aggienaut | Entries tagged with roadtrips

Saturday, February 24th, 2018 - We awoke to the first rainy day of our whole week in Tasmania. People say "it's cold!" down in Tasmania and allege the weather is much worse, but from my brief experience, we had a solid week of lovely sunny days in Tasmania whereas at home in Victoria I don't think we've had more than three days of sunny weather in a row all year, and even three in a row has happened maybe once or twice. I asked friends back home if they were getting the same week of nice weather and they said they were not, so there you have it, weather in Tasmania is great, case closed!

   We'd spent the night at an airbnb in a rural area on the peninsula between Hobart and Port Arthur, in this case a woman was airbnbing out a self contained section of her house. She was very nice. Mom wanted to visit with the farm animals and chooks (chickens) said to be on the property but in the pouring rain it wasn't very appealing to go mucking about. Well for some of us. For my dad, there was one thing he wanted to do: go swim in the ocean!!
   Following directions from our kindly host, we proceeded to nearby Pipe Clay Lagoon, which as were driving up beside it appeared to at the time consist of mud flats and/or a centimeter of water with happy water birds walking around looking for tasty snacks. What was really kind of neat though was on the sand bar section between the lagoon and the sea, there was literally no road but one drove on the sand (on the lagoon side) and there were houses on the sand bar whose driveways just went into the sand. Our host had mentioned that at high tides the water is up to the bottom of the driveways. Guess one has to plan one's comings and goings!
   Because it was still raining, when we parked and walked to the sea-side there was no one at all on the beach there. Dad declared the water to be (62? 65f?), which is actually similar to the ocean water temperature in California, in which he swims alll the tiime. So he went in and soon he was just a distant splish splashing arm. While he did this mom and I strolled up the beach looking for keen shells. There was quite a large amount of nice shells on the beach. Also the boiler of a ship that ran aground there in the 20s or thirties I believe (there was an informational plaque but I don't actually recall the date).

   By and by dad returned, invigorated and happy. He had swam in the ocean at the southernmost point any of us has ever been (save for Port Arthur the day before which looks like it has a few kilometers southing on this place but hey thats quibbling)! Now he was feeling celebratory so we decided to look for a nice place for breakfast. We had noticed on the maps a canal that appeared to not quite cut through a narrow neck in the peninsula and decided to investigate!! While so doing we found a nice restaurant overlooking the canal and settled in for a rather fancy brunch (at first I mom and I were thinking it looked a bit fancier than our usual lunch budget, but like I said, dad was feeling very festive - "it's our last day in Tasmania!"). While there we learned the canal had been built (in the 20s? 30s? I'm just gonna go ahead and assume every date I can't remember falls in that area) after intense lobbying by local farmers who wanted to I guess shorten the shipping route to bring their products to market in Hobart by boat (though looking at the map it really doesn't look that far around). After building the canal at a fair expense it was only briefly operational before storms silted up the seaward end of it, and constantly dredging this build-up proved unfeasible. So today it's just a canal to nowhere, with the seaward end completely built-over.

   Our plan for this morning WAS to go to the famous Salamanca Market, which everyone was saying we needed to go to, but being as it was totally pouring we decided to maybe take a rain check on the market (I can picture tassie_gal throwing up her arms in utter consternation at us here ::hides::).

   Instead we decided to hit an animal sanctuary on our way back north. We headed north, off the peninsula, and skirted along the east side of the Derwent estuary, with Hobart town across the way (though a fair bit of it had overgrown onto this side as well). About half an hour north of the city we came to the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary, here, conveniently, the rain had stopped and the weather was once again rather pleasant. We caught a guided tour by an elderly guide who mom (and dad agreed I believe) swore was the spitting image of my dad's mom, whom I barely knew, so I tried to get a good look. Here I suppose I really ought to describe said guide but I'm not sure how. She was a bit wirey, with white hair that looked like it had once been red, irish features.
   The sanctuary had the obligatory hundred or more tame kangaroos one can feed, lounging around living the good life, but we steamed right past these boring dime a dozen animals to see the famous Tasmanian devils. It turns out, you know, they look nothing like the cartoon character at all. They look kind of like large (small dog sized) stocky rats. And apparently are prone to tumors which makes them, um, really a bit ugly most of the time. I couldn't really get a good picture of one, they're very restless and I kept getting pictures of their back or otherwise ruined pictures, this is the best I got. They're mainly scavangers and opportunist eaters of anything they can get their hands on, and I realized they share their belligerent temperament with a lot of other animals that also fill that niche such as hyenas, and jackals; I guess it comes with the territory. Some of the enclosures had a chew toy on a bungee as an "animal enrichment item" to simulate the tug of war over a piece of meat they might regularly get in with their compatriots in the wild.
   When my grandmother's lookalike moved on to the koalas we peeled away, admired the cute echidna a bit (sign there said that echidnas are actually very smart with an unusually large brain for their size), fed some kangaroos (look at this cute kangaroo family, and note the tail and leg of the joey hiding in his mother's pouch here), managed not to accidentally feed the kookaburra, and were all a bit mind-bizorgled to learn from the sign that one cockatoo they had was over a hundred years old!! I knew some parrots live a really long time, such as the alleged* parrot of Winston Churchill which is still alive at 119 years old, but now I'm looking around at the huge flock of cockatoos that live around my house and thinking jesus any of these could be a hundred years old!

* while fact checking this claim I was sadly disillusioned to learn that the Churchill estate firmly maintains he owned no such parrot.

   From here we headed right across the island to return to the ferry terminal at Devonport. The land through the middle was idyllic rolling farm land. I tried to pull up some Beatles songs on youtube since my memory of childhood roadtrips with my parents were always accompanied by Beatles music (my dad is a big fan). The Beatles estate must be good at keeping the music off the freetube though because all I could find were crummy live recordings.
   I think we all thought there'd be some kind of cafe or something available at the ferry terminal, but once we checked in at around six and were let in to the car corral, there was no cafe other than someone selling coffee out of the back of a not-even-van-sized vehicle, and a very utilitarian toilet block, and we couldn't leave the corral area! Since the boat wasn't leaving till (9?) we realized we probably shouldn't have checked in so early, needlessly condemning ourselves to a few hours incarceration in literally a parking lot on a nice Tasmanian afternoon.

   This time we had a "family cabin" to ourselves, which was basically the exact same four bunk room but no weirdo strangers. Trip back was quite uneventful. Both my parents got up at 5 to witness the crossing of "the rip" into Prince Phillip Bay but having caught it on the way out I was happy to keep sleeping. Rousted up at 7:15 for an 8ish arrival. Had breakfast in one of Melbourne's cute laneways. Earlier planning had played with the idea of seeing some of Melbourne while we were there but I think we all agreed we were ready to go home, and proceeded back to my place.
   But not without stopping at another wildlife sanctuary!! On the northern outskirts of Geelong there is the Serendip Sanctuary! Whereas the other one had been pay entry and swarming with staff, Serendip is nice and quiet -- it's well maintained but I've never seen any staff, and it's free entry. Billie used to live just near it and we went a few times, it's a nice peaceful place to stroll and look at the animals. We saw emu and brolgas as well as wallabies and more kangaroos. They have some nice wetland areas where the viewing area is accessed through an entirely enclosed walkway and viewing is done thorugh slits in the wall, so the birds don't get started, and dozens of different kinds of birds can be seen. My mom in particular is a bit fond of birding so she enjoyed seeing so many different species all in one place. In addition to the open wetlands (birds there are all just naturally visiting of their own volition), there were also several large aviaries with dry land and scrub birds. Altogether a fun place for a peaceful stroll and/or seeing some birds. As always when I visit we only saw a handful of other people.

   And the next day, Monday, I had work! And my parents left on Wednesday! The End! Altogether a lovely visit and I think we're all very much looking forward to next time already.

   Total journey through Tasmania:

Current Music: The Beatles - Paperback Writer

Monday, November 24th, 1642 - Two fluyts are making their way across the limitless southern seas, their sails full and taut with the trade winds. A look-out up in the Zeehaen's crosstrees, huddling against the cold, looks out toward the grey horizon, where the sun should soon appear. The first golden sliver appears, straight ahead, and as the sea begins to sparkle the golden orb rises from the flat sea. But wait, is the sea not perfectly flat there? The sailor peers towards the sun, though it is quickly beginning to hurt his eyes. Salty spray stings his eyes but he squints fit to bore a tunnel, and, yes, there appear to be mountains silhouetted against the rising sun! He stares for a moment longer to be sure and then calls out, "laaaand hoooooooooo!" Moments later Captain Tasman has climbed up from deck and stands on the topyard, holding the mast with one hand and shielding his eyes with the other.

and here's actually a picture I took of the Red Sea coast of Egypt in 2009 because Captain Tasman didn't allow cameras in the rigging ):

Thursday, February 22nd, 2018, Zeehan, Tasmania - I had thought Zeehan was just a corruption of Zion or something, but it turns out Zeehaen, one of Tasman's two ships, means "sea hen" in Dutch. The town is named after the nearby Mt Zeehan which is believed to be what Abel Tasman first sighted in 1642, thus becoming the first European to see what would become Tasmania.

   That morning in Zeehan, I was delighted to find bumblebees (pictured below) busy visiting the flowers around the cottage -- there are no bumblebees on the Australian mainland, and Australians, famous for nonchalantly noting "you call that a spoider?" and "you call that a snoike?" and generally being entirely unimpressed with anyone else's animals, can be seen to jump and exclaim when seeing a bumblebee for the first time and insist that "you wouldn't believe it!!" when trying to describe it to another Australian.

   First stop, let's just drive through downtown. We were only a block or two away, and these intervening blocks showed a sad depressed old mining town ... but downtown mainstreet there was a cluster of beautiful grand old buildings with big facades and verandas. There was a museum with several steam locomotives under an awning. We decided to give this museum, the Western Heritage Museum a go and it turned out to be quite an impressive museum!! They specialized a bit in the mining history of the area, and had at least three rooms full of samples of minerals from all over the world, which mom found very exciting being a geology enthusiast. They also had a huge amount of historical artifacts, photos and information covering the entire western region of Tasmania. And a complete blacksmiths shop, and a number of historic water wheels and the locomotives and and and... we were forced to tear ourselves away before even seeing anything because we had the long run to Hobart this day.
   But first! The people we'd talked to in the Mushroom Cafe in Waratah the previous morning had said we needed to visit the "Spray Tunnel" in Zeehan. It turned out to be just out of town, about ten minutes down a curvy one lane dirt road with absolutely impenetrable bush on either side -- which made me marvel at the early prospectors who had somehow tromped around out here through that stuff looking for likely mining locations. We were concerned what would happen if we met another car on this road since there weren't even turn-outs, but presently we came to a small open area, the little parking area for the Spray Tunnel! There was of course an informational plaque, and there it was, a hole in the mountainside through which you could see light at the other end. The Spray Tunnel! Apparently an "adit" of the Spray Mine. We walked through it, marveling at the lack of graffiti.

   And now we really had to hoof it. We had planned to visit the nearby port town of Strahan, and I believe dad and I still wanted to but mom eventually won out that we didn't have time any more. So we set course for the the island's capitol, Hobart!

   Heading south-east through mountainous forested terrain, we soon came around a corner to see a completely denuded mountain looming above the town of Queenstown. Queenstown itself looked cute though, with once again a lot of beautiful old-timey looking buildings in town (in this case a few blocks of them). While it looked like the mountain behind town was one giant strip mine, and the river running through town ran a rusty brown, the town seemed healthier than Zeehan, possibly getting more tourist traffic since its on a main highway. Passing through downtown we were excited to see a steam locomotive actually chugging along outside of what appeared to probably be a rail museum. We quickly tried to park and take a picture of it but it was slinking into the railshed by the time I was able to get a picture. We didn't feel we had time to poke around any of the museums here, so we kept on trucking.
   For the next three hours we drove through beautiful natural landscapes -- you'll notice no the embedded map that nearly a third of Tasmania, consisting of most of this southwest corner, is national park. We remarked that it looked like it could be Yosemite, as the forests and meadows flitted by. Yosemite with eucalyptii. About half the journey was in national park but even once we got out of it things weren't very developed, just the very occasional small town.

   Finally about half an hour from our destination, we came to a town called New Norforlk where we crossed the river Derwent (which eventually becomes the big estuary Hobart is on), by way of a little bridge, and from here to our destination we were driving through urban area. Which isn't to say Hobart is huge, with a population of 222,000 its only a bit bigger than my nearby town of Geelong (177,023). It actually reminded me a bit of Portland Oregon (which is three times as big at 640,000). All of Tasmania only has 520,000 people, so half the island's population lives in Hobart.

   Driving in we noted what looked like "a bond villian lair" on an island in the Derwest estuary -- apparently that's the famous MONA art museum, only reachable by boat!

   We checked into our airbnb in a cute narrow house reminiscent of something one might find wedged in in San Franscisco. This time we were just getting a room from a woman who lived on premises. She was very nice. I coveted her crockery, when did I become someone who covets crockery? But just look at those pleasing simple patterns and nice elegant shapes.

   From there we walked a block to a street (Elizabeth Street) that was just restaurants and eateries for several blocks. It was at this point that I decided I loved this town! Making a decision was a bit difficult with all the options -- dad and I both were salivating for a $13 rump steak special at a brewery but mom was not having it and instead we had some very tasty thai. Walked back to the airbnb looking forward to the next two days in the Hobart area!

Current Music: Chris Stuart - Springhill Mine

Wednesday, February 21st, Waratah, Tasmania - We woke up to find ourselves on a precipice! Right in the very middle of town! The town of Waratah, it seems, is built right around a chasm, with a waterfall cascading down into it, right in the middle of town! Apparently the early pioneers saw this chasm and thought "ahah, we shall harness the mighty power of this convenient waterfall to mill osmiridium!" Which totally sounds like a made up mineral used as a mcguffin in a movie or game, like the "unobtainium" in Avatar. But compare this impressive old photo of their mcguffin mills to the previous link showing it now!

Our airbnb had actually been a few blocks away from the abyss, so we didn't wake up just beside it exactly per se. But it was still a bit of a surprise. We had headed off in search of "downtown" for some coffee, and found instead a giant chasm where downtown should be. Though the town had obviously seen better days, it still had another one of those grand old hotels, looking much as it had in ye olden days. Just beside the hotel was a rather funny cafe -- "the MUSH Room" was in a rather nondescript but oldish looking building, inside the decorations were very eclectic, but what struck me the most was the wide open kitchen looked like it had almost nothing in it. Like a coffee machine and microwave or something. It seems a bit odd. Also there were pictures of mushrooms all over, and books about mushrooms sitting around. Originally I was just gonna run in and get a coffee, and mom had come in with me, but we looked at eachother and said "dad needs to come in here!" because he's rather a fan of mushrooms. While waiting for my coffee we got to talking to a nice couple who gave us some more tips on things to see (though I think they themselves were only in Tassie as tourists?).

From Waratah we headed to Dove Lake, about an hour toward the middle of the island, through mostly forests, land cleared by logging, and replanted plantations. Dove Lake is near (at the base of?) Cradle Mountain, which I've gathered is one of the most famous destinations in Tasmania. I still don't really quite see how it looks like a cradle though. At the visitor center car park we had to park in the overflow parking lot it was so busy. One can drive to the trailhead parking lot sometimes if it's not too busy, but it was too busy on this day so one had to get a bus up from the visitor center. About twenty minutes on the comfortable bus (and they run like every five minutes) winding up a beautiful valley with several stops at different trailheads. Dove Lake is the end of the road and I'm not sure anyone on the bus was going anywhere else. From the trailhead start one has a good view of cradle mountain just behind the lake -- there was even a sign with a bracket to guide you to take the classic picture of the scene ... which I declined to take because it seemed way to cliche (why take a photo a million other people have taken?). Instead I took a picture of the big drones prohibited sign, thinking "what a world we live in, where people have to be warned to keep their flying robots at bay."

and also took this one of the lake and Cradle Mountain and a boat shed

The hike around the lake was a very lovely two-hour-ish hike, extremely well maintained. Large parts of it were on boardwalk, in places over the lake itself where the bank rose basically in a cliff around the lake. One can go on further loops to make the hike even longer if one so desires. Also I learned from signs in the vicinity that there's an epic transtasmanian "Overland Track" hiking trail that begins here and crosses most of the relatively wild and undeveloped southwest of the island. Something to potentially do some day!! Also the every popular wombat poo track ... I think some larrikan just stole the L from "wombat pool" ;)

After this delightful hike we tried to visit the interpretive center but it had closed at 3 and we arrived at 3:06. While waiting for the next bus from this stop we went on another lovely short loop walk. Finally got back to the main visitor center hoping for a snack at the cafe ... only to find IT closed literally a minute before we arrived at 4:01. Such sauce. This is the most popular tourist destination in Tasmania, there are five more hours of daylight, and everything is shutting down before normal business hours are even up? WTF Tasmania.

From Dove Lake we headed off to that ever popular must-see, Zeehan. Okay maybe not but my coworker is from there so we thought we'd swing through. It was about an hour and a half away, through a series of small mining towns as the road wound around small mountains. At one point we were alarmed to see a car protruding just off the road from a small gully! It was so fresh looking our first instinct was to pull over and see if someone needed assistance, but then we noticed the tires were gone and wheel mounts rusty. We hypothesize that the car really did crash there, but rather than tow it out the local council opted to keep it freshly painted as a clear warning to passing motorists to be careful.

Here's a calidendrous bit of forest on the Dove Lake loop

   Dad's search for accomodation in this sector had found slim pickins, but eventually he had called the local pub (called a hotel but usually they don't actually have accomodation) on said coworker's recommendation (not that she _recommended_ it, just that it was a local accomodation possibility) and it turned out they could put us up in a little miner's cottage next to the hotel! How quaint!
   The hotel turned out to be yet again one of these grand old 19th century gingerbread edifices, which seemed a bit out of place in what was obviously a down-on-its-luck former mining town. The hotel bar was full of "tradies" in their dirty high viz uniforms (Australians in any job that even remotely resembles blue collar seem to inevitably be wearing flourescent high visibility uniforms), the restaurant room was a cavernous hall that seemed to dwarf the few tables in it. The menu had a surprising selection of chinese food on it, clearly they had a chinese cook. Food was a very long time coming but that seemed entirely in keeping with this sleepy backwater of a place.

   Back at the cottage, another evening of watching the olympics. Doping in curling? Really Russia?? Really??? Even other curler's were like "uh, WHY??"

Mom and dad on the Dove Lake Loop

Tuesday, February 20th, Dismal Swamp, the Tarkine Wilderness - "Wait, which way is it?" asks dad, looking from the small map to the junction in the boardwalk "this junction isn't even on here!" I look at the map myself and as far as I can tell this junction is indeed not on the map. We are lost literally and figuratively deep in the dismal swamp!

   The day at begun at our little airbnb bungalow outside of Stanley. We had only been working up the plan for this day since yesterday and as soon as I saw "dismal swamp" on the map I knew we had to go there. I didn't really care what was or wasn't there, just, why WOULDN'T one want to visit a place called "dismal swamp??"
   The weather was sunny, with a cool breeze, which I realized with alarm reminded me of Autumn! If one accounts for the flipped year, February does equal August, so indeed the summer is coming to an end! Mom was eyeing some wild birds out the window "those look like chickens, are they chickens??" they looked just enough not like chickens to make one wonder. Mom got out the bird book and determined that they were in fact some kind of native bush-chicken, I believe?

   Our first destination was a coffee shop and bakery in the nearby town of Smithton (once again small, built around an estuary, with a busy little mainstreet), where the woman behind the counter was remarkably friendly. Smithton also had a small museum, which was closed, but we could see through the window the (plastic casts of, presumably) bones of a prehistoric giant wombat (a diprotodon I believe?) , and read the informational sign about it. Also, I think it was in the dismal swamp we learned about it actually, but while I'm on a paragraph about ancient megafauna: you've undoubtedly heard of the Tasmanian devil, you may (should) have heard of the Tasmanian tiger, but did you know there was also a Tasmanian lion (Which for some reason has a separate wikipedia entry under the name thylacoleo! The Tasmanian Lion is believed to have been extincted (extunck?) by the arrival of aboriginals around 60,000 years ago. The last confirmed living Tasmanian Tiger of course sadly died in a zoo in 1933 due to neglectfully being locked out of it's shelter during extreme weather ):< ...and I just learned just this moment that the closest living relative of the Tasmanian Tiger is the NUMBAT, which is the adorable little critter in my default icon!

   Next stop, Dismal Swamp!! --Or, as they're making a vague effort to rebrand it, "Tarkine Forest Adventures!" ...what's wrong with "dismal swamp???" Anyway the Dismal Swamp is a privately run "eco adventure" thing. There's 40 meter deep sinkhole (I can't find a good "about" page on the internet but the area of the sinkhole is hundreds of hectares actually I think? its big anyway). One drive up and parks in the car park, surrounded by walls of forest. From the gift-shop / cafe / ticketing area one can take "the longest slide in the southern hemisphere" (110 meters) down to the bottom ... for a hefty $25 roo-bucks. Or one can walk down via the lovely and well-maintained boardwalks, which we did.
   Down at the bottom there was a network of these nice boardwalks and it was really lovely being deep in such a delightful swamp. They had lots of informational little signs about the trees and plants, which mom in particular was really excited about. Another remarkable thing I learned from the signs was that there were crayfish who lived on the muddy swamp floor here and made themselves little crayfish towers. We saw their towers but not the crayfish themselves. We enjoyed strolling around the swamp for maybe two hours before dad started to get antsy that we needed to keep a move on for the rest of our planned perambulations. As noted at the beginning of the entry, we found we got a bit lost trying to navigate the unintentionally labyrinthine boardwalks on our way out, but not too badly. All in all I loved the dismal swamps, they were every bit as delightful as I had expected, and more!!

   From there we booked it to the west coast of the island, through mostly bucolic farm countryside. Visited the coast itself and beheld an isolated and idyllic surf beach, but being pressed for time we only looked at it from the car park and got back on the road. Headed south down the coast it was clear this is not the highly populated part of the island, as for miles and miles we saw nothing but brush around the road, and the roadkilled-padme-per-kilometer index was at almost zero. Despite this we saw fairly regular signs advising to be careful not to run over devils from dusk to dawn, as well as signs that appeared to warn of kangaroos lifting one's car, no doubt after having become addicted to human-introduced crossfit ::shakes head sadly::. On our whole coastal drive we only drove through one tiny micro-townlet, it really felt like a very remote and unpeopled coast.

   After half an hour running down parallel to the coast we turned inland (apparently the road continues to a miniscule former town that was once the port to a now closed mine and is now "just a collection of shacks." Our journey inland back into the Tarkine Wilderness led us into alternating forest and cleared land, with signs proclaiming we were witnessing managed sustainable logging or some such. Eventually I believe we entered a protected state forest and the huge surrounding trees were uninterrupted. We also passed several turnoffs just off the road with pallets of beehives on them, which of course we were intrigued to see. The hives had a lot of supers (additional boxes) stacked on top which would seem to indicate they were doing really well, and indeed they all seemed very busy at the entrances. Interesting to note, I'm not sure if anyone reading this is interested in the obscurities of comparative beekeeping, but I was interested to note while most commercial beekeepers in at least the states prefer to give the bees about two "deep" boxes before stacking shallow honey supers on top these operations seemed to use entirely shallows. I've been thinking about doing that if I were to god forbid restart, since I don't like having differing box sizes and am currently using all deeps, which get gosh darn heavy when full of honey.

   There were many many short walk options within the Tarkine Wilderness loop, but we had to zip right past most of them due to our ambition drive plan. Maybe some day I'll get back! ::looks off whistfully into the distance:: We managed to stop at a nice lookout point, and planned to stop to see a "flooded sinkhole" but accidentally zipped past it and there was nowhere to turn around. We did stop at the "Trowutta Arch" though. It consisted of a pleasant half hour walk through what an informational sign described as, I swear, "calidendrous," but I'm feeling a bit consternated because I wanted to double check the spelling and no variation comes up with ANY hits of any kind on Teh Google. But according to the sign this word means "beautiful or park-like forest" and referes to the wide airy space between the trees here under the canopy high above. It was indeed well beautious.

If adventure games taught me anything it's that I need to stand under that vine and type "climb vine"

   The "arch" it turned out was two side-by-side sinkholes which were connected by a big hole. One sinkhole was filled in allowing access and the other had a pool of water in the bottom. Pretty neat!

   From there we more-or-less hoofed it back up to civilization back at Smithton, and used main roads (such as they are in Tasmania) to get to our destination for the night about two hours away. First we traveled east along the coastal road we had come west on and then turned south, and noted that the padme-roadkill-per-kilometer was extremely high (like double digits) on this main corridor in the "relatively" densely populated north. When we got further from the coast it got less populated again and finally just as the sun was settomg we rolled into the little mining town of Waratah which seemed a bit isolated in the mountains. It was both cute and visibly run down, and had pleasant looking ponds right in the center of town. After we established ourselves in our airbnb (a little house that had been brought up to good repair and set up seemingly expressly for this purpose), inspired by platypus crossing signs we went out to see if we could see platypii in the ponds. Sadly no luck, I think the moon was mostly behind clouds again, I remember it being VERY dark. We stumbled through the darkness back to the house to watch some Olympics instead.

   In the morning would we discover we had been on the edge of a precipice? Would we figure out why the famed "Cradle Mountain" is so called? Find out next entry! :D

Monday, February 19th, Devonport - the sky is slate grey and casts a dreary industrial look on the town around the waterfront. Across the estuary the Spirit of Tasmania ferry we'd recently debarked looks like a giant toy with its discordantly optimistic red and white. I'm standing under giant bronze statues of flowers. There's a nearby explanational sign, and informational signs always attract me like bees to a flower. These poppies, it informs me, are a monument to the importance to the local economy of legal poppy farming -- under close government regulation they raise opiate poppies for use in commercial pharmaceuticals. "Such sauce!" I say to mom. Dad returns from his quick dash to a better vantage point to photo the ship.

Next stop, Ulverstone! Mission: Scallop pies! My coworker here (not Cato, though I'm sure he'd loorve a scallop* pie) is a native** Tasmanian*** and had informed me the first thing she always does when getting off the ferry is proceed straight to Crusty's Bakery in Ulverstone for a scallop pie. Ulverstone is only about twenty minutes west along a coast dotted with little seaside towns interspersed with farmland. We found Ulverstone to be another one of these little seaside towns built up around an estuary (at a population of 6,985, wikipedia informs me it's "one of the largest towns in Tasmania"), with several bakeries on the main street buzzing with business like a beehive on a sunny morning. Beside Crusty's was one of those grand old hotels with beautiful gilt second floor wraparound verandas which we would see many of throughout the island. At Crusty's we got one scallop pie and two pasties ("pahsties," a thing I fondly remember from Ireland but Not A Thing in the States). The scallop pie was.. interesting but not my favorite.

*As noted last entry, they say "scallop" not as "scahl-op" as god intended but more like ::does some green room voice exercises before coming back:: "skwau-lope." As the week went on we found scallope pies weren't just a specialty of this bakery, rather all of Tasmania seems to have a thing for them. Later, I asked my friend whom my other friends always bag out for being Tasmanian if he secretly craves scallop pies while living on the mainland, he admitted he didn't actually, to which I declared he was not truly Tasmanian, and he then admitted to being born in Bendigo on the Australian mainland, thus proving the efficacy of scallop pie love as a test of someone's true Tasmanianism.

**My coworker was born in Tasmania, which is not to be confused with being aboriginal. The plight of the aboriginal peoples of Tasmania is truly appalling. By 1876 the last full blooded aboriginal was declared to have died and the government declared they were an extinct peoples and "the aboriginal problem" was over. To this day the perception prevails in Australia that the native people's of Tasmania were entirely wiped out. As it happens wikipedia informs me that one full blooded aboriginal did live till 1905, and of persons who are partially aboriginal the last census indicated there were 23,576 in Tasmania at the 2016 census.
Considering the genocides and forced migrations of the native peoples of Australia happened around the same time as the same was happening to the native peoples of North America, I find it interesting to see how different the cultural awareness of it is. Everyone in America is "aware" that terrible things happened to the native Americans, but its not like here where it is mentioned all the time, most events open with an acknowledgement of the "traditional owners of this land," the local mall has a plaque to them, etc etc. Conversely, I think 99% of the people living in Southern California haven't the faintest idea what the name of the native tribe of their area was (Tongva in OC, though I cheated and looked it up just now, I thought it was the Chumash, who are just north, but vaguely remembered enough to suspect that wasn't exactly right) and probably think of amerindians as something that happened somewhere else.

***While I'm on Tasmanian history, the island was called Van Dieman's Land until 1856, until they changed it partially (largely?) as a branding/marketing move to get away from the terrible Vandiemonic reputation as a harsh destination for convicts (which had just been discontinued). Early references to people living there referred to them as Vandiemonians though, which I think is a fun demonym (a van diemonym?? ohohoho okay okay I'll stop).

   From Ulverstone we set out to continue west through more farmland and seaside townlets until we came to "Fossil Bluff" and "Table Cape," and mom does love a good fossil. We turned off the highway (which was only a curvy two lane thing anyway) to proceed down a windy country road along farms and coastal bluffs. Had to stop at a beautiful field of sunflowers. By now the sun had come out to make for a beautiful scene of sunflowers fields draped over the slopes by the coast. Neighboring fields had already been harvested of a flower crop, but the big signs on the gate declared:
      WARNING: DO NOT ENTER.
      THIS CROP HAS KILLED PEOPLE!!
   O_o. Reading the smaller print one learns that these are the commercial poppy fields! The wording of the sign makes one picture man eating plants in the field but I suppose they mean if you steal poppies to make and use heroin you might die? I feel like the wild claim that the crop will kill you draws more attention to it than a simple "DO . NOT . ENTER" sign would.
   Continuing on the pleasant winding road to the table cape we also saw signs for the nearby allegedly famous tulip farms but I don't recall seeing them. And there was a deer farm!! Golly, Tasmania has the most whimsical industries!!
   Went on a pleasant walk along a precarous seaside cliff from a lookout point to a lighthouse, but as admission was ($20?) which we felt was steep and we decided not to go in. Then drove down to fossil bluff beach and saw some of the usual million year old embedded shells. I think a sign indicated the actual fossil bluff was a ten minute walk from there but we were getting antsy to keep on moving west at that point.

   I almost forgot one other very strong first impression we got. Plastered on walls in the towns, and showing up in the most unlikely places among sunflower (and opiate) fields, there was an overwhelming number of election campaign signs. I swear I've never seen such concentrations of them. And the viciousness of their declarations on rival parties! Sure US state and national elections get nasty but the local elections usually keep the slander to a background whisper, but despite population levels more akin to most place's town elections, it was clear these politicians were out to gouge eachother's proverbial eyes out with their proverbial thumbs. "Liberals" (whom I had to keep reminding my parents are actually analogous to Republicans in America) seemed to have the most signs, but even between Labor and the Greens there seemed to be no love lost, with one memorably sign by Labor saying they promised not to work with the Greens. Anyway, as I said I almost forgot this except just now I checked my newsfeed and saw that the Liberals had won the election and the Greens declared it "the most bought election in Tasmanian history."
   I think the vehemence of the politics may stem from the fact that you have this small island with beautiful pristine forests full or rare species, but also logging is the major industry, so the conservatives really really want to support the logging industry and the ~~liberals~~ people-on-the-left really really want to protect the forests.

View looking back from atop "The Nut" at the narrow isthmus connecting Stanly to the Tasmanian mainland

   Only about an hour west we reached our destination, the town of Stanley, situated out on a peninsula that had formed behind a volcanic plug known as "the nut." The town itself was really cute, reminded me of a New England fishing village. Apparently a major film meant to be set in the 1800s was recently filmed there since all the buildings downtown look period appropriate.
   We took the chairlift up to the top of the nut and went on the very lovely walkabout around the top. Much of it was covered in sort of heath, but one low part was forested and within this beautiful forested bit was saw our first pademelons -- basically smaller more rounded wallebies. Sadly the pad-melons most commonly are seen smashed by the side of the road and as we continued to drive around Tasmania one can gauge how much nighttime traffic a section of road gets by the smashed-padmé-per-kilometer ratio.
   At the base of The Nut I had some lavendar icecream which I found remarkably good, and now I wonder why one doesn't see more of this delicious flavor.

   That evening we ate at the Stanley Hotel as it was the only place open (I think my parents would have preferred somewhere cheaper, it was a bit fancy, but it was good!!). Also, being the only place open on a Monday night the place was reservation only and after initially showing up at (6?) we had to come back at 7:30.
   That evening we went out to see the penguins -- on our earlier penguin adventure we had caught a mention that penguins also show up on the shores of Tasmania and a bit of research had revealed that this was one of the places! The beach did have designated penguin viewing locations and signs once again admonishing people not to take photos of the poor little penguins since the blue light in flashes hurts their wee little penguin eyes. As it happens we were staring into the inky blackness (moon largely obscured by clouds) at a designated location with about a dozen other tourists when a series of bright camera flashes down the path caught our attention. We ventured that way and found a little penguin paralyzed in fear on the path as some ill behaved tourist took a few more pictures.

   We then managed to run over no padmes at all on the return to our little airbnb (a custom made airbnb bungalow outside a main house) just out of town. And thus ended a delightful Day 1 in Tasmania!

( Beginning of This Adventure )

Tuesday, May 30th, Charleston, Oregon -The magical power of deep paranoia woke me up. Which is to say I woke up and looked at the time every ten minutes till 6:40, and then every two minutes until it was finally 6:50. Since I was sleeping in the crypt-like darkness of a ship's forecastle, a dozen sailors crammed in a space the size of a walk-in closet, I had a terror of my alarm going off.
   Despite my great efforts to get up without using the alarm, to my great horror, I apparently forgot to actually disable it and while I was getting dressed it started to go off at 7:00 and I leapt through the darkness like a blind cat to shut it off as fast as possible.
   Said goodbye to my dear friend Kori, who was of course asnooze and barely woke up enough to mumble goodbye. I covered her cheek in kisses until she chuckled sleepily and told her I'd swing by on my way back in the afternoon for a proper goodbye.

   And then up the ladder, pushing open the heavy wooden hatch and wiggling out with my backpack. The couple who was giving me a ride was there waiting in the fresh morning air. Surrounding us was a marina full of fishing boats and a thickly forested shore. We hopped precariously over the side to the dock -- the gangplank wasn't rigged, tossing our bags to eachother over the chasm. And then we were up the gently swaying floating dock, passing, as I mentioned, a salty former captain of mine coming the other way, who gave me an icy look and merest nod, as he secretly brandished his proverbial knife to figuratively slaughter the current captain of the ship and take over.
   Short taxi ride from Charleston to Coos Bay, past cute wooden houses and blackberry brambles. Rental car from there to Newport two hours north, along the coast but mostly you're not right on the coast so the sea isn't visible. Mainly thick pine forest and occasional bridges over rivers or big inlets from the sea, occasional small seaside towns. The couple was youngish and from Portland. The guy was an army reserve nurse, about to be sent to Korea to train people there, I think the woman may have been a teacher?

Newport - The couple dropped me off by my car, which to my relief had not been towed or ticketed, was left where I left it just beside where the boat had been docked. Had biscuits and gravy at the adorable little cafe that's right there. It's one of my favorite places, I guess I could literally say in the whole world. Just a really cute little cafe in what sort of looks like a little victorian house, right on the waterfront, with really good biscuits and gravy.

   Then I went to Englund Marine, a marine supply store, to get a ten pound spool of seine twine, a tarred twine I've been wishing I had for some time A sailor can fix absolutely anything with seine twine! It's the duct tape of the sea! Also from seine twine you make your Turks-head bracelet that is the secret sign of belonging to the ancient fellowship of sailors. I've had sailors randomly greet me in all sorts of places including once on a bus between Tanzania and Kenya due to the turks-head. It is said you earn the right to wear a turkshead by climbing to the very very very top of the mast, but I think it's also just as much also being able to make it yourself. And because you weave it directly on to your arm it cannot be removed unless cut off. I had removed mine a few years ago over fear of my hand swelled due to bee stings it could be very bad, but since my hand doesn't really swell at all any more I'd been wanting it back, and so as soon as I had a moment wove on the one in the previous link. I'll have to take a new picture tomorrow when the lighting is better, because now that it's not quite so brand new black it looks better I think.

   Does your occupation have any secret signs by which you can recognize a member out in the wilds?

   And then I retraced the trip back down to Coos Bay in my own car (which, I haven't mentioned in awhile, so I'll note I was borrowing me dad's prius). Unfortunately, when Ii got down there, the Lady Washington was out doing maneuvers so I couldn't go make proper goodbyes. But in Coos Bay town itself the other tallship, the caramel-and-blue hulled ketch Hawaiian Chieftain was moored up behind "The Casino." There was a little festival afoot, which is what had attracted the tallships, and also "the world's largest rubber duck" had been conjured up. It's about as tall as maybe a three story building, and the were in the midst of filling it with air. I took a picture but of course my phone later lost it.
   The Chieftain, as it turns out, was actually rafted to a barge thing that was moored to the pilings behind the Casino, but no gangway had been put in place yet and the gap was way too far to even contemplate jumping it. The crew was very busy up on deck doing various things and I happened to see the current captain, Gary, whom I had sailed under on a different vessel (the rather large brig Pilgrim). I called out to him and he came over onto the barge to greet me and express surprise that I was in the country. Two other sailors I've sailed with also came to greet me across the chasm, "Mr Sunshine," a thoroughly amiable older fellow (who's last name is Ray, which combined with his sunny disposition gets his name), and Shane who I think is maybe just a little younger than me and is also pretty nice (and at one time had an LJ even!).

Ugh look at that ten hours of driving and that's not counting the additional two hours of going between Coos Bay and Newport twice.

   From there I had to hoof it down to Davis/Sacramento in the middle of California, so I was off again! Would have greatly preferred to continue down the coast through the redwoods but was pressed for time at this point. Followed pretty much the route in the above map. I've described driving through Oregon a lot in this roadtrip so I won't spend much time on it suffice to say southern Oregon is mostly a land of thick forest and constant big hills / small mountains. Small highway is fun and swings through the landscape, then onto the Five which is more boring. Close to the border the landscape gets quite mountainous.
   Got off in a small town in the mountains near the border to get gas. Since this was still oregon an attendant came out to pump my gas, and she was so extremely cheerful about it and squeegied my windows as well, I felt I should tip her but wasn't sure how much was appropriate nor did I have anything smaller than a ten so I ended up not doing so, and she didn't seem the least bit phased by not getting a tip, cheerfully waving goodbye.
   And then once again a pulled an Australianism. The worst! Everyone's greatest fear when traveling between the countries. I stopped in the gas station driveway to look at my phone, then realized a car was behind me so quickly pulled onto the road and immediately onto the shoulder ... but what I didn't realize is doing this quick unthinking manouver I had pulled on to the LEFT SIDE OF THE ROAD, the side one drives on in Australia. Fortunately I was off on the shoulder but it was disconcerting to find cars passing me close head on! Quickly got to the correct side when a signal gave me a window of no cars on the road.

   Passed Mt Shasta in the waning gloaming light of evening, proceeded along the boring straight road betewen Redding and Davis in the dark -- and I had finished my audiobook so I was bouncing between unsatisfactory radio stations (even with the XM radio the car had!).

   Stopped in at Davis, where I had gone to college, solely to get delicious pizza at Woodstocks pizza there. Verily it was extremely delicious, and packed with students and many drunken students were hanging around outside since the G Street pub is right there. I looked at them all and found it hard to believe I had once been one of them. It seems so long ago now.

   From there I proceeded to Sacramento, just 11 miles across a causeway over rice fields. My friend Gabi is now living there with her mom and stepfather in the suburbs. Gabi (half Uruguayan I believe? Slight of build. Also a former LJer), has taken the unusual step of getting herself artificially inseminated, purposefully not wanting to have some guy have any claim on her kid. It was 9 or 10 when I get there so pretty much we just said our hellos and she showed me to the couch I'd be sleeping on.

Wednesday, May 31st, Sacramento, California - In the morning I met Gabi's little one, still less than a year old. She took about thirty pictures of me awkwardly holding said child and somehow my phone decided not to delete them. Gabi's mom made us breakfast and she kept referring to being part of the resistance to Trump with as much enthusiasm and sincerity as if she was spending her days engaged in partisan warfare. "Yes, but there's still us in the resistance! ... we will resist! ...we're gaining momentum you know! ...he can't keep us down!"
   She believed the repubicans would never ever ever impeach Trump, somethnig I've heard a number of people say, but I think when the republican members of congress realize that no part of their conservative agenda is going to get through with his blinding incompetence AND the stink of corruption is like that of a rotting whale (have you ever smelled a rotting whale? it's pretty bad), they'll absolutely cut the anchor chain on him.

From there I got back on the highway for the straight boring shot down the central valley on the five. Once again the dried grass was like the fuzz of a freshly shorn golden sheep. Once again I stopped at that roadtrip holy site, the In-N-Out in Kettleman City. Once again I got bogged down in absolutely shocking traffic in the LA area. And finally, as the sun was once again setting, arrived at my parents place in southern Orange County.

Now hopefully I can knock out my younger brother's wedding in one more entry and be done with this last trip!

( Beginning of this adventure )

Monday, May 29th - "Well, are you coming or not?" asked Kori, via facebook messenger that morning, "because I have not make the watch bills and need to know whether or not to put you on them,"
   "I really don't know how I'm going to manage it but I r eally want to, I'm trying desperately to figure something out but I haven't yet," I respond.
   "Okay well I'm making the watch bill and leaving you off." I'm sitting in my car in a gas station outside of Olympia, haven just driven down from Bellingham.
   I'm aiming to catch the tallship Lady Washington (of which Koriander is the first mate) in the small seaside town of Newport, Oregon, and sail as crew to Coos Bay, almost exactly 100 miles (98.3) south. The problem is I have to leave my car at one end, say the start, and then get back there. I thought it would be a simple matter, like there'd be an hourly bus running up and down the coast highway, right? Like a civilized place? No, there's a twice daily bus out of Coos Bay that would take me way inland to Eugene or Corvallis and I'd have to wait hours for a bus going to Newport. Google public transit routing puts the trip at like 26 hours! Renting a car looked to cost over $200 since I'd be only taking it one way. This was proving ridiculously difficult. I posted on facebook for advice from my Oregon based friends, and got back on the highway while racking my brain over the problem.

   It had been an easy two hour or so drive south from Bellingham along the big multi lane highway The Five, with no traffic congestion since it was still the middle of the three day weekend. The highway flies through Seattle raised up so high you feel like you're flying right over it and have a good view of the city as it goes by. I don't remember noticing Tacoma which comes just south, and Olympia is hidden by trees, it's odd you notice there's suddenly lots of exits and signs about the city but as you pass through Olympia, the state capitol, you might as well be in a forest as far as you can tell.
   To quote myself about Olympia, when we were there on the boat:
   Very ironically this is the first place we've been that doesn't have shore water or power or facilities of any kind for us. We had these things in tiny backwaters like Garibaldi and Sequim but here in the state capitol we've got nothing but the power we generate ourselves, the water we brought aboard in Gig Harbour, and we'll have to go find a pumpout dock to get rid of our crap.
   Olympia is a weird place. It has one street, 4th Avenue, that has a lot of bars and other cool stuff, but surrounding that is just muffler shops and other boring crap. All the locals look like cracked out vagrant-punks. In most towns we stand out for looking dishevelled -- in this town we all look positively clean and straight-laced compared to the locals.

Mt St Helens and Mt Rainier as seen from a plane on an earlier trip

   From Olympia it's pretty much a straight shot down the Five to Portland ("PDX"), and much the same as I described the Five south of PDX -- agricultural land with a five o clock shadow of trees growing anywhere anyone has neglected to keep them down, mountains in the distance. I want to say you can see Mt St Helens from the freeway but I might be transposing the good views of it when flying over this same airspace to SEA-TAC airport. Google tells me you can see it on clear days from the freeway anyway.
   There was a route to Newport that departed the five before PDX and runs down the coast, which I would have preferred, but I still didn't know if I'd be headed to Newport or catching a bus from Coos Bay or somewhere in between or maybe the whole thing would be impractical so I continued on down the five. Checking facebook just before entering PDX to see if anyone had any good advise yet (which I sweeearr I pulled over to do ::looks around nervously::) a friend I'd forgotten was in Portland had left a comment and as lunch was approaching I messaged her asking if she wanted to get together for lunch. She was down and I left it up to her to suggest a place, and she suggested one of the McMenamens -- McMenamen is a, I guess you could call it a chain but each location is super unique, they buy old sort of landmark buildings and turn them into restaurant/bar places. I was so glad she had suggested it because going to a McMenamens was definitely on my list but it hadn't occured to me this day because I had so much else on my mind.
   We were headed to the one called Broadway Pub. For some reason my GPS took me on an extremely roundabout way to get there and I only bothered to look at the big picture when it had already taken me on a wild goose chase. Anyway my friend, Hollie is ALSO from ye glory days of Model UN and PAXMUN and I don't think I've seen her literally since the last time I saw her at a conference. She now has a kid who I think is like 8 or 9 maybe? He came with her to lunch but shyly didn't say much. She is also married to a Brazilian airline pilot. Hollie has been working as a "promotional model" most of the time since MUN I believe.
   ***Plz allow me to insert here an incident I forgot to relate from up in Bellingham -- while looking at the menu I pulled another totl Australianism. In Australia "entrees" on the menu are appetizers, which I have to concede makes more sense. So I was looking at the menu and skipped over the entrees to look for "mains" and found very few (maybe just the specials), and was just starting to comment on the lack of selection of mains when it dawned on me.
   I had delicious cajun tater tots (I've been missing the McMenamen's tater tots!) and [? a burger?] (it's definitely clear to me while writing this that the terminal amount of time has passed since these events where I've practically forgotten everything that's not written down), and a pint of their excellent Tatonka Stout.

   After lunch it was time to get down to brass tacks and decide what I was doing, as I'd have to choose which road to go on right after Portland. I still had zero idea how I'd get back to my car or from the one city to the other. It seemed actually quite impossible.

...

   So naturally, I decided I'd go for it. I would leave my car in Newport and despite the apparent impossibility of getting back there from Coos Bay, I would just ... deal with that when I get there.

   Google maps tells us there's two routes from PDX to Newport, one along the Five most of the way and one that gets off the Five almost immediately. You can take a guess which one I took. It's an enjoyable drive through over hill and vale and through tiny farming communities and small towns. I had made this very drive one morning in January 2012 when I had a job interview with Rogue Brewery, first at their headquarters in Portland and then the next morning at their main facility in Newport, so the drive reminded me of that.
   Anyway it's about two and a half hours from Portland to Newport and despite being on the more scenic road for some reason I started feeling very sleepy and had to stop at one point and jog back and forth a bit to wake myself up. Also as I approached the coast a light drizzle began. The weather most of the trip had been amazingly excellent but the coast is famous for dreary weather. The last bit of the drive was through cute seaside towns.

[This would be the perfect place for the picture I definitely took of the boat at the dock there with with Newport bridge behind it, but that picture has also been lost]

   Finally arrived in Newport and the boat was right where I expected to find it. In fact, it was right where I had first joined the Hawaiian Chieftain to begin my seven month stint aboard. Swung aboard and found Kori in the aft cabin. There were several people in the crowded little space, including Daisy, who had been aboard the Chieftain when I first came aboard here, so we were excited to see eachother. I forget if there was someone else who knew me, but after at least Kori and Daisy (both shortish Hawaiian girls as it happens) were like "KRIS!!!" and hugged me. Captain Lazarus, whom I'm not sure I'd met before, did the same thing just to be silly.

   As this entry is once again long enough, and I feel descriptions of the boat and crew should belong to the same entry as the subsequent sail, I'll end this one here, where I have just come aboard in the gathering darkness of this memorable little town.

Current Music: Poe - Hey Pretty

   ( Beginning of this Adventure )

Friday, May 26th - Up in the back of town, where the houses are big and old and built on hills, near a cemetary, I park by what my GPS indicates is my friend Maureen's house. And lo, verily, there she is.
   Maureen, AKA Reen, has auburn hair, blue eyes that sparkle with delight and/or mischief, and a big delightful smile, and an arsenal of expressions that seem vaguely a satire of 50s culture. As I mentioned, I met her the day I got off the boat, and I think I had probably last seen her in Sacramento in 2013 or 14, whereupon we had briefly caught up for coffee. She now works as a lemur at a funeral home in Bellingham, and as such, having just come from work, she was wearing a black or dark blue dress with what we decided to call "a serenity stripe" down each side (apparently it's difficult finding the appropriately somber but not TOO somber clothing for her job).
   "Wait, what!," you might be saying, "lemur?!" Picturing a furry thing with saucer eyes and a barber-pole tail. But you see Lemures in Roman mythology are the "spirits of the restless dead," and since one of her duties is responding at all hours to go retrieve just-deceased persons and "take them into our care" it seemed appropriate and a lot more adorable than calling her a grim reaper. Also there was at one time a lemur snapchat filter which she used which was the best thing ever and I really hope they bring it back.
   She lives in a big decaying old house (I tried to lean again a column by the doorway and realized it wouldn't hold my weight, and in fact the portion of the porch by the door that overhung the hillside didn't quite look safe at all) up in the hills above the center of town, and just around the corner from the cemetary and funeral home where she works. We had to tiptoe through the common areas of her house lest the ~~vengeful spirits~~ housemates be disturbed, and despite our best efforts I believe one of them later griped.

   We immediately proceeded downtown, got an outdoor table at a little restaurant on State Street. Here I pulled another really glaring Australianism. In Australia "entrees" are appetizers (which I've gotta give it to them on this one that does fit the meaning of the word better), and so I was looking at the menu assuming everything under the entree heading was an appetizer and tehre wasn't much left that otherwise looked like a main (maybe some things under "specials?"), and I was just saying "well I don't mean to be a weirdo and order an entree for my main but... [pause in which Reen looks at me a little perplexed] OH MY GOD THEY ARE MAINS"
   Alas I forget what I had but it was quite good. Then we strolled about town a bit. It was fun because I particularly fondly remember Bellingham from when I came here aboard the Chieftain. The marina had been haunted by what we called "demon birds" due to their unearthly screech, next to a park with a memorial to lost fishermen/sailors, which Reen remarked had been sponsored by her employer!
I was in Bellingham on my birthday in 2010 (28th?), and it was quite like that movie Memento -- One minute it was only halfway through the evening, I was getting another drink in a bar on State Street, and then suddenly it was morning and I was in my bunk on the boat, in the blink of an eye, as if I'd been teleported! The rest of the missing evening slowly came back throughout the day as I interrogated people.
   And now seven years later here I was again walking these same streets! Alas we were unable to work the dumpling (perogi) restaurant into the weekend, but that evening we did hit up a MEAD BAR (!!!). They had several meads on tap as well as some weird jazzy-folksy-hippie music act on and lots of people of the grey haired elder-hippie variety, were swaying to and fro and for some reason knew when the right time to clap was even though there didn't seem to be any corresponding stop, pause or crescendo in the music.

File footage of Reen doing a numbat impression

Saturday, May 27th - This day began with this utter deliciousness from local place the Mount Bakery (a nearby snow capped mountain looming up over the city at a distance is Mt Baker). The menu had numerous delicious looking options, but I had the "blackwood benny" (smoked bacon and black pepper among other things) and Reen had the biscuits and gravy. Back in 2010 I visited a very similar restaurant called "Bayou on the Bay," which ALSO had delicious eggs benedicts and omelettes and things. Clearly this is a very good city.
   Other activities in around Bellingham which may or may not have been Saturday or Sunday including walking about a nice forested park just above down (Whatcome Falls), through which a river ran in a deep gorge. People were bathing under a waterfall and then a lot of swimmers were gathered in a swimming hole. I got some pictures I thought were pretty nice but my phone immediately deleted them (and yeah-no I do have the google photos auto backup setup but it deleted them before that could even happen).
   Just south of Bellingham is a state park (Laramie) of trails through a forested bit of the coast, which was nice but had a HECK of a lot of people out enjoying the summer afternoon. Also in the category or Just South of Bellingham is a town called Fairhaven, which when I was on the boat I was completely unaware of since again when boat-bound land distances are insurmountable. Fairhaven was a lot like Bellingham but without stoned grunge-hippies hanging about everywhere. While poking around Fairhaven we found the schooner Zodiac at her moorings, which was yet another reminder of my sailing days since we used to encounter the Zodiac in all sorts of obscure parts of the Puget sound, for example looming suddenly out of the morning fog off San Juan island like some kind of predatory privateer.
   Both Saturday and Sunday we stopped at a dogpark/bar in the afternoon to pet the doggies whilst having a beer or two.
   Saturday we had mexican at a place in Fairhaven. Normally I hold myself to vows to have no Mexican food north of San Francisco, but compared to "mexican food" in Australia I felt anything in America would be thoroughly satisfactory.

Schooner Zodiac in Bellingham Bay, 2010

Sunday, May 28th - Reen dragged me ~~into the underworld~~ along to her work. I saw dead people! Fortunately no one made me pet them, and there wasn't any gross embalming stuff going on. One of the dead people was wearing their nice suit and pink striped socks.

   Then we, with Reen's coworker / best friend Alexandrina and her husband ?? went to poke around Fairhaven again -- this time there was a sort of festival on -- Ski to Sea, some kind of race? ("A 2017 Ski to Sea team consists of eight racers competing in seven different sports: Cross Country Ski, Downhill Ski/Snowboard, Running, Road Bike, Canoe (2 paddlers), Cyclocross Bike, and Sea Kayak.") so there was a festive atmosphere about. We ate at an Americana themed restaurant (burgers of course) in Fairhaven that was also totally delicious.

   I'm sure I'm forgetting things we did, but long story short Bellingham is a delightful place with nice long summer days, delicious food, heaps of delicious beer (there's like at least three little craft breweries in town), and lots of beautiful forest areas to explore in the immediate vicinity.
   Monday may have been a holiday for most of America, (Memorial Day), but turns out people in the memorializing industry have to work that day! So Reen had to work and I had to rush down to catch the boat! Although at this point it was proving a serious problem that I'd be catching the boat in one small seaside town (Newport, Oregon), and riding it to another (Coos Bay, Oregon), and from there I'd need to get to my car but apparently there's NO bus service directly between neighboring seaside towns on the Oregon coast and I'd have to take a bus way inland to Eugene and back out again and it would take something impractical like 24 hours of bus limbo hell. Obviously this is a subject for another entry but I'm mentioning it now to leave it hanging in suspense because at this point I myself was quite in suspense about how this could be done if at all.

   And so, Monday morning, I bid adieu to lovely Bellingham and dear Reen my favorite lemur and began the journey south.

( Beginning of this Adventure )

Thursday, May 25th - Next stop on my agenda was to to see some old friends in Seattle. I'd meant to leave the Kettle Falls area earlier but like a river caught behind a glacial ice dam, we pooled in the Kettle Falls interpretive center too long, so it was around 1pm when I finally got on the road. Doug was concerned that some of the roads I intended to take might be snowed in, which was a novel thought, but we checked online and they were all open. I was also thrilled that this trip would require almost no retracing my steps or roads I'd ever been on before.

   The road took me down along the broad Columbia river, surrounded by pine forest and only occasional habitations. At one point I passed a ferry landing where a small ferry was loading cars, and at another there was a small townlet in a hairpin turn in the road that was gone in the blink of an eye (looking at the map that must be Hunters, population 306, "a focal point of the surrounding smaller communities" according to wikipedia). After about an hour of following the river I came to where the river Spokane joined the Columbia, and here, just over the bridge, I saw signs of Fort Spokane historical site. I pulled off here and drove into the parking area. The area was sort of a broad meadow overlooking the rivers, with a few restored wooden buildings. Other than the highway there was very little of the modern world in sight. I would dearly have liked to get out and look around but looking at the time I knew I had to keep moving if I was going to make dinner in Seattle with my friends. So I had to continue rushing down the river valley like a jökulhlaup.
   Shortly after leaving the fort the road turned west and no longer followed the river. The land opened up from hilly forests to broad fields of wheat and prairie. A few more small towns here with names like Wilbur (claim to fame: crop circles reported nearby) and Creston (claim to fame, last surviving member of Butch Cassidey's gang shot here in 1902) with giant grain silos towering over them. After about an hour of sailing along the quiet and straight highway through waves of grain, I came back to the bedammed river at Coulee City, and a very long dam was clearly visible above the town which I assumed was THE famous dam, but no I see "the" Coulee dam which had flooded so much upriver is actually located upriver a bit at the city of Grand Coulee, which I had bypassed (or rather it would have been out of my way). In actual fact I just realized looking at the map that this wasn't the Columbia river here at Coulee City at all but some other river, the Columbia splitting off above here. It's highly weird and unusual for a river to split in two directions going downstream!
   It turns out the gorge chewed through the landscape by the Missoula Floods in the Ice Age is not exactly the course of the Columbia River, and this seeming river valley south of the city of Grand Coulee is that ancient riverbed, the Grand Coulee itself. The Coulee riverbed was dry in modern times until the Grand Coulee dam was built, the one that flooded everything up river, and water is pumped from it through the rest of the Coulee riverbed to irrigate farms downriver. The more you know!

   All I knew at the time was that my GPS wanted me to take a road south here to connect to the boring looking interstate 90 running between Seattle and Spokane, and I wasn't having it. Despite my hurry, it didn't add to much time to stay on on the same two lane highway I'd been on (the 2) headed West into the mountains.
   Just across the Coulee I pulled into a turnout with a grand view into the "channeled scablands" of the Coulee valley, not that I was quite sure what I was looking at but it was nice. Through rising prairie farmland again for another half hour, then following a river south for a ten minutes which I didn't realize is the Columbia again (can't get away from this thing!), across a bridge and immediately into mountains! The road corkscrewed up a narrow valley beside a rushing mountain stream and eventually passed a faux bavarian alpine village and ski resorts. There was only a very light amount of snow at the level of the highway though.
   And then gradually descending the other side the mountains unwind and peter out and I found myself coming into the Seattle metropolitan area and big highways with rush-hour traffic! As it happens it wasn't actually that bad and my friend Mike (xaositecte) lived on the East side of the city, from which I was approaching (for those who know the city, his address was in Kirkland, for those, like me, that don't, it's separated from downtown by a large lake)

   Mike I know from Model United Nations (MUN), (we figured out he was in my committee at a conference in Vegas circa 2003 where I was representing Libya (despite having a green mohawk at the time), and filled my speeches with fiery quotes from the Quran (which I had in hand as I was taking an Islamic Scriptures class). Mike previously lived in Portland (or rather the "Vancouver" thats just beside PDX), and I think last time I saw him was when I crashed at his place the night before first joining the tallship Lady Washington there in 2009. He is, I believe, some kind of (software?) engineer, and his wife/and/or/girlfriend is a teacher (I really should take notes I suppose, given my memory). He had an adorable dog that I feel like was a pit / corgi cross or something? Is that a thing?
   We had made dinner plans with another MUN friend, Sameer, nearby. Sameer and I were jointly in charge of the America Pacific (Ampac) conference in Southern California in 2007. I was the Secretary-General, which in most MUN organizations would be the highest position, but this organization, PAXMUN, had Governor-Generals whose duties were supposed to be more over-arching while the SG was supposed to be in charge of more of the details. As it happens, Sameer appeared to totally not remember that he had tried to fire me (but failed because he tried to do so by email during a PAXMUN conference I was present at, along with all the board, and he was not, so they were very easily persuaded that I shouldn't be fired). Despite that we got along alright with no hard feelings, after all this is MUN, intrigue is in our blood, and diplomacy is the name of the game.
   Shortly after our conference, a coup d'etat had taken place on the board, wherein a certain power-hungry member (whom I shall name because their perfidy should stick to them, it was Mary McKenzie of one of the San Diego universities) through maneuvering (Sameer finally filled me in on a number of the sordid details during dinner) managed to fire the chairman of the board and other key opponents, and then went about cleaning house and in a flood of blacklisting got rid of most staff associated with the old regime, including my humble self (Sameer survived another year just because Governor-Generals had multi year appointments), and... did something new and shiny rise from this dripping scoured desolation? No she managed to run PAXMUN right into the ground in a stunning nosedive that saw it completely cease to be an organization within two years. Its a real shame -- I probably would have ceased being involved anyway since I had just graduated college, but its a shame its gone because it ran most of the big conferences in the the Southwestern United States (Ampac in LA, Amwest in Vegas, Amsouth in New Orleans, and several smaller ones) and Mary destroyed it like a toddler smashing a toy just to see what'll happen.
   Anyway, Sameer, Mike and I had a grand old time reminiscing about the antedeluvian days of yore. Sameer had gone on to run a Seattle based conference that he's still involved in to this day.

   Mike had a guest room so I didn't even have to sleep on a couch AND, a true hero of the people, he made biscuits and gravy and bacon for breakfast (he seemed particularly outraged when I described the lack of real bacon in Australia and valiantly brought forth some very high quality delicious bacon). And then as he headed off to work in the bright morning light I was headed north to a land of beautiful seaside towns I had visited during my life as a sailor and... ex girlfriends ::dramatic fade::

TO BE CONTINUED!

Current Music: Two Gallants - Waves of Grain

( Beginning of this Adventure )

Wednesday, May 24th - It's just about two hours from Spokane to my next destination, a tiny town called Marcus outside a small town called Kettle Falls north of Spokane. While the terrain south of Spokane on my approach had been rolling prairies, north of the city I was immediately in amongst narrow valleys of farmland separated by small forested mountains. This highway wasn't so big as to scare away the quaint red barns nestled into the bucolic landscape either.
   Passed through a few small country town blocks of Kettle Falls and then just out of town, surrounded by tall pine forest again, my GPS had me turn off onto the road for Marcus. Minutes later I found the road skirting what appeared to be a lake, and the lake appeared to be very low, which I thought was odd since the whole west coast has gotten record rain this year. And furthermore, it looked like there was the remnants of a road upon one of the barely exposed sandbars, which also intrigued me.
   As I'd find out later, the lake is actually the Columbia river (again), but it is dammed somewhere below here, and they have recently lowered the level quite a bit in anticipation of more snowmelt coming down the line from further up. And the roads? Apparently the town of Marcus had originally been where the lake is now, but when the river was dammed the whole town was moved, and you can still see some roads (as I did) and foundations when the water is really low.
   My friend Doug mentioned that Marcus was one of the first European towns in the area .. wikipedia doesn't mention that but it did have a role in a gold rush of the 1860s, since boat traffic couldn't pass the nearby Kettle Falls, Marcus became a staging area for boat traffic on the section upriver of the falls to the "Rapids of Death".
   And now, over a century and a half after this little town was founded ... it has a population of 183, no retail shopfronts, not even a post office. But it's ten minutes from the town of Kettle Falls so I think all business is there and Marcus is now just a few sleepy residential streets along the river/lake banks. Doug later told me there's a big apple cider festival every year in Marcus.
   The Canadian border is only 35 miles further up the river, but Doug told me he discovered the other day when he tried to take his wife to Canada that they wouldn't allow him in because he was arrested some 40 years ago for trespassing ("even though I had permission to be there!"). I'm similarly not legally allowed into Canada for stupid reasons. Eff Canada man.

   My friend Doug I met on my first project in Nigeria in 2012, where he was also doing a beekeeping project just like me with the same organization. In fact it was his mischievious influence that led to me talking to the princess. We kept in touch and in 2014 he joined me on a trip to East Africa to attend a beekeeping conference in Tanzania. We ended up having a grand old time traipsing around East Africa for about 40 days. Doug is in his seventies, a retired beekeeper, joking so much one never is really quiet sure when he's being serious, and he's an inveterate flirt. As I said he got me to talk to the princess, and a classic example of his mischievious influence: when we saw two cute girls at a restaurant in Ethiopia, he urged me to go talk to them. "Ask them where the Air Ethiopia office is" he suggested. "I KNOW where the Air Ethiopia office is!" I objected. "But they don't know you know!" he explained [cue that meme of the guy tapping his forehead knowingly]. I went and talked to them and they told me to sit with them and they'd show me where it was when they finished eating. Sage wisdom! No ladies would have been safe from Doug... if it weren't for the fact that on his previous visit to Ethiopia he had met and married a 22 year old Ethiopian woman.
   On this visit shortly after I arrived at Doug's house, he mentioned that Mebrihet had recently moved to Spokane to be nearer civilization and other young people.
   "I hope not permanently?" I asked, and he kind of shrugged and said
   "maybe? ... it was my suggestion actually."
   ...
   "Hey want to go look at some beehives?" he suggested brightly
   "Sure!"

   So we drove down the road another ten minutes in his pick-up to a beeyard of his where he had some nucs (small hives recently split off) he had introduced some experimental queens to from the University of Washington. It was around 5pm at this point, there were still several hours of daylight but it was quite brisk and a light rain misted down upon us intermittently. As we opened up the beehives to check if the queens were present and laying an F-18 fighter jet screamed through the valley on an apparent loop that brought it past us once every six minutes. It was quite close, and low, and I figured out it was a six minute loop specifically to try to be ready to get a picture, but never succeeded. Unfortunately for one reason or another many of the queens hadn't taken.

   Back at Doug's place he slapped some steaks on the grill for us and we cracked open some beers. As we were finishing a young fellow (early twenties-ish?) dropped in to talk to Doug, apparently he's on the autistic spectrum and doesn't have many friends, and so Doug tries to be friendly and makes him feel welcome to stop in.

   Suggested Musical Accompaniment For Next Bit:

   Like nearby Marcus, the original town of Kettle Falls was also flooded by the damming of the Columbia River

Thursday, May 25th - The next morning Doug took me to see some sites in the town of Kettle Falls. We poked around an old mill site, and the cute general store in town had a big antique store section that I perused for interesting things. Got several more beers from the fridge -- there's not much craft beer in Australia so I've been buying a lot of beer, more than I could drink, and when I finally returned to Australia I actually left quite a few interesting beers in their pantry! Good thing good beer ages well.
   We had lunch at this cute little diner style restaurant in Kettle Falls where we both had bacon burgers ('Murica!) sitting at the counter. The waitress walked by just as I was telling Doug I hoped to avoid petting any dead people in Bellingham, where Maureen works at a funeral home, Doug having asked what I would do there, and said waitress gave me an extremely strange look.

   Our last stop was the interpretive centre / museum by Kettle Falls. I just read the wikipedia article on Kettle Falls to make sure I got my facts right and if you have a minute it's actually worth a read, not too long and concisely encapsulates the story of the whole area I rather feel. For most of the last 9,000 years native Americans from a large surrounding area from the coast to the plains would come to Kettle falls to fish during salmon fishing season, with up to fourteen tribes meeting to trade, socialize, and settle disputes as well as catch the fish. The would only catch the weaker fish to ensure that the strongest would go on to breed. On June 19th, 1811, the first documented European explorer reached the site. Fort built nearby in 1825, Jesuit mission in 1845, hotel and resort town in 1891. In 1940 with the abovementioned dam building, Kettle Falls was flooded along with 21,000 acres of prime land used by the native peoples, and in June of that year 8,000-10,000 people attended a "ceremony of tears" as the falls disappeared forever under the lake. The dam now blocks the salmon from coming to to this part of the river at all.

Inside the interpretive center we met a man dressed all in clothes made from pelts like a trapper, and it turned out he had made them all himself and was a thoroughly interesting man. He is or was a history teacher at the local high school, and there were a number of absolutely gorgeous muskets in the museum which he said his students had made under his direction -- I'm not talking about model muskets I mean fully functional and beautiful looking guns! He seemed a bit accent-deaf, he seemed to assume I was just Australian without any further complications (frowny face), and launched into an interesting story about this time he was arrested for vagrancy in the Northern Territory, locked up overnight, but of the two cells in the jail the male one was full so they put him in with the women much to the great envy of the other fellas, and in the morning the local magistrate, who happened to be a friend of his, came and let him out. Immediately he was asked "do you have a license to drive a truck?" "yes?" "good because this truck of pig iron needs to get to Sydney but the driver just died!" ... so shortly after being sprung from jail he found himself driving a truckload of pig iron the thousands of miles toward Sydney. And then apparently some time later he was employed shooting deer from helicopters in New Zealand, apparently with plentiful dear and venison being (at the time at least) worth twice as much as beef, it was cost effective to employ helicopter based teams to hunt deer for their meat. Which I'm only making the connection just now but that's kind of a weird modern equivalent to the trapper he was dressed as in the interpretive center.

And by now it was around 13:00 and I was overdue to get on the road to meet my friends in Seattle for dinner! I'll save the drive to Seattle for next entry

Current Music: Slaid Cleaves - Below

   ( Beginning of this Adventure )

Monday, May 22nd - This day I was finally headed somewhere new (Spokane)! Unfortunately to get there I'd have to drive up the boring ole five a hundred or so miles to Portland, which I love, without having time to stop there, and then I'd be in new territory for the next several hours.
   As mentioned last entry, I left my friends Garian and Charlie's house in the morning just as they were leaving for work. I didn't really describe Eugene last entry but as I drove through it both coming and going I was really struck by how nice it seems. I've never been to any downtown area it may or may not have but everything I saw was tree lined streets and cute houses surrounded by lush shrubbery, it seemed extremely nice.

   Between Eugene and Portland the road is straight and boring. The kind of multi-lane highway that just steamrollers you through an environment, and even what you do see from it has been corrupted by it, as gas stations and businesses catering to the traffic crop up by the road and everything quaint wilts away from the concrete behemoth that breaths exhaust fumes and traffic noises.
   Still though, the surroundings are mostly farmland, and any little corner of undeveloped land sprouts a thick forest of trees as if the blanket of woods that once covered this land can only barely be held back.
   One shoots through the brief urban landscape of the state capitol, Salem, and then it's more of the same until you get to Portland, by far the biggest city in Oregon. Here you actually see highrises and overpasses and it took maybe half an hour to traverse the cityscape. Across the Columbia river, north of Portland, is "Vancouver," which is really just the northern suburbs of PDX (as locals call Portland), and this is confusing because of course if you were to follow the Five a few more hours north, you would arrive in Vancouver. Apparently Portland was founded by two very unimaginative men, one from Vancouver BC and one from Portland MN and they couldn't agree which of their home towns to name it after so they named one side of the river after one and the ther after the other (Oh if only they'd been a bit more imaginative and gone with Portcouver or Vancland or something). As it happens my travels took me off the Five here onto the 84, a somewhat smaller four lane highway that heads East from PDX following right along the southern bank of the Columbia river.

   ( Embedded map hates Coeur D'Alene for some reason, click here for whole map )

   The Columbia river is so wide you can easily see how it can be navigated by ships, and I couldn't help but picture the tallship Lady Washington out in the middle. My time aboard said ship has already come up many times in this present travelogue and I'm assuming it'll continue to. I first joined the boat in the Vancouver that's across the river from Portland and we sailed down the river westward to the sea, but the boat does go as far east upriver as, well, at least Pasco I guess. There's a fun song which I can't find audio of on the internet but the lyrics are here (if you want to use google fu to try to find an actual recording, the version I've always heard is by William Pint, and I note he does have a CD for sale with it on it that you can buy. If you're into sea shanties, it is worth a buy), about a time the Lady Washington sailed way up the river to Pasco in Eastern Washington. The last stanza describes the area:
      "Oh, Pasco is a dreadful place;
      It's a land that's seldom green;
      Where dust storms blow, trains do come and go,
      And tall ships are seldom seen, brave boys,
      Tall ships are seldom seen.

   For the first several hours though the road continues surprisingly straight along the southern bank for the river. The Columbia gorge was apparently blasted through the countryside by a torrential prehistoric floods from glacial lakes, which might explain why its surprisingly straight for a river. On either side the countryside was once again alternating thick forest or, where flat enough, farmland.
   Early on I passed a billboard for the "naked winery," in fact, I think I passed at least three billboards. At first I didn't even take note but by the third it had lodged in my brain and I was dying to know, what IS the naked winery?? Is it some swanky strip club with a winery theme? Is it an actual winery tasting room for nudists? Surely that sounds like a bad idea. When I stopped to eat and get gas in The Dalles, after I had googled what the heck the origin of the name of the Dalles was (apparently French for "the chutes," referring to the narrowing of the river here) I had to google the Naked Winery. Despite the innuendoes made on their billboards my very brief examination of their webpage seemed to indicate that it was just a winery. "Naked," is probably their chic way of saying they're organic like "naked juice," 'and other such "clever" hipster marketing ploys ::eyeroll::.
   Now as I may have mentioned I like to seek out non-chain little restaurants as I travel, and here in the Dalles I found a place called Burgerville that, I dunno if it has any other locations but I for one had never heard of it and it was new to me. I had a delicious hickery bacon burger with a side of DEEP FRIED ASPARAGUS which I think every burger place should have as a side from now on. And I once again pulled a flagrant Australianism. At first I tried to order a small drink, and the cashier said "are you sure, this is the small," holding up a tiny cup, and without thinking I exclaimed "THAT'S TOINY!!" and then as she looked at me with a "you're not from around here are you look" I ashamedly realized I had TOTALLY inserted an O in a word in which it didn't belong. Ironic because I'd expect a toiny drink in Australia, but in 'Murica, come on!

   Now getting gas in Oregon is something I find very tedious -- you cannot pump your own gas! The first gas station I pulled into in Oregon, remembering this, I waited for a minute or two at a pump but no one came up as I remembered happening. So I got out and looekd around and didn't see any obvious employees. Thinking maybe they had thank god changed the law I went to swipe my card in the reader but it wouldn't work. So I go inside, where I _did_ encounter an overweight man with a mullet and his overweight rat-tailed son filling up 64oz sodas ('Murica!), I asked the cashier how I pay for gas and he said I needed to bring him some sort of ticket or something, when I still looked confused he explained I needed to get it from an employee outside. So I go out and after some observation determined that there WERE employees pumping gas they just had no uniform or indication of their official status. Presently I was able to get one's attention, he wrote me up some kind of ticket thing that I went in and paid for and then I came out and he was pumping my gas finally .... altogether I found this to be a thoroughly tedious method of getting my gas paid for and into my car!!
   Interesting note on comparative gas pumping: In 'Straya, though they don't trust you to post-pay your restaurant meals, fueling your car, where you could easily accidentally drive off without paying, they always trust you to pay afterwords. And of course even though there's dozens and dozens of types of petroleum product we use in our daily lives, the one called gasoline is the one they call generically "petrol," and propane, butane, natural gas, and several other petroleum products they DO call generically "gas" ...

   Shortley after the Dalles, the landscape became more like the "dreadful place," described in the song. Clearly we were entering the priaries and the land around the river valley looked flat and grass covered. Then the highway splits, with the 84 itself veering away from the river and taking a south-easterly directly, and the 82 (which I took) turning north, crossing the Columbia, and then shortly crossing it again (at the infamous Pasco), because the Columbia also turns here and heads up north-west.
   From here the road leaves the river behind and just strikes off through mostly empty prairies for two hours until finally arriving in Spokane! Even though it seemed early for rush hour traffic (I think it was just before 3?) the traffic through the center of town was gnarly (and my phone GPS of course tries to avoid the most trafficky routes) and I think it took forty minutes just to get from the edge of town to my friend Brittney's apartment. Spokane itself looked a little smaller than Portland, I don't recall there being any particularly tall highrises, and I vaguely recall a number of old looking brick buildings in the downtown area. Having grown up far from Spokane all my life I've been saying it the way it looks like it should be pronounced (spoh-kane) but apparently it's (spoh-kenn) and I have serious trouble remembering to say it right.

This bridge gets mentioned further down in the entry but I'm putting it here to break up the text ;)

   My friend Brittney I met when I was on the boat (I told you the boats are really going to keep coming up on this trip. In this case the Hawaiian Chieftian -- the two boats generally hang out together but I started as a volunteer on the Lady for two weeks and then a few months later got a paid position on the Chieftain and was on for nearly seven months). They had actually let me off for once (we got a day off once every two weeks if we were really lucky) and I had been chilling for awhile in a coffee shop in the tiny town of Port Orchard in the Puget Sound and she had been working at the coffee shop. We've kept in touch in the intervening seven years, and though in fact one weekend I was going to fly up to see her in 2014 or 2015 but actually had fully booked my flight on the wrong weekend, which I discovered only when tried to check in to my flight, and the weekend I had actually booked I had something I had to do, so that was a few hundred dollars down the drain for nothing. So this was the first time I've seen her since she served me coffee in 2010.
   I've always liked to just skip over describing people because its hard but I'm trying to force myself not to shirk this (since originally posting the entries I've gone back and added a brief description of my friend Ben on day 0 and Garian in last entry). So Brittney, she's kind of slight, tattoos, lip rings in the position described as a snake bite apparently. While this description might make her sound kind of punkish, she these days is a conscientious mother to her three year old, Lily, and studiously undertaking online classes for a teaching degree.
   Lily is an adorable little blonde ball of energy. I had brought her a little stuffed animal kangaroo but then when I searched my bags to give it to her I couldn't find it anywhere, I don't know for the life a me where it got to. Searched my bags, the car, then my parents house when I returned, and even here, it has simply hopped off. In other news by this point I was starting to notice that all my friends I had visited had three year olds, this was turning in to Tour de Toddlers. Also I'd never seriously thought about it before but it also made me realize just about all my friends are either married with kids now or at least well on their way. I'm officially the man-spinster!

   So anyway, what is there to do in Spok-enn? Apparently.. leave and go to Idaho! After discussing what to do with the rest of the day we decided to go to Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, a mere half-hour east along the Spokenn River. Here in the bright summer late afternoon and early evening we walked along the docks beside the sparkling Lake Coeur D'Alene and ate at the rather nice restaurant in the hotel right on the water there.

Tuesday, May 23rd - Brittney had work as a nanny at 2pm but in the morning we went to a local botanical garden in Spokane. I love botanical gardens. One thing that was super impressive was the amount of pollen coming out of the tall pines in and around the botanical garden -- it was literally billowing like mist. A thick layer had accumulated on Brittsy's car in the mere hour or two we were there.
   The botanical garden was nice, there was a Japanese Garden there and I particularly love Japanese Gardens.
   After Brittsy went to work I drove to a state park just out of town on the west (downriver) side, "Bowl and Pitcher State Park." The camping and trailheads are on the inside of a bend in the river and there's a fun suspension bridge over the river here. Looking down, the river is moving so fast it's almost in rapids, and I saw some kayakers come shooting through. On the far side there's fun hiking trails all about. I spent the entire rest of the day hiking about here on the forest trails. Shortly I watching the sun set amongst the trees (nice and late in the evening) Brittney called to let me know she was headed home so I came back, and we watched Moina, as one does when there's a three year old girl about (actually I quite rather liked it as far as Disney movies go. It's about sailing and actually doesn't have any mushy romance at all! and my dear ex Kori is Hawaiian).

Wednesday, May 24th -
Woke up on the couch with Brittney's two cats again (Bella and Nightmare), all I can remember doing that morning is that we went for a walk (Brittney lives only minutes from the river... so far my impression is that everything in this area is somehow minutes from the river) and fed some Canadian geese.
And then it was time for me to continue on north! Which is a tale for another day!

(Beginning of this adventure)

Oh hey I found out how to embed a google map finally and it turns out it's pretty easy. Here's this day's drive:

Sunday, May 21st - Between Antioch, and my first destination, Davis, The Sacramento River spreads out in a tangle of marshlands and channels in an inverted delta. I've always wanted to drive straight through this area on one of the small farm roads that goes through there, but alas I had nearly nine hours of driving on my plate this day, so instead I woke up early, before anyone else in the house (jetlag was also still making me naturally wake up at 5:30), and crept quietly out ~~a window~~ the front door. I got on the boring major freeway, which took me Bayward to where the bridge at Bernici, which crosses the inner bay high up in a narrow place. On the south side refineries cap the hill like a dystopian crown, billowing steam from a dozen spires. Tolbooths, a rare thing on the West Coast, guard the entrance to the bridge. As you go over you can see the mothballed reserve fleet in Suisun Bay to the right and the California Maritime Academy training ship, which looks a bit like a small cruise ship, moored up just to the left of the bridge on the north bank. From there it's a pretty boring drive on major multi-lane freeways east on the 80 to Davis and Sacramento. An interesting note about the 80 though is that is you don't get off in Sacramento it'll take you clear across the country, and there's a somewhat startling/whimsical sign just outside of Davis advising that it is "3073 miles to Ocean City, MD." Once in Davis I made my way down the leafy streets to Crepeville, downtown, where a "hawaiian crepe" I'd been dreaming about for many many months was to be had!
   But since that's a fairly boring way to get from Antioch let me just transpose my transit of the same leg in 2010 to here. I had mentioned in last entry we sailed in to Antioch amid spiders blowing in the wind. From there we continued on up river to Sacramento:
   Friday morning we set off to continue up the river. The shore for much of the way consisted of golden brown rolling hills topped with giant white windmills. The sky was completely blue, and the sun so bright you couldn't even look in that direction. Presently the rolling hills disappeared behind 30 foot banks on either side. As these banks were often quite lush with vegetation and you couldn't see beyond them, if one didn't know what was on the other side one might think we were travelling through tropical jungles.
   One thing that strangely gets no mention here is that I dinstinctly remember we passed a half sunken old-timey stern-wheeler paddle boat off to the side of the river. Probably not an "authentic" steam boat but someone's more recent folly (there is, after all, a paddle-boat that still plys the river near Sacramento for fancy charters), but nonetheless a picturesque addition to the river.
   In Sacramento that October we moored up downtown under "Joes Crab Shack," and I left the ship after six months aboard, I got a ride into Davis (11 miles from Sacramento down "the causeway" over rice paddies) with Maureen, a friend of the first mate's.
   Now, 7 years later, as I sat at Crepeville enjoying an absolutely delicious crepe, and in a gratuitous bit of Americana nearby some college cheerleaders from Sac State performed cheers for a small race that was on through downtown that day, Maureen confirmed that she'd love to see me if I happened to be coming up to Bellingham. Bellingham, just about as far north as you can get in the continental United States, happens to be another place I had visited on the boats, and loved! I added it to my trip plans.

   But I didn't have time to linger here in Davis! I was soon on the road again, headed up the Five through the northern half of the state. The north/south divide in California is always reckoned to be somewhere approximately around, well, Kettleman City, with the Bay Area and Sacramento solidly being considered "Northern California," but it's easy to forget that there's actually half a state north of THAT.
   North of Davis the Five continues straight north up to Redding, which I think is a small farming town? I don't know, no one ever goes to Redding. The land up here has always been green whenever I've seen it, and there's once again a lot of almond orchards but that gives way to undeveloped land forested with oaks and undulating with low hills before Redding. From Redding you can see Mt Shasta rising tall and freestanding, symmetrical like a pyramid, clothed in snow, due north. The freeway leads up to the mountain, well I suppose you're already "in the mountains" by the time you get there, the road slaloming along the sides of valleys, surrounded by pine covered slopes, but Mt Shasta always looms up above, dwarfing any other promontory that could presume to call itself a mountain.

   I had taken note that for only an additional 20 minutes on the trip I could take a wildly divergent course to Eugene. The Five goes there directly, or, at the town of Weed (main export... shirts with the town name on them) get off on the 97 and go on a wide scenic detour.

   I feel I should explain that there's been a relative scarcity of my usually abundant pictures because my phone likes to do this thing where it works fine during normal life and for some reasno the moment I go on a vacation it starts failing to save pictures. Sometimes they would immediately appear as an unreadable file, or sometimes more insidiously they would seem alright and then anywhere from ten minutes later to days later become an unreadable file. What pictures I do have from this whole vacation are only the ones such as the one above which I had uploaded to instagram.

   The above picture was taken from a scenic turnout north of Mt Shasta, looking back at it. The 97 was much more enjoyable than the boring ole Five, a two lane country highway it swooped among the mountains and becomes the main street of small towns. Almost the entirety of my journey on the 97 was through forested mountains and at some point there was even snow on the ground on either side of the road. I discovered that Klamath Lake, which the road runs along for a bit, is actually quite big. I was also excited to drive right past Odell Lake, which is subject of a game I remember playing on the monochrome-monitor computer in computer lab in elementary school, which was essentially a trout simulator (man they don't come up with game ideas like they used to!)

   Finally came in to Eugene around 6pm (of course there were still hours of daylight). I had come to Eugene on Epic Roadtrip 2008 and also stayed with my friend Garian and her husband Charlie, though in the interim they've lived in Philadelphia for most of the intervening time (I visited them there too though at some point). But now they had a (six?) year old named Charlie (like his father) and a (three?) year old named Aramea (I think??). Garian had been a friend of mine freshman year of college, way back in 2001.
   Enjoyed catching up with Garian and Charlie and it was funny Little Charlie apparently took quite a liking to me (kept interrupting conversations to try to tell me things), and Garian kept saying "this is weird he's usually really shy!"
   And they still had their adorable pet corgi even though I think Garian said she/he is like 12 now!
   Garian, tall and blonde, but not in a bimbo-esque way, had been Navy ROTC when I met her freshman year. I don't recall when or why but I think she ended up deciding what she was doing at Davis wasn't for her and next I can recall she was studying architecture in Eugene. This is where I thought she had met Charlie but I learned in talking to them this evening that the story is actually cuter than that -- she had been back home in Pennsylvania when they met and he had moved to Eugene with her. Then as mentioned they had both gone to Philadelphia and gotten married and now were back. Charlie is ethnically Syrian, I think he grew up mostly in the States, he seems as American as anyone, but I remember him mentioning a home town in Syria near the Krak des Chevaliers that in 2008 he had said he'd like to take Garian to visit some time. I think that plan is probably curently indefinitely postponed :-/

   The next morning Charlie and Garian had to get the kids fed and dressed and off to school (or day care or wherever such aged kids go) and get off to work themselves and I got to witness first hand the circus of trying to get even well behaved kids through this process in a timely manner!
   And at the same time they were out the door I was too! Destination: Spokane! (for the first time on this trip a place I've never been anywhere near!)

Wednesday, May 17th - The sky was blue, the weather warm -- in the 80s, which the people back in my other home call a hot day, but here we rightly know this is just delightful weather.
   There was just one problem -- I wanted to make the most of my brief return home --which is to say home home-- but all my friends had this thing called "work" during the day. I couldn't spend three weeks bumming around my parents house, that would surely fall well short of living life to the utmost, and there's no excuse for that. I tried to at least make evening plans with my friend Amber but she said the weekend would be better. I started plotting; I had friends all up and down the West Coast. "Mind if I stop by on Saturday evening?" I said to my friend up by the San Francisco Bay, "Mind if I come by Sunday?" I said to my friend in southern Oregon. "Hey what if I were to visit you on Monday?" I said to my friend in Spokane, Eastern Washington. The messages went out, the responses came back. The plan was coming together! Naturally some people were only available on some days and the plan kept changing, but that's the fun way to travel!
   And of course I needed a noble steed! Fortunately my dad retired just the other month and suuurely he can live without his prius (the gas mileage! the gas mileage!) for a few days. He graciously lent me its use with only a little grumbling.

   But there were still days to kill, since I had to be at my grandfather's 90th birthday party in Southern California that Friday, the 19th. As it happens, this girl I had matched on Tinder when I randomly had set my location to Israel on a whim (okay not 100% random, I was reasoning that Israeli girls are generally gorgeous. Though on this bizarre tangent, after randomly setting tinder to numerous different locations I think I scientifically concluded that Iceland really does have the highest concentration of beautiful women (and with names like Sigurbjörg, Valgerður, Hrafnhilder, and Sigríður (that last one is apparently the #3 most common name in Iceland!)) happened to message me on this very day saying she had just arrived in San Diego (no Icelandic name here, just Rechela). It wouldn't have been a terribly high priority for me to drive an hour to hang out with someone I'd never met before except all my friends were busy during the day, and I had been (vaguely) in touch with her for about a year. Also I wanted to go to the Stone Brewery down San Diego way though as luck would have it that didn't end up fitting in.

Thursday, May 18th - So on this fine Thursday morning I set off south for San Diego. I've reflected that one doesn't write about what one finds mundane, which is why to read about a place one must read travelogues by visiting strangers, rather than the reports of locals. So as I made this roadtrip, listening via audiobook to the epic travelogues of my favorite author, Paul Theroux, it occurred to me that I shouldn't just fast forward through that which is familiar to me as would be my instinct.
   And so let me tell you about this drive. Mission Viejo, my starting point, is a morass of "upper middle class" suburbs, part of some ill advised city planning idea in the eighties of "oh wouldn't it be great to create a city with no center," ... and verily it is not great, it is soul-less to have a city with no center. Just meandering homogenous suburbs one could get quite lost amongst.
   Fortunately that great artery of California transportation, the vehicular Mississippi of the west, The Five, runs through to demarcate the otherwise indistinguishable border with the "city" of "Aliso Viejo." Once on The 5 one can settle in, turn off the GPS navigation, and the currents will take you inexorably to San Diego and, if you miss the exit there, possibly on into Mexico by accident.
   During your first ten minutes the freeway takes you in broad sweeping motions towards the sea -- the seemingly impossibly high concrete overpass of the 74 toll-road comes swooping right out of the sky to join the freeway, and under it the golden beacon of an In-N-Out burger sign is bound to make the driver salivate for at least a moment. But barely has one shaken visions of delicious and highly affordable In-N-Out burgers out of one's head than there is the sea sparkling in the sun ahead.
   From here the freeway parallels the coast through the suburban city of San Clemente (which does have a main street, being incorporated before city planners were completely daft), and then suddenly one crosses a bridge over a gully that leads to the famous surf beach of "Trestles," which I regrettably have never been to (but it's seemingly constantly threatened, "save trestles!" having been a refrain I've heard all my life) and with jarring suddeness there's no more suburbs at all, just open space -- grassy foothills on the left and blufftops looking down at cliffs and the sea to the right. This is Camp Pendleton Marine Base, which is as big as all of Orange County and kind of accidentally an important natural preserve since most of it is reserved for occasionally dropping bombs on. Often on the sides of the road one can glimpse very exciting military training operations in progress, helicoptors landing troops, harriers taking off (back when they were a thing), tanks rumbling around. At the far end of the base there's a military hovercraft base but it has high walls around it to prevent peeking.

   But first at this near end there's another important landmark -- the "giant D cups" of San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, rising up like, well, yeah. Now recently decomissioned but still concretely dominating the grassy landscape like giant mammery monuments. Ozymandias, look upon my works ye mighty and be titilated.

   The freeway stretches on in more or less a straight line paralleling the sea, with, here's something that seems so mundane to me as someone who's seen it all my life that I'd almost not mention it but I've heard other visitors remark on it -- there's signs all along the highway with pictures of a ragged refugee-looking family crossing the highway, and amusingly sometimes they're going one way and sometimes the other. This is of course in reference to migrants-of-questionable-legality who may have crept across the mexico border and at this point can apparently be found crisscrossing the highway willy nilly. I have never actually seen any doing this.
   On the northbound lanes there's an actual checkpoint where you sometimes have to stop and immigration officers peer into your window and I assume make a snap decision as to whether you're white enough or not. But for really I'm assuming all this business is here because with the Marine base stretching for miles and miles inland any migrants would indeed be funnelled along the highway here.

   South of the marine base suburban looking towns begin appearing again first in the coves and valleys and closer to the city itself one can see track housing draped all over the hills again. Also the traffic gets noticably more viscuous. And then suddenly one comes upon the cluster of highrises that is downtown San Diego, just past the Sea World signs and first seen across the international airport in the foreground (I think there's few major cities whose major airport is as snuggled up to downtown as in San Diego).
   Rechela had communicated to me to meet her downtown. Which I later found out was merely because she thought that would be more convenient, whereas in actual fact I had to circle around for 20 minutes before finding a parking space in expensive metered parking, and later find out her actual hotel is in a less busy part of the city where I could have easily parked, oh well.
   Having met a few girls from tinder in my time, I've come to expect them to look somehwere between 50%-60% as attractive as they do in their pictures, if not 30%, so I almost didn't recognize her when I was first across the street from her because she was actually fairly attractive -- a tumble of curly hair down to her waist, denim skirt, those giant bug eyed sunglasses that I actually hate. Though I'll note from the beginning I wasn't looking at this as a "date" so much as meeting up with a penpal. We strolled around the Gaslamp District a bit, which I hadn't really done much before this. It's got that old timey look of, well, an era when cities were lit with gas-lamps. Lots of restaurants and bars opening on to the street and boutique stores, but not hideously pretentious expensive ones like in Los Angeles. This is what I like about San Diego, it's altogether pretty chill. It doesn't assume you have to be rich to have a good time. I went in a hat shop but none of the hats were as nice as the akubra on my head.
   Presently Rechela and I went into a Mexican place for lunch -- I've been thoroughly Mexican-deprived in Australia so I was extremely eager for this. For some reason the waiter, an elderly hispanic man with a gentlemanly mustache, seemed to be thoroughly ignoring us for the first half-hour, and I was relishing the opportunity to give him a poor tip (we don't tip in Australia so you have no satisfaction against poor service!), though in the end my icy heart warmed, especially when, after she just said "um, the chicken?" and I was about to direct her to the actual menu options, he put his hand on my shoulder and winked knowingly, and brought her a chicken burrito after all.

   After this we visited my old friend the clipper ship Star of India and while a docent explained basic sailing ship stuff to us I smiled and nodded and didn't bother letting on that yes yes I know all this. If this was to be a truly thorough travelogue I could fill in many paragraphs about the ships but I've written and will write plenty about sailing ships so we will indeed kind of fast forward here.
   Next we proceeded to Old Town, which I've always been rather fond of. It's about the size of a block, located just outside of the downtown area, and is a recreation of how the city would have looked in the mid 19th century or so -- adobe buildings of an extremely Spanish/Mexican style, staff in period attire, lots of good mexican restaurants with the smell of fresh tortillas being made wafting deliciously out their windows. I remember having cactus candy here when I was young.
   Much to my great alarm, barely had we entered when a staffmember in a dapper hat said to me "now where's that accent from?"
   "Guess?" I said, curious what he would say. And here's the truly alarming part. Without hesitation, and with great confidence, he declares:
   "Australia!"
   Later I polled two more staffmembers in the same manner and got more or less the same answer.
   I saw a sign pointing to the "Blacksmith" and down that way a bunch of people seemed to be paying rapt attention to whatever was afoot, so "hey let's go over there maybe there's a blacksmithing demonstration" I said to Rechela. Arriving there though we found that while the forge was lit and the guy in the leather apron may have recently been working on something, for the whole several minutes we were in attendance he was holding forth to a young man about the blacksmithing facebook groups he should join and follow if he wants to get into it. Blacksmithing in the modern age! We crept off after he showed no sign of imminently hitting heated metal with any hammers of any kind.
   We went into a "native american jewelry" shop because I wanted to show Rechela some native american art. Making conversation with the (Danish ... possibly named something like Sigríður??) woman in there I commented that it looked like the barrel outside was melting, as its hoops had come loose and the whole thing had shifted in a way that made it look like it was indeed melting.
   "Haha yeah and I think bees are moving into it" she responded. Oh really, I had to go out and have a look, and she followed me out. I didn't see anything, but
   "they were going in and out every few minutes earlier," she said, "maybe they're just scouting." Which was a remarkably accurate prognosis, exhibiting a degree of bee knowledge beyond most random people, and she said it in a casual way that was neither showing off her bee knowledge (as some people are wont to do) and yet presupposed I too would know what she was talking about.
   "Well yes, it's swarming season and this would be a perfect place for them," I said, eyeing the barrel, and she nodded as if she thought so too. And that was that. I just thought it was very odd that we just randomly entered into this conversation about bees as if we had already established we were both beekeepers or something. I never did find out if she had any background in beekeeping.

   And then it was time to go. I dropped off Rechela at her much-easier-to-get-to hotel and retraced my steps back north. Arriving just in time to change and join my parents on a journey up about thiry minutes further north to the top end of Orange County, where my younger brother's fiancee (to be married in two weeks at the end of my trip) had just graduated optometry school. There was a festive dinner at a japanese restaurant with many of her relatives, and other than that it was a thing that happened not really central to my travelogue, so I'll end it here and continue next time with the beginning of the journey north!

Current Music: Tom Petty - Down South

Thursday, July 30th,
Labe, 0700 - Ibro, Damba, Daniel, driver Mamadou and I got started bright and early on our trip back to the capitol, leaving the hotel promptly at 7. Monica had gone back to the village she's posted to the day before to pack for her upcoming trip to the Peace Corps training village near Conakry (to welcome a new group of volunteers), and had told me she'd be waiting by "the orange sign" by the road junction to Doumba -- which I knew well because last year's project had been in Doumba. She estimated it would take us about 45 minutes to get there. Also I only realized in the morning that while Monica and I had come up with this plan we hadn't really shared it with the others apparently, so it was news to Ibro we were giving Monica a ride.
   The morning was clear and quiet as we sped down the road past the lsat buildings of Labe, over a small river, past foliage and bush ... and twenty minutes later we were rocketing through the Doumba junction. "wait wait wait!" I exclaimed, "we're supposed to meet Monica here!" I made them turn around and go back but they were very doubtful she would be there, saying it was nowhere near Sintali, where she's posted, and after one return pass we were on our way, me wishing I had had Monica tell the plan to one of them so they'd have had a clearer understanding of it.
   Continuing to text with Monica via whatsapp we established she might actually have meant a different junction that also leads to Doumba and we got there closer to the predeicted 45 minute travel time. She wasn't there, and we were just about to go continue on to the nearby town of Pita for breakfast and then come back when I saw her coming up the side road in a taxi. So she joined us, and now with six people we were a spot crowded. But hey, I think we counted 13 (THIRTEEN) people in one of the local taxis (a regular sedan style car, with three people in the front, four in the backseat, two more behind the back seat, and four people actually riding on top). Apparently Conakry has no bus system, so to get from Labe to the capitol as a local your only option is to pile into one of these overcrowded taxis for the 350km trip, and breakdowns are the norm.
   Stopped in at a little shop for breakfast. We were after omelettes but the guy "didn't have eggs," which was kind of a mystery since there were literally people selling eggs all around us. We discussed the oddity of that people in Guinea will often decide they "don't do" some type of business, like buy or sell eggs, and no matter how much business sense it makes can't be budged. Or if you buy a coke or something and it comes in a glass bottle you can't leave the shop with it because they get cash back for the glass bottle -- which is good that they're all about recycling but annoying you have to finish your drink there. So you offer to pay them more so you can take away the glass bottle and sometimes they might go for it, but sometimes they might insist that no you simply cannot take the glass bottle away from their premises no matter how much you offer.

Mamou, 1400 - After several hours of winding through the green mountains of Guinea we came to the town of Mamou and dropped Damba off at his house, tucked into a backstreet of Mamou. A gaggle of little girls (nieces?) ran up to hug his leg as soon as they say him. From there we proceeded just to the edge of town to where the college of forestry is tucked away in a way that somehow makes it feel like you're not near a large town at all but just in a secluded grove. Here we found another landcruiser identical to ours, with the Organization's logo, waiting. We had met up with another project and Ibro would be hopping from us to them. The American volunteer in this case was an old professor with spectacles, working on some kind of occupational survey. After a short chat with them we were off! Now with only four in the car: Daniel, Monica, myself and the driver.

The ENATEF school of Forestry in 2014

Kindia, 1600 - On our way to Kindia we passed a police checkpoint where they made our driver show them all his papers and even unload all the luggage in the back so they could confirm there was a fire extinguisher there. Meanwhile their rigorous safety inspecting didn't seem to apply to the taxis puttering by with piles of people on the roof. The driver grumbled that really they knew NGOs like us are always in complaince but were hoping we'd bribe them to get out of the hassle.
   A few hours later (these times are very approximate) we came to the town of Kindia and stopped for lunch. Just past Kinda there was a waterfall called the Eaux de Khaleesi -- "the waters of Khaleesi." Another volunteer last year had reported it was awesome so I had insisted we plan on stopping there. Just prior to the waterfall we made a stop, the driver announced his wife had come up here for her sister's graduation and so we'd be picking her up to take her back to Conakry. So we stopped by some buildings by the side of the road and picked her up, and let me tell you, I think she was one of the most gorgeous women I'd seen in all of Guinea. And she didn't speak any English but she seemed sweet. She works as a nurse. Driver Mamadou has definitely done alright for himself!
   It was just a short drive off the main road. At the location itself a nice looking little hotel was under construction, a number of bungalows seemed complete. We paid an entry fee of about a dollar a person and a guide with a hard hat took us down the trail. Despite the development of the site the first area we were led to had an entirely broken bridge we had to cross very precariously walking on just two planks. There was a fair bit of water crashing over a short falls here but I was kind of thinking "this is NOT as cool as the other volunteer had made it sound like" and was pondering whether we had time for me to drag the group to the "Wedding Veil Falls" I had visited previously -- I was still in kind of host mode trying to show Daniel the best parts of Guinea, and Monica as well hadn't been to the waterfalls. But then the guide announced "and now for the main suite!" and led us across a meadow to a locked gate. Unlocking it, he led us down a series of steps curving down amongst big mossy trees. Mamadou (driver)'s wife continued along with us even though she was wearing high heels! At the bottom of the steps the trail continued meandering maybe 100 feet along the gnarled roots and frequent little streams of water and then reached a small waterfall comign from a cliff high above and slippery rocks. Continuing along the base of the cliff we approached a growing roar and finally came to a large pool where a truly huge waterfall was falling. There was a wooden boardwalk positioned opposite the waterfall but the water level was unusually high and we'd have to wade to get to it ... which Monica, the tour guide, and I did. Because the boardwalk was exposed to constant mist the steps leading up to it were green with algae and so slimy I could get literally not traction at all -- I had to maintain three solid points of contact and have my foot up against a crack or something, practically crawling up the boardwalk. Once in the middle there was a dry space and now directly across from the waterfall we could appreciate that this was indeed an epic waterfall.

Conakry, 1800 - on the edge of town we came by the driver's house and dropped off his wife, and his two young children came running out to give him a hug. Then we continued on slogging through rush hour traffic. Conakry is a long peninsula and our hotel was at the far end of it. We could have been home in maybe half an hour if there was no traffic but instead the hours stretched on one after the other. At one point we watched a pick up truck practically DISAPPEAR into a pothole, that was pretty alarming. That thing had to be three to four feet deep and the size of a car, the unsuspecting pickup go one wheel in and went over, half in the hole with the bottom of its chassis resting on the edge of the pothole and its wheels spinning in contact with nothing.

Conakry, 2100 - On a quiet street just blocks from our hotel we came across a barricade across half the street that said "HALT" on it. The driver stopped and looked around. There didn't seem to be anyone around, there were cars driving on the other side, and this was the way he wanted to go. So after a minute or two of thinking about it he proceeded past it. Immediately there was a whistle and he stopped as a soldier came to the window and started yelling at him. Then the soldier asked to see the car's paperwork, and inspect our luggage. The driver was visibly grumpy with all this, and things seemed to escalate between him and the soldiers. Daniel says he saw a soldier slap him, and the driver later reported he could smell alcohol on their breath ... which is really scandalous in a muslim country where no one EVER drinks.
   We were hoping it would blow over but they took him into custody, making him sit on the bench with them, and continued to argue with him. I distinctly heard the words "500,000," presumably they were trying to get a $50 bribe from him. One of the soldiers talked to me in a friendly manner trying to say in very broken English that there wouldn't have been a problem except that the driver is being so argumentative. I'm sure he was hoping that by playing the good cop in a sort of "good cop bad cop" routine maybe I'd offer to give him some money to make up for my driver's argumentativeness and it would all go away. Daniel and I were told we were free to go, and I kind of suspected if we left they might release Mamadou since their hopes of a bribe would be over, but I also couldn't just walk away and leave him there. I intentionally didn't let on to the guards that I could speak any French at all, because if they can't negotiate with you they can't ask for a bribe. My phone wasn't working, reception is terrible in Conakry, but Daniel called Ibro, who called up the pipeline to USAID, which called up the pipeline to the US Embassy, whom I talked to briefly, and then they called someone in the Guinean military who called the garrison commander who called the unit captain... after awhile a person with military bearing but looking like he had just been called out of bed emerged from the darkness and addressed the soldiers in a posture of parade rest with his hands behind his back. His tone was not angry or chastising, just kind of "these are announcements" and the soldiers listened attentively. They all saluted and the man disappeared into the darkness. Shortly later, Mamadou was released and we continued on our way.
   In related news, Daniel mentioned that when he first arrived Ibro had told him "there's a police station down the block this way ... avoid it if you want to avoid trouble."

   And just ten minutes later we were at our hotel finally!

   Up next, the epic 89 hour trip home, complete with cancelled flights, being stranded in strange new African cities, violent bouts of puking, and maybe even a little romance!

Last Time on Emo-Snal! -- I'm sure you've forgotten by now but I'd just embarked on a roadtrip in Ethiopia with the family of a friend!

Saturday, November 29th, Adwa - Woke up to the sound of construction. I don't remember if it was power tools or just people hitting things with sledge hammers, but it was within the small building of the hotel, and it was loud. the entire second floor was still under construction. I tried to ignore it for awhile. I had no idea what time it was because the one plug I'd been able to plug my phone into was at the other end of the room. The one window om the room was semi-opaque and looked out into the hallway so the light coming in was indeterminate. After lying there trying to ignore the construction noises for awhile I emerged thinking I was probably late to arise. As it turns out I couldn't find anyone from our group about. So I poked around the premises, went to the second floor which was under construction and boring, then stepped over a really feeble barrier to ascend the stairs to the third floor, which presently served as a roof.

   While I was up there I saw various members of the Gebremeskel family come walking up from somewhere and hailed them, they were cheerfully like "Wtf why are you on the roof?" and Daniel came up to survey the view with me. His son (ten-ish, recall) would have come too but Daniel forbade him, as it was manifestly unsafe.

   Soon we were all up and ready for breakfast, so we all piled back into the van and drove across town (again, not a great distance), to a hotel where we were going to have breakfast ... but it turned out they didn't have any eggs, which would have been a problem for the several of us who wanted omelettes (Injera based Ethiopian food is very interesting but I like to start the day with something that's not going to baffle my stomach). So we walked a short way across a bridge to another eatery which was better stocked. It was a nice sunny day, as usual the streets were broad and had nearly no automobile traffic. Mostly pedestrians were out, with the occasional horse-drawn cart. In fact, conveniently, this is when and where the above picture was taken. As well as this picture of the Gebremeskel family from last entry, which I'm sure you completely have forgotten about ;)

   We had our breakfast and then visited a grandmotherly character -- I think Daniel's wife's mom? I really shouldn't be three months behind writing this, or take more detailed notes hey? She also lived in Adwa, down a narrow street. She was very excited to see the family because the visit was a surprise. Her place was reached through a little wooden door in a wall leading to a narrow sort of courtyard, which had some other doors leading off it but one of them led to her living-room / bed-room. There was a stone bench against one wall on which most of us sat. I noted that the ceiling was strangely high. Various things were hung on the walls as decorations, and there was a tv in one corner.
   After spending an hour or two visiting there, during which coffee was made (the traditional way, of course, ground and roasted on the spot) and consumed, it was time to visit more relatives. We all proceeded to the house of another Gebremeskel aunt or uncle, whereupon we were fed all over again. This consisted of a few one room buildings in a small pleasant enclosure, which also included a nice area under a thatched awning where people could sit outside, an old fashioned water pump, and the sort of large haystack which is a must for any village life scene in a medieval movie. Nod clambered up on this haystack and was told to get down by his dad. The kids enjoyed frolicking with their cousins, as kids do. Presently Doug taught the kids how to play a game kind of like hacky-sack out in the road outside the enclosure (don't worry, there was absolutely zero vehicle traffic, it was more like a broad dirt walkway). Soon other neighboring children joined in.
   Doug and I went walking with Daniel to the local market to see what the honey prices and availability was. The market looked like a desperately impoverished swap meet -- where people couldn't afford tables or canopies and set their wares up on mats on the ground with no shelter from the sun. There were warehouse buildings which seemed to have been set up for the market, and I guess looking at the pictures their doors were open but they looked dark and uninviting and certainly didn't look busy. We asked a few shopkeepers (in actual shops along the edges) who told us there was very little honey this season and they had none before we found a guy that had some. He didn't want to sell us a small amount though, insisting on either selling us a whole three gallon pale of it or not, which we had no use for that much honey and couldn't reach an agreement.

Onward to Axum!
   Finally we all set off in the van for our final destination, Axum! As I'm sure you recall, Axum was to be the site of an important religious festival the following day. It's twenty kilometers from Adwa to Axum and all along we passed pilgrims who were making the journey by foot. It's a bit long for a day's jaunt, esp for the many people who seemed elderly or slightly infirm, but at least it was pleasant, through gently rolling hills with green fields on either side.

   We found Axum itself choked with throngs of white-clad pilgrims. We were able to find a place to park on a sidestreet and joined the throngs. The pilgrims traditionally wrap themselves in a white cloak and the throngs were nearly all thus garbed. We got on a main street that led straight to the church of St Marie, and there must have been thousands of pilgrims! There were also ancient standing stones -- stelae -- on the hillside just off the road, thousands of years old, belonging to former empires. The "Queen of Sheba" of the bible was Ethiopian, Sheba being an empire spanning Ethiopia and Yemen. Any Ethiopian can tell you that Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, tricked King Solomon and took the Ark of the Covenant from him (leaving him a replica whereas he was going to give her a replica), and said Ark has remained in Axum ever since. In the mean time Axum was the centre of an Axumite Emptire of it's own from 100-940 AD (using the Ark to turn people into screaming ghosts??). Now the Ark resides in a special chapel next to the Church of St Marie in an enclosure into which no one is allowed admittance except for one monk who guards it and never ever ever leaves. When said monk is about to die he chooses a successor to continue his lonely vigil.
   Soo I didn't see the ark, but I was THIS close guys!
   Also located near the church are the three giant stelae and many very big ones:

   We walked around the church enclosure, which was already pretty crowded with pilgrims circumambulating it, but we made a circumabulation ourselves and headed back to the car. The ceremony itself was set to start at 3am that night. The sun was just setting as we headed back to the car. Daniel informed us that some people stay up all night, even staying out drinking (which seemed strangely sacrilegious to me but hey), and that would be kind of a giant party in town tonight, asking me (jokingly, I think?) if I wanted to stay in town but I declined.
   We returned to Adwa and had dinner at yet another restaurant. This one was cozy, and neither still-under-contruction nor the sort of sterile-elegance the place we'd had dinner the night before was. Despite having to get up extremely early we still took our time, the adults sitting around talking and having a few beers, while the kids darted about in the dark just outside. When we finally headed to the hotel for the night we headed not to the uncompleted one we'd spent the previous night in but the nice one we'd had dinner at the night before. I think we got to bed around midnight, in time to get about three hours of sleep.

Pilgrims in the church yard, already staked out for hte next morning's ceremony.

Next Episode: The Festival of St Marie!

Friday, November 28th, Mek'ele - We returned to the hotel just in time to meet Daniel and he took us to the courtyard of of his office building, where the company van was preparing for the trip. There we met his wife, two daughters, (17 & 14), his son Nod (aged 9?), his brother (a former banker who got tired of the corporate world of banking and opened a metal-working shop in Addis), his brother's wife, and his brother's young son (5?). The two daughters were mostly shy and didn't talk to us much, though when they finally did it was surprising what fluent English came out of them finally. I think the older one was named Hermone, and one of the things that came out when she finally started talking was that she had an unexpected fascination with specifically Korean culture of all things. On my flight to Mekelle I had sat next to the local head of the Korean aid agency, on her way to visit some Korean volunteers in Mekelle, so I kind of wished I could put her in contact with Hermone but alas it wasn't practical. Nod in contrast was extremely talkative and fascinated with Doug and I, we had great fun with him.

   The sun was setting as we trundled up the far side of the valley, past the concrete factory. I tried to snap some photos before the light ran out. Nod, who had come up from the back seat to hang out with Doug and I in the middle eagerly asked to borrow my big DSLR to try taking some shots myself. Hardly anyone seems to know how to operate a manual focus SLR style camera anymore, and this one was kind of finicky (among other things, the auto focus it should have had didn't work), but much to my surprise he actually figured it out relatively quickly and got some decent shots.
   Soon it was too dark for photos though, and we proceeded through the dark. A bluish glow emanated from the back seat where the girls were looking at their phones. We only encountered a vehicle going the other way once every ten minutes or less. There's two roads to Axum, it seems, and we'd opted for the new one, unaware that it wasn't yet completed. Several different construction companies had gotten contracts for different sections of the road and it seems each one was about 85% done, working from one end of their contracted section to the other, so there were long sections where the road was just a bumpy dirt road between the smooth asphalt sections. The landscape was rugged and the road wound around craggy hills. In one bumpy gully we were crossing in lieu of the bridge not yet being completed we started an entire pack of hyenas, who darted out of the headlights but didn't retreat any further than they had to and watched us go by with glowing eyes. We drove through one town where the power was apparently out, electrical light glowing in only a few windows that apparently had their own generators. In other windows the dim light of candles flickered, and as it was still early evening many people say about in the dark outside chatting or walked around going about whatever business they had at that hour. As is the custom in these lands without GPS, we flagged someone down at the central crossroads and asked about the way to our destination, was this the right road and was it entirely passable.
   Later on we came over a ridge and another town appeared before us, a starfield of gold and silver lights. Again we inquired of a passerby of directions.
   As we arrived in the town we'd be passing the night in (Adwa) the road forked. "That is the way to Eritrea" Daniel pointed to it. It was optimistically as well maintained as the one we were on, but "the border crossing hasn't been open in ten years." Can't get there from here.

   We finally pulled up next to a building in town that was reportedly the hotel we were staying at. Before we got all unpacked Daniel went up with me --one had to go up a short steep embankment from the road, and decent stair had not yet been cut into it-- and asked if it was acceptable after they showed me a room. The place was obviously still under construction, and Daniel seemed a little disappointed in the place (he had booked sight unseen based on someone else's recommendation I think) and the room was a bit rudimentary, but I found it entirely adequate. We all unpacked what we'd need for the night, and since Doug isn't a night owl and it was already 11, we went right to bed, but the rest of us got back in the van to head to another hotel for dinner.
   The other hotel was just a few minutes away across town. It was well lit and clean and spacious and elegant and Daniel was immediately wishing aloud we'd booked here. We all sat at a long table in sort of the hotel's living room and lingered over a traditional meal, followed by several beers. I think it was nearly 2 by the time we all (including the young kids!) returned to the hotel we'd be sleeping at.

   We've taken another little vacation from the narrative story line so let me recap. The recent picture posts have been from a roadtrip across Tanzania and back. On return from there I went to Moshi on the slopes of Kiliminjaro for a week, where the last narrative entries took place.

Monday, Nobember 24th - we had sorted out our bus tickets the other day in a dim office downtown where there seemed be absolutely nothing going on except our inquiry for tickets. Two buses leave every day for Nairobi, one at 6am, and one "around 2pm, but it doesn't even always run." Presumably because that's the bus that just arrived from Nairobi making the return run, except it doesn't always make it (!?). We therefore opted for the 6am bus. They kindly offered to have the bus actually swing by our guesthouse at 5:50 to pick us up, which we found awfully convenient.
   It's also worth noting that on the 22nd, just two days prior to our trip, Somali terrorist group Al-shebab, known to be active in Kenya, hijacked a bus bound for Nairobi and executed all 28 non Muslim passengers. My mother was very worried about me.

   Bright and early the next morning I was just about to enjoy a cup of coffee on the porch when the bus actually arrived a few minutes early of all things (this is not the African way!). Doug and I hopped on with our stuff. It wasn't a big charter bus but it was comfortable. The first leg was of course just down to the bus stop downtown. I'm not sure if this was an official bus station so much as it just parked on the street outside the office we'd bought the tickets on. It was a nice bright morning, and Kiliminjaro, usually shrouded in clouds, glowed orange in the morning light down one end of the street while the large red sun rose in the other direction, the sort of beautiful reverse-sunset people rarely catch.
   Presently, some ten to twenty minutes after our scheduled departure (ie, much more comfortably in accordance with African custom), we had our full load of passengers and we were off. We had many good views of the mountain out the window to the right as we wound out of town though it appears I didn't bother to upload any of them.
   At first the landscape outside of Moshi was mostly open with cultivated fields divided by rows of trees and numerous schoolchildren walking to school along the road in their ill-fitting uniforms with their books on their heads. As we approached Arusha about an hour later the landscape became much more lush just before we entered the city, as if we were driving though a forest or jungle just before the city. In the city we didn't go to the crowded bus station I'd been to before, which I admittedly had been a little bit dreading for its chaos, but instead pulled into the gated confines of the Impala Hotel. This was Impala Bus Lines and it occured to me that this bus line may have simply sprung up or existed to serve its hotels, though no one on it seemed to be staying there and most of our passengers looked to be locals, at least in the sense that they were clearly from East Africa. We changed buses here into a similar bus, though this one had assigned seating. I was dreading getting sardined by the assigned seating but as it happens no one was assigned next to me. There was other small buses from the same company there, it appeared to be a sort of hub.
   Onward we went! Once again through the lush outskirts of town to a more sparce and arid landscape outside. As I'd seen on the earlier roadtrip, it wasn't uncommon to see people in Maasai robes walking along the road seemingly miles and miles from anywhere, as well as people (often also in maasai robes) riding bicycles, sometimes even casually going cross country across the flat hard-packed earth.

09:30 - we passed another very similar looking bus broken down on the side of the road. Two busses were parked there actually and we pulled off just in front of them and parked. Our driver jumped out and ran back to confer with the drivers. He came trotting back and then several passengers from the other buses came along carrying their luggage and boarded us. Is this where al-shebab reveals themselves and kills us?? The driver never announced anything to us but I believe the first bus broke down, and the second bus didn't have capacity to take everyone so they were waiting for another bus so as not to abandon anyone. I don't believe the other buses were even from the same bus company as us. So that was a nice little example of professional courtesy. Especially since no one murdered any of us.

   Arriving at the Tanzania / Kenya border we stopped on a broad roadway on the Tanzanian side, the driver told us we had to go out and walk through, to take our carry-ons with us and not talk to anyone on the street or do business with them, and he'd meet us on the other side.

   Our first stop was to stand in line at an office on the Tanzanian side and get our passports exit-stamped. Then we walked across the border to an office on the Kenyan side. I was struck by how porous the border was -- there was no fence, no narrow controlled entrance to make sure you actually got your stamps. The hawkers who were pestering us like flies followed us from one side to the other without any concern whatsoever for the border. On the Kenyan side we stood in line at another office to get our entrance stamps, as well as filled out the now customary form in which we swear we haven't been anywhere with ebola for the last 21 days. The Canadian aid worker who had been sitting across from me was delayed because she's been working as a nurse in the Congo, where they do have ebola, and she does come in to contact with dead people and blood samples. Somehow she was able to satisfy them that she wasn't carrying ebola after about ten minutes though. In the mean time those of us who were through were able to wait on the bus. I made the mistake of opening the window a few inches to get some fresh air and immediately several arms were thrust in holding beaded necklaces they urged me to buy. It was like being attacked by a very insistent enterpreneurial giant squid. As soon as I found a moment when the arms were occupied elsewhere I hastily closed the window.
   Anyway, on we went! Presently Doug and I got to talked to the girl across the aisle from me (Doug was a row or two behind us). She turned out to be a Canadian nurse, I forget her name, we'll call her Heather. A few things made me suspicious, first it was several nautical turns of phrase, then I noticed her shirt had anchors on it, then I noticed the anchor tattoo on her wrist. "Do you.. sail?" I finally ventured. It turns out she indeed was in the habit of sailing on the barque Alvei. We of course had to then exchange some sea stories (for the many readers who are new to my journal right now, sailing is my other hobby when I'm not busy with bees ;) )
   Heather also had interesting stories from her work. She currently works for Doctors Without Borders (MSF, Medecins Sans Frontiers) at a place called Masisi in the Congo. Googling the name brings up things like "Masisi massacre," "situation untenable," and "civilians under attack in Masisi." In Masisi the MSF staff live in a compound filled with buildings made of shipping containers, and I imagine large hospital tents. It is surrounded by a high fence, barbed wire, and armed guards, and you don't go out at night. Nearby there's a river where a large number of people mine for gold in a very rudimentary fashion. Children work there mining for gold as well, in conditions you would probably find deplorable. I'm not sure if they're compelled to this by sheer poverty and hunger or guns at their back from the Mai Mai rebels. She said just a few months back rebels raided the town for some reason and killed many people, and that they're expecting another attack in a month. Heather had just been on her two-weeks vacation, though half the time was taken getting in and out -- to get back to the camp she'd have to get to Nairobi, take a commercial flight (overnight this night) to Burundi, a bush plane to some town nearer the compound, and then an MSF vehicle would pick her up, altogether it would take three days.

   Just twenty or thirty minutes past the border we pulled off to a little rest stop with a bathroom, cafe, and souvenir shop that sold knick-knacks that were all way out of our price range (most things were over $100), but the proprietor warily let us admire his wares, finely carved ebony sculptures of animals and people, book ends, back scratchers, all kinds of things a rich tourist might want to decorate their mansion with as a conversation piece to memorialize their safari. Not for poor aid workers like us.
   Outside he had several maasai robes on a rack for sale, and I commented to Heather that I'd actually been meaning to get one, too bad these were probably grossly overpriced and anyway I didn't have any money on me. She said the $15 they were being sold at actually reasonably compared with prices elsewhere she'd seen, and she'd lend me the $20 she'd been saving for a visa to get back into the Congo. Awfully kind of her.
   Doug, always making friends, determined that she was going to be idle in Nairobi for eight hours before her flight. Rather than spending eight hours of mind numbing and uncomfortable boredom at the airport, Doug invited her to come chill at out hotel with us, which she readily agreed to.

   The other event of note on the road was when we passed a crashed liquid petroleum gas tanker on the side of the road. I didn't get a good picture of it as we wemt by, so instead here's a picture of the OTHER crashed petroleum tanker we saw on the earlier roadtrip:

   Around 2pm we rolled in to the metropolis of Nairobi. The bus stopped at a few major hotels, though our little hotel (the Kahama), didn't make the cut -- but we called ahead and had the Kahama's driver pick us up from the nearest hotel they did serve. Stopped by an ATM on the way to pick up some Kenyan shillings and then the Kahama was kind enough to change my shillings to USD so I could pay back Heather.

   Now some of my friends have made some scandalous and salacious hints that having found a fellow tallship sailor and taken her back to my hotel I would have gotten up to some sort of mischief with her, I'll have you know that that's absolutely not true, I went out to dinner with the lovely Wairimu, a graduate student specializing in supply chains.

   All the pictures above are from the earlier roadtrip across Tanzania. That's why I wanted to finish those pictures before I tackled this entry, needed some roadtrip pictures. ;)
   The below is actually from the window of the dining room of the Kahama Hotel though.

Next, onward to Ethiopia!

Note: at the time of posting (and of the writing of this whole entry) I am in the field near the base of Mt Kiliminjaro, at the town of Moshi, Tanzania. Using the mobile wifi hotspot function on my phone to post this!

***

   "We have a friend in common," says the Belgian woman. We're at a soiree hosted by the Prime Minister of Tanzania.
   "Oh?" I ask. In one hand I have a glass bottle of coke and in the other glass in which I'm trying to little bit little dilute the rum the server half filled the glass with. At the full moon party in Zanzibar I also ended up receiving a bottle of coke and a glass with rum in it when I ordered a rum and coke, apparently it's a mix-it-yourself kind of thing here.
   "Mamadou Diallo, the president of the Guinean beekeeper's association"
   "Oh, yes! I'm working with him to try to help them reach the export market"
   "Why?" she asks. I'm taken a bit aback, what do you mean why.
   "They're selling honey at $1 a pound, the grocery stores there were carrying American honey which they probably bought at the international price of $2 a pound, that doesn't make any sense. So I want to help them be able to meet the quality and volume goals necessary to serve these contracts"
   "Oh I actually think everyone should grow local and I don't support exports." she says. Seriously. With this self righteous look on her face that seems to have completely dismissed the idea that they could be getting twice as much money for their honey.
   "Where are you from?" she asks after the awkward pause caused by her last revelation.
   "California"
   "Oh that's why you're so special." At which point I think I found an excuse to extricate myself from the conversation and avoid her the rest of the convention.

   This was the end of the first day of convention. Doug and I had arrived the day before. Our hotel was a bit ritzy, more reminiscent of the monocal wearing pith-hat safari going Africa than the living in huts Africa I'm used to, but I'm always down for a new experience. Walking to the convention to register we'd quickly found that this is a town where the touts will attack like tse tse flies. "My friend, my friend! Where are you from? my friend!" They both try to sell you useless stuff they're carrying themselves, and try to direct you to shops where they can get a commission for bringing you, as well as just generally try to ingratiate themself to you and be helpful so they can demand a tip. Generally pretty irritating really. Zanzibar wasn't so bad, even though it seemed more touristy and seemed to have high unemployment (if they people sitting idly on their porches all day is any indication). I don't know if it's a measure of greater desperation here or what. This is also a regional tourist hub though, since it's the center of the "northern safari circuit," so maybe the monocle wearing safari goers make fat marks.
   One of the touts followed me all the way to the convention hall (about three blocks), and I was deep in the midst of ignoring him when he showed me a painting on a roll of canvas he had that I actually kind of liked.
   "How much?" I asked, without slowing down.
   "80,000 shillings" ($47).
   "I'll give you 30,000 for it." I said without looking at him, as we crossed the street.
   "70,000"
   "30,000, take it or leave it." the secret to negotiating is to really go in with a take it or leave it attitude. He eventually argued me up to 45,000, but I didn't have the money on me anyway, so I asked him his name (Garry) and said I'd buy it from him later when I had the money.

   The convention center is the building the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was held in, and there's still some UN offices in the building, so it's quite a nice building. Registration was a zoo though -- they had somehow lost all the important documents and I had gone to such trouble to scan and email them months ago so there was a chaos of chasing paperwork at the registration table, especially since the same thing seems to have happened to everyone else.

   The First Apimondia Symposium on African Bees and Beekeeping had about 550 attendees, roughly half were from Tanzania, most of the rest were from elsewhere in Africa, and there were maybe around a dozen mzungus -- white people.
   There seemed to be an interesting divide among the mzungus -- there were a few, mainly Apimonida staff (the world beekeeping federation), who brought a weird Euro-centric view with them. Not that Europe was better (though they often noted American beekeeping as an example of what's bad in the world), but that they didn't want beekeeping in Africa to change. To me it seemed like they thought it was quaint and delightful and shouldn't be changed. And us development beekeepers think we're "special," apparently, to use the Belgian ladies term.
   And then those of us working in development formed a second group. We don't think bees can be kept here the same way as in Europe or America but we think beekeeping here can be improved for the betterment of locals. These two groups divided into two camps that didn't really hang out. There were subtle arguments. Contradictory public statements. Palpable condescension from certain people.

   Dr Wolfgang talked about how smaller hives have fewer diseases. Beekeepers looked at eachother and said that's great but smaller hives produce less honey and we need to feed our families. Beekeepers complained about the arrival of varroa mites and asked how to fight them. Dr Wolfgang informed them mites are natural and if they just don't treat and experience the very heavy losses eventually, after a few years, only resistant bees will be left. One of the major beekeepers in Tanzania left in frustration.
   The perpetually smiling British Nichola made a presentation the major theme of which was that "all hives are the same .. and you should keep using logs because they're so natural," and many locals presented consistently saying that frame hives produce twice as much, but this seemed to wash right over Nichola, and she kept smiling blithely.

   There was a group from Boston, a representative of which enthusiastically talked my ear off about how all african honey should be marketed as boutique "asali" (Swahili for honey) in little boutiques in Boston. There's nothing wrong with that enthusiasm but that's only a practical market for a small fraction of they honey here. The relative local price here is actually pretty good, we just need to enable more beekeepers to produce more of it.

   We met Simon, a beekeeper and owner of a travel agency from Moshi, near Mt Kiliminjaro, who travels to California at least once a year to run an ultra-marathon (100 mile race). And James a young man from Singapore running a farm near Dar Es Salaam, and a beekeeper from Pemba Island (the northern island in the Zanzibar archipelago), and of course many many many other interesting people. At the end of day two a jolly mzungu with a bushy white beard introduced himself to Doug and I, he was Stephen Peterson from Alaska. It quickly became apparent that he was just like us, traveling the world enjoying doing beekeeping projects. I went into my email to email him something and found the address was already there. Soon he asked "why are we sitting here when we could be having a beer??" as the conference hall was emptying for the end of the day, so he and I and Doug and James (the Singaporean) headed down the street until we found a bar. Local beers are Serengeti or Kiliminjaro (if you can't climb it, drink it!), as well as Nduvo and a few more boring things such as Castel. Stephen showed us amazing pictures from a beekeeping project he'd done in Borneo, where people get around by boat during the rainy season and bees are kept on "rafters," planks set in trees the bees make their hives under. Doug and I asked him if he'd come with us on our beekeeping project in Nicaragua this winter and he enthusiastically agreed to (oh I'll be just coming from Cuba at that point anyway!).
   Then we walked down the street a few blocks to Khan's BBQ. While on the way a tout adhered himself to us. "Hello it's me garry, you were going to buy a painting from me!" Ah yes, I remember that. I can't quite recall what he looked like but I remember the name. I told him to come with us and I'd sort it out when we reached our destination. He kept telling us we shouldn't be walking down the street at night but we got to our destination alive. Khan's is a mechanics shop by day and a bbq place by night. It was really good, and the indian proprietor was very nice. When I asked to use the bathroom I was led inside to where his family member were sitting about the courtyard in saris.
   Garry the tout turned out not to have the painting I wanted anymore, and I wasn't interested in any of the ones he did have but I felt obligated to buy something from him since I'd said I would and he'd come down the street with us. That's how they get you. So I bought a smaller different painting.
   The next day another tout would approach me saying "hey I'm Garry are you ready to buy that painting??" and I both recognized him and the painting. So apparently I got tricked by a false Garry.
   I heard another scary story that the year before someone had had a taxi driver arranged to meet them in the evening and knew the name of the taxi driver. A taxi showed up and he said the correct name so she got in. She ended up tied up, beaten up, mugged, and left in front of a random hotel. So apparently getting them to say the right name is not enough here in Arusha.
   When it came time to leave, Khan regarded with horror even the idea that Stephen would walk the 200 meters down the street to his hotel at night. This seems to be a universal sentiment here.. not the safest town. Khan called us a cab though and talked to the driver to arrange for all our safe returns to our respective hotels.

Thursday, November 13th - On the third and final day, among the presenters was a chemist from Germany named Arne who spoke about a naturally occuring toxic substance that is sometimes found in honey from certain places. During the question and answer period I asked what it's effects were, and then he came to talk to me after he was done and we more or less immediately became friends. He was a friendly chap of about 36, with a shaved head and a red beard.
   There was also an interesting presentation from an Israeli researcher, Shimon (or I suppose these are Dr Arne and Dr Shimon) about how the wax comb in a beehive is like the hive's liver, absorbing all the harmful chemicals. I'd never thought to look at it that way.

   At the end of day, Arne, Doug and I walked down to the bar we'd found the other day, where, sure enough, Stephen (Alaska) had ensconsed himself with a bunch of Italians.

Friday, November 14th - There was a choice of one of three different "technical excursions" after the conference, a one day, two day, or three day trip. Doug and I chose the three day trip. We were divided into two buses for the trip, and Doug ended up on the other bus. I suppose this is just as well because we get along great but it couldn't hurt to spend some time apart. I sat up front with Arne and a researcher from Copenhagen, Shimon from Israel right behind me. Way in the back was Dr Wolfgang and a cohort or two of his. Doug said on his bus it was kind of the same, the two groups.

   Once we headed out of town we entered a sparse landscape with little groundcover other than sporadic individual trees. Not infrequently we passed clusters of huts and there seemed to be locals in maasai robes walking up and down the road, herding cattle, or riding bikes loaded with jerry cans full of water the whole way. Our first stop after about an hour was a national park that had many many elephants in it. I also found the baobab trees as photo worthy as any animal and got many baobab photos to sort through now for the best.

   Next we visited a honey processing and bottling facility. It looked very nice, though there were some mumblings among our group that the machinery (from China) looked overly complicated, and that though it was freshly polished there was dust on some of the moving pieces that would seem to indicate it didn't actually get used as much as they said it did.

   We arrived at another bee yard just as the sun was setting, and were greeted by a troupe of women doing a dance to welcome us, which was really neat. This area was very beautiful with beehives in amongst lush vegetation, and I regret that I don't yet have any pictures up to insert here. Some local teenage girls got very giggly.

   That evening in Singida we were divided among several hotels. Arne and I and Copenhagen, among others, ended up in a hotel that was very new, not even open yet. But the owner owns one of the bee yards we'd visit the next day.. and the beer was complimentary.

Saturday, November 15th - Visited several bee yards including some in the "Itiki Thickets" (sp?), where hives are kept among a distinct ecosystem of thickets of two kinds of plants, which make a honey known for being particularly good. At another bee yard we were once again greeted by a dancing troupe, and as the light was better I got a good video of this which I'll probably post once I get home. At this bee yard Nichola apparently managed to piss off some bees leading to the evacuation of the bee yard. Some people ran away, but more than half of us, beekeeping professionals all, walked out slowly in a dignified manner. I was pleased to receive several compliments on the way I continued calmly shooting photographs while surrounded by stinging bees -- though in reality keeping the camera in front of my face protected the one place I hate being stung: my nose. ;D

   Stopped for lunch (finally at like 3:30) at a local government headquarters. I thought it was interesting to note that the emblem of the local government area featured a tree with beehives in it. Lunch was actually pretty good local dishes (have picture, will someday post), though I just skipped the chicken entirely because I've found it tends to be too chewy here. They had some interesting baobab-avocado juice.
   After this we continued on the long haul from the Singida area down to Dodoma. For awhile we were driving along what appeared to be a ridge below which was an expanse of flatlands much lower down, then we came to a steep descent on which many broken-down trucks lined the side of the road -- and right in the middle of it a jackknifed gasoline tanker took up half the road!! Down in the lowlands the ground was flatter and drier looking. Still many baobab trees.

   Dodoma itself just seemed like a small town, which is weird because it's actually the national capital. It's one of those things where Dar Es Salaam is the biggest city and cultural and economic center, but is way off in the corner so the capital buildings were built in Dodoma since it's in the center. Dodoma is also just about the center-point if one were to journey overland from Cairo to Capetown. We all stayed in the same nice hotel in Dodoma. I think most of us weren't very hungry for dinner, having eaten lunch so late, but we all sat around and chatted at the dinner table over some beers.

Sunday, November 16th - After we checked out of the hotel we headed to the Prime Minister's farm. It was an impressive property with many different kinds of crops and good irrigation systems and fences and watertanks. He had about 400 modern frame hives which looked to be in very good condition. Again I have pictures that'll go up some day.
   Then we started the long haul northward. Having left the farm around maybe 10am, we were in Singida around maybe 2pm for a short lunch of fried chicken and fries, and then onward all the way back to Arusha. We were still on the road as the sun set behind a mountain behind us. Ahead of us we could see rain coming down and lighning flickering in the sky, and in between there were clusters of huts and trees and fields and the smell of rain on the evening air.

   Arriving in Arusha I had a problem -- Doug was on the other bus and we hadn't discussed where we were going to stay, except that we weren't staying in the Arusha Hotel again because it was too expensive. I'd hoped we'd all get dropped off at a central location but the driver dropped everyone at their hotels. I had him swing by the conference center, where we'd met to join the buses, but it was dark and lonely there and Doug certainly wouldn't be waiting there.
   Shimon from Israel encouraged me to go to the Lush Garden hotel with him, so I sent a note with Arne, who was going back to the Arusha Hotel, and proceeded to Lush Garden.
   Just as we arrived at Lush Garden, the last stop, the driver was able to learn from the other vehicle's driver over the phone that they'd dropped Doug off at the Palace hotel. The driver was grumpy about going back there so I just decided to stay at Lush Garden and chase Doug down in the morning. I called Palace from reception but they said he had just left to go look for me at Arusha Hotel. So I called Arusha hotel but it sounded like I was talking into a pipe and I couldn't understand a word he said, so I just had to put my faith in that he'd get the note.
   As it happens Arne apparently didn't leave the note at reception like I thought he would but had it up in his room for some reason. But When Doug came in he found Arne having a beer and was correctly directed, because he appeared at Lush Garden shortly thereafter. Shenanigans.
   Based on this I'm saying we're planning this trip just one step ahead at a time, and sometimes one step behind.

   While this was going on I was also emailing with Simon in Moshi, who had invited us to come to Moshi (Simon, not to be confused with Shimon). We arranged that he'd have one of his employees meet us in the morning and guide us to the bus stop. Shimon didn't have plans for a few days so we invited him to come with us. He wasn't sure, asked the hotel if they had a room for the following night, and since they didn't he decided to come with us to Moshi. We had an interesting time trying to pay for the hotel since Shimon and Doug both had some US $20 bills that they wouldn't accept as payment, but we ended up trading them amongst ourselves until we could all get the payment sorted out.

   A nice young man, Joseph, who works for Simon showed up and we all took a taxi to the bus stop. I asked when the bus leaves and Joseph said it has no time table, it leaves when it is full. As we arrived at the hectic and crowded bus station and pushed out way through the crowd, the Moshi bus was already moving. But the door was still open and we were able to jump on. It had to do like an 18 point turn to get out of the station area anyway. And we were off to Moshi!

[to be continued!]

[A few pictures up on instagram]

( Previously: Day 3! )

Day 4: Wednesday October 3rd (map)

   So waking up in Coff's Harbour, first we went to investigate the nearby beaches. They were all quite beautiful, and there was a lovely footpath along the bluffs, as pictured above. Also, I was surprised by how uncrowded these beautiful beaches were. I mean, this ain't a million miles from nowhere, this is pretty much in the city of Coff's Harbour, on a beautiful day. Guess there's just so many gorgeous beaches that people get spread out.
   Or maybe no one was at the beaches because they were all at Coff's premier tourist destination...

That's right, it's the BANANA EXPERIENCE. In case you were wondering just what this BANANA EXPERIENCE is, there's an informational sign advising that its an "edu-tainment attraction for all ages!" "...enjoy a whole new theatre experience with state-of-the-art projections" "...experience ... a holographic-like presentation of the use and value of bananas" and "interactive and fun displays" (all bolding SIC). Who knew bananas could be so exciting????

(Apparently these guys)

   Also, do you sometimes find that when you go to whip it out and feed someone your banana, it is no longer good and rigid? Don't worry it "happens to everyone," but now with your very own "banana keeper" individual banana carrying case (only $7.95!), you can be sure to arrive with your banana intact and ready for action anywhere! --What? We're talking about fruit here people!

   And this monkey-on-a-banana totally doesn't look sexual at all. O_o

   Okay enough about the giant banana silliness. Its time we continued on our way and left giant silly objects behind yeah?
   So the next several hours we had nothing better to do than drive along the highway. Things had gotten noticeably more tropical since Newcastle and here we sometimes found ourselves driving through sugarcane fields and past sugarcane mills. There were a few little towns but I remember we were looking for a place to have breakfast/lunch and kept failing to find a place that really interested us.
   We turned off at signs for MacLean "the Scottish Town!" but found it rather dull and continued on our way. They did have a different tartan pattern wrapped around the base of every power pole though.

   Eventually we were able to get back to the coast in the town of Ballina and, wait, what's this??

   It's a GIANT PRAWN!! Are you ready for the giant prawn experience???

   Well, unfortunately the Giant Prawn Experience appears to have been demolished. But I'm informed there was specifically a community outcry preventing the demolishment of the Giant Prawn itself, so now it looms like cthulhu over a whole lot of nothing.
   And then, we were at Cape Byron:

   Yep, that's another classic awful photo-mesh or whatever you even call that. But its looking back from the cape towards the mainland. Note you can see water on both sides.
Cape Byron is the most Easterly point on mainland Australia. Also it's incredibly beautiful. And there's a pretty lighthouse (note the wallaby cameo in that picture). From the top of the cliffs we could also see dolphins swimming about in the ocean down below.

   Driving down from there to the main beaches we found them also very nice, though extremely popular. Cass talked me into trying some "sugarcane juice" and it was indeed pretty good, very sweet. I immediately started thinking it should be used to make mixed drinks. Lots of trendy little shops and things down there though, it was definitely touristy.

   From there we were essentially in Brisbane's backyard anyway and the sun shortly set, so we just cruised on up to Brisvegas. The End!

Next: I go into exile on a farm in nowheresville for awhile!

( all pictures from this day ) --I highly recommend you take a look today, there were a lot of nice pictures I didn't have room for in the entry.

Current Music: Adrienne Young - Rastus Russell

(previously: Day 2)

Roadtrip Day 3 - Tuesday, Oct 2nd - Map

   In the morning we poked around the seaside town of Newcastle a bit. It looked like a cute little port town. Just across the cove from down town there was a lot of heavy industry stuff -- looks like its a transhipment point for mined materials to be loaded on to freighters.

   After breakfast in a cute cafe in Newcastle we began the trek north again. From here the trip would be entirely up the coast, and though the Pacific ~~Coast~~ Highway follows the coast up, we agreed our goal was to take other routes as much as possible.

   Almost immediately out of Newcastle we took a 40k (round trip) detour to the end of a peninsula. At the end of this was the little town of Nelson Bay, at which the above photo was taken. The water was amazingly clear and beautiful there.

   A little bit further north we were able to take a scenic detour for a bit on a smaller road that went among the lagoons and brackish lakes of the coastline. There were many beautiful spots long this route, and a whole bunch of signs about an upcoming triathalon as well -- which made me think of my dear father and how I need to find a triatholon or marathon in order to tempt him into visiting. Unfortunately this particular triatholon was only a week or so away. Would be a beautiful place to do one though.

   We aimed to get to Port Macquarie for the sunset and I think we made it, except for one problem -- here on Australia's East Coast the sun rises over the sea and sets behind the land (the opposite of everything that is right and natural!!), so it disappeared behind some mountains without much excitement. Port Macquarie seemed cute, though we didn't stay there very long. Had a nice little boardwalk along the coastal bluffs (see photo below).

   From there we still had a fair bit of driving, but with light fading and not many options off the main highway, we just kind of cruised on up to Coffs Harbour (several hours north). Looking at a brochure of sights to see in and around Coffs Harbour I saw that apparently the "Big Banana" was Coff Harbours claim to fame, but that would have to wait till morning!
   There was also a hotel called "the Big Banana Inn" or something, in which I would assume one would have to be surprised if male strippers DIDN'T burst into your room at night and start lewdly dancing!

   TO CONTINUED!

And here's the boardwalk at Port MacQuarie!

( More pictures from this day! )

Current Music: Hank Williams III - Three Shades of Black

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The Agrinautica

Tales of a Beekeeper Errant

Entries tagged with roadtrips

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When We Remembered Zeehan

From Precipice to Pinnacles!

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Tasmania! Day 1!

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The Scenic Route to Eugene

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Guinea 2016 Part 3 - Roadtrip Guinea!

Roadtrip Ethiopia, Day 2

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Tanzanimania!

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Roadtrip Day 3