Ready, set, glow (still waiting for that last part)

I realise I’ve been the world’s worst blogger so far this trip, but I blame Eric.  He knocked me up a few weeks before we left Melbourne, and I haven’t felt too great since the halcyonic first two weeks on the road.

I knew something was amiss when I kept almost fainting those first weeks in Tasmania.  Not expecting to fall pregnant so soon, I didn’t think too much about it and was just vaguely annoyed, particularly when Eric beat me up a hill on our bicycles.  Then one day it dawned on me what this could mean, so of course I did what any sane person would have done and thought about it obsessively for several days whilst refusing to do anything about it.

The morning we were meant to register for the Overland Track, I thought I’d better actually investigate.  After my morning wee in a nice clearing in the woods, I watched as those two pink lines clearly formed on the little stick resting on a tree stump.  I walked over to the van and said to Eric, “I think you’d better come over here.”

Thank God for mobile internet as I was able to Google “holy shit I’m pregnant” and get lots of useful information.  Google said “moderate” exercise was ok, so I figured hiking eight days with a massive pack would be right on target.  Except for the rain and my whinging knees, the first few days were fine.  It was after that that the nausea kicked in and I decided never to hike more than a few hours in my life again, and certainly not whilst carrying everything needed for survival.

The first few nights on the trail, I woke up about 3 am and panicked until daylight.  This wasn’t supposed to happen so soon!  I only got to go surfing and cycling twice.  Then with some encouragement and enthusiasm from Eric, I arrived at the conclusion that we don’t generally get to order up a baby at our convenience.  Birth control only controls the NOT having a baby part.  I’d actually been off the pill for 15 months, so as educated adults we knew this was a possibility.  With my bad plumbing, we were lucky lighting struck at all, even if it was a few months earlier than we would have ideally liked.

I’m sorry to say that the rest of our time in Tasmania will always be remembered through a haze of nausea, which was pretty much unrelenting day and night.  We spent several days on Bruny Island, then driving down to the southernmost point you can reach in Australia by road, and then back up the east coast to the ferry. We saw some gorgeous places, and I tried to do a good bushwalk every couple of days to maintain some level of fitness, but I still seemed to find myself beached in the van each afternoon staring out the window counting the minutes until it was acceptable to go to bed (8 pm, if you’re wondering).

Anyway, boo hoo, poor me.  It’s not like I’m the first one to experience this, and thank Christ I’m not at work since I’d tell all my clients to fuck off and get fired.  I’ve (mostly) gotten over the urge to accost women with multiple children and demand they tell me how the hell they could purposely do this more than once.  I still think they’re crazy, but I feel less inclined to scream at them.

We had a lovely week and a half back in Melbourne visiting friends, but to be honest, if we visited you, you know about it, and if you aren’t in Melbourne, it would be pretty tedious and boring for me to describe our round of drinks and dinners.  At least we had some news to share.  Otherwise, it would have been a bit weird to do another round of “goodbye, goodbye, goodbye” after just doing it five weeks previous.  We probably wouldn’t have told people I was pregnant since I was only at eight weeks, but it seemed much nicer to get to tell people in person than to ring them up from Adelaide once we’re (hopefully) in the clear.  I will say that being pregnant is a great way to get out of staying out past 10 pm, not that I had a very hard time leaving to go to bed early when I didn’t have a legitimate excuse.

One of our favourite visit-ees, Kaya, on the occasion of her second birthday

Another favourite visit-ee, being spoiled by Matt and Sharon

Next we spent several days in Adelaide staying with Peter, my doctoral advisor.  I usually just refer to him as my advisor, but then people just think I have some kind of new age guru who dispenses life advice.  To be fair, Peter is pretty wise and does dispense good life advice, so maybe I should just let them think that.  It was so comforting to be around someone from “home” who has known us for almost 15 years (although it does make me feel really old to realise that I’ve known Peter for 15 years), and Peter spoiled us rotten.  Did you know that you can make soy milk???  And it’s heaps better than the stuff you can buy in the store.  When we have room for kitchen appliances again, we’re definitely getting a soy juicer.  For someone who drinks a lot of soy milk and eats a lot of tofu, I was shocked to see that soybeans are so small.  For some reason, I thought they would look like peanuts.

Hollow Mtn Walk, Grampians

Pinnacle Walk through the Grand Canyon, Grampians

The night we arrived in Adelaide was the 11^th anniversary of our first date, which was in Colorado when Peter had my life in the palm of his hand.  If someone had told me before that date that I’d be married to the cute boy I picked up in the bar, pregnant, living in a van in Australia, and having dinner with Peter, I wouldn’t have believed any of it.  Hell, I saw a psychic a year ago who told me I was going to get knocked up, and I couldn’t even believe that.

Now we’re just rambling around South Australia killing time until we can collect a cuter snapshot of our unborn in a couple of weeks.  It was pretty amazing to see it dancing around on the screen at the last ultrasound and to hear its heart beating, but it basically looks like a blob in the photo.  I feel reasonably normal in the mornings these days, so we try to see some things then before I turn into a monster around 2 pm and demand a nap.  Maybe it’s good practice for Eric in what having a child will be like.  If so, he’s going to be a hell of a dad, because he is certainly taking very good care of me.

Book report 3

In addition to not writing much over the past couple of months, I also haven’t been reading much.  Most afternoons and evenings my brain feels like it’s in a jar of formaldehyde, so I either just stare out the window (which Eric kindly points at something scenic) or watch some dorky TV shows Eric has loaded onto the Tye-pad for me (bless him).  Fortunately, my period of lucidity is getting later and later each week, so hopefully I can get back to spending hours reading things I’ll almost instantly forget.

While still in Tasmania, I read Mornings on Horseback about Teddy Roosevelt’s early life by David Mc Cullough, the same author who wrote Johnstown Flood (and The Path between the Seas, a freaking awesome book about the Panama Canal, that I read just before this trip – read it).  To me, the book was mainly an interesting snapshot of family life for the extremely wealthy just after the turn of the century.  Although he attended Harvard, Teddy had no formal education prior to that.  His family travelled the world extensively and occasionally employed tutors, but although extremely well read, Teddy’s secretary described him as barely literate due to his creative spelling and punctuation.  In the numerous excerpts from family correspondence (corrected by the author, thank goodness), everyone was overwhelmingly obsequious.  I would have expected people in those times to be more reserved in their displays of emotion, but instead you got the impression each spent all of their waking hours worshipping the others.  Teddy’s letters to his mother and sisters read more like love letters, and his letters to his father and brother are just as fawning.  The entire book was full of interesting facts about how a shy boy went from wanting to be a scientist to being one of the best remembered presidents of the US, but the only other fact I’ll mention is that Teddy’s mother and beloved first wife both died within 24 hours in the same house but of entirely unrelated causes.  No wonder he wanted to run away to the West and shoot things.

In university, I read my way through the Steinbeck shelf but somehow missed East of Eden.  After reading it, I question my literary taste at a younger age.  While this book also provided an interesting snapshot of life after the turn of the century, but for the much less wealthy (farmers in the Salinas Valley of California), the characters were a bit too black and white for me.  Everyone was either pure good or pure evil – hookers who run houses of pain, inventors with hearts of gold who never profit from their ideas, etc.  Some characters transition from good to evil or vice versa, which I think was his point, I still found it hard to picture any of them actually existing.  On an unrelated note, I thought it was interesting that Steinbeck kept trying to take a stance against racism through his depiction of the main family’s Chinese housekeeper as a wise scholar but ended up reinforcing another stereotype that may not have been as common in his time: the all-seeing Oriental mystic.  Anyway, poor Lee still gives up his dream of owning a bookshop and discussing philosophy because he so loves cooking and cleaning for this family of men who seem incapable of looking after themselves.

I just finished You’re Not Doing it Right by Michael Ian Black, one of the co-hosts of my favourite non-educational podcast, Mike and Tom Eat Snacks (MATES).  MATES applies the PER system (pick a snack, eat a snack, rate a snack) during each episode, where they nominally focus on a snack but really just practice their improv skills.  Hilarity ensues.  I downloaded Ed, a TV show from 2000-2004 just because it has both of them in it, and I love it.  Anyway, this book is Mike’s autobiographical account of his challenges with marriage and childrearing.  While I think his depression gives him a somewhat darker outlook on things than I have, I still laughed out loud a number of times despite the fact that doing so kept making me cough.

I’ve just started For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke about a man wrongly transported to Australia.  He ends up in prison in Port MacQuarie where we spent several days, and copies of it were for sale at every gift shop, so I figured it must be essential Australian reading.  I downloaded it to the Kindle, so I know I’m only 12% in, but here is my synopsis so far:  Woman confesses to her husband that their son was really sired by another man, before she was married mind you.  Husband in fit of rage threatens to ruin the wife’s reputation unless the son disappears and stops using the family name.  Husband rides off into the dark to murder the real father of his earlier supposed son.  Son, on fleeing, finds the body of his true father on the roadside, and whilst trying to save him is found by villagers who accuse him of the murder.  To keep his father from sullying his mother's reputation, son gives a false name and accepts responsibility for the crime.  To keep his mother from worrying, son writes her a letter telling her he’s sailing to India, when in reality he’s on his way to prison in Australia.  What he doesn’t know is that his father dropped dead the moment he arrived home from his murderous errand, so the son could have given his true name to the police and been freed instantly as no one from such a good family could stand convicted of murder.  Instead, he’s on a prison ship whose most sadistic officer just happens to be (gasp) the cousin his father had promised to leave all his money to after disowning his son (not sure how the cousin knew this since the father keeled over shortly after finding out).  The cousin is quite angry that the new will was never finalised and thus beats up on this “random” prisoner who is accused of murdering his uncle (who somehow he doesn’t recognise as his own cousin).  Amazingly, out at sea they come upon the boat the son lied about taking to India burning, so now his mother assumes him dead and will never look for him.  I expect the book to continue in the same vein with implausible coincidences and dramatic displays of emotion, but I guess that’s kind of the charm of a book written in 1870, just two years after the last convicts were transported.

Book report 2

Since we arrived at the hut by 2 or 3 pm each afternoon on the Overland Track, we had time to read a lot of books.  Thank goodness for the Kindle when you're trying to keep pack weight down!

I started with How to Be Black by by Baratunde Thurston.  It's a satirical instruction manual that combines comedy with some serious messages about the state of race relations in the US.  I was motivated to buy the book after I heard Baratunde on a podcast.  Although raised in a rough neighbourhood of DC without a father, who was killed in a drug-related shooting, he graduated from Harvard and is irrepressibly positive while being candid about the struggles of being black in the US.

Kosher Chinese was written by Michael Levy about his experiences as a Jewish Peace Corps volunteer in a remote Chinese village.  He also manages to entertain whilst interjecting a few more serious observations about the challenges facing a nation as large and diverse as China.  I hadn't realised that people weren't free to move between different regions of China, at least not legally, and the extent to which there are racial divisions within China, which seems contrary to socialism.  

The King's Mistresses by Elizabeth C Goldsmith tells the true story of two Italian sisters, one of whom was an early lover of Louis XIV and the other of whom became a mistress of Charles II.  Both were married and spent most of their lives fleeing their repressive husbands in a time when divorce wasn't an option.  We're talking about real rebels in 17th century Europe!

Given the amount of rain we had on the Overland Track, it was a bit eerie to finish with David Mc Cullough's history of the Johnstown Flood in 1889.  Essentially, a group of ultra-wealthy sportsmen, including Carnegie, caused the destruction of an entire valley of communities, most notably Johnstown, by building a faulty dam on their fishing lake.  Coming at a time when Americans were beginning to question why a few were becoming very wealthy while most workers were still fighting for a living wage for working long days, six days a week, the flood ignited a media frenzy.  Despite being convicted in the media, though, the wealthy men were legally acquitted of all wrongdoing.

Tassie adventure continues

We wrapped up our first stay in Hobart with the obligatory trip to the Cascade Brewery and then headed down to Bruny Island, where we stayed for four nights.  The first night we stayed in a caravan park so Eric could replace Turquey's alternator.  Our fellow campers didn't know what to think of Eric in full grease monkey mode.

Turquey was much happier with some new parts and even made a 3 km drive down a beach to a remote camping area that was so nice we had to stay a couple of nights.

From Bruny Island, we went down to Cockle Creek, the furthest south you can drive in Australia.  At that point, we were closer to Antarctica than to Cairns!  We toured Hastings Caves and did a couple of short walks in Hartz National Park before heading back to Hobart via Kingston, the headquarters of Australia's Antarctic Division.  The Division has an awesome free exhibit in the lobby, including this sledge that some poor guy spent over two weeks crossing the continent on, nearly freezing to death a number of times.

Oh, and they let you play dress up!

Now we're back in Hobart enjoying city life for a couple of days, including a stay in a hotel last night.  I didn't realise how much I missed sleeping in a bed.

We're leaving again this afternoon but can't decide which direction to head.  It's tough to believe we only have a few days in Tassie left.  We've really only been in half the state this entire month and have probably only seen about 70% of what we set out to explore.  That being said, we haven't felt rushed, and this island will probably be around a while longer!

Overland Track...is over

As we feared, we paid for the excellent weather along the west coast of Tasmania with almost constant rain on the Overland Track.  Out of eight days, we had three that were sunny.  On the second morning, we even woke up to snow.  Despite the rain, it was definitely an adventure we're (mostly) glad we had.

The $200 fee per hiker is certainly a bargain.  The trail is boardwalk over the muddiest sections, and huts or tent platforms are available each three to five hour stretch of the hike along with giant rainwater tanks.  Looking at the trail before we started, we thought we might combine a couple of the legs as a few hours didn't seem like much hiking, but with the weight we were carrying, we were relieved every time a hut came into view.

We started with two Kiwi couples in their late 20s who were biazarrely unfriendly and a 19-year-old Dutch guy who just sat and stared at the hut wall each night.  We kind of expect to see him on the news having killed twenty people in a village or something.

We stayed an extra night a the third hut to climb a nearby mountain.  Imagine our disappointment when a group of 20 came through that night, but we didn't get farther with any of them than casual conversation.  As we were climbing into bed that night, though, Eric recognised a friend from Melbourne, who in a hut that slept 60 happened to choose the bunk next to ours.  Without electric lights, it was so dark that Eric never would have seen him if he wasn't two feet away.

We stayed up a bit to talk to Martin and Jen, and Martin mentioned he had a bit of a toothache.  By morning, his face was so swollen that his eye was sealed shut.  Jen made a heroic dash to the next hut and back to find someone with a satellite phone, and the paramedics suggested that they would drive two hours to a side trailhead and then hike four hours in to assess the situation.  We were all a bit frustrated as it was clear that Martin would not be able to hike out, and he was in so much pain that it seemed inhuman to delay his evacuation by an entire day.  He was just laying there mostly comatose all day.  I got goosebumps when I heard a helicopter swoop into the valley just before dusk.  The pilot told us he knew they'd have to come get Martin eventually, so he convinced his boss that doing it before dinner was better than in the dark.  It was so good to see Martin looking happy and healthy again in Hobart for dinner after a short hospital stay.

Jen and Martin insisted on buying us dinner in Hobart for our part in their adventure, which was mostly sitting around the hut happy to have an excuse to avoid putting our packs on for another day, but we really owed them.  The beds in the huts were just plywood platforms, and Eric and I were the only people without sleeping pads.  The first three nights were fitful hours of half-sleep trying to find a comfortable position but just ending up with bruised hips and shoulders.  When Jen and Martin flew out, they left us with their sleeping pads, which made the rest of the hike SO much nicer.

The night they flew out, a lovely group of three couples from Brisbane and Canada came in along with a crazy German guy named Hans, and we had such a nice time with them in the huts each night thereafter.

We did some scenic sidetrips off the Overland but nothing more spectacular than what we've seen elsewhere.  To be honest, the rain and another challenging aspect that I'll describe in more detail in another post dampened our enjoyment a bit.

The only other real experience of note were the LEECHES!  Neither of us had ever seen a leech outside of movies, but they were everywhere.  Tasmanian leeches are tiny, but the just stretch out as long as they can from the end of a leaf and wait for a warm body to walk by.  The little bastards are impossible to kill.  We kept finding them on our clothes and trying to grind them into rocks, only to find them curled into impervious little balls.

On the last day, we were sprinting for the ferry back across the lake, and I knew from about 10 am that there was a leech under my gaiters but didn't want to stop to remove it.  When we arrived, I went into the lodge to change into dry clothes and to sign us out of the walk.  I left one pant leg rolled up, walked up to the bar, sprinkled some salt out of the shaker on to what was a very fat leech, and let him drop off as I walked out.  All class.

Our first night off the trail, we stayed in a little town nestled in the hills along the river called New Norfolk.  The place was considered "budget accommodation", but our room was lovely and the shower was HOT.  It took several minutes before the dirt stopped running in a continuous stream.  Upon check in, the lady told us where we could get discount bread.  At first I was offended that she thought we were charity cases, and then I realised the we are homeless!

One of Eric's dreams on the trail was to go to the cinema, so we did that last night and then just slept in our van in the middle of the city.  It was a bit surreal to wake up this morning to people walking by in suits on their way to work.  Thank goodness I didn't have to pee in the night, which would have necessitated bringing out the She-Wee!

We're just killing a few days here in Hobart waiting for a new alternator, which should arrive on Wednesday.  We visited the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) yesterday, established by David Walsh with his gambling wins.  The best part of the museum were the little snippets in the iPod touring device where David explained why he had bought each piece.  Today we went to the Maritime Museum, which had a nice little exhibit of antique surfing paraphernalia.   Tomorrow we may climb up Mt Wellington, and the Wednesday before we find a good parking lot to change out the alternator, we're touring the Cascade Brewery.  It's a tough life.

Book report 1

I thought I might keep track of the books I’m reading as it might be interesting to look back and remember the things that were occupying my mind.

On the boat over, I was engrossed in the second half of Nothing to Envy: Love, Life, and Death in North Korea, winner of the 2010 BBC prize for non-fiction by Barbara Demick.  I hadn’t realised that in the decades following the Korean War, North Korea’s economic performance outstripped South Korea’s, leading them to be held up as the shining example of successful Communism.  It wasn’t until the Soviet Union collapsed, eliminating North Korea’s free supply of energy and a primary trading partner, that economic conditions descended into a primitive subsistence (not that social conditions had ever been any better than Orwell’s 1984).  Although the electrical infrastructure remains in place, and you can see fallen or rusting power lines throughout the country, the country is almost entirely without electricity and thus the means of production.  The book follows the stories of six defectors, whose struggles don’t end when they make it to South Korea.  The author admits that the book is by no means a balanced or comprehensive picture simply because there is no access to the information that would be required to make it so.

Then I jumped into Coonardoo, a book written in 1926 by Katharine Susannah Prichard about the coexistence of a white family who runs a cattle station and the Aboriginal community that works for them in exchange for food and other basic necessities.  The titular character is a young Aboriginal girl who grows up alongside the future master of the station, who struggles throughout the book with his own inclinations versus what society tells him is an appropriate relationship with Coonardoo.  The plot itself isn’t surprising, although apparently it was very shocking in 1926 to even hint that an emotional attachment could exist between white and Aboriginal people.  Some of the racism inherent in the times reads through in the language and descriptions used, but the most interesting aspect of reading the book is hearing the author possibly struggle herself as she bravely counters popular thinking.  On a more visceral level, it also made me dread the heat we may encounter in Western Australia.

Now I’m racing to the finish of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee and winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.  I’ve covered almost 400 pages in less than 48 hours, because I literally can’t put it down.  I’ve woken up the past two mornings and tried to coax Eric back to sleep so I can read by my headlamp.  The author is a doctor who began specialising in oncology in 2004, but he is also a brilliant writer.  I didn’t realise just how ad hoc the search for a cure for cancer, which really isn’t a singular thing at all anyway, has been.  When I was younger and not eating beef because of the destruction of Amazonian rainforests, one reason was always that the biodiversity being lost could potentially hold the cure for cancer.  That actually seems true now that I’ve read about chemists milking just about every plant they can find in an empirical search for anything that will stop mutant cells from multiplying.  

On a personal note, it’s been really interesting to read about the search for a cure has been informed as the same research and statistical methods used in my field developed from about the 1920s. 

I’ve been lucky so far and really enjoyed all three books, which I would recommend to anyone.

Learning, learning, learning...then beach

Leaving the Spray Tunnel after a delicious breakfast of pancakes and fried eggs, we backtracked to Zeehan and spent three hours at the extensive local museum reading about all of the old mining towns we passed through on the previous day.  While the towns, which didn’t appear particularly prosperous when we drove through, had been a downer, it was even sadder to see what thriving communities they had once been. 

The Gaiety Theatre in Zeehan, one of the largest in the WORLD when it was built around 1900 with 1,000 seats, didn’t fare so well once the entire population of the town could fill the place two times over.  Fortunately, it’s been absorbed into the museum, like every other artefact from about a 200 mile radius.  We could have stayed all day looking at photographs and reading old newspaper clippings, but fortunately Eric and I reach the point of information overload about the same time.

We stopped briefly at the Henty Dunes on the way to Strahan, but they didn’t hold a candle to the ones in Wilson’s Promontory, Victoria.  Strahan was predictably a tourist hellhole, but the museum at the visitor’s centre was fantastic.  It drew a really vivid picture of what it was like to be a convict at nearby Macquarie Heads/Sarah Island.  While certainly some of the convicts had committed offenses, even the most serious crime doesn’t fit the punishment of deportation to such a remote, inhospitable place to be used as slave labour, not to mention the physical conditions and violence to which the men were subjected.  Essentially, the convicts were moved here to extract the valuable Huon Pine, although even that enterprise ran at a loss given the resistance and poor health of the undernourished, maltreated workers.  From what I’ve read, most of them weren’t even serious criminals; it was just a matter of England needing a way to rid themselves of what they viewed as a dangerous underclass once the US won independence and Georgia was no longer an option.

The other main focus of the museum was the local movement to stop the damming of the Gordon River.  While the museum fairly presented the fact that a struggling local population with desperately high unemployment wanted the jobs construction of a dam would bring, and on a larger scale the Tasmanian government wanted to continue the momentum of dam construction projects across the state, it certainly took the side of the winners: the conservationists.

I hadn’t realised what a conservative environment Tasmania, and I imagine much of Australia although possibly to a lesser extent, was even into the 1980s.  It seems like such a more liberal place than the US these days, particularly after what seems like a backslide into fundamentalism in recent years. 

The conservationist movement to save the river was really the first organised protest movement in the state and launched the Greens, the political party that would dominate Tasmanian politics for two decades to come.  A snippet in the museum referred to the fact that homosexuality was illegal in Tasmania until something horrific like 1988, and I wondered if the spirit of protest started by the conservationists sparked a bit of a revolution in this tiny island state.

It was tough to imagine the harsh conditions of convict times today, though, as Eric and I spent six hours walking along a 14 km beach in full sunshine, taking two hours out to sit in a protected grove of trees atop a 30 m sand dune whilst we ate lunch and read.  While it’s still gorgeous weather at the moment, this area is known to be cold, miserable, and rainy most of the time. (I must remind myself of this when our luck doesn’t hold at some later part of the trip – hopefully not the Overland Track).

We did find a heap of whale bones.  Although impressive in size outside of a museum, it was sad to think that a whole pod of whales must have washed up along here. 

Now we’re settling in for a second night camping at Macquarie Heads.  Although about 15 km down a rutted dirt road and pretty basic in terms of facilities, it’s a very popular spot, particularly with fishers, since you can drive down the 30 km or so of beach.  There are some freaky people who clearly live here full time in some kind of bogan fantasy, as well as some kind of religious group.  Last night about sunset, a group of about seven ladies in bonnets and long dresses walked by, something I haven’t seen since leaving the US.  I guess there’s fundamentalism everywhere, just in different proportions.

It’s so nice to spend two nights in the same place and really settle in.  It’s funny that even a week in, I already found myself today looking at today’s entertainment relative to other days instead of to work.  Any other Tuesday in the past 15 years, I would have killed to spend the day walking on the beach, but today it just seemed normal.