VTPR
20 - 26 Dec, Ian
The last time we came to Palm Beach we arrived in
a sea plane. We were staying in Sydney and thought we'd do a tour of the
harbour; when we turned up for our ride the pilot told us that he'd just had a
charter up to Palm Beach cancelled and he offered to run us up there for the
same price as a circuit round the bay. We landed on the quiet side of the
peninsular and the pilot pointed out the short path across to the surf beach and
told us where we could get hold of him any time that afternoon when we wanted to
return. I think he needed a drink: he'd been working on the underside of his
plane underwater in the harbour when he'd turned and seen a hammerhead at very
close quarters eyeing him up.
That was a few years ago. That day we saw no more of Palm Beach than the boathouse/cafe where we walked off the seaplane and the north beach, and both were deserted. When we were planning this trip I'd got it into my head, based on conversations with a couple of Aussie friends, that we should spend Christmas at Whale Beach. Paula had tried to find some accommodation and had no luck but had managed to find us an apartment at the next beach along. She told me that this was called Palm Beach but neither of us made the connection with the place we'd visited by seaplane until we reached Australia and looked at our itinerary more closely.
As we drove up from Sydney on Thursday we were all tired and the girls, who just wanted to get there, were firing questions from the back seat about what it would be like. Paula told them a few times, accurately, that she had no idea and that it was "your father" who had chosen the area over her preference for a return to the child-friendly Hamilton Island. The road up from Sydney was very ordinary, as they say here; I felt the pressure and hoped for the best.
Wherever we went, these last few days in Australia would be an airlock between the comfort of staying with long-time friends in Melbourne and an adventure into the unknown in Thailand, Laos and Nepal. Our last days with Nat and Brett had again been relaxed and easy. As we've done many times on our trip, we sought out the local culture not in the galleries and museums but in the living of ordinary life. We had fish, chips and pineapple fritters on the beach, watching all of the people who skit out to sea in little dinghies after work, and listening to the local radio commentary on the test match with South Africa. The beach was lovely, although eating our food presented the usual challenge: the emblematic animal of Aus shouldn't be the kangaroo or the emu but the fly. In the day we did more chores in the city and re-visited a cafe specialising in chocolate drinks and desserts. And we completed the last of the girls' dental treatments. Zoe had, like Heidi before her, managed to get an abscess that was infected, and so she too now needed antibiotics. In the US a prescription for this would cost, we had been told, $250, in addition to the ludicrous $100 we were charged for walking into the hospital to ask about it. We balked at this and gave her a reduced dose of cheaper adult antibiotics. In Australia the same prescription cost about $10. In the UK it would be free, though we're happy to pay the small cost here in Aus for what seems to be a better service.
On our final evening we returned to Terry and Penny's for another barbie dinner. Terry told me more about the novel he's finishing off, which is a genre thriller. I'm very envious. I have neither the desire nor the ability to do the same but I'm jealous of the way that he's found something that he's so interested in and that could realistically provide him with a new career. He knows his John Grishams and his Robert Ludlums, he's analysed his own project very thoughtfully and I think he may well make it. He currently works in PR and even has publishing contacts. As we approach New Year, when only the most resolute people can avoid the appeal of making resolutions, I seem to be swamped with stories about guys my age who have happily found their metier. One of my good friends, like Terry, has discovered that he is now a film person and is re-arranging his life to work on a script. The book that I've started reading - The Great War for Civilisation - is written by a man (Robert Fisk) who has known since childhood that he would be a foreign correspondent, and he's excellent at it. But few of us either enjoy a lifelong calling or a Damascene conversation to a wholly new career. So another of my close friends is evolving his career nicely, with a quality paper about to be published that should qualify him for membership of the Risk Theory Society. And I've just read about another guy who spends his life shooting videos of people playing his favourite sports; he enriches both his enjoyment and his career by being a certified Apple trainer in the technologies behind the movie production. I can only look to the heavens and hope.
When we left Penny's we returned to Nat and Brett's, where Nat led the girls in a hearty wine-fuelled candle-lit rendition of favourite carols before we had our last session of Kath & Kim.
In Palm Beach we know no one. Fortunately, it is a cool place. The apartment is fine, having a pool just over from our patio, and one of the beaches is only a minute's walk away across a quiet street. There's a useful wine store/deli on the corner of our block, which, like most other places around here, is both attractive and pricey. On our first evening we went to a trendy pizza place and then drove to Whale Beach. The beach was composed of perfect soft ochre sand. It was quiet, with only a few surfers out on their own, apparently honing their skills before coming out when the crowds are watching. Wooded hills rise from the back of the beach and are set with exclusive modern homes, all of which have huge picture windows looking out to sea. Paula tells me that it's celeb territory, and thinks that we drove past Leighton Hewitt's house.
The next morning I zipped down to the nearest town - Avalon, which is about ten minutes away. The sun was, of course, blazing, enhancing the buzzy, surfy vibe of the place. It has almost everything: a cinema showing decent movies, a couple of patisseries, a great bookstore - narrow and crammed with people, with a superb selection of books and a small cafe at the back, a wine store with a great Aussie selection, a supermarket. It even has a Toni & Guy. The only facility that it seems to lack is wifi, which surprises me given how mobile phones seemed to be everywhere in Aus before they were anywhere in other countries.
In the Mitsubishi I tried to tune in, as I have many times in Aus, to a talk radio station. With the weird exception of Tasmania that I wrote about before, I always find the same phenomenon: all of the talk radio shows are in foreign languages and all of the foreign language stations are talk-based. Maybe unlike the insecure minorities who use their language to shore up their threatened identities, the majority of white Aussies have attained a Marxist state of societal fulfilment where there's nothing left to do but listen to pop songs, or, as in the one brief non-music English chat segment I found, fantasise about becoming Angelina Jolie's guy in Aus.
In the afternoon we all drove out to explore Palm Beach, and our ultimate destination was the linked peninsular beaches that we'd visited from the sea plane. They were just as we remembered them, only now that we approached them by road through the bustling fancy towns they seemed less dreamy, more real, than when we dropped in from the sky. They were still relatively quiet. The ocean-side beach had no bathers: they would have been at serious risk from the traffic in kite surfers. When we'd been here before one or two of them had come and gone, and they had been the first kite surfers that I'd seen. This time there were ten of them out there, as well as four old school wind-surfers, and it was hard to see how they avoided a clash of lines. They sped along at a good crack, strapped to their cables, and periodically they'd take off and hang in the air for up to three of four seconds.
BTW, you may notice that some of the photo's I include in these blogs get dropped when I post them. This happens sometimes when I use a GPRS web connection, and these days I've stopped trying to remedy the problem immediately since it's easy to do when I next get broadband. If you miss a snap it may be worth revisiting the site later. As far as I'm aware all of the pictures, except possibly for this one (how can I know as I write?) should be there now; let me know if they're not.
I don't know how many people reside in Palm Beach and how many are just down for Christmas. Zoe and Heidi have been chatting to a girl in the pool whose family live in Sydney, which is about an hour away, and come here to play. I'd guess that most of the folks around here are wealthy weekenders from Sydney like this. There don't seem to be many places that you can rent casually nearby, and neither do there seem to be many places that you could work and earn enough to be here.
It is a good place to be for Christmas, although with the blue skies and high temperatures it's difficult for us to get into the Christmas swing - last year we had snow on Christmas Day and attended a Christmas service in a real cowshed, replete with cows. Although our year is undeniably a product of high affluence I'm getting good karma from the simplifications in our lifestyle. Christmas day provided another example: I was happier with my five inexpensive gifts, all of which I truly wanted, than I normally am with a far more costly spread. It's similar to the satisfaction I've had in living in only a few well-chosen clothes this year; when we get nearer the end of our trip I'll itemise all the clothes I've bought since we left and you'll see that it isn't many.
The tranquility of modest living was punctured by a message that (through the quirks of Paula's email) we received on Christmas Day. We already knew that we'd had some sort of landfall at our place in Dorset that needed fixing and that the agents of Satan from the insurance company had predictably refused to cover it; our Christmas message was the builder's quote for £10k. A brutal reminder that we can't so easily hop off the earn a lot/spend a lot treadmill.
For our Christmas movie we watched Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, which Santa had brought the girls; of the handful of movies we've seen at the cinema since we've been away this remains my favourite. In place of a CD of Christmas songs, which Paula notes I sneer about every year and miss when we don't have one, we listened to Michael Bublé. His joke performance of Sway on Kath & Kim has salvaged him, or almost salvaged him, from the ranks of Vic and Bob-style Parkinson guests in my mind so the CD I bought for Paula as a gift was not totally ironic. When I wrote about his Kath & Kim slot in a previous blog I mis-spelled his name ("Boublay"), and in doing so discovered a cunning way to get a lot of google hits.
In the evening we watched the first two ep's of the seventh and final season of Buffy, which was Santa's other gift to the girls. I'd almost given up on Buffy after the patchy sixth season and am now glad that we stuck with it. In between Charlie and Buffy we walked along the beach, made family calls home, had Christmas dinner, played a card game and swam in the pool.
I've been reading, too. The Fisk book I mentioned above is terrific and almost counteracts the wretched news. Bush continues to be alarming. In addition to crimes against the human rights of his own citizens far worse than those for which Nixon was impeached, he now recognises that his jihad against Iraq, which he has never deigned to justify satisfactorily, has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Yet he seems to have no shame, and the techniques of power that were capable of deposing Clinton - for personal behaviour that harmed at most a few rather than for the calamity he inflicted on the country of Somalia - seem to have no counterpart that could be used now. Every time I read news of the UK it's to answer the simple question: has Blair gone yet?
I read this week that in the UK it's no longer permissible to smile on a passport photograph for fear, as I understand it, that it could bamboozle face-reconigition software. I hope that this is not one of our major counter-terrorism investments, and that we might soon have a government that places more weight in diplomacy, or, to the extent that we must rely on the secret services, building a network of agents with an Arabic background. I had an argument about the power of technology to solve our problems with an American friend here in Aus this week. To my scenario of a drug that acted against DNA degradation and thus prevented ageing and that might one day be capable of production at the cost of aspirin he breezily insisted that free markets would remedy any issues that could arise in contention for finite resources. The US truly is the most theocratic of nations.
In reading the papers here I also learned the Lonely Hearts abbreviation: View To Permanent Relationship. While I have nothing at all against Lonely Hearts and this manifestly saves on copy dollars, there seems something iconically depressing about the distillation of the sentiment that you may want to spend your whole life with someone to four characters. It must be my new time-rich traveller's mentality.
Boxing Day here at Palm Beach is delightful. It's even warmer than Christmas Day was and the beaches and public areas are packed with families having picnics around their eskies. The girls and I had a drink at the boathouse that we'd flown in to some years ago, and Zoe and I walked up to the lighthouse that stands at the head of the peninsular. The views back across the beaches on either side of the spit were amazing.
That was a few years ago. That day we saw no more of Palm Beach than the boathouse/cafe where we walked off the seaplane and the north beach, and both were deserted. When we were planning this trip I'd got it into my head, based on conversations with a couple of Aussie friends, that we should spend Christmas at Whale Beach. Paula had tried to find some accommodation and had no luck but had managed to find us an apartment at the next beach along. She told me that this was called Palm Beach but neither of us made the connection with the place we'd visited by seaplane until we reached Australia and looked at our itinerary more closely.
As we drove up from Sydney on Thursday we were all tired and the girls, who just wanted to get there, were firing questions from the back seat about what it would be like. Paula told them a few times, accurately, that she had no idea and that it was "your father" who had chosen the area over her preference for a return to the child-friendly Hamilton Island. The road up from Sydney was very ordinary, as they say here; I felt the pressure and hoped for the best.
Wherever we went, these last few days in Australia would be an airlock between the comfort of staying with long-time friends in Melbourne and an adventure into the unknown in Thailand, Laos and Nepal. Our last days with Nat and Brett had again been relaxed and easy. As we've done many times on our trip, we sought out the local culture not in the galleries and museums but in the living of ordinary life. We had fish, chips and pineapple fritters on the beach, watching all of the people who skit out to sea in little dinghies after work, and listening to the local radio commentary on the test match with South Africa. The beach was lovely, although eating our food presented the usual challenge: the emblematic animal of Aus shouldn't be the kangaroo or the emu but the fly. In the day we did more chores in the city and re-visited a cafe specialising in chocolate drinks and desserts. And we completed the last of the girls' dental treatments. Zoe had, like Heidi before her, managed to get an abscess that was infected, and so she too now needed antibiotics. In the US a prescription for this would cost, we had been told, $250, in addition to the ludicrous $100 we were charged for walking into the hospital to ask about it. We balked at this and gave her a reduced dose of cheaper adult antibiotics. In Australia the same prescription cost about $10. In the UK it would be free, though we're happy to pay the small cost here in Aus for what seems to be a better service.
On our final evening we returned to Terry and Penny's for another barbie dinner. Terry told me more about the novel he's finishing off, which is a genre thriller. I'm very envious. I have neither the desire nor the ability to do the same but I'm jealous of the way that he's found something that he's so interested in and that could realistically provide him with a new career. He knows his John Grishams and his Robert Ludlums, he's analysed his own project very thoughtfully and I think he may well make it. He currently works in PR and even has publishing contacts. As we approach New Year, when only the most resolute people can avoid the appeal of making resolutions, I seem to be swamped with stories about guys my age who have happily found their metier. One of my good friends, like Terry, has discovered that he is now a film person and is re-arranging his life to work on a script. The book that I've started reading - The Great War for Civilisation - is written by a man (Robert Fisk) who has known since childhood that he would be a foreign correspondent, and he's excellent at it. But few of us either enjoy a lifelong calling or a Damascene conversation to a wholly new career. So another of my close friends is evolving his career nicely, with a quality paper about to be published that should qualify him for membership of the Risk Theory Society. And I've just read about another guy who spends his life shooting videos of people playing his favourite sports; he enriches both his enjoyment and his career by being a certified Apple trainer in the technologies behind the movie production. I can only look to the heavens and hope.
When we left Penny's we returned to Nat and Brett's, where Nat led the girls in a hearty wine-fuelled candle-lit rendition of favourite carols before we had our last session of Kath & Kim.
In Palm Beach we know no one. Fortunately, it is a cool place. The apartment is fine, having a pool just over from our patio, and one of the beaches is only a minute's walk away across a quiet street. There's a useful wine store/deli on the corner of our block, which, like most other places around here, is both attractive and pricey. On our first evening we went to a trendy pizza place and then drove to Whale Beach. The beach was composed of perfect soft ochre sand. It was quiet, with only a few surfers out on their own, apparently honing their skills before coming out when the crowds are watching. Wooded hills rise from the back of the beach and are set with exclusive modern homes, all of which have huge picture windows looking out to sea. Paula tells me that it's celeb territory, and thinks that we drove past Leighton Hewitt's house.
The next morning I zipped down to the nearest town - Avalon, which is about ten minutes away. The sun was, of course, blazing, enhancing the buzzy, surfy vibe of the place. It has almost everything: a cinema showing decent movies, a couple of patisseries, a great bookstore - narrow and crammed with people, with a superb selection of books and a small cafe at the back, a wine store with a great Aussie selection, a supermarket. It even has a Toni & Guy. The only facility that it seems to lack is wifi, which surprises me given how mobile phones seemed to be everywhere in Aus before they were anywhere in other countries.
In the Mitsubishi I tried to tune in, as I have many times in Aus, to a talk radio station. With the weird exception of Tasmania that I wrote about before, I always find the same phenomenon: all of the talk radio shows are in foreign languages and all of the foreign language stations are talk-based. Maybe unlike the insecure minorities who use their language to shore up their threatened identities, the majority of white Aussies have attained a Marxist state of societal fulfilment where there's nothing left to do but listen to pop songs, or, as in the one brief non-music English chat segment I found, fantasise about becoming Angelina Jolie's guy in Aus.
In the afternoon we all drove out to explore Palm Beach, and our ultimate destination was the linked peninsular beaches that we'd visited from the sea plane. They were just as we remembered them, only now that we approached them by road through the bustling fancy towns they seemed less dreamy, more real, than when we dropped in from the sky. They were still relatively quiet. The ocean-side beach had no bathers: they would have been at serious risk from the traffic in kite surfers. When we'd been here before one or two of them had come and gone, and they had been the first kite surfers that I'd seen. This time there were ten of them out there, as well as four old school wind-surfers, and it was hard to see how they avoided a clash of lines. They sped along at a good crack, strapped to their cables, and periodically they'd take off and hang in the air for up to three of four seconds.
BTW, you may notice that some of the photo's I include in these blogs get dropped when I post them. This happens sometimes when I use a GPRS web connection, and these days I've stopped trying to remedy the problem immediately since it's easy to do when I next get broadband. If you miss a snap it may be worth revisiting the site later. As far as I'm aware all of the pictures, except possibly for this one (how can I know as I write?) should be there now; let me know if they're not.
I don't know how many people reside in Palm Beach and how many are just down for Christmas. Zoe and Heidi have been chatting to a girl in the pool whose family live in Sydney, which is about an hour away, and come here to play. I'd guess that most of the folks around here are wealthy weekenders from Sydney like this. There don't seem to be many places that you can rent casually nearby, and neither do there seem to be many places that you could work and earn enough to be here.
It is a good place to be for Christmas, although with the blue skies and high temperatures it's difficult for us to get into the Christmas swing - last year we had snow on Christmas Day and attended a Christmas service in a real cowshed, replete with cows. Although our year is undeniably a product of high affluence I'm getting good karma from the simplifications in our lifestyle. Christmas day provided another example: I was happier with my five inexpensive gifts, all of which I truly wanted, than I normally am with a far more costly spread. It's similar to the satisfaction I've had in living in only a few well-chosen clothes this year; when we get nearer the end of our trip I'll itemise all the clothes I've bought since we left and you'll see that it isn't many.
The tranquility of modest living was punctured by a message that (through the quirks of Paula's email) we received on Christmas Day. We already knew that we'd had some sort of landfall at our place in Dorset that needed fixing and that the agents of Satan from the insurance company had predictably refused to cover it; our Christmas message was the builder's quote for £10k. A brutal reminder that we can't so easily hop off the earn a lot/spend a lot treadmill.
For our Christmas movie we watched Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, which Santa had brought the girls; of the handful of movies we've seen at the cinema since we've been away this remains my favourite. In place of a CD of Christmas songs, which Paula notes I sneer about every year and miss when we don't have one, we listened to Michael Bublé. His joke performance of Sway on Kath & Kim has salvaged him, or almost salvaged him, from the ranks of Vic and Bob-style Parkinson guests in my mind so the CD I bought for Paula as a gift was not totally ironic. When I wrote about his Kath & Kim slot in a previous blog I mis-spelled his name ("Boublay"), and in doing so discovered a cunning way to get a lot of google hits.
In the evening we watched the first two ep's of the seventh and final season of Buffy, which was Santa's other gift to the girls. I'd almost given up on Buffy after the patchy sixth season and am now glad that we stuck with it. In between Charlie and Buffy we walked along the beach, made family calls home, had Christmas dinner, played a card game and swam in the pool.
I've been reading, too. The Fisk book I mentioned above is terrific and almost counteracts the wretched news. Bush continues to be alarming. In addition to crimes against the human rights of his own citizens far worse than those for which Nixon was impeached, he now recognises that his jihad against Iraq, which he has never deigned to justify satisfactorily, has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Yet he seems to have no shame, and the techniques of power that were capable of deposing Clinton - for personal behaviour that harmed at most a few rather than for the calamity he inflicted on the country of Somalia - seem to have no counterpart that could be used now. Every time I read news of the UK it's to answer the simple question: has Blair gone yet?
I read this week that in the UK it's no longer permissible to smile on a passport photograph for fear, as I understand it, that it could bamboozle face-reconigition software. I hope that this is not one of our major counter-terrorism investments, and that we might soon have a government that places more weight in diplomacy, or, to the extent that we must rely on the secret services, building a network of agents with an Arabic background. I had an argument about the power of technology to solve our problems with an American friend here in Aus this week. To my scenario of a drug that acted against DNA degradation and thus prevented ageing and that might one day be capable of production at the cost of aspirin he breezily insisted that free markets would remedy any issues that could arise in contention for finite resources. The US truly is the most theocratic of nations.
In reading the papers here I also learned the Lonely Hearts abbreviation: View To Permanent Relationship. While I have nothing at all against Lonely Hearts and this manifestly saves on copy dollars, there seems something iconically depressing about the distillation of the sentiment that you may want to spend your whole life with someone to four characters. It must be my new time-rich traveller's mentality.
Boxing Day here at Palm Beach is delightful. It's even warmer than Christmas Day was and the beaches and public areas are packed with families having picnics around their eskies. The girls and I had a drink at the boathouse that we'd flown in to some years ago, and Zoe and I walked up to the lighthouse that stands at the head of the peninsular. The views back across the beaches on either side of the spit were amazing.
Posted: Mon - December 26, 2005 at 01:07 PM
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Published On: Dec 31, 2005 09:07 PM
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Published On: Dec 31, 2005 09:07 PM