Smoky Snowy sojourn

In recent weeks most of the best bushwalking areas around Sydney - the places I've been joyfully exploring for the last few years - have been burnt out. Most of the rest are closed because of the continuing danger. And the Sydney air is often opaque and hazardous, due to the fires raging all around.

I'd already arranged to spend a couple of nights with a bushwalking group in a ski lodge at Smiggin Holes in the Snowy Mountains, and thought we'd be far enough from the fires to breathe nice clean air.

Turns out that wasn't to be. The fires are so extensive that there's probably nowhere in the eastern half of the state that's completely free of their effects. It was nevertheless a nice break on balance.

Smiggin Holes, like the other winter resorts, was almost totally deserted. Maybe bushwalkers generally haven't twigged yet to the opportunities available for doing summer time stuff in comfort there.

We did a nice little day walk incorporating the summit of Little Twynam and the shores of Blue Lake.



There's always a lot of snow around up here, though I guess that could change in the not-so-distant future.

A Bollywood wedding party!

It was our very good fortune to be invited the other night to a wedding 'sangeet'. A sangeet is part of the traditional Indian wedding process. It's a pre-wedding party, where traditionally all the relatives from both families get together to party and get to know each other. They used to last for days, but tend to be just one evening these days.

The bride was the daughter of an old friend and fellow bushwalker who's originally from Bangladesh. The dress code was strictly 'Indian', and we were happy to oblige.

Indian weddings have always been grand affairs. It seems that they've become even grander these days, and the Bollywood theme is all the rage.

This do was held in Sydney's Paddington Town Hall. No expense was spared. There were two or three hundred guests, and an awful lot of them seemed to have been attending Bollywood dancing classes!

The bride arrived in style.

Between delicious meal breaks we were treated to dance performances from aunties and uncles, mates of the groom, nieces and nephews, and from the bride and groom themselves. The bride in particular, was an enthusiastic and accomplished dancer!


When not performing, they were holding court on their regal couch, either by themselves, or with their families.

















Towards the end everyone with any dancing genes in their body (so not me) was out there dancing. There was even a rather strange robocop character on stilts. Don't know what he was about!


All in all, a unique and rather wonderful experience for us!

Here are a couple of short videos:

Fires? I see no fires

I went up to the Blue Mountains today to photograph the big fires. There have been dramatic ones in the news lately. But the smoke was preventing any views of anything much. It was rather spooky being up there surrounded by all that bush, but being unable to see whether fires were approaching or not.




At Echo Point the tourists were posing in front of the pictures of the views rather than the views themselves.



There's a fire down there, the 'Ruined Castle' fire. But I couldn't see it for the smoke.

Most of the smoke is from the Wollemi National Park etc 'mega-fire' to the north. I'd hoped to maybe get a bit of a view of that one from Evans Lookout, but the road was closed,and the walking tracks too.

Worst air in the world

Our Sydney air is usually pretty good, as big city air quality goes. Last week it was about the worst in the world, with air visibility index numbers higher than Beijing's and Delhi's.

It's been caused by the massive bushfires raging around us. The nearby mega-blaze they call the 'Gospers Mountain' fire could more accurately now be called the 'Whole of Wollemi National Park, whole of the Yengo National Park, Much of the Blue Mountains National Park, and Many State Forest and Recreation Areas' fire. It's horrendous. Most of the best bushwalking areas I've been visiting in recent years are gone. All the other parks are closed, and it's looking like the whole Blue Mountains region will soon go up in smoke. As well as the bushland, that's also a serious number of towns and homes now under threat. Temperatures across Australia are the highest ever recorded.

So far nothing much has happened here in Sydney proper, though that could change at any moment. Everyone's screaming for much more support for the fire brigades and much more action on climate change. The Prime Minister has taken his family overseas for their holidays. The Acting Prime Minister says this concern about climate action is just something the 'raving inner city loonies' worry about. We're in good hands!

Priceless treasures of the dynasties include a cabbage and a pork belly

One of the absolute 'must see' destinations in Taipei is the National Palace Museum. It houses many of the finest treasures from Imperial China, the former possessions of emperors from many dynasties.

How they got to be in Taiwan rather than mainland China is of course a complicated story, like so many things involving Taiwan and China. China used to say they were 'stolen', but recently the respective national institutions have been co-operating and swapping exhibits even.

I spent four hours in there, slowly wending my way up from ground level to the third floor. At the top I discovered the collection of the finest treasures of all: the amazing bits of jade and other stones. And among the most prized exhibits, would you believe, are a jade cabbage and a piece of pork belly carved from stone!

And all kinds of priceless pieces of other arts and crafts

Mother and son memorials

Overlooking Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan is the Ci'en Pagoda. It was built in the early 1970s, by Chiang Kai-shek, in honour of his mother. Presumably this was for her role in giving the world the great generalissimo himself.

We were taken there on one of our easy-tourist days. We climbed the double-helix staircase and admired the views of the lake. Guide Simon told us all about the bad old days of Chiang's corrupt military dictatorship. (And the contrasting enlightenment of the current democracy.)








In Taipei I checked out the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and the adjoining Memorial Hall Square. It's quite a tourist attraction, and every hour, on the hour, you get to see the changing of the guard. They do an extraordinary little dance with each other for a good five minutes before completing the show. The square is a large and grand space - a sort of Taiwanese Tiananmen Square.

I've mentioned before that Taiwan has a robust democracy these days, so everything's no doubt contested. But I understand there have often been moves to dismantle the various Chiang Kai-shek memorials, whereas in mainland China he's been largely rehabilitated. It's been said he would have approved of what China has become, while Mao would have hated it - even though Mao had got to be in charge, and Chiang had had to run away.

And in Taiwan, his former party, the KMT, is now the opposition party and wants closer ties with the communist mainland. The governing progressive coalition is the side that doesn't.

Further to the subject of Chiang and his legacy: we'd noticed how much Japanese culture and food still permeates Taiwan, and that there seemed to be an absence of the anti-Japanese sentiment that still exists in other places that had been occupied by them. This is seemingly put down to the fact that when Chiang Kai-shek took over from them after WW2, his regime was so unpleasant that it made the Japanese period look good by comparison.

101 reasons I got over my tall building obsession

I've never been able to resist visiting the really tall buildings when there's one nearby. I mean the ones that are or were serious contenders for World's Tallest Building.

I've been up the Empire State Building, the Burj Khalifa, the Petronas Towers, the Canton Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center, Chicago's Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower), and in Melbourne, our very own Eureka Tower. There's usually a modest fee, a bit of a queue, and spectacular views from the top.

So it was inevitable that I'd find my way up to the top of Taipei 101 while I was there. It's admittedly only the 11th tallest in the world right now, at 509m, but from 2004 to 2010 it was in fact number one.

As usual, there's a not-to-scale wall chart that  exaggerates its size, depicting all the others as smaller, whether they are or not.

The entry fee was a bit more than expected, but the 40-minute queuing time was an even more unwelcome imposition.

The view was a problem for me too. Being in the only really big building in town, there's not much else to look at. I found it difficult to get my bearings. It might have worked better in daylight, when it would have been easier to locate the hills I'd been climbing earlier in the day.





So after 20 minutes I was ready to come down again. Except that there was another 40 minute queue to negotiate!


I did rather like the open access to the wind vibration dampening ball mechanism, hanging down through the centre of the building. It's a 660 tonne steel pendulum, and it's been known to move by up to one metre during typhoons.

Yehliu Geopark

It's a very popular tourist destination in northern Taiwan, an easy day trip out from Taipei. Maybe a little too popular, as in it's extremely crowded. But there's some very eye-catching scenery.

I'm sure there's lots here for geologists to wonder at, but mostly we're looking at the various formations, and trying to work out which is the 'Fairy Shoe', which the 'Elephant Rock', the 'Ice Cream Rock', and the 'Kissing Rock'. The most famous rock of all is the 'Queen's Head'. It's said to look like Queen Nefertiti (though one site said Queen Elizabeth 1st). That's only when you view it from the correct position though, and there was an enormous queue to get to that position!

There were several prominent sea anemone fossils,and signs saying not to damage the fossils and things. I'd prefer that they'd actually protected them with fences though.

These were the 'sea candles'. Possibly unique to here?

Taroko's aboriginal-run hotel

Until the late 17th century, Taiwan was predominantly inhabited by its aboriginal population, though there had been strong Spanish, Portugese, and Dutch presences, along with many others. It's a particularly complicated history.

But then along came the Ming Dynasty Han Chinese, and they came to dominate the place, with the aborigines retreating to the mountains. It's a bit analogous with Australia and its European invasion a bit later. And the Japanese ran the place from 1895 until 1945, of course.

 But back to the aborigines. They're in a bad way generally, but the Government runs generous programmes to support them, we were told.

There's also an interesting private programme, in the shape of the Taroko Village Hotel. It's owned by a wealthy non-aboriginal Taiwanese, but the employees are aboriginal, and the hotel is styled on the original village.


They serve traditional foods, notably different from the usual Chinese fare.



It's rather expensive too. We only dined there. Guide Samantha said their last group also stayed there. I asked her what went wrong. "Nothing went wrong", she said. I think it was just our budget that went wrong!