Saturday, April 22

We left the Britz outlet, and drove the car to Margaret River on a succession of highways: highway 4, to highway 3, to highway 2, to highway 1.  Our hotel was the modern sort, the kind where the person who would have been at the front desk has been replaced by a small box made in China, and the desk doesn’t exist, so both those guys are living in their parents’ basement writing comments on news articles castigating George Soros, whoever he is. Really. Did you ever hear of George Soros before he became the Go-To Jew to blame for the problems of the Western World? There were instructions on the box which kind of worked. Ultimately we got the pass code that would get us into our room which was very nice. There was a bottle of wine for us. The bedstands have coasters. They know their customer base.

We never drank the wine. We had wine with dinner. We went to Morrie’s. It is a popular place. This is a four day holiday weekend for ANZAC day, and since the restaurant is closed Sunday and Monday and for the Tuesday holiday — why do restaurants do that? the demand is peak at this time.

Sunday, April 23

We spent the day tasting wine at the wineries closest to Margaret River.   Leeuwin is a big name in the area, and had perfectly good wines.  We’d already had a shiraz from Voyager, and we tried a few others.  Redgate was a much more personal winery, the guy offering the tastes was the owner.  We’d thought we’d stop at Xanadu, but we’d really had enough, and just went back. Ray did most of the drinking, I only took tiny sips because I was driving.

“Cellar door” is the uniform term here for what Californians call a “tasting room”. I remember learning from my father, and who knows how the conversation took this turn, that some 19th-century literature dude had pronounced “Cellar Door” the most resonantly beautiful phrase in the English language. There was no mention of wine.

After we got back, we walked around town. We stopped at the tourist office and asked them about wine tours (so we both could drink), and they checked the Internet and told us that Wines for Dudes had an opening for the next day. They gave us a brochure for it, and also highlighted a bunch of interesting places on the map.

At their suggestion, we walked over to JahRoc galleries, which featured furniture they had made from local hardwoods, beautiful desks and tables and wine racks (along with other works by local artists). Unfortunately, Western Australia is banning the logging of native hardwood starting in 2024, and the gallery will be closing soon.

It was also interesting that the concept of “wine bar” didn’t seem to exist there. Maybe it’s a California thing. Restaurants with a fairly wide selection of wines by the glass is as close as you get.

We returned to the hotel and made reservations for the wine tour.

After we got back, we went to the Margaret River Tuck Shop for dinner, and were ignored for a good long time. Eventually somebody noticed that we had been lapped by other groups of diners and came to see if we had at least got a drink order in. Eventually one of the waiters explained that the printer had run out of paper just as our drink order was being printed, and got lost on the way to that little rotating thing with clips that tells the kitchen or the bar what’s up next. A little automation is a dangerous thing. Eventually we had fried prawns (complete with heads) and ceviche.

Do you eat shrimp cells? The older I get, the less patience I have for removing shrimp from shells and unless it’s really hard I just chew it up like a Chinese peasant. It’s only chitin. Today I learned, that the structure of Chitin was elucidated by Albert Hoffman in 1929, just when Alfred Kinsey was studying gall-wasps.

Monday, April 24

On Monday we were picked up by the Wines for Dudes bus. There were actually a few more female dudes than male on the bus. The “Wine For Dudes” tour guide, Jeremy, gradually devolved into talking about surfing and music more than about wine, which suited his clients. There were a lot of concert posters in the 1960’s fonts on the walls. “Wine for Dudes” sounds defensive, anyway; I suspect there is unspoken in Australian society the idea that dudes drink Foster’s. The clients on the tour seemed an ordinary cross-section of mature tourists. We were the oldest, but the others looked at least empty nest.

The first stop was at House of Cards, and at Gabriel Chocolate next door that was also doing tasting.  Tasting chocolate first is not the wisest move. Chocolate is actually a lot better than wine, and everybody knows it.

You can’t talk about wine, anyway. There is this whole alternate universe vocabulary. “Dark fruit” in winetalk is no closer to dark fruit in English, than “legs” are to legs. And the chocolate people next door talk the same way. 72% Madagascar. it was chocolate; we ate it (I got a cup of hot chocolate, too.)

Then we tasted wine at Skigh.  We then went to a small room in a large restaurant, Swings and Roundabouts.  First we were given bottles of Cabernet Merlot and Malbec, and a graduated cylinder.  We tasted each independently, and then made our own blend of the two.  After that, it was pizza, fries, and salad, and that filled us up for the day.

After lunch, we tasted wine at Montague, which had the best-tasting of the day.  The tour wound up at Beer Farm, but we were too full of pizza and wine to have any.

Tuesday, April 25

ANZAC Day. 108 years since the counteroffensive. Look for more holidays like this one.

It rained.  Also, we had to do the laundry, which was a little interesting in that the payment was done via ApplePay in an app.  We even set the temperature of the water and dryer using the app.  But it beat looking all over for change.  We’d arrived in Australia with A$100, and spent all of it except A$10.  Everything else was with credit cards, almost all contactless.

We then spent the day hanging out in the hotel.

We had been working quite diligently at using up the leftover food from the camper van.  There were still many Weetbix, so we’d bought milk.  There was still peanut butter, jam, and honey, so we’d bought bread.  We made it through most of that, and the remaining salami, cheese, and crackers, and cookies.  But there was still leftover rice, and there was still a bottle of wine we’d bought in Perth (and another the hotel had left for us).  So we went to the local doner kebab place, got a doner wrap and some tabouli, used the microwave in the hotel room to make some of the leftover rice, and had it with the takeaway food.  Not a bad meal.

Wednesday, April 26

It was time to leave Margaret River.  We stopped at Wooditjup National Park and walked on the Chimney Trail, through a lot of pretty gum trees.  We drove to Gracetown, which seems to be a surf spot, and walked to see the Philosopher’s Stones, an overhanging formation in the tide.  You have to see it at low tide if you want to get close. We continued driving to the Canal Rocks, a rock formation on the coast which has had “canals” created through it.  And we looked out at the ocean from the base of the Cape Naturaliste lighthouse. They have an ordinary metal chain link fence, but someone has cut holes in the pipes which act as a wind instrument in the perpetual wind. 

On the drive back to Perth, we stopped to eat at Flic’s Kitchen, a tasty restaurant in Mandurah. All these choices are powered by Internet sites, hence, google. They had an Australian take on Navajo Fry Bread. Scallops, swordfish, rhubarb custard tart. The usual. We continued to the Ibis Budget Perth Airport hotel.  I then went to get some cash for the Timor tour, and returned the rental car.  I wasn’t able to get as much as I needed, but figured we’d pull through somehow.  We got a few hours of rest before getting up at 3:30 for our 6:30 flight.

Thursday, April 27

It seemed to be a day of inspections, starting with the Uber driver who wouldn’t start driving until the little seat belt light turned off. Ray’s seat belt needed to be released and replugged, and that did the click, I mean trick. The Qantas terminal in Perth was very busy early in the morning, largely miners bound for destinations I’ve never heard, all around the west.

One of the X-ray machine operators pulled me aside for a Random Explosive Check. You can see her logic. If she had randomly selected one of the gilet jaunes in his fly-in day dungarees, she would have had to go through the whole rigamarole of patting down because miners and nitrate residue — but an American tourist, a swab, a bit of banter, and on my way.

Our flight was pretty on-time, and we had a fairly tight connection. We proceeded in Darwin to “International Connections”. Nobody else was there right then, so the security people could raise their thresholds. One guy looked at the labels of all the liquids making sure they weren’t more than 100ml. Another went through my pack, and wanted to rescan it without the bars of soap we’d bought for our friend Carla. And then the Immigration guy took a long time with my passport and asked a lot of questions.

We made it to the gate for our flight to Dili, and there was nobody there. No passengers or ground crew. The coffee lady assured us they would be there, and eventually, they were. We flew on an Embraer jet which was maybe 40% full, with 4-across seats which were noticeably wider than the 737 we flew on from Perth.

Thursday, April 13

We took an Uber to the Ibis Budget Perth Airport hotel, which despite its proximity was fairly expensive. We took another Uber to Cooee, a “modern Australian” restaurant.  We had delicious oysters, and a starter which had akoya, an unfamiliar sea creature, and samphire, a variety of seaweed.  A good fish course, a cheese plate, and some Western Australian wines (four shared glasses) rounded it out.

Friday, April 14

In the news this morning, cyclone Ilsa crossed the Pilbara Coast and entered Western Australia and began to disperse. It had been traveling down the channel between Indonesia and Australia, strengthening as it went; for a brief time it was even forecast there would be overcast skies at Exmouth; but the prevailing winds blew it onshore and it was gone before eclipse day. That part of Australia is fairly unoccupied. All the networks carried the same images of the destroyed Pardoo Roadhouse because that’s what there was, that they could get to. When the networks are all carrying the same photos of destruction, there wasn’t as much of it as they had hoped.

There was a nice coffee place across the highway from the hotel.  Afterwards we walked to a grocery store and bought some food for our week in a camper van.  Rice, linguini, oil, vinegar, mustard, eggplant pickle, WeetBix, sausage, eggs, butter, milk, coffee, crackers, cookies, fennel, lettuce, onions, salami, cheese, peanut butter, jam, bread — all the requirements. 

At dinner time we took the bus and train to meet our friends Elizabeth and Roxana for dinner at the house in Fremantle where they were staying.  We’d met them on an eclipse cruise in 2016 to Micronesia.  We joined Liz’ partner Paul, his sisters, and their husbands for a simple dinner of steak, potatoes, and salad.  And Western Australian wine.

Saturday, April 15

After another breakfast at the coffee place, we took the bus up the highway to the Britz outlet where we rented our excessively long camper van.  It was tall enough to stand up in, which was great, but it had a toilet and shower which we never used, because everywhere we stayed had them.  We plugged it in to 240v most of the places we went, though one place didn’t have power, and another didn’t want you to use it for heating or A/C.

We parked the van at the hotel, and took the bus into town to meet Liz and Roxana at the museum.  We went to the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art, where we’d met Thomas Rentmeister in 2012, who we now try to see whenever we go to Berlin.  This time PICA had an exhibition in the main floor which was pretty conceptual, featuring modified projectors where the film looped around in a complicated way.  The interesting exhibition was upstairs.  A motor was slowly moving some beams from which several wires were strung, feeding up to the ceiling and then down the walls, each supporting a piece of wood which was either charred or covered with ochre.  These were leaving marks on the wall as the strings moved them up and down.  Another piece had a historical book outlining plans for dealing with aboriginals, with ochre between its pages, and with water dripping on it so as to destroy it in a significant way.

We had a fairly large Japanese lunch, and headed back to the hotel and moved into the van.  We started driving north, stopping at Dan Murphy’s to pick up some Western Australian wine for the trip — we got four bottles, and some water. The clerks and even other customers were happy to help us pick wines out. I only picked one, which had a design on the label that looked like an eclipse. For one reason or another, we’ll drink it on the 20th.

Driving was pleasant, boring, uneventful.  It was pretty easy getting out of Perth with four lanes quite a ways up.  Then it became a two-lane road in good condition, with plenty of overtaking lanes.  I set the cruise control to 110kph and didn’t often have to pass in order to maintain the speed.  We made it to our first destination, the Western Flora Caravan Park, just as it got dark.  When we arrived, we were the only ones there, no sign of an eclipse rush.  We didn’t bother with dinner, just cheese and salami lettuce mustard sandwiches, and a Malbec from Margaret River.

I got up at three in the morning to take in the Southern Sky. Perfectly clear weather. Scorpio right overhead, not dragging its tail along the horizon like it does at home. The Cross, the clouds, the Milky Way…

Sunday, April 16

Breakfast was sausage, eggs, cheese, onion.  We had a French press in the van, making the best coffee of the trip.  More driving.  We stopped in Geraldton for a few missing groceries, Parmesan cheese and more water.

We crossed a major flooded River. I suppose the water came from central Australia where the cyclone rained itself out. The Highway department had put up signs “event ahead”. I supposed that was their way of saying drive carefully. Later on, we realized that the “event” was the eclipse we were headed to. The constabulary was prepared for the worst.

We drove on to the Wooramel Riverside Retreat, a basic camp spread out along the mostly dry Wooramel river.  No power or Internet, but we could cook just fine on propane, and the van had a separate 12V battery for the lights, water pump, and USB charging.  We had sausage and linguini and salad.  And some WA wine. (We aren’t good drinkers; wine lasts more than a day with us and fortunately it often improves.) We bought Anzac cookies for dessert and snacks. It’s that season.

The camp was packed with Australian campers and their kids. There is a hot spring there, too, though not as hot as our hot tub and far more crowded with strangers. It was here that we first began to run into eclipse watchers other than by design. There was a fellow who had been to Zambia in 2001!

Monday, April 17

Breakfast was WeetBix and PB&J.  We kept driving, and made it to the Coral Coast Tourist Park in Carnarvon.  It had powered sites, and WiFi throughout (plus usable cell signals), laundry, and showers.  We picked up a rotisserie chicken, and had that with rice and eggplant pickle augmenting the leftover linguini from the previous night.  More WA wine.

As we drove, we saw more and more “Major Event In Progress” road signs, with the speed limits dipping to 80 or 60 for turnoffs and roadhouses.  Seemed a bit strange, but whatever.

Tuesday, April 18

The man next to our slot seems to live at this trailer park. Old and sunbaked and stacks of bottles. Nobody travels with bottles. We ate breakfast and continued driving north.  Signs encouraged us to keep topping off the tank so we’d have gas to get back in case they ran out.  We topped off at the Minilya Roadhouse.  Google Maps was paying enough attention to draw the road in yellow.

Australia has flies.  They really like flying in your face, especially when you stop by the side of the road to pee.  Some of them are “March flies”, and actually bite you.  There were hardly any mosquitoes, though. Overall, the Australian insect population seems to have dropped as much as the American, or maybe there never were grasshoppers here. Do schools teach, that if you took a road trip in the 1950’s, you had to scrape off your windshield three or four times a day or you couldn’t see? It just isn’t like that, now. I drive to Oregon and back without cleaning my windshield. Dave is more fastidious but – well, he’d drive to Kansas as a child.

The termite mounds are dense up here, like haystacks dotting farmland, except that haystacks are all uniform marshmallows of white plastic now.

We came to a checkpoint where they were actually stopping cars. An absolutely unintelligible Aussie junior cop asked if we were going to Coral Bay. We weren’t, so forward we went. Turns out the major event is the eclipse. Usually in America if there is a horse show or a Grateful Dead Tribute concert, they don’t have signs 400 miles away warning you, but in Western Australia, there aren’t that many junctions. You could say, in a sense, that Geraldton is about six blocks from Exmouth because that’s how many viable alternate routes branch off in that two-day piece of driving. And some of the roads are unusable. The bridge at Fitzroy Crossing was flooded out a while back, and Cyclone Ilsa had closed roads as well. The recommended route from Perth to Darwin, if you’re piloting a truck, is via Alice Springs. That is like driving from San Francisco to Detroit by way of Brownsville. I bet the Australians fix their roads before Caltrans fixes Highway 84, which was closed on March 11 when the roadway slid into the creek. (It reopened to one-way traffic on July 27.)

We topped off again just before Exmouth (which WA residents pronounce ex-MOUTH not ex-muth) at “cheapest gas in town” in a little industrial area.  It was crowded, but not gas-shortage or Weimar inflation crowded. The manager had set up an additional pump. She said: “Go round and young Jack’ll take care of ye.” Young Jack had a portable pump connected to a barrel of diesel.

After driving through town, there was a checkpoint making sure we had reservations, shortly before the turnoff to the Yardie Homestead Caravan Park, where we’d planned on staying two nights, because they’d said they were booked on the third.  Turned out they were expecting us for three nights.  Oh well, our plans were made.  This was the place which restricted us from using power for the air conditioning or heating water.  Sigh.

The crowd was not particularly astronomical. I think these people might just come here every year. The signage is sixties, the inhabitants are decorated with tart stamps prison tack and only the occasional 8 inch diameter telescope. Young moms abound, herding young kids with obsolete hair and the pugnacious self-sufficiency of hand me down orphans. Eclipses take you to trailer parks everywhere.

Dinner was leftover chicken and rice, and WA wine. They do have a cafeteria at the park but we had food to eat up and only a few days to do it in. Don’t waste food.

On Monday Liz and Roxana had flown up from Perth to Learmonth, the airport south of Exmouth, and were whisked off to Sal Salis, an exclusive super-expensive “glamping” resort on the ocean in Cape Range National Park. Why do tour buses whisk people off? Are they brooms?

Travelquest had bought up all the tents at Sal Salis. Those who had reserved independently had been sent letters revoking their reservations. There are advantages to hanging out in salt-of-the-earth trailer parks.

We were in fairly constant communication with Liz and Roxana. They told us the tours they were planning on for Wednesday, so that we could meet them.

Wednesday, April 19

At dawn, a flock of corellas occupies the tree outside the bathroom. I don’t know where they go during the day. Going out before dawn in Australia is rewarding, not just for the stars.

After breakfast, we disconnected the van and drove down to Turquoise Bay to meet Liz and Roxana and Paul and his sister Beverly, on their tour.  It was a crowded parking lot. Shortly after we got there, we saw the Sal Salis vans drive up.  We walked over and met them, and walked down to the beach.  It was stunningly beautiful.  Waves broke way offshore, and a flat pool of ocean was there to explore.  There was a fairly strong current to the north.  The whole Sal Salis group swam together from south to north.  Ray went in for awhile, seeing many pretty fish.  While he was out, some swimmers carried in a man who wasn’t breathing, set him on the beach and started CPR.  A defibrillator showed up shortly thereafter.  Meanwhile, I went in myself for a short snorkel above the coral.

It turned out that the man didn’t make it, and that he was one of the eclipse guides for their tour.  He had had a heart attack, having previously had heart trouble.  The second tour of the day was canceled.

We went back to the camp to rent a set of fins, and arranged to meet Liz on the beach just outside their exclusive accommodation (all beaches in Australia are public).  The place had a few cabana seats on the beach, and Liz kept running to the bar to get more things to drink, juice at first but gradually turning into WA wine.  Over a period of about four hours, people just kept coming out and joining us, and we stayed there for several minutes after sunset.  There were close to twenty people by the time we left.  We met a couple from Los Altos, and some folks who’d seen lots of eclipses.  One of the tour leaders gave us some leftover eclipse t-shirts with a nice design.

(One concept I discovered there was “swimming pool fins”, fins which are small enough to pack in carry-on suitcases.  I think I’ll get some.)

We got a fish and chips takeaway from the camp cafe and had it with leftovers from the night before.

Thursday, 4/20

We got up, checked out, and headed into the Exmouth town center.  The caravan park was only on the edge of the path of totality, but Exmouth was adequately close to the center line to get almost the maximum duration of eclipse.  We stopped there for breakfast, at a nice little cafe called “early birds”.  Then we continued driving south to the industrial area where we’d gotten gas before.  Driving past the gas station, we found a little bluff with a few cars parked on it, and from the bluff we saw even more cars parked along a little road which went to the beach.  Assuming no clouds showed up, and none had, it was a beautiful day, it looked like it would make a good viewing spot.  We saw a cruise ship sitting offshore, maintaining its position on the centerline. We met a man from Belgium with a big camera, and another man who had driven from Adelaide.  We walked down to the beach — there were much bigger waves on the beach because there wasn’t a reef like there was on the west shore.  Several cars were parked down there.  A Japanese man had seven cameras with various lengths of lenses set up. We gave a pair of cardboard eclipse viewing goggles to a girl from Exmouth.

The eclipse started right on time around 10:04, and the moon gradually took a bigger and bigger bite out of the sun.  We found some things with pinholes to make projections.  Finally, totality arrived at 11:29, and we were treated to a bright eclipse with many prominences, and many corona points.  Jupiter was easily visible near the sun.  And about 60 seconds later, it was over. I didn’t see any shadow bands nor was there a view of the moon shadow, as the air was dry. May be the giant cruise ship (also Travelquest, I’m guessing) got a more comprehensive view. Carved one more notch on the butt of my gold-handled cane.

Everybody started leaving, and soon we did too.  Another nice thing about being at the south edge of town is that we’d avoid the exodus to some extent.  We did pause at a termite mound right at fourth contact to see the moon leave the sun completely uncovered.   Two other cars stopped there as well, to take photos of the termite mound.

We returned to Carnarvon and the Coral Coast Tourist Park.  We went back to the Woolworth’s and got some Australian lamb and some chicken thighs to get us through the next three nights.  The lamb was delightful.  We opened the South Australian wine with the eclipse-like label on it to celebrate.

Friday, April 21

We had WeetBix and PB&J in the van, but coffee in town, saving the last bit of ground coffee for the next morning.  The van demanded oil. It’s also been demanding a service, but we called Britz and they said not to worry. We drove back to the Western Flora Caravan Park, getting there a bit before sunset.  The guy gave us a little jar of honey, and said he’d set out some eggs in the kitchen.  Gosh, what a classic good-looking Aussie bloke he is. Tan, fit, swell pits, sleeveless shirt, guileless attitude. But as the roads improve, people headed toward Perth will just keep going three more hours, where in past years, they would have stopped. Don’t know what future Western Flora has.

Saturday, April 22

We had eggs and cheese and onion and toast for breakfast, prepared in the camp kitchen.  We drove back to Perth, and topped off the van with diesel.  We also needed to top off the propane tank, which proved to be not only time-consuming, but also impossible.  The first place we went didn’t dispense it anymore, the second only did “swap and go”.  The third place, a Boating Camping Fishing store, offered the service, but we weren’t able to detach the hose from the tank. So we just decided to return it unfilled.

After all that trouble, we’d missed our slot at the place to rent a car to drive down to Margaret River.  We called them and they said they’d be there in an hour.  We drove the van down there, and discovered they were already there.  We moved the stuff into the car, drove to the van rental place and returned it. It hadn’t been a bad place to live for the previous week.

Wednesday, April 12

We arrived in Singapore at 7:15am (2 1/2 hours of time zone change).  We got an app for their version of Uber, called Grab, and took it to our hotel.  Like many urban hotels, the reception desk is up an elevator, not on the street level.  We checked into our small room, and took a little nap.

We got up and walked around.  We had coffee, bought some Velcro (floppy disk now means an outboard 2 gigabyte SSD that isn’t securely attached to the computer), and found a wonderful vending machine.  i.Jooz is loaded with oranges, and you insert $2, watch a Zumex go through its moves through a little window, and get back a sealed cup of fresh-squeezed juice, squeezed as you watch.  They really should be everywhere.  We checked out Atlas, an office building featuring a studiedly Art Deco bar (not built back then, built a few years ago in that style). Dave said it’s a tribute to art deco and I said it’s art deco. A style has to be pretty specific before examples of it can be distinguished as “tributes”. With Elvis, you can have a tribute, or Jerry Garcia. But you wouldn’t have a Democratic Tribute Party. Trump, yes. Definitely in 40 years there will be performers touring the old folks’ homes leading cheers of “Lock ‘Er Up!”, following the morning Naatu-naatu-cise and the afternoon Remembering Tilapia Protein In The Kitchen With Mom.

We weren’t really ready to drink that early, though. We looked at an interesting restaurant nearby, The Coconut Club, but they were only serving snacks. It looked worth returning to when it opened for dinner at 6.

We headed to a popular attraction, Garden By The Bay.  From a distance you see towers covered with growing foliage. I suppose are trying to look like palm trees.  When you arrive you have the opportunity to buy tickets to the attractions.  First we went on the Skyway, a little walk along the towers with a good view of the city.  Then, the Flower Dome, a large indoor botanical garden.  Then, the Cloud Forest, another tall structure containing largely rainforest plants and a large waterfall.  This time it was featuring the movie “Avatar”, and had sculptures and games referencing the movie located throughout, as well as arcades where you could insert yourself into the movie. A lot of different people go there. There was a cherry-blossom themed exhibit with a torii and a model bullet train and of course a plaster Mount Fuji. Pokémon Forest. 

We saw enough of everything, and returned to The Coconut Club for their signature “nasi lemak”, an Indonesian dish consisting of coconut rice with stuff on it.  In our case the stuff was fish curry.  It was all delicious.  We stopped in the Atlas for a drink on the way back, but I was wearing shorts (Singapore is hot!) and they didn’t let us in because of their stupid dress code.

A cloud rather bigger than a man’s hand appeared on the horizon: Meteo Australia is changing their prediction for Exmouth from Clear to Overcast, thanks to Cyclone Ilsa approaching Western Australia from New Guinea. The prediction has been for clear weather, right straight along. We shall see.

Thursday, April 13

We returned to the i.Jooz machine, and then found a place open that early with coffee.

We got a Grab back to the airport, and flew to Perth on “Scoot”, which is a Singapore Airlines project. It’s minimal. Despite being on a new Dreamliner, there is no screen to look at, and inflight entertainment is streamed to your smart phone. The cabin temperature was hot, so much so that the pilot apologized and said it would be better once we were aloft. I wonder if they degrade their experience to make people want to fly Singapore, at a higher price. (But Singapore père doesn’t fly direct to Perth, I don’t think.)

Has everybody appreciated the current fad of airlines conducting their safety videos in anything but an airplane? I first noticed this on Icelandic Airways a while back, but now every airline does it. You are instructed to fasten your seat belt on toboggans or camels or electric chairs, and slide down a slide into a swimming hole or a vat of chocolate, but airplanes are strictly out of the frame.

The flight was smooth enough. Cyclone Ilsa, which was on its way to Category Five, was far to our east. Didn’t even see clouds.

Saturday, April 1

We arrived at 3:30am at the Colombo airport, actually in Negombo.  There are tons of anti-drug posters in the passport line.  Sri Lanka must have lots of drugs.  Our guide Ubali picked us up at the airport (it’s nice when someone is there with a sign with your name on it) and took us to a fancy hotel nearby to sleep for a few hours.  Their breakfast buffet was instructive, featuring hoppers (little bowls made out of fermented rice flour and coconut milk) and string hoppers (loosely woven noodles formed into little discs), several curries and sambals, and fruit.

Then we were on the road.  We bypassed the capital, Colombo, and headed to a historic fort town on the south coast, Galle.  We toured a small very old Dutch church, and walked around town.   The guide points out the beach was lined with buildings until the 2004 tsunami.

As usual, people ask if we are brothers, and where we are from.  We say, customarily, “California”.  Interestingly, at least two people have asked whether California was part of America.  In previous trips, California has been definitive as a location.  

Ray was thrilled to discover that the price for postcard postage was 70 rupees, or about 23 cents.  The cards themselves were only 60 rupees. We found some more coffee and the juice of a fruit we had never heard of (Ambarella), rejoined our driver, and headed east.  There were signs on the freeway warning of danger from peacocks.  Peacocks are pervasive all over Sri Lanka.  So are monkeys.

The first hotel was “Wadula Safari”, and it wasn’t easy to locate.  Our driver was not familiar with the location, and had to ask different people, some by leaning out the window, and some by phone.  Almost unique among modern people, he pulls over to the side of the road to use his cell phone.  The Google preferred route wanted to put us on roads which did not exist.  

It turned out, finally, that they way you get there is to communicate with the owner, who meets you at a little Buddhist shrine in his tuk-tuk, and takes you down a bumpy road about 10 minutes to the place.  We stayed in a bungalow, with a little lake nearby with water birds, water buffalo, and crocodiles.  A wire kept the buffaloes away.  There wasn’t really any cell service, and it didn’t matter because even where there was, our phones weren’t getting anything from the Internet.  There was WiFi, though, which still was slow and unreliable.  Dinner was “kottu”, and it was introduced dramatically by removing an upside-down bowl on plates already on the table.  We never saw it made, but apparently it’s like Benihana, a whole bunch of knife work cutting up pieces of roti and vegetables and meat.  It was also served pretty much in the dark, and it was very tasty.

The lights came on randomly during the night until we unscrewed the light bulbs.

Sunday, April 2

In the morning the tuk-tuk took us back to the road, and Ubali drove us back towards Galle to the entrance of Bundala National Park along the south coast.  A birdwatching guide and his driver met us there, and as we entered the park there were immediately several species of water birds.  We spent a few hours in the park, saw tons of water birds and several perching ones, an elephant, and a spotted deer chasing a wild boar.

We also encountered a truck with school kids.  Nice to know that the students are introduced to the wonders of their country.

We drove back to the hotel to rest during the middle of the day.  In the middle of the afternoon a jeep from Yala National Park arrived with its driver and Ubali.  We hopped in, and drove into the park which was right next to our hotel.  We saw a few more bird species and a few animals.  The highlight was pretty much failing to see a leopard, though at one point Dave did see some spots moving way back in the brush.  The annoying thing about the leopard was that there were a dozen jeeps all jockeying for position — it was actually pretty ridiculous.  All the reviews of Yala mention that you will see tons of jeeps with tourists and maybe a leopard.

We watched a large male spotted deer digging in the ground for a while, like a dog burying a bone.  Apparently they do this to mark their territory.

Back to the hotel, delicious noodles, and sleep.

Monday, April 3

Having had our day of Nature, we checked out, tuk-tuk’d up to the road, and Ubali drove us to the first sight of the day, a massive rock with seven figures which had been engraved on it hundreds of years ago.  After the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the Buddha in the center of this one became the tallest remaining Buddha figure in the world.  The figures had been covered with plaster originally, and a bit of the plaster remained.  Afterwards we had some wood-apple juice, not too sweet but a juice we’d never had.

We proceeded from there to Ella, a cute little mountain town.  On the way there was a waterfall with dozens of tourist stands and standing tourists along the road, reminding us of Romania.  In Ella we walked to the Nine Arch Bridge, and hung out for an hour or so waiting for the train to pass over it.  Ray met some Sri Lankans, and Dave met some Iranians while we were there.  One also hears lots of Russian.  The guide explained the story of the toddy-honey-jaggery progression of palm juice, as the sap is reduced further and further. This story was repeated by others along the way. It’s clearly something they want the visitors to learn.

We stayed in a “homestay”, pretty much an airbnb.  It was on a twisty little road accessible only by tuk-tuk.  They didn’t serve dinner, so we took a tuk-tuk to Matey’s Hut, which served delicious Sri Lankan rice & curry.  Their basic plate was four vegetable curries of your choice, rice, papadam, and an optional chicken curry.  They were out of several items, but we still found enough to be interesting.  The jackfruit curry was definitely the winner, being nicely spicy and having a variety of textures.  It was crowded and cheap and popular with the tourists.  There are a lot of tourists in Ella.  Not all from Europe; Sri Lankans who live near the coast come up to the Hill Stations to cool off. 

Tuesday, April 4

We took the tuk-tuk to the train station, where we met Ubali.  We put our packs in his car, and boarded the train.  The original idea was to take it to Kandy, our destination for the day, but he recommended getting off at Nanu-Oya, which most people on the train decided to do as well.  We went past dozens of tea farms in the scenic hills.  The most fascinating part of the train ride was the sound which had a continually varying rhythm as it went along.  Perhaps small variations in how the track was installed can cause that.

I had visualized this as a kind of toy train, like the one to Darjeeling or the ones that traverse different parts of the redwoods in California, but it’s part of the national rail system, and people use it to get from one place to another.  The weather was good on the part we took, but when we got off, it turned rainy.

There wasn’t anything I felt I had to see in Nanu-Oya, although they did have a nice old post office where I bought some cards (including a photo of the nice old post office).  Ubali drove us past several large tea plantations.  We stopped at Blue Fields Tea Gardens and had a factory tour, learning that the same leaves are used to make black tea, green tea, and white tea.  The black tea is fermented, the green tea isn’t, and the white tea is made from leaves of a particular shape.  But no photographs were allowed in the factory.  Didn’t seem there was anything super advanced and proprietary there, though.  We tasted tea in the tasting room, and didn’t buy any because then we’d have to carry it around for several more weeks, and worry about the agricultural requirements of several more countries.

We drove to Kandy, staying in a little hotel, St. Bridget’s Country Bungalow.  We picked a well-reviewed restaurant, High Tide, to check out for dinner.  Again, a tuk-tuk took us into town.  It was three months old, and featured crab curry, using crabs from the sea, caught off Colombo.  Unfortunately, one of the crabs tasted a little bit of ammonia, which is a decay product of crab:  Dave was well-acquainted with the taste after his first and last visit to Red Lobster several years ago.  Surprisingly, Ray didn’t notice it in his half.  We sadly provided feedback to the manager, who comped us dessert.

Wednesday, April 5

Ubali picked us up, and then picked up Dhanushka Liyanage, another guide in town, to take us on our “village walk”.  He specialized in birdwatching, and they picked him because we’d expressed interest.  He carried a camera with an enormous lens and took some great pictures of several of them.  He had recordings of bird calls so he could trick a few of them into coming out into view.  He was great, and if you go to Sri Lanka, look up “Paradise Island Safari”. 

Unfortunately, nobody had told us that we were going on such a walk, and we were unprepared with only one set of binoculars.  This was the single most egregious mistake made by our tour operators — they seemed to like surprises, but generally, we don’t.  The other thing they didn’t tell us about before we left was that there were leeches on the wet parts of the trail.  They gave us special leech socks to put on which theoretically are impenetrable, and wear leeches out when climbing up them.  They didn’t completely do that, though, we each ended up being bitten twice, on legs and torsos.  Perhaps if we’d tucked in our shirts, the torso bites would have ended up on our neck or somewhere.

The first section took us past row houses – huts – built by the British for their workers.  The next village had a policeman there trying to defuse an argument about a theft at a campsite.  Then came a long section in the forest.  The elevation was high enough that we didn’t completely get dehydrated or worn out.  The guide pointed out cardamom weeds.  This exotic plant for which we pay high prices in America, is in Sri Lanka an invasive pest, brought in from the Spice Islands, and they are trying to eradicate it.  We ate some pods to prove to ourselves it’s the same seed.

A small Shiva lingam protects the trail to the forest.  Sri Lanka is a sometimes uneasy amalgam of Hindu and Buddhist, Tamil and Sinhalese.  Ubali has a Buddha on his dashboard.  Kandy is about in the middle, and has Christian churches and also mosques.

The walk ended up in another village, a community which lives off the grid and has little contact with the modern world except through excited tourists.  All the rice farming is done entirely in the traditional way with no mechanization.  We had lunch in a family’s house, with a delicious spread of about seven different curries.

We went back to the hotel and rested, and had the hotel fix us a small dinner.

Thursday, April 6

We ate breakfast at the hotel, and then resumed driving.  The first stop was Dambulla, another two-thousand-year-old Buddhist cave temple.  This had five rooms.  The first one was ancient and claustrophobic with a large reclining Buddha carved out of the rock.  The second was fairly large with many Buddhas, dominated by an elaborate one carved out of a single rock.  It also featured “holy water” dripping from a spring.  The third one was 300 years old and had the best lighting, with a variety of Buddhas.  The fourth and fifth were smaller and less interesting.  The cave was at the top of a long staircase:  you needed to remove your shoes, but if you didn’t have socks, you had to walk barefoot across the hot ground which had been heated up by the sun.  Like walking on hot coals — it’s all about the suffering.

We then headed out to our next destination, Batticaloa, a town on the east coast.  The lagoon contains flying fish which are advertised as “singing”, making noises when there is a full moon.  There was a full moon that night, and after having a delicious lagoon crab curry, we went out in a small boat to listen for the singing fish.  The idea was you put an oar in the water, and put the handle up to your ear.  I definitely heard some tonal buzzing sounds, but it seemed like it was maybe one or two fish, not the large group of them that they were expecting.  Ray, whose hearing has declined recently, didn’t hear anything at all.  It was a little disappointing, but we tried.  If they were serious about proving the fish are a real experience, they’d invest in an underwater microphone and some headsets.

Friday, April 7

After breakfast, we drove back west to Polonnaruwa, a large temple complex.  The guidebooks say that it is in better shape than Anaradhapura so I had selected it when planning a tour with the guides.  It was the second capital after Anaradhapura, in the years 1070-1310.  Naturally it was overthrown and burned.  You don’t get to be a world heritage site by surviving intact without drama.  Polonnaruwa features a museum and ruins of a large monastery, spread out over hundreds of acres.  Of all the sites we’ve been to on this trip, it’s the most impossible to imagine seeing in a day.  On the other hand, it was hot, and spread out, and though we hardly saw but a corner of it, I was tired.  We ended at a reclining Buddha.  At least somebody gets to lie down.

Later we went to Minneriya National Park on a little safari.  It was supposed to have a large number of elephants, but the weather or water level was not right somehow, and we didn’t see them.  We did see several other animals, especially birds.  There was a displaying peacock at the front entrance.  As soon as the truck started up, he furled.  Clearly just for the tourists.

Going to the hotel was interesting.  We went to a corner, and waited for a little truck to arrive to get us.  It was after dark by the time it did.  We got in the truck, which took about forty minutes to go 4.5 km on a bumpy little unpaved road.  The stunning part of this adventure was the fireflies, which used to be all over America but are now mostly extinct.  The truck driving along the road must have stirred them up, because it left a trail of lights, which we could see outside the back because it was just an ordinary troop carrier (and I don’t mean the trademark, I mean a pickup which is open at the back, with only a cover). You get the same effect running your hand through a phosphorescent bay during one of the glowing tides that visit Jamaica and Puerto Rico and occasionally Half Moon Bay, California.

Finally we ended up at “Back Of Beyond”, a “tree house” complex.  Our tree house had a bathroom on the ground level, and a bed on the platform above.  The platform was open to all — no walls or locks or anything (there was a tiny safe).  While there were very few people around to distrust, it was in the forest, which has elephants and buffalo and most mischievously, monkeys.  They said they’d never had any problems with monkeys (though a friend of ours had stayed in a tree house once somewhere where monkeys definitely broke into his pack and messed stuff up).

I wrote a review:

“Let me describe what you will actually be getting if you stay here.  You will be on an elevated platform in the forest by a swamp, with only a back wall — a stage, essentially.  Bring your Edward Albee and Henrik Ibsen scripts to perform for the forest. Scripts on paper; there is no WiFi and no cell phone coverage.  None.  Just like a northern Mexico kidnapping.  And did I mention their English is several words short of rudimentary?

“Back Of Beyond” is not even a treehouse camp, it is LARPing a fantasy of how the simple brown people lived before those wicked cis- white publicly heterosexual males showed up with their Christianity and their genocide and their property and their Attachment and their germ theory of disease.  A wooden platform in a tree with a mattress on it is not a camp.  Campers do not leave the bed netting artfully parted with a light on behind for Interior Design effect, and those of you who have any experience of camping or of the tropics are excused from clicking on “You’ll never guess what happened next.”  A camp has provisions for security from wild animals such as monkeys raiding your wide open unlockable unclosable room platform to steal anything shiny.  This didn’t happen because I kept everything in the bed.

When I was a child the lack of connectivity didn’t exist either; but phones characterize human interaction in 2023 and one is much more isolated without them than one was in the 1950’s before they existed.  I keep thinking I should get a satellite phone, but this is the first time I’ve thought that in a place that calls itself a hotel. 

I’m not saying this is a bad establishment, it was just inappropriate for us when we hoped to do laundry and had some issues to deal with that required communication.

All I am saying is, be prepared for this experience.”

I don’t think I posted the review. I was mad, at the time.

Combining the monkey threat with the lack of cell or WiFi coverage, and the forty-minute drive, and the inability to do laundry, we decided we didn’t want to stay there a second night, and arranged to spend the second night at the place we were scheduled to be the night after.

Saturday, April 8

In the morning, we bailed on the treehouse.  I hadn’t slept well.  We were driven back to the place where the car was parked in the taxi which was tough on the spine.  An electrical wire was down over the access road.  The drivers got out to put it back in place.

We met our bird watching guide and went for a walk in the Sigiriya forest.  It was fairly successful.  I didn’t feel at the time we were seeing a lot of birds but now that I look at my notes, there were about thirty species pointed out to us, as well as a Giant Squirrel which is kind of a giant rat.  Everyone is in marketing.

Ubali met us at the other end of the walk, and it was time to do what we couldn’t do at the Back of Beyond: get our Australian eVisas!

In 2012, I had never heard of an eVisa.  We were going to Australia and the ticketing counter lady said we needed one and we said huh? and went on line and got them after answering a few questions and went and got our boarding passes.  It seems to me that was the same moment that the dad came up and told us his tiny son was absolutely convinced we were Santa Claus and could we play along?  The memories seem to be on the same mag tape.

However, it is different now.  Platoons of unemployed security consultants and really, really, stupid web designers have got to the Australian government and told them that their process was much too transparent.  And of course, it needs to be an app.

We went to the Ekho Zinc cafe, which has reliable WiFi.

Australia still wants your passport number and birthday, but the real challenge is that you have to submit a photo.  The Australian ETA app uses the original facial recognition algorithms used to keep track of convicts being transported in 1765.  It must have been twenty minutes trying to get it to lock on to my face, with all different lighting and expressions.  Makes me think I should become a bank robber when I get there, the security cameras would be all “hold/no face detected” and “tilt up”.

Go get an eVisa from Australia, see if it was just us.

After that, it was time for Culture, which meant climbing up Lion Rock, the vertiginous summer palace built by King Kashyapa during the 5th century.  It has a commanding view of the plains around it.  There were also monks studying there.  A fancy water system drove fountains from the water falling on the rock.  The modern setup allows tourists to walk to the top on stone steps near the bottom, and flight after flight of steel stairs the rest of the way.  When you’re going back down, there’s a little cave with paintings of topless women serving things.  You’re not allowed to take pictures of them, but we got postcards of a few of the paintings.  They’re all in pretty good shape.

Take water.  Ray felt faint on the way down because he’d drunk all of his.  We got passion fruit juice from the stands in the parking lot at the bottom.

We drove west to the Wilpattu area, found our hotel, Ceylon Resort, which was serving a delicious buffet of home-cooked Sri Lankan curries, including jackfruit, fast becoming my favorite.  For some reason, all the other guests there seemed to be from the Netherlands.  There was a bird which sang the same four notes over and over — Dave was able to identify it (an Indian Cuckoo) by Googling “Sri Lankan bird call four notes”.  We never saw it, but heard it almost all the time while we were there.

Sunday, April 9

We relaxed in the morning, and got picked up for an afternoon safari in nearby Wilpattu National Park.  It seemed pretty vast and varied and we saw kingfishers and herons and eagles and mongooses and monitor lizards.  But everyone assumes you are there to see the leopards.  After not seeing anything in a group of many jeeps, we drove elsewhere, and our driver noticed some fresh tracks.  We followed them, and he spotted the leopard who had made them.  We watched it move farther and farther away, and didn’t quite get a picture of it, but we saw it!    After driving around for quite awhile, and seeing an elephant and many birds, it was time to head back.  As we did, there was another collection of jeeps which were all looking at a leopard which had climbed way up a tree.  We got a good vantage point, and took some pictures.  It was difficult to focus on — our driver got much better pictures of it with my camera than I’d been able to.

Big Cats aren’t all that magical because they look and act just like small cats. Much more variation between buffalos and cows.

Back to the hotel, and a whole new set of curries for dinner and a whole new set of Dutch people. Also some Russians. Staying at the Ceylon Resort is like being the guest of the family. Among the best food we’ve had in Sri Lanka, original recipes of his mother-in-law and grandmother, if I understood correctly. The owner and Master of Ceremonies, Roshan, lights up the room when he appears. The yard is full of birds, and the ponds, of fish and frogs and flowers. The firecrackers you hear are to keep the elephants out of the garden.

Monday, April 10

After breakfast, we checked out, and drove down to Negombo, a coastal tourist town, and checked into our beach hotel.  They “upgraded” us to a room with a direct door to the pool area, but it felt like a downgrade from the “double” we’d booked, to a “twin”, as if they didn’t approve of us.  Sigh. They are always trying to be helpful, in the direction of normal.

We picked a place for dinner from Google, and walked 15 minutes up the road to get there.  It was a hotel restaurant which had closed down (nobody told Google, oh well).  We went to their current restaurant, which had a decent choice of courses in their optional Set Menu.  Ultimately it was not really worth the walk. All westernized. Tomato cream soup and minestrone. Sago pudding and treacle. Chocolate cake with weird jellies. Five Sri Lankan curries including banana flower which they called banana leaf. Rice, papadam, tuna tartare

The dramatic part was the thunderstorm happening just offshore as we sat in this covered restaurant which didn’t have walls — the thunder was loud and the lightning was bright. It wouldn’t have been fun to experience that in a treehouse. There must be a cultural trope of eating in a restaurant without walls during a thunderstorm. It happens often. They could have walls if they wanted. Maybe it’s a way of showing off how wide your porticos are, that you can watch the light show and not get wet.

Tuesday, April 11

We had breakfast in the beach hotel, and then Ubali drove us into town where we met our boat guide.  Negombo has canals, which were built by the Dutch, but aren’t as groomed as the canals in Amsterdam. We got on a little boat to explore the immense lagoon in Negombo.  Many shorebirds hanging out in town, a long drive across the lagoon where we were followed by terns, and then we arrived at a peaceful mangrove area where we moved more leisurely.  There were eagles watching for fish, and monkeys just hanging out.  At one point we got stuck in a little passage, but got out with a lot of pushing and twisting.  We went back across the lagoon, and came up through the commercial fisherman’s district where their boats lived.  We saw some traditional catamarans going out to sea.  As we arrived at the dock, we saw a coucal, which we’d heard repeatedly, we were told, but hadn’t ever seen.  Unfortunately, it didn’t hang around long enough to get its picture taken. The fish market area smells like unfresh parts of fish, but nowhere near as bad as a penguin colony.

We spent the rest of the day in the hotel, and had their buffet dinner, such as it was.  Around nine, it was time to go to the Colombo airport (which is actually in Negombo), and head on to Singapore. The flight left at 1:15 AM and lasted about three and a half hours. There was a storm over Indonesia. The pilot told the cabin crew to sit down about a minute before we flew out of it. I wonder what the formula really is, for the various levels of turning on the seat belt sign.

Somewhere along the line my iPhone has lost the ability to take pictures through windows. I wanted to take a photo of all the boats in the Singapore Straits but it insisted, this time and all times recently, in taking pictures of the dust on the window of the airplane, or car, or room that I am in.

Ray found another cheap fare going from Munich to Abu Dhabi to Colombo, Sri Lanka. So we took Ryanair from Dublin to Paris, spent a day there, flew on Lufthansa to Munich to see Lukas, staying overnight. Then we took Etihad to Abu Dhabi, spending a day there, and on to Colombo.

Sunday, March 26

The flight on Ryanair was not that bad, but it did leave late in the day, and it went to “Paris”. Ryanair saves airport fees by flying to cheap airports, like Beauvais, about an hour’s bus ride out of Paris (not that much farther than CDG).

Paris was in a bit of an uproar on that weekend, and it wasn’t at all clear that buses would be running to get into town.  The nation was angry that the president was attempting to enforce arithmetic by fiat, rather than going through the legislature.  He wanted to raise the pension age to 64 because there aren’t enough Moroccan teenagers to pay taxes to support the rest of France.  I understand the objection, but if you have accepted that the world should have eight billion people, and half the wealth held by a few hundred multibillionaires, and you don’t want all the rest to live in shacks of corrugated sheet metal (most already do), then you are constrained in your ability to fulfill the desire for all society to live half their lives as consumers.

The bus from Beauvais was running as usual.  It took us to Porte Maillot, and a short Uber trip took us to Hotel Boissière we’d often stayed in in Levallois-Perret, back when Avid had an office there. The rooms haven’t gotten any bigger, but the price hasn’t gone up much either.

Monday, March 27

Our plans for Monday didn’t involve public transport at all.  But as we walked around, we saw the effects of the garbage collector’s strike, with trash everywhere.  There should be regular garbage strikes to remind people how much crap we purchase and discard.

We did the usual going to one place for fresh-squeezed orange juice, another for pastries, and then to a bar to eat the pastries and juice with coffee and tea.  Then we walked from the hotel towards Palais de Tokyo as a goal (open on Monday!).  On the way we were distracted by two monumental Catholic Churches.  Sainte-Odile had a tall tower (which drew us there in the first place), and three domes.  It also had very interesting stained glass with words identifying the scenes depicted.  One was the “miracle of the cows”, and we still haven’t really found a reference to that anywhere.  Another building we walked past with oddly intersecting walls turned out to be the church of Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, which had interesting black-and-white frescoes.  Its main entrance was being renovated, but we’d gone in the back. Saints were also pictured on the hoardings covering the renovations.

Palais de Tokyo had two great exhibitions happening.  One was a retrospective of Miriam Cahn, an artist we’d noticed at the Venice Biennale last year, where she had works in one little room in the Giardini building.  Here she had works in several large rooms, and every one had a warning about possibly offensive images (which we are always excited to be notified of).  Many of her works are sexually graphic, but in general they are comments on mistreatment of women, by men in general and soldiers in particular.  The only named painting in the show, “fuck abstraction!”, was a reaction to the treatment of Ukrainian citizens by Russian soldiers, though it was taken by some critics as pedophilia.  

The other show, “Exposed”, was a 40-year retrospective of AIDS and art about it.  There were a few Derek Jarman works, and many others from artists I hadn’t heard of.  The curators seemed to treat AIDS mostly as a philosophical challenge and barely mention the contribution of scientists, in their explanatory timeline, even when the scientists were French.  (Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for having discovered the virus, in 1983.)

Then we walked to a little restaurant, Ripaille, which had an ordinary “formula” of 39 euros for entree+plat+dessert.  This is a place you can walk into and say “feed me,” and they will.  The food was all interesting and fat and the waiters were nice.

All in all, a perfect day.

Tuesday, March 28

Our next destination was Munich, and we had to get to the airport.  Lucky we were flying that day, since Lufthansa had had strikes in Munich the two days before.  There were reports that traffic on the Metro to downtown, and on the RER commuter train to the airport, were somewhat disrupted.  So, again, we ordered an Uber, and had a smooth ride, in a snazzy Citroen, to the airport.

We didn’t have to check in, so we went right to the gates.   It turned out to be in the little “Gates 60-68” area, which didn’t have much to offer, including seating, at first.  Everybody in Paris was arriving early in case there were delays in transport.  I got annoyed at Brioche Dorée, which had a fancy-looking Italian espresso machine to attract customers, but if you actually order coffee, they make it from a little pushbutton machine.  It wasn’t great.  Finally the plane arrived, a bit late, and took us to Munich.  Dennis, who we’d just seen in Colombia, let us use his Lufthansa Express Bus 10-pack QR code for the trips into town and back.

Dennis and his son Lukas and we took the subway down to Schlesinger Tor where there was a little noodle soup restaurant called “Max’s Beef Noodles”.  Ray’s pretty sure its owners are Uyghur.  It had a line out the door but we were seated after about 20 minutes, and it was delicious.  But we couldn’t see the noodle making floor show easily.  Unfortunately, Lukas (who is four) found the wait and the noise more than he could handle and ultimately was unhappy.  So we hurried back to Dennis’ house where we slept on his comfortable sofa bed.

Wednesday, March 29

In the morning Dennis got Lukas ready for school, and we walked with him towards the airport bus, stopping for juice/coffee/pastries.  Soon we were off to Abu Dhabi.  The Etihad Dreamliner made a big loop around the tip of the Negev, avoiding Israeli airspace, but came back up to catch a favorable tailwind blowing toward Kuwait.

The taxis in Abu Dhabi are cheaper than the Ubers:  Uber said it’d be 100 dirham to our Ramada Downtown hotel, but in the taxi it was only 80.  After sunset, we took another taxi to Al Mrzab, an Emirati restaurant, where we had perfectly-cooked lamb and rice, an arugula salad, mutabal (like babaganoush), and a delicious lemon-mint drink.

Thursday, March 30

After breakfast at the hotel (it was Ramadan, and the hotel breakfast buffet was full of infidels eating after the sun came up) we took a taxi to the Louvre.  It is a modern building which is different from the Louvre in Paris.  The collection is much smaller, but it is all beautifully presented.  They are trying so hard to indicate the unity of religions and peoples.  Every section has something for each of the major (monotheistic) religions.  There is a flow, fairly chronological.  We basically saw everything (except the videos) in the time we had there.  Speaking of running into works you weren’t expecting, there is a Paul Gauguin museum in rural Tahiti, which hasn’t the funds to purchase any of his works, and so has color copies and lots of ancillary material. When we were there in 2010, we saw a copy of “Enfants Luttant” (1888) which I briefly wondered where it was but forgot about that. Now, suddenly here it was on the wall. They also have, speaking of Massys, the Money Changer and his Wife. Salvator Mundi still hasn’t showed up.

The impression overall is that the museum is waiting to be populated.  They really need to hire Richard Serra.  Some of the spaces are so large that ordinary size paintings just get lost in them. It is an impressive building, designed by Nouvel who did the Institut du Monde Arabe – you can see his touch on the shadows.

Later Googling about the Louvre: in the fine print, it says that the museum here is only licensed to use the name “Louvre” until 2037. So it’s really less like the Norman Bridge Annex than it is like the GeoCities 3Com Stadium and Dog Park.

And about the breakfast room: I looked up Abu Dhabi in Wikipedia, and learned that only about 11% of the people living there are Emirati, and only about 76% of them are even Muslim.  So it isn’t surprising that they make accommodation for the eating habits of the other quarter of the residents.  Restaurants are closed, but if you are completely concealed from public view (2nd floor breakfast room at the hotel) you are allowed to pursue normal hours.

At sunset we left the museum went to Bu Tafish, a seafood place in some gated area.  The taxi dropped us off in front of a mosque and someone pointed out where we needed to walk.  They had a buffet, but also a menu.  We opted for the menu, as buffet food isn’t great for that long.  We had a grilled grouper with spices, which was great.  It was disappointing that the “crab salad” was made out of K-rab (also known as surimi).  And a little kunefe for dessert.

Friday, March 31 

There have been many flights this time which leave late in the day.  We checked out of the hotel, whiled away the time somehow, and went to the airport in the evening for a red-eye.  We had whiled away the last day in Dublin before flying to Paris.  This time, we bought an extra half-day at the hotel, and whiled away this last day writing cards and puttering at the hotel, before flying to Sri Lanka. 

A wedding in Dublin was the first of two scheduled events which spurred this trip. It resulted in having to pack not only clothes for cold weather as well as warm, but clothes one could wear to a wedding, as well as the casual clothes we wear almost all the time.

Thursday, March 23

We got off the ferry and boarded a bus that goes from the dock to another bus stop closer to the center of town, and after about five minutes it stopped moving.  It was stopped for at least fifteen minutes.  During that time Dave had made a dinner reservation, even taking the traffic jam slightly into account.  But it seemed like we wouldn’t make it anyway.  So we got off the bus and started walking.  We walked past the 3 Arena, which seemed to be causing the problem; tons of people were arriving to watch three sports commentators talk about football or something.  We kept walking until we found a free-flowing road towards the restaurant and our hotel.  First we waited for a bus, which kept not arriving.  Several passers-by offered help or sympathy.  Then Dave went on Uber and ordered … a taxi.  Their compromise between taxi vs. Uber is that you can use Uber to order and pay for the taxi — all the convenience, none of the exploitation.  The taxi not only approached the restaurant in time, it was able to let us drop off the luggage at the hotel so we didn’t have to drag it into the restaurant, which would have been pretty awkward as it turned out.

The restaurant was Dang Hai, in the Portobello neighborhood, a modern Chinese place.  We ate upstairs at the “Gold Bar” and had, again, a reasonably-priced tasting menu.  It seemed cocktails were more appropriate than wine, so we had a couple.

Friday, March 24

First order of the day was laundry.  We were staying at the same hotel as the last two times we were in Dublin, so we went back to the same laundry place, Laundry Online, and the same breakfast place, Brother Hubbard, while we waited for it.  This time we didn’t leave any socks behind.  We were excited to learn that Samuel, the groom, was attending a conference in the very same hotel, and we arranged to have lunch with him nearby at Canal Bank Cafe.  You never get to talk much to the bride or groom at a wedding, so it was nice to have an entire lunch to catch up with him.  We skipped dinner that night, spending the afternoon catching up with things on the Internet.

Saturday, March 25 — Wedding Day

We had breakfast at Coffee 2 Go, a place with great scones we’d discovered previously, and then walked to a church across the street from St. Stephen’s Green for the ceremony.  It was quite well-attended.  Dave used to play the organ in weddings, and would select a bunch of music to play while people are arriving.  He’d continue to play until the bridal party was actually ready to walk down the aisle.  This wedding was a bit different.  While people were arriving, the musicians were rehearsing.  At 1:00, the official before-music selection was played.  Then, fifteen minutes of silence.  Apparently there was some holdup with a bridesmaid or something.  Finally, the bridal march began, and things got going.  The first part was pretty much a normal wedding, with readings, rings, vows, and a pronouncement.  Then it continued into the mass section after a fairly lengthy signing of registers.  They even had chairs for Samuel and Clare, the bride, so they wouldn’t have to stand for the entire ceremony.  (The officiant was not so lucky.)  It was about 3pm when it was all over.  We boarded buses to go to the reception, which was about 40 minutes out of town in County Wicklow.

The reception was at a venue near Poulaphouca Falls, which figures into Ulysses as a place where Bloom masturbated when he was young.  I think “Leopold Bloom Jerked Off Here” beats “George Washington Slept Here”, if it’s Ulysses tie-ins you’re after, but this was not mentioned in any of the handouts.

We had appetizers and some drinks — the Prosecco disappeared pretty quickly — while waiting for Samuel and Clare to arrive.  They finally did, and we moved into the dining room where we were seated with several of Samuel’s childhood friends.  Samuel is a lawyer, and Clare is a journalist.  Dave asked his friend seated next to him if he was also a lawyer, and he said “worse — I’m in politics”.  He’s an analyst and aide to a Green officeholder.  We talked about many of the woes of the world.  The speeches were given primarily by the couple’s fathers, and by the bride and groom themselves.  The fathers had a few funny lines but overall it was very sweet.  The food was all really good too, which is unusual for weddings.  Instead of a wedding cake, they had a stack of different round cheeses.

Then the dance-a-thon began.  We were a bit sleepy and had ideas of going back to town, but that didn’t seem  possible.  So we just hung out.  It was heartwarming watching this large group of people who have been friends with each other forever all dancing with each other.  A band played for awhile, then there was a playlist of meaningful pop songs, with much singing along.  

Finally we were able to ride the bus back to downtown Dublin.  The singing along continued.  If you put a scene into a movie with a bunch of drunk Irishmen singing “Molly Malone” on a bus at three o’clock Sunday morning, an anti-defamation cabal would hit you for ethnic stereotyping.

There were many people staggering around on the street at 4am, and you had to be careful where you stepped.

Sunday, March 26

We slept in.  Checkout time was at noon, so we donated our wedding clothes as a belated Daffodil Day contribution (they had been bought at a charity shop in Dublin to begin with) and left our packs thus lightened with the concierge.  Went to the nearest coffee shop for coffee scone and tea.  Then a walk to the tourist area of the square where we determined that H&M wouldn’t give Dave his money back for the zipper on his hoodie that broke not long after we had purchased it.  The people said it was bought in Germany and it would have to be returned there.  Globalization only goes so far.  Orange juice also wasn’t possible.

In the afternoon, we retrieved our packs and got to the airport. Everything went smoothly, as our carry-on was under everybody’s weight limit.

The interesting cheap fare Ray found to get to Dublin did so via Lisbon and London. Getting to Dublin was via train to Wales, and a ferry from there.

Thursday, March 16 – Friday, March 17

We returned to SFO and boarded a TAP flight to Lisbon, leaving around 6pm and arriving at 11:30am the next day.  We took an Uber to our “airport hotel” about 2km away.  After a nap to supplement what little sleep we got on the 11-hour flight, we took another Uber to the Rua Agusta Arch, and walked up the hill slowly, looking out at all the little view spots, until arriving at a restaurant at which I think we were very lucky to get a reservation on a Friday. 

I didn’t realize it was St. Patrick’s Day until a clown dressed as a leprechaun danced down the street.

Plano was on Eater’s list of “essential” restaurants in Lisbon.  They had a comparatively inexpensive 6-course tasting menu, and we split a wine pairing.  It was all very creative and delicious.  It was in a building which had been a cistern, and had an arched brick ceiling.  Our waitress had a tattoo of the Mandelbrot Set.  This all seems very clever until you think of the implications about job possibilities for mathematicians.

The photos taken of each dish don’t help memory, in a place like that.  Nothing looks like fish, or chips.  But I did make some notes on my phone:

• Bread and cheese and olive oil and ham and olives three kinds and bubbly wine
• Crusty ball with vegetables inside
• Pork, bread, and pickles
• Tuna tartare in purée with oil and sweet potato crackers and candied peanuts
• Grilled grouper pickle and carrot and bone foam over I forget
• Steak and cauliflower purée and broccoli
• Dessert was basil granita and wine with tiny cubes of fruity things

Our waitress took us to tour the wine cellar afterwards.

Saturday, March 18

The music videos at breakfast at the airport hotel are so mechanical.  Even for chatGPT, they feel phoned in.

We returned to the airport and continued to Heathrow, which we’ve avoided for years.  (Lisbon was a 22-hour layover on one ticket).  Terminal 2 at Heathrow was not unpleasant at all, it looked pretty new.  There were electronic gates at passport control, and we got through it and down to the Underground reasonably quickly.  We were happy to hear that London Transport accepted contactless credit card transactions, so that there was no need to get tickets or even an Oyster card, like is also now the case in New York.  It made getting around much simpler.

We took the tube and a bus to our friend Frank’s house.  He lives with his mother in a flat right on the Thames, where she has lived for 50 years.  We arrived as Frank was having his birthday party, and it was fun talking with his friends and eating the party food.  Everybody spoke over each other but the takeaway line was a story from somebody’s past that ended, “* * brought home a prostitute and there’s blood all over the carpet!”

Frank got us settled in a spare room which was far from spare — it was filled with books by and about C.J. Jung; his mother was active for years in a club discussing his philosophy.  Most of the other rooms in the house were filled with books as well.

And never underestimate the cachet of having a harp in the main hall.

Sunday, March 19

We went to the National Gallery to see a small exhibition “The Ugly Duchess”, celebrating Quentin Matsys’ painting, which was inspired by some DaVinci works, and which inspired Tenniel’s illustration of the duchess for Alice In Wonderland.  The room was smaller than Frank’s flat, but contained what they said: a drawing by Leonardo, copied by Quinten Massys, and a the matching ugly man.  But they didn’t have the Tenniel drawing.  I wonder if it survives.  A quick look around the Internet does not lead me to the location of any of the original drawings.  Copper plates are said to show up at auctions now and then.

We came for that, and stayed for the massive permanent collection of paintings, mostly European.  I didn’t know that was where Degas’s Spartan kiddie porn was held, for example, or the Seurat painting of the swimmer with bad posture.  Museums are always good for surprises like that.

I had the same thoughts as usual, looking at old paintings: in between Vermeer’s camerawork and Caravaggio’s “You think this is black? THIS is BLACK” (someone should rework that Dolby Vision trailer into art history), every new arrow was added to the Western Canon artist’s quiver between 1500 and 1600, which then stayed stable until about 1850 when photography forced the practitioners to rethink what they were doing and why.  There hasn’t been a respite since.

Afterwards, we took a bus up to Stoke Newington to join our ex-coworker friends David and Yuriy and their wives at 19 Numara Bos Cirrik II, David’s favorite Turkish restaurant.  Frank was going to bring his mother and his girlfriend to dinner but three Ubers in a row cancelled on him.  It would have been a real problem, given her mobility issues; the place was full and densely packed.  A young person of indeterminate gender smiled at me and giggled, and their mother gave us all slices of cake from a birthday party that they were having.

Monday, March 20

Frank’s girlfriend Siobhan had arrived, and we met her at breakfast.  She is a professional harpist who plays many different variations of harps all over Europe.  She had tales of how difficult it is to get a work visa to perform in the US.  We went up to the V&A museum and saw a sampling of their collection, and then met our artist friend Oisin in his studio nearby.  We’d met him on an eclipse cruise in 2009, and he’s had a successful career since then.  Then back to Frank’s for Indian food, delivered.

Oisin said he had a notebook of “orphan sentences” and I think I ought to retitle my similar file with that name.

Tuesday, March 21

After a leisurely morning, we made our way to Euston Station, where we caught a train to Holyhead, Wales.  Isn’t this a more civilized way of getting from London to Dublin, than a plane flight?  All that English countryside.  The train takes three or four hours.  We arrived just after dark, in the drizzle, of course.  It was a short walk from the station to “Edinburgh Castle”.  We turned out to be staying in a room above a pub.  I thought by the name Castle, it might be a castle, or a lower tier Anaheim motel with plaster crenellations, but we walked in and the patrons shouted Santa Claus! and a bleached barmaid led us upstairs to a small room.  Though the pub was pretty boisterous, especially when karaoke was happening, it was OK because the noise didn’t penetrate up to the room.  We found an Indian restaurant which was open.  Dal soup, chicken tikka Ceylon, cauliflower, pickles, garlic naan.  It was good.  We did not have super high hopes for anything being open in a small Welsh port.  And so to bed.

Wednesday, March 22

We walked to the nearby Enterprise outlet, and rented a small car.  First we drove to the South Stack Lighthouse.  The lighthouse was closed, and the day was very windy and a little rainy, so we just peeked at it from up the hill, and turned around.  There were some “hut circles”, ruins of an earlier civilization.  We drove from there to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which goes on and on about how it’s the longest name in the world but it isn’t, they just left out the spaces.  Many scripts left out the spaces in the years before Gutenberg.  As one who has lived in Elpueblodenuestraseñoralareinadelosangelesdelríodeporciúncula, I’m only impressed enough to buy a couple of post cards to send to my cousin who sent me a post card from there.

We drove from there to Castle Conwy, a well-preserved fort (except for the roofs) next to a cute little town.  It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and I didn’t even know it.  The harpist had told us to go there, so we went.  We spent a couple hours walking around, and then headed back to Anglesey to the Sea Shanty Cafe, where we had a delicious “catch of the day”, John Dory, and smoked haddock fish cakes.  Both perfect.  The mushroom soup was good too and the wait staff were neither fast nor slow.  Only thing I didn’t like was the custard sauce which I think came out of a can.  

Their decor is seriously fun nautical kitsch.  Bottles of sand from all over the world.

Thursday, March 23

We returned the rental car.  Steven wants us to be sure to fill out the review forms as it’s a large part of his evaluation.   I hate always being asked to review things, like as not before I’ve even experienced them.  I don’t remember if I did.  Eventually it was time to board Irish Ferries to Dublin, where we had been invited to a wedding.  That was the whole reason for going around the world, to catch a wedding in March and an eclipse four weeks later.   The ferry “Ulysses” was not crowded, and the ride was smooth.  James Joyce must be as tickled as John Steinbeck to know how much all the people who hated him are profiting from him now.  Everything on the boat was Ulysses-themed.  If there were references to Scylla or Charybdis, I missed them.

About three weeks before leaving on the trip around the world, we went on a short excursion to El Salvador and Colombia. Dave’s niece Annika left on a trip to Central America a day or two earlier.

Tuesday, February 21

Dave’s niece Annika showed up on her way to a planned vacation in Central America. I picked her up at the airport (several steps here omitted), and immediately upon arriving back at the house, the power went out. I think this will become a tradition, just to make sure you have to pack in the dark.

Dinner was not impacted, however, because we already had a date to join our friends Wanda and Joe for a hello-goodbye dinner at Da Sichuan. Da Sichuan is still the most entertaining Chinese restaurant on the Peninsula although mostly empty now that civilization has collectively decided to do takeout. Civilization’s loss, not getting to banter with the owner. We had green bean cake, tofu, Mongolian chicken, eggplant and garlic sauce, fish noodles, lamb and sour cabbage hot pot, and gong xin cai, the hollow stalk spinach which is sold under a bunch of different names and is always a good green. I think Dave and I had it the first time when our guides picked it wild and boiled it before the eclipse in 1988 on Mindanao.

Joe was pretty perfect as a dinner guest for Annika. He told us all about driving a VW bus to Guatemala in 1962, with college mates, with a nebulous intention to hunt jaguars, for which they had brought a rifle. The road was out at some river, so eight or ten guys lifted the bus onto a small barge to cross into Guatemala, at which point they were arrested for smuggling a .22 rifle into the country (you see, it is possible to have a civil war and still have gun control). His friends spoke Spanish and talked their way out of trouble but they were deported immediately. Good news for the jaguars and also instructive for Annika: what she can expect; although challenging travel always seems to be in the past. Richard Halliburton wishes he were Richard Francis Burton who wishes he were Ibn Battuta.

Wednesday, February 22

The power was still out. I got out of bed as soon as it was light enough to see, and made plans to eat all the meat in the refrigerator as a first priority. As we are in the J’s in the alphabet world cooking project, we had Jerk Chicken.

Thursday, February 23

We woke up to a few inches of snow, more than we’d ever seen in 30 years of living here. The snow was about halfway down 84, but no problem driving for me, unlike the repeated incidents involving Amazon drivers who think the skid road into our backyard is Medway and get stuck in the mud. Amazon’s map says that. I saw it, a driver showed me it. The Google Map doesn’t make that mistake. With no power, we took Annika on a tour of San Francisco. She wanted to go to a bookstore, so, City Lights. Then with Carla and Mike to A Mano, finally, where we ate expensive food with atmospheric sound effects of the grease recycling truck growling greenly the whole time. There was some rain involved, too. We had to charge the car in San Bruno since the home power station isn’t.

Friday, February 24

A PG&E truck got stuck in the ditch in front of our driveway. Paul helped winch them out (anyone who ever lived in snow would have been able to rock it out in a minute). But it was all worthwhile, because the truck people turned the power back on in the afternoon. The power being out had made me put off configuring a computer for travel. I tried to do that today but discovered it wasn’t going to work so I went backwards. Annika flew out to Guatemala. We finished packing.

Saturday February 25

And so to San Salvador. My electronic boarding pass didn’t work so I had to get a paper one. Watched from the window seat, the sun set over the vast Sonoran desert. The only other surprise was the passport lady calling me “caballero” instead of “señor”. Dialect? We discovered the easiest way to get to our hotel was to use Uber. It was too late and tired to go out for dinner, so, tortilla soup at the hotel. As we were the only ones in the hotel restaurant, the waiter turned the stupid music down for us. Extra stars in the review!

Meanwhile, in the Annika-verse, the inclement weather had closed Los Angeles Airport and she was stuck there all by herself for a day or so. Dave and I did not hear the whole story, which was mostly filtered by way of her dad forwarding messages. Maybe she will blog.

Sunday, February 26    

We met our guide, Adonis, for tours of three Mayan ruins.  He was a university student, considerably overqualified.  The first site he took us to was Joya de Ceren.  We learned that El Salvador has 150 volcanoes. Joya de Ceren was built on the ashes from the eruption of one of them, around 500 AD.  It lasted about 150 years, until the eruption of another one.  The most fascinating diagram in their museum showed several layers of ash from the site, with each layer labeled with the name of the volcano which erupted.  Though all of the residents managed to evacuate before the eruption covered the village, the village was exceptionally well-preserved by the ash.  They did discover a skeleton of a duck on a leash.   It was also nice that one of their national bird species, the torogoz, or turquoise-browed motmot, was perched on a wire beneath the roof covering the ruins of several buildings.

Joya de Ceren is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, because UNESCO felt so bad about having a thousand palaces piled upon temples upon forts, and, you know, Italy, and they wanted to put in a preserved ruin of the way people actually lived, which you can see well in this site.  Volcanic ash does a good job of preserving details of the lifestyles it is destroying.  The Inquisition did that, too.  Much of what we know of the lives of ordinary people in Europe, was written down while they were being killed.  Here, you can see the crop furrows, and deduce what they were growing.  How their huts were furnished, minus what was carried away in haste.

Back to Pyramids.  The second ruin was San Andres, was also along the Río Sucio, so named because of volcanic ash, not litter, at that time.  San Andres seemed mostly to consist of mounds covering pyramids, after walking through a small museum picturing the overall layout.  It’s a good thing that everything in the world hasn’t been excavated, since everything we dig up, we seem to wreck, eventually.

We took a break for lunch at a little view restaurant next to a crater lake, which had watercraft buzzing around it much like Clear Lake.

The third ruin was Tazumal.  It prominently featured a large pyramid which had been partially restored in the mid-twentieth century to “what it would have looked like”.  Cue, once again, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc: “To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness which could never have existed at any given time.”  Families were enjoying the afternoon in the park.

An American told Ray he had a nice beard.  He told him that LAX had been closed for two days.  (Poor Annika!)  He lived in Pasadena.  Ray said he went to school in Pasadena, he said “PCC, thats a good school”, Ray said “the other one”.

We did finally get good news about Annika; that she made it to Guatemala, and found her tour group to hike to the volcano, and she sent some impressive photos of the ongoing eruption that she saw, at night.

Monday, February 27

The Holiday Inn in San Salvador has a good breakfast.  They have a pupusa station.

There was an earthquake in Nicaragua as we waited for our departure to Panama City.  Nothing special, just an additional experience.  Also, on the flight, my map kept changing to Portuguese.

A comfortable connection to our flight to Medellin.  Generally speaking, I am deprecating the whole concept of connecting flights when trip planning.  In this case, I would not have minded getting stuck in Panama City because it is an interesting enough place, and our stay in Colombia was planned to be long.

Icelandair really started a fad, with the safety briefing images transmuted to outside.  Every airline in the world does that now.  Your life jacket is under your seat, but the video shows a young adventurer reaching under the seat in a canoe or on a beach.

The flights were about an hour.  We got to Medellín more or less on time.  There is no Uber there, and taxi drivers of varying legitimacy vie for your attention after getting through customs.  Ours turned out not to be very legitimate, although he did give himself the advantage of grabbing us first out of the welcome door and quoting the tourist best price, what a tourist would bargain a random driver down to from 200,000.   He drove very aggressively, but not the most aggressive on the road, and asked for more money once we got to the parque in Barbosa.  Barbosa is the nearest town at the bottom of hill where our host Tibi lives. Dennis and Tibi were there waiting for us. Tibi figured the driver was “coked out”.  I think his first evaluation was “alert”.  Trying to sound neutral.  We stopped at a roadside chorizoria for some grilled pork, sausage, and chicharron on the way to Tibi’s house.  It was pretty darn good.  Tibi knows all those guys.

Tuesday, February 28

Dave set up in his favorite remote work office, where Tibi works with a glass wall opening to the rain forest in his back yard.   One of Tibi’s friends, a masseur, came by earlier in the day with his table and gave massages to the house guests.  Marco went to school in the afternoon and we picked him up afterwards and wandered around town getting snacks and beer.

Wednesday, March 1

Ray took a sick day today, which may have been the Holiday inn breakfast where not everything was perfectly hot.  Or, just adjusting his intestinal flora.  Everyone else drove up to Tibi’s airbnb in the town of Concepción, and up and coming tourist destination about an hour up the road, and a similar distance to the airport, which is where the tourists will come from.  The prime goal was retrieving Dave’s large monitor for the rest of the week’s work.  Ray was better by the afternoon.

Thursday, March 2

Dennis taught Tibi his capoeira exercises this morning.  They are harder than the dance stretching Ray does with Cyndi.  Dave worked.  Ray made brownies in the afternoon.  At night, we streamed RRR.  Dennis noticed that the rendering in RRR was less complete in the last half of the film, as presumably they ran out of money.  I noticed that it was pure fascist propaganda for Hindu superiority.

At some point Dennis decided that Marco shouldn’t watch it any more.  Buckets of blood, no breasts.

Friday, March 3

Ray did what he could of the Capoeira exercises.  Nothing involving being upside down.  Today the plan was to go shopping for furniture and supplies for the airbnb up in Concepción, and then go to the airbnb and set it up.  Only the first half happened.  Tibi and Marco and I went to the mall, Dave stayed and worked.  Marco was feeling intermittently bad and feverish, especially in the car and when he was getting tired.  He also is starting to think of himself as a man rather than a baby, which means he doesn’t like to appear weak, and that makes him angry in addition to feeling sick.  In the mall he was mostly OK, at home he was mostly OK, but we were running late. 

We picked up Dave and went to the trout farm near Tibi’s house, for the afternoon meal. The trout farm is still good.  They serve one thing, the fish they get from their ponds, grilled, with patacones (like tortillas, but made from plantain) and salsa.

The intent was to go all the way up the hill but it didn’t happen.  Marco was clearly tired.  When we got home he perked up and began crawling all over me until we all came to bed around ten.

Saturday, March 4

Dave stayed and worked. The rest of us went to Concepción and installed all the things you associate with Airbnb’s the world around.  Dennis and Marco and Ray decided pretty early on to go into town (about two blocks down from the airbnb) and wander around.  Marco escaped for a few minutes to where Ray didn’t know exactly where he was, but he found him, or some of the hive mind moms and sisters found him and pointed to him.  He was a little upset by that too, but recovered on the 100-meter walk back to the airbnb and immediately stopped crying “Papa” and went to play with some other little kid.

Then we went to “The Beach”, which is a sandy river bank with a tourist cafe.  One is told not to go swimming in tropical fresh water and not to eat junk food at tourist cafes with impressively bad art on the walls.  Ray took photos instead.

Dennis left for the airport.  Papa is needed with Lukas.  Next time, I hope he can bring Lukas and they can be friends the way everyone in the world is, using English as a Second Language.  Tibi and Marco and I drove away.  A borracho called from a bar, that Tibi should come and join them, but Tibi called back that he had the niño and couldn’t.  We were back at his house by 7.

Sunday, March 5 

We spent the day enjoying nature.

Monday, March 6

Dave worked.  It was a quiet day for Ray. At 5:30 we went down to meet Marco and Val and bought beers and bought street food empanadas and came back.  Val had got chicken for Marco who was hungry.  We have all been contributing to cooking, as Val is also in school and everybody is everything part time.

Tuesday, March 7

Ray saw the full moon at about 4am.  One and a half more months to the eclipse!  Ray seems to have written 28 post cards.

Wednesday, March 8

We got up at 5am. At 6:20 we left in a taxi which chose a route with an immense no-reason-traffic-jam so the airport was two hours away.  Despite the traffic, we arrived at the gate with time to spare, and flew to Panama, where Ray had a short connection to Orlando, which he made easily, and Dave had a six-hour layover before flying to San Francisco. Dave bought a “day pass” to the airport lounge so he could do a bit of work.  A lot cheaper than flying business class in order to use the lounge. He arrived home late, and took a $60 Uber home.

But it was the most awful travel day for Ray, at least among those that don’t cause gross physical damage. When he got to Orlando the line at Budget was 45 minutes, their process of picking a car was novel and chaotic (pick any car with an open trunk and a key),and all those people in their Budget cars were on the road.  He decided to drive through the country to avoid a forty-minute delay on I-4 (with the freeway tag for $25) but it turns out that Orlando is now stop-and-go suburbs literally all the way until you leave Haines City, and it was pretty much five hours from the time the plane landed until he got to the front desk at Hotel Jacaranda.  “It’s the season,” said Steve at the desk;  he’d sent Ray a voicemail asking when he’d arrive.  He must know the situation.

The people at Budget were really fast, with me.  Not so a guy with a small boy playing video games who was at the desk and on the phone to somebody the whole time I was in line, and when I left.  The kid smiled at me, just to have something to do I guess.

It will get them all prepared for Disney World.  I hear that Disney World has got a system to avoid standing in line.  Budget should talk to them.  The DMV and some embassies do.  It isn’t rocket science, you take a number.

Thursday, March 9

Ray spent the day in Avon Park.  He visits his college friend Mike there.  They go out to Olympic, Captain D’s, Homer’s Smorgasbord, the Cuban sandwich shop south of Sebring.  This time, only the first two.  The waitresses all know Mike, or they are well trained in the art of Honey and Dearie.  Mike had sweet tea.  Florida is sugar country already, and what they call sweet — Ray diluted it about 1:3 with regular iced tea.

Before Mike woke up, Ray went to thrift stores.  Why anyone would shop anyplace but a thrift store is beyond me.  I wasn’t even shopping, but when it’s your last day on vacation, you permit yourself a couple of hundred grams of souvenirs.

As mentioned, the state is crowded with late winter snowbirds, and I was only able to book one night at the Jacaranda.  The Jacaranda is a grand hotel from the days of the great Florida land rush of the 1920’s.  Since the Kenilworth closed, the Jacaranda is the only local representative of the breed.  To keep their doors open, they have leased out half the rooms to a local junior college, with the demographic effect that there is nobody in the building between the ages of 25 and 70.

So Ray had to leave for the Seven in Sebring, a representative of the new world of hotels.  The Seven is named after a curve in the Sebring Raceway that no longer exists because competitors were failing to negotiate the turn and injuring themselves.  It has a view overlooking the track.  It’s strangely congruent to the Kenilworth, in that the long halls meet at an obtuse angle–same with the Jacaranda.  But the rooms are corporate premium mediocre spare, as opposed to the Cabinet of Curiosities look that the Jacaranda and the Kenilworth went for a hundred years ago.

Corporate can be as creepy as old dark house.

Friday, March 10

Florida is no longer post card country.  Ray was only able to find old dusty cheesecake at one place in an antique mall.  Good as far as it goes, but no gators or palm trees or anything.  They had pizza for a slow lunch but Ray didn’t give himself time to get to the Tampa airport, from which his flight left, so I was in a huge rush, didn’t fill the car with gas, had to be escorted to the front of the security line (old white privilege, though I’m not old as Florida goes) and otherwise made a foolish pest of myself.  Fortunately, it’s 2023 and all the planes to everywhere are late.  Dave met Ray at the airport at 22:45 and we went to a small eatery in Burlingame or somewhere.  The same but different, from Florida: Lao coconut noodle soup, shrimp with okra, and instead of sweet tea, honey ginger hot drink.  Mexican Ballads on the speakers.  It is advertised as “fusion”.

The electricity at home had come on this afternoon, to herald my arrival.

Saturday, March 11 – Thursday, March 16

We spent a few days at home between vacations.  We went to Yoshi’s on the 11th, SF Jazz on the 12th (our friend Lori Carsillo was singing in the downstairs room), on the 14th an Amazon delivery vehicle got stuck in our backyard (I’ve lost count).  Paul tried to help them with a random tire chain but those are precision tools, you can’t just slap on a different size.  We ate at Lers Ros, at Flea Street — the power was largely out from 3/11 at 3am until just before we left.  This made it extra fun to try to configure a new computer for the trip.  My current Macbook has a hinge that is about to snap off.  Been there done that in Soroca in 2007.