia, as mop-ups uncover bodies in Queensland, flooding spreads in NSW and Victoria is badly affected. Also, Tasmania, where I'm going in just over a week (calamity, worryingly, now preceding me as well as following on my heels): two teenagers airlifted to safety after being swept along Cascade Gorge, which was on my itinerary, and where I have been previously. It's a huge, er, gorge between rocky cliffs, very spectacular, especially when viewed from the ski lift arrangement that spans it, on which you're suspended below a cable and move very slowly across the surging waters.

Near Heathcote, in Victoria, we went up to look at Lake Eppalock, to see the phenomenon of the spillway not just wet but actually foaming with water: the first time it had been put to use since it was built in the 1990s. Our host was still taken with the novelty of it all, that the lake was 107% full so soon after a time when "We thought we were going to lose the lake". It'll be a lot more impressive right now, I bet.

And back in Queensland, in Charleville, our guide there was still astonished by the floods they'd had just 4 weeks earlier, when Bradley's Gully overflowed and swept through the town from behind while everyone was watching the stopbanks on the Warrego River out front: half a metre of muddy water right through the town, including the bottom floor of the historic Corones Hotel, scene of high society in the first half of last century but the elegance now faded, and many treasured items spoiled by floodwater. Poor Jane, the tourism lady, found herself playing lady's maid, hand-washing gowns over and over, flushing the fine dirt out of seams and hems.

Australia's fine red dust is probably the most-cursed dirt on the planet: up in Broome, the pearl-masters deliberately chose to wear white linen suits to show how rich they were, able to afford not just lots of sets of clothes, but also the laundry maids to wash out the pindan dust every day, in water that had to be filtered over and over before it could be used.

A full day

What better way to spend a sunny summer Saturday than out with old friends nosing around Matakana Farmer's Market (fresh pastries, hot HOT Jamaican beef pasty, crowds of relaxed people and interesting shops full of pretty stuff that I have no temptation to buy any more - what a lot of money saved!) And then to Morris & James pottery to admire colour and form, art and craft, and eat a healthy salad.

Followed by sinful creamy gelato from Charlie's for some, but virtuous zingy blackcurrant sorbetto for me. Then Brick Bay Winery and Sculpture Trail for a pre-tipple wander through sun-soaked vineyards and cool shady bush scoffing at the art-speak in the guide, but admiring the creativity, both abstract and concrete, that led to such delights as this:

And enabled a bit of fun like this:

Then a trip back in time for one of us, but for the rest to Martin's Bay for a classic Kiwi camp-site and beach, to paddle in warm water, walk on soft sand and watch little kids with fat tummies and bucket hats chasing seagulls, and old-fashioned tractors pulling flash new boats out of the sea.

And finally snapper and spuds on the beach at Orewa with more little kids playing and discovering that scooters on concrete ramps stop pretty quickly when they reach the deep sand at the bottom. Always good to see children learning useful lessons.

Calamity Pam

Sometimes it might be better not to have travelled quite so much. Today's news was pretty uniformly bad, and having connections with the places where it was happening made it seem that much worse.

Even though Brisbane's flood levels didn't reach the high predicted, it was quite bad enough, with 26,000 houses drenched, huge damage everywhere including to the lovely places we walked so recently, and so much debris washing down the river that there are fears the Great Barrier Reef will cop some of it. And of course, the deaths, the featured stories just heartbreaking; and so many more people still missing.

Then down in Greymouth the police announced tonight that they are calling a halt to the recovery attempt and sealing the mine with the 29 men's bodies, what remains of them, still inside. The mine is so volatile even now, two months later, that it's just too dangerous to think about entering: 4 explosions and a fire so far. The families, and everyone else on the Coast, will be downcast, having clung to hope for so long. It's been raining there today, the hills hidden in low cloud, the sea grey, the bush a dull green.

And then, different but disturbing, there's the report of the murder of an Irish woman honeymooning in Mauritius, who disturbed hotel staff thieving in her room when she went into it, and was strangled, while her husband of two weeks sat in the dining room waiting for her return. And that was at Legends hotel in the north, where I stayed last year: where Matthew Flinders' cat came visiting, where my bed was covered in an intricate pattern of bougainvillea blooms, where a friendly attendant came to my door in the evening to shave jasmine-scented soap for my bath. Awful.

I was asked today if I'd like to go to Malaysia, to the east coast islands, for a bit of snorkelling and scoffing of seafood, and beach-side massage. Maybe it would work out better for Malaysia though if I stayed at home.

Water, water everywhere...

Hard to say anything more meaningful about the Queensland floods other than "Wow". Australia doesn't mess about when it comes to disasters: the sheer force, volume and spread of the floodwaters is just astonishing. To see footage of cars being flipped about, forced under bridges and left in piles by what is normally an inoffensive little creek in Toowoomba is simply breath-taking.

And now it's Brisbane's turn. As if there's not enough water in their river already, serpentining through the city and bringing, usually, a breath of cool freshness to what can be a chokingly hot and sweaty place. When we were there last April, we had a day free in the city, and it was really pleasant to spend it alongside the river at the South Bank Park, where there's a popular little beach area in the gardens and lots of open space for things like, that weekend, a festival to celebrate Buddha's birthday.

We went up in the big Ferris wheel, then crossed the bridge into the CBD to nose round the shops and be nosy about these people in their very odd dress - advertising something? Who knows.

And then we took a ferry along the river and looked at all the lovely houses and converted warehouses where right now everybody must be looking through their windows at the river and wondering where it's all going to stop.

This guy is the only one guaranteed to keep his feet dry.

Back to work

Yesterday was pretty much the official start of work again here after the holidays, even though the weather continues hot and muggy, school's out for another 3 weeks yet and lots of people are still away. But I'm not and it was time to hit the keyboard.

Working from home is a hard discipline: there are so many worthy distractions all around, jobs that need doing, that don't individually take so much time that it's unreasonable to consider leaving the computer to do them, but taken together eat up an entire morning. Or afternoon. Or both, even. Sigh.

And then there's the focus required to stick with something that doesn't have a deadline. Tch. So it was a triumph today to finish a story about Jaipur, even if I started out by writing about Washington. I'm not quite sure how that happened. But anyway, it was good to look back at the photos and remember the mad chaos of India, the colour, the press of people, the animals - everywhere, animals: cows, chickens, goats, dogs, monkeys, camels, horses, elephants - and the faded incredible opulence of the buildings. So much gold and silver, delicate hand-painted murals, fabrics embroidered in gold thread and decorated with thousands of tiny seed-pearls, each one drilled by hand. It's a tired cliche, of course, but the contrasts there are phenomenal.

A friend of mine has just gone to India for her umpteenth trip, salwar kameez at the ready, eager for the photo opportunities as in no other country. I've been twice now, both times to the same cities. There's so much contrast just within one city - how much different would it be to go to another area altogether?*

*To go to another area. Sorry you're gone, Leslie Nielsen.