Kein Schwein...

...kommentiert hier seit Wochen mein Geschreibsel und meine tollen Fotos. Das ist das beste Zeichen dafuer, dass in Deutschland der Sommer gekommen ist und die Leute besseres zu tun haben.

Ich verzeih es euch.

More from Fiji

I've safely returned to Australia and now I can share with you some of my best photos from the Fiji Islands.

Each picture tells a story, but instead of narrating it, I think you can think for yourself what the story is. Enjoy!

Kava

Kava drinking is the heart of Fiji culture, so I think I should devote an own posting on it.

In the evenings, men and women gather around a bowl called Tanoa. Traditionally this bowl is carved from wood, but on the Yasawas Islands we found that the simple people nowadays like to use a big plastic buoy cut in half, it's probably cheaper. The drink itself is prepared in a ritual that involves filling the powderized dried root of the kava plant into a cloth satchet, soaking it in cold water, kneading and pouring more water over it to create a milky brownish liquid. This drink is then poured in shallow cups made from coconut shells: the filled cup is passed to one person, who drinks it in one gulp, and passes the cup back to the chief who fills it for the next person, until everyone has had one. Then there is a break of about 10 minutes, filled with talk and/or singing and listening to music (Fijian men playing guitar and ukulele), before the next round of kava is distributed.

Kava doesn't make you drunk and is not addictive or dangerous to your health. What it does is make your body calm and relaxed. Typically you sleep very good after a kava night. The taste is nothing particularly pleasant: I find that it tastes "like if you get an injection at the dentist", referring to the tingling numbness it creates on your lips and tongue. The best part about the kava drinking is the socializing that comes with it. I find it very good that Fiji has a tradition like this and keeps it alive. It is an excellent alternative to alcohol drinking which has much more negative side effects.

Bula!

"Bula!" is the word every visitor to Fiji hears (and says themselves) at minimum two dozen times a day. It has more than one meaning -- "hello", "welcome", but also "cheers" when drinking. Bula bula is all around and everywhere here.

Cori and I are back from our one-week trip to the Yasawa Islands. We had mixed weather, some rain and wind but also some nice sunshine. On the sunny days it was really a bit like on a tropical island paradise, we could tan on the sand beaches and swim in the sea, and snorkel in the coral reefs. This was my first time to swim in the sea again since Easter!

We were in 5 different resorts on 5 different islands -- they offer a pass (named "Bula Pass", of course :) for island hopping with accommodation vouchers. You can choose to sleep in dormitories or "bures", which are small standalone huts or houses. The Fijians are warm and friendly people, they smile a lot and love to sing and dance and play guitar. They also have no understanding of time in the western sense of the word -- they call this "Fiji time" and it means that you shall not expect punctuality -- "an hour" can be as short as 30 minutes or as long as 3 hours, depending on how the other person likes it, usually to your disadvantage. But they do it with a smile, and although they do often steal your time they are also willing to give you of their time, unhurriedly.

Fiji

I have landed on the "island where the new day begins" -- Fiji is located just west of the date line, so every new day, in a way, starts here.

Cori has joined me and we have checked into our first hotel in Nadi. It was a good deal we had booked through the Internet, located between the airport and Nadi town. It is nice and even has a small pool.

The weather here is just as I had expected it -- tropical, but less hot than, say, Malaysia or Sri Lanka where I've been before. It is cloudy but warm (26 degrees in the afternoon when we arrived). The air is admittedly not very pleasant, it is humid and rather smoke-filled here at the main street in Nadi (they light wood fires for barbecues at the streetside). But all in all the temperatures make for a much better climate than Brisbane at this time of year, so I feel good and am happy to have come here.

I also think Cori and I have arrived just at the perfect time of year -- the weather is best here in June to September, and from our first impressions they still seem to be in off-season, the plane was half empty and the hotel looks like the same. So we figure we should find accommodation easily when we travel around here, and not too expensive.

Last day in Brisbane

I've returned to Brisbane, and today is my last day here -- tomorrow morning I'll fly to Fiji!

One of the things Australians do really very well are admission-free Botanical Gardens, I find. Even in the most horrible city you can escape the rat race and find tranquility in the midst of green. Brisbane has two such Botanical Gardens, one in the city and one in the west at Mount Coot-Tha. I was in the latter. The weather at the moment is nice -- days around 22 degrees Celsius, but cold nights (9 degrees in my campervan). So the nights get nasty, and I am glad to have a warm quilt for cover. In the long term I will really need to go 1000 km further north during winter.

I also attended a show in the planetarium that's next to the Botanical Gardens. They had a nice show about our place in the universe (narrated by Tom Hanks), and then an explanation of the current night sky (using a Zeiss projector from Germany that is rather old but fantastic quality and still works perfectly).

If someone asks me about my religion, I tend to say these days that I am approximately at the point where agnosticism, atheism and pantheism meet. Yes, it is a bit abstract, I am afraid, and you can probably not call it a religion either, but that's what best describes my current position.

But if I ever wanted to develop my pantheistic leaning into a kind of religion, my likely direction would be: Worship that what is holy to you, that what fills you with awe, that what created you, and that what gives you life. The big life-giver for us on this planet, besides Earth herself, is the Sun. So sun-worship would make some sense to me and feel right in a way. But star-worship, in a more general sense, would be even more sensible. After all, all solid matter, everything around us, and what we are made of ourselves, was once cooked in the stars. In short, if there were no stars, we would not be there. Or as Carl Sagan said, "We are star stuff."

Gold Coast

Only good manners could stop me from naming this posting "The ugly Gold Coast".

The skyline you see in this picture is not Brisbane. 80 km south of Brisbane is this stretch of coast that once was really beautiful. It had wonderful beaches, very suitable for surfing and all kind of beach and water fun. It became popular -- very popular -- too popular.

Today this sad abused stretch of land is overurbanized with one apartment tower built next to the other, and still growing. It almost looks like some of the coasts of Spain, if you know what I mean. Gold Coast is now a city with its own airport, in fact the sixth most populous city in all Australia.

Once this place was where the hippies would go. Now it's all money making and only that. They built theme parks too, and I'm sure they are very good, but expensive of course. Warner Brothers Movie World, Wet'n'Wild Water World, Sea World, and a few more.

I don't plan to go into any of these parks now, I need to save my money for Fiji. But I might go later when my visitors are here, it's more fun with company anyway.

Conclusion (Fazit): The Gold Coast is a big business and certainly a great financial success -- but not my type of place to go.

The Treehouse

I'd like to share with you a book that I am currently reading. I found it by coincidence in a second-hand shop (or "op-shop", as they call them here in Australia).

It is The Treehouse by Naomi Wolf. Amazon currently has second-hand copies of it from $0.01 (plus shipping), so if you're looking for a good book full of practical philosophy, by all means get yourself a copy.

It is not a novel. The author describes her father's (who is 80 at the time of writing) philosophy on life, poetry, creativity, passion, discipline, and values -- while narrating her own story of how she renovates a ramshackled old house in America and builds a treehouse for her daughter.

Rainforest

After 4 days it was time to leave the holiday house in Coolum Beach. Now it's camping time again. The weather was fine today, no rain, and I had a beautiful drive up the hills from which you get magificent views of the scenery, and the Pacific in the distance.

I did not need to go very far. Passing through Nambour I went to the little town Mapleton. There is a waterfall (Mapleton Falls) in a rainforest grove which they made a National Park.

This was my first encounter with Australian subtropical rainforest. (You may remember my pictures of the Tasmanian rainforests, but these are temperate and thus quite different in terms of flora and fauna.) The tracks were a bit muddy from the heavy rains but otherwise it was a really nice walk.

The tree in the picture is a strangler fig. It is a similar specimen to the one I photographed on Moonbi, but this guy has really strangled and murdered its host tree, as you can see. They are bastards -- but fascinating with their tentacle-like aerial roots.

Then 10 km futher down the way I made a stop at another similar place. It's called Kondilla National Park, and has waterfalls too.

That bird on the last picture was really cheeky and even came to sit on the "basket" of my campervan, watching me eagerly to see if he'd get his share from the sandwich I was eating at a picnic break. (He didn't get it!)

Finding a caravan park was a bit difficult tonight. It's a long weekend (Monday is Queen's Birthday) and the parks are nearly all booked out. But I finally found one and got the last available powered site (Stellplatz mit Strom) at Landsborough.

Sunshine Coast

Well the bad news is that it's raining. But otherwise I'm very lucky again because I don't have to stay in caravan parks, but enjoy a private accommodation once more. Garth and Florane have a holiday house here at the Sunshine Coast, in Coolum Beach, 90 minutes north of Brisbane. They went up here for 4 days and allowed me to join them and stay in the upstairs apartment. So now I have for a few days a whole apartment all to my own!

Yesterday we had a break in the rain and I could make a trip to Noosa Heads, where there is a nice national park and a beach named Alexandria Bay which is only accessible via a 2 km walking track.

But there is no more swimming here now, it's too late in the season.

Half-time

Now that I have booked my return flight I could count the number of days, and the result is that I will be exactly 333 days below the equator. The midpoint of that period, according to the calendar, is the 2nd of June, which is today!

To celebrate this point, I decided to take a "half-time break" and leave Australia for 2 weeks. New Zealand is too cold now in winter, so the two destinations that lent themselves due to their proximity to here are Bali and Fiji. I know Bali is beautiful, but I decided to go for the more exotic-pacific island Fiji!

Cori, whose work in Adelaide (she did the website and e-mail orders for a bra warehouse) comes to an end, will come up here and join me, so we can travel Fiji (low-budget) together. I'm very much looking forward to that trip and hope for some sunny beaches there. We booked the flight Brisbane to Nadi (pronounced [na.ndi], which is the main airport on Fiji) on 11 June, and return on 27 June.

The picture I'm sharing with you today is of three postcards from my home town Augsburg that reached me here in Down Under. Many thanks to the senders -- Brigitte, Paul and Sabiene -- and thanks to Moni who had come up with and organized the idea on my farewell party last year!