Travel

TheSubcontinental Drift #7

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From space, the 100 kilometre road from Orchhra where our train is parked, to Gwalia would look like any respectable highway. Four lanes of bitumen and a well-tended median strip down the middle. Now we’re not talking about the drivers here – they are a constant all over the country. We are talking about the actual road. It seems to me that to make a bitumen road, you put down the base, put the hot bitumen on the base then roll it flat and smooth. This has been achieved successfully all over the world. Except here. This feels like driving on a cobbled road in a vehicle with concrete suspension, except the cobbles haven’t flattened and smoothed with age. They are bricks that were liberally and randomly strewn around last week with edges exposed. Passenger joints have been loosened to the extent that limbs litter the buses aisle. It’s taken about an hour to write this paragraph – line up the “t”, hit the “h”. And vehicles are charged a toll to use this road. Maybe it’s to raise money to put that top layer of bitumen down.

There’s a very impressive palace in Orchhra that was built by Shah Jahan’s (of Taj Mahal fame) father. He built it especially to welcome one of his regal mates in the area. It took 22 years to build. That’s a long time to wait to go and see a friend for a barbecue and a beer.

In #5 of this series I mentioned that to get a decent night’s sleep on this train, I’d have to drink more. This was proven without a shadow of doubt on our last night on the train. One of the great aspects of travelling with groups of people is that occasionally you meet up with kindred spirits and a great time is had by all. So it has been on this trip. The four of us gave it a nudge last night and I slept like a baby. I woke up a bit fuzzy about four minutes before the alarm was due to go off (don’t you hate that) but it was a night where rattling wheels, swaying carriages and piercing horns were shoved firmly into the background. It was also a night when we were all gifted Indian garb – saris for the women and long collarless shirt type things for the men. There was an expectation that we would all dance, Indian style. The women did but in keeping with the ancient adage that men over 40 should never dance, we didn’t.

And that’s pretty much that for the Indian leg of this expedition, unless I think of something else. Sri Lanka will begin just as soon as I see something that you need to know about.

The Subcontinental Drift #6

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In Agra we were subjected to another bout of economic tourism. It’s to be expected and is perfectly understandable – milk the foreigners like Old Macdonald’s cow. Incidentally the various monuments are in on this as well. Entry signs say 50 rupees for Indians, 750 rupees for foreigners. You can’t get more obvious than that. Agra is all about the Taj Mahal so local artisans make various tables and othe items requiring flat surfaces and inlay them with semi-precious stones fashioned into shapes like flowers and….other flowers. If nothing catches your fancy here, the swarm of salesmen, one of whom is always at your elbow, will usher you into the next room which has similar stuff only smaller, like drink coasters. The next room, but wait there’s more, has wooden carvings and metal things and wall hangings. The next room is souvenirs where the CB bought a fridge magnet – our contribution to the local economy. After negotiating what seemed like the local version of Ikea we felt we had to buy something just to escape.

Moving on to Varanasi then Khajuraho, we see a life and death comparison or more accurately death and life respectively. Varanasi is dominated by death with two cremation areas on the Ganges in a 7 kilometre stretch of 84 ghats or step areas down to the river from the higher up town streets. Each crematorium can handle 40-50 bodies at a time without mingling grandad with the widow on the adjacent pyre. There is an element of “life” in the process I guess, because most of the ghat area is for people to cleanse and rejuvenate themselves in the river. Judging by what we saw in the river, this would be a short cut to crematorium 1 or 2 for people like us without the immune system of a mechanical bull.

Khajuraho on the other hand, is an overflowing font of life which has manifested in every newly wed’s (okay, in the 1950’s) favourite book – the Karma Sutra. They were randy buggers back in the 12th century, getting up to all sorts of shenanigans, all carved into temple walls in more loving detail than your average Pornhub video. We won’t go into what soldiers and their horses got up to when in the field with no (human) female company to speak of. Suffice to say, carving a surprised look on a horse’s face must have taken a lot of skill.

To emphasise the extent to which pleasures of the flesh dominated procedings in Dark Ages India, there were originally 84 temples in this area of which 25 remain. That’s a lot of dirty pictures and an absolute boon for the illiterates (and everyone else) although it would.d be rather difficult to hide a hindu temple under your mattress. However wild your imagination the good burghers of Khajuraho had it covered, bearing in mind they had no electricity for more elaborate kinks. There were either a small number of energiser bunny artisans, carving day and night for years or a very large number of equally talented sculptors dedicated to their art (and various proclivities). It must have been on for young and old on Saturday nights in Khajuraho.

You’ve heard of the caste system right? It’s a bit like a family hierarchy with Dad at the top (where’s that laughter coming from) and the pet budgerigar at the bottom. Indian society is similarly structured with Brahmins (spell check tried to change that to Bradman which I guess makes sense for cricket fans of which there are a few in India) at the top and Untouchables at the bottom. These Untouchables aren’t FBI agents although Melania Trump may have felt they were bottom feeders when American FBI agents were rummaging through her knicker drawer during a Mar a Largo raid a couple of years ago. No, they are societies forgotten people. But they apparently have their own king and you can see his big yellow house on the west bank of the Ganges in Varanasi – who knew? I don’t think his name’s Fagin, but I get a very Oliver Twist taste from this.

The Subcontinental Drift #5

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If I’m to get a decent night’s sleep on this train, I’m going to have to drink a lot more. I swear, last night we went cross-country and there were pot-holes aplenty. Trains aren’t supposed to do that. They are supposed to glide smoothly on two polished ribbons of steel. Walking back to our room involves pinballing down narrow corridors and I think i’ve done a hammy. Don’t get me wrong, the staff are great as is the service, the food is superb, the drinks are eminently reasonable and the presentation is immaculate, but this train has square wheels. The shinkansen it aint.

We’ve just been to the Taj Mahal. As with all ancient or at least centuries old wonders of the world, the numbers associated with it are mind-blowing. It took 20000 workers 22 years, from 1631 to 1653 to build it (admittedly short by European cathedral standards) in honour of a woman who bore 14 kids in 18 years, a tradition which families in this country have striven to uphold ever since. After a marathon like that the poor lady expired from over exertion but she has a magnificent monument to her efforts which one or two catholics might be a tad jealous of.

Actually, regarding the time it took to build this thing, if the heat is anything to go by, it’s not at all surprising. It’s all we can do to drag our feet around unencumbered let alone carrying a big block of marble. But if the Taj had been built in Norway, it’d have been finished in about three weeks. Have I mentioned how hot it’s been. It’s been, should I visit one of the wonders of the world or stay in the train’s airconditioned bar, hot. It’s been Monica Bellucci hot. And I got a cold. How did that happen and how mesmerisingly ironic. Bloody climate change….or something. Actually that’s been mentioned a few times by the guides and as there are only 18 of us (excluding staff) on this train, rather that alienate the climateers I’ve kept schtum. Notwithstanding climate debates and entirely due to the heat, I’m currently surviving on muscle memory and sense of smell.

Further on health matters, we’ve been in India for well over a week and the inevitable is yet to happen for me. In a perverse way I was sort of looking forward to it because my hat’s a bit tight and when the trapdoor opens you can usually be guaranteed to drop a couple of hat sizes. But Delhi belly will be lurking I have no doubt so the wait is like what the redcoats had to endure at Rorke’s Drift. Only a matter of time before the Zulus explode into view with debilitating mayhem on their agenda. Actually, the wait’s not quite that bad.

One thing I have noticed, or haven’t to be more precise, is the complete absence of the once ubiquitous Ambassador car. When I first started coming to India in the late 1980’s, they were pretty much the only cars on the road. Now, in your typical city commute, you are totally hemmed in by Korean and Japanese cars and the same trucks and buses – they haven’t gone anywhere. But where could the Ambassadors have gone? The things were damn near indestructible. I was in an accident in one many years ago. Today the front of the car would have needed considerable TLC from your favourite panel beater. Our Ambassador back then – not a mark. The inside of the car was chaotic with papers and bags  (and people) strewn about but the outside was business as usual.

Many years ago I spent some time walking the various government ministries trying to get a number of projects underway. One of the most comical scenes I saw was when convoys of Ambassadors left a ministerial building, like a stream of Noddy cars, conveying a minister somewhere. Amidst all the flashing lights and sirens there were security people hanging out of windows waving their arms to get traffic out of the way. Good luck with that.

The Subcontinental Drift #4

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We’re now on our way to see some of India’s and the world’s great sites via train. Apparently one of them isn’t the Ranthambore safari park but back to that later. We’re on the Deccan Odyssey and it’s not a bad way to travel especially when you have your own double bed and your own bathroom which is bigger than the hotel bathroom we had last time we stayed in London. In that one you could take a dump and have a shower at the same time – in the conventional ways and not the way you’re thinking.

We are so spoilt it got me thinking about Graham Nash on the Marrakesh Express (the music is never far away). There wasn’t any wifi back then in the 60’s, no newspapers for days and I can’t imagine being able to get Netflix on Moroccan TV. So when we get the shits because a football score back home in Australia isn’t immediately available, we need to pause and just for a change, watch the world around us drift by. So I’ll be looking at the world through the sunset in your eyes and smelling the garden in your hair, my love.

Back to the Ranthambore safari park. Apparently it contains between 75 and 80 tigers. We saw exactly none of them. This was slightly more disappointing than our Nepal tiger safari where we saw zero tigers but did see tiger footprints and tiger crap, according to our guide. I’m coming to the view that there are actually no tigers in the wild. They are all in zoos. Add to that, our vehicle had cement wheels and my arse can’t take much more of this luxury. Bouncing around in that vehicle did have one upside however. It doubled my steps for the day and I’m claiming them simply because of the energy expended in trying not to be thrown out of the vehicle.

Having done a few cruises we are in a position to make comparisons. So this is like a cruise on land. We are on a land cruiser, if you like. Sorry Toyota but this is the real deal. We stop in a place with something worth seeing, stagger round in 40 degree heat then retreat to the airconditioned bar immediately on returning to the train/ship.

When it comes to economic tourism the CB and I have been stung five times. Okay, we’re not talking trinkets and baubles here or in my case t-shirts with I Heart Jaipur on them. We’re talking serious stuff for serious money – glass in Murano and linen in Burano (or maybe the other way round) near Venice and carpets in Turkey, Nepal and Jordan. This is entirely voluntary of course. You’re not being tricked into spending big bucks on a carpet when you’ve been negotiating for the best part of an hour. But we managed to resist in Jaipur. A silk bed duvet for $260 was a heart-beat away from  confirmation until we pulled back from the brink. That’s an extra $260 to put over the bar in my world so we are way in front and additionally don’t have a pile of material to cart all over the subcontinent. Yesterday we were also taken to an establishment ostensibly to marvel at the intricate skills of gentlemen grinding and faceting precious stones into jewellery. Then, as an afterthought, how about we buy something? A skilled and persistent salesman almost had a turquoise necklace round the CB’s neck but we triumphed again.

My name is Chris and I put sugar in my coffee this morning. I felt like an alcoholic sneaking a surreptitious vodka. Not putting sugar in coffee has been vindicated by Bobby Kennedy’s appointment as Health Secretary in the Trump administration and his relentless pursuit of processed foods. But the coffee here is bitter and I weakened.

The Indian railway system is one of the wonders of the modernish world. When there are no highways to speak of and plane tickets are prohibitively expensive for your average village dweller, the train is the answer although the authorities are starting to clamp down. A prominent sign at Jaipur station advised potential passengers not to travel on the roof of the train. Electrification would render this sign somewhat redundant generally. But if you’ve spent your life with the wind in your hair, a few wires will help prevent you falling off, right. Notwithstanding the wonder of it all, the system is not conducive to a leisurely chuff chuff through the countryside. It seems like our train has to wait for an access slot then it’s hell-for-leather to the next waiting spot, then an hour later, repeat. And when this thing hits top-speed it feels like a Cessna in a hurricane. It’s all you can do to stop being flung against a wall as Casey Jones slams another shovel of coal into the boiler and hits the accelerator.

The Subcontinental Drift#3

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I have stood fuming, behind people in immigration queues in India who appear to be trying to negotiate their way into the country. I get most impatient in check-in lines at the airport and in immigration lines. How hard can it be, I’m saying to myself. Have a valid passport, get a visa, fill in the immigration form, you’re in. Now it’s e-visas and we became that person who’s holding up the queue a few days back. We had our e-visas and all of the other required documentation so what could possibly go wrong. Something induced chagrin in our immigration officer but we still have no idea what. So after handing over passport, boarding pass, e-visa print-out and customs form, he did this :

1. Takes the paperwork and stares at it like it was a ransom note.
2. Consults his colleague in the next booth who shrugs – a problem shared is two problems so he’s not interested.
3. Gets up and walks off. Not a good sign. Fortunately he didn’t return with an officious looking gentleman in uniform, just a worried look.
4. Re-takes his seat and continues tapping his computer and shuffling paper.
5. Stamps passport – a good sign but then…
6. Continues to scratch his head and stare intently at the computer screen and the paperwork yet again.
7. Hands everything back without having said a word or even looking at me during the whole process. I say “thank you sir”, step into India and hope I don’t have to step back into non-nationality limbo (remember, we’ve left Australia) to rescue the Child Bride..
8. Repeats with CB’s paperwork.

At least we didn’t have to wait for our luggage to appear. After this rigmarole it was rotating on the carousel when we got there.

So Trump’s new tariff regime has been announced. I think our hotel here in Delhi must think we’re Americans because our bar bill last night had 4 taxes attached. S.C. was 8%, CGST was 9%, SGST was 9% and DVAT was 25%. I don’t know what any of those are apart from variations on consumption taxes but it increased the bill by about 30% which, apart from being rather excessive, doesn’t appear to make mathematical sense until you realise that the two 9%’s were 9% of the 8%. So the original bill of 6050 rupees became 8133.62. Our government, with only a 10% GST are obviously rank amateurs, especially at milking foreigners.

My first visit to India was 1986 and I haven’t been back since 2013 so it’s changed a bit. The bit we have seen so far in Delhi including the airport, has changed in some fairly fundamental ways especially with their Metro rail system. The place has evolved from the East India Company to the Jetsons. Indians have always been pretty tech savvy – look who runs or at least drives a big chunk of Silicon Valley. But whilst your average Indian can code a moon launch, ask them to drive between two white lines and see how far you get. Those lines represent wasted paint; nothing more, nothing less. How else do you convert three lanes into five if you can’t ignore those pesky lines.

As Geoffrey Chaucer sagely observed in 1395, “time and tide wait for no man”, and neither does Indian traffic. As I remember, the traffic rules aren’t. They’re just for guidance and once you get past vaguely sticking to the jeft side of the road, you ‘re on your own. I couldn’t help notice the dual speed limits – 70km/hr for cars and 40km/hr for trucks….on the same road. Now there’s a recipe for disaster. Not quite as bad as the urban myth about Sweden switching from driving on the left side of the road to the right in 1967 – cars this weekend, trucks and buses next weekend. If you’ve seen pictures of the traffic on the actual fateful day you’ll notice vehicles being hit from all directions. It’s why Volvos are so boxy. What did really cause a small problem in Sweden was that the buses all had doors on the left side so stepping off said bus into traffic mayhem was somewhat problematic I would think.

The Subcontinental Drift #2

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Man, Singapore has changed over the decades I’ve been visiting and you especially notice if you haven’t been for a while. It now epitomises what can only be described as architectural porn. If Lily Philips and Bonnie Blue were buildings, they’d be here. Men would be queuing up at their various entrances to come inside. These days the newer buildings especially, are extravagant and extroverted and for a modest fee you can go all of the way… to the top. At this point (because i just deleted a whole lot of R18+ material) I’m reminded of that famous joke – a beautiful woman walks into a bar and asks the barman for a double entendre, so he gives her one. And I can hear Led Zeppelin singing songs from In Through The Out Door. That’s enough; time to move on.

Do you know how hard it is to drive in Singapore? Okay, it’s not that the traffic is like it is in Boston (scroll down a few pages to find out) but it’s really hard to be able to drive in Singapore. The government wants to keep the traffic moving and the fewer cars there are on the road, the more room there is for the buses. As I have said before, if you close your eyes and step into the road in Hong Kong you’ll get hit by a taxi or a Rolls Royce (okay, maybe not as probable now as 25 years ago). In Singapore you’ll be hit by a single decker or double decker bus. Only a certain number of cars are licensed at any one time so when a slot becomes available,  it’s auctioned. So how did that guy driving the clapped out Honda Civic afford the 90 grand for a certificate to drive before even buying his car. Oh…that does explain it.

When you visit Singapore, Raffles Hotel is a venue for tourist pilgrimage. Not so much the hotel itself, where dressing for dinner requires a cream linen jacket, jodhpurs, spurs and pith helmet, but the Long Bar which much to the chagrin of visiting colonels, accommodates shorts, t-shirts and thongs (of the foot variety). But you are made to pay for these indiscretions because the management knows you are only there to sample the famous Singapore Sling so one for me and one for the child bride plus GST plus service charge sets you back cents short of a ton. And that’s Singapore dollars which used to be worth somewhat less than the Aussie and are now worth 20% more. Thanks Albo. The only compensation (and reasonably priced nourishment ie free) was peanuts still in the shell. On relieving the nut of its outer layer, said layer is discarded on to the floor – tradition, old boy.

On our way back from Raffles to our lodgings, we happened upon a bar/restaurant that looked suitable for our custom. It was serving Taiwanese cuisine which is a bit too Cantonese for my liking but the menu looked okay so we went in. After dozens of trips to Taiwan you can get used to anything. A pint of Heineken for me and a stubby of Tiger for the CB and we were set. It was a good sized establishment but there was no one else in there, only us. The bar down the street was packed. Was there an imminent Chinese strike on the cards which we hadn’t been told about? There wasn’t. You would have heard about it.

And now, in the immortal words of Monty Python, for something completely different. The worst thing that can happen to you on the road is to have your credit card stopped by your bank. It happened to us yesterday. This has happened to me a few times in my travels. For example, a night out with my marketing team in London many years ago, in a less than salubrious establishment, resulted in a frantic phone call from the CB at some ungodly hour when I was still barely capable of lying down without falling over. The supermarket had rejected her card and apparently our bank was a little miffed. So this afternoon a couple of texts from the bank set off alarm bells. I was pretty sure it wasn’t my fault this time but what??? This is Singapore and everyone is scrupulously honest, right. It turns out, a card which I thought had expired years ago and been replaced, was still active and someone was using it. Apparently I am now a member of the National Gallery of Victoria. WTFingF. After being on hold for 15 minutes on an International call, it was eventually sorted

What is it with us and bars? If you’ve read about our recent trek through north-east America and Canada, you’ll know that not everyone takes these things anywhere near as seriously as I do. We’re talking Vince Lombardi’s seriousness about winning serious. So we’re in a perfectly respectable hotel in Singapore with a perfectly adequate lobby bar. Call me old fashioned but one thing expected of bars, especially with happy hour draining away, is that there will be someone behind the bar to do what people behind bars normally do for people in front of bars. So for two consecutive nights I’ve had to go to the front desk and politely ask, on behalf of us and other patrons, the whereabouts of the barman. Each time they’ve tracked him down long enough to pour a couple of drinks then promptly f.. off again. There’s a much better party going on somewhere else obviously. And while we’re on this topic, we just got on our flight for which we have lashed out to sit up the front and they are serving Singapore Slings. For nothing. More champagne, my dear. That can either be a question addressed to the child bride or a statement addressed to the flight attendant.

The Subcontinental Drift #1

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I used to have a love-hate relationship with India – I hated going and I loved leaving. But after 80 or so visits, with 1993 being the peak with nine, and about a year of my life spent there all up, I think I’m finally getting the hang of the place.

After a life snuggled up in the bosom of Western civilisation, my first experience of Madras as it was then called, was queuing up on the airport tarmac, patiently waiting for my turn at the single immigration desk. The door out of customs emptied us into the car-park where I was immediately identified by my then agent and now great friend who whisked me through the dark but crowded and noisy streets to a Taj hotel where I was introduced to something the Indians excel at – hotel bars. If you like subdued lighting, wood panelling and leather chairs, join the club. I always felt like I needed to be wearing a tux and smoking a cigar when sitting in one of these places, ordering my dry Martini, shaken not stirred. They are about as far away from the ubiquitous slums as it is possible to get.

But back to trip number one. I had decided that the food was going to kill me so during the ten or so days I was there, I subsisted on fried chicken, toast and beer, apart from the last meal. The last stop before going to the airport to leave was a revolving rooftop Chinese restaurant in Bombay, as it was then called. The Asian gentleman throwing up into a bathroom sink should have given a clue so by the time I reached Singapore, my body was the equivalent of a supermarket shopping trolley – it just wasn’t cooperating with my brain so all the way back to Brisbane I sat motionless staring straight ahead. If I moved my eyes above or below the horizontal I experienced what it must feel like riding a tumble dryer – rather odd actually. Mind over matter got me out of that plane and I have only ever once since felt worse, courtesy of a dodgy prawn in Seoul. That’s a story for another day. Incidentally I am now a slavish devotee of Indian food and have graduated to putting hot chillies in green salads. So I love hot food but will admit to being beaten by it twice; once in Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and once in Singleton in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. That night I had to saw the top of my head off to let the fire out and I swear my teeth and hair were sweating.

A friend once told me that you can tell how “civilised” a place is if you fly in at night and look down at the lights. If the streets and houses are arranged in reasonably predictable rows, you’re coming into a place with some semblance at least, of planning. If the lights appear to have spread like mold with just the occasional waving ribbon of flickering light, like a vein in cheese, you’re in for an interesting time. Not criticising here. Just saying. The culture shock comes in many guises. There’re the wash-your-eyes-out-with-bleach moments which I won’t go into right now (think of the children) and there are moments of incredulity like a hotel breakfast for three for the equivalent of $6. Admittedly that was before the ravages of 1990’s and more recent inflation, but seriously… I’m still expecting to be shirt-fronted by something entirely unexpected but the more mundane, like a man on an elephant patiently waiting for the traffic lights to change will be contemplated with a stifled yawn.

We won’t be restricting ourselves to India on this trip. Why fly over places when you can stop over. This doesn’t apply to the USA of course where the snobs living on the East Coast or the Left coast consider the rest of the place to be redneck flyover country. We don’t consider Singapore to be even a little bit redneck so will be stopping there to look at all of that glass. We wanted to go to the Maldives also so Sri Lanka gets a guernsey. And joy of joys, it’s not international cricket season although Australia has beaten both India and Sri Lanka recently so I would have bragging rights. I still expect cricket to come up in conversation but only every time we speak to the locals.

We’re on our way to Singers now so see you at #2.

American Phive-Oh #12

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That last one got a bit heavy as we used to say in, dare I say it, more sensible times. Normal programming will now resume.

After bidding the Amish of Lancaster County farewell and completing a whirlwind circuit of Washington’s monuments and historical pageantry it was on to the spiritual home of American democracy – Philadelphia. In matters of spirituality, symbols are quite important and Philadelphia has one that ranks as high as, alright, not quite with Magna Carta but certainly with…..others – the Liberty Bell. It is up there with the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo as one of the world’s most unimposing symbols as in it’s much smaller than you would expect and it’s got rather a large crack in it. So whereas Big Ben is still dinging and donging across London, the best you could get out of the Liberty Bell now would be a less than resounding clank.

It’s playoff time in major league baseball at the moment. I was here at this time of the year  in 1984 to visit some mines in the US and Canada and got to sit in various bars across both countries watching games culminating in the rather pretentiously named World Series between the Detroit Tigers and the San Diego Padres. I returned in 1988 to participate in some due diligence work in Cleveland and on the flight from Los Angeles to Cleveland the in-flight movie (there was only one back then) was Major League and on the return flight to Los Angeles the movie was Field of Dreams. Last time the CB and I were here in 2006, we went to see the New York Yankees play the Atlanta Braves at Yankee Stadium. So baseball on my trips to the US is as ubiquitous as red wine is on my pallete. Actually, that’s not quite the case of late. Our issues with wine and bars in North America have been well documented here. I’ll spare you the Philadephia story (involving the difference between reisling and moscatto). But I now choose my bars very carefully if red wine is to be actually consumed. The reason is that red wine is not as popular in most places (especially sports bars) as it is in our household so a glass of red wine in your average Irish pub will likely come out of a bottle first opened on St Patrick’s Day. That might be okay on March 18th but not so much in October. So it might look like red wine but that’s where the comparison ends.

As is our want, the child bride and I sought out a bar after the day’s sightseeing, the duration of which wasn’t significantly compromised by the Liberty Bell. In this particular bar we were introduced to a room full of fickle, fair weather, full-throated Phillies fans (I just broke my alliteration record). The Philadelphia Phillies were playing the New York Mets in a 5 game play-off series and at the top of the 8th inning of game 2 were one behind (and one game behind) so half the bar went home. Apparently their excellent record in the regular season and the experts’ expectation that they would flog the Mets, was not enough and that one run was insurmountable until it wasn’t and they won in the 9th. Those remaining in the bar lifted the roof off. It sounded like those who had left had returned with all of their mates.

Advance two days and the scene is repeated in New York. The CB and I are seated in an almost identical bar surrounded by Mets fans watching game 3. The Mets lead almost from the start and win easily and apart from the occasional half-hearted cheer, no one seems to care. And this is a perennially under-achieving team, over-achieving. Why the disinterest? Well we are one block from Madison Square Garden and about seven from Broadway’s theatre district. There is so much to choose from – baseball, basketball, ice hockey, football, the worlds best bands and plays – you can understand why there might be a team parochialism deficit, apart from for the city itself.

Something we did notice about New York this time is that it resembles a building site. On our recent cruise round Japan I remarked that there was enough bamboo in an extensive thicket in Kyoto to scaffold Manhattan. I think they took me at my word because there is scaffolding everywhere as countless buildings are refurbished. Either that or the Democratic Party which has almost North Korea like control of the city and state is giving lots of construction jobs to unions in return for donations, like they do in Victoria. Other infrastructure doesn’t appear to be faring quite as well though.

The only concession to the state of the rapidly deteriorating roads appears to be more bike lanes because I guess bikes don’t wear them out as fast as cabs. Further on the subject of transport, we caught the train from Penn Station to Newark Airport and sooner or later they’ll have to replace those trains’ six sided wheels.

That brings us to the close of this series. We are now on our way to San Francisco and I have a death-grip on my first red wine in an age. We lashed out as this has been rather a special trip so we’re travelling at the  front of the plane so this wine is rather good. I expect I’ll have a few more before we next talk. The sub-continent is under serious consideration so get ready for Curry Capers or something similar – that was the first thing that sprung to mind and I don’t have much time as I have to get back to this red.

American Phive-Oh #11

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Get ready for some political ranting. My opinions.This one’s a bit of a thematic mess and doesn’t flow but we’re getting to the end of the trip so I’m putting up random stuff.

We’re in the US again and the perennial issue which Americans face numerous times a day and about which we blow-ins stress over, is back at the forefront of considerations – tipping. It used to be that if a service was provided efficiently, cost-effectively or pleasantly, or a combination of all three, the provider would be rewarded via a tip. Then we were told that tips were necessary because the minimum wage was too minimum and providers needed tips to survive. So we’re moving from voluntary towards guilt-trip. Now the credit card machine comes with various percentage tipping options built in, one of which you are expected to choose and one of which isn’t necessarily zero. So now the customer isn’t just expected to reward good service but to also subsidise the waiter’s wage. Lucky business owner. If we’re contributing to the business do we get a share of the profits? That sort of socialism always falls over when it’s extended to sharing the losses also, so we live with it.

We’ve just been in Amish country in backblocks Pennsylvania. It’s the sort of place that brings out the voyeur in us all – there’s one, someone shouts and there’s another and that house has green blinds and washing on the line and no electricity connection. We’re all experts in finding Amish now. It’s a bit like whale watching or train-spotting except the Amish don’t move as fast (they travel in horse drawn buggies) and don’t have numbers riveted to their sides (they wear quaint clothes instead). Whilst they make the occasional concession to the modern world these days, like using batteries or communal phones, I can’t help thinking the world is technologically accelerating away from them and their Mennonite brothers and sisters. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing for them.

There are two things that stand the US apart from just about every other country in the world (apart from the Amish community). One regards the attitude to their veterans. Washington does monuments to their history, their wars and their veterans better than anywhere I’ve ever been. And the respect shown is heart-felt and admirable, for the most part. Attitude doesn’t always translate into action however so there’s work to be done in this regard. Government funding for illegal economic immigrants while veterans live on the streets is an over-simplification of a complex problem but the underlying premise has some legitimacy.

The other is the utterly unhinged (to those better endowed with common sense) love affair with abortion. Millions of mainly (this is 2024) women will never have an abortion or contemplate having one but will die in a ditch defending their god-given right to have one. Is that related to the “pursuit of happiness” outlined in the Declaration of Independence? And to justify this commitment  to “women’s reproductive health care” they’ll quote the 1% of tragic examples where compromises and compassion are absolutely necessary and ignore the 90+% of cases which are simply contraception after the fact because people (men and women) are too stupid, too lazy or too ignorant to take advantage of one of the many ways to prevent pregnancy.

So much for the deep and meaningfuls. Back to the quirky and irreverent (and irrelevant) with #12

American Phive-Oh #10

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Toronto is Sydney big and the hotel we stayed in was the biggest in Toronto so it was like staying in a railway station. But it did have one redeeming feature. In keeping with the dominant theme of this blog, it had a functioning bar – not a very big one considering the size of the hotel but we found a table and two comfortable chairs and they had what we wanted off the drinks menu so considering progress to date, that was a massive win. And ad nauseum, the following happened at the restaurant on the waterfront we lunched in earlier that day. I asked for a Peroni draft. Didn’t have any. Okay, a bottle of Stella. Didn’t have any. Okay a Peroni in a bottle – success. This is a BYO continent.

I haven’t been able to determine whether the following quote was originally said by Custer’s nemesis, Crazy Horse or by conservative commentator Lt Col Allen West. Incidentally, with every bit of global knowledge back to the beginning of time at our fingertips, you’d think it easy to find this out. Life’s too short. Back to the quote which has been used in the context of historical philistines destroying statues – not the Taliban or Islamic State but the rent-a-scum anarcho-terrorists funded by people like George Soros and their useful idiot middle class marxist apprentices who have to borrow mummy’s car to get to the protest. It goes as follows:
“History is not there for you to like or dislike. It is there for you to learn from it. And if it offends you, even better. Because then you are less likely to repeat it. It’s not yours for you to erase or destroy.”

So it was refreshing to see statues of both Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Victoria outside the Ontario parliament building in Toronto. And they weren’t graffitied either. Being in the fenced grounds of the parliament would help, especially as said grounds are patrolled by both protective services officers and peace officers. What’s the difference, I hear you ask? Well I asked a young lady peace officer and she referred to her powers of arrest and rather ironically, pointed to the gun on her hip to illustrate the difference. Fair enough, thought I. Those statues are in good hands. I can’t help but think that our state and federal governments would allow similar statues to be sacrificed on the alter of political correctness or historical atonement or imperialist apology or something. The rabid mobs would have had their way with them. But not in Toronto.

As if the Niagara Falls region needed anything else, it’s also a big wine growing region – who knew? This is still Canada and most of the time it’s freezing. Next thing, we’ll be seeing palm trees. Considering the almost continuous rant in this blog about the difficulty in securing alcoholic refreshment in this part of the world, this is rather ironic. For a part of the world that supposedly doesn’t get irony, there’s a lot of it. Unconscious irony anyone?

There are officially three Niagara Falls. The biggest and most spectacular is the horse-shoe on the Canadian side of the border. On the US side there are two but one, the bridal veil as it’s called hardly counts as it’s a thin ribbon of water compared with the bigger curtain right next to it. I guess because Canada has the spectacular one, as a sop to big brother they get to say they have two.