All Aboard the Indian Pacific—Please Remain Calm

We liked Sydney a lot, and could easily have spent more time there. We never got to the Tim Tam factory, for example. I’d also hoped to get to a second location of an excellent music store called Red Eye Records, although I bought so much music at the branch that I did get to that I’m not sure how much more I could have brought home.

I also could have snacked at Max Brenner a half-dozen more times, but as with the music situation, it’s probably best that I didn’t get to indulge myself further. So as much as we enjoyed Sydney, I think we were both ready for the next leg of our adventure, which was the three-night journey to Perth on the Indian Pacific train.

This train takes its name from the fact that you will, if you stay on the train for the whole 65-hour, 4,352-kilometer, trans-continental journey, glimpse both the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. Along the way, you pass through three Australian states, change time zones twice, and cruise along the longest stretch of perfectly straight track in the world—297 miles without a bend, and precious little change in elevation, either.

One of the first things I noticed as I settled into our cabin was a sign on the wall (actually an emergency safety notice) saying “Don’t Panic.” And I could see where Indian-Pacific passengers might be a little on edge: The economy-class sleeper compartments are small. Really small. By day there are two seats facing each other with a folding table between them, a comically narrow closet, a luggage rack high overhead, and a sort of a Murphy sink that folds out of the wall like the bed in an old-fashioned studio apartment.

I also noticed a bunk bed suspended about 15 inches from the ceiling, and my palms got clammy imagining sleeping in such a tiny space. By night, though, the bunk is lowered several feet, and a bottom bunk, perhaps inspired by the sink, flips down out of the wall. Full linens and towels are provided. There are single-sex toilets at one end of each carriage, and, remarkably, two showers at the other end. A red-service dining car served bland but perfectly adequate hot food. It was snug, but there was enough space under the seats and in the closet to keep our bags out of the way and our diversions close at hand. I confess that I did have a moment of panic when I first saw the tiny space where we would spend the next three days, but once we’d left suburban Sydney and spotted our first-ever wild kangaroos, I decided I was up for the outback adventure.

Just Because

Here's a koala eating eucalyptus. They do a lot of that.

Opera House

I thought I knew what the Sydney Opera House looked like. It’s smooth and white, right?

Not quite, as it turns out. It’s actually a slightly pinkish beige, and I learned on a tour that the exterior is made of ceramic tiles. They’re laid out in a pattern that suggests fish scales, or feathers. It’s a pretty outlandish building, designed by a Scandinavian architect who wasn’t positive his own design could even be built.

And if you think the current building is wacky, you should see some of the other proposals. A contest was held in the 1950s to solicit ideas for the design of Sydney’s new opera house, and the ones that didn’t look like Frank Lloyd Wright boxes looked like places the Jetsons might go to see a show.

And here’s another interesting tidbit about the opera house. The seats in the main performance hall (where unfortunately you aren’t allowed to take pictures) were made out of materials chosen because they absorb the same amount of sound as a human body. This means that a diva who has been rehearsing in an empty hall isn’t startled by a change in tone when the house is packed on opening night.

Maybe that’s common in opera houses, or maybe it’s a musical urban legend. But it impressed me nonetheless. Interestingly, the author Jan Morris, whose book Sydney I have with me, says that Australians like to sniff that they have the best opera house in the world. The only problem, they say, is that the façade is in Sydney and the interior is in Melbourne. I didn’t see an opera in either place, so I can’t say if I think this is true.

Dugongs

I knew Australia had wacky wildlife, but here’s a creature I didn’t know about: The dugong. These look like manatees, and I never did find anyone to tell me if they’re the same creature we have in North America. In any case, I’ve never seen a manatee with my own eyes, so this was a new experience.

These dugongs live in a deep tank in the Sydney aquarium. You can look down at them from a walkway around the edge of the tank, or you can walk through Plexiglas tunnels at the bottom of the tank and watch them swim above you.

That might sound scary, but even small children seemed to love it. Dugongs are the size of park benches, but so roly poly that it’s just hard to take them seriously. They look like they’re smiling as they happily Hoover up romaine lettuce left on the bottom of their tank in an approximation of the naturally growing sea grass they would normally eat.

(Lettuce! They got this big on lettuce! What in the world do they eat when they’re dieting?)

The aquarium has two large tanks. The dugongs live in one, and Great Barrier Reef creatures live in another. In one part of the second tank I saw a coral shelf surrounded by lots of little dentist-office fish. That was nice but we’d seen so many angelfish by this time that I was ready to move on pretty quickly. Just as I was about to walk away, a giant potato cod (“sofa cod” is more like it) drifted out from under the shelf and scared us half to death. Pipi and I both sort of shrieked, and as we looked around nervously to see who’d noticed, it slunk back under the rock to wait for the next victim. I almost think it was doing this on purpose. I guess it probably gets pretty boring swimming around the same tank day in and day out.

On an unrelated note, I want to apologize for being out of touch. Everything’s fine; it’s just kind not as easy as I’d hoped to get an internet connection and, as I think I mentioned, I’m on vacation! I won’t be for much longer, though, so posts should pick up soon.

Taronga Zoo

The zoo here is amazing, probably the best I’ve ever been to. It’s not just the scenery. The zoo also has great shows, like a ranger talk about birds punctuated by actual raptors and parrots swooping over the audience on cue. And there is a large Australian animal area that comprises almost half the zoo.

I have always had a particular love of koalas, so a highlight for me was getting to go into a cage with two of them. This one was named Katy, if I remember correctly. It might have been Katy’s friend Trevor. It’s kind of hard to tell them apart.

You can’t touch the koalas here, or anywhere in New South Wales, for that matter. Koala cuddling is only legal in a few states, and yes, there actually are laws on the books concerning koala cuddling. It’s a different country. So I don’t know what they feel like, but I can report that their fur looks very soft and plush, but maybe not so clean.

An interesting note about Australia: As anyone who has read Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country knows, almost everything in Australia can kill you. It has toxic snakes, spiders, jellies, crocodiles, fish, and even seashells that can bring down a grown man. But the bears? Sleepy, stoned, and perfectly harmless.

(Yes, I know koala bears aren’t really bears, but I still think it’s interesting.)

Here is a link to more photos. I apologize if some of them don’t have captions yet. I’m on vacation!

Tomb With a View

I expected to like Sydney, so I wasn’t a bit surprised that it has turned out to be a friendly, sunny, agreeable city. What surprised me a little bit was the discovery that it is also an attractive city. I knew the harbor was supposed to be pretty, and I knew the weather is good, and I knew that the Opera House is one of the worlds’ most striking buildings. But I also know that Sydney is a relatively new city, as world capitals go, and that it grew enormously in the last 50 years. I worried that this would mean a lot of bland, hastily built post-war sprawl.

In actuality, Sydney has a really interesting mix of old and new architecture. There’s no old district; instead you find solid sandstone Victorian-era government buildings right next to light glass skyscrapers. I find the variety nice to look at, and I can’t think of another city where old and new are integrated in exactly this way.

But far more striking than the architecture of Sydney is the setting. I know that everyone says this about the place, but I guess everyone has to discover this for his- or herself. What really drove it home for me is the observation that harbor views are so plentiful here that they are actually giving them out to dead people and animals.

On our first day, we visited a cemetery near Bondi Beach that stood on a bluff overlooking the open ocean. (It was a setting for some movie we’d never seen.) This was a spectacular setting, but it had nothing on what we saw yesterday at the zoo. The Taronga zoo is situated on top of a hill across the harbor from downtown Sydney. On a clear day, which we had, you can see the above vista from much of the park. It’s a little distracting. At one point, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to look at the giraffes in the foreground or the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background more. I’m sorry if I’ve offended anyone by not automatically prioritizing God’s creatures over man-made constructions, but please keep in mind that they have giraffes at the zoo in my hometown, but I’d never before set eyes on the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

Here is a link to photos. I apologize if some of them don’t have captions yet. I’m on vacation!

Greetings From the Land Down Under

Pipi and I are in Australia! We arrived in Sydney at 6am this morning, and hit the ground running, immediately embarking on a narrated tour of Sydney movie locations.

For most people, the highlight of this tour would have been driving very slowly past Nicole Kidman’s house, hoping she’d come out (no luck there); lunch on Bondi Beach; or getting the dish on where celebrities hang out in Sydney. But Pipi and I are not most people. Our favorite part was the very first stop on the tour. This was the Harbourview Hotel (pictured), which was featured in our favorite Australian movie of all time. We want to make our Harbourview stalking experience complete by going back for dinner or a drink (it’s one of those hotels that’s not for sleeping), but this will do for now.

After our tour, we stopped by a chocolate shop near our hotel that we saw from the van. This turned out to be Max Brenner’s Chocolate Bar, which offers chocolate bonbons, decadent chocolate desserts, fondue that is nothing more (or less) than a melted chocolate bar, and the best hot chocolate ever, in flavors like toffee and Dutch orange. I thought our hotel, at the edge of the Central Business District, was well located when I booked it, but now I know I made exactly the right accommodation decision.

Our day has been very long. We haven’t slept in a real bed since Sunday morning, and as I write, it’s Tuesday night. So we’re a little delirious, and it’s not just the cocoa taking. Tomorrow will probably be a long day, too, because I expect to be up around 4am with jet lag. The plan is to take a ferry across the harbor to the zoo. I wonder how early they open?

Here are some photos of our first day.

Waking up Canadian

Here’s an unsettling thought: You may be Canadian and not even know it.

If you’ve suddenly found yourself putting vinegar on your French fries, listening to a lot of Rush, or getting uncharacteristically excited about hockey, there’s a possible explanation: You may have become Canadian on April 17.

Probably you didn’t, though. My understanding is that the new laws apply only to people born outside of Canada to Canadian parents. So if you have no known connection to the great white north, it’s unlikely that you are now from there.

Still, if you find yourself seized with the sudden desire to smother perfectly good potatoes in cheese and gravy, you might want to check out this link to see if it is possible that you are Canadian.

On a Different Note…

…So to speak, is the music of New Zealand opera legend Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Strangely, Ms. Kanawa has been in our local news lately because an employee of a bank in Alameda, California, is accused of embezzling a large sum of money from her.

Play it Strange

New Zealand tends to get overshadowed by its bigger, louder neighbor across the Tasman Sea. This has certainly been the case for me lately. I’ve been getting myself in the proper frame of mind for my upcoming trip to Australia by watching a lot of Australian movies and listening to a lot of music from down under.

My neglect of New Zealand’s contribution to popular culture is especially egregious right now, as May is officially New Zealand Music Month. (Well, it is in New Zealand, anyway.) This inspired me to put together a tribute to some of the strange, beautiful, genius music from the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Split Enz: Six Months in a Leaky Boat
Tim Finn’s New Wave paean to the rugged individuals who settled New Zealand.

The Swingers: Counting the Beat
Led by the mad genius Phil Judd, the Swingers were the most famous band to come out of Split Enz that wasn’t Crowded House.

Neil Finn: She Will Have Her Way
Here’s another Split Enz alumnus, Neil Finn, at his Beatlesque best.

Tim Finn: Fraction Too Much Friction
And here’s his brother, Tim. I saw him open for Suzanne Vega when I was in high school. At the time I hadn’t really heard of him, and was impatient for the main act. Now I wish I had been paying more attention.

Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
Long before there were Tegan and Sara, there were the Topp Twins. This song might be better with the just the audio because the clothes and the hair are, frankly, a little distracting. But acoustic sister jams don’t get much catchier than this.

Flight of the Conchords: Business Time
Proof that New Zealand zaniness is alive and well in the 21st century.

Better Than a Boomerang?

I’m going to ask if I can’t pick up a copy of my thermal image on my way out of Australia. That would make a truly unique souvenir of my trip.

Are You Hot or Not?

I’ve been emailing a wonderful woman in Australia named Janice who organizes and conducts tours of movie locations in Sydney. Because Australia aside, I love Australian movies so much, I scheduled this tour for our first day in the country. In our emails, we’ve been trying to figure out exactly where and when we should meet.

In the course of figuring out how long it will take Pipi and me to get downtown from the airport, Janice has informed me that because of swine flu, there will be one brand-new immigration hurdle to jump through at the airport: a thermal imaging machine. These machines scan a traveler’s body and report his or her temperature down to a fraction of a degree. These machines can’t say for sure if a person has the H1N1 virus, but they can at least flag visitors arriving with a fever.

This seems like a pretty good idea. What would make it a great idea would be if they performed this screening before we got on the plane. They way they do it now, they can stop one infected person from bringing down a whole continent, which is good. But speaking selfishly, I’d really like it if they found a way to keep that one infected person from sitting next to me for 15 hours.

Vote Early, Vote Often

Pipi was just in Eureka, California, on business. While filling up the rental car at the Bigfoot Gas Station in nearby McKinleyville, she was struck by a sign so odd that she submitted it to the Signspotting web site. You can see it—and rate it—here.

Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time

My cable company likes me so much (and why shouldn’t they—I just started giving them five dollars extra a month so that I can watch soccer games filmed with what appears to be the original Zapruder camera) that they gave me a voucher for a free on-demand movie.

I knew I had to use this windfall wisely. It occurred to me that I should probably order a long movie, to maximize the value of the gift. If it were something I’d been meaning to see, obviously that would be a good thing, and if I could claim it were educational, or even work-related, so much the better.

This is how I came to watch the entire movie Australia by myself this evening, while Pipi was away on a business trip. It was kind of fun, and romantic, and full of really pretty things, like outback scenery and Hugh Jackman. Unfortunately, it was also full of really bad special effects, alcoholic Ocker characters, and magical aborigines. I almost always like Australian films in general, and those by Baz Luhrmann in particular. But this was no Strictly Ballroom. It wasn’t horrible; it just proves that Australians can have their sweeping epics fall flat, too.

Underwater Photography

I’m rough on cameras. The last film camera I bought was purchased in Hong Kong when I was studying abroad, an acquisition that was necessary because I had taken its instamatic predecessor with me on an unscheduled dip in the Formosa Strait. And my first digital camera is, as far as I know, at the bottom of China’s West Lake, the victim of a boating accident. So if I ever ask to borrow your camera, please gently but firmly tell me to get lost. Especially if I’m going to Asia. (Or swimming.)

Dude, Where’s My Charger?

I was talking to my father about travel inconveniences, and he brought up an excellent point: Technology can make some things about traveling easier, but it does introduce a whole new set of headaches. Chief among them is the seemingly constant need to charge gadgets. I remember my friend John and I desperately trying to keep our cameras, computers, telephones, and iPods charged up using one single outlet in a tent in Mongolia. It’s not really a fond memory. The cell phones and music players we obviously could have done without, but I was trying to blog and John is a professional photographer, so we really needed our big battery-powered toys to work.

This new need to charge things kept me from moving into digital photography for a good year. When Pipi and I went to Cuba in 2002, we were told that the island ran on the same voltage as the United States. What we didn’t realize, however, was that our hotel in Havana was a Dutch-run establishment that attracted mostly Europeans, and the plugs all fit continental-style power cords.

The front desk had a few adapters available for guests to borrow, and I remember lively negotiations for them among the members of our group who had brought digital cameras. I watched this drama from a smug distance, and hung onto my film camera until it came to the end of its natural lifespan in Hawaii the following summer. If I hadn’t had to replace that camera then, who knows how long I would have resisted moving into the digital age.

Gone Digital

Film is another thing Rick Steves says he has stopped discussing in his books, because he feels that most tourists have gone digital.

Although I still love the idea of art photography on film, and do own a film camera, I don’t really miss the practice of worrying about film while traveling. Hustling up multiple rolls before departure, keeping them separate from the exposed film, trying to find camera shops in strange cities when I inevitably ran out, worrying about the airport x-ray machines ruining my photos….none of these rituals is one I am nostalgic about.

I know a lot of things about travel used to be easier in the old days. You used to be able to wear shoes, pack nail clippers, and carry an oil drum full of shampoo if you wanted to, as long as it fit in the overhead bin and you could demonstrate that it wouldn’t ignite as you chain-smoked in your seat.

Travel has obviously acquired some inconveniences in recent years. But I find it helpful to remember that it has shed some, too. Modern technology means we never have to worry about leaving the airplane tickets at home, or running out of film just as the Loch Ness Monster is ready for its close-up.

Those thoughts don’t entirely take the sting out of having children laugh at you as you get jets of air shot at you in a little glass cage and strangers root through your luggage, but they help a little.

Another Travel Ritual I Won’t Miss

As I was reading through this week’s travel section, an item in an article by Rick Steves caught my eye. While listing what’s new in Europe this year, he mentions, almost in passing, that he has taken information about traveler’s checks out of his newest guidebook editions, because his feeling is that modern ATM networks have rendered traveler’s checks obsolete.

This comes as a relief to me. I haven’t used traveler’s checks in a long time, and it just dawned on me that maybe I never will again. I won’t miss them. Losing a wad of checks while traveling is another disaster I somehow managed to avoid, which is remarkable, because that kind of thing is right up my alley. It’s a relief to know that I may never again have to worry about keeping track of serial numbers or finding a bank that’s open on whatever saint’s day it happens to be.

Armchair Travel

I just finished reading a fantastic book called The House at Sugar Beach, by Helene Cooper. It paints a picture of a place, Liberia, that I don’t think I’ll be visiting any time soon, but the picture is vivid.

The author grew up a privileged child in Liberia during the 1970s. In 1980, when she was 14, there was a coup and her family had to flee. An adopted sister was left behind to finish high school.

The author’s search for forgiveness from her sister reminded me a little bit of the movie The Killing Fields, and her journey from spoiled child to refugee reminded me of Empire of the Sun--although Helene’s own mother insisted that they were not technically refugees because they paid for their own plane tickets out of Africa.

Much of the book takes place outside of Liberia, but I still learned a lot about the country and its incongruous history. This taste will have to do until Liberia calms down enough to sustain a tourist industry. (I’m not holding my breath—even Lonely Planet recommends against going anywhere in the country outside of Monrovia.)

Little Things Seem Big to Nicole

Coin collecting is not a glamorous hobby. I know that. Shaking out my piggy bank and poring over handfuls of change looking for wheat pennies did not help my playground popularity as a child, and as an adult, fewer people than you might expect think that being able to tell if a coin came from Philadelphia or Denver is a good party trick.

But, getting excited about things that most people could care less about does have its advantages. For instance, something happened to me today that would be an annoyance at best to normal people, but which made my whole afternoon.

I went to buy flowers in a neighborhood where you pay for your parking at a machine that gives you a receipt to put on your dashboard. I have noticed that these contraptions often reject perfectly good coins, letting them fall through to the change return box, so I always check the box both before and after I put my own money in.

This time when I checked, I found an unexpected treat. It wasn’t a bent nickel, or a slug, or even a quarter with something stuck to it, but something even odder: an English 20-pence piece.

Okay, it’s not really that big of a deal, but I do love the idea that a machine designed to give me parking validation instead spat out a little piece of Europe.

Paper Tickets Are Dead

I also read an article that included a quote by a travel expert who declared paper tickets “technically obsolete.” What a relief. I’ve made a lot of dumb travel goofs in my day, but I never actually managed to lose a plane ticket. Now, I can safely say that I never will.

Armchair Travel

The tidbit about banking in Maui is just one of many facts I gleaned from a recent travel-section binge. I had a number of Chronicles stacked up, and finally worked my way through them.

Speaking of banking, one other interesting thing I learned is that the dollar is surprisingly strong against foreign currencies these days. About a year ago, for example, one U.S. dollar was buying about one and a quarter New Zealand dollars. But now one dollar is worth almost two Kiwi dollars. This is about the rate I remember from my visit five years ago. The news about Australia is also pretty good for Americans. A year ago the currencies were very close to equal. Now a U.S. dollar is worth about half again the value of an Australian dollar. That will help considerably down under.

Fun Fact

The bank in Hana, on the island of Maui, is open only ninety minutes a day.

I’m Just Saying

A partial list of places gay couples can get married:
Spain
South Africa
Nepal

A partial list of places they can’t:
Fire Island
Key West
Palm Springs
Buenos Aires
Greece
Sydney
Berlin
Los Cabos
Las Vegas

It occurs to me that a trip where a couple gets married in every country where it’s legal would be an odd but interesting adventure.

Not Strictly Related, But….

….Vermont! I did not see this coming.

How does this make me feel? Surprisingly sad. Sad because as good as the news is, it led me to notice that in one important way, California falls short of the example set by states to the east.

We have no maple candy here.

I learned this because I could think of no better tribute to Vermont than a spontaneous mid-afternoon maple sugar candy binge. First I tried Walgreens, then an upscale grocery store with lots of imported candy and cookies, and finally a candy store in a swanky neighborhood. No luck. The lady at the candy store said they sometimes get maple candy at Christmas. I told her that spring is maple syrup season and she smiled at me in a way that I thought was reserved for people who offer useless information. I left empty-handed and still unsure how to honor the Green Mountain State in a way that doesn’t involve a trip to Ben & Jerry’s.

I guess I can boil up some corn on the cob while I thinking that over. (Thanks to you, too, Iowa!)

Reading Material

It’s a looooong flight to Australia. We have a non-stop flight from Los Angeles that will take just under 15 hours. Much of that will be at what seems like nighttime to us, but I don’t sleep all that well on planes so I need something to do. We will also be taking two long train trips in Australia, and of course, there’s always the trip back.

This means that I need a lot of reading material. Luckily, I have a number of books stacked up at home. I do feel, though, that I should stock up on some destination-specific reading.

I have a guidebook, a Frommer’s guide to the whole country that I’ve been flipping through. I’ve also already read Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country.

If I’m feeling like something light, I might re-read The Thorn Birds. I read that once when I was quite young—probably too young, actually—and I remember having crushes on several characters and the whole southern continent as well. It seemed like a place with enough drama to satisfy a young teenager, which is a lot of drama indeed.

I also want to read Jan Morris’ Sydney. Her last book took me several months to get through, so that may be enough, but if anyone else has some good Australia books to recommend, I would love to hear about it.

Making a List

Speaking of music, here’s my Australia playlist so far.

Land Down Under, by Men at Work. Vegemite? Chunder? If you lived in New Hampshire in 1982, this song made Australia seem like the most exotic place in the world.

Lady, by the Little River Band. From 1978; probably the first Australian song I ever heard. My Mom and I both used to get so excited when this came on the radio.

Jessie’s Girl, by Rick Springfield. No, he is! Who knew?

Humming a Tune, by Mental as Anything. From the Starstruck soundtrack.

Body and Soul, by Jo Kennedy. A remake of a Split Enz song, also from Starstruck.

That’s the Way, by Deckchairs Overboard. An oddly mesmerizing song featuring a pre-Crowded House Paul Hester as well as a bass player that I thought might be a drag queen but isn’t. You have to see the video for this one.

Before Too Long, by Paul Kelly and the Messengers.

Something So Strong, by Crowded House. I saw this video so many times in the eighties that I only recently realized how well the song stands the test of time.

New Sensation, by INXS.

What’s My Scene, by the Hoodoo Gurus.

Dream World, by Midnight Oil.

Take it In, by the Waifs. I love this band!

Let Me Be, by Xavier Rudd. From 2004. See, I’m not entirely trapped in the eighties.

Throw Your Arms Around Me, by Hunters and Collectors. Okay, yes I am.

I know there some big omissions. No Olivia Newton John or Bee Gees, for one thing. I don’t think I own any songs by these artists. I guess don’t love everything Australian.

Tangled up in Blue

I hope it was clear that I was joking about being in a funk yesterday. Eating ice cream and listening to girls with guitars is actually perfectly normal behavior for me. It’s only when the music stops that you need to worry.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Sometimes when I submit an article to an editor, I hear back right away, but usually rejection takes a long time. The record so far is two years. So the nine months it took a certain Los Angeles-based publication to get back to me about an article on Japan that I sent them last June isn’t too unusual.

What is unusual is that I think nine months is the longest I’ve ever waited for this kind of message. It wasn’t exactly a rejection, but it certainly wasn’t encouraging. The email thanked me for sending the piece, and noted that they receive far more submissions than they can possibly print, making competition for column inches very tight. Then it invited me to look at their online editorial guidelines and wished me well.

It was, frankly, a little bit like being dumped by a serious smooth talker; the kind of breakup where the conversation seems nice while you’re in it, but later you realize that what they were saying was that there won’t be any more conversations.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. I’m not going to go get an extreme haircut over it or anything. It just kind of came out of the blue is all. Why now? Was I being needy? Did the editor meet another Japan article? Can we still be friends? I don’t know. I’m going to spend the next few days eating ice cream and listening to Joni Mitchell, and hoping it will all make sense eventually.

Meanwhile, Back in My World

This is what it feels like in Oakland today: Like it’s going to take divine intervention to turn things around.

I love Oakland, but it’s a rough time to be in the city. In January, BART police shot an unarmed man to death on the platform of the BART station closest to my house. Now a fugitive parolee has managed to kill four police officers single-handedly before dying in a standoff.

These killings took place around MacArthur Boulevard, a very long street that cuts through many neighborhoods, my own included. I haven’t gotten as far east as 75th Avenue on my walking tour yet, but yesterday I decided to jump ahead a little bit. I usually like to finish one neighborhood before moving on to another, but I wanted to see what was going on in this part of the town that has been in the news lately.

MacArthur Boulevard in Eastmont didn’t look all that different from the way it does near my house. There’s a big cemetery, which feels peaceful. But on the side streets, most yards have chain-link fences and big dogs.

The most remarkable aspect to the neighborhood right now is that there are several shrines set up to honor those who recently died. On two corners at the intersection of 75th and MacArthur there are floral tributes to the four officers. And on 75th Avenue, in front of an apartment building (I think the one where the suspect and the last two officers died) there is a memorial for the cop killer.

This disturbed me because I don’t see any way to paint this particular incident as an example of police brutality. Plus, the killer, with a long rap sheet and DNA evidence linking him to the rape of a 12-year-old girl, is a hard guy to feel sympathy for. Still, as the signs on the avenue attest, he was someone to somebody—quite a few people, actually. That gave me something to think about as I walked back toward my own, quieter strip of MacArthur.

Taking Care of Business

No matter; there is still plenty of time to square away little details, like hotel reservations. Right now I’m concentrating on important arrangements. I’ve already taken care of booking a tour of the Sydney Opera House and a walking tour of Sydney movie locations. And I’m making good progress on researching concerts we might like to see. I’m also making lists of movies we have to rent before we leave. (Top of the list are Australia, and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert--again.)

When is a Hotel Not a Hotel?

Answer: When it’s in Australia.

It’s said that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seems plausible. In a possibly related linguistic quirk, Australians seem to have developed several different words for “drinking establishment.” If you want to go out for a drink down under (as opposed to picking up something at a “bottle shop” to drink at home), you can go to a bar, a pub, a club, or, confusingly, a hotel.

Hotels in Australia always have beer, but they don’t necessarily have rooms. I learned this the hard way when I emailed the Harbour View Hotel in Sydney. I knew of it because it played a boardinghouse in my favorite Australian movie (Starstruck), and I thought it would be fun to stay there.

I wrote asking how much rooms cost, and wondered why they didn’t seem to be in a hurry to take my money. I finally got a politely restrained note back explaining that they aren’t a hotel you can stay at. That was disappointing, but maybe it’s for the best. The hotel seems to be right under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and it probably would have been too noisy for sleeping anyway.

If anyone has a recommendation for a moderately priced hotel in Sydney, please let me know!

Australia is Sooooo Big…

How big is it? So big, motorcycle gangs travel by plane.

I wish this were a joke, but it isn’t. A few days ago, rival biker gangs clashed at the Sydney airport, smacking each other with those metal poles that the velvet ropes go between. The melee spread over two floors. This sounds absurd, and it is, but someone did die, so it’s not really funny.

There are many unanswered questions regarding this incident, some of which probably only bother me. For one thing, how did the one gang find the other? As I’ve mentioned before, you can’t just meet people at the gate anymore in most places, and I would have thought Australia was one of those places.

Secondly, what was the biker gang doing on a plane? Australia, which has sunny weather and wide-open roads, is probably the ideal place to ride motorcycles. Why in the world didn’t they make a road trip of it? I know, I know, the distances between Australian cities can be huge, but they’re bikies (to use the Australian slang I just learned). What else did they have to do this week?

It’s hard to even imagine a biker on a plane. Real rebels don’t put their seats in the full upright position just because the man tells them to, and they certainly aren’t going to extinguish their smoking materials. And how did they get through the metal detector? There are many things I don’t understand about this strange and troubling gang incident, and I can’t believe I’m about to go halfway around the world to find the kind of senseless violence that exists right in the Bay Area.

Rising to the Challenge

This morning I didn’t know what KLM stood for, but I do now: "Koninkliijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij," which means “Royal Airline Company.” This information comes courtesy of my father, who is both a former airline pilot and a speaker of Dutch, so I didn’t have to go far to get the answer.

(K,L, and M are also the San Francisco public transportation lines that run under Market Street between the Financial District and the Castro neighborhood. When I moved to San Francisco, I quickly learned that to get to the Castro, I just had to pretend I was going to Amsterdam, another sexually liberated place with lenient recreational drug policies. Or so I hear.)

Fun Fact

Have you ever wondered why there’s no “u” in “Qantas?” This has always driven me nuts. Australians, like the British, put “u”s everywhere they don’t belong (colour, favour, etc.) and then leave out this one, which, coming after a “q,” I would have considered mandatory. But there is an explanation: Qantas is an acronym standing for “Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services.”

If only this new information somehow allowed me to use “Qantas” as a Scrabble word, but alas, a proper noun is a proper noun.

The Third Sex?

Here’s something I’ve never encountered before: A few hours after booking our tickets to Australia, I went back to the Qantas site to double-check that my reservation had gone through. It had, but the site did want me to fill in some pre-departure information to make it official.

One of the personal details they wanted amused me. They wanted to know my gender, which is not so funny, but the options were: male, female, or “unspecified.”

“Unspecified.” Not “transgender,” or “intersex.” Not “none of your darn business.” Just “unspecified.”

I have the impression that Australians pride themselves on being a little more brash and forthright than their tea-sipping Kiwi neighbors, but I am reminded that both countries came into the world as English colonies, and it seems the Aussies haven’t totally lost their instinct for defusing awkward questions in a dignified and understated way.

(I marked “female,” but I’m seriously considering changing my answer just to see what happens.)

It’s My Recurring Dream

Do you ever have recurring dreams? I never have exactly the same dream twice, but I have recurring scenarios. Most of them are pretty common, I think. One is where I show up to work or class inappropriately dressed, or not dressed at all. The other involves being completely unprepared for something at school. Sometimes it’s a paper I haven’t written, but usually it’s an exam I haven’t studied for, and almost always, the class is math.

There is one other category of anxiety dream that I’ve been having more and more often as an adult. (I have lots of good dreams, too; they’re just more creatively plotted.) Lately I’ve been having stressful dreams about traveling and messing up. Usually I’m about to miss my plane for some really dumb reason--I can’t get anyone to tell me when the flight leaves, or I’ve forgotten to pack, or I realize on my way to the airport that I don’t have my passport or tickets. (I also often dream that the plane is flying really low, or landing on a freeway. I don’t know what that’s about.)

The one thing these travel dreams have in common is that I’m almost always on my way to Australia in them. I’m not sure why the land down under is so anxiety-provoking for me. I think it has something to do with the fact that it’s such a big deal to go there—I think I’m really afraid of messing up something that important and hard to reschedule.

I mention this because in May, I really will be trying to catch a flight to Australia. Pipi and I have been talking about this for a while, and we finally committed. I just bought two tickets to Sydney on Qantas. They’re non-refundable (although for what I paid, I think I get to keep the plane when we’re done), so we’re going for sure now.

It’s two months away, but I’ve already started a list of things (like packing) to be sure to do before we leave the house.

Small Digital World

My Hawaii article appeared in the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, and also online. There were a few comments posted to the online version. These reader comments can be pretty nasty, but the group went pretty easy on me. (I think--I am still scratching my head over the Jimi Hendrix/rainbow bridge post.)

What I didn’t see were emails that readers sent directly to the Chronicle. The next week’s travel section quoted a few, though, and one message made me laugh. It was from Sandi, the park ranger who helped turn around my bad attitude about the weather.

She didn’t say how she’d found the article, but she did say she liked it, and I’m glad. I meant for her to come off well. I needed a talking down that day, and Sandi came through. Thanks for reading, Sandi!

Not Losing Hope Yet

I wrote the Shanghai article quite some time ago, and I was starting to give up on finding a travel-section audience for it.

I happened to mention this to the people I will call, for lack of a better word, my in-laws. (There’s nothing lawful about it at all, but don’t get me started.)

Anyway, Pipi’s mother suggested that instead of trying to get travel publications interested in an article with a Jewish theme, I instead try to get a Jewish journal interested in an article with a travel theme. Genius! There’s hope for this piece yet.

Well, It’s Better Than a Dishonorable Mention

Here’s another interesting development: One of my stories won an honorable mention in the 2009 Solas Awards. This is a writing contest sponsored annually by Travelers' Tales, a Bay-Area publishing company specializing in travel literature.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that there seem to be a lot of categories, with several winners in each category. You’ll also notice that the honorable mention list is rather long. You’d be forgiven, then, for concluding that this is one of those competitions where everybody wins. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I did the math (and then had to go lie down for a while) and determined that it was a competition where hardly more than a third of the competitors won.

The story in question is one I’m happy to have praised, however faintly. It’s about Shanghai’s Jewish history. I’ve been having trouble attracting attention to it, and I was starting to think I’m the only one who finds the idea of Jewish culture in China intriguing.

“Hey, Let’s Go out for Mongolian…”

The oddest thing about Mongolia popping up again in my life is that hours before I noticed my yurt write-up, I had been chatting with a real Mongolian.

Pipi and I had gone out for waffles at a neighborhood place we’d never been to, and I was feeling eccentric, so I was wearing a suede herdsman’s jacket that I had bought at a natural history museum in Ulan Batar. Our waitress noticed it right away. She told me she herself was from U.B.—she was quick to add that she’d been born in the urban area, and I got the impression she wanted me to know that she was a city girl, no more a nomadic sheepherder than I was.

Later Pipi chided me for leaving without asking the woman where we could get good Mongolian food in the Bay Area, but sadly, I don’t remember Mongolia as a place with really great cuisine. I liked a lot of the things I ate; I just don’t see salt tea and fried mutton dumplings really catching on here. But then, Northern Californians do like a good yurt, so you never know what’s going to find an audience.

Published Again

Here’s a pleasant surprise: I was out of town the weekend of March 1, so it took me several days to get my hands on a Chronicle travel section from that weekend. When I finally did, I noticed that a small blurb of mine got published. I had no idea this was going to happen so I hadn’t even submitted an invoice. It turns out it literally pays to read the paper carefully.

Published

My Hawaii story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle over the weekend. I’m very happy with it. The editing was minimal, so I stand by it all. Here’s a link.

On A Completely Different Note

Once upon a time, if you wanted to pick someone up at the airport, you used to be able to meet people at their gate as they got off the plane. I used to love that. I loved the anticipation of watching streams of people come out of a jetway and watching the face of one person in that crowd light up when they saw me. I loved being met, too, and I would always feel a twinge of sadness anytime I got off a plane unmet and had to walk past all those people hugging and kissing their loved ones. I would feel this way even if I was just changing planes and wasn’t even expecting anyone to greet me. It embarrassed me, but it would happen every time.

Now, of course, you have to have a boarding pass to be anywhere near a gate. I’ve gotten so used to the ritual of meeting people at baggage claim--or being swooped up in a touch-and-go curbside operation--that I don’t get wistful anymore walking through the airport by myself.

Just recently, though, Pipi happened to notice that they still have flight arrival information posted at airports. Why is this? No one meets people at gates anymore. You can only meet an arriving passenger if you have a boarding pass, meaning you’d have to be about to go somewhere. How often does that happen? Maybe more often than I think, but I’m pretty sure the posting of arrival information is just one of those quaint things, like no-smoking signs, left over from a bygone era of air travel.

Snow Day

Pipi and I are back from Boston. I’m afraid it wasn’t a fun trip—we were there for Pipi’s grandmother’s funeral. We left Saturday morning for what was supposed to be a punishingly quick trip to the East Coast, but were saved from ourselves by the weather.

On Sunday morning, the day of the funeral, we woke up in the hotel to discover that the biggest storm of the year had already dumped about six inches of snow on Cambridge, with no sign of letting up. Later that morning, as I stood by the snowy gravesite, I thought to myself that this must be Mother Nature welcoming Dorchester-born Grandma Ethel back to New England.

Pipi and I and the rest of her immediate family were supposed to fly back to California Monday, but the storm caused a huge number of flight cancellations and for a while, it looked like the whole party might be stuck. Pipi’s sister-in-law, Michelle, said she thought Ethel was telling us she wasn’t ready for us to go home yet, and I think maybe we weren’t ready to go, either. At brunch, we all batted around ideas about how to fill our extra afternoon in Boston and everyone but Pipi and I, who already knew we were grounded, put off checking the status of flights back to the West Coast.

In the end, the L.A. family made their flights out and only Pipi and I stayed behind. I wish I could say we spent our day going to museums and exploring the city, but the weather was really awful, so we mostly watched movies and read books. When we went out, we limited ourselves to the Harvard Square area. It was a classic lazy snow day, and it felt like a delicious indulgence.

Could Michelle be right? Could Pipi’s Nana have sent the snowstorm? I know the answer is no, that there’s nothing otherworldly about a nor’easter in New England. But it’s fun to think about, and I like the idea that the day off was one last thoughtful gift from a classy and considerate woman who will be missed.

We Interrupt This Broadcast

I am going to be making an unexpected trip to the East Coast. This should keep me busy for the next few days. I’ll be back Tuesday.

Alarming Newspaper News

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting on its own possible demise. It seems they need to find a buyer or a whole lot of money lying around soon or the paper will be in dire financial straits.

This is alarming not just because I have a peculiar obsession with getting myself published in this paper, but also because the closing of the Chronicle would obviously be a very bad omen for publishing in general. Here’s hoping they—and other newspapers in trouble—find a way to turn things around.

A Different Perspective

It’s fashionable to mock air travel for being tedious and irritating, and lots of comedians and travel writers (especially those who think they’re also comedians) get easy laughs out of this subject.

Then there is this brave guy who thinks we ought to be enjoying flying more. This clip is pretty interesting, and very funny. Thanks to my sister for sending it my way! (The first few seconds don’t make a lot of sense—what now about the donkey?—and he riffs for a few minutes on other subjects. Flying stuff starts at about the two-minute mark.)

(Oh, and the language is a little crude—sorry!)

So It’s Not Just Me

This guy seems to be a compulsive facebook user, too.

Not Strictly Related, But….

…Has anyone else heard of this Facebook thing?

I’ve been resisting, because I’ve seen it suck the productivity right out of stronger people than myself. But I finally succumbed, and whoa, Nellie, is it ever a time waster. I was right about that.

But it’s also a fabulous tool for reconnecting with people, and for all those who pooh-pooh electronic communication as superficial, I submit that I have known my friend Lisa for 12 years, and we just now realized that we share a fanaticism for the band Squeeze. We figured this out not through a face-to-face conversation, but because in my Facebook profile I’d marked myself as a fan of the band’s lead singer.

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it; that there is some socially redeeming value to all the time I now spend on this site.

Some of the site’s features are a little harder to justify, but they are undeniably fun. One feature lets you put virtual pins on a world map to show where you’ve been. You can share your map with your friends and see where your friends have been. I’m pleased to discover that I’m the only one of us who has visited Mongolia, but my African and South-East Asian experience (zilch) does not come close to measuring up to my peers.

As if that’s not enough, the map page also comes with a link to a geography game. I’ve played an online game like it before, but this one gives you a score in the form of a “travel IQ.” Mine was a slightly disappointing 111, but I’m just getting my mouse warmed up. I know I can do better next time. It’ll just take a minute…

More Disarming Digs

I sent another one in. (If the editor feels she’s under siege from me, then I’m accomplishing my goal.) This one’s about the experience of traveling on the Trans-Siberian railroad in a sleeper car. If that’s not “disarming,” I don’t know what is.

Disarming Digs

I just submitted a very short piece to the Chronicle. They have a new section on offbeat lodgings, and I wrote in with a description and photo of a Mongolian nomad tent I once spent the night in. That’s got to be offbeat enough to at least warrant a second glance. Here’s hoping.

Why Didn’t I Think of That Part II

Before I interrupted myself with my appreciation of Southwest Airlines and Valentine’s Day, I was musing about getting scooped.

It probably happens to everyone. It happened to me recently—the Chronicle had a story on the Trans-Siberian railroad, which I’ve taken. The author didn’t take the train the whole way across Russia. Instead, he traveled from Moscow to Yekaterinburg and back. The Moscow-Siberia leg was the route traveled by the Czar Nicolas II, on what turned out to be the last trip he ever took—he and his family all met a bad end in Yekaterinburg. So the author presented the story as following in the last footsteps of Russia’s last Czar.

That’s a creative angle, and it was a good story. So I definitely am not saying mine would have been better. I just know it could have been me in the paper, if I’d just been quicker on the draw, or done a better job, or known the editor better, or…well, I don’t really know. You can make yourself crazy trying to figure out why something happened or didn’t happen. All you can do is hope for better luck next time. (You can also hope your trip gets complicated in some amusing and unforeseen way. Everyone likes a good-trip-gone-wrong story.)

Happy Valentine’s Day

Speaking of LUV, I hope everyone has a very happy Valentine’s Day. Pipi and I are going to L.A. to see a play directed by her cousin. We’ll have dinner at a restaurant we like at the Grove, which is Pipi’s favorite mall.

Okay, that sounds kind of funny—favorite mall? But if you grew up in L.A., you’d have a favorite mall, too. And it would probably be the Grove, which is very nice and often good for a celebrity sighting. I grew up in a place where there were only two malls. One we creatively dubbed “the mall,” and the other was “the dead mall,” so I may not be much of a judge, but my inexpert opinion is that even though you can’t get an orange Julius to save your life, the Grove is a pretty good mall.

So happy Valentine’s Day. Here’s wishing everyone love and happiness, or at least some good retail therapy.

LUV is All You Need

They’re not the most glamorous of carriers. In fact, Southwest Airlines, with its folksy flight attendants, orange airplanes, and cutsey stock-ticker symbol (LUV), has probably done more than any other legacy operation to destroy the mystique of air travel.

But LUV is there for you. When something comes up unexpectedly as it did for me this weekend (and is it just me, or is this year already off-the-charts bizarro?), Southwest does make it incredibly easy to change your plans. I just had to bump up a flight for this coming Saturday by a couple of hours. I assumed that I would have to pay the difference between the price of my original flight and the two-day advanced purchace price of the new flight. Since I had to rebook for both Pipi and myself, I thought it might be expensive.

Turns out, there’s a sale going on and the new flight was about half the price of the old one. No, Southwest isn’t going to pay me, but they are letting me change my itinerary absolutely free. That’s a rare thing in these days of baggage fees and peanut surcharges.

It’s official: For flights under 2,000 miles, I LUV Southwest.

Why Didn’t I Think of That?

Last Sunday the San Francisco Chronicle had a cover story on gay and lesbian travel. There was no incredibly creative angle; the main information conveyed was that there exist cruises sailings for gay and lesbian travelers, and that more and more same-sex couples are honeymooning and traveling with children. The author didn’t even go on any gay adventures. This piece was strictly a desk job. I finished the piece thinking, “Well I could have done that.”

So why didn’t I? Because I didn’t think of it. Or rather, it didn’t occur to me that the Chronicle would be interested in a cover story that is an overview of gay travel. I’m not saying I could have done it better; it was a very good article. I’m just saying I could also have done it, but for some reason I didn’t. I’m reminded yet again that so much of this business is having the right idea at the right time. I’m going to have to work on that.

And Now for Something Completely Different

The San Francisco Chronicle has given itself a complete makeover. If you ask me, it looks a little too much like USA Today for my taste, but that’s not important to me. What is important to me is the fact that there are several new departments in the travel section, and a brand new editor to go with them. It’s a great opportunity and I hope to weasel my way in there and pretend like I was there all along. We’ll see how well that works out.

Speaking of India

There’s a new Indian restaurant in Oakland’s Dimond District, which is right next to my neighborhood. It’s called Shaan and it’s pretty good. They bungled our delivery order pretty badly—we got three times as much rice as we asked for, and half as many lassis (wrong flavor, too), but it was all so good we didn’t mind. We will definitely be back when we’re in the mood for something a little healthier than Vik’s.

A Clarification

Every once in a while I’m reminded that I’m not writing in a vacuum. Real people, sometimes not even related to me, check in here and keep me honest.

Yesterday an alert reader noticed that I had a questionable claim in a posting I wrote more than a year ago. In it, I called Kauai the rainiest place in the world because it gets 350 days of rain annually. This may make Kauai the place with the most monotonous weather forecast, but it is not actually the rainiest spot on the globe. Parts of Kauai get about 400 inches of rain a year, which is a lot, but not as much as the village of Mawsynram, in India’s Meghalaya State. This sodden spot gets 467 inches of rain every year, making Mawsynram a strong contender for the world’s rainiest place.

Of course a much more glaring error is my contention in the same posting that we didn’t need any more rain in northern California. In spite of a rainy January, last winter’s rainfall was below average, as I recall. And now we’re in a drought, with very little rain having fallen in January of this year. I take it back! We could use some rain now.

How It’s Done

I just finished reading Trieste, by Jan Morris. It took me a long time to get through, because it’s a dense book, full of centuries’ worth of historical lessons and anecdotes, and because Morris writes in a careful third-person style that’s very different from the zany, personal stories that are popular now.

The time was well spent, though. Morris paints an interesting portrait of Trieste, a city I’ve never been to (and one which, according to a possibly apocryphal 1999 poll, 70% of Italians don’t realize is in Italy). She covers all aspects of Trieste’s history and culture, from the city’s Jewish Diaspora to the city’s relations with its Slavic neighbors and what happened when the city ceased to be an important Adriatic port.

Just when the anecdotes start to get a little cloying and you’re starting to wonder where she’s going with all of them, Morris wraps up the book—her last, she says--with a magnificent chapter that explains why Trieste has been significant to her throughout the years. It’s a beautiful end to not just a book but an entire distinguished writing career. The final chapter manages to tell us a lot about both the author and the city, without being either self-indulgent or dryly historical. In my experience, that’s a hard balance to strike. It’s easy to tell your own story about a place, and easy to impart a history lesson, but very hard to make your own experiences interesting and relevant to a general audience. This book shows how that’s done.

First Things First

Before we go to Australia (Pipi just got the time off, so it’s looking more and more like that will happen), we’ve got a quick trip to L.A. in the works. We’re going down to see a play staged by Pipi’s cousin, Debbie. It’s been getting great reviews and keeps getting extended. We’re very proud of her.

Going to Australia in My Mind

I’ve been paying attention to all things Australian lately because Pipi and I are trying to plan a trip there for this year. Details to follow, if it all comes together.

I also feel I should mention that not everyone celebrated Australia Day on Monday. The country’s Aboriginal population parties on that day about as heartily as America’s indigenous people do on Columbus Day (i.e., not so much) for precisely the same reasons. So don’t think you were the only person not having a knees-up (party) that day.

Happy Australia Day

It has been brought to my attention that in my post-Christmas hibernating mode, I managed to overlook a holiday entirely. (Honestly, after a yuletide season that included many parties, most good but one so awful that all my clothes had to be dry-cleaned afterward, I don’t think I would have been ready for more festivity anyway.)

Monday was Australia Day, and the day came and went at my house with nary a boomerang thrown nor a vegemite container cracked. I’m not sure what I would have done if I had known. I probably would have had a Fosters and watched an offbeat independent film where everyone has unusual names. That sounds like a pretty good plan for the coming weekend, and better late than never. Happy Australia Day, everyone.

One More Thing…

…About water landings. I had never heard of anything like the Hudson River incident, but it turns out that safe water landings aren’t unprecedented. The San Francisco Chronicle had an article a few days ago about a similar situation that occurred in the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii in 1956. A passenger plane lost power in two out of four engines and had to ditch in the open water. Everyone on board survived that crash, too.

Here’s a link to the article.

Remarkably, video exists of the crash and rescue operation, too—someone on board the Coast Guard ship that pulled everyone out of the water had a movie camera.

Xin Nian Kuai Le

Happy Lunar New Year. If you’ve been feeling like you got 2009 off on the wrong foot, tonight you get another chance, when the year of the Ox begins. May it be a prosperous one.

I’m Not Making This Up

And neither is my father. There is apparently an urban legend going around implying that a frozen chicken has the power to destroy a locomotive. It’s not true. They really do use frozen, not fresh poultry to test engines and windshields. (Well, except for the Air Force, which now uses synthetic birds. This story just keeps getting stranger.)

Chicken Gun

I actually did learn one other tidbit of information from the Hudson River plane crash. I learned that because bird strikes are not at all unusual, airplane engine prototypes have to be tested for their resiliency to birds before they go into production.

How do they do this? Well, there’s really only one way. There exists a tool that is a distant cousin of the ball lobbers tennis instructors use. (It has several names; “rooster booster” is my favorite.) Engineers load real chickens (my father says they use frozen ones from the supermarket) into the gun and launch them at high speed directly into the spinning turbines. The engines are required to maintain a certain amount of power after the strike. If they don’t, the engine design goes back to the drawing board before it’s used on a commercial aircraft.

Think about this the next time you see a scientist speaking soberly on the news about the safety testing that airplanes have to go through. Now you have some idea what that guy's doing all day long when he’s not on camera.

The Audacity

Here’s to choosing hope over fear.

The Unlikely Event of a Water Landing

I think we can all agree that this is an amazing story.

There are a few takeaways for me. The first is the reassuring knowledge that airplanes more or less float, at least for a little while. I didn’t know this.

The second is a reminder that pilots are the most unflappable people in the world. This I did know.

The last thing I have gleaned from coverage of this crash is the conviction that New Yorkers can handle a disaster like no other people on earth. An airplane falls out of the sky and nobody panics. The passengers calmly exit the aircraft and stand on the wing in freezing water up to their knees like they’re waiting for a crosstown bus. Ferry commuters start throwing life jackets overboard and pulling people out of the water like they do it every day.

It’s pretty incredible. I worry that if this had happened in the Bay Area no rescue would have happened before a drum circle was organized and social workers had determined that all the victims actually wanted to be saved. I fear that if I had been on the plane, I would not have calmly waited my turn to exit. I’m pretty sure I would have made a scene, and I think it would have been like the scene in Airplane where the passengers are lining up for the chance to slap the hysterical woman.

I don’t always enjoy being in New York City, but I will admit that the people are a lot tougher than I am.

What Changed?

I’m not sure why this article got accepted when others haven’t. I suspect that the subject matter was right—the Chronicle runs a lot of stories about Hawaii because it’s a destination that’s hugely popular with Californians.

One variable that’s impossible to discount is the fact that there’s a new executive travel editor at the Chronicle. I liked the old editor personally—I’ve taken classes from him and run into him several times at networking events, and he seems like a really nice guy. The last time I saw him he told me I was doing some good work, but he just never printed my stories. I think they were mostly a little too urban for him. I’ve had more established travel writers tell me they too had trouble getting him interested in city and culture pieces—he seemed more drawn to stories with an outdoor slant.

The new editor said in her introductory column (which was mostly about shoes) that she’s an urban girl, and I almost turned cartwheels. As soon as I read that I started revising some city stories I’ve had sitting around. I’ve already sent one (Shanghai) and will be sending more. The idea is to get in on the ground floor with a new editor still building up a stable of freelancers. We’ll see how that goes.

Hawaii Article to be Published

Last week I posted a serialized account of my adventure on Haleakala. Later in the week, when I’d gotten a little distance from it, I put the two halves together, tightened it up considerably, said a Hail Mary, and flung it at a couple of editors.

I submitted it first to Travelers’ Tales. They publish anthologies of travel literature. I haven’t heard from them yet, but I wouldn’t expect to—they have long turn-around times.

The other editor I sent it to was at the San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper whose travel section has a long tradition of roundly ignoring me. Yesterday, though, the Chronicle was feeling benevolent and accepted the Hawaii story.

The story is scheduled to run March 8, in a Hawaii-themed issue. It should be in the Departures spot. This is where the editor normally has a column, but it’s not unusual for a guest writer to appear there. I’ll post a link as soon as it’s up.

Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad…

…Especially when a good alternative surfaces.

There were three things I was hoping to do in Maui. One was snorkeling at Molokini, which I did. Another was driving up Haleakala for the sunrise. The sunrise didn’t happen, but the trip did, so I think that qualifies as a good-faith effort. (And it turns out that I got more out of that trip than I even realized—details tomorrow.)

The last thing on my list was driving to Hana. Once we were in Hawaii, though, I started to realize that people weren’t exaggerating when they said it was an all-day thing. It was hard to understand from a distance how this could be, but then I got there and began to see how narrow roads, traffic, and a culture that values not rushing all contribute to making Hana a very long expedition. It didn’t feel right taking a whole day away from a family celebration, so we didn’t make the drive.

Fortunately, we found an alternate trip that seemed to include many of the important elements of the road to Hana, such as great views, real Hawaiian towns, and island-paced progress. For this trip, we drove Route 30 around the northern shore of west Maui.

The road was narrow and twisting, and provided a beautiful view of sea cliffs and the ocean itself. In one particularly harrowing stretch, where you are not, strictly speaking, supposed to take your rental car, the road went down to one lane. In both directions. Because of the curves, so many pullouts had been created that I wondered why they didn’t just go ahead and carve out a whole lane. If everyone goes slowly enough and keeps an eye on the road ahead, it does work out fine.

We stopped at Julia’s Best Banana Bread in the town of Kahakuloa (free samples!). It was very good. The town itself is interesting, too, isolated as it is by the hard drive. Judging from the number of stands set up along the main drag, I’d say the economy seems to be coconut-candy based. I might have liked to have stayed longer, if only to sample more of the local currency.

The nice thing about this drive is that the road intersects with major highways near the airport, so you don’t have to retrace your route. Getting home is much faster than the outbound trip. We were back almost before anyone even noticed we were gone. We didn’t see quite as many waterfalls as we might have on the road to Hana, but I bet the banana bread was better.

Honolua Bay

As great as Molokini was, it isn’t the kind of trip you can do spontaneously, unless you have a boat that can go out on the open sea. It’s also a little expensive. Luckily, it’s not the only snorkeling option on Maui. It’s not even the only great snorkeling option on Maui.

A few days after the Molokini trip, several of us from the wedding party drove to Honolua Bay, on the northern part of west Maui, for a do-it-yourself diving expedition. We rented masks, fins, and snorkels from a dive shop on the way. The guy at the shop was either not very bright or else he was very stoned. Either way, I can’t say I recommend that particular shop, but I do recommend Honolua Bay.

To get there, you just park by the side of the road and walk about five minutes through a patch of jungle that is inexplicably full of chickens. The bay is semi-circular, fairly shallow, and very clear once you’re away from the beach. There weren’t fish everywhere you looked as in the water around Molokini, but there were big, beautiful schools that were fun to watch.

One thing we saw at Honolua that we didn’t see at Molokini were sea turtles. They were enormous and didn’t seem at all bothered by our presence. Honestly, I’m not sure they even noticed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have an underwater camera that day, so I don’t have any photos. Here is a link to other Maui shots, though.

Molokini

Along with the sunrise on Haleakala, one other thing I really wanted to do in Maui was snorkel at Molokini. This was one quest that worked out well.

Molokini is about two and a half miles across the water from Maui. It took about an hour to get there on a catamaran. It would usually take a little less, but the captain stopped the boat and in fact backtracked a little because he sighted a pod of whales that he wanted us to get a look at.

Molokini is not exactly a secret, and the water got a little crowded. Still, the visibility was great and there were a lot of fish. The parts of the crater that are still above water protect the snorkeling area, keeping it very calm. I saw needlefish, puffers, angelfish, lots of coral, and a giant sea cucumber. Eww. On the way back to Maui, we passed through a sea-turtle gathering. All that and it was only lunchtime when we got back to the marina where we’d parked. That was a good morning of sightseeing.

Surfing Goats

Did you know that goats can surf? I didn’t, either, but these are especially cool goats. They live at the Surfing Goat Dairy, in the town of Kula, on Maui. The dairy is in upcountry (i.e., not coastal) Maui. They offer great tours with plenty of cheese tasting.

Surfing Goat makes more varieties, or I guess I should say flavors of cheese than most dairies. What avant-garde chocolate makers are doing with truffles these days, Surfing Goat is doing for goat cheese. They start with a basic creamy chevre base (called “Udderly Delicious”), and add all kinds of things I’ve never seen in cheese before. Some work really well, like the O Sole Mio, which has sun-dried tomatoes in it, and some are a little out there. I never tried the Mandalay blend, for example, which contains apple bananas and curry, but I don’t think I need to. Most of the cheese was really good, though, and the tours are fun. You can feed the goats, who are gentle and friendly, and see them milked.

All the goats (there are about 80 on the farm right now) have names, but unfortunately I didn’t write down what this one is called. She was a character.

Come Back Soon

We stopped at a visitor center about halfway down the mountain. There was a nene (wild goose) crossing sign near the parking lot, but no nene were out in the rain. I worried that this meant the two of us had less sense than a goose. Outside the main building was a silversword plant, a rare succulent that grows only on Hawaiian volcanoes. In Hawaiian, the plant is called ahinahina, which means “very gray.” In spite of the name, it’s normally an attractive plant, especially if you catch it in flower. This one, though, was covered in the withered remains of its once-in-a-lifetime blooming cycle. Wind-battered and rain-spattered, this specimen was not just very gray; it was also very close to death.

Inside, though, all was warm and bright. There was a friendly park ranger named Sandi on duty and she listened patiently while we whined about driving all this way and missing out on the sunrise. When we paused for breath she asked gently if we’d ever heard it said that the journey is more important than the destination. I forced an indulgent smile. Yes, of course I’d heard that, and 99% of the time I agreed. But this was, so far, a hundredth-percentile day, and I was too wet, too cold, and too far from a good cup of coffee to imagine my attitude changing.

Sandi went on, though. The journey we had just taken, she said, from the West Maui coast to the Haleakala summit, was like driving from New Mexico to Alaska, if you considered the number of climate zones you pass through on both trips. Looking at it that way, it was quite a journey we’d had that morning, and maybe a little more appreciation was in order.

Sandi further redeemed herself by giving us some practical information, including the visitor center phone number and the URL for a live summit webcam, both of which might have told us before leaving the hotel that Haleakala was socked in and likely to remain that way all day.

The ranger left us with some last words. “Haleakala is sending you a message,” she assured us. “She wants you to come back.” Sandi let that sink in, then added, “She doesn’t say that to everyone.”

By the time we left the visitor center, Haleakala was driving her point home with an intensity she must reserve for her densest visitors. The pounding rain continued all the way down the mountain and followed us back to the normally dry Ka’anapali coast. It was still raining the next morning. The storm eventually passed, but we got caught up in the excitement and late nights of the family wedding that had brought us to the island, and we never did take Haleakala up on her invitation.

Someday I will, though. It’s not every day a volcano offers you a personal summons, and when Haleakala speaks, I, for one, listen. I don’t know when I’ll be on Maui next, but when I am, I fully intend to get myself to the summit of Haleakala again and finally have that spiritual sunrise experience.

I’m going to check the webcam first, though.

The Darkest Hour is Just After the Dawn

What’s the exact opposite of “spiritual?” I don’t think we have a word for this in our language. Hawaiian does, though, and the word is Haleakala.

Haleakala is, of course, really the name of a dormant volcano on the island of Maui. The House of the Sun is about 10,000 feet high, and is both Maui’s most conspicuous physical feature and one of its biggest attractions. It’s considered especially auspicious to visit the volcano’s summit at dawn. On a good morning, the sun, visible across a massive crater-like depression, appears to rise out of a cauldron of cloud. On a great morning, the mist turns fiery red and orange and the lunar landscape is illuminated in adobe hues. And a couple of times a year, if some of the more hyperbolic descriptions I’ve read are true, angels actually sing. “Spiritual” is a word I encountered repeatedly while researching the Haleakala sunrise experience, and so I put an early-morning trip to the top on the short list of things we absolutely had to do on Maui.

Pipi and I scheduled the trip for our first full day in Hawaii, reasoning that jet-lag would make the early wake-up call less painful. It did, but 3:45 still felt very early to two people who were supposed to be on vacation. Nothing was open, so we made peanut butter breakfast sandwiches and coffee in our room, and set out on the two-hour drive to the top of Haleakala.

For a volcano, Haleakala is pretty easy to drive on. The road is well paved and wide enough for two cars. It’s very dark and curvy, though, and often choked with bicycle-laden vans ferrying riders to the top for the popular 37-mile sunrise coast down the mountain. On the morning we drove it, there was the added challenge of dense fog, which started at about 5,000 feet of elevation.

It was the kind of fog that is so thick it’s hard to imagine that it’s sunny anywhere. And it may not have been. It certainly wasn’t sunny at the top of Haleakala. In fact, it was about as far from sunny as I’ve ever seen. At a little past 6am, it was dark, with a howling wind blowing and fog swirling. Sleet pinged off the car like buckshot. Visibility was about 50 feet. When I finally gathered the courage to get out of the car, I accidentally started down a hiking trail instead of the path to the observatory, but was luckily turned back by a blast of wind that could have knocked down an eight-year-old. I was wearing what at sea level had seen like a nervous-Nellie number of layers, but the cold still took my breath away. As I scurried back to the car with my head down and my hand on my hat, I had a little epiphany, the closest I came to a spiritual moment that whole morning. “This is how people die on mountains,” I said to myself. (And in my head, it didn’t even sound melodramatic.)

When Pipi and I finally found the visitors’ center, with about 20 minutes to spare before theoretical sunrise, we found it already filled with a rainbow coalition of disappointed people from around the globe. I heard sulking in at least three languages. We all milled around until our watches said the sunrise had occurred. It was lighter now, and the sleet had turned to regular rain. It was barely 7am (although we were already thinking about lunch) and already we’d had a big setback. As we got in the car and prepared ourselves for the long, wet plummet back to the coast, I wondered if there were any way to salvage some crumbs of spirituality from the day.

Happy New Year

This is again a short week, but I did want to take a moment to wish everyone a happy New Year! See you in 2009.

Maui Photos

I finally got my Hawaii photos uploaded and labeled. Here they are.

Merry Christmas

I’ll be enjoying a little Christmas break for the next few days, and I hope you all are, too. I wish a very merry Christmas to everyone.

(For your viewing pleasure, a photo taken in Maui. Hawaiian Christmases are especially surreal.)

Geography Quiz Answers

Here are the answers to the geography quiz. How did you do? I got, by my generous reckoning, 26.5 right out of 49. This was by far my best year. It helps that I always read the Chronicle travel section—the editor gets a lot of trivia from stories that appear there. (And sometimes from stories that don’t—I strongly suspect that a rejected article of mine inspired a question about Mongolia that was included several years ago, but I can’t prove it.)

Yuletide Geography Quiz

Some Christmas traditions are enduring. Every year, for example, in a tradition going back to when I was in junior high school, we have a Yule log cake for dessert at Christmas dinner.

Some traditions do fall by the wayside. One thing we don’t do anymore is axe-murder a whole tree. We used to, but now we just use a little potted rosemary bush decorated with gingerbread cutouts. It’s small, tasteful, and sustainable, so it works well for everyone. The only thing I miss about the full-size tree is the ritual argument with my sister over what exactly that dough ornament I made when I was six is supposed to be. (It’s a sheep, so don’t even let her try to tell you it’s a turkey. It’s clearly a sheep. With drumsticks.)

For every tradition that runs its course though, it seems a new one comes along. Here’s one that’s fairly new for me. It may not have the emotional resonance of baking Christmas cookies for Santa, and now that I think of it, there is nothing specifically holiday-ish about it, but it’s something I do every year at Christmastime nonetheless. Please join me in hosting a glass of eggnog (and then discreetly leaving it on a bookcase because nobody really likes more than a few sips of eggnog) and taking the annual San Francisco Chronicle Geography Quiz.

On a Lighter Note

Pipi and I are off to Hawaii today. Her brother is getting married there, and we’ve all decided to make a vacation out of it. I’ll be back late next week. I probably won’t blog while I’m there, but I will put up pictures as soon as I can.

Other Things We Learned the Hard Way

One other example of this kind of thing: After the Indian Ocean earthquake in 2004, we all learned that what we used to call a tidal wave is really supposed to be called a tsunami. I sort of knew that before the event, but all the news coverage really cemented the proper term into my brain.

Mumbai

Like everyone, I’ve been following the news from India. I don’t have much to add to the narrative that hasn’t been said already. I did have one observation, though, and that’s that I noticed that all the news I’ve been reading refers to the city where the attacks took place as Mumbai. For a day or two, most stories clarified that this is the city formerly known as Bombay. But now they’ve stopped, because it’s just understood that we have internalized the new name and don’t need to be reminded anymore.

Mumbai has been known as such since 1996, but I confess, the name change never really took with me until now. But now I’ve heard Mumbai enough that I get it, and I probably won’t make the mistake of calling the city by its outdated name anymore. It’s funny how a tragedy can have the unintended effect of making us a little more cosmopolitan.

Now I need to get to work becoming fluent with the names Kolkata (Calcutta) and Bengaluru (Bangalore). But please, no more violence. I can do this on my own if I put my mind to it.

Bah, Humbug…

…No, that’s too strong, because there are a few really great Christmas pop songs out there. Here are a few that actually make me dawdle if they should come on just as I am getting ready to leave a store.

Christmas Rapping, by the Waitresses
When the song came out, I remember that the thing that impressed me the most was the fact that the song used the word “damn,” which I thought was very daring. But I was 11. Now, I realize that this was actually a group of very good musicians. Note: there is no actual rapping on the song.

2000 Miles, by the Pretenders
This is one of those not-so-merry-Christmas Christmas songs. Brillantly melancholy.

I Believe in Father Christmas, by Greg Lake
Perhaps because the holiday season involves a lot of overindulgance, things that I normally hate in pop music—strings, kettle drums, obvious classical influences, and British terminology—all seem to work here.

River, by Joni Mitchell
I always used to wonder what Christmas was like in warm places, like Los Angeles, and now I know. Kind of bittersweet.

Father Christmas, by the Kinks
The best song ever written about getting mugged while dressed up as Santa Claus. OK, actually the only song ever written about that, but it is really good.

Fairy Tale of New York, by The Pogues with the late, great Kirsty MacColl.
This is another song about dysfunctional Christmas, but this one is funny. The song gets extra points for being sung by a guy who was born on Christmas day.

Do They Know It’s Christmas, by Band Aid
Boy George, George Michael, Duran Duran…it’s the ultimate guilty Christmas pleasure.

The Christians and the Pagans, by Dar Williams
In all seriousness, this is possibly the best secular Christmas song ever. It’s about a family gathering that by rights should have gone horribly wrong. But instead, everyone realizes they have more in common than they ever realized and gets along great. And isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

It’s Beginning to Sound a Lot Like Christmas

Where did November go? It was just here, and then I turned around, and suddenly there’s Christmas music at the grocery store.

I sort of dread this part of the holiday season because Christmas music at the grocery store means I have to start shopping in very short bursts. I can only stand commercial pop holiday music like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” for a minute or so. I think it’s just a coincidence that this is also about how long I can hold my breath, but I’m not sure. What I do know is that for the next few weeks, I will be shopping like I’m diving for abalone. I’ll take a deep breath, dive in, and hope I manage to grab at least one thing before the pain becomes too excruciating.