Gute Reise! (hoffentlich)

So, here I am in Qantas's rather understated, but pleasant enough, lounge, mourning being too late for the Bircher muesli they do so well here, and looking forward to the flight to Sydney, in Business. Shame it's only three and a half hours...

Then it's a more or less immediate transfer to the Premium Economy flight to Frankfurt. I flew PE with Air NZ to Perth, and it will be a hard act to follow. I hope they score. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oy, oy,oy!

Show-off Sydney

One day I must find out why it is that planes don't just swoop down and land without all that silly circling: can't they slow down and descend as they approach land over the ocean? But at least it makes for a good view as you come in, and Sydney's one of the best. Shame the phone is turned off at that point.

Scalloped beaches, cliffs with white foamy feet, bush right up to the city margins, and then warm orange tile roofs surrounding that wonderful harbour, and sometimes even the bridge and Opera House. Tch. Showing off even before you land!

Free WiFi for the people!

Back on the NZ Herald's cover again, yay, with the Tasman showing off its glamorous face - and the centrefold too (with MY title, for once: score!) I hope the Bay of Fires people will be happy, that they'll get some bookings because of the story, and that Matt and Kate won't get fired for being outed internationally as bare-faced liars.

What is getting more attention though (Twitter! Facebook!) is the guest Comment I did on page 2, in which I froth at the mouth yet again about hotel WiFi and the swingeing charges they impose totally without shame for something that should be as standard in a room as the bed. As the unconcerned Hilton rep said, "it'll come" but in the meantime, we here at the forefront of digital technology are once again putting our blood pressure at risk by having to cope with dunder-headed people dragging their feet and holding back the rest of us who can see so clearly how things are meant to be.

And not just hotels, as a friend pointed out: airports too. They should all be like Dubai, where she says there's not only free WiFi throughout, but also sockets for plugging in and charging. Why stop at hotels and airports, I'm thinking now? Free WiFi everywhere! All the time! For everyone! Even Hilton Man can see the future; dammit, tomorrow is the future.Why wait?

Suite as

It's been another of those weeks: stories out in a couple of publications about Queensland and Washington state; stories sold about the West Coast, Amazon and Victoria; working on Western Australia; as well as beginning to focus on next week's crazy flit to Germany for a 5-day cruise along the Rhine, and discussing the itinerary for June/July in the UK.

That's why Germany is a there-and-back, since I'll be in Europe again so soon: though it does seem rather a waste of free flights, with so much richness and variety right there. But the five days will be fun, on the maiden cruise of a fancy suite-only ship, calling in at Gutenberg, Rudesheim and Cologne (Glockengasse Nummer 4711!) and ending up in Amsterdam.

I've only been to Germany once before, to Hamburg, and once to Amsterdam too. That was the last stop on the Big Trip from NZ to Britain: 16 countries in 6 months, flying on 16 different airlines on 26 flights. I kept a diary (in a notebook! Longhand! How untechnological) and the last entry finishes like this -

>> We didn't lose anything, we didn't have anything stolen, and we never misplaced our bags. We saw a lot of places, did a lot of things, spent a lot of money and had a lot of fun. Now we're arriving back at the same time as many other British holidaymakers, and I can imagine being asked where we spent our holiday. We'll reel off the list of exotic names, and end up with Amsterdam. "Amsterdam!" the tourist from Rhyll will say. "The wife and I went there. Did you see Anne Frank's house?" "No," we'll have to say. "Shame, you really missed something there. You should have seen the bookcase..."

Because it was closed. Maybe this time!

Dorothy calling

So much for Schadenfreude. Mouthing a few platitudes about the dreadful tornados recently in the southern states of the US has come back to bite me: an F2 tornado ripped through my local shopping mall yesterday afternoon while I sat at home looking out of the window thinking, "Tch. Three o'clock rain again", and killed a man working on the roof of a building there.

Astonishing. It was the real deal: swirling (clockwise) vortex sucking up sheets of roofing iron and a couple of trampolines, throwing cars about, toppling trees and street lamps, and terrifying people who'd popped into the supermarket for a bottle of milk and some catfood. It formed at Albany, hopped across a couple of suburbs, touched down outside Glenfield College moments before the final bell rang, jumped the harbour, landed briefly on the other side, and fizzled out. All over in just a few minutes, leaving chaos in its wake.

We don't do tornados here, really. They happen, but so rarely that no-one remembers, till the next time. Cyclones are more our thing - but we haven't had a big one of them for a while, either. The closest I've come was visiting the Cook Islands last year a few weeks after Cyclone Pat tore across Aitutaki, and that was pretty impressive: foliage stripped, corrugated iron wrapped round trees, collapsed houses, missing roofs. But people were busy with rakes and wheelbarrows restoring the island back to normal - which looks pretty close to paradise to us tourists - with a resignation that I imagine is the prevailing attitude in Albany right now. And Christchurch. And Japan, and Alabama, and Queensland...

Connecting

[By the way, next time you're slumped glumly in your armchair while your favourite TV programme keeps breaking up into its constituent pixels and disappearing off the screen, don't sit there passively, and unscientifically, thinking "Well, I knew rain wrecked the satellite signal, but what's with this gale? Is is blowing the rays around the sky, or what?" Get up and go outside and remove the wayward branch of rose bush that's waving in front of the sensor, and save yourself a $90 technician call-out fee.]

Because of breaks in the programme (see above) I missed David Attenborough's introduction to the footage of a bird eating flowers on some sort of bush, but then he said "currawong" and I thought, "Currawong! Australian crow-type bird! I remember seeing one in Tasmania, when I was walking around Dove Lake in the unexpected snow, in my smooth-soled sneakers, and there was a man eating his lunchtime sandwich by the water, and suddenly a currawong swooped down and snatched it from his fingers right as he was going to bite it, and he didn't know whether he was more shocked or hungry!" And then the close-up was swapped for a wide shot, and there was Cradle Mountain and Dove Lake. I love it when that happens.

Then we watched 'Buildings that Shaped the World' which is much more interesting than it sounds, about city planning this time, and shouted "Bath! Edinburgh! York! London!" all the way through as the pictures came up on the screen. It's just as well we were on our own. When other people do that sort of thing, it's simply indefensible, don't you think?

Storm warning

There's a storm passing over and I was going to refer to the terrible tornados that have ripped through some of the southern states of the US, killing hundreds and reducing whole towns to rubble - when they didn't just suck entire houses up into the air, that is, and spit them out somewhere else completely.

But I've just heard that Osama Bin Laden has been killed by American forces, and that's much bigger news than a mile-wide tornado: it's world-wide news, an event that will affect millions. If only it were a line drawn under 9/11, the end of that terrible story, and the start of moving on; but it won't be. There will be repercussions in all sorts of expected, and unexpected, places.

I'm not sorry he's been killed, of course: it had to be done. But now, for everybody, it's like living on permanent tornado alert (or even like living in Christchurch, still juddering with aftershocks - 5.3 on Saturday - and not knowing if the next one will be the biggie). Where will the storm strike next, and whose life is going to be sucked up and obliterated?