Behold the Ted!

And his bird par excellence, Karen! (on the left)

La Paz is extremely high, almost 4km, which is half the cruising height of a passenger jet (can you tell I’ve been reading Wikipedia?). This means that water boils at 85 degrees and even if you make tea according to the stringent British tea protocol I was brought up with (preheat the pot, add tea, pour in boiling water) it still tastes like you used hot water out of a tap. Apparently you can make good tea if you have a pressure cooker. It also means that you get altitude sickness really easily, the cure for which is Coca Tea:

Coca Tea is made from the same leaves that they use to make cocaine, but is (apparently) non addictive and produces little effect except the magical vanishing of altitude sickness symptoms (nausea, tiredness, aching joints).

The main event of the trip was cycling the “World’s Most Dangerous Road ™” which used to kill about 300 people a year until they opened a new road in 2006 that doesn’t require heavily laden trucks to pass each other on a 6 metre wide dirt track with a 800 foot vertical drop to one side and no barrier.

The road involves a 3.5km drop in altitude over about 3 hours of solid bone-shaking vibration, so we were glad to get to the bottom and chill out for a few days in Coroico, which was initially beautifully sunny…

and then beautifully cloudy

.

We’ve been in La Paz for around 10 days now, and here I part ways with Jude – she’s going off round South America for a month, I’m going back to the UK early to help the folks with an opera they’re putting on. Your regular programme of jealousy-inducing blog postage will have to be maintained by her wifeliness.

Over and Out,

Bernie :o)

P.S. Since there was no more relavent place to put this photo, I’ll just drop it in here. A Bolivian extension cord, “fixed” by El Ted. Absolutely not a fire hazard:

It’s 6am, and either the memory of entering the country in the same manner or perhaps the mild dementia brought about by pitting sleep depravation and caffeine against each other is making me all nostalgic for our trip. Jude has talked extensively about the oddities of Aussie culture but I’ve kept my mouth shut until now. So here is, in no particular order, the things that I loved about Oz.

Stuff that Aussies say

I’m not talking about funny slang words that they use, Jude has written about those. I’m talking about sentences that would never leave the mouth of a Brit.

Some of my faves:

• after I waited a couple of minutes at a festival portaloo, a man in work overalls emerged with a hose slung over his shoulder, patted the wall of the loo twice and said “she’s good to go mate”
• when ordering food in an outback pub, the barman says “one moment, I just gotta go back there and check that the chef is still sober”
• overheard in a bar, coming from an elderly gentleman in an Akubra and vest: “So my fuckin daughter is a fuckin real estate agent for fuckin Ray White, and she’s coming up this weekend to fuckin sort out my fuckin flat rental. Apparently if you take the right fuckin photos, you get fuckin twice as many fuckin people fuckin interested in renting the fuckin place”

Fun fact: the swear words dropped arbitrarily into sentences to provide a bit of breathing space in the same way that “er…” does are called “incidental expletives”

Public barbies

Any sufficiently wealthy country provides certain services for free, because the thought of somebody going without the service is more horrible to imagine than the idea of losing money in providing it. Most western countries include emergency sea rescue in this category. Australia includes barbecues.

Walk into any park in Australia and you’ll likely find a free gas BBQ, serviced and cleaned by the council:

Primary colour landscapes

That is, assuming that you subscribe to an additive colour model where the primary colous are Red, Green and Blue, not the subtractive Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. That would be well weird.

Bombing down dirt roads

Being in the middle of nowhere

This was the lagest settlement for about 200 km in any direction.

Charlie the Challenger

Our trusty battered old 4×4

Goodbye Charlie, you will be missed. *sniff*

What is a Ute Muster you ask?

This is a Ute Muster:

A Ute Muster is camping in the bush with 500 other 4 wheel drive parties

A Ute Muster is keeping beer cold in very classy stubbie holders:

A Ute Muster is dancing badly into the night to the tune of a country band playing out of an 18 wheeler who introduced one song with “This here tune gots to do with selling vegetables off the back of a truck”.

A Ute muster is awesome.

GE is building some “experience centres” in China to showcase a few of their five bajillion products. Being a technology company, it’s not enough to have a big paper catalogue or perhaps a video playing on a projector. Nope, to keep up with the Jonses (or the Mitsubishis rather) you need a number of multi-touch tables with swishy animated graphics and particle systems.

Best I can tell I was hired largely on the back on having built the software for inamo. Well I certainly wasn’t hired for my total absence of prior experience with the technologies we were using (“C++ & OpenGL” for the geeks reading, “Hardcode graphics programming” for everybody else). Fortunately I got to work with two extremely good developers (helpfully named Stephane and Stephen) and got up to speed in no time. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I’m thinking of a career adjustment when I get back to the UK to do more of this kind of work. Four months of coding, animating, debugging and arguing with designers later, and we’d built these:

(if you have a fast connection, click the bottom right button to make them full screen)

The videos really don’t them justice – they’re big, smooth, responsive and generally sexy. Just like Jude. [Note to readers – I have been appropriately slapped for that comment]

The whole of the city centre is cordoned off as reconstruction work has begin in earnest. This is Kilmore St near the centre, according to Google Street View:

This is the same view now:

The whole of the town centre is cordoned off, and accessible only to construction workers:

It took over two hours to walk around the circumference of the cordon. So much of the city looks as though time just stopped on the day of the quake. Through the dusty windows of cafes you can still see the coffee cups broken on the floor where they rolled off set tables during the quake. Most of the buildings still have a spray-painted sign saying which team checked them for survivors and when. This apartment building was checked by NSWTF (New South Wales Taskforce, a group from Australia) at 5.50am, 6 days after the quake:

The older buildings seemed worst affected:

And there are sobering reminders of the human cost:

However, there are things to be optimistic about. Famous for their ingenuity, the Kiwis have found a way to keep commerce going even in the stricken areas: shipping containers. When I first heard that there was a “container mall” in the town centre, I imagined a bleak corridor of metal bearing BP and Monsanto logos like some illegal Hong Kong gun market from an action film. The reality was pleasingly well executed (and unlike most inner city malls, there’s no shortage of parking space because of all the demolished buildings):

The cafe in the above pictures is light and airy, with sofas and cushions inside. There are banks, a food court and plenty of international clothing brand shops. Across town there was even a container bar with a passable whisky selection:

Yes, that’s a shipping container, heavily remodelled. The bar was full of locals and tourists and could have been in any world city. There was even a group of men in pink leotards pouring beer down the throat of their soon-to-be-betrothed friend.

Life goes on.

This country is big. Like, really really big. We’ve covered around 1500 kilometres in a week – more than enough to get you from London to Italy. Covering this distance in Europe would be a nightmare, full of turnings, roundabouts and suicidal Gallic teenagers on mopeds. In the outback it can actually be relaxing. The directions from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock are literally “Head south, take the first major right turn in 200 kilometres, continue another 250 kilometres, and be sure to wave if you see any cars”. You mostly have the road to yourself – just hours of gunbarrel-straight highways, music from the iPod and gradually changing geology. And roadkill. And bushfires.

Here are some photos from the trip, confirming among other things that the roads are straight, that the sand is red, and that melons grow out of the ground by the roadside:

So there’s been a silly idea brewing in my head for a while now, and over this last week I think I’ve finally convinced Jude that it’s worth doing. We’re going to drive around Australia. Probably anticlockwise.

I wish I had an oversize tabletop map, some wooden figurines and a long stick to push them around with; but Photoshop will have to do.

This will be quite an undertaking. Taking into account detours to see sights, it’ll be at least 20,000 kilometres. We’ll need a 4×4 car since much of our time will be spent on tracks and unsealed roads. And a tent, and a cooker, and some camp furniture, and a lot of maps, and a satellite phone, and books, and a fridge to keep the beer cold, and a toolkit, and cooking gear, and probably a lot of stuff I haven’t thought of yet.

It’s going to be epic. I’ll keep you posted about the more interesting aspects of preparation, and try to gloss over the fridge research. Watch this space.

The function of this first picture is largely to prevent this post from being a gallery of photos of arses:

Jude, tackling an overhang:

Jude has a knack of looking like a ninja:

Aaron, wondering where they put the next foothold:

Me, holding on with my teeth. Actually, you can hold on with your belly if you get the right kind of slope. True story.

And finally, THE SCALING OF THE PINNACLE!

OK, so we’ve really been here for a month already, but we’ve been busy attending weddings, house hunting and coding. Well I was coding, Jude was being sociable and stuff. We have now found a cute little place to live in Rushcutters Bay, just a few minutes walk from the centre. We’re in a studio flat on the 6th floor of a building perched on a hill running down to the harbour. Except that we’re on the hill-facing side, and have a view of other people’s flats and the maintenance shed. No worries: we have a balcony, a bathroom, a boudoir, a brasserie and a bench, and that’s all we need. Home sweet home.

The next step is to find a job and integrate ourselves into Australian life. Look Normal, they must suspect nothing.

Being something of a geek (had you heard?) I have catalogued these thoughts and sorted them into 4 categories:

Things we will miss about travelling

• The demented humour of long term travelling buddies. New species are formed by a process of genetic drift when two populations are separated for so long that they become very different from each other, and no longer interbreed when the populations merge. When you spend practically 24 hours a day with your wife for 6 months, a new species of humor emerges.
• Awesome night skies. We’ve been travelling mainly in rural places, with clear black night skies covered in stars. The stars are so many and so thick that it’s hard to recognise the famous constellations because there are so many stars in them that you can’t normally see.
• Friendliness of rural folk. Africans seem to be both surprised and delighted that you’d want to spend time in their village, rather than the capital city.
• Trying the local specialities in each new region. Each country has its traditional carbohydrate. Kushari (Egypt) is our favourite, followed by Ugali (Tanzania).
• African music. From traditional Tanzanian Sana Sana to South African township rap, it’s always a good move to be playing the local stuff when you stop at a police checkpoint.
• South African KFC. It’s just a little bit better than the already insanely addictive British version.

Things we won’t miss about travelling

• Repacking every few days. And you know the bag gets 20 cubic centimeters smaller each time you do it.
• Sweating. 30 degree heat and high humidity gives you a 24-hour face shine.
• Mosquitos. Itchy little bastards.
• Car guards. These guys hang around car parks waving their hands like landing technicians on an aircraft carrier, hoping for a tip. No thanks, I can park my tiny rental car in a space designed for a 2 tonne pickup truck without assistance.
• Packed transport. Quiz time: which can fit more people, a 48 foot long London bus or a 15 foot long Tanzanian Dala Dala? If you answered “London bus”, you get no points.
• Military grade security in residential areas. Because it doesn’t fill you with confidence when every home in Cape Town has electric fencing and a sign on it saying “Excalibur armed response” with a little cartoon of a man holding a Kalashnikov.

Things we’re looking forward to in Oz

• Friends! Although I might have forgotten how to socialise after 6 months on the road.
• Job interviews. Funny that, but I’m actually quite excited. I haven’t had an interview in 3 years. I’m looking forward to the job itself too. And the pay check, that will be nice.
• BLAT sandwiches. Bacon, lettuce, avocado and tomato. Sydney is awash with them, and we’re going to eat them all. Every. Last. One.
• Being told what to do. 6 months of absolute creative freedom has been great, but for once it will be nice to turn up at an office in the morning and have someone else set the priorities.
• Shopping for a Ute. Vroom vroom.
• Watching silly movies. We left the UK with 30 movies that I legally obtained trough a legitimate distribution channel. I picked them from Empire Magazine’s top 100 movies list. They’re all serious, beard stroking affairs. Bring on the stupid action flicks and romantic comedies.
• Cooking for ourselves. Eating in restaurants for 6 months sounds great, but I can’t fit into any of my trousers any more :o(

Things we’re not looking forward to in Oz

• Cleaning. No more “my hotel room is dirty, buy me a new one.”
• erm…
• that’s it!

This one on the other hand, is a little more peaceful. For your maximal viewing pleasure, I suggest you make it full screen using the little menu thingy in the bottom right of the video.