"Brown babies"

An incredible documentary about the babies born in Germany after WWII from a German mother and an Afro-american soldier:

 

 

O sodade na coração

Kingfisher

Misunderstandings

The other day I went to this cinema I love which has two rooms, one on the groundfloor and one upstairs. There were only two people in the hall, a mother and her child. Then the guy who checks the tickets showed up and with the most serious face asked me: "Is it for The Ugly Duckling?". The lady waiting in the hall burst into laughter. I answered no, I was actually there to see "Fill the void" (a film about the Jewish ultra-orthodox community by Rama Burshtein, herself a member of that community). "Upstairs", he said. As I took the stairs I heard him speaking to the lady: "I saw the child and thought you three were together...", as if excusing himself.

 

I love the Ugly Duckling. Maybe next week.

Erlkönig interpreted by Jessye Norman

Korea, one year later

Almost one year after I visited South Korea, tension is high in the Peninsula... I had a look at the pictures I took during my visit and found this one taken in the Haeinsa Temple.

 

 

Food for love

They say, in several languages I know, that love goes through the stomach. I happen to live with someone who could be a chef and cooks five-star meals on a daily basis.

 

An old friend to whom I was describing on the phone, this Saturday morning, the luxury breakfast awaiting me on the table, observed that from an early age I have been well fed, first in my family environment and now by my partner. Gourmet meals have always been something normal in my life ever since I was a child.

 

I looked at the fresh home-made bread on the table. Bread, the most symbolic of all meals in the Western and Middle Eastern worlds, which nourishes body and soul.

 

The smell of fried king scallops reached my nostrils. I said goodbye to my friend and indulged once more in a delicatessen experience.

 

Bread (food). Love. What else do we need to live well?

What Iranians wish

Sleep and noise in Geneva

Some people would like Geneva to be like a cemetery. A group of citizens came up with a creative initiative to try to keep the city alive: www.notrebruit.ch

 

©www.notrebruit.ch

 

 

 

Pierre Rabhi

La modernité est fondée sur une rupture avec la nature et le désir, c’est-à-dire l’intuition, la sensibilité, la sensualité (…). Aves les grandes promesses technologiques, nous avons manqué de générosité, nous sommes allées contre les lois de la nature. L’intelligence manque : elle ne se mesure pas au nombre de diplômes, mais à la lucidité que seule l’intelligence de la vie possède pour éclairer notre regard.

Interview, Am, 12/2009

On ageing

An enlightening article by Tim Kreider on the issue of ageing: You Are Going to Die

Two dreams come true in a few days

I started 2013 by fulfilling two dreams in the Western Cape, South Africa.

The first was seeing great white sharks from up close. That happened on the 2nd Jan thanks to a 3 hour boat trip and cage diving with Marine Dynamics from Gansbaai.

A couple of days later we were driving near the ocean when I misread the map and we took the wrong road. When I realised this we were too lazy to drive back to Mossel Bay, so we just kept going and decided to do Route 62 instead. We ended up by visiting an animal park - usually I never visit this sort of places, I like to see animals in their natural environment, not in zoos/parks. But for some reason for this one I decided to make an exception.

Then, unexpectedly, a second dream came true: I was able to cuddle two tiger cubs.

As if this weren't enough, there was the incredible beauty of Capetown,...

... its wildlife,...

Dassies

Proteas

... and its incredibly sad history.



District Six Museum

Mandela's cell, Robben Island Prison

 

Nicolas Bouvier

Le voyage - intérieur ou extérieur - n'a pas de sens s'il n'est pas justement un chambardement constant des attitudes que l'on avait au départ. Ou un ajustement. On ne voyage pas pour confirmer un système, mais pour en trouver un meilleur, auquel on fera bien d'ailleurs de ne pas adhérer trop longtemps. Ce qui importe c'est le passage.

Nicolas Bouvier, Le vide et le plein

On trying

"Day 51

The only real failure is the failure to try. And the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment. As we always must. We came here and we tried. All of us in our own different ways. Can we be blamed for feeling that we're too old to change? Too scared of disappointment to start it all again? We get up in the morning, we do our best. Nothing else matters.

From the diary of a character of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Today on BBC...

... there was an article about the horrors of wildlife trafficking.

There was this image...............................................



"A tiger cub rescued from smugglers in Thailand en route to China."



Martha Graham

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. (...) You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. (...) [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Epilogue

“A long curved wash of ripple

Left there its fingerprint

One long-before-time lost day.

I turn a dead sea’s leaves

And touch that day and look.”

Judith Wright

My time in Australia is coming to an end. In a couple of hours I shall be starting my 33 hour trip back home. For the moment everything is still fresh in my memory, but what will stay of this trip as time goes by and memories blur? Maybe I will remember when I was walking jet lagged in the Botanic Gardens in Sydney and saw the Opera House for the first time; or my first encounter with a wombat in Tasmania; the koalas in Cape Otway; the Central Market in Adelaide; the train to Alice Springs - the way Aboriginal children kept smiling for the long journey while spoilt white children would make scenes; the first time I saw Uluru on the horizon, the omnipresent ochre colour and the outback roads; the heat in Darwin, the rock paintings in Ubirr and the minutes I had Gunlom for myself; the bays of the West coast; brushing my teeth under a waterfall in Karijini, and the way everything became hot there - the water, the steering wheel, everything; the evening ceremony at the monastery in New Norcia; the many sunsets. Or maybe I will remember many apparently insignificant moments – sitting on a couch in Federation Square, crossing the road in Canberra or finding refuge from the heat in Alice Springs’ shops.

And then there are the people I met on the way: Jiayin, whom I met in Tasmania and later on the train to Alice Springs; the Israeli couple of farmers in Coles Bay who couldn't figure out how googlemaps worked on their iPad and asked me, of all persons, to help them out; Nathalya, Dave and Stephen, who not knowing me from anywhere opened me the door of their houses; Heather and Yvette in Victor Harbor, so concerned that I would be stranded on Kangaroo Island; Fei Hung and the expression on his face when we met again in Monkey Mia; Kate, in New Norcia, who found me a room to spend the night; the girl from the petrol station in Kalbarri who re-opened the station for me when I told her I had almost run out of fuel; that guy in Meekatharra who laughed and said "An espresso?? Forget it mate, you are in the bush!"

The bush. This word will never sound the same. Big wide hot spaces full of life, where the notion of time is different, penetrated by a powerful light and a deep silence interrupted only by the sounds of nature, undisturbed by man or technology or anything else, obeying ancient rhythms known only to the wise. When I visited the Australian Museum in Canberra I saw pictures of the scars left by the wounds that the Aborigines open on themselves as they progress in knowledge and understanding of the universe. Later, when I was in Uluru and Kata Tjuta, I noticed how the surface of the mountains seemed to be cut by shapes which strangely looked like the Aboriginal scars: it’s a sort of elliptic shape, a bit like the leaf of a tree, or an eye. I interpreted – but this is only my interpretation, I do not by any means pretend to be an expert in Aboriginal culture – that the Aborigines opened those wounds because they wanted their sacred landscapes marked on them, part of them. I come from a different culture/background, I am a whitefella, and yet I understand that need so well! I do not want a collection of exotic moments. I want what I lived marked on me, I want it to participate and mingle with everything that I will live next, to keep living in me, to stay present like a scar.

 

 

These are my last hours in Australia, and this is what I wish.

Rottnest Island and the quokkas

As I feared, Rottnest Island was full of teenagers who finished school and had boiling hormones. But they seemed to stay in the settlement near the jetty, as soon as I rented a bike and rode to other parts of the island it was very quiet. It’s a small island, only 11x4km and it’s not spectacular, or maybe I have just seen too many spectacular places and have become blasé. However, it’s a very pleasant place with some beautiful beaches (I did some snorkeling again), clear waters AND: an animal I hadn’t seen before – Australia surprises me to the very last moment. Meet the quokka:

The quokka is a marsupial; it belongs to the family of the kangaroo. Since the island is so small and receives so many visitors, they are used to people are not afraid of getting near you, you can even touch them, they are very curious.

One of the bays of Rottnest Island

The island is only 19km away from Perth, but it felt as if it were very far… The Western tip is amazing. On my second day I got an SMS from the ferry company saying that because of the bad weather the schedule had changed. I ended up returning to Perth a couple of hours earlier than expected. The trip was horrible, they distributed paper bags to everyone "just in case" and the service stopped in Fremantle but they put me in a shuttle that dropped me at my hostel. I had to wait one hour or so for the nausea to go away.

Karijini National Park, Great Northern Highway, and New Norcia

After a 7 hour drive from Exmouth I reached the entrance of the Karijini National Park, only to drive 55km more on an unpaved road to the visitors centre.

The park is enormous and you have to drive very carefully in order not to blow a tyre - there is only one paved road and all the nice places are reached through unpaved roads, many of which in bad condition. Also, you must make sure that you have enough fuel to circulate inside the park until you leave, the next petrol station is 34km away from one of the 2 entrances, and that you have enough drinking water (you can't get it inside the park). I did have drinking water with me, the problem is that it was so hot in the car that the water quickly became hot, and the last thing you want when it's 42ºC is to drink hot water, although you do it anyway, because it's either that or dehydrate.

At the visitors centre I was told there are only two places where you can overnight inside the park, an eco-retreat where you pay something like $170 for a ensuite tent (it must be a very nice tent) or $7 to sleep on a campground, in either a tent or in your own car. Since I don't have a tent, I had to sleep in my car. The campground only had a (very) basic toilet facility, no sinks or showers, in fact no running water at all, so I had to wash myself in the waterholes of the park and brush my teeth using the water from the waterfalls!

Hotel for the night: my car

Sometimes I wished I had gone to Karijini on a tour, like I did for Uluru/Kata Tjuta/Kings Canyon or for Kakadu/Litchfield. They would have worried about all the logistics: bumpy roads (if they blew a tyre - or several - they'd have to fix it, not me), drinking water (they have these big tanks that keep the water cold), food (I just ate apples and biscuits during my 3 days there, and that was until all the apples rotted in the car due to the heat and I was left with the biscuits!), tents (I wouldn't have had to sleep in my car), fuel,... and I could have just enjoyed the waterfalls and the scenery without having to worry about all this. The positive side of going there on my own was the fact that I often had the waterfalls and pools for myself. There were not many visitors, no tours at all, and since the park is so huge I often found myself alone in a natural pool where I swam wearing my Adam's suit only! Even better, I could stay in each place for as long as I pleased. I ended up staying 3 days in this paradise.

Beautiful, peaceful, sacred Fern Pool

Fortescue Falls

View from the top of the Fortescue Falls

  

Junction Pool

  

Handrail Pool

The gorges

Then it was time to start the road back to Perth (1411km far from Karijini), and to put an end to my biscuits' diet and Robinson Crusoe lifestyle (though he didn't even have a car to sleep in)! I decided to leave on Friday. I had to go to a roadhouse in the opposite direction, Munjina, which means a 34kmx2 detour, just to get some fuel to make sure I could reach the next petrol station in Newman, 200km away. I took the opportunity to wash my clothes in the camping park's laundry and then I set off to Newman.

Munjina Roadhouse

When I arrived it was already dark. Newman is a mining town, like most of the towns on the Great Northern Highway. These are remote places where people go just for the good money that they make on a mine-related job. Obviously businesses in these towns take advantage of all the money that companies and their employees make and everything is expensive. The cheapest thing that I found to sleep was a room without bathroom or toilet, improvised in a sort of container (the kind of container they put on ships, only this one was made of wood, or fake-wood), for $95... It hurt but there was no other option.

On Saturday I woke up early and at 6:50am I was leaving charmless Newman and its prefabricated houses. The Great Northern Highway doesn't have much to see, the landscape is pretty monotonous. I was driving alone, there are no radio stations and the CD player wasn't working - while in Karijini I had forgotten one window open when driving on the unpaved roads and when I actually paid attention to the inside part of the car (instead of watching for stones which could blow the tyres), there was ochre dust covering everything! It also got inside the CD player, which stopped working.

One of the Karijini roads

There are not many "private cars" on the Great Northern Highway. The only cars you see are those of the people working in the mines, they all seem to drive the same model of 4WD. However, there are lots of trucks and also "oversize trucks"... These are huge trucks that carry big machines, platforms or even prefabricated houses (yes, a truck carries a whole house on it), which makes them occupy more than just their own side of the road: they take your side of the road too! These giants are always announced by a car which precedes them with an "oversize" sign. You have to slow down and keep as much as you can to the side of the road to allow them to pass, or you'll get a prefabricated house on your face, which is an interesting way of dying - he was driving when a house hit him.

An oversize truck parked near the Great Northern Highway

When I had been driving for a couple of hours already, the sky became clouded, the air heavier, and I could see amazing lightning on the horizon. Soon it started pouring to the point where I couldn't drive faster than 80km/h. It was a beautiful storm that cleaned my car from its Karijini dust, but it was also scary, since I had these "oversize trucks" coming (or driving in front of me) and could hardly see them. In a couple of minutes the temperature dropped from 39ºC to 19ºC (according to the car). After an hour or so, it stopped raining, the sun came out again, and it was 37ºC!

I drove approx. 1000km from Newman to New Norcia, with only 3 stops to eat something and buy water. I didn't want to spend the night in another expensive and depressing mining town, so I just decided to make that effort in one day.

I arrived in New Norcia by the end of the afternoon. New Norcia is a tiny monastic town only 132km far from Perth. There is a Benedictine monastery founded in the mid-19th century and little else, everything revolves around the monastery. I had read that the latter actually had a guesthouse where you can sleep, so I asked at the museum/visitor centre about that, but they told me that both the monastery and the only hotel in town - which is owned by the monks - were full and that I'd have to drive 30km farther to another town to find accommodation. I was a bit upset both because I had planned to sleep in New Norcia (I liked the place from the moment I arrived) and because I was tired after my 1000km journey. Then the desk officer - the name of this angel is Kate - said she might have another option. She made a phone call, left for a few minutes, and when she came back she told me that I could sleep at the Old Convent. She took me there to show me around. It was a huge house with a big living-room and a kitchen and I don't know how many rooms. She told me this was usually for groups only but I could have one of the rooms if I wanted. So thanks to Kate I had not only a place to sleep, I had a whole convent for myself (I confess it was a bit intimidating at night - me alone in this big old house... hmm). I was so happy that I could stay there and didn't have to drive anywhere anymore! Only because someone CARED! Then I wanted to phone home to say I'm still alive but I had no coverage and the only public cabin in town only accepted cards. When I asked at the hotel's reception if there was internet anywhere, the receptionist said there wasn't. I explained that I hadn't given any news for several days and was afraid that my family would be worried and... she invited me to send an email from her (the reception's) computer! I have had many such experiences with Australians, where people just do their best to help you when they see that you need help, they are not indifferent to you. This is one of the things I shall never forget about this trip.

Southern Europe? Mexico? No, New Norcia, Western Australia

The Benedictine convent

New Norcia hotel

After sending a short email I went to the monastery and attended the 6:30pm prayer (the Benedictine monks give it a name but I can't remember it), the monks welcome visitors. There are only 8 monks left in New Norcia. Besides myself there were a couple of people attending who were staying at the monastery's guesthouse. As the ceremony went on (they basically sing some psalms) I kept having these flashes of a documentary I saw a couple of years ago, Le grand silence, even though those monks belong to another order. But I'd need to write all night if I were to talk about that. When the ceremony was over I went back to the hotel to taste the Abbey Ale. The monks also produce wine, bread and plenty of other delicious stuff. Then I slept as I hadn’t slept for ages.

Abbey Ale

The next day I took my time to visit New Norcia before I started driving back to Perth, 132km away. The traffic increases as you approach the town and the speed limits are stricter, so it does take a lot of time. It was already dark when I finally reached the hostel and for the first time at any hostel that I’ve been, I was told they were fully booked and was given a list to try my luck elsewhere. I suddenly remembered that the school holidays have just started – I’m glad I’m leaving Australia in a couple of days! I tried my luck at two hostels that were a dump – I’m being nice when I say dump. I ended up at a third hostel that was less a dump than the two previous ones. Then the next morning I had another unpleasant surprise when returning the car: they told me that because the car was “exceptionally dirty” (of course it was, I had been driving in the bush for almost two weeks, there was dust everywhere) I would have to pay $110 extra for cleaning costs (it’s in their rental conditions); but the next surprise was worse: in spite of the fact that I was returning the car 2 days earlier than expected, I would actually have to pay more per day than foreseen because their prices change according to the number of rental days: so for a difference of 2 rental days I paid $38 instead of $20 per day – I found this totally dishonest, but it’s in their rental agreement too, so there was nothing I could do! Had I known, I’d have just parked the car somewhere and returned it on Wednesday as foreseen! I was really angry.

Then it was time to plan my last 3 days here. I didn’t want to stay in Perth for 3 days, so I decided to book a trip to Rottnest, an island just an hour way by ferry where you can do snorkelling, go to the beach, rent a bike, hike or do nothing. I knew this wasn’t the ideal period (school holidays) but I didn’t have many options near Perth.