Back to: Nique`s Travel Diary - Index

Hi everyone, Well I’ve less than 24 hours in London left and I’m going to use a few of the hours to catch up on my diary writing. I’ve finished packing everything apart from the few things I’ll need until I leave, and thankfully it nearly all fits in one backpack. The last few things I’ll throw in my other big pack but at least it will be light. I sent a box of stuff home several weeks back and it cost £98 for 25 kilos by surface mail. Not a cheap exercise to embark on, but there’s no way I could have carried all the stuff I had been travelling with plus the box of suits and winter clothes and stuff that Mum and Dad sent me from home. My tent, sleeping mat, mosquito net, suits and boots were probably the most bulky and heavy things I sent that I wouldn’t be needing for the last few weeks of my trip. Just a little note for myself, is that I found out the other day where the word Beefeater, the nickname for the Yeoman Guards at the Tower of London, comes from. I wandered into the English Teddy Bear Company shop and was picking up this teddy and that, and there was a collection of ones in uniforms of a London Copper, a Yeoman Guard, one of the guards from Buckingham Palace that wear those tall, furry, bear skin hats. On the tag of the Yeoman Guard it said that they were called Beefeaters because one of their duties included testing the food for the King and Queen to make sure it was safe, or not poisoned. Last week I went to the Natural History Museum in London. I’d been looking forward to this for a while ‘cause I’d booked myself tickets to some things of interest to me that I’d found on their website. Firstly I ambled around one of the most fantastic photographic exhibitions I’ve ever seen. It’s called Earth from the Air and all the photos were taken from a helicopter hovering or flying between 30 – 3,000 feet (10 – 3,000 metres) above the subjects. The artist is a guy by the name of Yann Arthus-Bertrand and it took him over 10 years to get the exhibition of his work to the stage it is in now. The photos are taken over all different countries around the planet and he and his team has had to get permits and work out the best time of year to go to each destination, and he researches everything and notes the exact location with latitude and longitude that each photo was taken at. Apparently he’s got over 100,000 photos, but only about 160 of them are on display in this exhibition, and it’s just been extended in London for another year, but is scheduled to be in Australia in 3 years time. I’d keep an eye out for it if you can. The exhibition is free and funded by the sales of books, postcards, posters and calendars. I was so tempted to buy the book but it was so big and heavy that I’ll have to buy it online with delivery. I love coffee table books, not just for the photos, but I tend to read them from cover to cover as well. The exhibition is also a way of distributing information. Each photo has a few paragraphs of information about the scene it displays, and there are also many boards, the same size as the each photo, which is about the size of big movie poster. On the boards without the photos are statistics like “1 in 5 of the world’s population does not have access to safe drinking water” and “Every week, more than a million people are added to the world’s population” and “The amount of oil consumed in 6 weeks, half of which is used on transport, would have lasted a whole year in 1950”. Anyway, I’ll describe some of the photos… There was a photo of this man in a white robe praying on one of hundreds of Middle Eastern style rugs all laid out overlapping each other. Another is of a man in a bright red jacket standing alone on this massive iceberg in Antarctica. The photographer always keeps the red jacket in the chopper so that if necessary, he can drop his assistant off to be in a shot in order to convey the scale of subject of the picture. The iceberg I’m talking about was probably the size of Sydney, maybe the size of a small country. There was a photo of the storage section of a bottling plant, and you could see a couple of people walking around and a couple of forklifts that appeared miniscule compared to the stacked up crates of bottled beverages. There were photos of fields of crops that looked like a mosaic of different green, of the colourful rows in a tulip fields, of the Great Barrier Reef, of the humming bird in the Nazca Lines, of a Shantytown in Brazil, of the massive Moreno Glacier, that Nick and I saw a tiny fraction of in Patagonian Argentina, and when we saw it, that tiny fraction alone looked gigantic. After visiting that exhibition I realised that quite a lot of time had passed and it was already time for me to go to the Darwin Centre for the tour I had booked. The Darwin Centre is quite new, and has only been open to the public for four months. It is mainly a storage and research building, so far taking up 7 stories and that’s only phase one. Phase two is set to open in 2007. In this centre are 22 million specimens preserved in pure alcohol. The amazing thing is, that’s only about a third of the collection. Some of the specimens date back to the 1700s, and some of the older jars, glass being a very slow flowing liquid, are totally warped with age. On each jar is a label, some old, and some more recent, all hand written, because as yet, the special long lasting and non-smudging, and alcohol-resistant ink required is not available in cartridges for printers. Each jar has a label on the outside, and one on the inside, just in case of a fire or a spillage or whatever destroying the outside label. There is something like 27 kilometres of shelving in the centre, and the majority of specimens kept in jars are kept in metal lockers that reach from the floor to the ceiling, inside huge rooms where the lights only come on when the double set of security doors have been open, and only stay on for a fixed amount of time. Of course if you’re in the room for longer you can restart the lights. The double security doors is more to do with a temperature buffer than security. The locker rooms are kept at a constant 13 degrees Celsius. We were also taken into the tank room where larger specimens are kept. The walls are lined with large jars containing mainly fish, but also mammals and birds. I saw a jar with 3 echidnas in it, and a jar with a huge deep-ocean fish in it, and only 2 weeks ago a baby porpoise that had got tangled in a net and drowned was brought in, and we saw that too. But the really big animals, which we weren’t allowed to see, are kept in big stainless steel tanks. There are hoists attached to the ceiling to lift the lids of the tanks and to raise and lower the specimens in and out. After the tour I had booked myself a seat in a lecture by one of the scientist that work in the centre. The talk was entitled “Would you Recognise Life on Another Planet?” The presenter started by asking the audience, which included a huge school group, if they would recognise life on planet Earth, and proceeded to talk in detail about bacteria and micro-organisms. The presentation was too detailed and used too much jargon and I lost interest, but remained until the end anyway. The guy spoke of some hot springs in Japan that are at the bottom of some mountain where he conducts a lot of research. The water is so concentrated with some natural mineral, I can’t remember what, that every year when people bath in the spring, there are associated deaths. At question time after the presentation, the kid’s questions all related to death in these hot springs. After the Darwin Centre, I went to see the exhibition for the National Wildlife Photographer of the Year. I loved this exhibition, the photos were wonderful and it was amazing to read about how and where the photographer got the photo. Many of them stake out in hides, even kids in the under 17 division state that they had to wait for several hours, lying in a boggy marsh or sitting in a tree to get the right subject and lighting and all round ambience. The final thing I had booked tickets for in the Natural History Museum that day was the Pfiezer Annual Science Lecture to be presented by Professor Robert Winston, entitled Human Instinct. Prof. Winston is like the David Attenborough for humans. He has done a couple of series on TV and he has published books that correspond to each series. Mum and I have enjoyed the watching the shows and Mum has read one of the books as well. In addition, Prof. Winston is one of the pioneers of medical research into fertility and IVF, and he is a member of the House of Lords in parliament. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed with the lecture. The title, Human Instinct, is the same as that of his latest series, which Nick and I had been watching. His speech jumped around, with very little fluidity, from stuff about human instinct to stuff about IVF, with a little bit or controversy and a tiny bit or politics thrown in, and he also rubbed up Pfizer, the sponsor and also the pharmaceutical company which developed Viagra, the right way. The lecture was very interesting, just not put together well, and I didn’t agree with many of Prof. Winston’s opinions, and in question time he didn’t satisfactorily answer my question. Marcia, Ruairidh and Nick had come to the lecture as well, and both Marcia and some lady that was sitting next to me on my other side both commented on how he avoided what I really asked. In case you’re wondering what I asked, or rather the comment I posed for him to respond to, I’ll roughly describe it. With reference to the facts that I wrote earlier, associated with the Earth from the Air photography display, why shouldn’t we be concentrating on fixing environmental and social problems that effect the planet’s already enormous population, rather than further researching and developing methods to artificially further increase the population. His response was pretty much saying that we can’t help people in third world countries and people living in poverty without continuously researching and expanding our knowledge. I partially agree with this, but definitely not in the field of IVF. I feel that the only people who benefit from the processes that derive from such research are the people that can afford to benefit from it. A few days later, Luka and two of his friends, as well as Nick and myself went to see Michael Moore perform live. Michael is a loud and fat political comedian from the USA, who, as a political and current affairs ignoramus (by choice), and someone who has never been impressed by a stand up comedy show in my life, I had never heard of. He wrote the book Stupid White Male, and is in the current movie called Bowling for Columbine. I haven’t read or seen either of these, and have no inclination to do so. The guy really irritated me. Some of the things he said I agreed with and some I didn’t. He took two volunteers from the audience to prove that Americans are stupid, the first was an American, and there were a few, but he chose a guy that got straight As at the University of Santa Cruz. The guy was probably in his early thirties. The British person he chose happened to be a 14-year-old kid who was still in school. It was just a light-hearted competition, the questions being about geography and the contestant’s respective national members of parliament and those of neighbouring countries. The kid won, but the British guy lost a couple of points for saying something stupid or in direct conflict with Michael Moore’s beliefs or something. Michael was totally bagging out Bush and Blaire, Sadam Husein, and Osama Bin Laden. He also told us a story of how when he was a teenager, and he was lazy and had no interests and his school headmaster hated him. He was sent to a parliamentary procedure camp, where each child had to take on the role of someone in parliament and they hold a debate and so on. He had no interest, so stayed in his dorm room listening to music and eating munchies for most of the week. At one time, when he ran out of snacks, he went to the vending machine to replenish, and saw a notice of a public speaking competition, the topic being something like equality. He noticed it was being sponsored by some club that he knew his dad had previously refused to join because they didn’t allow coloured people to join. He decided to write a speech depicting this indiscrepancy and entered the competition just to be a stirrer. He was horrified when he won and had to present the speech again to a larger group of people, including the sponsors. They were outraged, but several months later they changed their by-laws to allow coloured people to be members of their club. So from this incident, Michael decides that it was so easy for a single person to make huge changes in the world. Then he went on to say the one thing that probably pissed a lot of people off. It was having a go at the complacency of the victims of September 11th. He started off by saying that it was a terrible thing to happen and all of that, but then he said referring to a single one of the planes. That considering there were 5 terrorists in the plane, two of which were in the cockpit, the remaining 3, armed with only a small blade each, were left to control 90 or however many passengers. He shouted in anger that he couldn’t believe a group of 90 or more unarmed people couldn’t dominate and destroy the group of 3 terrorists. There was an outcry which Michael ignored, someone sitting in front of me shouted something out and was asked to leave by security. Michael continued shouting and it was just awful. Towards the end of the show he pointed out the idiosyncrasies of customer loyalty cards. How the companies that offer them, push up the prices to pay for the running of the program, which tempts people to overspend in order to collect an almost impossible number of points which entitles them to something for free. So people are generally willing, or are forced, to pay higher prices trying to chase something that will take so long to get something they don’t really need for free, if it is indeed obtainable at all. So he had some people go down the isles of where the audience was sitting with nets for everyone to put their loyalty cards in. When the nets were delivered to him on stage, he cut the cards up and added them to some large jars that were already filled with cards. The audience grew violently opposed to these cards within minutes, with the encouragement of Michael, and people were clapping and creating a bit of a scene. The funny thing was that when the show ended and everyone left, there were a few beggars outside the hall and everyone walked right passed them and ignored them as usual. All quite forgetting their pledge of only a few minutes earlier to not support big businesses and loyalty cards and to take a stand against them so that everyone can benefit from lower prices and make standard grocery items more affordable for those who have a lower income level. Anyway, I didn’t enjoy that show at all, but we had a pleasant dinner before hand. On Sunday a bunch of us, including Steve Hickie went to a pub for a bit and then walked back to Luka and Sarah’s place for some table tennis and the boys had a swim and mucking about with a football in the pool. Joan, that we met on our Brazil to Peru tour, and with whom Nick and I stayed with when we first arrived in London popped in for a while too. Then on Monday night was my going home get together, which was a last minute thing at one of the oldest pubs in London, called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. Mick Bull had recommended it the first time I saw him after arriving in London, and I had passed it and it was recommended on the Charles Dickens Walking Tour I had done earlier. It’s on Fleet Street in the city and was rebuilt in 1667 after it had burned down in the great fire of 1666. It has about 5 stories, two below street level, one on street level, and two or three above and has many little nooks and cranny’s and very narrow and low stair cases. There is a stuffed parrot, called Polly, in a glass case in one of the rooms, and Polly lived in the pub for the 40 years of her life and died in 1926. Their was a framed board next to the case with numerous obituaries for Polly from a selections of newspapers from around the world. I met Ruairidh on the street level floor, and when I went to look around I found at one of the wooden bench tables downstairs, Sam and Ainsley, and Ainsley’s brother Wade, together with Dean and Deb, who had just got back from their trip to Egypt that day. Darren, Marcia’s flat mate came, even though Marcia was stuck at work and didn’t arrive until just after everyone else had left. It was great to see Greg and Lorraine, the Kiwis who we met on our Brazil to Peru tour, and who lived down the road from us on the Isle of Dogs. Mick Bull came along too, and I’m not sure, but I think spent a fair bit of time talking about computers with Nick. At least when I came to see what was going on the first thing I heard was something about lines of code. It was a really nice evening, and including Sunday at Luka’s and this night, I got to see and say good bye to everyone I wanted to. Unfortunately there were three people who I wanted to catch up with in London but never got around to, and they were Jessica Haworth from my tour in Africa, Dev, who was the Nepalese guide on my Nepal tour, and Mike Katz from Sydney, but not to worry. I’ve had the most fantastic year and visited plenty of new and exiting locations. I’ve done awesome things and seen spectacular places. I’ve learned new things and met great people. Thank you to everyone who has contributed, in whatever way, to my experience. And especially to Nick, dear Chook, who I’ve spent most of my time with, and would have been lost without (literally). We both have many special memories we can treasure forever. I’ll miss you very much when I go home. I hope that when you come home our friendship will stay just as strong and we can share many more wonderful times together over many, many years. The next morning, Tuesday 3rd of December 2002 was the day my big trip ended. I’m now writing this from my real home, East Lindfield, Sydney, Australia. Marcia met me at the DLR station and accompanied me most of the way to Heathrow Airport. My flight ran a bit over an hour late, and had a one-hour stop over in Singapore, but the flight was comfortable and the Qantas staff were so friendly and lovely. I only watched two movies on the whole 21 hour flight which were “Austin Powers : Gold Member” and “Changing Lanes”. The rest of the time I played Tetris and a couple of other computer games, and read my book “Life on Air”, the autobiography of David Attenborough, who, by the way, never responded to my letter. I was so excited about going home, despite not having a clear idea of what I was going to do when I got there. Mum and Dad and Jem, Leonie, Peter and my cousins Josh and Jezz, and Tucki were all at the airport to greet me. Silly Jem, who now lives out of home and was coming separately from Mum and Dad, forgot to call to see if my flight was arriving on time, so he had been waiting ages and, I imagine, had quite a hefty airport parking fee. We stopped off at the Seven Eleven on the way home to get milk, a mango wiess bar ice-cream, and a packet of original Tim Tam biscuits.  I got home and looked around the house, and barely anything had changed. Mum had cleared all her junk out of my room for my arrival, but, now that Jem has moved out, it had all been dumped in his room. I had a quick look at the two rolls of photos I was most eager to see, those I took whilst trekking and climbing to Aconcagua Base Camp in Argentina, and then headed off to bed, falling asleep to the sounds of the crickets and cicadas outside. The next morning I was up early, to the sound of the kookaburra’s laugh and other bird sounds. I went outside onto the patio to have a look at our beautiful bush back yard and watch the rainbow lorikeets playing in the gum trees and nibbling at the Illawarah flame tree. I then went out the front to get the paper for Dad, which was at the top of our driveway under the jacaranda tree, which hasn’t yet started to shed it’s little mauve flowers into a lovely carpet. I had a giggle at the little plaque we’ve got on our carport wall that reads “On this site in 1785 nothing happened”. The hydrangeas next to Dad’s car have outstanding, huge blue flowers and the ones in the garden opposite our front door have bright pink flowers, and two little jacarandas have self seeded below the gum trees next to Mum’s car. Cherries are in season and our next door neighbour’s house and garden are lined with Christmas fairy lights. I love being home!