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#73: Journey’s end: life continues (back to life, back to reality.) The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. Travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

20 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by thewritingimp in children, family, gap year, holidays, humour, south America, travel, writing

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family, Glastonbury, home, middle-classes, Quito, school, teenagers, travel

75 life

This is the last few days of what should have been a year away, but now has to be eleven months as we have to go back to get The Boy into his comprehensive school, so he’s not classed as a re-admission and on a waiting list. We go on our last excursion from Quito to the belt of the world at Cuidad Mitad del mundo (Middle of the World City).

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We jump back and forth from the northern to the southern hemispheres. The Boy is reluctant and remonstrating with us, “It’s such a sad touristy thing to do.”

“Yep, but when someone asks you how many times you have crossed the equator, you can say ‘dozens of times’. “ He is not convinced, he is practising to be a proper teenager in a few days’ time.

“In the merchant navy they shave your head the first time you cross the equator. We could shave your hair off in a symbolic gesture of solidarity to seamen.” He laughs, well, he’s nearly a teenager. “We could just shave it off anyway, so your new brutal hairstyle matches your personality!” A young non-nonsense Australian joins in, “Hey, you are a tourist, mate. Get jumping, you’ll feel better for it.” So reluctantly he joins his sister who is already bounding the line like she is in a Disney musical. He feels better for it and it lifts his, and everyone else’s mood. We take the obligatory photos of the brutal monument dedicated to 0º-0’-0”Latitude.

We visit The Magic Bean Café for the last time on the morning of our departure and evaluate our nearly-year away. It feels like we are in an ephemeral bohemian novel – Marquez springs to mind, surreal that it will soon end. We, the parents, could travel onwards forever now, more addicted than institutionalised, more enthused than jaded, with a topping of escapism thrown in. Should we have paid forty grand off the mortgage, rather than spent the equity on taking a gap year? I say ‘squandered on coming away’ to The Wife to evoke a reaction. The answer is obviously ‘no’. We discuss the best bits about the last year of our lives, and the good seem to outweigh the bad bits by about ten to one. But don’t kid yourself there won’t be travails, annoyances, and resilience needed during a full year away. Even the relative hardships untarnish to memories that make us laugh and smile.

We are in Quito airport, this is the last time we will need to check our bags in, the next time we will be reunited will be in Manchester, after they get delayed at Heathrow!, and we will be ‘home’. Customs have taken it upon themselves to go through all our bags quite methodically, (except The Girl’s, or ‘Pequena mula de drogas’ as we like to call her. The Boy is not only accosted by this perceived violation, but his hormones are nipping away at him as well, he is about to explode, we both try and calm him, but he can’t fight against it any longer, he bursts.

“My life is over…”he tries to contain himself, but he has no chance, “I’ve been backstage at Glastonbury… and, I’ve been around the world. WHAT ELSE is there left for me to do?!”Both The Wife and I burst into laughter. “WHAT, WHAT? “ Exhorts the pre-teenager.

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So we are back in the routine, we have been for, total disclosure here, ten years! This all happened ten years ago, ten years have got behind us all. Writing now, only affirms how much it has enhanced all our lives. All those that appear scared by life, or cannot bare the stress of any change, the comfort of the everyday, some seem visibly shocked by what we have done, even now after both the children have made it to university. But how did you educate them? What did you do for money? What about your jobs? I know most of us are only a few months away from the streets, but you cannot let your fears paralyse you, or you become a ghost in the machine, living to work – stay optimistic and good things happen to you, it’s not purely by chance – you won’t win the lottery, if you don’t buy a ticket. The Wife gets the same job back she left. My job as a shortage secondary science teacher is not only left open, they have decided to give me a three-grand pay increase for some unknown reason. The Boy gets back into his old school, but tells all but his very closest friends he has been away in London for the year. The Girl starts a new junior school nearer to our home. I ask her how her first day of school went.

“We had Geography, and we are doing about the Amazon Rain Forest. “ I light up as she tells me.

“Did you tell them you’ve been, about piranha fishing, the caimans, the anacondas, collecting poison arrow frogs, swimming in a river?”

“I didn’t want to show off!”I am both sad, and immensely proud of her at the same time.

“Did you not say anything at all? Offer to bring some photos in? The trinkets you bought from a Shaman?”The look she gives me, reiterates what she has already told me. Then she adds, “The teacher had most of it right, but I didn’t want to correct her!”

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Two months after being back I’ve been sent on a middle-management course. We have to give a five-minute talk on any subject after a coffee break and a few of us are deciding what to talk about. I genuinely have no idea and express these feelings aloud. ‘You must have done something interesting across the summer holidays?’ ‘I did go around the world with my family all last year.’They look at me as if I’m taking the piss; I’ve not even considered it might sound a bit showy. So I talk about this, I set about my talk giving a very brief résumé of the places and the people and pre-empt the worried questions the professional middle-classes always ask, always the education issue comes up first – can you image the fine now? I tell them semi-flippantly, ‘schools don’t mind when middle-class people take their children out of school, it’s the working classes they object to, as they’re not taking them to museums and immersing them into the language and culture.’ My time is up and the ‘facilitator’ asks if anyone would object if I was given a little more time to answer some more questions that people may have. A resounding ‘yes’ ‘that’s fine’ ‘I want to know…’ I become defined as the teacher that took a family gap year for the rest of the course, but there are worse things to be defined by.

People ask what our family gap-year away was ‘really’ like? At least for the first few weeks anyway;

We have;

Basked in the glow of the Golden Temple with relatives and roots,

met and impersonated penguins,

observed tigers on the stalk,

walked in the footsteps of Ghandi,

counted and framed shooting stars in the Australian dessert,

traversed glaciers,

submerged ourselves on the Great Barrier Reef,

ridden through Pushka on a camel with the wind in our hair,

stepped through petrified forests,

experienced the havoc a few can inflict on the many,

surveyed the sunrise over Micha Picchu,

Traced the Nazca Lines,

upheld the natural jewellery of poisonous arrow frogs,

been awed as pink dolphins break the water’s surface,

Epicured on piranhas in the Amazon,

abandoned black-screens for analogue books,

lived with few material possessions,

set our watches in every time zone,

witnessed The Boy undergo the biological change; wrestle the hormonal beast,

laughed with friends of every nation,

grown much closer as a family,

and… seen the world is connected by love and friendship…

I think… but mostly I just reply, “Yeah, it was great.”

If you take your kids out of school and go around the world for a year, you have to expect them to be more; independent, confident, secure, better readers, empathetic, wiser. The flipside for some is the travel bug bites them, they are more, as the great philosopher Eric Cantona once said: secure, independent and loved. But now they also have wings and they may glide further from the nest and end up working in Australia, or travelling through South East Asia, where they are now, but would we have had it any other way?: No! Don’t forget as parents we are only the bows, our children are the arrows, we have done the best we could, and will endeavour to do so, when at times it’s bloody hard, but that’s what families are about, that’s the invisible glue that sets fast.

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Disclaimer

I may have a break from my blogginations for a while; there is tricky book to finish. Recently I spent two and half months in Central America and Cuba with The Wife, I may tell you about that at some point. The biggest complaint I’ve had while writing this irreverent flickering images nonsense  is calling The Wife,‘The Wife!’, feminists hate this, and they have every right to do so, I appreciate that – she doesn’t hate it, and she is a proper feminist. When I set off with the first blog she didn’t want her name mentioned, this was probably a wise thought, ‘I know what you can be like, people that know me might read it.’ She has mellowed, she is the reason we went away in the first place, she is the real risk taker in our relationship – I was only a risk-taker by association. She was the one that made a decision that has enhanced all our lives measurably, and the memories only get rosier with the passing of time, for this and many other reasons, is why I love her, so when I write: ‘The Wife’, what I mean is ‘my’ intelligent, beautiful,  Punjabi Princess.

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BIG LOVE to you all for reading these blogs in numbers that have astounded me, and as you travel and travail through life, catching and avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune, take my BIG LOVE with you, always… and make sure the glue is setting hard.

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

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I write books. You can buy any of them at very reasonable prices here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

My latest book: Hull, Hell & Homecomings, is out later this year to coincide with Kingston upon Hull being the 2017 UK City of Culture.

 

Epilogue:  Through the Sun Gate: Machu Picchu.

This was the highlight of our family gap year: at least for The Wife it was. The sun creeping over the verdant Andes, the conical sides of Mount Huayna like benevolent reaching arms, to the blanket of the scattered ancient Inca ruins below. The Wife fighting for words to express its beauty; for her no anti-climax, for the rest of us the satisfaction that we have all made the three and a half day trek without oxygen and stretcher bearers. To stave off altitude sickness I have chewed the recommended cocoa leaves – all that occurred was an aching jaw like I had been hit a few days previous by Mike Tyson in a bad mood. The continued expectant eyes’ of the porters that I might have some ‘spare leaves’ – I felt like a drug dealer, I gave them all of them.

I have equal measures of wonderment and relief that we have made it, especially with a nine-year-old daughter, not so much in tow, more running ahead. The Wife has led us to the iconic photographic point – you know the one I mean. The children now more interested in the Mother and baby Llama just to our right, which are now bathed in the smiles of their own mother. The place is deserted; it is seven in the morning, ideal for photography in the still. She is punctuating the endless pictures with sighs of contentment and flowery adjectives – ‘this is why we are here’. The children are getting restless and not sharing her excitement now. Then it happens, whilst the baby llama is content to feed from its mother’s milk. The Madonna lets out the loudest expulsion of mammalian wind we have ever heard – ever! At the same time her short tail rises up and levitates in the air momentarily, before comedically falling back to its resting position. The children fall with it, into uncontrollable fits of laughter, I have no option but to follow suit. The laughter is not echoed by The Wife at the end of her (rudely) interrupted pilgrimage. Now would be a good time to break open the unused oxygen cylinder.

Several years pass and my wife is relaying the tales of our year out in the kitchen to a friend. She is waxing lyrical about the Incan ruins, her highlight, just as both the now teenage children enter the kitchen.

“What you talking about?” enquires the eldest.

The wife knows best not to mention Machu Picchu, it has been code named ‘Old Peak.’ – the rough Quechuan translation into English.

“She was telling me about Machu Picchu, it sounds soo wonderful. You are so lucky to have been.”

“Did she tell you about the Llamas?” The children look at each other trying to suppress something.

“No, what about the Llamas?” she lightly demands looking at The Wife, whom is shaking her head rhythmically from side to side.

Then they’re off again, transported back, memories underlined by laughter, and I have little choice again, but to join in.

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Madonna and child!

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#71: Evolving biodiversity. The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. Travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

06 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by thewritingimp in children, family, fiction, gap year, holidays, humour, south America, thewritingIMP, travel, Uncategorized, wildlife, writing

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Brexit, Galapagos, iguanas, land tortoises, Lonesome George, penguins, photographs, xenophobia

 

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Guayaquil in Ecuador is a pleasant enough place next to the Pacific; some have said it has an edge to it. You can’t take your gun into a restaurant (or roller skates – Have you ever been threatened with a roller skate?) – That may suggest a slight edginess, (or an American High School disco!), but it seems fine to us. It has a nice coastal frontage, and the large numbers of land iguanas in Bolivar Park are well worth a visit, nothing says South America like feeding an iguana fruit, snorting cocaine, reading a Marquez book, toting your gun on roller skates during your main course and shouting random lines from Speedy Gonzales – I may have made the last parts up, or read them in a Hunter S Thompson book!

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Before we have come away, we have all written down one ‘dream’ thing we want to do, think of an achievable bucket list with one item on – tick, where’s the number for Dignitas! Everyone’s done his or hers now apart from me. I remember like yesterday getting a new Parker pen for Christmas in the sixth form and then setting about my A level Biology evolution assignment. I fell into it like you might fall into a fiction book, lost. Only momentarily being distracted by the young neighbourhood kids singing up at me “Pindus, success on a plate for you” This was a slight derivation on an advert at the time for Findus fish fingers – funny, the storage unit of the mind! I remember thinking then of all the places in the world I’d like to go, this is A number one, top of the pile (kick your legs in the air)… The Galapagos Isles – So good they named it after the old Spanish word for saddle, due to the shape of the giant tortoises backs’. So I told The Boy he was in charge on the mainland and left them behind, ‘Hideous Kinky’ as that maybe.

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The Galapagos lie 1000km west of the Ecuadorian coast and is part of the nation of the earth’s belt. This is where I have to check myself a little, have some measure, and not write a novella on the home of evolution. On landing we get shown to the 20-birth cruiser that will be home for the week ahead. We are all introduced to one another and the crew, Diago, the guide for the week is very charming and knowledgeable. I’m sharing a birth with a bohemian Italian, Fernando, he can speak four languages fluently. He shares a story about Heathrow Airport when I tell him I’m English. He has passed through there a few weeks previous. “I went up to the international help desk and asked them, “Do you speak Italian?” “No” the young woman replied, “French?”. “No”. “German?”. “No”. Exasperated he asks, “What languages can you speak?” “Oh, I can speak English!”She says like it’s a major achievement for her. “But it says this is an international help desk, what happens if people can’t speak any English?” “I can’t  help them then!” “Ok, let’s talk in English.”This is only one reason why Brexit was such a bad idea.

We take small boats around from the main town port of Santa Cruz to a natural mangrove nursery. The amount of biodiversity is enormous, I will avoid mentioning all the animals, but just on that first brief trip we observed; blue-footed boobies, land and marine iguanas, fire lizards, sea lions, Sally-Lightfoot crabs, bottlenose dolphins, manta rays, frigate birds, baby sharks, Galapagos hawk, lava herons, oyster catchers, storm petrol, green and hawksbill turtles. It is, bloody amazing!

The next morning we are up early to go and see the giant land tortoises, this is a mini bus ride and I sit next to Diago and naively  and slightly pleadingly ask, “We will see them, won’t we.” “If we don’t, it will be the first time ever we haven’t.”As we pull away from the small town (village), he casually points without speaking, to three we pass by the side of the road. Then as we pull off the tarmacked road and bump down the track, we have a comedic moment were a giant tortoise, this is four foot high, refuses to leave the track when the driver bibs the horn, and four of us have to alight to lift a 200kg turtle out of the way! We are heading to a watering hole and there are another fifteen there, several even bigger than lazy one we have met.

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You can never tire of seeing a giant tortoise, it’s like a cross between ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and ‘Around the world in 80 Days’. Their tastiness was almost their downfall, somewhere near 200, 000 were eaten; even Darwin ate them! But how did such enormous tortoises get from the mainland? Have a think about that for a second (?), they can weigh up to 400 kg! [Have you finished thinking – you’re only cheating yourselves!] One possible explanation – a now defunct land bridge from the mainland, but that is incredibly unlikely. The accepted theory is they swam!! Hey up, I hear you say in a Yorkshire accent. You would, and I did, think they would do the opposite of swimming, sinking without grace, so in 1923 William Beebe, a naturalist, threw an enormous one in the sea and watched as it “floated buoyantly!” He was astonished apparently, and so am I. So the most popular theory goes like this; turtles can float, pregnant turtle falls into the sea on the mainland, floats/swims/gets carried by strong easterly ocean currents and when she climbs out she has an island archipelago named after a body.

There are many great aspects to the boat, but falling asleep after lovely food and beer/wine and waking up at another new island in the Galapagos is the best. It was on the first Island – Bartolome, this is where my stills camera plopped into the sea, just after we had been to spot white-tipped sharks over the headland, on the opposite bay. On the sandy beach that also had the largest male sea lions I have ever seen. I excitedly spotted Galapagos penguins in the surf, so in my excitement to film tropical penguins and get my video camera out, the other camera, plopped out of the camera bag, and failed to work ever again, even the memory card followed suit, this is why there are no photos of The Fat Peruvian of Peru! Then to top it all, by the time I get the video camera cranked up, the penguins have gone. Out of the bad comes the good (positive peace), this meant I could only record everything with the video camera, and consequently have lots of better footage.

Some on board are not bothered about snorkelling around the iconic Pinnacle Rock, but I’m not missing out. So I set off on my own, the penguins are shooting and speeding around me in the warm water. I have no one to share it with, and amazingly none of the others see them, it was after the triumph of this I spot a very large murky figure in the water ahead, it is enormous, and the shape shouts one thing: shark! Fucking BIG shark!! And it appears to be getting bigger as it leaves the murk twenty metres away. ‘Cling to other people’, ‘make yourself bigger’, there is no one, just me. A twelve stone bloke, how big can I make myself? – it is not a great white nasty, it’s a male sea lion, weighing in at about a ton, we have been told not to approach them as they can be very dangerous. It fixes me in its eye-line, transfixes me, and moves towards me, whilst never taking its eyes from mine, it nudges me deliberately on the left shoulder and carries on. I’d rather it be a sea lion than an enormous hungry shark, but not much can scare me, I’ve been to prehistoric island of Komodo!

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On our next excursion we come across a group of German photographers taking pictures, pretty much of everything, one appears to be snapping rocks. Diago tells me of one trip he ran for photographers, again German, they took 2,000 photos a day! 14,000 by the end, spent all nighty editing them down to just thousands, can you imagine, “Here’s a photo of an iguana, here’s another photo of an iguana, and another, just another 700 to go.”

Lonesome George, the last giant Galapagos turtle (died June 2012).

We visit the Darwin Research Conservation Centre on our last day, I’m keen to meet the legendary Gorgeous George, originally when he was discovered, the last of a sub-species from Pinta Island, each island has their own sub-species, not much swimming had appeared to be going on, why risk it? He’s gorgeous mainly because of alliteration only, originally he was Lonesome George. He’s a legend in his own lunchtime, he’s up there with Harriot, the female Giant Tortoise Darwin brought back on HMS Beagle in 1836 (died 2005) that ended up in Australia, and also metaphorically in an upward direction in heaven that are connected now. They have been throwing ‘sexy’females of other subspecies in with him since 1971, he died in 2012, but I can only conclude two possibilities; firstly, GG is xenophobic and will only make the beast with two-saddles with a Pinta female, or, he’s a homosexual. He took the genes with him, it was a lot of pressure to bear, he was well over a hundred years old. I hope the Anglo-Saxon race doesn’t depend on me to bring forth the fruit of my loins at that (un)ripe age with lots of tourists ‘doggedly’ exalting words of encouragement! Donald Trump appears to be in charge of that now! (I did read on the internet that he is thinking of banning anyone without a spray tan from all public places, as that’s where his random thought generator stopped whilst he lost interest on Twitter the night before! It must be true as its unreal news: unreal is the new real!)

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I buy a lovely photograph of three iguanas on the beach at Bartolome the night before I fly out, it is just three iguanas among the hundreds I saw, but every time I stop to look at it I can see beyond it to the white-tipped sharks, tropical penguins like arrows in the water, Pinnacle Rock and a massive belligerent sea lion giving me a territorial nudge.

 

All Galapagos iguanas eat vegetation, the marine iguana consumes only algae – this is very unusual in the animal world, a vegetarian lizard. They are amazing animals, to regulate their salt intake from the sea water they sneeze concentrated brine out of their nostrils, it is worth going there just to see this. And after the amazing ‘BBC Planet Earth’: iguanas vs snakes, that maybe another reason, the most amazing piece of documentary making ever (although some of it is staged!), watch it if you have never seen it, you will remember it for the rest of your lives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3OjfK0t1XM

I see everything and more in the Galapagos, the only ones missing from my Eye-Spy book of Galapagos animals is the hammerhead shark and the flightless cormorant.

The Galapagos Islands are amazing. It is not only me with a degree in Ecology that feels this way, everyone agrees it’s been amazing. The only two other experiences people on board say gazump this is walking to Everest Base Camp and the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil.

On my return to England I am in the NHS system to get my left dislocating shoulder sorted out, and on my first visit I tell the consultant about how I dislocated it in Australia and how an aggressive sea lion also had a go. The next time I visit him he has scheduled me to be his last appointment before lunch, and he explains, “Tell more about the Galapagos Islands, I want to go.” I explain and advise him further that if you’re going that far, you have to go to the Amazon Rain Forest as well, that will also blow you away. The next time I see him after my shoulder has been operated on (not by him), he tells me he has booked both… he will not have regretted it, I’m absolutely certain of that.

Next time: Swimming with the Piranhas.

All the missing travel blogs can be found on https://www.goodreads.com/author/dashboard

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

My latest book: Hull, Hell & Homecomings, is out later this year to coincide with Kingston upon Hull being the 2017 UK City of Culture.hull-hell-and-homecomings-8

I write books. You can buy any of them at very reasonable prices here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

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#63 Kangaroos on the Lawn, Satin Bowerbird in the garden. The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. Travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

11 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by thewritingimp in Australia, children, family, food, gap year, holidays, humour, thewritingIMP, travel

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kangeroos, satin bowerbird, Canberra, Australian parliament, hospitals, Old Tom, utopia, siblicide, Peter Carey, Bill Bryson,

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Sydney seemed to sprawl indefinitely but eventually we are out and on the country roads again – it feels good, through Wollongong – which means ‘Whiteman piss off’ in the local Aboriginal language, or just ‘The Gong’ to local interlopers.

We are heading to Batemans Bay to see a friend of close friends, Peter (real name), just to say hello as we have strict orders from them that we must visit him. He lives in the same house they used to live in just outside Batemans Bay in a lovely spot called Malloneys Beach. A beautiful house virtually on the beach, only a large kangaroo occupied municipal fifty-metre verdant lawn separates the two. When we eventually arrive there is a Mob – this is the correct collective noun for kangeroos – and it sort of sums them up. kangeroos have a strange expression; half startled: half belligerent! I half expect them to say, ‘Listen carefully, this is how it works Pommy, you don’t hassle us, we don’t hassle you. Oh, and that counts for your excitable kids as well!’They remind me of the story of the Italian tourists travelling through the outback in a jeep that hits a large male, take your pick from buck, boomer, jack or old man. The kangaroo looks dead, so they start dressing it with designer goods; Armani jacket, Rolex watch, a gold necklace, etc… but this old man was not dead, only stunned and as they are doing their photoshoot Jack comes round and bounces off into the night wearing all their lavish trinkets… this buck was definitely a boomer!

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You know you will always love the friends of your own best friends, and Peter is no different. After all the introductions (Peter is an enthusiastic History Teacher in the local High school), he sorts beds out for us all, we protest and say we’ll find somewhere in town, he is genuinely offended. He leaves us the run of the house and goes out.

It is a great spot in The Marramarang National Park with its abundant Gum trees,  we try hard to spot Koalas, but fail. It affords the amenities of Batemans Bay alongside the beauty of the forest and the coast, Pebbly Beach is the next beach down, another beautiful spot, where mobbing Rosellas are plentiful. In the garden is a Satin Bowerbird, like most creatures in Australia it is unusual, this particular animal’s unusualness is not its appearance. What this miscreant does is collet blue things, (I’m not making this up!) to attract a mate, blue plastic, blue bottle lids, blue movies, Picasso paintings, ballpoint pens, blue clothes pegs and blue flowers – it is the last two that especially pisses the locals off, the guy next door is a high-ranking ex-government official; the sort if he were American or British would be surrounded by men wearing sunglasses, black suits and earpieces, carrying concealed weaponry and looking nervous. He has taken a particular dislike to the Bird of satinness. Like Peter, he appears to know very little about the avian annoyance. He tells me its mating call grates on him, which having heard it, must sound like the call of a gathering of small children that have assembled to mock his decades of power, my interpretation! I can tell you no more as I have signed a confidentiality contract, and they would make it look like an accident.

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I know about the Satin Bowerbird, as I have taught it, I’m much more excited to see it than the locals. I think my enthusiasm annoys him as much as the blue collector!

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Batemans Bay is the nearest coastline to Canberra. Canberra is a bizarre place, it is so spread out that you have to drive virtually everywhere within the city, and no one appears to live there, well, when the government aren’t sitting. It is equidistant between Melbourne and Sydney, and when two cities that both think they are the capital can’t agree where to position parliament, it only leaves one location. We stumble across an oil painting of our neighbour; it is just missing a faint bowerbird in a tree in the background. I think Canberra is based on every 1960’s Sci-fi utopia, it is soulless, it shouldn’t be, it is actually quite beautiful, but it has no soul, not even the main camp chamber of the parliament can lift it – it has to be a gay architect’s idea of revenge!

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We visit the Science Museum and The War Museum (on the orders of Peter), but someone has kidnapped the people, maybe this is why making utopias is a bad idea, no one wants to live in them, too prescriptive and dictatorial? Either that or a plutonium bomb has leaked out.

We have our first taste of what we think is the outback at Braidwood, it feels like the outback at this stage of our travels – a pretty Wild West town, again with very few people in it. I wonder if they think we are the aliens?

One night Peter takes the kids fishing from the beach and catches a decent sized mullet for our tea. The Girl thinks this is brilliant, the fruits of the sea onto the plate in an hour. It is good for the kids to see the real connection between food and the platter.

We say our goodbyes; we have stayed 6 nights, reluctant to move on as we are having such a great time. The Wife and I discuss the fact that someone as lovely as Peter should have a decent woman in his life, as he has made no secret he is looking, but the only free females of breeding age are Kangeroos, and you can only marry those in mining towns! Soon after we leave he meets a lovely woman, they come over to stay with us in England and they believe they have conceived in our house, the rest as they say, is history, a lot of time, money, effort and sleepless nights.

I always read at least one book about the country I am going to visit as well as the guidebooks. I have read Peter Carey’s True History of the Ned Kelly Gang and Bill Bryson’s Down Under and it is through reading the latter I know where we are bound next: Eden

Old Tom was a mercenary misanthropic Killer whale whose skeletal remains are the basis for the towns imaginatively named: Eden Killer Whale Museum. The onshore whaling station, the countries once longest running, was founded by a carpenter Alexander Davidson and his grandson ‘Fearless’ George Davidson – fearless is another way of saying certifiably cracked, his mates called him ‘Crazy Fish’ but not to his face. Old Tom (and his pod) would help herd passing Baleen Whales into the bay. Old Tom would thrash around in the bay as the migrating Baleens passed pretending to be in distress to attract them from their migratory course. The Davidsons would kill them, then leave the whales anchored in the bay so that scallywag Tom et al could eat the tongue and lips, that’s all they wanted! I know it sounds like I’m making this up (again), but it’s true – honest! Here check it out http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-legend-of-old-tom-and-the-gruesome-law-of-the-tongue/ I did my own research into ‘Crazy Fish’ Davidson, deceased. Old Tom was classed as the leader, and he kept his epicurean verve for lips and tongues for four decades.

old-tom-eden

Old Tom still looking quite pleased with himself!

Although I was engrossed by the museum, the children have found an old record player with a stash of 70’s disco and pop, The Boy is holding up an ABBA LP like it is the voice box recorder from an unadvanced spacecraft. “How does it work?” It looks a hundred years old now; they are amazed, they are laughing at it like a couple of bullies from the future. But I remind the boy, feeling slightly affronted and the protector of times past that I once took him to the Science Museum in Manchester and pointing at a 1950s cylinder Hoover and asked him what it was for, for him to reply: ‘Is it the first mobile phone!’’How mobile would that be?’ ‘Two of you could carry it!’I have to be dragged away by The Wife feigning hunger, it could be a double bluff, but at times like this I recall the beautiful elephants of Kuala Lumpur Zoo ( https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6946206-28-a-woman-in-bloom-travails-through-life-sometimes-avoiding-the-p ), and cannot risk it, the kids have become bored with the singing discs.

We set off later than planned for Melbourne, The Wife is impatient because of this we don’t have a proper breakfast – this is never a good idea. Everyone is ratty and I suggest we stop somewhere and get a bite to eat. There will be more choice in Melbourne, let’s keep going – The Wife is driving, The Wife is in charge (I may wear the trousers, but she picks them out and I iron them!) I have given the kids a large apple each in the back. The Boy has eaten his and then stolen his little sisters, he doesn’t want it, he just wants to torment her. She is maybe pinching him or using cruelty as a revenge weapon, I cannot detect from the front. She is very skilled at pushing his buttons, her favourite is to puff her cheeks out and rub an imaginary large belly – he’s not fat, but it annoys him, fuelled by his hormones, she will do this from behind the safety of her father! He threatens even greater levels of punishment in ever increasing threatening gangster tones. “I’m going to slap you up,” “just wait until this car stops; I’m going to kill you.” The Wife has already snapped, then he threatens her with siblicide again and I snap.  “Give me the bloody apple,” I demand as I shot my arm into the back at just the right angle for the side of the heavily cushioned seat to spring the ball form the socket of my shoulder. “SHIT!” “What, what is it?” Demands The Wife. “My arm’s dislocated.” She knows I’m being serious, I’ve done them so many times. The one that has decided to limp with gravity was due to be operated on before we came away after a dislocation during a football game, but I have put it off due to our travails.61596251d4dd7bed650fc35174cde4

I’m beside the busy road trying with all my might, fighting the pain to snap it back in against a tree like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. If I can get it back in before the muscles go into spasm, I have a chance, it is a stubborn bastard, it pops out easy, but is always reluctant to pop back in. A guy walking his dog is watching the pantomime from a bridge and ambles down to assist. He points us in the direction of the nearest hospital in very nearby Traralgon. The Latrobe Regional Hospital is deserted when we get there, they ask me for insurance, which I tell them I have, but then never again ask to see it. There appears to be a lot of bored medical staff glad to have something to do, I’m surrounded by so many looking at me like I’m a member of the royal family. They can’t get it back with Nitrous Oxide, so have to knock me out. When I awake it is at least back where it should be, and should hopefully endeavour to stay there.

I’m annoyed with myself both physically, psychologically and parentally. I hardly ever lose my temper; I’m like a laissez faire Dalai Lama on holiday. This injury messes things up and I know I have to be even more careful with it for the next three months. I was lucky we were literally ten minutes from a state of the art hospital; it will not be the same in South America. The family rally around, The Boy is feeling particularly guilty: someone has to have the blame, we live in a blame culture, but annoyingly the blame ultimately lies with me, and that never sits easy, even when all your sockets are in their correct positions and you are being fed chocolate and pizza!

 

Next time: Don’t scratch below the surface.

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

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#56: Blowing down Backroads Heading South. The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. Travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by thewritingimp in children, family, gap year, holidays, humour, travel

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Penguins, Marlborough, Wellington, Fifty Shades of Grey, Moeraki Boulders, Dunedin, Albatross, Cadburys chocolate, the house of pain, BDSM

fairy penguins

Lots of wandering around Windy Wellington – officially the windiest city in the world. Decided on a coach tour to see all the capital, not quite realising how small it is! Museums, jumping off jetties, rock pools, National Museum (Te Papa), the kids were made to catch up on their journals, the girl practised her times tables, the boy improved his reading age.

 

I will say this now as a disclaimer – everywhere on the South Island of New Zealand is spectacularly beautiful – so you can add as many superlatives and flowery adjectives as you wish to any description on the island, you would have to endeavour to find a land fill site or an asbestos factory to try and disprove that premise; but the natural world can literally take your breath away, and you have to fight to get it back – you get the idea.

P C sound

Turned off the Cook Straights to the beautiful Prince Charlotte Sound. The kids were made to drink in the views but became restless quickly.

However small Picton is at the other end we managed to drive the wrong way as the expletive laden wife directed her volley of disgust to a deaf lorry driver and our first encounter of the South Island was a car park at a dead end.

Through Marlborough Country, Blenheim, Seddon to the majestic coast road and past Kaikoura, the occasional dwelling or hamlet, stopping to marvel at the fur seals basking on the rocks. We see our first sign that states: ‘Welcome to the House of Pain’ as we start down the sparsely populated road. The wife and I debate what this means, it is painted on a brick wall in one foot high white paint. We can only surmise it is cheap advert for S & M at an establishment you probably wouldn’t want to frequent even if you were that way inclined. At this stage it is not BDSM, this is pre-Fifty Shades of Grey and we are both sexual civilians not prepared to get involved in collateral damage.

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In the morning when we set off and spot yet another sign offering hospitality and pain in an unknown dwelling.

 

On the short journey down the coast to Dunedin we missed the Moeraki Boulders, which I had researched in the guide book and was not about to pass by, so we double back 12 km to see them. The Boy went into a moanathon for the entire 12 kms.

“What are we going back to see, some rocks in the sea?”

“Special spherical boulder balls boy. Perfectly spherical like lots of giants’ testicles that have grown over millions of years, or washed ashore from the canoes as the Maori legend suggests. Grown almost organically over millions of years in a mystic sea!”I retort summarising and paraphrasing the guidebook.

“So basically some rocks then!”This groaning loops around and around until I lose patience and tell him to reserve judgement until he as observed said geological features. “Rocks,” he concludes. “ They will be worth the detour, won’t they?” the wife chips in. “See what you’ve done, you’ve infected your mother with your malignant cynicism. Like I’m the Rock-Master General for New Zealand and not the one prepared, and the only one allowed to read the guide book in advance.”

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The tide was low enough to expose the Spherical boulders, and the boy could not contain his excitement as he hopped from one to another, then when I pointed to a whale far offshore, too distant for an amateur like me to identify, he almost burst with excitement, followed by deflation when he could not spot the large sea mammal. In the end we had to pull him off them as the crepuscular light crept over us. Without sounding too much like an episode of The Wonder Years, he learnt a valuable lesson that day; that sometimes you have to trust the authority figure to take you out of the way to the shore of the globular orbs.

In the world of Physics there is a ‘hilarious’ insult that is used by fellow Physicists, and that is to call someone of displeasure an ‘SB’ – a spherical bastard, as no matter what direction you look at them, they are still a bastard! Which for your average Physicist, with poor social skills, no life-partner, poor personal hygiene, and a vast collection of Sci-Fi (and more visceral) movies, is quite funny!

 

We arrive in Dunedin at six in the evening. I’m desperate to go around the coast and watch the Blue Penguins returning to their burrows, but I was gazumped by a barbeque – cute penguins can wait, grilled food cannot! – I only know this by looking in my journal, I can recall virtually everything we did in Dunedin and the surrounding area, but I have just looked the holiday park up and it still doesn’t ring any synapses. After a while the holiday parks merge into one, especially if you travel the south island twice, like we did, and could have quite easily set off immediately for a third time. As always family democracy dictates we can all choose one activity in any place we stop. The girl is bouncing around on her bed when she hears the wife and me discussing the Cadbury’s factory tour. “It won’t be like Willy Wonka, you know that don’t you?””Will it have lots of chocolate?” “Yes, there’ll be plenty of chocolate.” The bouncing continues and the concentric vibrations of, “Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate” radiate out and make us all laugh. She is punching the air, she’s an addict, an exuberant addict – I think she is imagining the gift shop already! It wasn’t Willy Wonka’s, but when they released a ton of chocolate through a silo, the girl informs us this is how she wants to die, not swim, drown in it – she is a bloody addict. The coroner’s report is going to make great headlines in The Daily Mail: ‘Parents Guilty of Assisted Suicide of their own Daughter in Confectionary Compulsion!’ There is lots of free chocolate and we leave with enough to keep her going until rehab.

c w of Choc

Dunedin is often referred to as the ‘Edinburgh of the South’ due to the large number of Scottish settlers in the mid nineteenth century; Dunedin is the old Gaelic name for Edinburgh.

royal alb

After lunch we move onto The Royal albatross Sanctuary at the end of Otago Peninsula, specifically at Taiarora Head. This is the only mainland-breeding colony in the world. The guided tour takes us through the woefully inadequate Second World War gun emplacements next to the colony, which would have been fine if the Japanese had attacked on surfboards and inflatable dinghies! The Royal albatross is the second biggest albatross species in the world with a wing span of nearly ten feet, they glide majestically on the wind, but landing provides its own problems for such a heavy bird. I expect the scouse vultures from Bedknobs and Broomsticks to appear on the few occasions we observe landings. The boy gets very excited as we leave the car park as one is perched on a gatepost, he demands we get out and take a photo and it is difficult to tell who is photobombing who, but one of them is more indifferent than the other!

y e panguins

We move on a little further down the peninsula to the Yellow Eyed Penguin Sanctuary and get close up and personal with the most endangered penguin on the globe. The staff are very passionate as they take us around the labyrinth of tunnels dug into the sand. We spot our first Sea lion on the beach. It is early evening, the blustery wind is making it cold, we are waiting around to see the Blue Fairy Penguins. This is what I’ve really come to see, though I must admit the Royal albatrosses were amazing. The kids are getting bored and don’t want to venture out in the cold until there is a very high probability of a sighting. I’m out in the cold (this is the NZ summer!) talking to a young female student, she is a volunteer as are many others that help out, she assures me we will see many without having to venture far from the road. While we are waiting I ask her about the ‘House of Pain’ signs we have seen on the coastal road, (it probably comes over as a creepy chat-up line, but I have reassured her that my family are in car out of view somewhere!) She informs me, that this refers to the old Carisbrook Rugby Stadium, The Drum, and more specifically the team that plays there. The rugby union team The Highlanders, which now play in the newer Forsyth Barr stadium – the world’s only fully roofed natural turfed venue, apparently. Both the wife and I are disappointed, it would have been an edgy statement for a conservative New Zealand, but instead I picture the sad rugby fanatic going to the effort of painting his signage (it will be a man!) under the cover of darkness, the complete SB.  I wonder now if the new Stadium will be called the ‘BDSM Shades of Green’Venue?, or for the sake of advertising it may just have to be referred to as the ‘Interpersonal Dynamics’ Forsyth Barr Stadium!

b f pens

The Volunteer spots the small penguins in the dark, how?, I have no idea, popping out of the sea. I go and retrieve my family unit from the enema, making promises of definite sightings, they are slightly reluctant, but it is my turn to be enthusiastic. They take a long time to arrive, waddling up steep sandy hillside, clumsy birds away from the comfort of the ocean, but eventually they appear around us and scuttle past to their consolatory burrows. It is invigorating to be in amongst them, even the wife gets excited; it’s only normally mountains in the great outdoors that have this effect on her. We brave the cold for as long as we can before it beats us back to the warmth of the people-carrier and home. It has been a fantastic day, life affirming, everyone is wearing a smile and talking about the best bits, the chocolate factory seems a long time ago now, but the girl remembers it and reluctantly puts it as her number one. The boy puts the ambivalent Royal albatross as his, I pick the Blue Fairy Penguins, as I have seen David Attenborough doing the self-same thing and the wife states; “The best part of the day was sharing all these events with my family.” – She’s a wise old bird sometimes!

Next time: I’ll be bach!

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

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Tags: Penguins, Marlborough, Wellington, Fifty Shades of Grey, Moeraki Boulders, Dunedin, Albatross, Cadburys chocolate, the house of pain, BDSM,

#54: Maori, and Ivory. The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. Travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

21 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by thewritingimp in children, family, gap year, holidays, humour, travel, writing

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Bay of Islands, Cape Reinga, sandboarding, chocolate, Rotorua, exploitation, Waitangi Treaty Grounds, Flagstaff Hill, Cool Hand Luke, addiction, Bill Bryson,

rotu

Rotorua is the first place on the New Zealand bucket list; Lauren takes us there and gives us a guided tour even though she has seen it many times before. ‘Rotten-rua’she calls it, and it hits you before you arrive. The sulphurous whiffs only add to the magic for us. You can never tire of climbing into crystal clear water that looks cool but transpires to be pleasantly warm. What can wear a little thin is the umpteenth time someone asks, ‘you farted?’ – A great place for the chronically flatulent!

geez

The next day our family visit volcanic White Island by boat trip – It is a landscape from a Sci-fi movie. We step from the boat in our gas masks, which I think are a little ‘health & safety’ over the top, but they add to the experience. The multi-coloured terrain is an exhilarating walk to the super-heated bubbling pools in the distance. I endeavour to explain how pressure super-heats the water, as the kids endeavour to exit left. We all survive, with room to spare!

Wiamana is outside Whakatane in the country, Maori country. It is where Lauren grew up and I have heard lots of stories about the sleepy place. The family ran the local convenience store for years and it is like something from the Wild West on a bank holiday. Alan has come with us all and is regaling us with fascinating stories. He used to have a single engine plane to get about, to visit friends further away. There is no law out here; it is lawless without being worryingly so. Lauren drove the family car from the age of thirteen, when I say drove, she would often go and pick Alan up from a pub in Whakatane after he had played the Hammond organ in there for the night – sensible enough to not drive drunk, but then being picked up by an emerging teenager! No one batted an eye-lid, can you imagine in the ultra-safe, risk averse countries some of us live in?

We stop at the tiny Maori cemetery on the way up into hills, on the way to swim in a river. At this point I don’t know the significance – it is where Alan will be laid to rest in a few weeks, among his ex-customers, neighbours, Maori friends, Maori Chiefs.

We leave the next day to get back to Don and Lauren’s house. I am certain I will see Alan again. Years always go by, and I always see him again.

90 mile bg

After having the car serviced we are set to venture the short distance north to use Kerikeri in The Bay of Islands as a base. We stay at a backpacking hostel, as we do in most major cities on our antipodean travels. To the young independent travellers we meet, we are ‘cool’ and our children are told regularly, ‘you’re so lucky.’ Kerikeri is a lovely place, steeped in history, there’s something here for everyone, native and foreign. The picturesque Russell is short boat ride across the sheltered bay, or in our case in an amphibious craft, or yellow duck, the ones that tend to sink quite regularly, and worryingly, in England, more so when you think there’s only about three working in the entire tourist trade! Ours doesn’t bother and the exuberant tour guide gets us all to blow our decoy duck whistles to the slight embarrassment of the wife and the delight of the children, well, we’re tourists.

ship nz

Russell is a beautiful spot, but it was not always so, Charles Darwin described it as ‘the hell hole of the Pacific.’ The main industry when he docked there in The Beagle in 1835 was prostitution and grog shops, and just to add a little balance, there was a mission. Now the only thing incarcerated in the original tiny prison/police station is a lawnmower.

russell

A short walk up the hill to the church allows you to find the bullet holes in the walls and graves from the fighting between natives and the British. Across the far side of the bay is Waitangi Treaty Grounds (Flagstaff Hill) where the historic document was signed between the Maoris and the British, historic because it remains the only treaty of peace and mutual benefit between an imperial invading force and indigenous people! Of course the invading Europeans ripped the natives off, especially for land, but there is plenty of it, but look at how other indigenous peoples have been ‘treated’ by there more powerful invaders. Native American death toll is somewhere between 80-100,000,000 (I put the noughts in to emphasise the scale), and 20,000 Native Australians died at the hand of the white man, but that was mainly because there wasn’t many of them to start with and they tend to be dispersed to areas the white man didn’t/doesn’t want. So however unfair the original divvying up of the land in the surrounding area was in 1840, there is a meme of harmony that is tangible in NZ life, that is not by accident, that is due to dialogue and trust, and a piece of paper. Let’s not kid ourselves; had New Zealand been nearer to Europe and of more strategic significance, and not on the other side of the world, things may have been a lot different for the Maoris, as it was exactly the same authorities that wreaked havoc in North America and Australia!

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war canoe

We visit the world’s longest canoe down by the shore in the grounds, the war canoe with the unpronounceable name (Ngatokimatawhaorua), it is 35m long and can get you and 75 mates in for a paddle. I have seen this as a boy on Blue Peter (Children’s  programme) and been fascinated by it. On the hill next to the flagpole is the original mission treaty house, which is the oldest wooden building in the nation, from 1822. Lauren has told us on two occasions to go and actively seek out NZ’s oldest stone building –The Stone Store, and on our last day there we do so, it is an uninspiring square utilitarian store in the guise of a house that we have driven by it several times and been too uninspired to pass comment, it was finished in 1836, which in the scheme of things, is not that old really. The only redeeming feature it has a lovely location by the water. We practise our invented enthusiasm in case Lauren asks us about it. The wife and I have a discussion on what native people feel patriotic about, and conclude it would not be semi-old stone store building or a barn for us. After our travels, because of our travels, we have a friend over from Australia, and he walks around the centre of Manchester agog, looking at buildings that are more than 200 years old. Somethings you take for granted if you come from the ‘old world’.

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We are up early for a four-wheel drive bus tour to (almost) the furthest point of NZ, Cape Reinga. I’m looking forward to the 90 Mile beach, I’ve seen it many times on the tele and I like the idea of driving on a beach if not for 90 miles, at least a large part of the actual 64 miles it is. We stop to look at the magnificent Puketi Kauri Forest, which bores the kids, and seemed to have a similar effect on The Queen the last time she visited, judging by the rapidity of her walking, she did not appear interested in hugging a 2,000-year-old tree.

sbing

We are back on the coach and the next stop is sand boarding on the dunes at Te Paki. This gives me a realistic opportunity of breaking my neck and everyone else as well. The middle-aged tour guide/driver refuses to show us how to do it. We have already sand boarded into a lake next to Bethells Beach, but this dune is twenty times larger. I have very dodgy shoulders that dislocate if a sparrow farts in the distance; the right one stays in now due to an operation, but the left one is more subordinate. So I only have one objective as I’m pushed forward by the wife to make sure it is safe for our offspring – to try and keep my shoulders in their sockets. I clamp them, along with my arms to my body like I’m bungee jumping through hyperspace. As I’m inevitably launched into the air I keep my single objective in front of me. I land in the sand like dart, nearly breaking my neck, but my shoulders are still in place! Not helped as I struggle to my feet to start spitting sand unceremoniously,  I’m like a sedimentary court-jester there to amuse. I recover, and goaded by the children and watching other people, realising the idea is to not try and hospitalise yourself, I join the queue and glide with penguinesque grace (in my own mind). I put a big tick on the bucket list, and in the notes I write, enough!

seas meet

We climb up to the lighthouse at Cape Reinga and watch the mighty Pacific from the east fight against the plucky Tasman Sea from the west; the unsettled choppy waters are clear delineation, and a warning not to be foolish enough to get in. The Maori’s name it after a male and female respectively, what is happening as the two bodies of water meet, can only be classed as domestic violence! We stop at a gift shop on the way back to Kerikeri and purchase a kauri wood chopping board that I still treasure to this day as I prepare food.

tpoi

We visit the quirky Hundertwasser toilets in Kawakawa and I buy shares in the steam railway that I know I will never see a dividend from, but in times like these I ask myself, what would Bill Bryson do?

On our journey up to Kerikeri we have stopped at a hotel/pub in the middle of nowhere. A guy from Cornwall is the sole person in there. I wander around the pub looking at the black and white photos on the wall; there are a few from harsh farming times of the past, that do not encourage you to take up agriculture. I can only assume the people stood next to their farm machinery and implements did not know they were having their pictures taken, or off camera someone is pointing a semi-automatic weapon in their direction. There are many of rugby teams; I have no idea where you would get enough people around here to form a team, never mind one to actually play against. It reminds me of those two pub football teams in the Channel Isles that play each other every week of the season. I go back and get chatting to Cornish man. He explains he is only here in New Zealand for two years so he can get into Australia. He has been at this pub for months, I lean into him and whisper conspiratorially, “You’re not being held hostage, are you?” He laughs, which I take as a ‘no’. There has to be easier ways to get into Australia, surely? – stealing bread! They are throwing English-speaking people in normally. I wonder if he’s still there in the basement on a dirty mattress auditioning for a part in Saw 17, or whatever number it is now.

A few days previous we have visited a chocolate factory, the girl is obsessed, and in a reverse psychology strategy we have concocted, we have told her she can eat as much as she likes on the way back to Don and Lauren’s. Both her parents are hoping she will vomit and be cured of her addiction – sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind! She doesn’t believe us when we say it. She hits her first Cool Hand Luke  moment in Kawakawa and I offer to take her in to a newsagents to buy more supplies – the plan is working, but when I call her bluff and take her in she is in chocolate heaven and grabs more provisions! She stops masticating a couple of times, then she’s off again, she has won, she is officially an addict, and we are partly responsible, we are what is known in CAA circles (Chocoholic Addiction Anonymous) as ‘Parental Feeders’, we will probably end up in prison for historical feeder charges, except all the evidence has been consumed. We will cure her of her thumb sucking addiction by painting on a carcinogenic chemical (‘Stop-It’), banded in most developed countries in the world. We have come to the conclusion that more stick is needed, and much, much less chocolate-coated carrot!

monochrome imp all black

Next time:

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

I write books. You can buy any of them at very reasonable prices here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

 

#37 The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. The bimonthly travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by thewritingimp in children, gap year, travel, writing

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McLeod Ganj: The Lama’s home, naughty monks and the end of the rain brings puberty.

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Just a few years ago we gave up our jobs, seized the kids out of school, and exited left around the world for a year.

The Tibetan Buddhist enclave that is ‘in the cloud-ganga’ (there is ‘weed’ growing everywhere), was a big turning point in our year away. That was the juncture where we all exhaled, the same as when you go on a summer holiday and it takes you a few days to acclimatise, get your bearings and just relax into it; easier for us, the grown-ups; having travelled several times before; the children now happier, excitable. My daughter skipping about, eight at this stage, my son scouring the guide book for things to do. We had a simple rule when we stayed anywhere, everybody picked one thing they wanted to do, and we had to make time to do it: family democracy without the need of a voting system.

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The place could have that cathartic effect, surrounded by monks and people that want to associate with monks, maybe that’s why the Israelis were there? The rainy season seemed to end while we were here (not a metaphor), not before one last deluge. We were staying only three hundred yards from the centre, up a steep incline. The family unit had all gone off to eat, I was meeting them later at the tiny local cinema to watch ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, as I had been stuck down with what is never called anything but ‘the trots’ by my parents. My trotting was of a dressage nature the short distance to the toilet, but I wouldn’t have won any medals even with ribbons in my hair. Then it rained, like several dams bursting. Taxis couldn’t get up to the apartment due to a fallen tree so I risked it. I laughably had a brolly–little more than an ornament for the deluge to bully. Like a biblical scene the road turned into a river up to my ankles in just seconds, and by the time I had reached the cinema I was super-saturated. We plonked ourselves down at the very front of the thirty-seater auditorium, which looked as though it had been fashioned on an old jumbo jet. To the protestations of my daughter I took my sodden canvas trousers off and placed them on the bar of the exit door to drip metronomically away. She protested further, and I informed her: “No one’s going to come in now, the film’s about to start.” Allayed by parental confidence, she then directed me to rub her lower intestines as she had a stomach-ache. So, I’m sat in my damp undercrackers rubbing a small girls belly, when the fire exit flies open and a sneaky monk comes and sits next to me. The Girl is mortified, demanding I put my soaked britches back on. I inform her I’m not, and the monk is oblivious in a ‘world of pure imagination’.

The next day was our audience with the Lama himself. For a few dollars ($100) you can pop in and have a chat, or at least you used to be able to. We were all excited about this, what better way to spend a few minutes than with a lovely man that is on his twelve reincarnation, and hasn’t got a nasty bone in him. But he was a no-show, he had to go out of the country on business, a little rude, but we had no option but to forgive him. We wandered around the grounds and watched the Buddhist monks worshiping, and we were all shocked to see quite a few of the monks at the back talking and sharing images on mobile phones while the priest was giving a sermon–Well, when the cats away. I talked in church when I went once a month as a child, but I was not trying to come back with the top job, just picking up points for the scout patrol, and when boredom really set in, seeing how many prayer cushions we could collect undetected.

People use the expression surreal far too readily, but if you have played in a mountain stream with your kids while what seemed like every monk in North India washed their clothing around you, then strewn it out on the rocks to dry, while you disappear and reappear behind a small secret waterfall – that is somewhat surreal. Like the night before in the cinema as we exited, the monk had gone before the closing credits, a rampaging cow shot by on the narrow side street, which would have inflicted a nasty bovine injury if it had connected with us. I suppose the unusual becomes usual the more it happens.

My son joined the ‘Trot Club’ the day after. McLoed Ganj was the only place any of us got any food-based sickness in our three and a half months in India. I think we got ill from the unhygienically ‘washed’ plates from a street vendor, but the results are not back from the lab yet. There is a lot of fear about going to India and getting ill from the food, but if you are sensible, we ate hardly any meat and drank only bottled water. I lost nearly half a stone which allowed me to fit back into those budgie smugglers I bought when I was seventeen, which then mysteriously vanished, to rematerialize eleven months later.

My son had the first of his trilogy of his ‘screaming abdabs’, Sydney and Quito airports would complete the trilogy. Puberty was certainly about to wander into town, and he was probably ‘under the weather with the trots’ – as Philip Larkin and/or Alan Bennett may say? He was missing his close friends; his hormones were reaching out to his brotherhood across to the west. He stopped motionless in the deserted street and after an initial aforemath, he let loose with his teary emotional Shakespearean Roman emperor soliloquy:  “I just want to see Jamie… If I could just see him, just for 30 seconds, I would give all the money in the world, just for thirty seconds. If I could just see his face.” We are a little further down the incline and The Wife is already telling me not to laugh at him. He starts again, this time I expect him to fall to his knees and shake his fist at the God-of-missing-teenage-friends. We becalm him and tell him tomorrow we will make sure he speaks to Jamie on the phone and the internet. Jamie helps his psyche by informing him. “School’s really, really, shit. I wish I was travelling with you.” A repeat performance is mitigated by allowing at least an hours’ internet each day wherever possible. The Girl has been somewhat bemused by his street behaviour, and in a quiet moment alone with her the next day I ask her what she made of it: ‘He’s like a big baby.’ I explain that hormones are powerful devilish bastards, like an injured irate psychopath on crack just before payday, in child friendly eight-year old words way. Thinking now there may be more empathy for her elder sibling, she repeats her mantra: ‘He’s still like a big baby!’

The rains lifted, any reservations any of us had about our travails evaporated. We knew we had done the right thing coming away. We knew our older selves would thank our younger selves in the future, as we sit in our fattening pens, or watching the clock until our pensions kick in, or dribbling away in our old people’s home… or with our family gathered around our bed. I was once told a story by a friend whose uncle was on his last legs in hospital. “Any regrets, Uncle?” “Yeah, I wish I hadn’t spent three days in 1973 undersealing the bottom of a Ford Capri.”

The Wife is a great believer in mini retirements, lots of little ones along the way, that’s one of the main reasons we went ‘gapping’. If you are unfortunate enough to be born recently in Britain for example, you may never own your own home and you made be whipped and made to toil until you are 68! – If in fact you make it that far. Mini retirements are looking a lot more appetising now I would wager.

Next week: On the way to the Golden Temple.

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

BookCoverImage

Ian M Pindar writes books, and about himself in the third person sometimes, so it looks as though he has a huge team of dedicated professionals working around him. His latest book is in fact a novella and has the strange title of: ‘Foot-sex of the Mind’. It is not a Mills and Boon, but about finding out what is important in life far too late. It will take you four hours to read, or half the distance between  Shimla and McLoed Ganj by bus. http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

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#35 The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. The bimonthly travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

09 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by thewritingimp in children, gap year, travel, writing

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Last night I went to the theatre: The Lowry Salford to watch ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’. I received an email from The Wife in the morning to inform me she would like to attend the play, and there was only three days left in the run. She added, ‘I was going to buy you tickets for this for Christmas, but I didn’t get around to it!’ So it was left to me to sort it, and to be honest, I wasn’t that bothered having read the book twice, the second time to teach it to two English classes. I couldn’t really see how the play would not just be a rehashing of the book in a condensed form. The first surprise I had was the price of the tickets: £44 each! ($66!) This is when the first dilemma hit me and one I was to be interrogated on just as the boom of lights and sound system of the play exploded – there was no curtain.

“How much were the tickets?” the casual enquiry from The Wife.

“£44 quid each.”

“What! Do you mean £44 all together?”

“No, I mean £88 all together.”

“If I knew it was going to be that expensive I’d have told you not to have bothered.”

“That’s where I had a the dilemma. I did not want to be accused of being a ‘tight Yorkshire Get.’ ” She gives me a quizzical look and I believed in my mind she was deep in retrospection to all the times she has called me ‘a tight Yorkshire Git/Get.’ With money and The Wife it is not long before little adages such as the one last night appear. “Oh well, you can’t take it with you.” Then she is deep in thought and I think she is about to supplement her adage with another stock one, but, “They’re bloody expensive, but you would spend that on a football match I bet?” I go quite, silent condemnation. I try not to tell her the price of football tickets; it would no one any good apart from players on wage day.

“I hope it is good for that money. Clare’s sister said the second half was good.”

“What about the first half?”

“She slept all the way through it.” (Put your own exclamation mark in.)

“So the second half was better than when she was asleep in the middle of seventeen hundred people?” She ignores my comment.

“Clare enjoyed it.”

“Did she sleep through any of it?” She looks at me like I’m being sarcastic. “No, course not.”

“Just her sister snoring away.”

The play started, but not before I had explained the pricing structure of the tiers in the theatre. I’d only managed to get these tickets as someone had rung through and cancelled just before I contacted the theatre, which saved me further financial accusation of non-prudency.

The play is amazing. It is worth watching for the post-modern computer-projector-LED wizardry inside the space age cube set and stage direction alone. What I thought would be a bit of a slog, shot by. I recommend the over-priced tickets, maybe as a treat, for say, a Christmas present to yourself.

We had parked the car on a side street in Salford Quays. I knew full well that you needed a parking permit and informed the The Wife so as we parked up. She was more concerned about not getting stuck in the traffic leaving the car park. The inevitable happened. Add another £35 to the night out and the hassle of paying it, something I visualised as a Christmas present to myself to alleviate the stress as I did so. There’s always a moral, or at least a lesson to be learnt, or several in this case, the main one being: Don’t buy your own Christmas presents, Christmas is expensive enough as it is!

The area of the blog that always attracts the most comment is always religion, and always from the religious, atheists don’t seem to be bothered, but the religious go out of their way to defend ‘their’ religion. I don’t want to get into that again. The second area that unusually attracted the most comment was when I very briefly mentioned our family gap year. Marking the dwarf in the football blog received a few enquiries and I will enlighten you with that story at some point, but I know a lot of people don’t like football full stop.

The blog in question was about being middle class, the one thing I wanted to be when I grew up (present tense now), not for the money, for the knowledgeable enlightenment–maybe in the next reincarnation! Without repeating myself, people could be divided into two groups; those ‘conservative’ ones that were concerned about the children’s education–and how on earth would they be educated away from the marvellous status quo of the English education system. To these I would have said: “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land,” but I did not know that Hellen Keller quote then, instead I just thought, ‘so they don’t turn out as scared and as trapped as you are.’ Then there was the others, ‘you lucky bastards group’, that openly proclaimed they were green with jealousy. Fortunately both the schools of the children granted their blessings, but we’d have gone anyway.

On the education issue, when we set off The Girl (Y4) was eight and The Boy (Y8) was twelve. They were both made to read every day, complete a journal and The Girl had to do maths (plural my American friends) as well, which she needed boosting in, ‘intervention’ as they say in the teaching game. I would be lying if I said they did this every day, but they always made up for any missing work. When we set off The Boy would have to be tortured and bribed to read – not allowed a Playstation until he could read up to his chronological age, which at the time was eight–this would be a sure fire way to boost the reading ages of the developed world, especially of boys if all parents implemented this. At one point we paid him 2p/page to read last thing at night: ‘come feed the brain, tuppence a page, tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a page!’ On many occasions in remote areas and late at night there was little else to do apart from games and talking. I will say BBC World News was always welcomed however depressing, so ‘The Boy’ defaulted to reading books, at the start he was being forced to read easy books like Horowitz’s Stormbreaker series, by the end he was devouring grown-up novels and had to be prized away from his tomes so we could switch the light off to slumber. So on the education front his reading age advanced about three years within less than a year and ‘The Girl’ came back conversant in her times-tables.

A study out of America a few years ago claimed that one of the reasons why middle class kids do better than working class ones is because in the long summer holidays they get taken to museums and on foreign holidays. On that premise the children had a lifetime of holidays in one go.

People always wonder if it was hard travelling with the children, the simple answer is: no. They get in the grove, and after the initial shock of arriving in Delhi in the middle of night to find to ourselves in the scrummage of passport control, wild rabid-like dogs outside the airport building, Geckos on the walls of the last minute guest house that freaked out ‘The Girl’ – this after I get an email on landing to say The 5* Hotel I had booked us into to help with the acclimatisation was overbooked and we were on our own! Those early days were worrying when The Girl is saying, “I thought it would be like one of our ‘normal’ holidays.” The Boy understood what lay ahead in India, but The Girl had never given it a thought and we had tried to brace her for the ‘change.’ Even worse she would not leave the hotel complex into the bustle of Connaught Square, “I want to go home,” was her initial default setting. So we decided to get out of Delhi – of all the places we went Delhi was the worst for beggars, the thing that really unsettled my daughter, and why wouldn’t it – girls her own age living on the streets, corrugated cardboard for a ground sheet. The puzzlement of how and why it was/is allowed to happen still puzzles when India can afford a space programme?

We soon left for the hills of Shimla, even when we arrived there, one vomit apiece from the children on the meandering mountain road. It was the gloomy end to the rainy season and it felt a little oppressive. I was strangely mistaken while horse riding in the hills of Shimla for Michael Palin (Monty Python), confusion until the taxi driver interpreted the guide’s pointing and local dialect to be, the horse Michael Palin rode during filming The Himalayas series for the BBC. It was here a few days into our eleven months away a friend rang me on my mobile, a friend I had told several times we were going travelling.

“Are you playing football tonight?”

“No, I’m in Shimla.”

“Shimla, is that a restaurant in Rusholme?”

“No, it’s in the foothills of the Himalayas.”

“The Himalayas?, Everest and all that.”

“I suppose so, but you can’t see the biggest mountain in the world from here.”

“What you doing there then?”

“I’m go-karting with the kids at the highest go-kart track in the world.”

This conversation could have gone on for a long time, not very desirable when I was getting charged for someone to call me. I know I was born in Yorkshire, but surely, ‘the Cheeky bastards!’

“We’ve set out on our gap year; we’ve been away about a week now.”

“Oh right. So you’re not playing footy tonight?”

“No, pencil me in for next August.”

The theme park was deserted except for one coach load of high-school children aged about thirteen. At one point they all congregated around an outside disco and did that Indian hand flicking dancing to a bangra track. It was both joyful and mesmerising to watch; they seemed so young and free and happy. Life appeared to hold absolutely no fear for any of them. Maybe it was their one day of freedom before they went back to sitting in segregated rows again? I wonder if Danny Boyle was surreptitiously watching them and stole the idea for the end of ‘Slumdog Millionaire?”

It took two weeks to acclimatise, not until we arrived in Manila, the rains almost gone did it feel like a real adventure. We had a lovely guesthouse with a wooden mezzanine floor that the kids adored, overlooking the mountains of the Himalayas, the first snow of winter arrived on the high peaks while we were there, also helped along by vast array of films to watch. The kids befriended a boy of nine, Sunny; who made his living shining shoes; having been sent away from his village to live with an aunt; as his parents could not afford to have him at home, it was a difficult concept for my daughter; but it is the abstract part of education that is very difficult to teach in the western world.

Before the acclimatisation was the going away. This was by far the most stressful part of the whole voyage. Getting the house sorted to rent out for almost a full year. It was probably a good thing that we did not give this as much thought beforehand as we probably should have, as it could have well put us off completely. There is a lot to do, a lot. Storage of surplus things, cancelling bills, sorting insurance out, extra furniture, estate agent, money, possible repairs, car, mail redirected, emergency contacts, phones, emails, etc, etc, etc.

The Wife was insistent we made a will with the expressed intent the children went to live with her sister if under some inexplicable event that we the parents died, leaving behind the orphaned offspring. Even my brother, who became executor of the will and a very meticulous person was a little taken aback when The Wife informed him, “All our dental records could be found at the local dental practice.” We stored a lot of our clothing in next doors’ dry cellar, which when we came back all mine had gone mouldy, which sounds horrendous, but in the Zen-like state I was in and the fact I could get all my worldly possessions in one travel case seemed superfluous anyway.

We rented the house to four professional women and they could not believe there was a piano, an instrument that no one in our family can play, but cannot be disposed of as it belonged to my Grandma, who used to be an ad hoc piano tutor, and it was won in a seven-horse-accumulator by my Granddad. I can still see their faces light up when I opened the cupboard to show them all the food they could have, and especially the well-stocked spice and herb cupboard. By this time we had lost the will to move anything else to another location, (this was before the Tories introduced food banks for the people), and anyway, the looks on their faces made the benevolence worthwhile.

However efficient you think you have been there is always something you miss. The only grit in the oyster shell was bloody Sky TV. I had rung them and they had assured me that my subscription would be cancelled, then once we were away they informed me I had to do it in writing, which they refused to let anyone in my family do for me. When I rang them I got a graphic design company in Edinburgh, who told me quite telepathically that I probably wanted SKY TV and I would be ringing from outside the country. A friend of mine used to live in a village in England and the Italian restaurant in the same village had a similar telephone number with just one differing digit at the end. When he first moved there he diligently informed the restaurant, which did nothing and he also informed all the patrons ringing up they had misdialled. He got so exasperated by the number of calls he answered he started lying. “Yes, how many people are in your party of dinners?” Then when it continued he got even more carried away. “Sorry we are fully booked for six months.” “We’ve had a severe outbreak of campylobacter food poisoning.” “We don’t have any pizza dough, a problem with our suppliers, do you fancy paella?” etc, etc. I digress, but you don’t expect to be writing a letter to Sky TV in Edinburgh from the foothills of the Himalayas.

It was a relief to get on the plane and the realisation that we could do no more now.

On the plane was The Wife’s cousin en route from Canada to India. Whom we completely failed to miss as she has not seen him for twenty-seven years and would have not recognised them anyway.

Not until we arrived in Manali did we start to get into some sort of laid-back rhythm.

What the first week taught us all hopefully was extra resilience. The Wife and I had travelled a lot before the kids arrived, but a lot is never enough with travel, as friend once stated, “Travel broadens the mind and gives you the opportunity to take the piss out of more people!” My Wife considered herself to be too young to have her first child at twenty-eight, but the Health Visitor put it all into perspective when she informed us she had just come from a house down the road that had grandma that was twenty-eight!

If you are going to take the plunge of travelling for any prolonged period of time with children, it is always the acclimatising and sorting out any organisation before departure              that are by far the hardest part of the entire journey. Once your away and into your stride and the stress starts to evaporate in those first few moments, a weight is gently lifted, to be replaced by something else that will probably make you live a lot longer, and a lot happier whilst your do so.

If you have any questions you want to ask, do not hesitate to contact me.

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

Ian M Pindar writes books, and also about himself in the third person sometimes, so it looks as though he has a team of dedicated professionals working around him. His latest book is in fact a novella and has the strange title of: ‘Foot-sex of the Mind’. It is not a Mills and Boon, but about finding out what is important in life far too late.  http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

 BookCoverImage

This book will be free on Amazon all next weekend.

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