Thursday 1 April The Big Trip: executive summary
We're back home again, after two months of travel in five countries, staying in 31 different locations, taking 15 flights and renting seven cars. We got home this morning after an overnight flight from Hong Kong, and we're both feeling pretty shattered. But we had a really marvellous time, and Mary survived the whole trip without any serious allergy problems. In due course I'll say a bit more about our experiences. But that will have to wait a few days because no sooner are we back than I have to get ready for another trip in a couple of days. This time, I'll be going on business, to a math conference in Belfast. I get back from that a week today, and by then I hope I'll be in a fit state to describe our various adventures.
For now, here's a brief summary of some of the high and low points of the trip.
Highlights
• swimming in the lagoon of a south sea coral island (off the coast of Fiji);
• the overnight boat trip on Doubtful Sound, in New Zealand's fiordland;
• paddling a kayak round the Bay of Islands, in New Zealand's North Island;
• swimming in the surf off Bondi Beach, Australia;
• watching the sun set over Uluru (Ayers Rock, central Australia);
• snorkelling among the tropical fish and coral of the Great Barrier Reef.
Low points
• the voicemail message on British Airways' lost luggage telephone line: "If your luggage has been missing for less than ten days, press 1; for all other enquiries, press 2." Ten days?!
• checking our bank balance at an internet cafe, and finding that we were nearly £9,000 in the red (banker's error, as it turned out).
• arriving in Cairns just as a cyclone was developing offshore (it rained, hard, nonstop, for three days, all the roads out of Cairns were impassible because of flooding, boat trips to the Barrier Reef were cancelled because of heavy seas, and we were effectively marooned in our hotel).
Looking at the list of highlights, I see that they are nearly all related to the sea. Perhaps I'm just trying to relive childhood holidays on the Isle of Wight.
I'm falling asleep at the keyboard, so that's all for now. More next week.
Friday 9 April The Big Trip I: Hawaii
We left Britain on 1 February, flying from Manchester to London, then on to Los Angeles and Honolulu. When we arrived at Los Angeles and had to clear US Customs, we found that our luggage had not arrived (it never made the connection at Heathrow). This was a tricky situation, because the Manchester-Heathrow and Heathrow-LA flights were with British Airways, but the LA-Honolulu leg of the journey was with American Airlines. We filed a missing baggage report at LA, then had to continue on to Honolulu without our luggage.
The airlines have an agreement that in cases like this, the carrier for the final leg of the journey is responsible for getting the luggage delivered to the passenger. So we had to deal with American Airlines although the missing luggage was still with British Airways. The people at American Airlines were very sympathetic and helpful, but there was nothing they could do to locate the missing bags. Eventually, they referred me to a British Airways missing baggage helpline. When I phoned this number, I was greeted with a voicemail announcement saying "If your luggage has been missing for less than ten days, press 1. For all other enquiries, press 2."
I think that was just about the worst moment of the entire trip. It sounded as though our luggage was never going to catch up with us. We were due to leave Hawaii for Fiji the following week, and then moving on to New Zealand a couple of days after that. If the luggage took more than ten days to reach Hawaii, we would already have had to move on without it.
On the second day of our stay I got past the voicemail and managed to speak to a human operator, but they were not able to help at all. They said that the missing luggage had still not been traced, and they didn't even know whether it was in London or possibly had never left Manchester. At this time, we were staying at a hotel in Waikiki, but we were too concerned about dealing with the missing luggage to be able to enjoy our holiday there. Our original plan had been to stay in Waikiki for five nights, then fly over to the Big Island of Hawaii for a few days before coming back to Honolulu to fly on to Fiji. But clearly we couldn't leave Waikiki until the missing bags were traced, so I asked the hotel if we could stay on for an extra three days. They said that we could stay for one more night, but that after that there was no chance of accommodation anywhere in town because of the Pro Bowl.
I had seen posters saying "Pro Bowl" around town, and at first I assumed that this must refer to some professional bowling tournament. But then I remembered that Americans use the word "bowl" where we would say "cup" ("Super Bowl", "Rose Bowl", but "European Cup", "FA Cup"). This Pro Bowl is apparently some kind of American football tournament, and it fills the town with visitors.
Things were looking bad. We had to stay somewhere near Honolulu in the hope that our luggage might arrive before we were due to leave for Fiji, and yet there was nowhere there for us to stay for the weekend 6-8 February. Meanwhile, we only had the British winter clothing that we were wearing when we arrived, and the weather was hot and sunny. On the third day of our visit, British Airways told us that they still had no idea where our luggage was, and we decided that we simply had to go on a shopping expedition. We spent the morning in the Ala Moana Mall buying clothes (jeans, shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and sandals for me, dresses for Mary, plus a few changes of underclothes). You might think that this is not the ideal way to be spending a holiday in Hawaii. But in fact we had a great time there. I always like to buy clothes in America. They are so much cheaper and better than in Britain. The pair of Levis that I bought there cost about one third what I would have paid at home, and the trail sandals (which are the most comfortable shoes I have worn for many years) cost less than $20. At the current incredibly favourable exchange rate, that's about £11. Even if we had not been forced to, we would have wanted to buy some new clothes while in Hawaii, and we were very pleased with our purchases.
When we got back to the hotel after lunch, the first thing we saw was our suitcases in the lobby. At the very time when British Airways were telling us that they had not been located, they must already have been well on their way to Honolulu.
With that little crisis out of the way, I immediately went to the hotel's travel desk to see if there was still a possibility of going to the Big Island for a few days. We were in luck: they were able to find flights and hotel accommodation for us to spend three days there, returning to Honolulu just in time to connect with our onward flight to Fiji.
After that, we could relax and enjoy the rest of our time on Oahu. We both thought that it was completely ideal vacation territory: perfect climate, beautiful beaches, easy to travel around, good food, in fact everything you could wish for. Also, everything is amazingly cheap at the current rate of exchange. We both want to go back there as soon as we can.
The famous Waikiki beach was less than ideal. It was very crowded, and not sufficiently accessible (a lot of the beachfront hotels and restaurants block access for non-customers). It certainly isn't in the same league as Bondi Beach (of which more in a later instalment). The most noticeable difference between Waikiki and a Mediterranean beach is that none of the women are topless. I didn't see a single bare breast on Waikiki beach (America still retains a Puritan taboo on public nudity) whereas in Benidorm you'd be hard put to find one that was covered. For the record, Bondi has an intermediate position. A few of the younger women there were topless, but they were only a small minority. Not that I take any interest in such things, but one can't help noticing.
For the three days we spent on the Big Island, we stayed at the excellent King Kamehameha Hotel at Kona beach. The main thing to see on the Big Island is the Volcanoes National Park. We spent an interesting day driving round the Kilauea caldera, stopping off at various points to follow trails to see craters, lava tubes and so on. We didn't see the actual lava flow, however. Sometimes visitors can get quite close to the lava flow. But it changes direction from time to time, and is currently in a remote and inaccessible part of the park.
Next instalment: Fiji.
Tuesday 13 April The Big Trip II: Fiji
Writing about the big trip is harder than I expected it to be. Reading through the previous instalment, I see that I haven't begun to give an impression of what Hawaii is like. What struck us most about it was the easygoing laid-back atmosphere and the interesting ethnic and cultural mix of the islands. We were surprised by the strong Japanese influence – not just the honeymoon couples and coach parties of Japanese tourists that we met throughout the whole trip wherever we went, but among the Hawaiian residents there seemed to be more people of Japanese descent than there were westerners or Polynesians.
We left Hawaii on 8 February and, as on any day when we had to fly, the journey occupied the whole tedious day. Air travel is no fun these days, with the endless security checks and long waits after early check-ins. Before the flight from Kona airport on Hawaii to Honolulu, a customs official took Mary's camera away to inspect it, and we only discovered a couple of days later that he had somehow jammed the mechanism so that it no longer worked at all. For the rest of the trip, Mary had to use disposable cameras.
That behaviour seemed typical of American immigration and customs officials. When I last went to the USA, in 2001, I was impressed by the helpful and courteous attitude of the US immigration people. They were clearly making a big effort to overcome their traditional image of being hostile and obstructive. But since 9/11 they have reverted to type, and they now seem to be as rude and suspicious as they ever were.
We arrived at the Honolulu airport domestic terminal late in the afternoon, just as it was about to close for the day. We made our way across to the international terminal, and found that this was also closed, and not expected to open until 9pm, in preparation for the overnight flights, of which ours was one. We had to wait outside for three dreary hours with nothing to do but stand guard over our luggage.
We left Honolulu just before midnight on 8 February, and arrived at Nadi airport, Fiji, early in the morning of 10 February, slightly puzzled by the fact that 9 February had disappeared without trace as we crossed the International Date Line some time during the night. The other thing that happened during the night was that the captain woke us up with an announcement that because of an unexpectedly strong headwind he was running low on fuel and would have to divert to Apia to refuel. Apia, in case you haven't heard of it, is in Western Samoa. Western Samoa, in case you haven't heard of that either, is a tiny dot on the map of the southern Pacific, and is an actual country with its own top level domain internet code .ws, although like many of the Pacific islands it is in some sense administered by New Zealand. We landed there for about 45 minutes in the early hours of what technically must have been 9 February (since Western Samoa is on the east side of the International Date Line, unlike Fiji which is just to the west). But I don't count myself as having visited Western Samoa. You can't claim to have visited a country if you haven't even disembarked from the aircraft. So my total number of countries visited stands at 34. But that is a slightly fuzzy figure. For example, I visited East Germany and West Germany when they were separate countries, and I have also visited the reunified Germany. So should that count as one country, or two, or even three? (I only let it count as one.)
Fiji lies 18 degrees south of the equator, and is hot and steamy. It was a British colony until a few years back, and still retains some signs of that, such as driving on the left. When we first planned the trip, we meant to stay there for three days. But we had forgotten about the International Date Line (and so had the travel agent), so we only actually had two days there. On the first day, we drove to Natadola beach, an idyllic tropical beach with several kilometres of pure white sand, which we had virtually to ourselves. On the second day, we went on a cruise to the even more idyllic Mamanuca Islands, stopping off at one of them, a perfect South Sea Island with a lagoon and a coral reef, for a swim and a barbecue lunch.
That evening, we had one of the best meals of the trip, at The Edge, an elegant restaurant in Nadi. I chose fish dishes, a lobster bisque soup followed by deep sea pacapaca with scampi, and Mary had king fish. We had never heard of pacapaca or king fish before, but they were both delicious and I can recommend them strongly. During the meal, we were presented with no fewer than four additional courses "compliments of the chef": a small starter consisting of breaded fish in a piquant sauce, a lemon sherbet with champagne to cleanse the palate between courses, a choc ice dessert with coffee, and a little box of chocs to take away with us. The bill, including wine and tip, came to 105 Fiji dollars, or about £35 for the two of us. When we got back to the hotel, they asked us to complete a questionnaire about our stay, and for this we were rewarded with free cocktails at the bar. A fitting end to a short but happy stay in Fiji.
Wednesday 14 April
Last week I was in Belfast for the annual conference of British mathematicians. In the five years since the ending of the IRA terror campaign, Belfast has changed beyond recognition. From being one of the most dangerous and backward cities in Europe, it has been transformed into a place that is only averagely run-down and depressing. That's to say, it's still not exactly an exciting place to spend three days, but it's a great deal better than it used to be. One of the improvements is that (in a province governed by repressed religious bigots, where any kind of homosexual activity was until recently illegal) it now has a gay sauna, The Garage. I spent a happy evening there, and found it to be a lively, friendly place with a mixed clientele including some frisky young Chinese students. One of them seemed to take a fancy to me, and got a bit carried away, as a result of which I wrenched my knee, displacing a cartilage which swelled up overnight so that the next day I could hardly walk. Obviously I'm getting too old for physical activity of that kind. Of course, everyone at the conference wanted to know what caused the injury, and I told them, virtually truthfully, that I must have twisted the knee while turning over in bed. I managed to hobble as far as a nearby pharmacy to get some anti-inflammatory gel, which made the joint slightly less painful, and I phoned Mary to get her to make an appointment with our osteopath for when I came home.
I arrived home, still walking slowly and painfully on my twisted knee, just before the Easter break, and I thought there was no chance that Mary would have been able to get an osteopath's appointment for me until after the holiday. Sure enough, our usual osteopath was away for a couple of weeks. But he now has an assistant, a newly qualified Greek by the name of Niko, who was able to give me an appointment on Good Friday. Let me tell you that being treated by Niko is worth dislocating your knee for. He is very young, unbelievably cute and goodlooking. I asked him what had made him go in for osteopathy, and he said that as a teenage skateboarder he had fallen and hurt his back. His father sent him to an osteopath for treatment and he was so impressed that he had decided to follow that career. Since there are no schools of osteopathy in Greece, he came to England for training. I don't know how long he has been here, but he still looks like a teenage skateboarder.
Half an hour's massage from him was blissful, and also had a good effect in reducing the swelling on the knee. He wanted me to come back for another session in a few days, and how could I resist? So I went back to see him again today although the knee is now well on the way to recovery and only slightly painful. I mentioned to him that I also sometimes have trouble with a stiff neck, so I was treated to a neck massage as well as a knee massage. At the end of the session he again suggested that I should came back next week. But much as I should like to have treatment from him as often as he wants, I don't really think that I can justify paying £25 a week indefinitely. I asked him how many more sessions he thought I needed, and he agreed that perhaps one more would suffice. So I have one more session with him next week. That's something to look forward to.
Monday 19 April The Big Trip III: New Zealand
We spent the best part of a month in New Zealand, and we wished that it could have been much longer. The scenery, especially in the South Island, is breathtakingly spectacular, the roads are empty, the people are incredibly friendly, and the environment is managed by the Department of Conservation which must be the most enlightened and efficient government conservation agency anywhere in the world, better even than the US National Park Service. The weather was less than ideal, and we were told everywhere we went that they were having the worst summer for 100 years. There was serious flooding in the North Island. But that was while we were in the South Island, and the weather did not disrupt our plans at all.
We started at Christchurch and spent two weeks making a leisurely clockwise circuit of the South Island. The first lesson we learned was that self catering is better than eating out. That's not to say that the standard of catering in restaurants is bad. Far from it: the trouble was that the portions were so enormous that we were embarrassed to leave most of what was on the plate. As Mary put it, the average New Zealand restaurant meal was enough to feed an Indian city. In any case, by the time we arrived in NZ we had already been eating out for two weeks and we were getting tired of restaurant meals. Fortunately, self catering is easy for travellers in NZ. Most motel rooms have kitchenette facilities with electric kettle, toaster, hob unit and even microwave. We didn't want to stay in motels all the time, because it's more interesting to use B&Bs or Homestays, where you can get to meet the natives. But whenever we felt that we were putting on too much weight we stayed in motels for a couple of days so that we could eat more frugally.
The second lesson we learned was that too many people are vacationing in New Zealand. (Personally, I blame Tolkien for this. The country was full of Brits looking for Lord of the Rings filming locations.) Before the trip, we had been told that you could just turn up in a town, go to the Tourist Office and they would find accommodation for you. But we quickly discovered that this didn't work. On a couple of occasions, we were almost reduced to spending the night in the rental car because all the accommodation was taken. Fortunately it never quite came to that. But we found that we had to book accommodation about a week ahead to be sure of getting it. That meant that we didn't have quite as much flexibility as I would have liked. It also meant that I had to spend a lot of time reading ahead in the guide book to decide how much time we were likely to want to spend in each place.
I don't want this journal to degenerate into a travelogue, so I won't try to list all the places we visited. (Sooner or later, I'll put up some pages of photos on our family web site, for anyone who's interested.) Apart from the spectacular scenery, one of the most interesting things about NZ was the bird life. We saw albatrosses, penguins, cormorants, gannets, and exotic birds found only in New Zealand such as the pukeko, weka, kea, takahe and (of course) kiwi.
To make up for the day we lost by crossing the International Date Line, we had an extra day in February through it being a leap year. We used this to extend our stay on the South Island to a couple of days longer than we originally planned. Then we took the ferry across to the North Island, where we had another ten days. We stayed for two days with Mary's cousins in Rotorua, then headed north to the Coromandel peninsula and the Bay of Islands for yet more breathtaking scenery before driving down to Auckland for the flight to Sydney.
My favourite NZ TV commercial showed a bunch of harassed Hong Kong businessmen at a golf driving range, after dark. Voiceover: "Golf club membership here costs $15,000 a year. With a 20 year waiting list. So I come here to practise. At night." Cut to a scene in rural New Zealand: beyond a five-barred gate is an immaculate golf course, deserted except for a couple of players on a distant fairway. Beside the gate, a handwritten notice saying "Green fees $15. Leave in honesty box." Background music: a song with the words "We don't know how lucky we are." (Don't ask me what this was supposed to be advertising, I never noticed. Probably it was some make of car.)
Are New Zealanders really that lucky? I think the answer is probably yes, if you're an outdoors, sports-loving type. As vacation territory, NZ is unbeatable, and we both want to go back there as soon as we can afford it. But I don't think I would choose to live there. It really does feel like the end of the earth, and if you're looking for cultural or intellectual life you might find it a bit thin on the ground.
Thursday 22 April The Big Trip IV: Australia (New South Wales)
Australia seemed to be a less well organised country than New Zealand. Mary pointed out that this may be because the Australians have no equivalent of the excellent Department of Conservation, which plays such a big part in making the tourist's life easy and enjoyable in NZ. In comparison, Australia was unpredictable, and we found we kept having to alter our plans to cope with unexpected hitches. However, this turned out to be not a bad thing, because these changes of plan resulted in some of the best moments of the entire trip.
In just under four weeks we were able to cover most of New Zealand. But Australia is far too big to cover in one vacation, and our original plan was to concentrate on just two areas in the two and a half weeks that we had available. We allowed ourselves eight days to see Sydney and the Blue Mountains, followed by a flight to Cairns, where we planned to spend ten days seeing the Great Barrier Reef and exploring some of tropical North Queensland.
The three days that we spent in Sydney were very successful. About half an hour after we arrived at our hotel (in a very good location in the historic Harbour Rocks area of the city), the phone rang, and it was my cousins inviting us to a beach barbecue.
My grandfather had a cousin who emigrated to Australia with his parents in 1884, and the two branches of the family have kept in touch ever since. Last year, these Australian cousins (third cousins, I suppose they technically are) came to England and stayed with my brother. I have never met them, but when they found that Mary and I were coming to Sydney they offered to show us round.
When they phoned, they asked whether we could take the next ferry across the harbour, where they would meet us and take us to their swim club on Balmoral Beach, where they were planning a barbecue. We were still feeling a bit disoriented, having only flown in from Auckland a few minutes earlier. But we did a quick change of clothes, walked down to the harbour and found the correct ferry, and had a great evening with them, swimming, chatting and enjoying the food off the barbie. You couldn't imagine a more typically Australian way to spend an evening. It was an ideal start to our visit.
In the next two days we saw the sights of Sydney and went to a performance at the Opera House. Then we rented a car and set off for the Blue Mountains. The scenery there was beautiful but the weather was cool and cloudy, and on the second day the cloud level came right down so that the whole area was caught in a thick mist. The dampness affected the motel rooms and triggered our allergies. So next day, when things were no better, we decided to cut our losses and go back to the coast. We ended up staying in a beachfront hotel at Bondi for a couple of days, where the weather was perfect, the beach and the surf were the stuff of dreams and we enjoyed two of the best days of the trip.
Bondi beach certainly lives up to its reputation as one of the best in the world. The huge expanse of pure white sand makes it seem uncrowded even when there are hundreds of people there. A promenade extends along the whole length of the beach, and behind it there is a broad grassy area before you get to the beachfront road with the hotels and shops beyond. There are separate designated areas for swimming and surfboarding, and the surf is big enough to make swimming a real challenge.
Halfway along the beach, just below the promenade, there is a booth where you can rent everything you could conceivably need for a day at the beach, from beach towels to surfboards, and also lockers where you can leave clothing and valuables. The booth was manned by a friendly young English guy. It was fun to see his reaction when Mary came up to him and asked if she could rent a motorised boogie board. You could see him trying to figure out how to handle this crazy woman, before he realised that she was kidding.
After two blissful days at Bondi we headed northwards to Cairns. [To be continued.]
Thursday 28 April The Big Trip V: Australia (Queensland and Northern Territory)
When we landed at Cairns airport on 17 March it was hot, steamy and raining hard as we boarded the transfer bus to the Cairns Colonial Club resort hotel, where we were booked in for the next five days. When planning the trip, I reckoned that after six weeks on the road we would be glad of somewhere to stay and relax for a few days and the travel agent recommended the Colonial Club. Also, it was a good base for day trips to the Great Barrier Reef.
The bus dropped us off at the hotel, by which time the rain had become a real tropical storm, and we were told that a cyclone was developing offshore. By the next morning, the town was completely cut off. All the roads in every direction were flooded, boat trips and other excursions were cancelled and even the airport was closed for a few hours. The rain continued bucketing down more or less nonstop, and by the third day we had had enough. We went to a travel agent in the town and asked if they had any last minute trips available to somewhere hot and dry. The agent asked if we had anywhere particular in mind. I said, "Well ideally it would be nice to go to Uluru [Ayers Rock, as it used to be called], but I don't suppose we could afford that." After a few moments searching on the computer, the agent admitted that there were no really cheap airfares to Uluru for the next few days, but she quoted a price that seemed reasonable to us. She then looked for accommodation, and came up with a package that we definitely could not afford. We said that wouldn't do, and she looked again. This time she came up with the Outback Pioneer Hotel, which seemd like remarkably good value. We said we'd take it, and she booked flights and accommodation, leaving the following morning and staying for three days.
We kept our fingers crossed that the airport would not be closed again, but by next morning the rain had eased off and it looked as though the worst of the cyclone was over. We were very glad to be leaving Cairns, and excited about the prospect of seeing Uluru. We always wanted to go there in any case, but when we were originally planning the trip it seemed too expensive and complicated to fit it into the itinerary.
The three days in Uluru were perfect in every way. The deep red of the soil and the rocks, the blue of the sky, and the dry heat were magical, especially after the grey, squelching, dripping rainforests of Cairns. To see the sun setting over Ayers Rock was an experience of a lifetime. Also, the hotel just suited our casual style. It was a combined hotel and backpackers' lodge, with a large kitchen for the backpackers, which we were able to use for our self-catering. It also had a large outdoor bar and an excellent swimming pool. Three days passed all too quickly. This was definitely one of the highlights of the whole trip. In fact, both Uluru and the Bay of Islands (in New Zealand's North Island) were last minute diversions, not on our original itinerary, and these two places were probably the most memorable of the entire trip.
When we got back to Cairns the weather was much improved, and we had a couple of days in which we went on excursions to the barrier reef and to Kuranda in the hills behind Cairns. The barrier reef trip was another memorable day for me – not so much for Mary, unfortunately, because she wasn't feeling too well – and I had a great time snorkelling over the reef, seeing exotic fish and coral as well as giant clams and a sea turtle.
