Dumagete: Just keeps on getting better!

*

Years and years ago, when Ian and I sailed annually across the Pacific on the Blue Star line, I became friendly with one of the ship’s officer cadets, a serious young Filipino man by the name of Jay. He shared his family story and his ambitions with me, over a can or two of beer, and I remember his final line: ‘You should come to the Philippines, you would love them’. Why me, especially? I thought. And then I remembered ghastly tales of over-populations, fume-drowned photos of Manila and Imelda Marcos’s shoes and decided the young lad was being patriotic rather than personal.

Oh, Jay, why didn’t I listen to you! Not, I suppose, that in the decade between then and now I have had much of a chance to make it here, but, still, why didn’t I believe you? OK, I’m sure that the over-populated areas, the fumes of Manila and anything at all to do with politics and footwear would still turn me off, but as of 72 hours ago my experience of the Philippine Islands has been enriched by visits to the buzzing, colourful, million-populated town of Dumagete, to the villages of Bacong and Dauin, and to places around and beyond … and I am falling for this place like Isaac Newton’s apple.

We arrived in the pretty harbour at Bacong early on Easter Sunday, and I’d planned on staying on board for the day. Surely nothing would be happening. But purser Steve had organised John the cab-driver to take all those who wanted – for Easter mass or just plain sightseeing -- to make the 12km trip to Dumagete, so I went.

The good vibes started as soon as we hit the Main Highway. Warm, bright, colourful, busy. Fine houses, fabulous flowers and greenery, and Lord be praised: an immaculate tarmac road simply buzzing with mopeds, bikes both motorised and pedal, the ubiquitous tuktuks and a good ration of buses. Rather fewer private motor vehicles. And the vibes stayed good as we hit town.

I wont pretend that the centre of Dumagete proper is particularly aesthetic. A main square with a heavy ration of statues (Jose Rizal is evidently the local hero, I must find out why), some pretty flowers and .. a great hole in the middle where a sewage plant is being installed. And, alas, the odd baby beggar and moneychangers almost at the doors of the temple. The temple is the C18th-19th-20th cathedral.

I spotted the sea, and headed in that direction and found myself on a lovely half-mile boulevard stretching round the bay to the ferry port. I devoured it happily and encountered one of the most amazing statues I’ve ever met, commemorating seven nuns who arrived here in 1904 and made themselves beloved of all.



I circumvented the vast campus of the 1901 Silliman University (50,000 students!), dove through shopping streets and residential streets and mean streets and ended up at the Municipal Market, a vast affair of open food halls and gloomy stalled corridors which even on Easter Sunday were in semi-full swing. So many food stalls! I suppose a million people can eat all those gleaming fish and scrawny chickens (I’m now told they may have been fruit bats) and cleavered up chunks of meat in one day ..?

Finally, I arrived back at the Cathedral where Easter Mass was coming to its end and I joined the small crowd at the welcomingly wide-open doors for the sung Lord’s Prayer. Sadly, it wasn’t the version I used to sing on the radio in the 1960s so I couldn’t join in.



And then, back to the cool of the ship, glowing with the almost certitude that this place was for me.

Considering that I’d seen all the city I needed, I determined on day two to don my walking shoes and head away from town. So at 9am I set off towards the village of Dauwin 3 ½ km distant. Walking on the Main Highway is a wee bit hazardous. Few people walk, everyone takes a tuk-tuk or a jitney, also the traffic is pretty heavy and everyone hoots as they overtake. Which means the hooting is all but continuous. They also hooted when they saw this madman striding towards them down the edge of the tarmac and took wide or sometimes less wide evasive action. I now know why moped drivers wear yashmaks: many vehicles wouldn’t pass a noxious fumes test.

The walk was a joy. I seem to like everything I see in the Philippines. I noticed a lot of slightly incomplete but ‘wealthy’ houses up for rent (how much, I wondered), I noticed several beachside resorts, almost all ‘for sale’ (not going there!), but mostly it was the same combination of glorious greenery and happy houses, endless little shacky ‘shops’ (mostly sporting, or half built of, Coca Cola ads), roaming or roped cows and careless chickens, and, of course, the cheerful and half-shy ‘hallo’-ing people.
Local preoccupations show though. I passed a sizeable medical centre which advertised its services: ‘family planning’, ‘HIV/AIDS’ and ... ‘gender sensibilities’. We are in the land of the ‘ladyboy’.
I also passed ‘Ricky’s Massage’ in the township of Dauwin, and longed to pop in for a bit of much-needed pummeling and osteopathy. I regretted that I’d cashed no pesos. But 100 metres further down the road I came to ‘Ricky’s welding services’ and thought that maybe Ricky wouldn’t be quite the man to take out my kinks.

I got a wee bit carried away, pounding through the mid-morning heat, and when I found that I’d gone 3km beyond Dauwin I judged it prudent to turn back. Just as well I did. You see, I’d forgotten to change into my walking shoes. Espadrilles on hot hard tarmac aren’t quite the same. My faltering must have shown around km10, when a kind young man offered me his pillion. I was too proud, and he zoomed on. And blow me down if some minutes later he didn’t appear from behind me, again…!

I reached the ship, footsore and broiled, and realised that I’d done my 12km plus in little worse than 6km per hour. That was my speed 35 years ago, when Alison and I used to tramp the hills of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic together. So maybe this old boy isn’t doing too badly after all. Still, maybe I should have tried Ricky.

Tired of ‘tours’ centred on shops and souvenirs and ‘resorts’, I – in allegiance with Jim (83) and Betty from Minnesota – arranged with John for a drive into the country for our day three activity.
This place just keeps on getting better!
We had a glorious day. A drive of little more than an hour inland and upwards, past scenery which looked sometimes New Zealandish, sometimes French, but – thanks to its tropical greenery and – once the mansions of the foreign rich (yes, I asked the price) passed -- its tropical houses, shacks and storelets, was clearly neither. Just lovely.
We slung our anchor at a spot in the hills, named Cocosava, beside a waterfall-ridden river, where a rocky pool, some tables and chairs and a barbecue grill had been installed. Entrance 10 pesos (25 cents US). Our braver members bathed in the icy river, underneath a heavy cataract. I broke my non-swimming habit and irrepressibly leapt, in my best shorts, into the rocky pool to gambol in its fast-flowing waterfall. Heaven!
Unlike in Santo, we didn’t have this place to ourselves. Two large groups, young men and children mostly, soon joined us and, as we disported ourselves in the pool and the torrent, the place rang with squeals and laughter.



It was also soon infused with the smells of delicious BBQ cooking. John’s 16 year-old daughter Megan flung the most enormous prawns I have ever seen on to the flames, along with rich slabs of lamb leg chop. John produced ice cold beer, rice and condiments and then filleted fresh pineapple …

One of my fondest meal memories of all time is of a beach feast of fresh fish and salad, taken on a beach in Rhodes, around 1973. I think this one must qualify for the same kind of memory. I can taste and feel the bloody juice from the rare lamb dribbling down my chin. And I shall dream of those cray-sized prawns.

What else, I wonder, can the Philippines come up with to enchant me? The next day or two will tell. But one thing I know already, I am definitely coming back here.



Wheels in Dumaguete: Pierre John R Buscato, Godspeed Cars, 0906-2710312

Saturday in the Park with Kurt

*

New Britain behind us, we sailed into New Guinea for short visits to two ports: the area’s most important town, Lae, and the smaller Madang. The guidebook was not at all friendly about the former and expansive about the latter. Strange, when they aren’t really that far the one from the other. But the guidebook is utterly and absolutely right. It is difficult to believe that the hideous and filthy town of Lae, physically on a level of Honiara and with a crime-rate to match (the second mate on the previous Banks Line ship was mugged), and the truly beautiful Madang have anything in common. Yet the people are of the same race (note: see comment below), the traditions and history are more or less the same … but Lae is to Madang as I think Purgatory must be to Heaven.

I shall pass Lae over simply by saying that, being warned about its lawlessness and ugliness, we decided to take a 2 ½ hour minibus tour. Vastly overpriced, it consisted of a lengthy stay in stores selling reproduction tribal art, a teeth-rattling ride over ‘roads’ worse than the worst in Santo, and a brief visit to the Rainforest Habitat, a pretty little zoo in the grounds of the University of Technology. After which I was extremely happy to depart. My only kind memory of Lae is of our gentle minibus driver, and my own private zoo guide. Boys, I’m sorry you have to live in such a godforsaken place.

Perhaps the contrast helped me fall in love with Madang. It has been called the prettiest town in the Pacific and I reckon that epithet may very well be true. We sailed in through palm-dressed islands, past the memorial to the second-world war Coastwatchers, and the tactfully modern-island-style Madang Resort and its adjoining hotels, chalets and restaurants, past the modern Yacht Club, to the cluster of buildings that are the active town of Madang, and into its empty dock.
I hurtled off the ship as soon as I could and set forth down the main road. So far, not exceptional. A lake covered in water lilies, the old German shipyard, cylinders holding .. what? Fuel, palm oil? And ahead the long road to the airport.
Down a side road I could see the sea glistening on the other side of the peninsula. That looked more promising. Go for the side road.
The promise was amply fulfilled. In a few minutes I was beside the true blue Pacific, amongst waving palms, wide green spaces, rock pools and pinnacles, and all the other things (give or take a sandy Caribbean beach) one could hope for in a tropical island.



For more than an hour I simply strode happily up one street and down another, past cheerful houses set in richly floral gardens and immaculate lawns. The houses are built on the same principle as those everywhere else in New Guinea, but so much more substantial and solid, the gardens no larger than elsewhere, but somehow gloriously richer. The people evidently have a pride. I passed one smiling woman picking up the leaves that had fallen onto her road-front. One by one, by hand. And a pickup truck passed me with a megaphone-man crying out messages of Keep-Tidy civic pride. Nowhere was there the garlands of filth lying along the roads, sticking in the puddles, nowhere the abandoned plastic bags, the heaps of rotting rubbish that one cannot avoid elsewhere. If cleanliness is next to godliness, Madang is the most Christian town in New Guinea.
In such a town, one expects to find happy people. And I did. I could have worn my camera out snapping the multitude of pikaninies (sic) and little boys who wanted to be photographed. I could have spent the afternoon laughing and larking about with them.




I think I had covered most of the streets of maintown Madang by the time my water-bottle started to run low and the back of my sweat-soaked shirt to send cold sticky signs up my spine. I pulled out the map, and decided to return by the touristic route – past the hotels, the memorial, through the Saturday market .. who will buy all those root vegetables, those coconuts, and those other unfamiliar vegetables? Who those violently coloured Mother Hubbards? Who all those eternal bits of ‘native art’? … past the town’s few street of modern shops and amenities ..
I stopped by an inlet near the hotel to look at the Sunday picnic which is evidently a local tradition. Rows of folk, under brightly coloured umbrellas, cooking all sorts of fruit and vegetables over stone fireplaces. A wonderful picture. Seurat’s La Grande-Jatte flashed half ironically through my mind, and I took a photo to ponder the strange thought.



Alas, earlier on, amidst all that beauty, one of our passengers had almost become the victim of an unsuccessful pickpocket. A serpent in Paradise. The incident over, he was approached by a local woman who apologised and begged him not to think that her town was like that.
I’m sure it isn’t, but it takes a little thing like that sadly to remind you that nothing in this world is perfect. That and this omnipresence of signs that this property is patrolled by such and such a firm. Its true. One grinning patroller, spotting me striding where tourists seldom go, offered me a lift!

I like to think Madang, of its kind, almost is perfect. Its certainly as perfect as you are going to get in this part of the world.
I look forward to coming again.

The smothered city

*

I wasn’t optimistic about Rabaul. My memories of the Papua-New Guinea (Port Moresby) of thirty-five years ago, other folks’ more recent comments, and the guide-book’s tales of desolation following the eruption of two of the local volcanoes in 1994 all combined to present a pretty bleak prospect.
It was like having a horse come in at 100-1. The less you expect, the more pleasant the surprise: and can tell you, I liked Rabaul. I was fascinated by it. I was interested in it.
Miles before you sail into Simpson Harbour, you can see where you are going. One of the two offensive craters of 1994 is still at it, smoking sometimes whitely and gently, the next minute belching boiling black. Our second officer, who did late watch, says that at night it even glows red. As you sail by, you can see where the lava flowed towards the sea during the last eruption, you can see the smoke twisting up from a hundred fumaroles, and you can see the flattened dome of the ‘mountain’ with its torn away mouth … you can also feel the prickle of the ever-present ash in the air, and taste in on your lips. Uncomfortable it may be, but impressive and wonderful as well.



Our time in Rabaul was limited as we are port hopping, trying to fit into wharfing schedules and get our cargo loaded as quickly as possible. Not an easy thing in an area where an understanding of urgency is about as well developed as a notion of honesty.
The local Rabaul Hotel, an establishment with a wonderfully colourful past, sent a minibus for our valiant ten, and we were given a 4-hour potted Rabul tour. There isn’t too much to see in the way of ‘tourist attractions’. The town (which was, anyway, virtually destroyed in both World Wars) has been more or less rebuilt since the eruption, but you can’t recreate history, and the local government actually went out of its way, in the aftermath of the blast, to destroy it. 

The lava from the mountains did not touch Rabaul. But the wind was blowing the wrong way, and it was simply smothered under a metre and sometimes two of black volcanic ash. Buildings collapsed under the ashen weight, the airport, the golf course, Chinatown, and all that part of Rabaul closest to the crater were irretrievably drowned. Mango Avenue, once a tree-lined boulevard with three hotels, was barely saved. Everything beyond was condemned, and the government bulldozers finished the job the mountain had begun. What might have been a modern Pompeii was flattened. Today it is a desolation of ash, which the lush local greenery has only begun to reclaim.

We drove down Mango Avenue, past a bulldozer pounding the metres deep ash into a road-surface, through cuts in deep walls of ash, to the local museum. It consists of one room, filled with fabulous photos and documents from earlier times – the area has been French, German, Australian and British during the last century and a bit – plus some less fascinating (to me) bric a brac from the various wartime occupations.

From there – via some wasted time (for me) at a souvenir shop -- we scaled the edge of the original crater (now largely the harbour), past some of the 60 kilometres of underground tunnels built during the Japanese occupation, to the site of the local volcanic institute, from where the whole vista of Rabaul, its volcanos and its harbour could be seen




And finally, the best bit. Our bus bumped its way off the end of Mango Avenue, onto the fields of black ash, deeply runnelled by the rains of the recently ended wet season, and headed us toward the smoking Tuvurvur. A little shelter has been put up amongst the deep folds of ash, on the edge of the bay, and from there we had a splendid close-up view of the smoking blister. Some of our team paddled in the hot waters of the bay, dipped fingers in the almost boiling sulphurous water that runs coursing through the runnels, perforated by what looked like tiny geysers, bursting from under the ashy surface...





Back to the Hotel Rabaul for an iced beer and more history, and then ‘home’ to an air conditioned cabin. Ten very weary people. No-one who’d been out in the gritty, breezeless heat of the day went out after dinner. And I suspect that – as I closed my eyes at 8pm – I was amongst the last of our little band to call it a day.

A splendid day.

And now, it is 9am, and we are sailing out of the harbour, the volcano smoking us goodbye (and ‘hello’ to a Holland American cruise ship bearing 1,200 tourists to a hive of minibuses waiting eagerly at the port gates) on our way to Lae. The guide book makes Lae sound a stab-you-in-the-back nightmare. So maybe I’ll like it, too. I hope so.

My patent tropical sun-hat

And mosquito deterrent. Recommended for those travelling in the tropics and equipped with bald heads or number one haircuts.
It began its life as my father’s silk opera scarf, and may very well be older than I. And I will bet it has never been so much and so usefully employed in all its long life.

New Britain

*

From the Solomon Islands to the equally oddly named New Britain is but a short journey through bright blue seas scattered with all sorts of fiercely forested islands, large, small and infintesimal. It is odd to see a piece of land protruding from the sea, a piece no larger than a blanket, yet dense with greenery and spouting an incongruous coco-palm like a tall feather on a tiny chapeau. But you get used to it. The climate is so propitious to growth that any handful of earth is a garden.

We sailed into Kimbe in the dark, and loading began in the small hours, so we had just a few hours after breakfast to wander down the tarmac to town. The road was thick with travellers, mostly on foot, for this was Sunday and what must have been the entire population of the area was heading for one or other of the village’s all-embracing selection of churches.
Kimbe is not a large settlement, but its fairly xomprehensive. Apart from the churches, there were a couple of small groups of typical Pacific shops, selling everything that’s cheap (and half an aisle of soaps!) and including no less than four ‘beer shops’, the general stores with guards on the doors to discourage the innocent (?) local incomprehension of the words ‘private property’, the usual administration buildings and rather more businesses (all closed) that I’d have expected in a place this size. The dwellings, outside the centre, were tidy and well-built and many featured a small wayside stall at the bottom of the garden. The one next to the first church I passed was selling betel nut. But all in all, Kimbe had a nice air of small solidity about it.

It didn’t take long to do the rounds, to the same barrage of hellos and good mornings and smiles I’d enjoyed in Vanuatu, and – having successfully avoided (just) being sprayed by the sudden squirts of betel-juice which are a hazard of any group of people -- we were back on board ship before the sun climbed too high in the blazing sky.

My memories of Kimbe. The handsome, smartly-dressed and well-spoken young Micronesian with his three piccaninnies and a splendid smile, who, leaping from the back of his pick up truck, struck up conversation with me at the Assembly of God Church. His warmth, sincerity, and his evident pride in his town and his church. The little girl, carrying her littler brother out from the Catholic church with grown-up seriousness and responsibility. And the small boys, laughing in such wonderful, carefree fashion as they scrambled up the mooring ropes of the ship just for the joy of the game.
Kimbe is OK. I just hope the rubbish man comes on Mondays to give the streets a wash and brush up. And I hope those laughing lads don’t turn into betel addicts. I fear, alas, that it’s a forlorn hope.

Solomon in all his .. hmmm

*

Well, the sun did eventually come out in Santo, but I felt I’d seen what I wanted to see, and didn’t want to spoil my happy impression, so I stayed shipside and toasted my increasingly bulky body up on deck until we left town. Next stop, Honiara, Solomon Islands.

Deep breath.

Well. I’ve been to one or two scungy, depressing, just plain horrid places in my travels of the last 40 years, but I regret to say that Honiara beats them all. I know. I know there are reasons, of a sort. The locals seem to have spent an incommensurate part of their recent history blowing each other up or burning each other down for little or no valid reason, so one can hardly expect the man-made parts of the place to be physically beautiful. And it is the tropics, so its going to be more than comfortably hot, with all the problems that brings. But this place isn’t just hot, its dirty-dusty and above all its unkempt, ugly and filthy. Even the greenery, so beautiful in Santo, is a dirty green colour in Honiara. And, alas, even the people have caught the prevailing colour. We have a different race here from smiling Vila and happy Santo. I’m not an expert on Pacific races, but the difference is evident. Here, ninety percent of the faces were a blank scowl. Or a vacant, red-mouthed stare. For this is betel land, and everywhere you look -- from the nearest thing to a pretty young girl (and it wasn’t too near) to a toothless old man -- you see the vampiric red juice dripping from chins, and squirting from between lips.
My abiding memory of Honiara, glimpsed as I tried to negotiate my way along what passes for a main street, past the fouled concrete shops, through the unyielding, unhappy crowds thronging the impossible footpaths, is of a young man crowned by a supersized frizz of Melanesian hair, zonked out in the dirt and rubbish at the foot of a scrawny tree. His eyes were staring angrily like those of a dead man, his mouth was agape, and the red juice stained his chest and his shirt. The journalistic Kurt wanted to take his photograph. The Kurt inside me just wanted to get the Hell out of this place.
I did try. I pushed on and walked to both ends of the town, past the modern grey banks, past the multiple churches (surely God could tell these people to be joyous), past one nice Melanesian arts shop (I want no souvenirs of Honiara), past one out-of-place looking tidy hotel … but I have never been so glad as when, after a little short of an hour, I scrambled up the gangplank to my cool little cabin.

The guide book which said ‘there is little to like in Honiara’ was wrong. There is NOTHING to like in Honiara. It made me feel sad, disgusted and about twenty other negative things all in one time. The guide book also said, don’t judge the Solomons on Honiara. On that one, I reserved judgement.

We were condemned to four whole further days in this burg while our 3000 tons of copra were loaded, but there was no way at all that I was going down that gangway again. While my fellow travellers and ship pals issued forth gamely in search of something worthwhile, I luxuriated on board ship. I’ll chase round in a good port with the best of them, just as I did thirty-five years ago, but I’m darned if I’m going to subject myself to the arsehole of the Pacific just because I’m on the spot.
PS Honiara looks ever so much better from a deckchair on monkey island than it does close up, and my four days of leisure were enlivened by a view of the very active inter-island shipping ferries (people and goods, including one very noisy live pig strapped to a pole). So I’ll illustrate this with pictures of Honiara taken from ta safe distance.




Well, the guide book was right. First thing this morning we sailed into Noro. Ah, mais, oui! Noro is a spot on the map which exists around a factory which cans yellow-fish tuna. There is the factory, the fishing fleet (I counted 11 oldish boats), and the brown, artisanal houses (many on stilts) which house the workers of the factory. Then there is the all-important wharf itself with its tidy road and bright boats, after which a little group of buildings including a general store, the administration buildings and, Lord’s sake, up on the hill, Noro Lodge, hotel and licensed restaurant (currently under much-needed – says the book -- renovation). And that is Noro.




We were only here a short time, picking up 44 containers of scrap metal, but our James (who can give me a decade plus) scrambled down the pilot’s ladder (no gangway here) and checked it out. He says it and its people are as delightful at close quarters as from afar. He also photographed the merry locals and scarpered down the ladder again to give them prints! Next year maybe I shall brave the pilot’s ladder…

So, the Solomon Islands, it seems, are indeed delightful.
If you stay away from Honiara.

More Espiritu Santo

*

Day two of Espiritu Santo dawned, of course, rainy. Gently rainy. But rain is not a deterrent here.

At 9am driver-guide Kenneth and his Tour minibus presented itself at the foot of the gangplank and we all climbed aboard for what was to turn out to be a truly enjoyable day.

We started off with a quick whirl up and down the main street of the town. What a difference a day makes! With the shabby shop-shutters down, the market tables overflowing, and the whole place alive and colourfully buzzing, Luganville took on a wonderfully vivacious air that even the peeling concrete and puddles couldn’t dim.

Then we set off towards the north of the island. The town ended quickly and splendidly with a large, new Agricultural College, and at the same time the tarmac ended too. From here on, it was dirt roads of decreasing proportions and increasing age all the way. Given the way the rains come down here, and given that seemingly the Santo Ministry of Works consists of one elderly, large, yellow grader, we would, over the next couple of hours, find ourselves tackling some hair-raisingly rain-rutted routes.

Our first event was a visit to a ‘typical’ country village. And I reckon this typical country village really was exactly that. I don’t think Santo has got round to special country villages for the tourists yet. Plaited walls and palm-leaf roofs, huge and lovely trees, typical tropical flowers, typical tropical dogs and, of course, the people. A deep-hued man dragging a cow on a rope (it promptly sat down), a little caramel boy with wide eyes, and everywhere those grand, infectious grins…





On we drove, past our first copra smoker. I didn’t actually know, before, what copra really was. Just that it was a coconut product. Well, I do know now, and I have had a detailed education on the drying and separating of the inside of the fruit that is the raw material of this place’s main industry. I also realise why it can’t be loaded in the rain. The finished article is bundled into loosely woven sacking, barely closed with wide, gaping stitching at each end. As packaging goes it’s airy, but at best approximate. But who wants a hold full of mouldering coconut?

The other obvious agricultural activity is cattle. Well, the climate and the lush greenery clearly agree with cows: the fields were full of fine, beefy animals. So, often, were the roads. Fencing is an idiosyncratic art here. Many fences are ‘live’, not with electricity but with green growth. The fence-posts have rooted and they supply not only an enclosure but also cattle feed! (Maybe I should try that one on my fence-devouring horses). But more paddocks have no fencing than do, and the cattle are free to wander. I guess, given the lushness of the pasturage, they have little need to stray far.

Our destination was Champagne Beach. I was a little worried about this, as the name had a resort-y ring to it. But who, I thought would rattle over an hour and more of excruciating roads to get to a resort? Well, Champagne Beach turned out to be a gem. Your genuine coral sand beach, with a line of local-style chalets set in green lawns and lashings of lavish flora and .. best of all … we were the only people there! So we lunched on good stout sandwiches and papaya and grapefruit and bottled water from Kenneth’s esky, some of us took a dip in the warm sea or a stroll along the strand (me), and it was like having one’s own private little piece of storybook Pacific paradise for an hour and a bit.
Oh, and the champagne bit? It’s the colour of the sand.




Not far from Champagne Beach, Kenneth took us to visit the village and the house where he had grown up. The minibus wove in and out of the non-existent streets, between the houses, past a ‘church’ and a sizeable football field, and I was staggered when he told us that this not overlarge group of houses was home to over a thousand people! People living largely in the traditional fashion, as folk do in the northern parts of Santo. Give or take a minibus in the family.

And then we set off to brave, upwards, the most terrifying of the runnelled roads that we’d earlier negotiated downwards. There were a couple of occasions when I thought e wouldn’t make it, but we did. A fear seriously for the suspension of Kenneth’s proud new bus.

Our last stop for the day was to be the Blue Hole. Well, the Blue Hole seems to figure in most descriptions of the beauties of Santo, but there is no sign to it, and it is approached by a muddy track at the end of which we had to abandon the bus and climb aboard the tray of our accompanying pick-up for a particularly vertiginous last few hundred metres. Not the easiest of ‘tourist attractions’ to approach!
Well, it is a hole, and the water is indeed the bluest of deep blue set in foliage of the most dazzling green and gold. And it is also, theoretically, swimmable. If you can scramble successfully down the slippery stones to its edge. The three most adventurous of our party (average age: seventy-something) took up the challenge. I hastily appointed myself chief photographer to the occasion, before deciding I’d rather climb the vertiginous bit back up on my own two feet than on the slipping-and-sliding tray of the truck. And that was when God decided that there was one kind of rain we hadn’t had today, and pulled out the plug. Drenched again, like some circus clown. Transparent again. What joy I’d had the foresight to pop a couple of bottles of beer in my little red cabin-bag.



By three o’clock we were all safely if wetly back on ship, queuing for the laundry dryer, after a grand day’s outing.
I do like Santo.
And it looks as if I shall be able to go on liking it. The wharf is empty. Seems copra-loading has been called off.

Lost in Lugainville

*

From the island of Espe, Vanuatu (capital: Port Vila) to the island of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu (capital?: Luganville), is little more than a night-time wriggle northwards through the chicane of islets that make up this beautiful but battered country. Battered? Oh, dear, yes. Battered by a massive American presence and the action that it attracted during the 1940s war, and battered all over again by power-drugged local men who would be king, thirty years later. Santo, the biggest island of the group, was the centre for both tragedies.

We sailed in, through the gauntlet of islands, mid-morning under – what else? -- erratic rain. We are going to be here for two days (maybe more, depending on the weather: copra, our main cargo, cannot, it seems, be loaded in the rain) and I decided that, even if the novelty of rainy walking may have worn off a tad after yesterday, I’d power ashore, ‘do’ the town, the beach, the markets and the river, and pop up that inviting green hill behind them.

Well, I’ve been and I’ve done it. I took all sorts of extra turnings and byways, climbed right over the hill … and I was still back at the gangplank in just an hour and a very small bit. The town of Luganville is only just worthy of that description. ‘Village’ would be kinder and, even then … settlement, maybe?



The traces of the war can still be seen, even though (thanks to local 1946 politicians’ inefficiencies) the Americans dumped most of what they couldn’t take home into the sea off what is now known as Million Dollar Point. You can’t miss the semicircular army huts, now converted to other uses, and I also spotted the carcase of an elderly ship, and the chassis of a troop carrier (I think) both, I am sure, artistically placed for the modern tourist, for believe it or not Santo is becoming a tourist destination. Apparently, largely for war groupies and thanks to the opportunities for snorkel-divers to explore its wrecks.



I saw nothing else of all that on my walk. On the front, set back from the untidy green-lined coral beach with its soggy park and modern foodstalls, just flat-roofed concrete buildings and variegated shanties (how does a roof of plastic bags, straw and newspaper keep out the sort of rain they have here?), two ANZ ATMs, a prominent First National land agent, some tatty-shuttered shops with a higher degree of Chinese owners than in Vila, several invitingly atmospheric-looking places for sleeping, eating and drinking which would give Conrad Hilton and building inspectors nightmares, as well as lashings of delightful greenery and tropical flora. Someone had added to the rickety town hall (currently scaffolded with something you wouldn’t get me up onto!) a vast and vaguely modernist courtyard roof, already getting tatty from the weather. Less comical was the neat, new food market, with its long benches but very few occupants. Maybe because it was Sunday. Apart from the ATMs and First National, and in spite of the predilection for concrete, the whole place had a distinct feeling of Somerset Maugham to it. Wonderful!

Before I knew it, I’d reached the Sarakata River: lushly green, lushly indigo, and with little fishing and pleasure boats buzzing here and there.



I photographed a smiling, waving man in a smashing outrigger (alas, it came out as a photo of my thumb). I photographed three little giggling girls outside a shanty with a vast washing line full of multicoloured knickers (maybe mother is a washerwoman?) and a surprisingly nearly-new red pickup truck out the back. And then I struck out up the hill.



As in Vila, away from the front, amongst the greenery and gardens, shanties give way to ageing bungalows with reasonably sound roofs and even the occasional ‘villa’. Not to mention public buildings. One of the first substantial peeling mid-C20th buildings I came upon was the local Law Courts. The already-peeled Rotary Club buildings even had a broken-down swimming pool. More modern, and decked out with beautiful gardens, was the local branch of the University of the South Pacific. But Luganville is not Vila. It’s much, much smaller, much, much less consequent. There is no Vanair catering mansion here. No high-class cricket ground.

But Espiritu Santo is, it seems, ‘developing’.

Barely across the water one can see the island of Aore. Aore is, it seems, a ‘resort’. So I won’t be going there. Give me shoreside Santo any day. It has a real charm.

Smiling in the Rain

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Port Vila. The guide books make it sound awful, what with its hideous political history and their assurances that it was now a booming tourist metropolis. Should I go ashore or not? I did fancy a walk. But…
I got up at 5am, did my gymnasium bit, and climbed up to the bridge to cast an eye over the town as we sailed in. Nothing. Just a wimple of mist and rain. And when finally the town peeped greyly into view it looked very ordinary. Forget the walk, I thought. But I wanted some local ‘vatu’ (100ish to the US$) for tomorrow’s jaunt in Santo, and the guide book said there was an ANZ in town. And from the deck the local greenery looked so deliciously lavish. I dithered. And then I heard the jolly sounds of other folk going ashore. Well, why not …?
Uniform for malarial countries. Super-light cover-all. I decked myself out in my thin cotton Arab pants (closed ankles), my Monoprix lawn shirt (closed wrists) , shoved Dad’s old opera scarf (silk) which does me as a turban (neck covered) into my bag, donned my new Logan for-the-trip shoes and off I set.
The rain was falling lightly. Lovely, warm droplets of soft tropical rain. The others were catching the bus to town. Not this boy, of course. I strode off along what passes for a dockyard in Vila and immediately thought ‘I like this place’. The containers coming and going sit not in a vast yard, but alongside the road that leads to town, and the trucks and lifter-machines do their loading and unloading in the middle of the public highway!


The road to town passed by the usual range of shabby tropical buildings, cracked, faded and forgotten businesses of sometimes unlikely kinds, and I’m sure that there would have been some nice views if one could have seen through the grey haze. Mostly no footpath, but when there was one, I wished it finished for it was ten times more dangerous and precipitous than the road. A road on which drivers actually took huge trouble to avoid puddles, so as not to spray a pedestrian. Amazing! Where else in the world…?
Then, a couple of kilometres into my walk, the heavens emptied themselves upon earth. Drowningly but deliciously. So, as the locals sheltered under vast coloured umbrellas or shop awnings, I just carried on, heading along the road in Kurt-length strides. Well, I was soaked utterly through, a living wet-T-shirt advertisement, so what difference did a bit more warm-n-wetness make?



Down the main street, half touristy, half-shabby, past the grandiose food market with its bananas and coconuts, and the sodden tourist market, selling plastic grass skirts and those shirts that we all used to pray our friends wouldn’t bring us back from their holidays in Fiji. Past the ANZ bank where an elderly German lady tutted me that I should get home and have a good rubdown and a whisky. Then, firmly, off the waterfront. Up through Chinatown – all Chinatowns smell the same, but this one was really deliciously spicy and ramshackle -- up to a little residential suburb where I stumbled upon the local Chamber of Commerce, an aged clapboard house with a lavish tropical garden. On, then, to the quarter, back from the more commercial area, that housed the schools, the church, the theatre (Australian provoked, alas), a magnificent playing field with a stand Lords would envy, and a palatial establishment which turned out to be the catering department of Vanair.
And all the way, along my way, I was greeted with smiles, shouts, helloes, and bonjours on all sides. One small young man with a huge umbrella even ran after me – two strides to my one! -- to try to have a conversation. Was it just that the sight of an elderly chap in Arab pants and a silk scarf, drenched to the skin, doing a seven-league-boots act along the road was the novelty of the season? Or are the people of Vila just the joyously friendly islanders that I’ve met in other like countries? For, of course, except for the German lady, every one of the more than a hundred folk who greeted me, spoke to me, shook my hand (and in one case made me shake the baby’s hand) were of course Ni-Vanuatu: the local Polynesian (?) people. And mostly young men. Several blokes in vans stopped and offered me a ride. One was at the helm of a pick up truck and I thought back, thirty-five years, to St Maarten in the Caribbean, where I circumnavigated the island standing on the back of such a truck, wind in the hair I then had and blissfully happy. Would he take me round the island, I wondered. Not enough time, but dreams are free.

One couple of girls giggled shyly as they whispered ‘Alo’. I looked down. Not only was my shirt pasted transparently to my body by the rain, so were my super-thin cotton trousers. ‘Kiwi flasher arrested in Rue d’Artois’, I thought as I strode on without bothering to ‘adjust my clothing’, as they say.


Back down the wharf yard accompanied by hoots, yells and cheers from the dock workers who’d seen me set out in the rain two hours earlier…

Thank goodness I did go. I’m sure I shall remember Vila for a long time. Not its scenery, its greenery, its buildings, views, markets or even its bank. But its people, The Ni-Vanuatu. And that lovely, soft, warm rain.

Almost Chrissie-mas!

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With bags packed (bless you, Sarah) and head distinctly in departure mode, what better way to spend a waiting-to-go day than … at the races.
Tuesday trotting is a new thing in New Zealand, introduced just this year to feed the ravenously hungry television-betting industry. Tuesday race-days have reduced stakes and (theoretically) reduced fields, sort of like dog racing with sulkies, and they were intended for the lesser lights of the sport and the lesser horses of ditto. Well, that was the idea. It hasn’t quite turned out like that.
Read on.
Rangiora HRC was the organiser of this week’s event, which is why I was there doing my ‘meeting and greeting and congratulating’ act. Also, best-friends-Robin-and-Geraldine-Wilson had two horses in and Jan, Wendy’s sister, had brought Chrissie all the way down from Nelson. She’d run at the previous week’s event and finished a splendid second.
Well, what a grand day it was! I had some really delightful people to meet and greet (hello the Wakelin family, Mrs Strachan et al), the Wilsons' pair nailed up a first ('His Honour' aka Tony) and a second (my old friend 'Gridlock' aka Lockie) and I also ended up presenting the trophy and the traditional winner’s bit of a tipple to my Mum’s friend, Barbara, as well. I'm not sure who was the more shocked at our unforseen meeting, she or I!
And Chrissie? Well, Chrissie was in the last race. And on the turn she was in last place. Here’s the photo of the finish. That’s her at the very top (ie way out wide), almost – but not quite -- getting up to win. Right under my nose!
And who beat her? Which lesser light? Just a representative of the ritziest and starriest stable in the whole of New Zealand. Well, if you have to get beat, even on a Tuesday …



So bravo, Chrissie, and bravo Jan who now has the remarkable record of driving in four races at Addington, the HQ of NZ harness racing, for one win and two seconds.

And now, off for a jolly supper at the local resto, and then it's time to get that head of mine back into departure mode...

Here I go again .. eventually?

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My mother says that half the fun of a voyage is the planning of it.

I beg to disagree.

I’ve passed many a wakeful midnight during these last weeks over the arrangements for my next seven months. You see, I’m not one of that kind who can start out around the world (with one very small green suitcase and one even smaller red cabin bag) with a blank book. Not even this year when, I’ve decided, I shall not ‘guest’ myself upon friends old and new. Well, not so often as last year.

So, here is the plan. And it starts, already, with an imponderable. Groan.

The good ship the Gazellebank, Captain Peter Stapleton (see earlier blogs and pics ), was due to pick me up in Auckland 26 January 2008. At this moment, it’s re-scheduled for 14 February. And will, probably, unless Peter puts on the steam, not even make that. Which retards my arrival in Europe by at least 3 weeks. So my first adventure on the old Continent has been emasculated.



Now, I shall now arrive in Hamburg – after ten weeks on the high and low seas -- in late April, to be met by my dear friend Kevin (see blog) with whom I shall visit his birthplace, Berlin, before ending up in his present home town (see blog) of Amsterdam. From there, I am booked to fly, on 14 May, to Jersey.

In Jersey I am staying at the Bayview Guest House, St Helier. Yes, I’m in town this year. Sorry, Lucille of lovely Rocqueberg View, but my heart and feet are older now and last year’s shoes wore out. And I still fret about destruction of your umbrella (see blog).

From there, by two-part ferry (via Portsmouth) to the Isle of Wight for a lazy month of June at Hermitage Court Farm on St Catherine’s Downs. I and Red Ted’s (much) younger brother who will help me track down a few of my Victorian Vocalists in the island’s graveyards.



And then, on 1 July, France. That’s where I really want to be. So why have I tarried so long elsewhere? It’s partly the damned car-driving thing… I simply can’t drive again on the wrong side of the road. Hell, some people would say I can’t drive on the right side of the road… Especially roads with all those erratic touristy cars on them. Instead, I have to rely on the kindness of others.
So, what will I do, what do I want in France?
Umm. I wish.. I wish.. for a nice sixtyish gentleman (grin) to drive me around and help me find a new French home … At least, I think that’s what I want.
But, more realistically, I just hope to re-meet old and newer friends and almost-family, stay with (YES! but briefly) some darling people, and have a lovely French time…

Oh heck, mum is totally wrong. I loathe the planning, but I am looking forward to the places and the people.

Lyndall says...

...

That its a perfectly good picture
That I look better at 12 stone than thirteen and a half
That she even believes she spies a muscle
Have I been at the horse feed?
And that I'm to put it on the blog pronto
so here it is

The Cavalcade of Red Ted

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I left Nelson and mother at 7.45 this morning.

My wonderful little break was, I thought, at an end.

Good grief, I thought initially it was the other way round! HERE was supposed to be the break. But, no. I have some head getting-together to do.

I drove back south through mostly the same country as on the upward leg. Beautiful. Only a few of those beastly caravans and Maui trucks (may they be damned and banned for all time) to make one slam on the brakes. Four and a half hours instead of nearly six!. Did I speed? Red Ted can’t speed.

I don’t care much for driving. But today … cruising through the glories of NZ … hell, I was happy.
Again
Twice in two days.
Ted seemed happy too. What would I do without him?
He did the ups and downs and fought off all sane challengers (NZ drivers are THE PITS and there would seem to be no speed limit except for me!)

I took petrol at Wakefield, a brief lunch at Hope Bridge – it had to be brief thanks to the scourge of NZ, sandflies! -- and arrived home to find… water pump problems. ARGGGH!
I’m going to bed

Dream trip over!

I have had such a happy time.

Could life perhaps always be like this?

My Father

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When I go back to Richmond or Nelson, I’m not Kurt Friedrich Gänzl internationally famed, multi-award-winning author and blablabla…

I’m Dr Gallas’s son. Dr Fred Gallas, longtime headmaster of Waimea College, Richmond, and remembered with enormous respect (and occasionally just a little twinge of fear) by the many, many thousands of local boys and girls who attended the school during his long period at its head.
Even this week, leaning over the bars of the horse-yards at the racecourse … ‘YOU are Dr Gallas’s son…?!’
I sure am. And couldn’t be prouder of it.

This year was of course Waimea College’s fiftieth birthday, and the odd bit of uninformed twaddle found its way into print (as these things do) for the occasion. I could have reacted, but I didn’t bother.

If only those people knew the truth. And (chuckle) if only those thousands of boys and girls could have looked into the box of photos my mother gave me yesterday, and seen their benignly stern ‘Victorian’ headmaster when he was in his teens and early twenties.

Mountaineer, international skier, gymnast, health and fitness teacher, Ph D (and half a dozen other sets of letters) … and heck, how come I never inherited those good looks, not to mention that elevation….!

My wonderful father. God bless him.

An Anniversary Day at the Races

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I first discovered harness racing at the age of 11. My father had been appointed as the inaugural principal of brand new Waimea College, Richmond, Nelson, and in January 1957 the family removed from Wellington to Richmond. An 11 year-old is a bit of a pain when carpets and furniture are being unpacked, so I was allowed to wander down to see what was going so colourfully on down at the Agricultural and Pastoral Society’s grounds. What father didn’t realise, until some time later, was that the A&P grounds contain Richmond racetrack, and ‘what was going on’ was not a country fair but the Nelson Harness Racing Club’s summer meeting. That was the day I first got hooked on the sport. And, I suppose, if I hadn’t gone, I wouldn’t now have the farm of 'Gerolstein' and all its horses, I wouldn’t have been the proud achiever of 28 racing wins. There would have been no Davey Crockett, no Master Ado, no Lite Gasp, and, Zeus forbid, no Elena de Gerolstein. I’d be a lot richer. But much less happier.

It wasn’t till I started telling someone how long ago I’d first come racing in Richmond that it hit me. Today was my half century. Fifty years exactly from my first glimpse of Rosyth, Somerset Lad and the world of harness racing. Well, it turned out to be a truly wonderful ‘birthday’. I can’t remember when I last enjoyed myself at the races so much.

All the old Nelson/Richmond pals from the 1990s were there, and we had joyous reunions. All the horsey pals from down the years were there … who would miss Nelson? … and in holiday mode. None of the ‘rush to Addington on a windy Friday night, run your horse and get home as quickly as possible’. Here, everyone is happy to linger.
Wayne Higgs, who trained all my early horses for me, was there with a team. He’d grinned to me not long ago that he would win a dozen races on the holiday circuits this year. So I passed the news on to my punting friends. I’m afraid they scoffed. Well, I’m here to say that Wayne took out three races on 11 January alone, and at tidy odds too!
And Murray Edmonds, who drove our dear Davey Crockett at Nelson one year (he came 4th, I have the video) and now trains my Wanda, Fritzl and Seppl: as every year, he was there with a tidy team, including my Gwen’s half-brother, Boomdiddiboom, and her ‘nephew’, Ronnie Coute.
None of mine, alas. I’m having what’s politely called a fallow period, but I get just as much fun watching the rest of the red-white-and-yellow horses running. With Murray, Wayne and the other pals there in force, I always had at least two or three horses to cheer on per race.
And, of course, there was ‘Chrissie’. Chrissie is Konni Kase, and she’s trained and driven by Wendy’s sister, Jan. She’s five now, and hasn’t really shown anything on the track since a promising first start, way back. But she had trialled well last week, so hope was in the air.
Well, Wayne hit hard and first with his triple whammy. And Murray almost pipped the redhot expensively-bought favourite with a once wild beast named Barmy Army. I took my photo an instant too soon .. he got even closer than in this picture.




Ronnie ran very well for fourth (he will be hot fave on day two after that!), and Boom just behind him in his usual honest 6th, so Gwen and Duchess’s ‘family’ were far from disgraced.
Then it was Chrissie’s turn. Here she is parading in the birdcage before the race: she’s grown into a fine specimen.



I needed six eyes for this race, the Hoani Jack Cup, because, apart from Chrissie, my friends Erin and Arkie had a new horse running, and old pal Les St Clair had one in too. But of course, I watched Chrissie. She’d drawn 17, so she was lastish when they settled. But Jan took her courage in her hands, looped the field three wide, put the horse handy and Chrissie ran on stoutly to finish sixth just 3 lengths from the winner and just a length off getting in the money! That’s her on the outside, in the yellow jacket. She’s making ground all the time, and was closer by the end. Oh, and by the way, she was the rank outsider of the field, paying 100-1! Not next time!



This picture however, tells a further tale. That one sneaking through on the inside to win the race – that’s Fire Dancer aka ‘Erin’, and the one pushing through the middle to second? That’s Les’s horse! So Erin and Arkie got to take home the Hoani Jack Cup, and the remaining races of the day passed in a flood of joy, great company and cold chardonnay, under the glorious Nelson sunshine.




Yes, this is why I got into harness racing. Why have I stopped doing this thought of thing? Well, I know why I stopped. But now, I must start again ... next summer Red Ted the Suzuki Alto is going to have to work a bit more for his living!

And so my anniversary day, Johnny’s birthday, was a splendid one, finishing with a quiet little supper and a nice bottle of local wine with mother, and -- oh, bliss! -- a good night’s sleep. So, who thought he’d never be happy again…?

A Trip Northwards ... and back in time

January 11 2008 was brother John’s 58th birthday. January 11 2008 was also the Nelson Harness Racing Club’s summer meeting. And I wanted to spend a day or two with mother, before, in a few weeks, I head off back to Europe. Mother just happens to live directly opposite Richmond racecourse.
So what more logic than for us to spend Johnny’s birthday together, and of course take in a bit of summery harness racing.
Just to make this trip all the more logical, Nicho from Germany (and Barraba Station) has been staying with us, and has as yet seen of New Zealand only Sefton, horse racing and Mount Cook. So what more suitable than for him to ride with me the 400 kilometres from Gerolstein to Richmond and, from there, bus, hitch and walk his way back to Christchurch in time to catch his plane for Stuttgart at the end of the month.
And so, on January 10, the little red car (which, these days, isn’t used to doing much more than a short sprint to the shops or the racetrack) was rolled out of its bed at 7am, and off we set in a mild grey Canterbury drizzle.
What I didn’t realise was that it would turn out, for me, to be much more than a simple car trip.
Only once in the past five years have I driven over what used to be the familiar road between Canterbury and Nelson. The road that, in the 1990s, Ian and I scooted regularly up and down, from our cottage in St Arnaud, happily following our horses round the Canterbury racetracks or fulfilling various lecturing and book-related dates. What memories there were, round every corner of the road.
Happily, as we approached the Lewis Pass, the point in the mountainous’ backbone’ of New Zealand’s South Island where you cross out of the Canterbury plains, the clouds vanished and the sun came out, so for the second half of our trip we saw the Buller and Nelson provinces at their best. I’d somehow forgotten (how could I?) just how beautiful New Zealand’s countryside is.
We stopped at the impressive Maruia Falls for soda water and a choc-bar. More memories. A visit there with Ian ten years ago. And much further back, as children, Johnny and I with our parents. It hasn’t changed. Except at last they’ve put signs up so you don’t miss it. And a toilet and picnic table and a proper track to the riverside! But in true New Zealand Dept of Conservation manner: no rubbish bin. (Well, someone would have to empty it. Official answer!).



I’ve never wanted to go back to Lake Rotoiti and the village of St Arnaud, where I spent so many weekends of my childhood climbing and skiing, and where Ian and I had a small holiday farm for something like a decade. But Nicho needed to see it, so I bit the bullet and detoured. The lake first. It must be over half a century since I first paddled in its waters.
It too is, of course, the same. Its deep blue waters, its pebbled ‘beach’, and the friendly mountains, naked of snow at this time of year. I must be getting old and kindly. I ever felt warmth towards toward the happy families picnicking messily (no DOC wastebin) on the strand, until one little girl decided it would be fun to frighten the ducks (the same ones, I’m sure, from 50 years ago). She now knows that frightening ducks is not funny. Especially in a National Park.
I got Nicho to take a picture of me in the same place where I had one taken in my childhood, and I intended to put the Then and the Now up here together. But I can’t find the Then, and I take a lousy photo Now, so here’s Nicho instead.



From the lake we drove out through St Arnaud village. Much of it is the same, but the new village hall has at last been built (it looks more like an aircraft factory) and some grotty ‘developer’ has shoved a dozen or so tatty chalets onto what used to be one paddock on the edge of the (tiny) burg. A ghastly eyesore. And then, a couple of kilometres down the road, Fernenland. Our sometime wee house and 62 acres. I didn’t mean not to look, and anyway the buildings and gardens are hidden behind the National Trust mini-forest (my donation) that lines the road. I just clocked the fact that the trees had grown hugely since our time, and plunged onwards. Too many memories can be too many.

Through the vast Golden Down forests, on the road we used to take each week to buy supplies in Wakefield (a wonderful butcher) and Richmond. Alas, the butcher has sold up and his little shop is now a garish block of commerces. My friendly garagiste, too, has gone into retirement, but his successor has spruced the place up nicely. We press on.

At the bottom of the main street of Richmond, Nicho piled out with his backpack and headed for the busstop. And I turned in the other direction, to Villa 40, Oakwoods Village, and a whole lot more memories.

A long time between blogs

It’s been a long time between blogs, hasn’t it.

Mainly because there wasn’t a lot to blog about during this very indifferent hot-n-cold, grey-n-gold antipodean summer.

I’ve done a bit of writing and researching on my monster work on Victorian Vocalists. I’ve done a bit of horse, of course. A tiny bit of farming. And, in between, well, not a lot.

It has not been the most successful or exciting horsey season at Gerolstein. Mostly so-so racehorses and a whole heap of bad luck have kept success on the racetrack away, and my own beloved beasts … well, Elena, Wanda and Boris are all ‘resting’. Elena curbed a hock (the penalty, I fear, of her large size), just when she was starting to get things nicely together on the beach, and Wanda and Boris were both judged to ‘need more time’. Little Fritzl and Seppl are eating grass too, over in Motukarara, but they both – like Wanda and Elena – should hopefully be back in warm-up action more or less about the time I set sail for Europe (6 February). Gwen and Duchess (below) had a year off from baby-bearing, so they and I are having to make do with ‘other people’s babies’ (we have three beauties on the farm) for now, but they came home last week in foal to the French stallion Love You, so this time next year we will -- hopefully --have two fine Friwi foals.




We’ve had a horse lose its driver, a horse fall through the fault of an incompetent (other) driver and animal, we’ve had a horse caught in an electric fence (and it cost me 20 jolts of electricity to get him out), but the worst event of the horsey summer, was the loss of little Peggy, who died just after I posted her picture on this blog, aged five weeks. We are due for some luck! But that’s racing.

So 2007 is nearly over. It has had some high spots, some (including my first ever motor-car graunch) not so high, but I look forward to doing better in 2008. And, of course, I shall tell you all about it.

Bonne année!

Rosie's Baby

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With the easing of the equine flu restrictions in Australia, Barry and Rosemary were at last able to voyage up to the Hunter Valley and visit Rosmarino (Rosie) and her progeny at Brooklyn Lodge. Rosie and her last year's foal, Basil, came in for a share of the attention ... but, needless to say, the latest addition to the family, little Peggy (by Fusaichi Pegasus) was the most photographed girl on the block. She is much admired by those who have knowledge, so fingers crossed that she will grow up a bonny and speedy lass.

My name is Mikie!

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Well, its dusk .. and the wee boy has, as promised, a name!

Also its a degree or two less frigid. For the moment...

So we run (intermittently) to keep warm...

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Hey World, Here I Am!

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A bitterly cold night in Canterbury, NZ. Three degrees, and showers of heavy rain.

So this, of course, had to be the night that Sally chose to give birth, under the pine trees, to her fourth son, a baby brother for General George, for Ned, and for one year-old Rose.

Our first Gerolstein foal of the year! Welcome, ummm... baby. (I guess he'll have a name by the end of the day!)



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