Around the World In 80 Months: Travels and Reflections In Four Continents 2007-2014

By Peter G Emery

Part reminiscence, part commentary, Around the World in 80 Months presents the author’s ‘take’ on people and places in widely differing cultures during the period 2007-2014. Being based in three continents afforded opportunities to observe social and cultural realities in a variety of countries, while catching up with family and friends enabled him and his wife to roam through a fourth. Around the World in 80 Months is a celebration of sharing the joys of retirement and un-retirement, of negotiating the unexpected and of finding common cause with others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Oct 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483418483

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Around the World in 80 Months

Travels and Reflections in four continents 2007-2014

PETER G EMERY

Copyright © 2014 Peter G Emery.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-1849-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-1848-3 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 09/24/2014

Contents

Preface

EUROPE

France

Springtime in the Languedoc

Letter from Marseillan

A Languedoc Christmas - December 2008

Le Tour de France 2012

A - Z of Spain and Portugal

Austria-Hungary : A Tale of Two Cities

Return to Scotland (or Carry on up the Trossachs) : June 2013

Jaunts along the Jurassic Coast

Malta Mandala

ASIA

Istanbul

When the balloon goes up…

Yasmeen (jasmine)

Ra’s Madraka – Oman – March 2007

A Semester in Arabia – Fall 2010

Some Al-Ain People

Travels around Malaysia –

Kanchnnaburi

AUSTRALIA

Symbols of the Past

Et in arcadia nos……

Sunshine and Gold

True Blue

Australia, Race and I

Devotional

S W I F T S

NORTH AMERI CA – CANADA

Montreal

Nova Scotia

Niagara Falls

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Camrose, Alberta

Vancouver and Seattle

To Josephine

Dear heart,

We did set sail and our odyssey continues…

Preface

Clay lies still but blood’s a rover ;

Breath’s a ware that will not keep.

Up lad : when the journey’s over

There’ll be time enough to sleep

A E Housman

In his essay ‘Why I write’ George Orwell stated as one of his reasons…because I want to. This urge to record, to express personal thoughts and images is associated with man from pre-historic times. The desire to assert an identity and put one’s mark on the world is as old as humanity – whether it be the red-ochre animal paintings of the Lascaux caves, or the rocks of Muscat harbour where generations of English mariners left their monikers, described by the late Sultan of Oman as ‘my personal address book’. Two impulses are at work here ; the need to affirm one’s persona and the yen to leave home and visit other people and places, and they find common cause in the genre of travel writing.

Sometimes the experience of the Other reinforces love of one’s own country and its values :

I travelled among unknown men,

In lands beyond the sea;

Nor England! did I know till then

What love I bore to thee.

William Wordsworth

At other times, the ‘still sad music of humanity’ seems to echo with the same resonance - a common yearning for safe passage through this ‘vale of tears’, a satisfying of basic needs, and an adherence to the rights of man.

Since retiring in 2007, after spending a quarter of my life teaching at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, I have travelled with my wife Jo around the world in a delayed time-fuse kind of way – a few weeks here, a month or two there. We have tried retirement and then, perforce, we have tried un-retirement, returning to the Arab World to work in the UAE in 2010. Now we are back in Australia, which we consider will be our stopping-off point from the whirligig that has been the last 7 years (or 80 months).

The pieces in this volume are a record of our settlings and wanderings through four continents, a snapshot of selected people and places which we encountered, as well as my thoughts on attitudes and events in different parts of the globe. We have battled the heat of the Arabian sun and we have had a foretaste of the brutality of polar vortexes amidst the Canadian prairies, before returning to our home base of Adelaide, which for one brief day in February 2014 endured the reputation of being the ‘hottest city in the world’. Working and visiting different countries during this period has afforded the opportunity to reflect, to describe and to reach out to the Other and others but now we must follow the counsel of Voltaire, the sage of Ferney, and cultivate our own garden.

The traveller can get the greatest joy of travel even without going to the mountains, by staying at home and watching and going about the field to watch a sailing cloud, or a dog, or a hedge, or a lonely tree.

Lin Yutang, Chinese writer and philologist

Springtime in the Languedoc

‘Fraichement’ said Mme Josette at the bakery with admirable concision. We have just returned to Marseillan from the Adelaide summer in the middle of the coldest winter in the region for 30 years ; some wet snow is drifting onto our summer terrace and the tramontane (north wind) whistles down our street pinning us back into the warmth of our little house in rue du Commandant Riviere. Who was he? No one knows but they are quick to correct a visitor who says Capitaine Riviere by mistake. In the village, little details matter. But why do they matter? No one can say. Winter is a time of hibernation – for all forms of life ; from the lowliest capricorne in our overhead oak beams to M. Vidal’s cowering spaniels, who are booted out twice a day to attend to their business. Folks stay close to their petit feu and there are no birds visible in the bare branches of our plane tree in the square behind us – only one or two brave sparrows hop around in the street outside the bakery pecking the crumbs left by the clients. A good way to distinguish French from foreigners is the baguette test : the French very often break off and eat the bout de pain as they leave the boulangerie but foreigners almost never. Out in the vineyards which surround our village the black vines are as hard and unyielding as iron ; on the etang the flamingoes are huddled together in the shallow water finding warmth in their solidarity in a similar way to emperor penguins. The landscape is sage and sere and far to the north the hills above Lodeve are powdered with white. Winter is an excellent time to put off those painting and brico jobs and read, rest and experiment by trying out new recipes and concocting delicious soups. We make the occasional foray – along the road to Gignac bordered by a double line of plane trees as far as the eye can see. Popular wisdom has it that these trees were planted in the early 1800s to shade Napoleon’s armies from the merciless Midi sun. Some motorists have requested that they be cut down since ‘the trees cause accidents’ but fortunately so far common sense has prevailed and a survey shows that 75% of people think that they should be retained. We soon start climbing up past the Roman bridge over the Gorges de l’Herault and the Grottes des Clamouses to the mountain fastness of St Guilhem le Desert. Its impressive Abbaye, renowned as a stopping point on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostella, is constructed on the ruins of the monastery of Gellone, founded by Guillaume (Guilhem in Occitan), a grandson of Charles Martel the famous liegeman of Charlemagne who defeated the Saracen armies in the battles of Tours, thus checking definitively their northward surge in Europe in the 8th century and thereby perhaps delaying the establishment of a mosque in London by more than a millennium. Guilhem’s monastery originally contained a precious relic of part of the Holy Cross donated by the Emperor Charlemagne and this, together with its founder’s reputation for saintliness, soon brought pilgrims flocking to the 11th century Abbaye and adjacent stopping points along the famous route such as the neighbouring Prieurie du St Michel du Grandmont near Lodeve. Perhaps because of its relative remoteness and lack of an encircling connurbation, the latter communicates a reassuring sense of stillness, well-being and sanctity in which one discerns the orisons of countless voices echoing down through the ages. The monks disappeared from these religious establishments at the time of the French revolution : in a particularly vivid evocation, a monk at the Abbaye de Valmagne describes how the assembled brothers heard the clamorous mob of citoyens advancing from the town of Meze through the vineyards to take over the building and fled in front of the revolutionary wave. After being occupied and divested, the abbeys and priories were often bought up by private individuals in the early 19th century and have remained in the keeping of these families down to the present. The Abbaye of St Guilhem is not in a desert although the scrub-covered limestone hills that overlook it confer a certain remoteness on the village ; rather, the epithet ‘desert’ applies to the spiritual odyssey of religious devotees in their renunciation of the ways of this world. Our visit took place on a day of biting cold ; we stumbled into a welcoming auberge when there were very few visitors about to enjoy cassoulet and roti de porc. The cafes around the ancient gnarled plane tree in the square were bereft of customers and many of the shops down the narrow ruelles were closed for business.

Here in the Languedoc we are close to the march of the seasons and their ordered rituals. An early sign of the approaching spring is the snarl of buzz-saws around the village while the municipality workers trim the plane trees and oleanders down to size. The week before Easter, teams of men fan out on the streets lifting off the manhole covers to check the condition of the sewer-pipes. Tables and chairs appear tentatively in front of the cafes with a few hardy anoraks nursing their beer in the weak sunshine. Holiday-homers prepare for aperitifs on the terrace in anticipation of the long summer evenings under the slowly-darkening sky which on midsummer nights in the Midi acquires that deep cobalt blue, so vividly depicted by Van Gogh above that café in Arles. The first white asparagus are displayed at the greengrocer’s along with the gariguettes (the delicious small strawberries of the region) and charentais melons (of ineffable sweetness). The flea market at Marseillan-Plage begins to rouse itself from its winter torpor and parking rapidly becomes impossible as the punters crowd in. White-kneed and pink-faced shorts-wearers (tourists) can be seen in the supermarket car-parks. Mobile-homes begin to criss-cross the departmental roads and the jeunesse start revving up their motos - portable noise-machines (which are not used to travel from A to B so much as to modulate from pp to ff). The elderly emerge to blink in the sunlight and audaciously cast the odd clout. In the fields the may blossom is out and the rows of vines, in-filled by acres of little white flowers, miraculously put out their first delicate shoots. The roadside verges are bordered by buttercups, poppies and blue and white wild iris in profusion. The almond, plum and cherry blossom appear, at first tight and unfurled until, when the temperature reaches the mid-20s, they gauge that winter has receded and it is safe to burst into bloom and reveal to the world the full palette of their spring colours. Over garden fences sweet-scented purple lilacs are in bloom - the kind that Ivor Novello used to gather in the spring – and the wisteria’s regal bunches of deep lavender bracts have already turned a whiter shade of pale after their brief first flowering. In the fields the white and pinky-red clusters of the horse-chestnuts are arranged like candles on a Christmas tree. Ancient lichened walls are beautified by damask-red rambling roses and the coral-pink flowers of japonica. The early primavera which bravely battled through the winter snows are now giving up their struggles as the sun turns warm and the wind shifts to the south. The plane trees are fringed by an imperceptible sheen of light green as the first hirondelles appear high up in the sky, the advance guard of the flocks of swifts that circle in formation low over the rooftops on summer evenings. Soon we will see them inspecting the eaves and dipping and swooping low in aerial courtship once they establish their nests. Meanwhile the flamingoes (vividly termed flamants roses in French) have ventured north towards the Camargue to conduct their mating rituals and are no longer to be seen on our etang. At this time of year when the humidity rises, this inland lake acquires a pearly sheen in the soft blue light. In the hinterland, the landscape is mistily verdant resembling that of the rainier climes of northern Europe in this brief interval before the onset of the blinding harshness of the canicule (scorching heat). Down at the beach on the Mediterranean side, hardy kids are already dipping their toes and more into the water while parents keep a watchful eye sheltering from the occasional gusts of wind in front of the sand dunes. The myriad crowds of bathers and parked dormobiles hailing from all parts of Europe are still a couple of months away. There is a translucent quality to the light as we sit on our terrace listening to the roucoulements of the wood-pigeons and the chiming notes of our resident Scopus owl. It is too early in the year for the nightingales but their song is heard less and less as woods and thickets are sacrificed for more villas with swimming-pools, the ultimate success symbol of the bourgeoisie.

The weekly market is awash with pansies, petunias and geraniums with which to decorate window boxes and terraces and bouquets of lily-of-the-valley (muguets) to celebrate the Fete des Meres. The sweet old lady who sells them to me quotes a local saying : Les bonnes contes pour les bons gens (good people settle their bills) but the other meaning of contes is ‘stories’ and the advent of spring in the Languedoc is a good story to be part of and to have witnessed.

Envoi: The first week in May is heralded by torrential rain and cold winds. Some rain is blown in on the stairs and through the gaps in the front top window but otherwise the house stays dry. We install the front door cover in its slots to stop water flooding in from the street, pull up the drawbridge and stay indoors for the day. We hear of 6-meter waves on the Cote d’Azur carrying away cars on the promenade des Anglais (ca n’est jamais arrive) and snow in Carcassone and Toulouse. In the bakery, Mme Vidal says that with the advent of Ste Marie we are now in for two weeks of cold, signalled by the return of the Mistral. Time, once again, to ‘rug up and break out the Armagnac’?

Letter from Marseillan

20.07.08

Thunder and rain this morning and the swifts stayed in their nests under the eaves until 7 a.m. .An absence of insects in the air or an atavistic warning against flying when lightning is about? The rain will decrotter les rues..interesting that English does not have an equivalent word for cleaning the streets of the pestilence which remains unpleasantly evident despite the best efforts of teams of mechanical and human road sweepers and cleaners. Once a week the huge cleaning truck with its attendant hoses spraying a perfumed mist threads through the narrow lanes almost into our kitchen door while the driver – a jolly giant with bouffant moustaches sits in the cab munching a banana. He says he gave up smoking 20 years ago and eats fruit because it’s healthy but it doesn’t do much good for his figure. Since we left almost two years ago there has been a change of maire, Williams Meric the socialist having been replaced by a conservative who came to power on a clochemerle ticket. Now the toilets in the town centre are apparently immaculate and the air is noisy with little trucks going up and down the streets with rotating brushes. Madame Boite-a-Clou in the hardware shop welcomed me back with the comment la vie est belle as it is indeed for her and her husband and those of us of the troisieme age who are lucky enough to still enjoy reasonable health and quality of life. Many there are who have it tough…the little black lady with the colourful clothes who lives in a tiny ground-floor room accompanied by her faithful cat Mizou and who takes flowers to her husband’s grave every week ; the bag lady who gets more elephantine by the year and sits on any available ledge puffing a gasper ; dear Madame Jeannine who taught in the village school for many years and gamely hobbles down to the shops every day ; Andre (the huntsman with his Tyrolean hat) who has lost some of his vigour of yore when he used to rattle up the street on a tiny tractor bound for his vineyard outside town ; our immediate neighbours who we have to call the moustiques (after their eponymous cat tethered to a leash in the street never straying more than a meter or two) and who have just retired down here from the north only for the husband to be stricken with cancer and the exhausting courses in chemo- and radio-therapy ; various elderly men for whom the short walk to the boulangerie is like the final assault on Everest, who walk with sticks and some of whom have to lean on the walls and pause every few steps..And then there are the Grumps, the son and daughter-in-law of our erstwhile neighbour Lucy Vidal (of blessed and sweet memory)..They had two spaniel type dogs who were turfed out of the house periodically to attend to nature and one of whom – the brown one – ate poisoned chicken last week and died a slow and lingering death therefrom. For days he lay on the front doorstep almost motionless whimpering. We asked why they didn’t take him to the vet but were told that the vet was closed over the long Bastille Day holiday weekend. Finally one morning there was a louder yelp than normal and then silence. Having castigated the dogs for contributing to the state of the streets, I