Nature – Page 17 – the heart thrills

BACK OF BEYOND

Beijing, 15 October 2013

I’m just back from a business trip to Haixi prefecture, which is the remotest prefecture of that remote Chinese province, Qinghai. Squeezed between its better-known neighbours Xinjian, Gansu, Sichuan, and Tibet, Qinghai doesn’t get much press, which is a pity. To my mind, it’s one of China’s most beautiful provinces. Here’s a picture we took out on the grasslands when my wife and I, together with our son, went there a couple of years ago.

As for Haixi prefecture, it hardly gets a mention at all in the world’s press. This is a great pity, because it’s a seriously beautiful part of the world; on the desertic side, but I like that kind of landscape.

My colleague and I were there to study what we could do to help the prefectural authorities build up a local brand in the organic production of wolfberries (we seem to be getting a reputation for agro-processing). I can perfectly understand it if my readers have never heard of wolfberries. Neither had I until I came to China and found them floating in various soups during banquets. But our ignorance is our loss. Wolfberries have had an honourable place in Chinese cuisine – and traditional medicine – for the last 2,000 years.

If one has seen them at all, it’s probably as dry berries

although this is how we saw them during our trip, fresh

on bushes in plantations

OK, I probably shouldn’t say this, since one of the things the Haixi authorities would like us to help them with is to get fresh wolfberries into supermarkets, but I can’t say that I’m particularly impressed by the wolfberry. If I were standing in the fruit aisle of my local supermarket and had to choose between wolfberries and, say, blueberries, I would choose the latter every time. But hey, I’m not Chinese; they would probably make the opposite decision.

In any case, I will not dwell on the wolfberry, because my attention was captured by something else altogether. Haixi has a lot of sun – 300 days of sun a year, we were told. So quite sensibly, the government has bet on a solar power future for Qinghai. As we drove from wolfberry plantation to wolfberry plantation, and after passing several large photovoltaic arrays, we drew up here:

This, my friends, is a concentrated solar power plant (or at least one version of such). The hundreds of mirrors on the ground focus the sun’s rays on the luminous white spot at the top of the column. That spot is a boiler where the heat of the sun turns water into steam, which is then used to generate electricity. I tried to capture the beauty of that ethereally, whitely glowing spot of concentrated solar rays, but my iPhone camera simply wasn’t up to it. So I’ve added the only other photo I’ve found on the web of this plant.

And I add photos of similar plants in other parts of the world. This one is near Seville in Spain

While this is one was in California’s Mojave desert (it was demolished a few years ago).

Not clear if this approach will ever generate electricity cheaply enough. But who cares, like Concord, another technological has-been

it’s beautiful.

Soon after this brush with the ultra-modern, we came across a picture as ancient as China itself, a line of camels padding slowly into the setting sun. I didn’t get a photo, not with my iPhone, but I show a picture of camels taken elsewhere in Qinghai.

I could have been in Tang China. I am moved to throw in a photo I took back in May in the Museum of the University of Philadelphia of Tang era sculptures of camels.

Minutes after this close encounter with the age-old, we drew up at a freshwater lake for a dinner of locally caught crabs. To whet our appetite, we were taken on a short cruise across a magically still mirror of water

as the sun dipped below the hills behind us.

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Qinghai grasslands: my son’s picture
Wolfberry-dry: http://soni.monovee.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/wolfberry.jpg
Wolfberry-fresh: http://mingmingtea.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Wolfberry_extract.jpg
Wolfberry-bush and fresh berry: http://images04.olx.com/ui/2/98/54/13309454_2.jpg
CSP-1: my photo
CSP-2 : http://res.heraldm.com/content/image/2013/08/01/20130801000653_0.jpg
CSP Spain: http://www.finetubes.co.uk/uploads/images/gemasolar-2011-2_low_res.jpg
CSP California: http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/images/solar_two_barstow.jpg
Concord: http://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/images/news/concorde-will-take-to-the-skies-again-21839_1.jpg
Camels: http://m1.i.pbase.com/g1/62/942562/2/146679881.nWrkycH7.jpg
Tang camels: my photo
Lake views: my photo

NOTES ON AUSTRALIA – UPPER MURRAY RIVER

Beijing, 8 October 2013

After a quick visit to Canberra and its museums, which I covered in my last post, we were on our way to the Snowy Mountains and beyond. Since I want to focus on the beyond, I’ll quickly slip through the mountains part. It wasn’t quite that easy in practice. Our plan was to drive along the Alpine Way, but when we got to Jindabyne, we discovered that the Way was closed after Thredbo because of a massive landslide. What to do? After poring over the map, we decided to loop through the mountains to the north and rejoin the Alpine Way just before Corryong.

And so we found ourselves, without really planning it, in the upper reaches of the Murray River. I have to tell you, it was absolutely, absolutely lovely. Maybe we were lucky with the season, with spring being in full swing. It certainly helped that we had clear, sunny days. Here’s a series of photos I took with my iPhone. Hopefully, they can give readers a sense of the sheer beauty of the landscape that we had wandered into.

You can see the Snowy Mountains in the distance, while the river in the foreground is the Murray River and the ponds are the famous billabongs which I mentioned in my first Australian post.

When I saw this landscape after our drive through the relatively dry eastern side of the Snowy Mountains and the forests of Kosciuszko National Park, I could not stop myself from thinking biblically. Up popped the Old Testament story of the Israelites who come back to Moses after exploring Canaan and exclaim, “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey!” Milk and honey … that certainly describes the land we saw before us. William Blake’s Jerusalem also came to mind:
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

My wife’s first thought had instead a whiff of the pagan. It reminded her, she said, of Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit.

Whatever the reference, it was certainly very beautiful.

After spending a night in Corryong, and getting some good advice on which road to take from a very nice lady at the local information centre (I have to say, these information centres gave us excellent service everywhere we went), we set off along a small road which hugged the Murray River. It was all very peaceful.

We watched a local farmer and his family herd in cows and their calves for marking, as they bellowed mightily against this corralling, and had a long chat with them about the future of farming. We watched Australian white ibises, which we had last seen in Sydney as scavengers, fly regally over our heads, while sulphur-crested cockatoos crossed our path with a slow and sensuous flap of their wings.

We finally reached Lake Hume. At first, it was the drowned trees which struck us

then it was the pelicans, which were swimming among the trees

The last time I had seen pelicans was as a child in St. James’s park …

Then the lake broadened out.

We followed the lakeshore until Albury. Thereafter, the landscape got drier, flatter and less interesting so I’ll skip the final day.

Finally, it was time to drive back to Sydney. We decided to pass through Corryong again; we had liked it so much. We had one last vision of wondrous drifts of wildflowers in the fields

before we headed up through Tumbarumba and Tumut to the Hume Highway. Next stop, Sydney Airport and then Beijing. Sigh!

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Hobbit: http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/the-hobbit-movie-48-fps.jpg
Sulphur-crested cockatoo: http://www.zoo.org.au/sites/default/files/styles/zv_carousel_large/public/sulphur-crest-cockatoo-animal-profile-web620.jpg?itok=dXPfOmk5
all other photos: mine

NOTES ON AUSTRALIA – KANGAROOS

Beijing, 3 October 2013

If there is one thing which is as Australian as the eucalyptus (see my previous post), it has to be the kangaroo. In fact, it’s even more Australian! As I pointed out in the last post, a few eucalyptus species exist which are not native to Australia. On the other hand, no kangaroo species exist outside of Australia.

Not only are kangaroos very Australian, they are also pretty weird. The first Europeans to reach Australia immediately noticed them. How could they not? There was nothing like them anywhere else in the world. Here is the first entry that Joseph Banks, the botanist aboard James Cook’s HMS Enterprise, made in his diary about kangaroos:

“Quadrupeds we saw but few and were able to catch few of them that we did see. The largest was calld by the natives Kangooroo. It is different from any European and indeed any animal I have heard or read of except the Gerbua of Egypt, which is not larger than a rat when this is as large as a midling Lamb; the largest we shot weighd 84 lb. It may however be easily known from all other animals by the singular property of running or rather hopping upon only its hinder legs carrying its fore bent close to its breast; in this manner however it hops so fast that in the rocky bad ground where it is commonly found it easily beat my grey hound, who tho he was fairly started at several killd only one and that quite a young one.”

In his diary, James Cook was somewhat more prosaic:

“Saturday, 23^rd June … One of the Men saw an Animal something less than a greyhound; it was of a Mouse Colour, very slender made, and swift of Foot. … Sunday, 24^th June … I saw myself this morning, a little way from the Ship, one of the Animals before spoke off; it was of a light mouse Colour and the full size of a Grey Hound, and shaped in every respect like one, with a long tail, which it carried like a Grey hound; in short, I should have taken it for a wild dog but for its walking or running, in which it jumpd like a Hare or Deer. Another of them was seen to-day by some of our people, who saw the first; they described them as having very small Legs, and the print of the Feet like that of a Goat; but this I could not see myself because the ground the one I saw was upon was too hard, and the length of the Grass hindered my seeing its legs.”

Folk back home in Europe had only the vaguest of ideas of what this strange animal looked like. A few years after Cook’s visit to Australia, Joseph Banks requested George Stubbs, better known as the painter of rich men’s horses, to paint a kangaroo. This is what Stubbs came up with, on the basis of various skeletons, some rough sketches, some verbal descriptions, and a kangaroo skin which Banks had brought back to the UK:

And this, through prints and other disseminations, was the only picture the Brits had for many years of the kangaroo.

Europeans found this animal weirdly fascinating. It didn’t walk or run, for Lord’s sake, but bounded along! Like a hare. Or maybe a deer. Or actually more like a frog. And what was this story about some of them having two heads? Whoever was making these claims had either imbibed too much rum or was spinning tall tales (well, they were either convicts, or sailors, or soldiers: all dodgy types, right?). And then it became clear that the tale of two heads was actually true, but only because mothers carried their young in a pouch. In a pouch, for Lord’s sake!

And they boxed!

All this made the kangaroo even more fascinatingly weird.

Of course, we have the advantage of having grown up with the weirdness, which makes the strange familiar. Yeah, sure, the kangaroo bounds, so what’s the big deal? It boxes? Ho-hum. And its mothers have a pouch in which to put their kids? Sensible design idea, don’t we do that now? (I did)

But we definitely weren’t blasé about the idea of coming nose to nose with a kangaroo. Our interest was already heightened at the airport in Beijing when we were waiting to board our flight to Sydney. We started chatting to a couple of Australians who had just finished touring China, and when we told them we would be hiring a car they warned us to be careful about running into kangaroos, especially at dusk. Were they that common, we asked? Oh yes, they replied, and hitting them made a mess of your car. Ah.

So of course the first time we saw this sign on the side of the road as we drove out of Sydney

we began to scan the sides of the road with growing excitement. But it was only when we had crossed our fords and were wending our way to the King’s Highway to be on our way to Canberra that we saw our first kangaroos!

They saw us too and kept a wary eye on us. At some point, they started bounding off across the grass into the trees. Now, I’ve known all my life that kangaroos bound but let me tell you, nothing prepares you for the actual experience. You see this really quite big animal hunch over and start bouncing along just like a rubber ball, and with a very smooth motion. It’s lovely.

We saw kangaroos a number of other times over the rest of our trip, and always this wonderful sight of them bounding along.

But all too soon as we drove up King’s Highway, we saw another, and grimmer, reality – dead kangaroos, killed by vehicles

My wife reckons that we saw more dead kangaroos along the side of the road than live ones. I think she’s right.

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George Stubbs’s kangaroo: http://cdn.50up.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/The-Kongouro-from-New-Hol-010.jpg
Kangaroo and joey: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Kangaroo_and_joey03.jpg
Snuggly pouch: http://img.diytrade.com/cdimg/863429/8193309/0/1236395200/snugli_baby_carriers_nojo_baby_carrier_baby_carrier_reviews.jpg
Kangaroos boxing: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7050/6843889051_d1e4ea5e91_z.jpg
Kangaroo sign: http://aphs.worldnomads.com/kiwiaoraki/6858/Australia_Pictures_2_993.jpg
Bounding kangaroos: http://createwolstonpark.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/bounding-kangaroos.jpg?w=847
Dead kangaroos: http://yaldapashai.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/dsc0191.jpg
remaining picture: mine

NOTES ON AUSTRALIA – THE EUCALYPTUS

Beijing, 2 October 2013

In my previous post my wife and I were driving down the coast just south of Sydney. I should point out that during the drive, while we were keeping one eye on the sea to our left we had the other eye fixed on the forests of eucalyptus on our right. They clothe the upper reaches of the Great Dividing Range which runs parallel to the coast. Both of us found these forests of eucalyptus fascinating.

What is more Australian than the eucalyptus? My favourite source of information, Wikipedia, informs me that of the 700-plus species of eucalyptus, only 15 occur outside of Australia and only 9 of these do not also occur in Australia. So Australia is Eucalyptus-land. But we humans have carried it out of Australia. The tree which destroyed my bed of nasturtiums when I was a child was a eucalyptus. This was in Eritrea, and the eucalyptus was brought there by the Italians when it was an Italian colony. One of my memories of that period was taking a walk with my English grandmother through a plantation of eucalyptuses. The crackling of the dry leaves on the ground as we walked over them, that typical scent of eucalyptus, my pulling off the bark hanging from the trees – all this I still, more than 50 years later, remember vividly. Since then, I’ve always had a fondness for the eucalyptus, even though its being taken out of its natural Australian ecosystems has been criticized: an “invasive water-sucker”, it’s been rudely called. All my life, I have seen it dotted around parks and along streets, the last time in Sausalito when we went to visit our son in San Francisco.

So it was with pleasurable interest that I was finally meeting the eucalyptus on its home turf.

I mentioned in my last post our drive through Heathcote National Park. That was our first taste of a forest of eucalyptuses. But we wanted more. So when we decided to leave the coast for Canberra, I thought we could first swing through Brooman State Forest down to the Clyde River and then follow the river until we got to the King’s Highway, which would take us up to Canberra. Based on the maps I had, I thought we would be taking small but asphalted roads the whole way. Wrong! Almost immediately we found ourselves on a dirt road which given our little Micra made me somewhat nervous. My levels of nervousness increased geometrically as the road got progressively rougher. And then we arrived at an intersection not marked on my map. Which way to go? After a moment of hesitation, I indicated a direction to my wife. As we drove deeper into the forest, and as signs of human presence quickly disappeared, my wife became more cheerful while my forebodings grew. While she exclaimed at the beautiful things we were passing I began to mentally review various nightmare scenarios we could be facing: we would run out of petrol, we would run off the road, something under the car would break, a tree would fall on us … Then the road started running downwards and suddenly we found ourselves at a ford. We had to drive through the Clyde River! The ford was 50 metres long, at least!! I stared aghast; this was not among the nightmare scenarios I had envisioned. Could we get across? My wife got out, took off her shoes, and waded in. Yes, yes, she said, you can make it. I looked at the height of the water on her calves and hoped that she was right. After a short prayer I started driving across, leaving my wife to wade over behind me.

We made it, for me a huge relief, for my wife a huge enjoyment, with her merrily taking photos left and right as she waded across the river.

I thought that was it. But we had to ford three more streams feeding into the river! At the last, I really thought we had had it, the water was considerably deeper than even at the river. But an angel was with us and we made it across. Thereafter, the road got better and I could relax and get into the mood of things. The road was a delight

the river was lovely

Gazing down on it I could almost imagine what this country must have looked like to the first European immigrants who arrived here, before they started changing the landscape to make it look more like what they knew back home.

We came across more eucalyptus forests as we crossed the Snowy Mountains after Canberra, and slowly a thought formed in both our minds. My wife put it very well when she said one day that eucalyptus trees look dusty. So true! The green of eucalyptuses is indeed a very dull green, the sort of green you see on trees lining a dirt road where passing cars throw up clouds of dust. I was pleased to see a comment in the museum we visited in Canberra, to the effect that the first European painters had been perplexed by the green of the local trees, which to their eyes was dull and quite unlike the bright greens of the trees they were used to in the UK (They were also perplexed by trees that didn’t shed their leaves but shed their bark. That doesn’t bother me so much; effects of globalization, I suppose).

It’s nice to know that we had the same reaction in 2013 as a bunch of Brits 200 years ago did when also on their first visit to Australia.

Next post I’ll deal with another very Australian thing, the kangaroo.

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Early Australian art: http://www.myplace.edu.au/verve/_resources/Early_Colonial_Art_1830_page.jpg

Other pictures: mine and my wife’s

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NOTES ON AUSTRALIA – GRAND PACIFIC DRIVE

Beijing, 2 October 2013

Welcome back to these notes on the trip my wife and I made to Australia. Our stay in Sydney is covered in the previous post.

After Sydney we moved south. This meant hiring a car, and we got ourselves a bright red Micra

It’s a snug little car which was just the right size for me, my wife, and three pieces of luggage (which ended up being five after we had bought things in the local supermarkets which we can’t get in Beijing). Initially, we faced the challenge of driving on the left-hand side of the road. This is one of the less useful things which Australia has inherited from the UK. I passed my driving test in Scotland and so started my driving life driving on the left, but the vast majority of my driving since then has been on the right. As for my wife, she’s never really driven on the left. So there was a bit of tension at the beginning, especially as we had to drive out of Sydney during a busy period. But we quickly got the hang of it and thereafter we had no problems – except for two things: we systematically put the windscreen wipers on when we wanted to signal a right or left turn (because the positions of the two levers were the reverse of their positions in “normal” cars); and when we turned right at an intersection we had a tendency of ending up on the right hand side of the road. But no worries! As you can see, we have survived to tell the tale.

Our initial plan was to drive down the coast towards Melbourne, along the Prince’s Highway, and then turn inland whenever it was time to start heading back to Sydney and its airport. I should explain why we chose to do this. Some five years ago, in a lodge located on a tributary to the Amazon River not too far from Manaus

we met an Australian and had one of those conversations you always have when meeting fellow-travellers: swapping notes on places travelled and things to see. The conversation inevitably turned to Australia, and he told us to go to Sydney and then drive along the coast. He wrote it all down on a paper napkin, which we carefully kept – but alas, that paper napkin is in storage in Vienna! When we were planning this trip we were trying to remember if he had told us to drive south or north from Sydney. For reasons which I cannot now remember, we plumped for going south. But this turned out to be not such a good idea. Contrary to what we had expected, we found the coast ho-hum. It was terribly built up, the sea-shores offered the usual sea-related touristy stuff, and most of the towns we passed through were suffering from ugly strip development. There were three bright spots in the gloom. The first was a highly enjoyable drive through Heathcote National Park just south of Sydney, where we saw massed Eucalyptus trees close up for the first time in our lives

After which we landed up on the Grand Pacific Drive. This road hugs the coast for some 20 kilometers, so we got wonderful views of the coast in the dying hours of the day.

The second bright spot was the few hours we spent on Jervis Bay, which has the most amazingly white sand (and very clear water – but bloody cold, at least when we were there).

The third bright spot was our dinner at Batehaven, next to Bateman’s Bay. We had an excellent fish and chips (at a place called Berny’s – pass the word). In contrast to driving on the left, fish-’n-chips is one of the more useful things which Australia has inherited from the UK.

We ate it sitting at a table in the city park with the sea in front of us, lingeringly licked our fingers when it was all wolfed down, and then walked along the beach under a waning moon. Wonderful.

But all this was not enough to keep us from abandoning the coast. We decided on a rapid change of plan: make a brief trip to Canberra to visit a museum and then head for the Snowy Mountains. But before we did that, we went for a little ride through the Benandarah State Forest. This ride, and what we found there, will be the subject of my next post.

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Red Micra: http://images.cardekho.com/images/car-images/large/Nissan/nissan-micra/05-nissan-micra-brick-red.jpg
Lodge in the Amazon: http://www.jumalodge.com/gallery/2012/2.jpg
Eucalyptus forest: http://www.elrst.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/eucalyptus-forest.jpeg
The coast along the Grand Pacific Drive: my picture
Jervis bay: http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/70/a6/66/jervis-bay.jpg
Bernys: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-dRGLeO8Kuw8/UhBa4uMijTI/AAAAAAABGmQ/afHL9AEl4Qs/s0/DSC03108.JPG

NOTES ON AUSTRALIA – SYDNEY

Beijing, 1 October 2013

G’day cobbers! My wife and I are just back from a short holiday in Australia – the first time either of us have visited the country.

OK, let me say right up front that I am indulging in some revolting ethnic typing here. No-one during our trip said either “g’day” or “cobber” to us. Maybe in the small part of Australia we visited – Sydney, the coast immediately to the south of it, Canberra, and the Snowy Mountains – people don’t use these expressions, but the fact is no-one said them. Sorry about that!

But they did use a number of expressions which sounded odd to my English ear. “No worries”, used the same way I would use “you’re welcome”, as in “thank you”, “no worries”. “See you later” at the end of a conversation, even if there was no chance in hell of ever seeing the other person again. “How’s it going today?” at the beginning of a conversation, where I would merely say “hello” – the Americans have the same habit; I’ve never known how to respond to this. They obviously don’t want to hear a catalogue of my ills, so should I just say “fine”, even if I’m feeling like death warmed up? And should I in turn ask them how it’s going for them? That seems the logical – and civil – thing to do, but the few times I’ve done it my American or Australian interlocutors have seemed rather startled.

Then there were words used in normal conversation which I’ve only heard as Australian exotica. Take “billabong”, for instance, which I’d only ever heard in the song “Waltzing Mathilda” (“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong, Under the shade of a coolibah tree” etc.). But after hearing several people talk about billabongs, I plucked up the courage to ask what they were exactly. (FYI, they are isolated ponds left behind after a river changes course; we saw many of them on the upper reaches of the Murray River – more on that later. Now I have to find out what a coolibah tree is ..)

And of course there was the accent. Though distinctive, it wasn’t that hard for us to decipher. But for several nights in a row I did try to figure out, through endless repetition with my mouth in various shapes, how the Australians were forming their O’s, as in “no” or “go”. My wife eventually ordered me to halt my dreadful drones, or else. The New Zealand accent is much harder to follow, as my wife and I discovered a few years ago when we visited that country. I quickly got into the habit of standing next to her whenever she asked a New Zealander a question, because there was a 99% chance she wouldn’t understand the answer whereas in my case it was only 60%, so I could step in to continue the conversation and not have us standing there smiling uncertainly at the responder.

If I start with these linguistic considerations, it’s because the language we heard during our trip typifies my feelings about Australia: so much was deeply familiar, yet so much was quite strange. This continuing counterpoint between the familiar and the strange accompanied us throughout our trip.

We started our trip in Sydney, emerging bleary-eyed from our overnight flight to a sunny, beautifully clear, fresh day, conditions which we had pretty much for the whole trip. Ah, those clear, intensely blue skies! After all the misty, foggy, smoggy days we had endured in Beijing, we couldn’t stop remarking with wonder on the blueness of the sky, and on the clarity, the sharpness of the air.

Our first port of call was – had to be – the Sydney Opera House down at the harbour. The path we chose to get there took us through the city’s botanic gardens: shades of Kew Gardens in London, so familiar to me after multiple visits there as a child with my grandmother. A familiarity made that much stronger by the Worthy Civic Buildings like Government House and the Art Gallery of New South Wales which lie along the gardens’ edges and which obviously belong to that class of British official buildings which clutter up Imperial London and dot the cities of the ex-British colonies. But the gardens also had a more exotic flavour, planted as they are with Australian species I had never seen before; look at this tree, for instance, with its shaggy bark. My wife and I gawked at it, never having seen anything quite like it. It’s a Prickly Leaved Tea Tree, by the way.

And look at these really odd birds, with their curiously curved long thin beaks, which populated the gardens.

They played the familiar role of pigeons in a park, padding cautiously around people sitting or lying on the grass and looking out for any crumbs or left-overs to pick up, as this photo by someone else amply demonstrates.

They went about their business in a much more dignified manner than pigeons, though; aristocrats fallen on hard times compared to pigeons’ scabby lumpen-proletarianism. I later learned that this is the Austalian white ibis.

To enter the gardens we first had to walk down Victoria Street, which was lined with magnificent plane trees – the familiar – but also rows of two-floor houses with verandahs running the length of the second floor – very foreign to our eyes.

My wife saw a resemblance to houses we had seen ages ago in Savannah, Georgia. To me, they had something of the Caribbean or the Latin American, or maybe the South-East Asian. Certainly not English. We saw similar houses in other parts of old Sydney. I wonder where their design came from?

This road threw up another delight, this flowering plant which we later saw in a number of other places.

My wife and I had never seen this plant before, but it reminded us powerfully of the flowering agave plant which we often see when we go down to the sea in Italy.

And so eventually, after these various detours, we came to the Sydney Opera House.

What a magnificent, magnificent building! All the more stunning because of its position in the harbour, its white sails, or wings, or shells, picked out against blue: blue skies above, blue waters below.

We came back to it again and again, with a ride on one of the harbour’s many ferries …

… with a concert one evening (where we were served up a strange medley of Wagnerian themes), which allowed us to see the building at night …

… and finally with a tour of the whole complex, where I discovered to my surprise that the shells are not plain whitened concrete as I had imagined but are covered with ceramic tiles of different shades of white, and with different degrees of shine, very beautiful to look at close up.

The Opera House is undoubtedly a marvel, alone worth the trip. It is truly unique, I cannot think of any building anywhere quite like it (incidentally, the story of its construction is also dramatic, full of clashes between huge egoes, of back-stabbings, of bad-mouthings, and of a final dramatic denouement; worthy of an opera). I cannot say the same of that other architectural icon in Sydney, the Harbour Bridge. Perhaps its construction was an engineering feat in its time (the 1930s), but I find all that criss-cross of thick, black iron bars horribly clunky.

It reminds me of Scotland’s Firth of Forth railway bridge

the ugly duckling to the later Firth of Forth road bridge, with its beautiful soaring lines of a classical suspension bridge.

Perhaps Sydney’s city fathers could consider a rebuild along the latter lines, or at least a make-over. I’m sure that with modern computing to help them refine the load calculations, engineers could get rid of half of that ironware and still have the bridge stay up. Just a suggestion.

I will pass over the rest of our time in Sydney, pleasant as it was. In a later post or two, I’ll come back to our visits to two of its museums when I mention our lightning visit to the Federal capital city, Canberra, and I’ll cover the rest of our trip.

See ya later!

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Ibis eating food: http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/images2/au_ibistable.jpg
flowering agave plant: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/75/Agave_at_Cape_Sounion.jpg
harbour bridge: http://www.ausmotive.com/images/MB-Sydney-Harbour-Bridge-crossing.jpg
firth of forth railway bridge: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/jpeg/firth3w.jpg
firth of forth road bridge: http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/38/3839/K3YYF00Z/posters/forth-road-bridge-built-in-1964-firth-of-forth-scotland-united-kingdom-europe.jpg
all other pictures are mine

THE TRACTOR

Beijing, 14 September 2013

In the trip to Xinjiang which I mentioned in my previous post, we were also taken to see a tractor manufacturer. Row upon row of bright new tractors greeted us as we walked into the factory’s yard

but we ignored these, headed as we were for the shed where they assembled the tractors.

It was with some relief that we exchanged the heat and light of the yard for the cool darkness of the shed interior. There, we were introduced to the plant manager, and after a hearty shaking of hands all round he launched into his exposé of all the wonderful things his factory was doing. I let his voice wash over me as I took in a yellow tractor, newly assembled, standing proud and tall before me.

And suddenly I was 14 or 15 again, standing, on a beautiful summer’s day, by the side of a tractor. I was out on the plains of Manitoba, an hour or so’s drive from Winnipeg, on a farm owned by the parents of a friend of my sister’s. The farmer was asking me if I wanted to try ploughing a field and I was saying yes. Why not? Everything is possible when you are 14 or 15.

So he gave me a quick lesson in tractor driving and ploughing, and sent me off to a distant field. And off I went, my hat cocked at a jaunty angle as I surveyed the surroundings, Lord of everything I beheld. After 10 minutes, I arrived at the field – the North American plains are very big and tractors are very slow – and there I found myself faced with an unexpected choice: there were actually two fields, one to the left and one to the right, and no fences. Which one? I hesitated, trying to remember my instructions – no mobile phones in those days, no way to check back – and eventually plumped for the field to the right.

So I started ploughing, starting as instructed at the field’s edge and going round in ever-decreasing circles until the middle was reached. By the end of the first circle, I noticed a man standing on the edge of the field. By the end of the second circle, he had walked over and signaled me to stop. He asked me politely what I was doing. Well, I was ploughing the field, I replied lamely. Yes, he responded patiently, but on whose instructions. Well, I said, and here I named my farmer host. Ah, he said, but the fact was that I was ploughing HIS field. Not that he minded, he added quickly, the field was fallow (thank God! I screamed inside of me) and no doubt it would benefit from an extra plough, but still … He pleasantly instructed me to stay still while he phoned his neighbour.

I sat there, on the tractor, with my hat at not quite such a cocky angle now, with a sense of impending doom. And indeed my farmer host came scorching over like a bat out of hell. He covered in 10 seconds in his battered old car what had taken me 10 minutes with the tractor. He bounced out, glared at me, and excused himself profusely with his neighbour, but the offended party was very gracious about it all and the situation resolved itself pleasantly.

My farmer host next turned to me and in that very deliberate and slow tone one reserves for the village idiot told me that I was meant to be ploughing the LEFT field. And to make sure that the village idiot had understood he pointed very insistently at the field in question. Suitably chastened, with my hat drooping about my ears, I headed for said field, and started again.

So there I was, circling the field, spiraling slowly – EVER so slowly; the field was very big – towards its middle. I have to tell you, ploughing is pretty boring. After about the fourth circle the novelty of it all had worn off and I was wondering how to pass the time. I tried singing, but the noise of the engine drowned out even the lustiest of my songs. I tried driving with one hand, but that palled after 2 minutes. I tried driving with one leg up on the dashboard, but that was uncomfortable. In a moment of desperation, I even thought of trying to drive sitting backwards but luckily good sense prevailed. So I was reduced to just driving, driving, driving in ever decreasing circles as the sun slowly dropped to the horizon of the endless Manitoban plains.

Ploughing the plains may be boring but the plains themselves have a strange beauty. As a boy brought up in undulating landscapes, used to cresting land-waves and finding hills rising up before me, I initially found the plains disorienting. Whenever my parents took us out for drives I never knew which way to look. But after a while I began to appreciate the way the sky was so close to the land, seeming to press down on it and you, and how you could really enjoy cloud formations in the vast, uncluttered sky of the plains. I could never get over those fields of wheat stretching off as far as the eye could see, registering on their waving surface every meander of the passing breeze …

I was nudged, the plant manager had finished his peroration. I came out of my reverie with a smile playing on my lips, which no doubt delighted the man, reinforcing his conviction that what he did was incredibly interesting. With another round of hearty handshakes, we emerged blinking into the strong sunlight and headed for the car and the next factory.

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tractors inside and outside: GUO Li
tractor and the sunset: http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4045/4482416778_f1fc6db355_z.jpg
wheat fields: https://farm5[dot]staticflickr.com/4127/4975335245_a2e33916c3_z.jpg

TOMATO WASTE

Beijing, 13 September 2013

Last week, I was up in Xinjiang (or the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, to give it its full title), where I and some colleagues were discussing possible projects and visiting some industrial plants. The most intriguing of these visits was to a plant where this welcomed you when you arrived.

Readers would be excused if, like me when I got out of the car and like my wife when I showed her this picture, they scratch their heads and ask themselves what on earth this stuff is.

Tomato waste, that’s what it is.

Yes, these are the left-overs from the process to make tomato paste, a significant industry in Xinjiang, which grows some 4 million tons of tomatoes a year. As you might imagine, with a process that basically squeezes the juice out of tomatoes for further concentration the waste consists primarily of tomato seeds and skins.

Mr. Liu, a spry septuagenarian and founder of the company, met us as we got out of the cars and led us to the exhibition room. He started by explaining that he was on the rebound with this company; he set it up after going bankrupt in a previous foray into capitalism. The business model Mr. Liu adopted in this new venture is simple but ingenious. He takes the tomato wastes off the hands of the tomato paste makers, who are glad to offload them at no cost since they don’t know what to do with them. So far so good. But he doesn’t just dump them in a convenient hole somewhere as most waste dealers still do in this part of the world. No, he works his magic on the wastes to make a whole series of new products with them.

The most important of these is tomato seed oil. Yes, you can press all those little seeds in a tomato

and make this lovely orange-colored oil

No doubt the colour comes from a combination of the gold of oil with the red of lycopene, the chemical which gives tomatoes their red colour. The oil commands premium prices from restaurateurs and others who have refined culinary tastes.

But Mr. Liu is not satisfied with just this one product. He also makes a skin tonifier from the juice squeezed out of the waste.

He told us it contains high levels of anti-oxidants, so is excellent for slowing down the aging process. As proof of this assertion, he said he was made aware of the juice’s beneficial effects by his workers who, it seems, were padding around in the juice with only sandals on and discovered that the skin of their feet was rejuvenated. I pass on this nugget of information without in any way suggesting that I believe it.

Mr. Liu also makes pills from this same juice, no doubt to encourage digestion or some such (I can’t believe the skin of our stomachs and intestines need rejuvenation).

And with everything that is left over Mr. Liu makes cattle feed. Apparently, cattle quite like tomato waste once the seeds have been removed. They clearly have refined palates.

Despite his 70 years, Mr. Liu is bubbling over with new ideas. He showed us a new silo where he will start storing the tomato left-overs so that he can process the stuff more regularly throughout the year – right now, he is forced to do a lot of processing at harvest time and to stand idle the rest of the year. I didn’t quite understand how he planned to avoid the waste from rotting; something about adopting a system used for centuries by farmers in Xinjiang to preserve their cattle feed (the translation got a bit tangled at this point). He is also planning to start processing the small, green tomatoes which are left behind in the fields at harvest time and which actually represent some 20% of the tomatoes grown. And no doubt he has other ideas up his capacious sleeves.

I really admire people like Mr. Liu. He is the embodiment of that phrase much loved in certain environmental circles, “from waste to profits”. I don’t pretend that Mr. Liu invented the process of extracting oil from tomato seeds – a rapid surf of the web after the visit showed me this (although the lotion may be his idea). But he had the courage, after a ruinous bankruptcy which left him more or less only with the clothes on his back, to set up a new business, seeing an opportunity where others would only turn up their noses. And he keeps on coming up with new products to squeeze out of his tomato wastes.

I feel duty bound, however, to report a slight hiccup in all this. A few mornings ago, my wife tersely informed me by text that the skin tonifier which I gave her to try made her smell like a tomato. For a tomato lover like myself this may actually be a plus, but for others with a more measured relationship to the tomato this news may give them pause.

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Tomato waste: my picture
Tomato seeds: http://www.fixityourself.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/SavingSeeds1.jpg
Tomato seed oil: http://www.onecoup.com/uploadfile/2011822325.jpg
Tomato tonifier: my picture

SKITTERING WATER STRIDERS

Beijing, 17 August 2013

It was flowers in the Spring. It is insects in the high summer. Because this posting, following on from my previous two on dragonflies and crickets, will be on water striders. I began to notice them a week or so ago, on my daily crossings of my piece of canal to and from work. As is my habit, I was looking over the water to see what was new, when a sudden, evanescent dimpling of the water surface caught my eye. Then there was another, and then another … No doubt about it, the water striders were out and about, skittering across the water’s skin.

I love these insects, they are part of my childhood. During those long summer holidays which my family spent in France with my grandmother – golden-hued in my memory – I spent a lot of time with my cousins biking across the countryside. In those days, there were still a lot of lavoirs, washing stations, dotted across the countryside. They were places where the women (no men, of course …) used to come to wash the family’s clothes.

They were located along a stream. Sometimes, a basin would be built alongside the stream, fed by it and discharging back into it.

But just as often, the women washed directly in the stream; if necessary, a small dam was thrown across the stream to create a pool of still water for washing.

By the time my cousins and I were biking around, the lavoirs were hardly used any more. The march of the washing machine across the landscape was underway. But the infrastructure was still largely intact. We would often stop at the lavoirs, for a rest, to splash our faces, wash our bikes if needs be – and to watch the water striders. The pools of still water which had been created for the washerwomen were very much to the striders’ liking, so they haunted these spots. With the casual cruelty of little boys, we would take a poke at the striders, watching them skim away across the water’s surface. We were fascinated by their ability to stand on water (it’s not for nothing that another name for these insects is Jesus bugs).

I’ve been boning up on water striders, primarily to understand how it is that they can stand on water. I won’t bore you with the details, but it has to do with being light, spreading this light weight over a number of legs, and having a lot of hairs on those legs. This is enough for them not to break through the water tension. Who wouldn’t like to be able to walk on water? With our weight, we can only walk – or at least sit – on mercury.

I remember being fascinated by this photo when I saw it years ago in an article in the National Geographic on mercury. Now, with everything I know about the awful effects of mercury on people, it makes me shudder profoundly.

In passing, I’ve also learnt how water striders feed. When an insect falls into the water, the strider senses its struggles through small vibrations and ripples in the water surface. It darts across to the poor thing, pierces it, and injects saliva. The enzymes in the saliva digest the victim’s tissues. The strider then sucks up the partially digested broth.

Now that I’ve totally grossed out my wife and any other normal readers, I put in this nice close-up picture.

Enjoy!

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Water spiders: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Amenbo_06f5520sx.jpg/450px-Amenbo_06f5520sx.jpg
Lavoir-historical: http://www.stleger.info/les72StLeger/region4/78.cpa/78.foret/78—oiseauxlavoir2.jpg
Lavoir-indirect: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_55S9JjX9Ot8/TO5NK1GMXsI/AAAAAAAAAZc/EZEjKoTSze4/s1600/lavoir-beaune.jpg
Lavoir-direct: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Bullion_Lavoir_de_Moutiers.JPG
Man floating on mercury: http://i.imgur.com/DfTbR.jpg
Water spider-closeup: http://img.burrard-lucas.com/united_kingdom/full/pond_skater.jpg

CHIRPING CRICKETS

Beijing, 16 August 2013

Another phenomenon of this hot and muggy season is the crickets. Every tree, every bush, every blade of grass seems to host a multitude of crickets chirping like crazy. “Chirping” does not adequately describe the thunderous noise the crickets are making. Indeed, last weekend, when my wife and I were walking along a tree-shaded street, the noise in the foliage above our heads was so loud that we both instinctively looked up, half expecting to see a giant, four-foot cricket come tumbling down onto our heads.

A little navigation around my favourite fact-checking site – Wikipedia – has informed me that only male crickets chirp – or stridulate if one wants to be formally correct. They do so for one of four reasons: to attract females (“fairly loud”); to court a nearby female (“very quiet”); to chase off other males hanging around (“aggressive”); and to celebrate a bout of successful copulation (noise levels not defined). Since the noise they are currently making is so deafening, I presume we are witnessing either the first or the third of these stridulatory chants (I sort of assume – by extension of human behaviour – that post-copulatory stridulation will be merely a contented buzz). Not surprising, really, since Wikipedia informs me that crickets mate in the late summer. I presume that every male cricket in Beijing is currently hot under the collar and on the prowl.

Wikipedia has also corrected a fundamental misunderstanding on my part. I had always thought that crickets chirp – sorry, stridulate – by rubbing their legs together. Not so! They rub their wings together. One wing has a large vein – the “stridulatory organ” – which runs along the bottom of it and is covered with teeth. By rubbing the other wing along the teeth, our friend Cricket gets his chirp. And by holding his wings up and open when he does this, he gets a loudspeaker effect. Very clever.

I am moved at this point to insert a few photos of crickets, even though I know that my wife will not appreciate them much. Creepy-crawlies are not her thing and these close-ups of crickets make them out to be quite creepy-crawly.

I suppose one of the things that foreigners – or at least Western foreigners – in China find odd is the important role which crickets have played, and continue to play, in China as pets. To be honest, I personally find it very strange that anyone would want a cricket as a pet. Don’t get me wrong, I find it admirable for people to have small pets – I think it’s ridiculous, even cruel, to have large dogs as pets in a crowded city, for instance – but I think mice is about the smallest one should reasonably go. Having an insect as a pet seems frankly contrarian, especially since their life expectancy is low to very low: for instance, an adult cricket lives about a month before it kicks the bucket, shuffles off its mortal coil, runs down the curtain, and joins the choir invisible (as John Cleese memorably put it in the Monty Python skit about the dead Norwegian parrot).

But important they have been. Over the centuries, Chinese have lovingly built cages for their cricket pets, using materials which go from the most precious to the most humble:

Jade:

Ivory:

Ceramic (this particular version has some rather naughty pictures on it):

Ox bone:

Metal:

Bamboo:

There was even a cottage industry – controlled by the Emperor’s household, presumably because it was so lucrative – in growing special gourds to be used as cricket cages:

And of course crickets have graced Chinese scrolls:

The extraordinary thing is that crickets still play a role in Chinese life. Here is a picture I took outside some pet shops in Shanghai. This is a string of cricket cages, made of humble raffia or something similar

while this is a close-up of another string, in even humbler plastic, where you can see the crickets inside, waiting for their new masters.

The Chinese even used crickets to hold cricket fights. They still do.

This I have not seen yet. I wonder if English bookies could get into this game.

And with that, I wish you goodnight through the most famous cricket of all, Jiminy Cricket:

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Green cricket: http://ezwebrus.com/wallpapers/insect/green_cricket.jpg
Brown cricket: http://www.marketwallpapers.com/wallpapers/1/wallpaper-3107.jpg
Cricket cages-jade: http://www.paulfrasercollectibles.com/upload/public/docimages/Image/h/j/p/Chinese-jade-cricket-cages-410.jpg
Cricket cage-9: http://img.carters.com.au/134198.jpg
Cricket cage-ceramic: http://www.christies.com/lotfinderimages/d48014/d4801435x.jpg
Cricket cage-ox-bone: http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00cvyQhwERqtga/Rare-Fantastic-Ox-Bone-Tiger-Design-Cricket-Cage.jpg
Cricket cage-metal: http://p2.la-img.com/1567/36700/15356320_1_l.jpg
Cricket cage-bamboo: http://www.asiantreasuries.com/cricket%20cage%20%282%29.jpg
Cricket cage-gourd: http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/11138/11502127_1.jpg?v=8CE71FC734C5BE0
Scroll with cricket-1: http://p2.la-img.com/1311/38039/16205516_1_l.jpg
Scroll with cricket-3: http://p2.la-img.com/179/30164/11744435_1_l.jpg
Cricket fighting: http://lh5.ggpht.com/-AVooPylAFsg/TrqrCxFnkwI/AAAAAAAARjY/A13FdWkEFfE/cricket-fighting-14%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800
English bookies: http://www.teara.govt.nz/files/38947-ap.jpg
Jiminy Cricket: http://www.waouo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/jiminycricket-236×576.jpg