And we just stand idly by...

Please read this. You will hear plenty about it in the next two weeks. My guess is that it will then disappear from tv screens, as we once again do nothing about it:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/18/zimbabwe

A Trip to Fraser Island

I love the greens in this photograph. Beautiful.

For the holiday weekend, Dom and I took a trip to Queensland’s rainforest and beach paradise of Fraser Island.

I already have my big holiday for this year planned – in December I’ll be back in the UK for 3 weeks over Christmas and New Year. As this will drain most of my annual leave, I’m having to be pretty scrooge-like with my holidays for the next few months.
Those crazy, crazy 'roads'.

So with the office closed for a long weekend, and the Sydney weather turning a little more wintry (well, 18C and rainy), it made a lot of sense to get out of the city and seek the warmer climes of Queensland.

Hervey Bay is a 90 minute flight north from Sydney, and the stopping off point for the ferry to Fraser Island. Dom and I had organised a 3-day hire of a Landrover Discovery (see pics), which would be our trusty steed for getting around the road-free, sand-dune covered expanse of Fraser.

Right: eagle-spotted ray, seen from the cliffs at Indian Heads, Fraser Island.

After an unconventional safety video – “do not drive in the salt water, deflate tires to extract yourself from swamps, do not feed the wild dingos, etc…” – we were off on the ferry.

We had been told about the island’s dirt tracks, but hardly expected the all-terrain assault course that awaited us. Half-sweating in fear, and half-laughing hysterically, we tackled the outrageous cambers, giant pot-holes and sand slides that make up the navigable tracks. In fact, this was one of the key attractions for me – awesome fun, and really just like a big advert for 4x4 off-roading.

It got even better after we’d traversed the 15 mile-wide island and reached 75-mile beach on the far side. Driving at up to 90kmph along the beach, running through wash-outs and scattering wading birds was just too much fun!

I should say a little about the natural attractions too. As you can see from the pics, the island has some beautiful scenery – a natural result of the combination of desert, rainforest, lakes and ocean, which is actually pretty hard to find, even in Australia.

One less natural attraction is the wreck of the Moheno, a passenger liner washed ashore in a storm in 1935. The ship had been bought by the Japenese, but was shipwrecked during delivery to its new owners.

Given that it would probably have been used against the Australians in WWII, the grounding can now be considered somewhat fortunate.

Great place, great weekend break, back to work now.

A New Career and A New Home in A New Town (Going Through a Bowie Phase at the Moment)

I belatedly realised that the title of a previous update could have led you to believe that I’ve become as slovenly as to only update the website four times a year.

This update should abolish that impression.

I have a new home. Please see various images of the fantastic views. This is the key selling point. Otherwise it’s a ‘studio’ apartment. Like most real-estate euphemisms, ‘studio’ really just means one big room with a bathroom. I may be dating an artist, but I’m not about to turn into one.

I like the apartment though. It’s small but cosy. There’s a gym and a jacuzzi downstairs. It’s very very near to town. The swimming pool is even closer.

LEFT: Yes, this really is the view!

I’ve been doing a lot of swimming since India. Otherwise I’ve been trying to spend as much time out of doors as I can. After a very poor summer here (by Australian standards), the autumn has been amazing. Every day has been 20C and sunny. As it gets dark by 6pm, its best to do as much as possible outdoors at the weekends.

Talking of weekends, my next adventure will be a trip to Fraser Island for the holiday weekend (6th-9th June). Fraser Island is a fantastic wildlife/beach/ocean getaway. Dom and I are very excited. Actually, I’m amazed they still celebrate the queen’s birthday here. Though if the alternative was one day fewer holidays in the year, I guess I’d celebrate anything.

Happy Birthday Keith. We had another big night out at the Argyll last Friday. This was a more sober moment – must have been near the start of the evening.

Work is going well though. We had our annual fundraiser last week. I was a table host – and conversationalist – for the gathering at the hyper-plush Sheraton Hyde Park. Even though I conversed with a large number of the donors, we still managed to raise a substantial sum on the night. The highlights included an interview between our new CEO and our founder, Senior Australian of the Year David Bussau. We were also lucky enough to have one of our donors from the Philippines in the room. Her presentation was particularly moving, and a great reminder of how much we have, when others have so little. In other words, it was a great prod for the guests to write some cheques!

Chrissie, Rebecca, Karen and Sarah at our fundraiser. Have you ever seen a more glamorous looking finance team???

Another Big Trip to India…

This is the amazing view from Adam and Jo's apartment window. The towering apartment blocks are part of Thane's incredible building surge, reflecting the money brought about by the rocketing Mumbai economy. It's not just money that builds these tower blocks though. Poorly paid labourers live in the slum houses you can see in the foreground. These workers risk their lives daily, working in dismal conditions to earn wages that will keep them in poverty in urban Mumbai, but far exceed what can be earned in rural India.

How many Indian cities can you visit in a week? It seems like four or five if you are on a business trip. I’m just back from my second work trip to India and I had the good fortune to visit four cities I hadn’t been to before:

Hyderabad sits right in the middle of India, towards the south, and is the old capital of the Mughal empire and home to India’s Shia muslim population.

My rather eccentric hotel in Bangalore had a golf course across the road and a gaggle of geese in the forecourt (see bottom of picture).

Bangalore is well known to Brits as the IT capital of India. When a UK-based company hits the headlines for transferring its IT operations to India, this is most likely where they end up (though Hyderabad and Chennai/Madras are also getting in on that action). Bangalore has a great history, though no other Indian city seems to have made quite such a headlong rush towards the twenty-first century. The city has a very modern feel to it, and – typically – development has brought problems as well as virtues: during my stay I was caught up in some of the worst traffic I’ve experienced in any city.

For all its modernity, Mumbai still retains much that is exotic about India. Here you can see goats' feet chopped and ready for sale.

Mumbai is perhaps India’s most vibrant, confronting and news-worthy city. Apartments in some parts of Mumbai cost as much as they do in the more affluent parts of London or New York. Poverty in Mumbai is as shocking as in any other urban location in India. The two things – extreme poverty and extreme wealth – can often be found literally within yards of each other in Mumbai, the electronics and media (ie 'Bollywood') capital of India.

Ahmadabad in North West India is the capital of Gujurat state and famous as the birthplace of Ghandi. In the general aesthetic of the place (the architecture, the people, the enivronment), Ahmadabad feels closest to neighbouring Pakistan, but I was still unable to get a Peshwari Naan in the hotel restaurant.

I had meetings, site visits and work to do in all of these cities, mostly related to the healthcare project that I’m working on for Opportunity. I learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work in India and I met a number of people that will be useful contacts in future. If that’s all that happens on one of these trips, it’s a success. In addition to that, I made good progress towards partnering with a couple of organisations to help provide healthcare to the poor – that’s a great bonus.

Another great bonus was the chance to meet up with Adam and Jo in Mumbai and see their home there. It was hard to believe that we hadn’t met up for nearly three years. Within 10 minutes Adam and I were getting along like friends that see each other every day. We had a great laugh buzzing round Mumbai on Adam’s motorbike, buying cheap electronic gadgets (a mobile charger for Rps120 – fantastic! – a hifi for my ipod – awsome! – a speaker system for my mobile phone – lovin’ it sick!), buying furry underwear and paper stamps (ahhhh, don’t ask). Friends like that are just beyond any value. It was also great to meet Freya for the first time – she is gorgeous – and Alastair seemed as loveable and cheeky as his dad. Looking forward to meeting up with them again when I’m back in the UK in 6 months time. (Hopefully I’ll even get the chance to whup Adam’s ass at pool.) They have just bought a great house in Blackburn, where they are moving to when their great three-year Indian adventure ends on 10th June. I really did make it out to see them in the nick of time.

Back in Australia, it has been great to see Graeme and Jill in the last few weeks too. Part of their 3-week holiday here coincided with my India trip, which meant I had to cancel a planned weekend with them in Brisbane. That was a bummer, but we had a good time in Sydney, hitting some restaurants and making the most of the Anzac holiday weekend. I was somewhat disturbed by Graeme and Dom’s shared love for the audio cassette. Though it has to be said that their taste in music was pretty, erm… divergent. And no Graeme, your encyclopedic knowledge of obscure Australian rock music is NOT something to be proud of.

This means that in the space of a week I’ve caught up with three of my best friends. This hasn’t happened for a long time.

Adam and I had a great laugh in India, not least shopping for 'quality' Mumbai souvenirs. Here I am, loving my 'stylish' Rp200 watch sick!!! (Picture of furry underwear to follow!)

So, with some relief, a more uptodate addition to the website. It’s a pity the photos aren’t better though – I just seem to keep forgetting to take pics. I didn’t get a single one off Adam, Jo and the kids. Well, here’s a link to Adam’s site to make up for that:
http://www.clanblack.co.uk/

Ok, time to sleep off the jetlag. I had another flight on the A380 superjumbo this morning, but its hard to appreciate when you're arriving into Sydney at 7am, without having caught a minute's sleep...

Autumn!

Well… this is a record! And not a good one. Apologies to anyone who has been checking the website regularly (or even irregularly), you will not have seen anything new on this site for some weeks.

In fact, it was only when I checked this morning that I realised it had been more than a month since I’d last put anything on here. And given my commitment to update the website weekly, I am feeling guilty, chaste… in short I deserve a wee ‘boot up the erse’!

At least, after such a long absence, I have plenty to write about. And to keep this manageable, I’ll stick to the interesting stuff.

Top of recent ‘achievements’ was discovering Jervis Bay a few weeks ago… and Canberra . On paper, a trip to Canberra was long overdue – it’s the nation’s capital after all, and only a few hours from Sydney .

It took an art exhibition to attract me there in the end. The Turner to Monet Landscapes Exhibition has been advertised heavily over here, and it turned out to be worth the visit. From European masters including Constable and Friedrich to great aussie artists like Glover and Streeton, there was plenty to see at the exhibition. Canberra itself seemed much less impressive. Dom and I didn’t stay long enough to really do the place justice. I did get an overwhelming impression of a sleepy green, white and blue country town, spread over a huge area of modern town planning. Everything is roundabouts and bypasses, without there being much to bypass or go round about…

Who’s Dom you ask? Dom is a very sweet aussie girl that I met at the Playground Weekender music festival in April. After a few strange – and admittedly slightly drunken – dance routines in the dance tent, Dom and I quickly discovered a compatibility in our music tastes that bordered on the supernatural. Normally, when I tell people I love The Cinematic Orchestra, Yo La Tengo, Beck’s Guerolito and the DJ Shadow remix album, they go duh…. whahhh??? Dom not only knows all these peculiarities but loves them too.

A couple of weeks ago we went to see Air together at the Opera House. The gig was sold out but I was lucky enough to get two seats for row D (!!) and what a gig. Yes, its lounge-fi, yes they wear cotton slacks and have bad hair-dos (they are french), but boy can they do an amazing live gig.

Incidentally, the Playground Weekender was a top weekend, with Ian Brown, Maximo Park and Kruder & Dorfmeister, not to mention my mates Willy, Smithy and co, doing a bit of DJ-ing on a great site on the banks of the Hawksbury River a couple of hours north of Sydney.

Otherwise, weekends have been taken up with horse-racing (watching/gambling, not riding), barbeques on the beach (some of which have been washed out!), and of course painting Keith’s house. Like the opera house, Keith’s renovations are over-budget and over-schedule. Ed and I are hoping that we will eventually finish the job by 2009. Even sooner if Keith gives us a hand. Only kidding Keith – you know we love to wind you up!

Easter weekend is well worth a mention too. Had a fabulous weekend north of Sydney with friends Jude and Nicola. Nicola's folks have a holiday home up there. It's a particularly beatiful part of New South Wales, with beaches scattered everywhere and gorgeous forest walks. Dom and I joined Chris, Caroline and James, and Dave, Virginia and family. Much Polish vodka was drunk and there was some pretty healthy swimming and running too.

Work has been pretty eventful too in the last month or so. Both of the projects I’ve been working on have progressed nicely recently and I’m looking forward to making further progress when I’m back in the field (ie India ) in the next few weeks.

Progress with the projects means that there’s a good rationale for me staying on for the long term. After some thought, I’ve decided I’d like to stay on here beyond November. Therefore, the plan is to make a trip back to Scotland to see the family for xmas.

So that’s a whistle stop tour through the last few weeks. And now I’m off to India again…

That’ll be the adventure side of the next few weeks. Less exhilirating is the need to find a new flat before my lease runs out in May. I’ve had a very pleasant 5 months staying with Dave and Dave but as the guys are moving on, it’s time to find somewhere new. I’ve decided on a one-bedroom apartment. And I want to live somewhere with a rooftop view like this…

…it’s not impossible, but with rent going through the roof in Sydney , it could be an exhausting search!


OH WELL! I ABSOLUTELY DESPAIR! I don't mean to make excuses (here we go!) but blogger is a real pain for me these days. I've been a fan since the start, but it really is time they improved their service. The last week of delay has been because the site never works properly. I've decided to publish this post even though i couldnt see which of my pictures were which. so annoying. but better to post something than nothing!