Behind the Curtain
9 - 15 Dec, (Now with photo, I hope)
Ian
One paradox of our travels has been that the more
somewhere ostensibly seems like home the more unusual it seems. In Maine, for
example, after 3 months in Africa and Corsica it seemed bizarre to be in North
America, which I suppose we conceive of as being like England only with better
services and less irony, and yet to feel so foreign. In Tasmania I have the
same dream-like sense of the distorted familiar; it's like watching a movie
about home, only with the audio and visual tracks slightly out of
sync.
The weather has the changeability of the English climate, but with less wishy-washy weather: the other night, for example, we had lightning that I could see in bed through the drawn curtains and with my eyes shut. When I opened my eyes the lightning - still beyond the drawn curtains - was phenomenally bright, like a bowl of burning magnesium. I was wired to my iPod at the time and also just feeling too lazy to go to the window and look properly. Similarly, when we've had rain here it's often been more satisfactorily battering rain than we usually get at home.
As when we were in North America, we've mixed up visiting the local attractions with periods of just settling in and trying to catch the vibe of the place. Thus since I last wrote I've finished reading English Passengers and also read the entertaining but less excellent Shadow Divers. The latter is written as a "Ripping Yarns" documentary account of a couple of guys with a mission for deep sea shipwreck diving who come across a U-boat off the New Jersey coast and tenaciously research its story. Despite the constant mythologising - imagine a bio of Batman written by Robin - it is fascinating, especially if you have an interest in diving, and it's a good thing to read while I await delivery of my official, non-temporary PADI certificate.
A few days ago I picked up the book What we Believe but Cannot Prove, which is a collection of short pieces by "leading thinkers" each of whom proposes one candidate on the subject. I don't know whether it's a book I can read straight through but the contributor list is actually impressive. I think that one reason I bought it was to cast around for inspiration regarding the organisation of my "beliefs" blogs, a couple of which are sitting unpublished on my mac. I do like the idea of this book: it pleases me that people care about such interesting, unproductive topics, and that they've found such an appealing way to present their musings.
But we haven't just been sitting around reading. We returned to Dove Lake and did the circuit that I described last time in the dry. We haven't yet done any of the longer multi-hour walks around Cradle Mountain; I think they'll remain a project for next time. Impressive though Cradle Mountain is, the one that towers above our cabin - Roland Mountain - has more of a hold on our imagination. It rises in a huge craggy wall that adds drama to the otherwise meadowy pastoral setting. The nearest place to us is called Paradise and it does seem very unspoilt. At our resort John has built nine cabins, or cottages as he calls them, that he rents out but it doesn't feel like a tourist destination. The people we've met here are generally passing through in cars or on bikes and seem surprised that we've planned to stay here for a couple of weeks; even John seemed taken aback when I booked it.
The tourist places here seem a little half-hearted. On Tuesday we went to a place down the road called Tasmazia, which is has a few large mazes, a twee little model village, lavender fields and a pancake house. The mazes were surprisingly fun - much better than Hampton Court, after which one of them is named - and the pancakes were good, too. Tasmazia was set up some years ago by the same guy who had the brainwave of making the nearest town, Sheffield, more appealing by commissioning murals on every large exposed wall. The parish council feeling of the local tourism efforts does add charm to the area, although not necessarily quite as they intended.
Sheffield is barely a town, being far smaller than many English villages - Cranleigh has ten to fifteen times the population. I like it. This morning I was there buying supplies and saw a guy walking around with his pet alpaca.
The nearest large towns are Devonport and Launceston ("Lonnie"). On Friday afternoon we went to the cinema in Devonport and saw Corpse Bride. We had the entire auditorium to ourselves; after seeing the film I could understand why - it just wasn't as good as it ought to have been. I also tried to book in for a massage, which is a treat I've been meaning to award myself for a few months, only to find that the aromatherapy girl was booked for the whole forthcoming week. That must be what people do here.
Launceston is a larger town that I like more, though it's useful more than it is pretty. It's the only place I've found in Tassie where I can get broadband internet connectivity from my mac - for the rest of the month I've been relying on GPRS, which is both expensive and slow. None of the cafes we've been to have heard of wifi (though we haven't tried Hobart) and when I asked the guy at the community on-line access centre whether I could run an ethernet cable from his router he looked at me as though I was a money launderer. But in Lonnie there was an Apple franchise, and they'd bought out the Vodafone franchise next door (which, since they have no reception on the island is not doing too well) and installed a few iMacs and a wireless router amidst the cabinets of phones. The chap who worked there could not have been more helpful. As I sat in the sofa and tried to figure out how to post Zoe's Rangiroa newsletter he ran and got me a cappuccino from the cafe down the road, then he let me run an ethernet line to my mac to get more bandwidth, then, as the files were uploading, he looked after it for a couple of hours while I went to the park with Paula and the girls. And because it had taken a while he gave me a big discount. Now the problems I've had recently are sorted and the girls' newsletters up to Rangiroa are all on line.
The park near Lonnie - which is named with the now-familiar tourist acumen, Cataract Gorge - is a relaxing place to hang out. While I can't agree with the mariner quoted there as saying that it's "A scene of natural beauty probably not surpassed in the world" there is fine parkland, a picturesque river you can swim in and a 50 metre pool. There is also a chair lift over most of this that claims to have the largest single chair lift span in the world, at 308 metres. We went on it; I sat with Heidi, and Paula and Zoe followed behind. I don't know why I went on it, since it is easy to see both how flimsy the seats are and how easy it would be to drop out of them to a certain death. I guess I thought that even though I have vertigo there must be other people who go on it who either have worse vertigo or handle it less well. Well I didn't panic and I didn't jump, but neither did I enjoy it. I count the fact that I still experience vertigo, and that it diminishes pleasures that I might otherwise have, as one of my failures in life so far, although I have no appetite at all to submit myself to Tower of Terror-style ordeals.
Yesterday we went on another highly recommended attraction: a boat trip from Strahan. We rode on a 25 metre catamaran from a protected harbour and out into the sea, then turned and returned for a cruise along a tidal river. We docked a couple of times and disembarked. The first stop was at an island that had served as an early penal colony, where an enthusiastic Baldrick-type guy recounted gruesome tales about the lives of the cons and the soldiers. I don't know if people yet holiday in Sarajevo to hear how one day boys left their schools, took to the surrounding hills and started shelling and sniping at the families of their schoolmates: if they don't yet they will.
Our other little walk was along a stretch of boardwalk through the dense forest that covers much of the east of the island. It was a nice little stretch but not as enjoyable as standing at the bow of the ship getting blasted by the wind, which was whipping white-caps over the orange-brown river.
On a visit to Acadia in Maine I learned that the red and green lane markers at sea are arranged according to the snappy maxim Red Right Returning. One evening while looking over the Tiputa pass in Rangiroa I was perplexed to notice that the red shipping light on the other side of the pass would be port-side to returning ships. As it happened, our friends there were boat-savvy and Bert explained to me that the world is partitioned into an A zone and a B zone, which are opposite-handed, as it were, with regard to shipping lights. Apparently there isn't even a convenient rule for determining which zone you're in. Isn't this miserable! I noticed from the catamaran yesterday that we weren't in Red Right Returning land.
Since we've been in Australia our driving around has been accompanied by Stephen Fry reading the last Harry Potter novel, and as we pulled in yesterday evening we were close to the end. After I read this to the girls in Maine - now 5 months ago! - I wrote that I would place money on Snape ending up on the right side in the final novel. I now have other claims about the book that I'd place a cash bet on, if anyone fancies a flutter, including who R.A.B. will turn out to be.
There's a scene near the end of the book in which Dumbledore and Harry stand in front of a blank rock face knowing that it conceals a door; after mumbling an obscure incantation Dumbledore discerns the outline of the door and determines that to open it will require the spilling of blood. Harry's feelings at this point are probably close to my own feelings about returning to work, with the difference that I'm not entirely sure that I can see the outline of the door. There is, thankfully, quite a while to go before I have to break through and cross this threshold.
This month, though, we pass a number of milestones. On the way to Aus we crossed the international dateline. We reached the two thirds point in our year. We have Christmas coming up, and the New Year. Sometime soon we will send the first parcels home on the slow boat that will arrive after we do. And when we leave Aus - or Tasmania actually - we will start moving nearer to home for the first time since we left Morocco.
But for now we're hanging out enjoyably somewhere with place names like Sheffield, Melton Mowbray, Guildford, Bridport and even Somerset that looks like an idealisation of the English countryside, complete with drizzle and weak sun, and where friendly people speak to us in English - and which, inexplicably, is nothing at all like home.
The weather has the changeability of the English climate, but with less wishy-washy weather: the other night, for example, we had lightning that I could see in bed through the drawn curtains and with my eyes shut. When I opened my eyes the lightning - still beyond the drawn curtains - was phenomenally bright, like a bowl of burning magnesium. I was wired to my iPod at the time and also just feeling too lazy to go to the window and look properly. Similarly, when we've had rain here it's often been more satisfactorily battering rain than we usually get at home.
As when we were in North America, we've mixed up visiting the local attractions with periods of just settling in and trying to catch the vibe of the place. Thus since I last wrote I've finished reading English Passengers and also read the entertaining but less excellent Shadow Divers. The latter is written as a "Ripping Yarns" documentary account of a couple of guys with a mission for deep sea shipwreck diving who come across a U-boat off the New Jersey coast and tenaciously research its story. Despite the constant mythologising - imagine a bio of Batman written by Robin - it is fascinating, especially if you have an interest in diving, and it's a good thing to read while I await delivery of my official, non-temporary PADI certificate.
A few days ago I picked up the book What we Believe but Cannot Prove, which is a collection of short pieces by "leading thinkers" each of whom proposes one candidate on the subject. I don't know whether it's a book I can read straight through but the contributor list is actually impressive. I think that one reason I bought it was to cast around for inspiration regarding the organisation of my "beliefs" blogs, a couple of which are sitting unpublished on my mac. I do like the idea of this book: it pleases me that people care about such interesting, unproductive topics, and that they've found such an appealing way to present their musings.
But we haven't just been sitting around reading. We returned to Dove Lake and did the circuit that I described last time in the dry. We haven't yet done any of the longer multi-hour walks around Cradle Mountain; I think they'll remain a project for next time. Impressive though Cradle Mountain is, the one that towers above our cabin - Roland Mountain - has more of a hold on our imagination. It rises in a huge craggy wall that adds drama to the otherwise meadowy pastoral setting. The nearest place to us is called Paradise and it does seem very unspoilt. At our resort John has built nine cabins, or cottages as he calls them, that he rents out but it doesn't feel like a tourist destination. The people we've met here are generally passing through in cars or on bikes and seem surprised that we've planned to stay here for a couple of weeks; even John seemed taken aback when I booked it.
The tourist places here seem a little half-hearted. On Tuesday we went to a place down the road called Tasmazia, which is has a few large mazes, a twee little model village, lavender fields and a pancake house. The mazes were surprisingly fun - much better than Hampton Court, after which one of them is named - and the pancakes were good, too. Tasmazia was set up some years ago by the same guy who had the brainwave of making the nearest town, Sheffield, more appealing by commissioning murals on every large exposed wall. The parish council feeling of the local tourism efforts does add charm to the area, although not necessarily quite as they intended.
Sheffield is barely a town, being far smaller than many English villages - Cranleigh has ten to fifteen times the population. I like it. This morning I was there buying supplies and saw a guy walking around with his pet alpaca.
The nearest large towns are Devonport and Launceston ("Lonnie"). On Friday afternoon we went to the cinema in Devonport and saw Corpse Bride. We had the entire auditorium to ourselves; after seeing the film I could understand why - it just wasn't as good as it ought to have been. I also tried to book in for a massage, which is a treat I've been meaning to award myself for a few months, only to find that the aromatherapy girl was booked for the whole forthcoming week. That must be what people do here.
Launceston is a larger town that I like more, though it's useful more than it is pretty. It's the only place I've found in Tassie where I can get broadband internet connectivity from my mac - for the rest of the month I've been relying on GPRS, which is both expensive and slow. None of the cafes we've been to have heard of wifi (though we haven't tried Hobart) and when I asked the guy at the community on-line access centre whether I could run an ethernet cable from his router he looked at me as though I was a money launderer. But in Lonnie there was an Apple franchise, and they'd bought out the Vodafone franchise next door (which, since they have no reception on the island is not doing too well) and installed a few iMacs and a wireless router amidst the cabinets of phones. The chap who worked there could not have been more helpful. As I sat in the sofa and tried to figure out how to post Zoe's Rangiroa newsletter he ran and got me a cappuccino from the cafe down the road, then he let me run an ethernet line to my mac to get more bandwidth, then, as the files were uploading, he looked after it for a couple of hours while I went to the park with Paula and the girls. And because it had taken a while he gave me a big discount. Now the problems I've had recently are sorted and the girls' newsletters up to Rangiroa are all on line.
The park near Lonnie - which is named with the now-familiar tourist acumen, Cataract Gorge - is a relaxing place to hang out. While I can't agree with the mariner quoted there as saying that it's "A scene of natural beauty probably not surpassed in the world" there is fine parkland, a picturesque river you can swim in and a 50 metre pool. There is also a chair lift over most of this that claims to have the largest single chair lift span in the world, at 308 metres. We went on it; I sat with Heidi, and Paula and Zoe followed behind. I don't know why I went on it, since it is easy to see both how flimsy the seats are and how easy it would be to drop out of them to a certain death. I guess I thought that even though I have vertigo there must be other people who go on it who either have worse vertigo or handle it less well. Well I didn't panic and I didn't jump, but neither did I enjoy it. I count the fact that I still experience vertigo, and that it diminishes pleasures that I might otherwise have, as one of my failures in life so far, although I have no appetite at all to submit myself to Tower of Terror-style ordeals.
Yesterday we went on another highly recommended attraction: a boat trip from Strahan. We rode on a 25 metre catamaran from a protected harbour and out into the sea, then turned and returned for a cruise along a tidal river. We docked a couple of times and disembarked. The first stop was at an island that had served as an early penal colony, where an enthusiastic Baldrick-type guy recounted gruesome tales about the lives of the cons and the soldiers. I don't know if people yet holiday in Sarajevo to hear how one day boys left their schools, took to the surrounding hills and started shelling and sniping at the families of their schoolmates: if they don't yet they will.
Our other little walk was along a stretch of boardwalk through the dense forest that covers much of the east of the island. It was a nice little stretch but not as enjoyable as standing at the bow of the ship getting blasted by the wind, which was whipping white-caps over the orange-brown river.
On a visit to Acadia in Maine I learned that the red and green lane markers at sea are arranged according to the snappy maxim Red Right Returning. One evening while looking over the Tiputa pass in Rangiroa I was perplexed to notice that the red shipping light on the other side of the pass would be port-side to returning ships. As it happened, our friends there were boat-savvy and Bert explained to me that the world is partitioned into an A zone and a B zone, which are opposite-handed, as it were, with regard to shipping lights. Apparently there isn't even a convenient rule for determining which zone you're in. Isn't this miserable! I noticed from the catamaran yesterday that we weren't in Red Right Returning land.
Since we've been in Australia our driving around has been accompanied by Stephen Fry reading the last Harry Potter novel, and as we pulled in yesterday evening we were close to the end. After I read this to the girls in Maine - now 5 months ago! - I wrote that I would place money on Snape ending up on the right side in the final novel. I now have other claims about the book that I'd place a cash bet on, if anyone fancies a flutter, including who R.A.B. will turn out to be.
There's a scene near the end of the book in which Dumbledore and Harry stand in front of a blank rock face knowing that it conceals a door; after mumbling an obscure incantation Dumbledore discerns the outline of the door and determines that to open it will require the spilling of blood. Harry's feelings at this point are probably close to my own feelings about returning to work, with the difference that I'm not entirely sure that I can see the outline of the door. There is, thankfully, quite a while to go before I have to break through and cross this threshold.
This month, though, we pass a number of milestones. On the way to Aus we crossed the international dateline. We reached the two thirds point in our year. We have Christmas coming up, and the New Year. Sometime soon we will send the first parcels home on the slow boat that will arrive after we do. And when we leave Aus - or Tasmania actually - we will start moving nearer to home for the first time since we left Morocco.
But for now we're hanging out enjoyably somewhere with place names like Sheffield, Melton Mowbray, Guildford, Bridport and even Somerset that looks like an idealisation of the English countryside, complete with drizzle and weak sun, and where friendly people speak to us in English - and which, inexplicably, is nothing at all like home.
Posted: Thu - December 15, 2005 at 02:04 PM
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Published On: Dec 20, 2005 11:30 AM
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Published On: Dec 20, 2005 11:30 AM