Diving with Sharks

One of the aspects of diving that freaks most newbies out is dadun .... dadun ... dundundundundun - yes, that's right, JAWS! A few years ago now all six of us certified as divers and I can still remember being slightly paranoid about the sharks, particularly on that first night dive when I was positive the ferocious beasts were lurking in the darkness. Several years and many dives later we found ourselves in the Bahamas on Valetines day, which also happens to be R's birthday (R took the photo above). He wanted to go diving with the sharks. Ok, so that's fine for the two of us but was I really doing the right thing insisting our four children also come and offer themselves up as potential shark bait? 

 We had a few blood coloured cocktails and pondered the question of responsible parenting. I'm glad to say that as usual, living life in all it's experiences outweighed the cottonwool theory.

 As we reached this momentous decision the Bahaman Police band came marching down the main street of Nassau - it was a funeral march! The bishop of Nassau had died.  In Feng Shui they say that if one of your pets dies it is replacing the death of one of your family members. Well I claimed the bishop as my pet and took the poor chaps funeral as a good omen!

 To steel our courage we went off to the pirate museum  where replica pirate ships and fascinating accounts of the famous pirates like Blackbeard who had made the Bahamas their home were displayed. Henry Morgan led many successful raids including one on Panama city which earned the pirate a knighthood! One of his favourite hunting grounds was around the island of Andros where he would hang a lantern to lure unsuspecing ship onto the reef. The bluff is named in his honour - Morgans Bluff. Another pirate, William Catt is said to have buried his treasure in one of the many caverns on Cat island, named after him. Of particular interest to the feminists out there is the all female crew of The Shark Lady who would take to the sea topless.

After some time in the stocks contemplating our fate we swaggered off to meet the sharks that awaited those who had to walk the plank.

During our briefing we were warned to keep our hands tucked under our arms or into our weight belts. Once there's food floating around its easy for the sharks to mistake fingers and hands flapping around for a chunk of free meat. Meanwhile, the diver who was feeding the sharks to lure them in got totally kitted out in chain mail, which was reassuring. All I could think was if one of my children came up minus one hand I'd never forgive myself.

 This is first daughter diving down, she's a bit of an arm flapper so she was the one I was most concerned about. She was also the one who really didn't want to go and needed a push in direction of one more life experience. Thank christ she remembered to keep her hands tucked in!

                                        This is third daughter, fearless, she thinks she's superman.

                                 There were tons of lion fish (these critters are deadly poisonous!

And so many moray eels we became quite blase about them!

Finally as we sat on the bottom the chain mailed shark feeder released the bloody meat and 50 sharks made a bee line for it. As they swam in around us one of them knocked my mask with its tail. My eyes went wide as I calculated at lightning speed how to replace it without exposing my fingers. I slide my hand up my chest, pulled my mask back into place then quickly slid it back into my weight belt. The feeder swam off with the last little bit of meat to lure the sharks away and we slowly made our way back to surface amongst a few curious sharks who still lurked around us. Yay! The kids were exhilarated at having lived the diving with sharks experience AND they still had all ten fingers and toes!

Defaecated Coffee Anyone?

You read right - I didn't mean to write decaffeinated coffee. This is a picture of the Civet cat (or palm civet) that lives in Sumatra. Up in Aceh where mother lives these little critters, just slightly bigger than a house cat roam the jungle and occasionally wonder into peoples homes. One night mother had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a drink and passing thru the hallway saw what she thought was a wire hanging down out of the corner of her eye. She brushed it aside and realised the wire was rather furry. Looking up at the overhanging rafter she saw the furry wire was in fact a civet cats tail and the civet cat was sitting there quite calmly eating a mango it had procured for itself from the kitchen! Mother woke Faridah up, who I might tell you is more inclined to shooing away cats of any size and shape including tigers with a broom. The civet cat took a look at Faridahs broom and casual as you like climbed down from there after and walked, or rather strolled at a leisurely pace, down the front stairs back into the jungle.

Aceh is a large coffee growing area so the lovely red coffee berries pictured above are plentiful. That's right, coffee is actually a fruit, a berry, not a bean as we so ignoramously call it. This means that between the coffee berries and the civet cat some smart arse  once upon a time discovered that making coffee from the 'beans' that had passed thru the gut of the civet cat actually tastes wonderful. It's called Kopi Luwak - cat-poo coffee - and is highly prized, exacting exorbitantly high prices ($600/kg) which makes it about $30 for a cup of cat poo scented coffee. 

Supposedly the civet is a discerning gourmand and eats only the most perfectly matured, choicest beans which it then later excretes partially digested. Lucky workers - oh to have their job! - then collect said poo, exhibit C above, and roast the shit. This produces a coffee with an aroma that is rich and strong, incredibly full bodied and almost syrupy. It's said to be thick with a hint of chocolate that lingers on the palette long after. This would be because as the coveted poo passes out of the arse of the civet cat anal scent glands secrete a fluid with a musky odor. I'm heading up to Aceh in January and I know you'll all be jealously thinking of me as I'm sipping a steamy cup  of  anal scented cat poo coffee.

Wishful Thinking!

 This story is about the consequences of making choices based on predetermined wish fulfillment. As you may have heard me mention in a previous blog, Russell was in fourth year med school and I was in second year interior architecture when first daughter arrived. This was the consequence of a sleepless night spent in a creaky old hotel run by three creepy spinster sisters in Bega (see Crazy Cyclists).

 When R was in his final (6th)year and I was in my fourth year second daughter arrived (luckily not in the orangutan reservation in Borneo, but that's another story). R's fellow med students couldn't believe it. 'Did you miss the family planning lecture Russell?' they asked. My uni studies became more and more part time with all the unexpected arrivals, but as I had with first daughter, I took second daughter to uni with me quite happily breastfed her in one arm whilst trying to work on the computer or draw with the other arm.
I had a new unit and tutor - a thirty something male - in perspective drawing. In the first class we were doing a drawing activity when second daughter started crying. I picked her up, popped out a boob and proceeded to breastfeed her whilst simultaneously endeavouring to stabilise the paper, ruler and manipulate the draughting pen. Suddenly Mr Tutor disappeared for approximately 15 minutes. When he returned he had a beet red face so naturally we wondered what was up with him.
After class the head of department invited me into her office.
'You've really shocked the new drawing tutor' she said with a smile on her face, 'He came in blustering and spluttering'.
Apparently he'd stormed into her office and demanded she do something 'about the, the, the, well! There's a woman in my class and, and, and well, she's breastfeeding!'
My H.D. had looked at him calmly and casually inquired, 'And?'
'Well!' he exclaimed, 'Aren't you going to do something about it?'
'Hmm,' she considered, 'Well, I don't think I can breastfeed the baby, what about you?'
He stormed out of her office and never raised the matter again.
 My HD told me she thought I was an excellent role model and inspiration for younger girls who thought a career and study ended with motherhood.

Two years later I was feeling quite ill and took myself off to the doctor. A pee and a dip of the stick in the jar later he exclaimed, 'By god, you're pregnant!'
What!!!I rand R at work.
'We're pregnant!'
'What??? How???' he said shocked.
'Well the usual way I guess' I replied.
In a dilemma we conferred over what to do - could we cope with another child. We joked that we would only keep it if it was twins. We also told all of our friends this. A short while later R had to go to Dunedin in New Zealand on a training course for a month. We would regularly post Anne Geddes card to each other of twins and I showed these to our friends. As I got enormous he took it upon himself to sew me two new dresses (see above photo) only thing is he didn't allow for the 'bump' so they were rather short at the front!

 As soon as he came back it was time for the 12 week ultrasound. 'Well, here's where we find out if we're having twins" we joked with each other. The doctor brought up the ultrasound image on her screen and the began shifting from foot to foot.
'Umm, is this your first pregnancy?' she asked.
'No, third.'
'Umm, I'm not sure how to say this but you're having twins' she announced.
R had already seen the screen and was looking disbelievingly at it. 'Oh my god! We really are having twins!' is all we could say for the next hour while we drove to pick up first daughter from her Montessori school. Waiting outside her classroom we told some of our friends who were there and showed them the ultrasound. They couldn't believe it.
'Nooo!' they said, 'Who does that? Wishes for twins and then gets them!'
Well, I guess we do! Then there were four!

Snakes Blood Anyone?

In 2005 we took a months journey through China. Russell had been there in '86 with his high school orchestra and things had changed significantly since those days where everyone wore the standard blue Mao workers uniform and rode push bikes. Signs were posted everywhere for the benefit and instruction of the ignorant tourists - usually in English, like the sign above, that would have said tourists in fits of laughter. One such sign in our bathroom stated that floor drainage had been installed for the benefit of air pollution.  Beijing was a riot of vehicular and pedestrian confusion. 

It had been a lifetime wish fulfilled to see the Great Wall of China and I was incredibly excited to see and touch it in real life. We were given strict instructions to be down from the wall by a specified time or we would be left there, so off we scuttled. The children asked if they could go off aways along the wall and because Russell had a devious plan in place (see Four Weddings, No Funeral post) he shooed them off quickly enough. They took off at a great rate, racing along the wall. After he had proposed in front of the Chinese audience and I finally said yes, we realised that we only a few minutes to get back down to the nearest town and the kids were no where in sight! Russell dumped his backpack with me and started sprinting along the wall. Fifteen minutes later a very puffed family arrived back - the twins and second daughter had just thought they would keep going as far as they could - and you know how far that would be - until Russell had managed to sabotage this plan by catching up to them.

 After Beijing we travelled via Xi'an where the terracotta warriors are to Chongching where we started a seven day cruise down the Yangtze to Shanghai. I had read Simon Winchesters River at the Centre of the World in which he travels from Shanghai up river toward Tibet and recounts the history of China through the events that happened in each place he comes to. The children were fascinated by the fact that unwanted girl babies were often thrown into the river (even still today) and would lean over the rails for endless hours in the hope of spotting a bloated and floating body. The best the river could manage was a rotten pig carcass.

Cruising through the Three Gorges was spectacular, the water an emerald green, and many people were still living a very basic rural life by the banks of the river, washing clothes in the river, using the old sampans and junks, but the damming of the Three Gorges would soon threaten their lives with the rising water levels that was set to swallow entire towns.

 In Guilin we  had lunch in a local restaurant, handpicked to have no other tourist in it. The waitress asked for our order and as it was local we actually didn't have a clue what was on offer, so gave her the 'I don't know' look and shrug of the shoulders. She enlisted the help of a male assistant and gestured for us to follow her. Around the side and attached to the restaurant was a small room that contained our lunch choices - all alive. We could choose from chickens, ducks, various other smaller birds, cats, and various snakes. Oooo! I'd always wanted to try snake since watching a film set in the Amazon where a plane crash survivor lives on roasted snake. I'd heard it tasted a bit like chicken so that was what I was having. I cajoled Russell and young son into trying it with me but the girls weren't having a bar of it. We then had to select which snake we wanted and as we didn't think we could eat a big fat snake we chose a smaller one.

 Back in the restaurant the very thoughtful waitress brought the skin of the snake which the cook had prepared into a 'snakeskin salad' - crunchy. She then brought out glasses of the snakes blood mixed with pure alcohol and indicated it would make us strong. Young son who will try anything drank his happily. I took mine a bit reluctantly and you can see in the following photos Russells experience.

 First daughter screamed at the appearance of the snakes blood and ran from the table with her two younger sisters in hot squealing pursuit. They weren't having a bar of it!
 As if this wasn't enough to entice us with the green gall bladder juice was then offered to us - ok that was enough! Finally the roasted snaked itself appeared but we really should of chosen a fatter snake - it was full of bones and not nearly as succulent as I had dreamed it would be.

Silly Sailors!

 During a semester break in 1991, before Russell and I went on our crazy cycling trip, we asked my dad if we could borrow his boat for a week. So ok, neither of us could actually sail but that was not about to get in our way. My very accommodating dad agreed to sail us over to Rottonest,(thats him above sailing) an island of the coast of Perth, Western Australia. We moored in Thompsons bay on a bouy, rowed to shore and put dad on the ferry back to the mainland, with instructions to return in a week and sail us back.

 We had a fantastic time. I was always running around naked because that was just what one did in those days, those of us from the more liberated and less conservative backgrounds (I'm Danish, need I say more?) and Russell thought it was all very daring. We washed in the ocean, swam, cooked on board, played games and of course every evening to the sunset Russell would play his French Horn to the other boats in the bay.

 Very early one morning, as we lay asleep in our bunks, I became aware of a bumping sound. I opened my eyes - it was still quite dark.
'Russell! Russell! What's that bumping?'
Russell was awake immediately 'I don't know, I'll go check'
We had tied the dinghy off the stern but suddenly it wasn't there , it was floating off in the distance! Luckily a another dinghy with a little motor was passing nearby and Russell managed to flag it down, get a lift and tow it back to the boat. We fastened the knots more securely this time.
 On the last morning Russell woke me up.
'Dorit! Wake up! Is this normal for the boat to be leaning?'
I noticed I was kind of tipping over in my bunk.
'Probably just the boat moving in the tide' I said and we went back to sleep.
A little while later we woke up nearly falling out of our bunks! We both flew out of bed and raced up on deck to the first rays of daylight. Horrors of horrors, the tide had gone out and because we were grounded and keeling over rapidly it meant our boat had failed to turn direction with the change of wind and was facing the completely opposite way to all the other boats!

 'Oh my god, we're going to sink and drown!' I cried. I mean really, you jump in the water and swim around all week but as soon as you're on a boat and it starts to look like it might sink you panic - what's with that?
Russell quickly got into action mode and had a rescue plan. He jumped in the dinghy, attached a rope between the boat and him and began to row as hard as he could to another bouy. Slipping the rope around the bouy he hauled and hauled and with a very slight incoming tide he was able to pull the boat off the reef slightly. We were saved! The boat wouldn't sink, we wouldn't die and my dad wouldn't kill me!

Later that day my dad came over on the ferry to sail us back. As he approached Rottonest he looked at all the boats moored in Thompsons Bay 'What the hell is the silly boat doing facing the wrong way' he thought. Then 'Oh dear! That's my boat! What have those kids done?' That's him in the picture above having a beer as we tell him the saga. That's a typical look my dad has when he just can't believe something that's happened.

Crazy Cyclists

The year I first started going out with Russell we were both Uni students. We decided that at the end of the year we would take the train across the Nullabor desert from Perth on the west coast to Sydney on the east coast. My mother was living in Melbourne at the time with a mad Egyptian so we would also go down there to visit her. We deliberated over the best was to travel between Sydney and Melbourne and decided we would train down to Canberra then, taking our bikes on the train, we would bike from Canberra to Melbourne.

We bought a lightweight tent, organised saddle bags for our clothing and supplies, rigged up water bottles with long pieces of flexible plastic tubing we could suck on at any time ( now such a thing has been marketed and is called a Camelbak). On our first day we studied our map and determined our route out of Canberra. We would take a small road through the country to avoid the main highway and big trucks. We could see there were plenty of small towns along the way to pick up supplies. We rode as far as we could before dusk and then searching for somewhere to pitch our tent came to a small country church. There was not a soul around so we figured it was probably safe to camp in the church yard as it was midweek. We pitched our tent by torchlight, cooked some dinner over a fire and went to sleep.

In the morning the churchyard was shrouded in mist. We washed from the tap in the yard - it was freezing cold - and decided to see what was on the other side of the hedge we'd pitched the tent next to. You can imagine our horror when we not only found a graveyard but TWO freshly dug graves next to each other! You've never seen two people pack up camp so fast.
Riding on up a mountain in the mist we soon noticed that we hadn't come across any of the towns marked on the map. We were getting quite hungry and had come to a vast expanse of pine forest. Luckily we spotted a ranger and showing him the map asked what had happened to all the towns.
'Oh no!' he exclaimed, 'They're not towns marked on the map, they're old homesteads  mostly abandoned now'
 We looked at him aghast. Shit! We would starve to death and it was only our second day out! Luckily he took pity on us and gave us a tin of tuna and some crackers.

That night we camped near one of the abandoned homesteads.

The following day we worked out the shortest route to the next real town and began cycling. It was not very long before we realised that we probably should have purchased a topographical map. The short route was turning out to be a long route of very steep mountains we had to walk up.

We finally made it to Bega - yes where the cheese comes from - though I got a flat tyre and ended up having to get a lift in the back of a ute. We were really stuffed by the time we reached Bega and said, stuff it, we'll stay in a hotel tonight.

There was one old historic two storey hotel so we parked our bikes outside and went in to the lobby. The place appeared to be deserted. Eventually an old spinster came out.
'What do you want?' she asked.
'Ummm, a room?'
'I'll have to check!'
She shuffled off and came back with two of her equally elderly sisters.
'You can have room 13 up the stairs, bathrooms down the hall, don't be late for breakfast' one of them said.
We went up to our room. It turned out we were the only ones staying there. There was a long hallway of creaky floorboards and only the area outside our room was lit. To go to the bathroom we had to take a torch.
'Let's escape the three creepy sisters and go out for dinner and maybe there's a movie on at the old cinema down the road,' Russell said.
Guess what the one and only movie showing in town was? 'Freddies Dead' in 3D - no joke!

We didn't sleep well that night and that's probably why first daughter was conceived in Bega! We celebrated our escape from horror town the next night with champagne, feeling lucky to be alive.
By the way we eventually made it to Melbourne but had to train the last section because I just kept feeling too exhausted and strange - pregnancy does that!

Tunisian Trouble

Back in '84 I travelled with my mother to Tunisia. We flew in from Germany to Sousse on the east coast. Mother managed to locate a hotel for $2/day. We weren't sure if it was the hotel we had booked and this required a French painter, a school teacher and eventually another gentleman, Toufik, to help with the translations.He was a Tunisian who had emigrated to Sicicly but had returned to help the widow of  the recently deceased hotel owner, who had died falling into the feature well he had been constructing in the hotel. Toufik took an instant fancy to mother and offered to drive us around all of Tunisia.

We drove south to Sfax and then into the Sahara to Gabes where we found Toufiks police friend we were to visit had thrown himself of a balcony. This required plan B which was to stay with Jewish friends of Toufiks. He was a marble millionaire and everything in the house was made of marble, even the toilet! We had couscous for dinner and mother proceded with her usual tact to tell the joke about a Jew and two Arabs on a cruise ship (Toufik was an arab).  This jewish guy, Mosha, has saved up for a meditteranean cruise and goes and sits in a deck chair and suddenly the sun is blocked by two Arabs who proceed to sit down on either side of him. One Arab says to Mosha
'Hey Jew boy, get me an orange juice and leave your left shoe here'
So he thinks, well you know we all have a right to be here and it's a wonderful cruise so he goes along with it and goes and gets the orange juice. When he comes back with the orange juice he puts his foot in the shoe and it is wet. Then after a while the other Arab nudges him and says
'Jew boy, get me an orange juice!' and Mosha says
'I suppose you want me to leave my right shoe here?'
'That's right' replies the second Arab.
Mosha goes and brings back an orange juice and putting his shoe back on finds that it too is wet. He sits down and after a little while when the Arabs have finished their orange juice he says
'Tut, tut, tut, isn't it terrible! Here we all are on this wonderful Meditteranean cruise and what happens? Arabs piss in Jews shoes and Jews piss in Arabs orange juice!'
There was dead silence at the dinner table.

From there we sailed over to Gerba and went to a club med in the evening. It looked ike a mental assylum with everyone running around in  white versions of the local usually black kaftans.
We drove further south into the desert to Douz and the further south we got Toufik insisted we cover ourselves up completely so we wouldn't get 'stolen' for camels he said. Apparently we were worth a lot of camels. In Tozeur we went to the zoo and cuddled a lion.

We stayed with a school teacher friend and slept in a traditional bed set into an alcoved wall that belonged to the mother (I think she ended up on the floor!)
Toufik then decided that I was lonely and he picked up a relative, a handsome young pharmacist who continued the journey with us.

In Kairouan we discovered a ruined coloseum from the Carthagians.Whenever we saw yellow  headlights as we got further north towards Tabarka near the Libyan border Toufik would yell out
'Ah! Bloody Libyans' The Tusians had white headlights.

We finally made it up to Tunis (the capital) where we had to go for a 'promenade' every evening. On the final night mother and I found we were expect to return the favour of being taken around Tunisia, if you know what I mean. It was a completely ridiculous extract from Pink Panther, involving people (us) running between rooms,  erroneous phone calls, and an over eager virgin (not me - my escort!)