IRAN 1996

This is as much an aide memoire as it is a travel piece I wrote  all those years ago to catch my own memories; now I can share the experience. I wish I had taken more photos back then as I do now.It was so long ago……

In some global chain of effects, the speechwriter who put the “axis of evil” in the mouth of George Bush had me rummaging through memories. I was with the first Australian tour group into Iran after the Ayatollah seized power. It was 17 years ago. What portents did I see, or fail to see, that defined this country as a point in the triangle of terror?

I had replied to an ad: “Carpet dealers going to Iran will take others….”. As an obsessive my recent interest in carpet determined I should go; should swallow the chattering classes’ scorn at “tour group” travelling and tailgate the expertise and contacts of the carpet dealers.

Eighteen of us gathered in Istanbul, some of the women unable to wait before donning the head to toe black chador only to find that the bar at Istanbul airport did not look kindly on women in hejab taking a drink or two. Better to wait until some point in the flight when as if by osmosis, the Iranian women aboard gave the lead. Their expensive western clothes disappeared under heavy coats and all hair covered. We are in Iranian air space.

The herbs and spices of the bazaars and souks are always one of the enchanting sights.

In the chromatic scale of airports, Tehran was a stand-out. It was basically a male show but the few women personified the exotic – one in exquisitely cut full length camel hair coat, another a wisp in long white with a tribal scarf wound around her head and trailing down a slender back.. The rich and stylish can carve a niche anywhere. There were large headscarves that came from the fashion houses of Europe and a young couple, she in patterned black chador, furtively sharing a cigarette. A ravenesque flock of teenage girls peeped out, chadors clenched between their teeth.

From the window of the down at heel Azardi Hotel (formerly the Hilton) 25 idle cranes interjected the jagged skyline of this concrete box city. With a city of 12 million people, growing at a rate of more that 2 % per annum, development must continue a pace.

The pervasiveness of the Government was first noticed the next day with security guards who were clearly meant to protect propriety as well as museum exhibits. A blonde amongst us got more than one poke in the ribs and signaled instructions that she was to attend to her drifting headgear.

That night we were invited to a party at the home of a journalist and his wife. At that party, the Iranian women in the safety of the home wore the most chic of clothes and there seemed to be no shortage of forbidden alcohol for toasts.

It was in the days when I had a smoke with my drink…even in the strict theocracy.

Yet under the surface, here is a story of great sadness. The hosts had not seen their children since the revolution when they sent the little ones to Europe for safety and left them there for the same reason. Photos of sons grown and married abroad represented a lifetime of family life forgone.

In the sparsely populated west, there was a training/work centre for the widows whose husbands had died in the 19980-88 Iran Iraq war. They were making a grand carpet for some opulent mansion.

Over the next week we travelled most of the country. We walked through Qum, the holy town where Mullahs stride and visited the carpet auctions in Isfahan; we mixed with the wary, impassive silent crowd in the covered markets of Bijar in Iranian Kurdistan; we gaze at the extraordinary palaces of Persepolis and wander the rose gardens of Shiraz. We pass breathtakingly stark Biblical hills and see young women threshing sunflowers, for seed for stock, dressed in wondrous patterned colour from scarf to floating skirt. We have tea in the tents of nomads and visit snow fields in the summer. On the road to Baghdad we see great carvings in the towering cliff face, the way ancient kings told of the exploits.

 

One of the preserved towers of Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion begun in Persia

But the presence of the state is never far away. Exploring a 13th century mausoleum we are followed by a local camera crew. They say they are making a travel documentary for the American market and would like to interview us on our impressions. Someone says they are from the Ministry of Propaganda and the paranoia rises.

When we visit the roof of Iran, home to the Lors and Bakhtiari tribes, we are accompanied by the chaps from the Department of Islamic Culture and Guidance and again they video us.

A final time we notice the Monty Python security measures is at Persepolis. Exploring the parade of long forgotten nations, we notice a newcomer. He has a tape recorder and is clearly causing our urbane and loquacious guide some disquiet. With customary Australian directness, someone asks him what he is doing. He advises that he is learning to be a guide and disappears soon after.

The guide at Persepolis was one of the most elegant men I ever met.

Our guide seems to speak openly enough although he sings a song of a bird pining to be free. He is a man of culture who soaked up life living as a gentleman in London under the Shah but found his career cut short with the revolution. He is witty and elegant, a poetic Persian. How sad to see him waiting anxiously in the hotel foyer while the details of his pittance are calculated.

The tile work alone is worth the trip.

It is difficult to know the reality when you whistlestop through. The crowds out walking in the evening look like the passing parade anywhere. Families eating ices; young couples eyeing each other; children playing happily But we hear first hand of women professionals scared to laugh on the job or look at colleagues in the eye for fear of dismissal. We are told of a couple to be jailed that week since guests danced with the opposite sex at their wedding. This dancing boldness is hard to believe since the only weddings we saw were one where the men and women held separate receptions and another, a mass ceremony of a hundred country couples financed by the Government and scripted to protocols.

There were mosques where the chador had to be more formal even when worn by Westerners.

There were satellite dishes on many roofs. Hard to believe that the culture was not being nibbled away. More so now with the Internet revolution. Back then, shy knots of women talked to us, curious about our lives. There was the woman praying in the brilliantly tiled mosque for her son in Thailand hoping for his visa to America.

Gentle women taking tea, leaving their work on carpet making, were shyly communicating.

I wonder sometimes whether he was so desperate that he came by boat to Australia instead and is one of the Iranians we held in the camps. Maybe it is someone like him who is now one of the Iranians we are now forcing to go back or keeping in the disgraceful conditions of Manus Island quelled by the PNG police.

If it was going to be all right, who wouldn’t want to go back to a land of beauty, history, culture and family? Unless of course, you believed you were in danger.

What I saw in Iran was as much a product of religion and politics as gun massacres and capital punishment reflect American culture and politics. Bush might have call Iran part of the axis of evil but in Iran at that time, America was equally depicted as the Evil Empire. The sad irony of it all!

Now 17 years later there is an Iranian refugee in my extended family, a young man who suffered greatly at the hands of our Government before he was allowed to stay. A finer person it would be hard to find; this country is lucky to have him but he must pine for home.

New York, New York (2012)..you gotta love this city

It used to be said that New York was where the future came to rehearse. But that edginess has been overridden by the highlights of global aspiration. Whether caused by Mayor Giuliani the Tidier or by the imperatives of the new century, this city now seems to be where the most polished of the present resides.

Day 1. We arrive jet shocked at 2.30am but are up and out before lunch. Walk walk walk…past Rockefeller, down the Avenue of the Americas and to MOMA. What pleasure to see the old faves on the fifth floor…1880 to 1940, Cezanne Dali Kahlo Matisse Monet Picasso van Gogh.

View from window of MOMA

It was in this gallery that the penny first dropped for me about painting; that’s why I think I overinflated the whole shebang here. The collection post 1940 seemed less capturing this time.  Maybe it is the curating, maybe the  2004 renovations are too grand for the collection.

Art Class in MOMA

Dinner at Osteria al Doge just over the road from the apartment. Good Italian despite being so close to the ever moving crush of Times Square.

Day 2. Walk walk walk uptown to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 82nd. For me the collection far overshadows MOMA. My  faves  are the Impressionists. Am I a conservative romantic at heart?  Then there are the galleries of Roman, Greek, Middle Eastern antiquities while the Friends of Iran haven’t been too shabby in their donations either. Rich friends of the old Shah I presume.

I could spend a month in this museum.

The Upper East reflected in a Central Park pond

A walk thought the pleasures of Central Park and I drop briefly into Saks. The loos are on the same floor as the shoes. Wow! extremity, opulence, fashion victimisation all come to play here. Some of the fashion names that seem to have lopsidedly penertrated the culture are  represented in the most ridiculous, extravagant collection of shoes to be beheld. Only great wealth and weird values tarry here. Why in a sane world would I have heard of Jimmy Choo?

Some window has fish and shoes.. Mad fantasy stuff.

Who do they think will buy them? Cinderella?

This night we see Clybourne Park at the Walter Kerr Theatre. It’s a sharp, satirical look at changing race relations in the USA across two decades. It was good and must have touched a an American nerve given the standing ovation.

Day 3. Walk walk walk down 44th to Battery Park with a few meanders along the way. Twice when I ask directions I am told, “You should take the bus”.  Sure it was 30 degrees but? Was it my age, the heat or just the New York way?

One meander was to Century 21. My memory from 1998 was that It was a great warehouse with racks overstocked often with designer clothes at amazing prices. Now it seems to be a tawdry department store chain. Ah America, where enterprise is rewarded.

The streets are alive with images.

Shoes again!

Psychics are plentiful

The poet in the park, Garrett Buhl Robinson, read aloud from his work.

Even an old van can become a garden

A common sight

The ferry to the Staten Island is free. Imagine. Mostly tourists though.

After trying online for a few weeks and then being told by the concierge that one would have to kill to get tickets…I walk to where the Book of Mormon is on and manage to get 2 good ones. Why am I going to a musical? Just because it was written by the people who wrote South Park? Just because it won this year’s Tony award? Just because I’ve never done it before?  Have to see a Broadway musical before you die?

Anyway an excellent Marguerita at the Blue Bar of the Algonquin is one way to celebrate. A strong one too. The famous old haunt of many from Faulkner to Dorothy Parker and Hemingway (who seemed to haunt so many places it is a wonder he had time to write) is now a refurbished shadow of its grand days … A few days later I see a tour group emerge.

Just enough tele to see the Republican campaign excerpts. This county cannot be so silly as to support this man who looks like a charactature of a TV evangelist.

Day 4 . Walk walk walk. First I call into the NY Democratic campaign headquarters on Broadway. At this stage it looks like early days in the office of a State candidate  at home. A very young bearded man is giving a training session to 8 people. I am reminded of the Greens.

The door to NY city campaign HQ

Down to Chelsea to the fabulous refurbishment that is now the Chelsea Markets with a 6/10 lunch at the recommended Spice Market….perhaps Pastis on the next corner would have been better but it looked a bit Woolhara. Not surprising since the whole area had a Paddington air especially the gentrification of the Meatpackers district with the very smart small new craft markets.

Then up onto the aerial walkway ..the elevated greened old railway tracks which are packed with walkers or loungers on the smart wooden benches. Just another example of the lack of civic imagination in Sydney.

A different architecture seen from the walkway

Reclining along the high rise walkway

The streets are gun barrel straight

Art along the walkway

That night we see Old Jews telling Jokes At the Westside Theatre.  The jokes were so good I bought the CD:

CNN interviewer, ” Mr Goldberg for 50 years you have prayed here at the wailing wall every day. What do you pray for?” Mr Goldberg, “I pray for world peace, for Arabs and Jews to be brothers, to an end to this Israel problem.” Interviewer, “So how do you feel after 50 years?” “Like I am banging my head against a wall every day”. Most of the other jokes were about sex. mothers and marriage.

Day 5. First to Grand Central to find the Apple shop that has entombed itself in this iconic building. Fix the problem but another memory has been shot. The old Oyster Bar I first went to in the 80′s where row upon row of tiered shell fish were on display for the selecting is now a tame red checked tableclothed  claustrophobic cafe. Oh well! Apologies to all those I pointed in that direction.

Ferry to Brooklyn for the Sunday flea market.Wow, such quality product.

I get an invite to Friday night dinner in Williamsburg.

Sophie and I have many talks over the weeks about how the sheer population density can produce so much that is better than we can experience at home. The best of the best is so much better here. Be it the craft at markets, or the art, or the streetscape and urban spaces; perhaps not the best of the restaurants. The monumental architecture and the treasured streetscape scale  add to the sense of the grand. The vibrant and seemingly easy multiculturism also adds to this sense of a society that has arrived. But we see only glimpses of a many layered Manhattan.

The monumental architecture

And the monuments of the new twin towers

We walk through Williamsburg with its boutiques and bars and what a pleasure to see Toby’s Estate coffee shop.

This was the small boy who grew up over the road playing with my kids. I felt proud of you Tobes and am I remembering right?

Jay knocked out your tooth. Hey, it was only a milk one.

Anyway home through the rocking Brazilian masses celebrating their national day.  That night we see the new Batman movie..a bit freaky seeing Gotham under attack and then walking home at midnight through the same stage set.

Day 6. Shop till you drop. It is worth it. Jeans that cost $250 in Sydney are less than$100 here with the tax break. So I buy 4 pairs. Good shoes on sale for $30 although you could pay $3000 at Saks. Food is half the price.

The window of Louis Vuitton celebrates Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama who has collaborated on a collection.

Schwartz do bigger lollies

Despite the debt clock that had increased substantially by the end of a week

Sophie is out that night so I take myself to the John Dory Oyster Bar on the corner of Broadway and 29th in the Ace hotel.  The first pleasure here is the George Washington cocktail – ginger, lemon, egg white,hard cider and applejack. It tastes so good and must be good for you. So I have two.

And the food…first whelk and then chorizo stuffed cuttlefish and toffee date pudding to finish. Yum.

The Ace hotel is an experience in itself. A design based place where it becomes a private club at night with cutting edge art on display. When I wander through a few dozen hipsters are playing with their laptops at long tables in the dark lobby. Tonight is comedy night I’m told.

This place is a creation of the time – techno and organised happenings. I wonder if it is the Chelsea Hotel of the new century.
On the box it’s all Obamarama tonight in readiness for tomorrow’s democratic convention. Much more palatable than the other. MSNBC seems to be a fan. It becomes the only watchable channel.

Day 7. Today the Frick. The Turner ports (Cologne and Dieppe) are wonderful and their light seems to infuse me. I want to breathe it in. There is a Memling portrait of a man whom I could have once become obsessed with. But many of the old Masters whilst objectively fine, don’t ring any bells except the obvious historical appreciation.

It is a Grand House. Frick bought the Fragonard room in its entirety from the JP Morgan estate. What a tradition of benevolence these Americans have. And how bloody rich on the backs of others they became. Nonetheless Gina and her ilk could learn a lot about giving.

I go to Central Station where Apple has colonised an entire wing. There is light drizzle going in at 5.20pm; half an hour later a guy is trundling a trolley selling umbrellas. Ah American enterprise!

Tomorrow night Maria Carey is singing at Rockefeller Plaza for the start of the NFL season so there is a half a kilometre of huge equipment trucks along 48th.

In my street and they are filming “Person of Interest” (for TV) just down the block. The rain isn’t helping either. Here on 44th we have the Harvard Club, the revamped Algonquin and the New York Bar Association. Hard to see why any person of interest would be here in 2012 but I rubberneck to see a crane drop a dummy from the Bar Association building. There must be 50 crew for the single shot.

To night is the Democratic convention. Michelle Obama is a class act.

Day 8. Enough of midtown and uptown, we walk walk walk down to the lower east and then across to the Village. How things have changed here. Boutiques abound and I remember when I found Washington Square scary. Now on Prince near Mercer I can see Louis Vuitton, Mont Blanc and Calvin Klein stores.

Charming Chelseas neighbourhood

Lunch at Katz’s deli. Matzo soup, pastrami on rye in the packed, blissfully unglossed old deli. A sense of what the New York of a few iterations ago would have been like. But the table where Sally had her pretend orgasm for Harry has brought in the tourist hordes.

Dinner is at a Zagat rated 93% modern American seafood, Oceana. Posh but half as good (and half as expensive) as an Australian equivalent, say The Pier in its heyday.

Day 9.  The train to another icon, Coney Island. The subway is a kaleidoscope of  life in this town. Opposite are a young mum with a stroller, a Hasidic Jew, an African American guy in full sports outfit, an old Asian man, a tough looking presumed Brooklyner and a young well dressed WASPish woman.  The trains are sparkling clean with no graffiti.

Coney Island is a sad sight but perhaps ever thus when a fun park is empty. Four separate fenced fun parks are fringed by a wide boardwalk and then a huge expanse of dirty sand to a flat dull sea. We walk out on the pier and chat to the fishermen.

The plastic palm

It’s a little bleak here

And the desolate gym equipment

Thursday night…time for the musical. It is an absurd fantasy about Mormon boys in Uganda. The entire audience rises to a standing ovation. What is it with these guys?

Day 1o Walk walk walk downtown again. This time we lunch at the chic tapas restaurant, Casa Mono, near Union Square. The blackened beets with summer beans, goat’s cheese and mixed granola win the day; then on to the Farmer’s Market in the Square. After casing the lower west, finding a rare good cup of coffee and missing Robert de Nero in TriBeCa, I call in on Kate and the dear new 4 week old in Soho.

How lucky to be living here. She points me to the Hudson Parkway which runs alongside the river from top to bottom. We tarry there watching football in a revamped industrial building, people jogging and sunning. Again, where is my city’s corresponding civic imagination?

In Bryant Park there is a reading room and table tennis

And young people dancing

Sophie is having another night with friends and wild horses won’t keep me from going back to the whelks at the John Dory Oyster Bar. I drink their take on the mojhito, the Lonsdale Mojhito. It has mint, lime, white rum, cachaca and soda and Gill, it is far far better than those many sugar infested cheap rum ones in Cuba.

Back up Broadway where half the road has been turned into garden and cycle way for 15 blocks and yet we complain about a small bit of Sydney being taken from cars!

If they can close off blocks of Broadway, why not George Street?

Again I pause and watch the constant crowd buzzing good  naturedly Batman, the Naked Cowboy, Grover, Sponge Bob Squarepants and others. Frustrated actors spruik every show in town. It’s always party time here.

Day 12 What a great farewell gift. The Labor Day parade. It goes on and on. Three hours of marchers, some of whom started below our windows at 7 am. Surprisingly few teachers, firemen and health workers and no police union. But the blue collars are out in force. The Harley riders from the Electrical Trades and the Teamsters make my day.

Tradies on bikes

    

  

While the workers watch on

                               

                                                           

and finally

      The only sad note is when a barman tells us Obama hasn’t a hope in hell.

                                     Sad also to leave a great time in a great city.

The Kimberley coast (2012).

As Australians we believe that somewhere deep, we connect to this vast empty landscape. Somehow like our Aboriginal peoples we identify with country. Although most of us cling to cities on the coast the desert, the scarps, the bleakness and the beauty all resonate in the psyche.

What joy then to cruise the north-west coastline and to be awestruck by the majesty of the cliffs, the drama of the waterfalls,  the tranquillity of the sounds and  simply the vastness and grandeur of this great land.

Such a comfortable expedition

Ten days on the Orion – with the mostly affluent,  first flush of the baby boomer generation… many 44 years married and 99% a couples story, a social composite I am unused to. Never mind. everyone has a back story and I am sure some will be interesting. I haven’t done this before and  it takes the few days at sea from Darwin to Wyndham (to call into Timor for international licensing credibility) to sort out the species.

A large group of slick eastern suburbs couples  – thin, tanned wives who hang out together while their husband drip  igadgets; the segregation reminds me of the Aussie barbecue cliché;  they take no time  to colonise the best deck chair area where I observe one woman reading the very latest chic lit soft porn bestseller. Others sort themselves out less noticeably. Early alliances start and  brief sea sickness accounts for a few. The 73 crew  for  the 75 guests are mostly Phillipino and a happier lot you couldn’t find.

Here is yet another examples of global labour going to the cheapest bidder but the woman who runs this cruise line has certainly found the secret to a contented workforce. What issues it raises! Lower paid work for the poorest whose families desperately need support or maintain Australian basic wages and provide a fraction of the service?

The sunsets were always special

Day 3  – Wyndham, Kununarra and all in between

Anyway two days in and we dock at Wyndham; the adventure begins. The port of Wyndham is skirted by mud flats but the unpretentious scattering of houses are selling for  half a million dollars such is the impact of the mining industry. A loquacious bus driver takes us along a road where the iron ore road trains pass every 20 minutes 24/7 and where export cattle trucks and nickel loads intersperse. At Kununarra a tired Cessna awaits.

All aboard the tired old Cessna… 

That dry Australian humour

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We fly over the beehive Bungle Bungle massif, amazing cones of rock in the midst of a vast landscape. I fantasise I can see dinosaur footprints below in this 300 million year old land. Would I could see the rocks glowing in the sunset.Amazing that the Bungles were not “discovered” by white Australians until the mid 1980′s – testament to the scale of the country.

The Bungles Bungles from the air

Then we overpass Lake Argyle, storage for the Ord River Scheme, the biggest reservoir in Australia, bigger than Sydney harbour. We see  the deep stepped concentric cuts of the Argyle diamond mine where they have had to halt the digging ; they have gone so deep, the water table is fighting back. This mine produces 25% of the world’s natural diamonds.

Day 4 – King George waterfalls

A river winds  through sentinel sandstone cliffs 80 metres high… layer upon layer of red/ochre stone depending on the light. The sandstone is oxidised or blackened by algae from the waterfalls along the bank. We are here to see the twin falls either side of the bluff in a grand amphitheatre. These cliffs are 1.1 million years old and were once, before the ice ages taller than the Andes…as high as Everest. But over the millennia water has worn them to this grand canyon.

How can you describe the grandeur?

Cliffs sentinal

One side of the aterfall… there’s another on the other side of the bluff

The hardy (not me) trek to the top and swim. Tucked into a cliff, the crew had set up a boat with champagne and croissants. Our zodiacs motored up to this floating indulgence before speeding us under the waterfalls for that experience.

Day 5 -  Vansittart Bay and Jar island

Today was an experience that captures me still. On Jar island we climbed a steepish escarpment to three caves with examples of Bradshaw Art. Cave paintings that could be older than 20,000 years. Joseph Bradshaw first recorded this art style in 1891 and it has been named for him although the Aboriginal people of the Kimberley call this style Gwion Gwion. There ar estimated to be 250,000 such caves in the Kimberley but no resources available to document and preserve these national treasures.

So like the active figures of Africian rock art

It blew my mind that we could sit in these caves with these historic treasures; photograph them, even touch tem and the only constraint was deep respect for place. The art, mostly tasselled figures with a few prehistoric animals are so stained into the rock that there was no suggestion that they were endangered by the groups of travellers who passed through. A far cry from the cave painting of France which, when I visited 25 years ago, were not open to the public and viewers were only shown parallel artificial caves.

Hands and figures.. from.maybe 40,000 years ago

There are said to be 250,000 of Bradshaw art in the Kimberley

No-one knows who made these drawing… some bear an identical resemblance to rock art found in Africa and some of the ornamented dancing figures have the feeling of Javanese puppetry. Would I had more time to know…like so many things. One depiction is of pre historic  pygmies. Here also is the earliest halo figures of later aboriginal art.

The rocks  are about 1.8 million years old...pre fossil like yesterday. Life was lived her in the Pleistocene age. The question is raised in the debate on the genesis  as to whether the Aboriginal people are from one genetic stream or from many.  Once there we’re people in the north of Australia..at Kuranda (documented in 1938) as pygmies. And at Yawijibaya there were a people 7 feet high.

The eerie yet familiar rock art resonated as did the beautiful stillness of another beach that afternoon. We zodiaced to a beach and trekked across the salt pans to a WW2 plane wreck but it was the isolated beauty of the beach replicated stretching thousands of miles around the Australian coast that makes it almost too much to comprehend.

Day 6 – Mitchell Falls

The helicopter takes off from a small beach and lands there later in the grass after the tide has come in. The pilot looks like Sal Mineo and spends six months of the year here.Who would have thought there were enough tourists in this remote area to keep four pilots busy?

The 30 minute ride serves to again underline the vastness of the country and the scene from the sky is reminiscent of so much painting…from aboriginal art to Fred Williams. How did they have this aerial view? I walk to the three level falls and then  dip into the cool river above.

Part of the Mitchell Plateau from the air…reminiscent of so much art

Mitchell River National Park is  115,300 hectares  in some of the most remote and inaccessible country in Australia. It can’t be too remote though, I run into two walkers on the path… a three-hour walk  from the campsite they tell me. The Aboriginal people wer evacuated from the Mitchell plateau during WW2 (for their safety!!). But now some of the traditional land owners have returned and have been instrumental in drawing up the management plans for the new national park.

The Mitchell Falls

The afternoon is spent in the zodiac meandering up creeks of mangroves in that eerie still  water. Strange to see these mangroves fringed by the always present red cliffs. Only a few crocs to be seen and then almost encircled by zodiacs. How we are drawn to primeval creatures!

The beauty of the mangrove

And the ever present croc

Day 7. Raft Point and Montgomery reef

Montgomery Reef is 400 sq. ks  and the top of the reef is exposed only at high tide. We set out at dawn and travelled for a few hours in zodiacs to watch the reef emerge from the sea with the waterfalls pouring off it. Because of the tides we are able to see it emerge about 10 metres and although people excitedly saw extensive bird life and turtles, I seemed to miss most of the momentary sightings. Back to the ship with an enchanting picturesque visual of an umberella in the sandbar and staff waiting with Bloody Marys.

The reef behind rose from the water …as the tide ran out

But civilisation was never far away

In the afternoon we visit the cave paintings on Raft Point and here are the representations of  the Kimberley’s the major image,  the heroic Wandjina, creator of the clans. Each clan has its own Wandjina. Tradition has it that a member of the clan must come back and “freshen up” the Wandjina of his people.

Description fails me

Day 8 -  Fishing and Talbot Bay

While others power ride their zodiac through the vertical falls I go on a fishing trip…what fun. First I am touched by the care and concern of the staff helping an elderly man, mostly wheelchair bound, in and out of the fishing boat. He has the best catch although I snag a metre long reef shark but can’t land it. We let all the fish go.

After we spend two and a half hours motoring the bay and its nooks to see the amazing geological forms where the Kimberley about 1.6 million years ago smashed into the continent and the tall sandstone cliffs gradually went on the vertical . I am surprised at how little bird and animal life there is but it is just after the big wet and apparently too early in the seasons.

Somtimes the rock formations look like sculpture

here are the vertical falls

Although we are 3000 kilometres from Perth, the seaplanes fly in and the guys who run the speed boats  through the falls live on a houseboat here. There seem to be about 15 charter companies coming in and out of these rivers and bays in the season.

At the end of the day

I sit in the glassed 6 th floor front lounge at a white tableclothed table musing over a delicious afternoon tea. Gracious green and sandstone folding hills are pure National Geographic. What more could one want? Majestic nature and elegant living in the one package.

I cannot believe how efficient and pleasant the Filipino staff are. Clearly the company has an amazing human resources program. The woman who owns this company should run Telstra. This trip is planned /managed/ executed to a T.  Lectures before or after every excursion; efficient pleasant transport to the points of interest; some meals are up there with the best.

Day 9 -  Yampi Sound and its islands.

We took the zodiac around the sound and while the vistas are broad and beautiful, I was conflicted by the mining operations in this stunning landscape. Cockatoo Island contains one of the world’s richest ore bodies. It yielded an average purity of 69 % (1951-1986); with some  ore content at 97 %. Both Cockatoo (in 2000) & Koolan (in 2006) Islands have recommenced mining operations.

In the afternoon was swim time at the Crocodile Creek waterhole. Margaritas in the clear shallows, small waterfall to the rear. If there is a heaven, then I am sure it will  contain a version of this place. On a dull winter’s day or at a time of stress, I hope my mind’s eye  can conjure up the visual joy of that experience.

heaven… the swimming hole and margeuritas!!

Day 10 on  –    Broome

What a gem of a town. As a former planner and urban manager, I am chuffed by the development control plan which has produced a town centre that pays homage to its history and which to date seems to have kept rapacious development at bay.

Great streetscape

Tropical lushness

As I trudge around the art galleries, I meet, in their proprietors, the most charming group of people I have met for a long time. Other people,  in response to my questions about directions go out of their way and drive me there. As they would erroneously claim for them selves in Byron Bay, this place does indeed seem to have a special energy. Especially sipping a cocktail at sunset overlooking Cable Beach. And catching my breath at the unexpected collection of Syd Nolans at the cable beach resort.

Sunset at Cable Beach

Time to go.  Broome airport…white corrogated iron with green posts .. fans… pitched latticed roof over a  central court shades of Somerset Maugham. There is a wishing well… I would wish to come back.

Uganda 2006 and 2007….more an essay than a quick one…..

Kampala

The dinasours out front of the local shopping centre in Kampala seem weirdly symbolic

Mention Uganda and most people’s spontaneous response used to be Idi Amin or Raid on Entebbe. These days it’s Forest Whittaker playing Idi Amin. Those horrors were 25 years ago. For the last two decades President Yoweri Museveni has been the Big Man ruling this country of 27.6.million, a patchwork tribal population.

Uganda’s current long-term war in the north is still playing out in stalled peace talks in southern Sudan. The foe is the guerilla Lord’s Resistance Army, a vicious and wacky lot who kidnap, terrorise and enlist children in the name of God. Each night, thousands of children march long distances to safe havens to avoid abduction.  1.8 million people are living in camps.

All this is a long way from Kampala – at least 8 hours by road. In this capital of 1.2 million, life is a series of visual contrasts as economic development rushes into the city.  The blue glass high rise of the social security building is fringed by streets where vendors loll on the pavement; a young boy stands patiently behind bathroom scales waiting for a rare customer; men in suits use phones at mobile kiosks.

Phone calls to make

Magazines for sale

And these are the magazines

A bold construction program is delivering hundreds of new hotel rooms for CHOGOM in November. The Aga Khan’s Serena hotel is up and running with its strange mix of Rajasthani/African/Islamic architecture. The homeless Karamajong children from the warrior tribe in the west have been rounded up off the streets as part of the tidying up process for the Heads of Government. Main roads are being repaired.

An abundance of prooduce

Women in the markets

Chickens for sale

and chillis

Markets everywhere in the third world are the heart of a city... beats a mall any day!

New oil exploration is another heralded bow to the economic fiddle while in parts of the country up to 60% of people still live in traditional huts without access to safe water or electricity. Though back in 1056 when Princess Elizabeth came to visit Murcheson Falls, she had all mod cons in a purpose built house.

And the Princess' mod cons.

The house built for Princess Elizabeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 7 hills of Kampala bear absolutely no resemblance to those of the Eternal City but they are as symbolic.  They demonstrate the various lifestyles and beliefs systems that shake along together in this city. A grand mosque gifted by the Saudis, a Catholic cathedral, a Hindu temple, the city centre, an enclave of prestige bungalows each with a verdant garden (and all guarded by armed security)  – each crowns a different slope.

Kampala is a city where differences seemingly live serendipitously together. And there is an Art Gallery.

Modern art with a gun.

A local sculpture

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The languid air, soporific in its humidity, weaves around traffic chaos and pollution spewing cars. Lush tropical vegetation, banana palms, frangipani, jacarandas, bougainvillea, flame trees, are punctuated with dry red dust rising from compacted footpaths and median strips.

Nature isn't leaving the city centre without a fight

There are many rich and middle class people here both Ugandan and ex-pat, many of whom are part of the army of aid personnel. These enjoy the fringe benefits of any sophisticated city, from supermarkets and bars to a French patisserie and a Belgian butcher all set in the sawtooth streetscape of many developing cities. The affluent can even enjoy a nearby resort on the shores of Lake Victoria with horse riding and the largest swimming pool in East Africa.

But here’s another example of the impact of change, the lake has receded about 100 metres in the past two years following the construction of a damn at nearby Jinja, the fabled but now questioned, mouth of the Nile.

Outside this world of bars and pools, compare the life of the vast majority of Kampalans struggling to find a living income.  There is sadness in the eyes of one as he talks of a dead baby daughter killed by witchcraft and his long term employer who would give him no money to get a doctor. Another man’s eyes wash with emotion as he speaks of “the brothers” who are still suffering in the war -torn north. At a busy crossroads, a boy stands with his blind grandmother day after day, charity their only hope for survival. The slums of Kampala remain.

Yet these people, subdued by a history of horror, have a quiet dignity. The courteous greeting and genuine enquiry after family wellbeing slows one down to the core elements of life. This is a marked difference to the bustle of western cities. If nothing else the local innate style in the wearing of beautifully pressed, mostly second hand clothes, makes most westerners look dowdy.

Outside the bustle of town, the site where the kings of Buganda are buried boasts a large grassed hut. The Buganda, a Bantu people, are the largest tribe in Uganda with 16% of the population mostly settled around Kampala. Work is slowly proceeding on restoring grass roofs and re-matting boundaries in anticipation of CHOGOM when the Queen of England will visit the tombs of the kings of Buganda. She will not be allowed to pass the fence of spears however, unless she too is drawn into the mythical forests where the local dead kings now dwell.

The grass hut of the Bugandan kings

Work on the restoration is not going at a cracking pace with some suggestion that UNESCO funding has been siphoned off. The local paper is full of the current audit of central government departments where vast monies are unaccounted. A recent scandal fingered the Kampala City Council and every urban pothole is a reminder that corruption is a fact of business in many worlds.

These are boom times for some. In the café at the Sheraton, tables are occupied variously by 4 well-tailored Indians, a glamorous blond woman with a Clark Kent look-alike, a pair of elegant African women, and an intense group of English and Africans. A sign of the times is the laptops open and at work on every table.

Many more Australian tourists will find their way to Kampala as a middle aged group, one boasting the Tamworth County Music festival T shirt, advised me. The city is a jumping off ground for the truly intrepid who want to see the gorillas in the mist of the Mountains of the Moon, a day’s journey to the west of the capital at Biwindi Impenetrable National Park.

And cows on the road

Of course there are baboons

If you look closely, you can see the elephant

If you are a wildlife tourist, most of the big game was wiped out by vicious slaughter during the Amin regime but it is returning to Queen Victoria National Park and Murcheson Falls.

In the national parks the animal numbers are growing again

Churchill called Uganda the Pearl of Africa. More tourists would help buff its dulled lustre and provide welcome income for many. Don’t wait until the hordes come, get there early!

Neglected trolley! Bloody Woolies!

Earley spring… a trolley appears!

After looking at one of Woolworths’ runaways on the footpath outside for 2 weeks, I reported it late-September ish. 

Overnight it was moved ….across the road!

October 27

FOUR   WEEKS LATER    October 27

Bloody Wooloworths. Corporate citizen, my hat!  The trolley has been around for 6 weeks.

I reported the co-ordinates 4 weeks ago to the main desk. The supermarket is only 1250 metres away!

Neutral Bay. Said to be their biggest store for yonks.

I’d push it uphill but the bag-lady visuals put me off.’

World record for the longest ignored trolley?

Nov 13... keeping track

OK. We’re going for that record….nineth week now.. November 13.

Time to note specifics.

It’s still there with only slightly more rubbish in it and someone has taken the trouble to turn it around.

Strange (not) that North Sydney Council  rangers who seem to  book cars at 10pm, have not noticed it?

Wonder how the people who just paid AUS$4mill for an apartment behind the stone fence feel about it?

Probably less fazed than they do about the portaloo and pipes which appeared on the footpath 2 weeks ago.

Nice little visual OR will Dr Who appear at any moment?

Cuba 2007

Colour. Music. Players wander in Havana.

Cuba….a historic, adventurous, vibrant, magical, nostalgic, brave, atmospheric island.

The historic revolution has left a socialist legacy of great free medical care and education as well as glimpses of a vibrant sensuous musical culture that I suspect could not have flourished under capitalism. Everyone might have been too busy.

The American embargo meant that a wide disparity in income levels has not been available to the Cuban people; in fact most people live mega modestly. But isn’t this equality part of what the Occupy movement is about?

A visual spin-off is that wonderful big fin 50’s cars roam the streets and ramshackle Grand architecture from the 1870’s to art deco abounds. In the country large old, open backed farm trucks act as buses and memories of the revolution resonate not just with the young people in their solidarity scarves but also in the numerous memorials, especially those to the five martyrs in American detention.

The cars alone are woth the trip

Embargos are relative though. Boatloads of one western luxury, a good Cuban cigar, seem to have no trouble evading customs.

Rolling cigars for the international playboys

How could ambivalence not pervade this island? Its very own revolutionary hero, the romantic and good Che, started his career in government reviewing appeals and firing squads for those convicted by the revolutionary tribunals as war criminals. The great Che  ruled over capital punishment!!

Other discordant ambiguities -  the USA has its dreaded Quantanamo Bay prison on the island, and we spent a few nights at a Cuban Resort which I have totally repressed. No locals of course; charter flights and chips.

But essentially it is politics, colour, nostalgia, time- warp, architecture, vitality….. a very large Afro Cuban woman oozing out of a short short skirt and a minimalist top with all the joy and confidence in the world; an impromptu jam session in the street that makes you think you have stumbled across the Buena Vista Social Club at home; a daiquiri on a steamy night with the sound of a saxophone in the distance.

Iconic Havana, the French settled Cienfuegos, world heritage Trinidad (although most of the country seems UNESCO heritage listed!), the musical and revolutionary Santiago de Cuba, Venales National Park.  Ah! I could do it all again and again.

Havana.... music, street theatre, bars, fabulous buildings – many restored. Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky had a plan to turn this town into the sin centre of the world with but were suprised in 1959 when Casto turned up. Hemingway propped himself up in a bar then – the bronze life size replica is all that remains. This is claimed to be the bar where in the 30′s the mojito was born! Drinking was obviously a long term occupation for in the 20’s  a bartender there invented frozen daiquiris and made himself a fortune; the evidence is his great mausoleum in the fabulous cemetery.

Somehow it doesn't seem touristy... just a way to earn a dollar!

Shades of the old Tropicana. They still dance ...for the tourists.

The streets are charming

And so are the parks

The buildings delight

Who can blame them?

Cienfuegos  founded by the French in 1819 is an elegant city of fine 19th century architecture which now has one of the many Cuban UNESCO World Heritage listings. In this coastal town the pre revolutionary lot were working with the mafia to convert a particularly ornate wedding cake palace into a casino. Now talented artists can be found among the many galleries in the colonnaded square.

Here's the hotel that was planned to be the Mafia casino.. a speedboat ride from Miami!

Political sentiment on show --Free the Fve

More street art

Trinidadanother World Heritage cobblestone pedestrian town where life of the locals seems to chug along in traditional ways with old people rocking away in their chairs close to doorways to watch the passing parade. Music pervades again. Bands play in the main square to crowds of locals as well as tourists.

The cobblestone street

Will it last the distance?

Santiago de Cuba has almost 500,000 people mostly Afro-Cubans.
The revolution was launched here with Castro appearing on a balcony in the main Square in 1959.  Music comes from doorways and jam sessions in the happen in the street. Bacardi started the rum business here and you can take a little trip to see the remnants of the sugar plantations with their grand residences and slave quarters.

Music, music everywhere

And then there is Vinales Valleyand the small town there

Another memorial to the Five who need to be Freed!

The young socialists

A small country town

Life from the window

Thursday morning

“crazy bout you”

I wake up look out the window, a message carefully printed on the road.

My heart soars. Romance is alive and in my very street.

I spend the day smiling, wondering which of the anonymous neighbours is having such an exciting time.

Lucky person! Ah! what sweet nostalgia for my own youth

Friday morning

“A crazy stalker”

Hopes dashed. Love blighted. Heart broken.

What sad tale lies behind this response?.

Four million stories are being played out in this city…this was one of them.