Nota Bene

By way of a preface:

Without looking on the Internet, who can tell me which is bigger: the Moon or Australia?

This is the first in a mini-series of posts on Kimberley, Australia!

I’d heard a lot about this place. That it’s impressively beautiful, with scenic landscapes and fantastic views. But that it’s also huge, hard to reach, sparsely populated, and has almost no roads. Plus it’s red hot all year round because it’s in the tropics. All that turned out to be true, but all the same, hardly anyone really knew much about Kimberley because they’d never been there. Folks had heard this or that about it, but no one could give me the real scoop on where to go or what to see.

So it was my job to lead the scouting party. We recently spent three days in and around Broome, and now I know almost everything about the place – and I’m eager to share this knowledge :).

Everything I saw and snapped and touched made a big impression on me, so I’ll write about all the main bits in stand-alone installments in no particular order.  If you want you could read them all later and piece the jigsaw together for yourself; it’ll be worth it.

So…

Australia is stupendously massive. The country’s dimensions are around 4000 km from western edge to eastern edge, and 3000 from north to south. That’s almost the distance from Brest on the Atlantic coast of France to the Urals in Russia across, and just ~500 km less than the distance between the top tip of Finland down to Athens, Greece vertically. In effect, the territory of Australia is pretty much equivalent to the whole of Europe.

Australia’s ‘waist line’ is slightly larger than the Moon’s diameter. The Moon, unlike Australia, can be routinely visible to all inhabitants of Earth who, if only occasionally, direct the optical system incorporated into their heads up into the sky :).

But this stat might really shock you: the Moon is almost 3500 km in diameter – which is 500 km less than the fattest bulge on Australia’s ‘waist’!

Read on: a small town spread across a huge territory…

I’d been wanting to get to Scotland for ages, and just recently I finally made it. But it was only for two days in St Andrews, and although those were a super two days, they hardly equaled ‘doing’ Scotland. Far too short a stay. A proper trip to Scotland requires several days touring the country, driving around lochs, walking in the mountains. Oh yes, Scotland has plenty of mountains. When the plane took off I could clearly see the snow-clad peaks far away to the north. Alas, they’ll have to wait for next time.

Scottish scenery – it’s just crying out to be your desktop wallpaper. Have a look!:

Read on: I don’t need to say much here – the photos tell the story…

What are the differences between a chilly Australian winter and a hot Scottish whisky summer?

There are plenty, but the main ones are: First, here in bonnie Scotland – at least on the eastern side where we were last week – there are no palm trees to be seen out the window. Second, the sun moves in the opposite direction, and does so very slowly: it gets dark around 10pm and gets light around 4-5am. Sure, it’s at a latitude of 56 degrees north after all!

Anyway, here we were in sunny St Andrews in Scotland, United Kingdom!

Read on: Green and pleasant land…

What are the chances of Hell ever freezing over, or, in the meantime, a cat surviving a short stay there? That’s right, slim at best.

Now, I would have thought there’d be similarly slim chances of seeing a car with Russian ’41’ plates – that’s Kamchatka folks, far-eastern Russia, next to Japan – on the cobbled roads of the Kaliningrad region – right at the other end of the world’s longest country some dozen time zones away. But I was recently proved wrong. Extremely unlikely sightings do occur…:

’41’; must be on the run

Once I saw some motorbikes with German plates on the island of Crete. More than 1000km from home! EH?

And just occasionally UK plates – white on the front, yellow on the back – are to be seen in Moscow. That sure is some distance to cover.

Surprised? Intrigued? Impressed? You… shouldn’t be…

…For this is what I saw the other day:

‘Extreme Duty Winch’ – on an extreme duty Benz!

Yes folks, these photos were taken last week – not in, say, Saxony, Germany – but in Sydney, Australia! These Merc G-Classes were parked up outside the Shangri-La hotel there. Maybe Hell will one day freeze over – or at least fit central heating in the bed & breakfasts there to keep visiting felines warm…

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!

So, how on earth – or in (freezing) Hell – did they get there?

On a ship: from Italy via the Suez canal, across the Indian Ocean, around Australia and to Sydney?

Or overland: via Poland, Russia, Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Papua, and then on a ferry to northern Oz, and then cross-country-desert?

Or maybe the more boring route: via Greece, Turkey, Syria (hmmm, maybe not), Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India, Myanmar, and so on?

// Or maybe they were just playing silly beggars and put German plates on locally purchased and registered Mercedes? Naah, surely not. The customized bits and bobs added to these vehicles (e.g., the contraption on one of the roofs), all that road (desert?) grime… Naah.

So how did they get here? A mystery. What do you think?  Any ideas?

G’day maties!…

Each year at the end of May through early June, Sydney goes all visually vivid of a night. Vivid Sydney comes to town – a festival of ‘light, music and ideas’ with lots more besides. It kinda takes over the whole city: The famous Opera House gets all hallucinatory, there’s a laser show in Darling Harbour, and buildings and bridges get made over with bizarre visuals projected onto them.

Read on: Popular means hordes of folks…

In the southern hemisphere – of course including Australia, where I was last week – June 1 is the first day of winter. Down under it’s hardly gonna be all snow drifts, frozen-over lakes and -40 degrees temperatures or anything, but it can still get relatively cold at night. The nightly average minimum temperature at this time of year in northwestern Australia is 15 degrees centigrade, but that’s only the average; in some places there can be night frosts. In Oz!! All the same, by day, hardly wintry in the town of Broome in Kimberley:

Read on: In the middle of nowhere…

I love to play pranks, act daft, or just play like a kid – especially when the following are present: a large friendly group of like-minded revelers and a real special location.

Just recently both those ingredients were indeed present – and in full effect. It was the evening after one of our partner conferences – for the first time in Venice.

Read on: Everyone in aristocratic grab…

After a very long but perfectly pleasant drive along a coast road extraordinaire, we finally arrived in Venice! Here, as per usual, it was a mixture of a lot of business and a lot of pleasure (the latter meaning inspecting places of interest, for all you jumping to the wrong conclusions!). Also as per, I’ll not go into the useful though boring business bit; I’ll dive straight into the juicy pleasure bit. And juicy it was; a succulent adventure into the avant-garde of the bizarre world of modern art…

Modern art – it’s a… divisive topic.

From the point of view of modern art’s consumer, or observer, it can invoke utter delight and rapture just as much as it can indignation and disgust. It can be thoroughly appreciated as true to the ideals of the avant-garde aesthetic, as much as leave the beholder utterly flabbergasted and even angered at the absurdity of some of the exhib(sh)its on display.

It’s not only divisive; it can get confusing too. What’s high art, what is pure BS? What’s an exhibit, what are fixtures and fittings of the building the exhibition is housed in, like a ventilator, a trash can, some ongoing repairs to the roof, a plug in a wall socket?

The latter sometimes needs a placard saying ‘this is a plug plugged into a wall socket; it is a work of art of our electrician’, otherwise the ‘connoisseurs’ might take it for a modern kunst masterpiece. Then there’s stuff like Malevich’s Black Square – a plug-in-a-socket if ever there was one; no matter: folks have kept traveling from all over the world to see it in the flesh in Tretyakovskaya for several decades.

What have I just been saying? :)

Read on: First impressions? Can you guess?…

A long time ago I set myself a ‘must-do’ for the next time I’m in Southern France/Northern Italy by the sea. I’d just completed a night drive from Nice to Genoa along the E80. That drive was fantastic. Like Crockett’s night-time speeding along empty Miami streets of a night: no cars, great road, great car, great music… but no views due to the lack of sunlight.

The road skirts the northern edges of a sea – not the Mediterranean – the Ligurian. Never heard of it? You’re not the only one.

Anyway, years passed, but my must-do remained. Now, finally, at last, that must-do has turned into a ‘had to, and did do’, and a very satisfactory one at that.

What a road. Smooth as a baby’s bottom, not much traffic, nice bridges and tunnels, plus good drivers who know their highway code and observe lane discipline. The main thing though: the views. To the right – Ligurian loveliness. To the left – impossible Italian impressiveness. Rolling hills, the sea, the cute villages, the castles atop peaks and along the coast.

Read on: a truly must-drive…

Watching the F-1 Grand Prix in Monaco is of course a great idea. But first of all you have to get there.

Turns out that’s no easy task when Formula-One comes to town. If you get there before the main race, which is what we did – that’s fairly ok, but trying to get into the city state on the day of the race – that’s when things get tricky. Apparently there are that many roads closed in and around the center of town that’s it’s practically impossible to move around in a car, or, if possible – tediously time-consuming. Just keep it in mind next time you might be in the south of France when it’s F-1 weekend.

As for us, the walk from the hotel to the yacht we rented moored next to the racetrack should take just 15 minutes. But even that took much longer as everything was closed to death even for pedestrians. It seemed there were just two other options to get round this Monte-Carlo-lockdown-syndrome – either to spend the night on the yacht (hmmm, not such a bad idea), or to get to the yacht on a small motorboat. Only the former option – sleeping on the yacht – is workable, we found out: because even on a small motorboat you get caught up in traffic – in a boat-jam!!

In short, next year, I think we’ll make the yacht our base – for both sleeping on and watching the action from :).

Read on: everything covered with F-1 fans…