travel

A Bevvy in the Boulders – Part 1

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Well the xhild (her new pronoun – no, actually it’s a typo – the “x” is next to the “c”) bride and I have finally escaped, albeit for just a few days. Our travel plans were decimated last year for obvious reasons and this year hasn’t been any better. So we loaded up the car and hit the road. Of course any excursion that involves more than one night away from home rivals D-Day for logistical complexity because you never know when you might need…… (fill in name of appropriate item or inappropriate as the case may be, a truffle trowel, for example). We did however manage to leave enough space in the car for a few cases of wine and that space was duly filled because wine tasting was the primary motivation for visiting that particular part of the world.

We stayed at a rather rustic establishment that came with cabins and its own micro-brewery just outside Stanthorpe, a pretty little town (if rather rocky – it’s in an area called the Granite Belt) in south east Queensland once famous for apples and snow. It is just about the only place in sub-tropical Queensland where it does snow occasionally.

Incidentally the little town just outside Stanthorpe called Applethorpe has a school which they have self-titled “the coolest school in Queensland”. Applethorpe has the cold and the apples covered whereas (and here’s the geologist in me making a rare appearance), Stanthorpe is named after Stannum, the Latin word for tin which was mined in the area (in the late 1800’s) before they started growing apples. And those of you who remember any chemistry will know that the chemical symbol for tin is Sn.

Now onto more frivolous musings. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Stanthorpe is now known for apples, snow and wine.

Incidentally, back on the travel thing, just to show how out of touch the CB and I are, we went to a bottle shop in Stanthorpe on the first afternoon and as we browsed we separately asked the attendant if they had any local wines and he pointed us to the section which had a large sign over it which read “Local Wines”. Now as any regular traveler will know, it’s advisable to have your metaphorical antennae up when you’re out of your homely comfort zone. You need to be able to notice stuff. However this was Stanthorpe not Mogadishu but we have been out of practice so both claim immunity from accusations of stupidity. And why were we buying wine from a bottle shop when there were dozens of cellar doors within staggering distance? It was the first afternoon prior to visiting any local wineries so we needed supplies to get us through the next few hours.

But here’s the real reason we needed to stock-up. The place where we were staying had a very nice bar which shuts at 5.00pm. Let me say that again. The bar opens at 10.00am and shuts at 5.00pm. Not 5.00am but 5.00pm. The first day, we got there with enough time to order one drink. The bar lady asked me if I wanted a 10oz beer, a 15oz or a pint. Nice lady, stupid question. If she’d offered me a bucket after a day of driving and considerable stress, I’d have taken that.

Stress, you say. Yes, something happened between arriving in Stanthorpe and getting to our accommodation, apart from the mercy stop at the bottle shop. This was something I had never done or even contemplated in my many years of existence. I bought a pair of Ugg boots. These have long been considered, along with flanno’s and mullets as integral parts of bogan culture. And I wouldn’t or hadn’t ever contemplated such a flagrant act of cultural appropriation, apart from eating Indian (and Thai, Chinese, Japanese etc) food, driving German cars, drinking ….well any nationality actually….beer (apart from non-alcoholic Iranian beer which I tried once in Iran, funnily enough, and tastes like what I would assume camel’s piss tastes like) and on and on the list goes. Having said that, the inner bogan does emerge occasionally. My wife and daughter once scolded me for wearing jeans and thongs (the ones that go on your feet not in your arse). Who knew?

So a bridge too far, or in this case more like an elephant’s foot too far, had been crossed and I had succumbed to warm feet syndrome. I have never been a fashionista and I’m as likely to follow fashion trends as I am to go bungee jumping. And by buying Ugg boots, I broke the bungee.

More to follow.

A Contract Job

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It’s difficult to conceptualise this now but when Bob Hawke, Australia’s then prime minister and previously the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, sacked a bunch of airline pilots for striking, all hell broke loose. The pilots were members of a union and the number 1 card-carrying union member in the country told them to take a hike.

This was such a long time ago that one of the planes that was brought in to replace our grounded pilotless planes to help move people around, was from Yugoslavia. Astute observers of history will be aware that Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore. The Yugoslavian divorce started in 1991 and some would argue it’s still underway which doesn’t auger well for Bill and Melinda Gates who have much more treasure to divvy up than the Balkans ever had.

Our pilots’ strike was in 1989 and I remember the time vividly which is just as well because I am about to tell you a story to which the pilot’s strike was of peripheral importance and the geopolitical strife brewing in Belgrade was of no significance whatsoever.

However what I am about to relate to you has some significance to what’s happening today trade-wise but you’ll have to bear with me here because it may appear that I am drawing a very long bow. Long story short, China is busy blocking exports of various Australian products to its markets and other countries are stepping in to take up the slack. One of them is India which is taking more and more of our coal which is currently persona-non-grata in China. The Chinese also don’t want our wine (that’s a heroic sacrifice on the part of the Chinese authorities), our lobsters (ditto) and a whole range of other things, the latest of which appears to be liquified natural gas. But back to coal.

The groundwork for India’s growing imports of Australian coal was laid by a few intrepid Australian companies and a small band of marketing brothers back in the 1980’s. I was one of them. And the first foundation stone was laid in 1989. I fear the introduction to this story will be longer than the story itself but here we go.

Three companies and six coal marketers had been negotiating with the Indian Government steel authority throughout 1988 and 1989. The prize was the first long term coal contract that the Indian Government had ever signed. As it turned out they awarded five and our company got two of them. The business between India and Australia has since grown exponentially, hence the above reference to stepping in.

Now I don’t know whether it was naivety or mischievousness but our counterparts used to think they could call us over to India as if our office was across the street. Flights were few and far between back then so getting in and out at short notice was problematic at the best of times. And a visa was required.

So, it’s 8.00pm on Sunday evening, October 3rd 1989 and my wife and I are relaxing with a glass of wine (her) and a beer (me) when the phone rings. It’s my boss and he advises me he’s been talking to our agent who has been talking to our potential long term customer in India and they told our agent who told my boss who’s telling me that they want to sign the long term contracts on Tuesday October 5th. Did I mention that there was a pilot’s strike. And I didn’t have a visa. Or a signing authority for contracts the size of which I was being asked to sign. What happens next is called focussing the mind….or operating in a state of panic.

I had an Indian mate in Melbourne who was mates with the Indian consulate visa guy in Sydney (as luck would have it) so I rang him immediately and asked him for a favour – contact the consulate in Sydney, tell them what’s happening and ask them if I can drop by some time tomorrow (morning hopefully) and get my passport visa stamped. This process normally takes a week or two. I then rang our agent in New Delhi and asked him to book me a hotel room for a couple of nights. There was nothing else I could do that night so I either had eight more beers or went straight to bed – that bit I can’t remember.

First thing next morning I rang our travel agent and asked her to book me flights to New Delhi…..today. Oh and did I mention I need enough time in Sydney to go to the Indian Consulate in North Sydney to pick up a visa then get back to the airport (in south Sydney) with enough time to get an international flight. When she had stopped laughing and picked up the telephone off the floor she asked if I was aware that the pilot’s strike had somewhat restricted the availability of seats on planes. But being the professional that she was, she proceeded to get me a seat facing the side of a plane rather than the front. It was on an army C130 Hercules from Brisbane to Sydney. Sydney to Bangkok/Singapore/Hong Kong and Bangkok/Singapore/Hong/Kong to New Delhi were works in progress.

On arriving at the airport I rang my boss (no mobile phones back then kids) and asked him to organise a signing authority and to fax it (no email either) to our agent’s office in New Delhi and then rang my mate in Melbourne regarding my visa. He said it was being arranged. I got on the C130 and headed off to Sydney, not knowing if this adventure was going to stop there.

At Sydney airport I was advised that our travel agent had me on a flight to Bangkok (but Bangkok/New Delhi was still up in the air – yuk yuk) so I rushed off to the Indian Consulate, got my visa, rushed back to the airport in time to get on the plane and slump down in my (business class) seat with a glass of champagne and relax because there was nothing else I could do until Bangkok.

Eight hours later the nice lady at the transit desk in Bangkok airport advised that I had a booking on the next Thai International flight to New Delhi, in a couple of hours…..first class – love that travel agent. It had all come together in less than 24 hours.

What happened next was classic India. After moving heaven and earth and arriving in New Delhi in the early hours of Tuesday morning my agent and I fronted at the steel company office at 9.00am and were told……they weren’t ready for us and could we come back tomorrow. Now India can be a frustrating place at the best of times but in this case the prize was beyond valuable so we bit our respective lips and retired to the hotel to wait. Wednesday morning – same. Thursday morning – same. Friday morning they were ready to sign. But there was another twist and it didn’t involve travel because I had a bit of spare time to organise flights out and had taken the precaution of booking out on Friday evening, to be safe.

The other company marketing managers and their agents and me and mine were all pacing in the waiting room in which we had all spent far too much of our lives up to that point. After the contracts had been typed (yes typed) then checked and amended where necessary we would be asked in one by one to sign. After metaphorically drawing the short straw, my two contracts were numbers four and five in the queue. By mid-afternoon we were just starting on four. By about 6.00pm we were ready to start five when the steel company’s senior manager asked me if we could come back on Monday to do the last one.

Through gritted teeth I advised that in the circumstances I would prefer to not spend one minute more in that office than I had to. I may have said something a little more polite but the message was the same nonetheless. So at my insistence the typists and my counterparts soldiered on and we finished about 10.00pm on Friday night. Then the power failed so the lifts were out and we had to walk down 13 flights of stairs but I didn’t care as I had two contracts worth upwards of A$100million in my bag.

I don’t remember anything about the flights home but my log (which I kept for all of my business trips) tells me I came back first class on KLM to Singapore and on Qantas to Brisbane. I can’t remember if I was authorised to fly at the pointy end back than but that time, I didn’t care.

Do You Remember When…

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Back on 9/11 (this year) I intended writing one of those “do you remember where you were when….” essays but I forgot so I’m writing it now. I finished the (paying) work I do each week yesterday and the (non-paying) garden work half an hour ago and it’s raining so I thought I’d impose a bit of cancel-culture on procrastination to fill in a few minutes until beer time. Incidentally, that’s the only time you’ll see the words “cancel-culture” here other than as a target of disdain and ridicule.

There are very few events in human history that warrant remembering what you were doing when they occur because most of those memorable moments are the reasons you remember as in, I remember what I was doing the day I got married – I was getting married.

No we’re talking about disconnected events fusing together into an unforgettable nuclear marriage of inconvenience. For me, only three immediately spring to mind.

The first was when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd 1963. I was a small boy getting on a ship in Southampton in the UK with my family to travel to Australia. A note was left on each table when we fronted for our first meal onboard advising us of what had happened. As master of ceremonies at one of my brothers’ wedding, also on November 22nd I was able to remind him that an event of earth-shattering infamy happened on that day, some 30 odd years before. Also, Kennedy got shot.

The second was the actual day of 9/11. I was in Seoul, Korea and had been out with a work colleague, our agent and some customers for dinner and drinks and on returning to our hotel our Korean agent received a phone call from his wife, advising him that a plane had flown into a building in New York – no other details. After a suitably shocked exchange of comments we retired to the bar. On returning to my room and turning on the TV, the full horror of the events that day were revealed.

Seoul is a garrison town for the US army and the hotel I was staying in is next door to the imposing Seoul World Trade Centre. It’s not uncommon to see military activity in Seoul both in the air and on the ground at the best of times. At the worst of times it was chaos. Organized chaos I’m sure but you can imagine the traffic when all but one entrance to the very large army base are shut. And there were more than the usual number of choppers in the air, many buzzing around the building next door, not to mention the troops on the ground. Seoul is after all, only about 50km from North Korea.

Incidentally, I’ve been to Korea over 60 times (I used to keep count) and have never been to the DMZ. The Child Bride has been to Korea once and when she went to the DMZ she brought me back a hat.

After doing what we had to do that day we made our way to the airport to catch our flight to Osaka to connect with our Ansett International flight to Brisbane. Ansett was doing it really tough right then and rumours were swirling that they were about to go under. As we flew into Kansai airport, I saw the big bird with the “A” on the tail – relief. After boarding (and getting upgraded to first class – some good things did happen on that trip) I was privy to a conversation between two flight attendants which filled me with, not so much dread considering what had happened the day before, but considerable disquiet. They weren’t sure whether the plane would actually leave Osaka. Fortunately, it did – relief.

Our flight was scheduled to fly from Kansai Airport to Brisbane and then on to Sydney. Bearing in mind that the airline was on its last legs (wings? wheels?), the announcements as we approached Brisbane went like this:

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Please ensure your belongings are stowed….etc

A few minutes later…..

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Would all connecting passengers please deplane and re-board when the announcement is made. We’ll be in Brisbane for approximately one hour.

A few minutes later…..

We’ll be landing in Brisbane soon. Would all connecting passengers deplane and wait for an announcement regarding your onward journey.

A few minutes later…..

This flight will now terminate in Brisbane. The ground staff will advise arrangements for your onward connection to Sydney.

A few minutes later…..

Please be advised that all of the passengers heading to Sydney will have to make your own onward arrangements. We don’t know how we’re getting there either.

The airline had expired while we were travelling between Japan and Australia.

And the third time was only recently so only time will tell whether it sticks with me but I’m betting it will. It was one of those occasions that will only happen once in your life – my father died.

My mother and one of my brothers and I had been to see Dad in the morning and it was not a pretty sight. He was in stage 7 of Alzheimer’s which means an inability to swallow, amongst other things. Mum struggled to even look at the handsome athletic man of her youth now a shriveled shell of a man struggling to breathe. We left after a few minutes and returned to her home about 10 minutes drive away from the nursing home Dad had resided in for the past few years.

We had been there for about twenty minutes when Mum’s phone rang. Now those of you who have frequented nursing homes will know that a lot of the staff are Asian, in this case many were from the Philippines. My Mum still speaks with a distinct Manchester accent but, ironically struggles with other accents. She hates ringing the phone company or the electricity company because she will generally find herself talking to someone in Manila or Bangalore. Anyway she could not understand what the lady who rang was saying. If I hadn’t been there to take the call maybe she still wouldn’t be aware that Dad died just after we left.

I cheated a bit with the third example. It wasn’t a disconnected (from my life) event that imposed  itself on me to the extent that it never leaves but, what can I say other than I won’t forget that day.

I just thought of another. The day Gough Whitlam was sacked as Australia’s Prime Minister on November 11th 1975, I was at university. There was a great rending of garments, wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the communist student union types. My lot, we did what we normally did – went to the pub.

Corona Crazy

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The CB and I are into day 12 of our two week lock-down. We started to feel it after only two days. At that point we were starting to get desperate being down to our last internet, three laptops, one desktop, two smart TV’s, Netflix, Foxtel, Stan, free-to-air TV (whatever that is), 2 smart phones, 7 guitars and associated paraphernalia, a cupboard full of food, a fridge full of beer (and some food), a wine rack full of wine, countless toilet rolls, a house full of comfortable furniture and two children at our beck and call. It was touch and go whether we would survive the next 12 days.

But here we are with only two days left. To those who have been going stir crazy, I say harden up. It’s not that bad and if you prepared and have the mental capacity to withstand the range of deprivations dumped on us collectively by an over-zealous political sector (and I include politicians, bureaucrats and police in that over-reaching totalitarian collective), then you’ll be okay.

We aren’t in the least bit stir crazy and were perfectly okay until the two cats were returned from their “holiday” at the cattery which they endured while we were away. As usually happens, as soon as they got home they filed an eviction notice with the authorities as two people (us) had again squatted in their house. They do this every time we travel and it never works because the CB and I have more money than them and can therefore afford better lawyers. You’d think they’d learn.

But things will be back to normal in a couple of days except for the fact that stray people are now being rounded up and removed to five start hotel rooms I believe as well as being fined for exercising that sadly missed right to freedom of assembly. Compensation for this is coming in the form of money – our money being given back to us in advance because the government hasn’t taken it off us (and our kids and their kids and their kids etc) yet.

It must be great being the government. They can pump up the economy by injecting cash into it by buying back government bonds. But here’s the best bit. They just print more money to buy said bonds back. How brilliant is that. Imagine if we could all do that.

Play It Again, Diego

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Well the child bride and I are off to Europe again next week. It was to be South America this year but a family wedding in Wales in August put paid to that. Those of you who regularly read my stuff on this website will know that I occasionally digress and I’m going to here. Do you know where the term “put paid to” comes from? No, neither did I until I looked it up a minute ago. It refers to the practice of bookkeepers stamping “Paid” on accounts which had been finalised so it’s not quite as exotic as sayings like “beyond the pale” or “three sheets to the wind”. But you did learn something by coming here today.

Anyway, back to the travel thing. Yes the epic tour of South America has been postponed until next year so we can get to a wedding in a place called Mold in Wales. I don’t know if that name has some historic meaning or whether it’s just constantly damp, but I do know it’s a real place because I have a cousin who used to live there. But before we meet up with Cuz 1 and Cuz 2 (of Rheinube River Ramble fame) whose son it is who’s getting married, we’ll be tripping around Spain and Portugal (the Iberian Interlude perhaps, in keeping with the rather dorky names I have for these trips) then we’re off to Morocco which could be called the Camel Caravanserai. Carlos Santana’s fourth album was called “Caravanserai” but I’m sure he won’t mind me pinching the name as I’m sure we’re outside the statute of limitations as it relates to these things. While there and in keeping with its current trendiness, we’ll be looking for a gin joint for the CB to walk into. This sentence and the title of this piece are a little esoteric, I know, but not that esoteric if you’ve seen the Bogart movie. And Rick didn’t actually say…….. doesn’t matter.

So this post is like a prologue to our trip. I shall try to keep you posted as we swan around – there’s another one of those sayings. No wonder English is such a hard language to master. I’ve been speaking and writing it for decades and just had to look up “put paid to”.

It was going to be a bit difficult to keep up with the scribing because as I mentioned in the previous post, I was expert witnessing for a mining related trial and that process was to be ongoing while we are away. Fortunately, (or not depending on how you look at it) I was kicked off the case. I was a relative latecomer to the trial after another chap got sick but my report must have been so demoralising for the other side that they protested to the judge and he elbowed me. There were legal reasons which I won’t bore you with here. Needless to say it’s yet another example to add to my list of reasons why I believe we have a legal system and not a justice system. And I don’t have to lug a laptop around Europe with me now. Yippeee!!