LA 90210
Topic: North America

 

LA,

swimming pools, movie stars

dirty streets and dirty cars.

    My first trip to La was a bit hectic. Within 24 hours, I'd bought a car , drunk a pile of beer, and ended up outside a bar at 2am talking to a Nam vet who was smoking some killer hooch and, talking about flying through the jungle at night while someone shot tracers the size of basket balls at him. Twenty Four hours after that, I had been to Disney land (closed for winter), the Pinto had blown up, spraying the windscreen with greasy anti freeze, whilst refusing to run when stopped at the lights, and I was, in a hot pool In the Sera Nevadas with a girl I had picked up at the airport.

     I've been here plenty of times since then but nothing has lived up to those first couple of crazy days here more than thirty years ago. I declare right here I like Los Angles, but it can be a bit daunting for the new comer. My very first impression of LA was this place is an absolute dump. Sure everything is covered with a fine dust, the houses all look the same, every where is a 3 hour bus ride away. Hay, there is still some great things to do here.

     I left Melbourne at 11.am on a Monday and arrived in LA about five hours before I left. This meant I had to stay awake after a sixteen hour flight for another nine hours at least, until my hostel opened at three. Fortunately there are plenty of low stress things to do here. I heeded to the Pantry café in downtown La for a classic breakfast. Five bucks gets you scrambled eggs, toast coffee and grits 24 hours a day the same as it has the last 90 years. A bit of a wander around downtown to pick up a few things I'd forgotten then off to the bright lights of Hollywood and Vine. Hollywood used to be a dump for the down and outs when I first came here, now its just a tourist trap. Still worth seeing, try your foot prints in Fred Astair's, Check out Marlin's star on the sidewalk, catch a latest release at the chinese cinema where they hold the Oscars.

      LA is the land of cars. It's criss-crossed by huge freeways that seem to crawl along 24 hours a day. Never driven in the US. LA is not the place to learn. Fortunately there is now an alternative, there is a great metro system here. Don't worry, LA is huge, but you can relax on the subway while you cruse around. Buy a TAP pass ( $1 take note Myki) stick in some extra cash and you can jump on and off the Metro all day long. There are now trains from the airport to downtown and plenty of other places you don't want to go, Buses take you everywhere else. Your never lonely as there are always plenty of people talking to themselves. The bloke behind me at breakfast was having a loud conversation on his phone for half an hour. It was only when I went to leave I realised he did not have a phone. Don't want to talk to your self, most people are quite happy to have a chat. Spanish seems to work most of the time, occasionally English too. WASP,s don't take the bus.

     From Hollywood it's the 704 bus to Santa Monica through Beverly Hills. This is where the mythical Californian's live. Unfortunately you, I, and most of the rest of LA can't afford it. Fortunately the express bus whisks you past Rodeo Drive in a flash so you don't realise what you are missing. Once your at the beach you can stare down at the stars houses beside the Santa Monica pier. Walk south to Venice beach. I don't recommend swimming as the water is about 10 deg all year long. Grab a cheese steak/ beer combo, then watch the roller blader's /gym junkies watch themselves.

By now it,s 6PM and being winter here dark. I've just missed the 33 bus so it's a twenty minuet wait, freezing my arse off out side a 7-11. My new home is in Crenshaw South Central. LA. Home of rappers and Drive by's. “What was I thinking when I booked this” . I get off the bus, grab a burrito, and walk down a relatively quite street to the hostel. No cruising dudes in lowered caddies, no tooled up 13 year old's in hoodies on street corners. The hostel looks like an old southern mansion, it has two huge Fan palm trees with there tops lit up in the front yard. It's fairly new and purposely built by the owner an older black gentleman who greets me with “James Bond we've been waiting for you”. Being two stories it's out of character with the surrounding neighbour hood of small low rise bungalows. It even has a swimming pool, and my favourite part a full breakfast. I find out the lit palms help you find the place at night, you can see them from a mile away. I crash and sleep soundly.

I'm actually on my way to Mexico, so LA is just a rest break in the flight. The next day I check out the La Brea Tar pits, and the farmers markets. The pits provide a lot of the fossils world wide to museums with the best on display there. You can watch while they dig them out “very slowly”. The Market is LA's top tourist destination apparently. I can tell you they have a happy hour and good food. Mean while gotta fly. Voy a Mexico. Click for more.

The Heaphy Track and the Able Tasman Park
Topic: Oceania

 

     I've got a Kiwi mate who lives in  Queenstown. He's a mad keen cross country skier, paddler and deer farmer. Well actually keener deer farmer. At the camp where we worked together every one else would be reading Playboy except for Flip who would be checking out the centrefold in deer farmer monthly. I was in-between swings and looking for something to do, so a quick jump across the Tasman for a bit of fun seemed in order. The great thing about NZ is you really don't really need to adapt too much on holidays. The drive on the same side of the road, almost speak the same language, and have a healthy disrespect for all Aussies. 

         Flip lives in one of the most scenic spots on the globe, snow covered mountains rise behind the beautiful lake Wakatipu. The golf course is next door, and his deer farm is on top of the hill. One hundred and eighty acres of prime velvet raising country. Fortunately I'm not here to go farming. Closest I get is a night out with the pump action fixing the local feral problem. The next day we hop into Flips 4 wheel drive van, and head to the top of the south Island, past miles of hydro schemes and endless ranges.

           We are planning to walk the Heaphy track which is an old cattle track that goes 80 KM from the east coast to the west coast across the southern Alps of NZ. Being a cattle track it doesn't really have a lot of scenic highlights as it sticks to the valleys and low passes. As a matter of fact it's actually a better mountain bike ride, unfortunately at the time they had just turned it into a National Park so such fun was now verboten. We had to walk. I say it hugs the Valleys but the first day is a 1000m climb to Perry saddle hut. Bad news. Good news, as they say in the classics it's all down hill from here. The walk takes about 6 days, we are staying in the mountain huts which have the usual selection of mostly foreign backpackers.The first night we meet Bob who is a 80 year old organic farmer taking a couple of 20 year old female Scandinavian woofers on a walking adventure. The hill nearly killed me, my feet are really sore and blistered, and my pack seems to weigh a ton. Bob is as fresh as a daisy, must be the organic food. We spend a pleasant night chewing the fat and talking deer farming with the visitors. 

    We take off early next morning but by lunch time my feet are killing me. I can't go any further. It seems like my feet have grown a size since I last wore my really comfortable Rossies, and now in the middle of the walk I have come to realize they do not fit any more. Fortunately Flip has a pair of sandals, looks like I'm going to do one of NZ's major walks in thongs. As it was a cattle/bike track the surface is pretty good and my feet get better out of my boots. Over the next couple of days we wind our way down towards the coast. When we get to half way we find a tree full of worn out boots. Seems like I'm not the first. I add to the pile. Finally we get to the coast and a place where we can catch the bus which we have booked back to the nearest town. There are a bunch of Japanese tourists and a few other hikers there. After a wait the bus turns up and the Japanese jump on. They haven't booked so the bloke has only bought out the small bus. We wait an hour till he returns. 

    A night at the local pub, with a real bed, parma, and a hot shower does us wonders. All we have to do is get back over the hill to the car. There are two choices, a $40 bus ride that takes four hours or a shuttle flight that takes 45 minutes. After six days it would be kind of nice to see all we had walked over in 15  minutes. We get to the airport and the Japanese are already there filling up the plane. There where a couple more than he thought there would be so he apologises and tells us he will be back in a couple of hours. So much for the short trip. The field is half an hour from town so we sit down to wait in the luxurious tin shed terminal. The plane returns, we get in and head up the track, but the cloud has closed the pass. "We don't fly through clouds as they tend to have hard centres" our pilot tells us. No worries we will just go around. Our 45 minuet flight turns in to a hour and a half tour around the top of the South Island. Priceless, we see seals, whales and a whole lot of beautiful coast line.

     That night we are back in Motuaka having dinner with one of Flips mates who builds boats. John builds custom made wooden canoes for hunting lodges and sea kayaks for adventures He has a model he sells to rental mobs, and his first prototype is sitting in the shed. Why don't we take it while where here and paddle round the Able Tasman national park. Why not.

    I walked the Able Tasman a couple of years before, it's spectacular. All great coastline with beautiful bays. You can go diving off the beach for scallops. Sea kayaking is much more civilized than Tramping. You get to take chairs, and fresh food, in an Esky, and beer. The weather is great. We spend about five hours a day paddling between camps, with Flip taking the odd fishing break. I don't remember him catching any thing. In the after noon we pull up on a deserted beach, light a fire, pull out a deck chair and watch the sun set. The only thing missing is a beer. Hold on we have a slab of cold VB, Carlton is dumping the stuff here and its cheaper than the local beer.  We paddle about 100 k's over 5 days then hitch back to get the car. Highly recommended.

PS you can now mountain bike the Heaphy track again, as they have changed the rules. You can hire sea kayaks at Motuaka.

Click the pic for more photos

Killing Time In The Freezer
Topic: Antarctica
A fantastic video from the current doctor at Casey station. The doc's generally don’t have a lot of medical stuff to do apart from the odd bit of amateur dentistry, this bloke has put his spare time to great use. Thanks Grant

 

https://vimeo.com/102715370

Island Life
Topic: Oceania

Cancelled
Topic: Undefined

John Mellion had a famous dislike of Melbourne, this was his right as a Sydneyophile. I personally think Sydney is one of Australia's greatest dung heaps, and try to avoid it at all costs. Funnily enough though the  Airlines insist on sending me, and a lot of other's there at great expense both to myself and them. My friend and I where going to the Cook Islands which only has one direct flight a week, from you guessed it, "Sydney". That's why I found myself driving into the second worst airport in the world on a chilly Saturday night. I'd done the homework and decided to park at the Blue Emu carpark. Book online $99, expensive but cheaper than the other options. We park at the far end, and hop on the free shuttle bus to the domestic terminal. There we find the only way to get to the international terminal is a $5.50 five minute ride on another shuttle. After a ten minute wait,I fork out more of my hard earned and end up with a pocket full of shrapnel to take out of the country. Running Parking cost total $121.00. 

            Hey, in 6 hours we will be sitting on a beach, soaking up the sun rather than standing here in the rain. We are 2 hours early,  so we amble in and check the flights screen to find out what counter to go to. My eyes wander down the screen. 19.35, Check, Rarotonga, Check, Cancelled, Chec_ _ _ _  WTF.  FF to the counter where a frazzled Air New Zealand lady tells us it's cancelled due to bad weather and points us to a long line. We get to the counter, get told it's cancelled due to maintenance issues. Why didn't you ring us? We tried came the answer but somehow managed to miss the two hundred people at the counter. As for the poor suckers that came from Sydney they get to go home and wait, at least there going to put us up for the night, The bad news is the next fight is tomorrow arvo, and it goes via New Zealand. Be out front for the bus ride to the hotel in half an hour. We get 30 dollars in vouchers to spend on a meal while we wait. Two beers thanks, sorry you can only buy food and drink. But beer is both food and drink I plead. No good. I settle for a latte, and a muffin. 

         Out front, we wait with the mob in the cold for the bus. The mood is ugly, it's cold wet and where meant to be on our way to a tropical island. If the New Zealand rugby team walked past I think the pensioners would have ripped them to bits. The bus is meant to  be there at 9.20 to take us five minutes to the hotel. 9.30, 940. 9.50. The bus rocks up, we wait, 10.00. 10.10, the mob is about to head inside and rip the Kiwi's to bits. 10.20, I go inside, a bloke is pointing out to the frazzled lady the bus could have driven to the hotel 6 times by now. It's going shortly she says. 'Get your act together', he storms off. The bus driver sensibly has been hiding, finally he starts the bus. The idea of spending 20 hours at an airport hotel is not growing on us. Fortunately everything we have been told so far has been wrong, and so is the location of the hotel. We find ourselves at the Menzies a classic hotel in the heart of Sydney just around the corner from the Coat hanger. We check in and get a $100 room credit, which we head off to the piano bar to drink. Later on I wander out and take a few pics of the harbour. Big breakie, in the morning, and a bit more of a lie in until checkout. We wander down the rocks and check out the market. After lunch we jump a cab and head back to the airport. I check the screen, It's going and on time. I hand over my taxi receipt and get informed I need to ring customer service tomorrow then fill out a form which they don't have. Did you know I'm meant to be on a beach in a foreign country sipping Pina colada's by then, actually I'm meant to be there now. I get the costomer service number.

           A week  later. Sydney. It's still bloody raining. After a bit of searching we are at the eleven dollar shuttle stop. I check the schedule. It stops at 9.50. It's ten. We walk back to the other end of the terminal and catch a taxi. $17.10 plus a $4.00 fee for getting a taxi from the airport to the airport. If a virus started killing investment bankers I doubt anyone would bother to look for a cure.

MONA
Topic: Australia

 

The Museum of Old and New Art, or MONA , sits buried in a old vineyard on the outskirts of Hobart. The sign on the front of the building says Sunny Dale shopping centre, the bright reception area would be at home in any corporate office. It's only once you've entered, getting sucked down into the cavernous concrete bowels that you start to realise your in for a different sort of experience. Once you,ve decended to the bottom, you slowly work your way back up through the meseum towards the daylight. The place is full of challenging art, spread out so you never feel like your in a gallery, or crowded out by other punters. There is the pulse room where 200 lights throb with your magnified heartbeat thumping as a backing track, Water fountains spitting out meaninless words. Caverns of display screens full of random data, or unique art from someone who I hope is firmly locked up at night. There is even a whole room dedicated to a huge scientific machine that turns food into poo. I have two of these in my backyard already, and they don't need 3 people to oversee them. The building itself is equal to the works, contrasting and amplifying the experience, full of little nooks and follies, it would be worth the visit even without the exhibits. David Walsh punter mastermind behind it has created something unique and special.

A perfect place for an evil genius to plot the conquest of the world. Sleepy Hobart, who would suspect a concrete fortress, armed with evil death rays hidden under pyramids sheltering yuppie art lovers. Sure the top three basements are an excellent art museum, but we really know there is another ten floors below hiding rooms full of technicians plotting the overthrow of world order. You heard it here first, after all I should know, I am 007.

More pics here.

The Mine
Topic: Australia

 

 

Light Keeper for a Day
Topic: Australia

 

 

   I can't remember how many times I have been to the Wilsons Promontory Light Station, but it's still is one of my favorite trips. My first trips there where with "Uncle Reg" on his old cray boat in the 70's. At that stage the Light was still a manned light station and you where only permitted to visit on a prearranged trip. The light was on open Tuesdays and Thursdays, ten till two. A crusty old light keeper would begrudgingly show you around the place after opening the gate at the bottom of the hill. If you where lucky you got a ride up the last hill to the light in his land rover. As I got older we walked in, and camped at Roaring Meg Creek. You'd get up in the morning and race off for the hours walk to meet the Light keeper, and trudge back to the campsite for another night of sleeping on rocks and dehydrated food. My aunties once walked all the way there and back in one day. Not a bad effort as the walk in is 19km, 38 return, Lanie said she was a wee tired after that one. It would of killed me, but they made them tougher back then.

Grand Ridge Bike Ride
Topic: Australia

 

     When I organize a bike ride I generally Plan the route, get the food, supply the transport,cook the food and drive the support vehicle. When Mick organizes one he plans the route, and I do the others. Don't know how this happens, good delegation Mick !   There is a election on the horizon so my brother though he would do the right thing and have a bit of charity fundraising for his favorite political party. A weekend riding along the Grand Ridge Road from Ellen Bank to the Tarra Vally Guest House, Total distance 80km over 2 days. Throw in a bit of food and luxury camping in the bush, small donation for costs, profits to the party, whats not to love. 6000 emails later, and no takers we decided to do it anyway.

    The Strzelecki ranges are a low lying group of hills in between the Latrobe Vally and the coast. They contain towering mountain ash trees, a temperate climate, matching rain forest, and winding dirt roads.Even though they are only a short way from Melbourne, most people don't even know they exist. Once populated by hill farmers, and remote saw millers, they are now mostly State parks and forestry reserves. Through the center of all this runs the Grand ridge road, Victoria's only (mostly) dirt highway.

    Wave goodbye to the dogs (no car space), and four starters packed into the wagon for the hour long trip up the hill. The forecast all week had been rain,rain,rain, not unusual for this area, so we where pleasantly surprised to be greeted by a sunny day when we pulled the bikes off the  carrier at Ellenbank. The next couple of hours where spent gliding along the rambling road, past farms and old sheds,to Mirboo North and lunch. It's market day, and the center of town is full of people selling eveything from old tools to healing crystals. Lunch consisted of a snag in bread from the CWA van, followed by a couple of beers at the Mirboo North Pub, and  cake n coffee at the bakery. A diet designed to keep those calories up for the strenuous riding ahead. A couple more hours meandering through the hills and we arrived at Turtons Creek our stop for the night.

    Set up the bedding, Light the fire, nibblies, a couple of heart starters, send Frank off to clear the track, right, lets hit the pub for dinner. I can recommend the Exchange Hotel Foster. Eye Fillet on the menu, Footy on the telly, Frosties on the Bar. Next day after, a fine nights sleep, a shower, and, the breakfast smorgasbord, we head back to the hills. To day is much less rural. We ride through the high mountain ash forests, with sweeping views appearing now and again through the trees. Every now and again there is a sign to a community long gone. A school here, a hall there, all that's left is impenetrable bush. No pubs or Markets today, so we stop at Ryton Junction for a break. We see three cars along the road all day, and  one of them is stuck in the bush after taking the corner to fast. Finally we come to the end point Balook and the Tara Vally Guest House. Hot Coffee and a Sunday Roast before 3pm. Whats the time, 3.30, Oh we well Settle for the Scones and Cream. We pack ourselves into the car,and head down the hill towards town. It starts to rain, got away with that one.

more pics here

Click here for the route it's also good drive if you don't want to ride it.

Start at the center
Topic: Australia

 

We started off at the center and worked our way out. Mick had agreed to orginize a bike ride route for the Greens senetor elect, to tour her new terrtory, on the way to her new job. I got the job of driver. Keep off the main roads and see the real people was the brief. We got lost, almost bogged, had plenty of small town coffee stops, and we saw a lot of nada. Shep to Benella is going to be a ripper. There is still time to jump onboard ride leaves 15/6/14.

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