Bright Ideas

The Blair UK government is well-known for its idiotic ideas. On-the-spot fines where you would be frogmarched to the nearest ATM. The A* grade in GCSEs. The Millennium Dome. Harriet Harman.

The Aussie government appears to be competing with them. From 2010, it will no longer be possible to buy the traditional incandescent light bulb. Only the fluorescent energy-saver bulbs will be on sale. This is expected to reduce the country's carbon emissions by, if I use the most optimistic estimate I could find, as much as 0.1%.

I'm somewhat torn over this one. While I do think we should be doing our best not to completely strip the planet of its resources before we've figured out where we can get refills, I would think that there are other things that could be encouraged to help with this. E.g. charging shops and offices high electricity rates after normal opening hours, so they're not encouraged to leave all their lights blazing because it might deter a burglar and it "doesn't cost much". The sooner economists come up with a sensible measure to replace GDP that factors in intangible costs the better.

(I also noticed this was in the news today, so it appears that they're also not averse to plagiarism.)

Plans for the long weekend - I'm using up one of my time-off-in-lieu days I got for working silly hours in January :

- Visit some gardening stores and buy a garden table and some local plants (local, hence drought-resistant ... I can only water my plants on Tuesday, Thursday and alternating Saturday nights, as I live in an even-numbered house. This is not a joke - see above re crazy Aussie ideas.)
- Visit furniture stores, to purchase a bed, a dining table and chairs and a sofa (which will largely complete my arrival, at least in a purely materialistic sense. Might think about getting a telly at some point in the future, but I'm really not missing having one)
- Visit Hanging Rock, something I failed to do a few weeks ago. (One of my colleagues told me a story which is probably only amusing if you've seen the film or are at least vaguely aware of the legend. She and some of her friends once went there dressed as Victorian schoolgirls, didn't realise the park closed at 5 so happily carried on walking, and the rangers found them after a major search 2 hours later. Well, I laughed!)
- Visit some other local tourist spot, which I haven't decided on yet. Might be The Rip - the entrance to Port Phillip Bay, on which Melbourne stands, one of the most dangerous stretches of coast in the country, and also where an Aussie prime minister named Harold vanished while swimming. (The disappearance of Harold Bishop was definitely a case of art imitating life, though, as the real Harold, Harold Holt, disappeared in 1967.)

My stuff did arrive on 7th Feb. Mostly, anyway. There were 3 mishaps. In increasing order of irritation - first, my stereo had been slightly dented on the top but remained perfectly functional, second, a corner about 2 inches long broke off my coffee table and third, they lost one of my packages altogether. Of the 24 packages they shipped, it was definitely the "best" one they could have lost - all it was was a sheet of plywood which formed the back of my flat-pack bookcase, and fortunately they sell wood over here, I've seen it advertised.

Stupid newspaper statistics misuse #1379845 - see the 22 Feb item here. Will people ever understand probability?

And to finish, a last memory of Venezuela - my tentmate Mark, a photographer and travel journalist by night (by day he works as tech support for a major insurance company), wrote this article on the trip. If you look carefully, you can see me swimming in one of the photos (if I'm honest, you really need to know that it's me there in the first place!) Note also the scary three-armed fruit-seller.

Venezuela. Again!

Brian, unofficial official videographer of the Venezuela trip, has created an excellent DVD of his video camera footage - some 2.5 hours of it, no less. The views of Angel Falls and Roraima work so much better than in a photograph - no idea why, but the photos just don't look like the real thing. He has some pretty inspired background music too - Travis's "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" on the top of Roraima made me laugh out loud! It brought back a few things I'd forgotten :

The hola birds
The children playing with the dog at Kawe
The downpour at Angel Falls
Bob Marley and the speed-demon 4WD driver
Several conversations I had with Chirag and Jai about Brian always videoing us!

However, the monkey spider footage is not a good thing to watch on an 8ft projector screen.

Back to Reality

It's taken me a while to get round to finally writing this post, for several reasons. Chief one, which is still a little upsetting, is that I've lost the first 2/3 of my holiday "diary," and while I can still remember vast swathes of the trip, I'm sure there are many of the little bits and pieces that make up the full story that I've forgotten, like...

Fruti Max, facts of the day, PV=nRT, "For twos, you use the bag," "Bumface," "Amanda, that's oarful," the monkey spider, Brian and the Day of the Three Spilt Drinks (also Brian and the day of camera footage...), the sunbow when we landed at Kamarata, "a woman comes in 3 times a week," the bus-surfing, Michelmas at Chichirivichi, bananas, ant armies, Chinotto at Paraitepui, Tek river waterfall jacuzzi, the Milky Way at Kawe, toilet buddies, "hold a firework in your right hand and count to 10," galletas, termite chilli sauce, fireflies, Salto El Sapo and "pondering life" afterwards, joy of movement on Roraima, partial eclipse, Myra's long-sleeved top, wrong turns (on the way up through the bog and on the way down through the steep forest near Paraitepui) the beautiful spider, snake in the cooler box, watermelons (for eating, for betting and for leaving sat on rocks for slowcoaches to enjoy), Carlucho the rain attractor, chinchoros, homemade limeade, menthol, waking up to the ISS, group dynamics, toilet terror, "when the fly comes down 6 inches...," Tarot Shithead, the flickering lights in the hotel on the first night - and the shower cubicle there too, pool at Banana Camps in Santa Elena, the DVT hour, thunderstorms at Angostura, lollies, swimming in Angel Falls, seeing Angel Falls from El Mirador for the first time and wanting to agree with Lee but not being able to speak, not washing for 6 days, remoteness, "How're you doing, brother?" on the way down Roraima, Simon & Garfunkel music quiz, Dust in the Wind - English and Portuguese - Piano Man, More Than Words and Mr Big, Ann Arbor coincidences, the Chinese girl's Mills & Boon folder of love for Jose Alexander, restaurant malfunction at El Tizon, solitary coffee at Kawe falls and at Angel Falls, hammocks for giants, crossing Rio Kukenan on the way back, El Anal cashew nuts, Toffee Goodness - something sticky and sweet, checking of passports on leaving the plain in CDG, insect attack, the 15 Minutes of Chocolate conversation, Aussie "mites", selling Amanda all my bolivars at airports...

And those are the ones I do remember!

Photos are here and here.

I don't think I've ever been on such a ... concentrated holiday. Even now, 2 weeks later, and I still haven't got my head back fully into the real world from it - of course, that could be in part because the real world isn't exactly somewhere I'm enjoying living right at the moment.

Spider in the Web

I'm getting a little bit bothered about the potential for spiders on this Venezuela trip!

I'm OK with ones of up to about an inch across - those are my absolute limit, and while I can cope with having one of that size in the same room of me, I'll be keeping a very close eye on it, almost to the exclusion of looking anywhere else. Anything bigger than that, and I can't really even look at pictures of them - a friend I told about this said he'd scared himself stupid looking at a photo of a bird-eating spider, about a foot across.

I'm worried how I'll react if one drops on me in the jungle, or I wake up and one's on my bed, or my face...

No - I need to sleep this evening, so I'll have to stop this train of thought!

In my usual style, I have yet to do any packing whatsoever, despite leaving tomorrow lunchtime. I've also got several things to do in town tomorrow, including getting the haircut I didn't get last week, faxing the last bits of my visa application off and getting toothpaste, towel and other little things I've forgotten.

Oh, and the Oz bank account application too.

And my MFI furniture.

And...