Crazy golf

Whitby

Whitby was one of my favourite towns in England when I was growing up.

My school class did geography fieldwork there.  For one assignment, I stood on a remote side street, where I had to count passing cars for an hour.  I think there were six.  Maybe I added a couple out of boredom.

At least we got to make lots of colourful charts and maps using the combined data, and I suppose our teachers got a free hour in the pub.

The main thing, though, was that Whitby was one of the seaside towns that we used for family outings when we were living in North Yorkshire.  Each time, we had to do all the sights: the fishing boats bobbing at the quay, the whalebone arch over the footpath, the 199 steps up to the churchyard following the route Dracula had taken.

Then we'd stroll back along the cobbled streets, where my mother would disapprove of the smell of fish and chips and my father would look disappointed.

Our route home took us up from the town centre and along the cliff-top.  Up there, above the lingering aroma of cooking fat and malt vinegar, there was a weather-beaten crazy golf course of 12 holes or so.  I used to love crazy golf (well, who didn't), but this was a set-up that I particularly liked.   The last hole was one of those affairs arranged so that you could only have one attempt.  The ball would go past a net of some sort and drop into one of a series of holes out of reach of the player.  There it could be collected by the ticket seller, marking the end of the round.   There was a sign above the last hole that said "ring the bell and win a free game". 

The free game was such a child's objective.  I fantasised that one day I would be able to get my little ball up the ramp and between the windmill sails at just the right angle to fall into the correct hole to make the bell ring.  Like a parrot wanting a cracker, I suppose. 

Finally, one day, after many visits in the stinging salt-air wind, I actually managed it!   I got the ball into the one hole in a dozen that would ring the tinny little bell.  Then, full of excitement, I ran up to the wooden ticket booth, all peeling paint and splinters, to claim my free game.

The free game was, of course, another round of crazy golf.  I don't know what I imagined the free game would be otherwise.   Something that wasn't a round of crazy golf.  My chagrin knew no bounds, made worse by the fact that my father was a bit pressed for time that day (or so he claimed), so I didn't get to savour every last moment of my unwanted free round of crazy golf. 

I'm sure this taught me a lesson in expectation management, but I am reminded of it now by a round of medical tests that I'm currently taking.  Each test so far has been a success in that it has been negative, but each test points to the possibility of a further test.

With each test result, I ring the bell and win a free game that I find I didn't really want.

Cascading over the edge of reason

An illustrated reading of an extract from Those Footsteps Behind: Around the World in 50 Poems.

Chasing lions in our pyjamas

An illustrated reading of an extract from Those Footsteps Behind.

Imaging and footsteps

At first glance, the two volumes of poetry that I have recently self-published may not appear to be very closely connected.  They are, however, conceived as different sides of the same coin. To put it another way, Magnetic Resonance Imaging is the yin to the yang of Those Footsteps Behind.



Some of the material in Magnetic Resonance Imaging may be familiar to readers of this blog.  At a personal level, it represents "the Finland years" and was mostly written in the period 2005-2009.  The themes of pain and loss play a large role, whether physically or emotionally.  Moreover, the point of view is very much an inwardly directed gaze.  The intention is that this is enhanced by the use of the structure of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, as the music bounces around in the writer's mind.

On the other hand, the material in Those Footsteps Behind was, in chronological terms, written later. In this case, the writing represents the period 2012-2016. However, this is not necessarily synchronous with the time at which any events represented in the work took place.

The overarching themes now have become travel and time, and the point of view has become more outwardly focused. On the surface, the work is possibly more descriptive of physical landscapes than of emotional ones. The use of illustrative photographs, I hope, enhances this type of imagery. However, the poems in this case are intended to initiate at least some resonance in linking the concrete world of the traveller's footsteps to the intangible world of the traveller's experience.  Occasional echoes from other past and future travellers arise here and there to further muddy the mix.

The reader may choose to view the connections in different ways, of course: maybe not just inward-looking and outward-looking, but possibly pain and recovery, or shade and light.  Once beyond the writer's reach, words take on their own lives in a reader's hands, after all.  However, these two volumes will remain in the writer's mind as, if not twins, at least siblings.

"if they photographed my head they'd probably see her.
she's always there"
(Magnetic Resonance Imaging)

"life for us from this point on
means chasing lions in our pyjamas."
(Those Footsteps Behind)

Now in print

Self-publishing seems to be a thing now.  Maybe 'twas ever thus.  It's vanity press, of course. ("Vanity of vanities, all is vanity", to quote Evelyn Waugh; although he had a publisher, so he was obviously talking about something else. Ah, "Quomodo sedet sola civitas".)

Nevertheless, we must keep up with the Joneses, even if the Waughs are out of reach.

Here's a brief update.

*New* Those Footsteps Behind: Illustrated Poems of Travel.
Available in print from Lulu.  Submitted for distribution through Amazon (forthcoming).

Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Poetry Collection.
Available in print from Amazon.

A Kick up the Balkans: A Diary of a Year of Change.  First published on this blog, and now available in print or for Kindle from Amazon.

Culture jock

Yes, I have now left Finland.

I have my green card, but my social security number is pending and my goods are en route. I am in mental transit. The perfect mode in which to be surprised by cultural unfamiliarity.

For this is Georgia. That's the Georgia on My Mind, The Devil Went Down to Georgia, Rainy Night in Georgia style of Georgia.  Not the other one. Not the formerly Soviet Republic of Georgia. That's a different Georgia. Get that right.

Georgia, USA, certainly keeps giving me cultural surprises.  And the thing with surprises is that they often come from a direction that you didn't expect. Otherwise they wouldn't be surprises, right?

Did you know, for example, that the music bands to originate from Georgia include R.E.M. and the B-52s? I didn't.  Nor did I expect to be living almost next door to a thriving local organic greengrocer. Nor did I expect to have a paved footpath (almost) all the way into town from where we live.

To use a word that seems sometimes to be misappropriated on this side of Big Water, here in the quaint university town of Valdosta, some things seem surprisingly "liberal".  The tiny town centre may shut early, but there's a late-night drag show on Saturdays. There was also a very good beer-tasting not long ago, with plenty of microbrews and not a single bottle of Bud in sight.

That was at a place called 'Bas Bleu'.  Spelt 'Bas Bleu' but pronounced 'Bar Blue'. Ah well.

There are also bits and pieces that may fit some preconceived stereotypes rather more snugly.  There's the downtown, high-street shop front given over almost exclusively to what you might reasonably call "jive-ass preacher" gear, for example. (Yup, I learned that term from The Blues Brothers. Amazing what a li'l cultural edumacation can do, y'all.)  Largely, though, I have found many of these cultural unfamiliarities to be endearing rather than alienating.

The things that I have found less than endearing come mostly from the media.  I have been surprised by the volume of television ads that claim positive benefits on behalf of fossil fuels and prescription medications. Neither was I fully expecting my good old-fashioned paper junk mail to include a fairly thick brochure for a firearms sale. A semi-auto rifle on the cover at only $1299.99, for example. At least the .99 price tag seems universal.

In another score for the stereotypical view from elsewhere, our apartment complex has no recycling. However, when I open my eyes, there are recycling bins of different colours dotted all around town, ready to be spotted and filled.  A recycling enthusiast may not have it easy, but recycling can be done. With effort.

As such, it's individual people that often make the biggest difference in a place. In that sense, Valdosta for me is a case of so far, so good.  From the older gentleman bagging groceries at the Winn-Dixie check-out, to the real-life military crime scene investigator, the welcome in the Peach State has been, well, unimpeachable. I'm sure there's more to come, but it's a good enough start.

Intercultural indices of the breakfast egg

There I was, with two other naked blokes, talking about eggs.

No, really. If you're Finnish or if you've spent any significant time in Finland, the situation seems less foreign. It's a sauna thing, see. People discard their clothes to sit and sweat together, and pass the time in either perspiration-soaked silence or small talk.

This time it was small talk. Which meandered in the direction of intercultural diversity.

At this point, I should explain that I've just returned to Finland after a bout of globetrotting to and from the two Uniteds: Kingdom and States. The Kingdom is much as it ever was, and maybe much as it ever shall be. The States, on the other hand, is still an object of some cultural puzzlement.

Or to put it another way, the States makes me feel like an object of some cultural puzzlement.

An infamous misquotation hangs in the air, with the two same nations still divided by the same common language, and the authorship (Shaw or Wilde, both Irish) still unresolved. But at this moment, the pith seems to be epitomised by eggs.

Actually, I'm spreading the yolk somewhat. It's not an Anglo thing, it's European-North American intercultural diversity hanging like an improperly punched chad in the frontal lobe of my mind.

One much-regurgitated personal tale from the Bulgaria of old concerns my favourite menu item of the times: Хемъндекс без Яйце (that is, 'ham and eggs without egg').

The lack of said breakfast item in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall is neatly juxtaposed by the market saturation on the other side of the pond in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Lehman Brothers.

There still, the unwary European traveller can be befuddled by waitresses who, intent on earning their 20% tip, want to know whether the eggs are to be 'over easy' or 'sunny side up' (and whether the sausages are to be 'patty' or 'string'; and which of any number of variants of milk/cream/milk-cream mix is to be preferred).

And hence it strikes me, with not a little irony, that in Europe I may not understand what is said, but I do most often get the meaning. In America, where we have that common tongue, I can mostly tune in to what people say. The puzzle more often is what they mean.

Miles and miles and miles

The BBC reported today that, in 2009, air passenger traffic declined by its largest amount since 1945.

Whoa, there! I certainly didn't notice many empty seats on my travels, and I wasn't even flying with budget airlines. So maybe there have been fewer flights operated, through airline codeshares and so on. And that would surely be a good thing, environmentally speaking.

Which brings me to this: air miles. I just calculated my travel mileage for 2009. With Helsinki as my base, that involved a round-the-world ticket, a return to Bangkok, a return to Cincinnati, and a couple of visits to the UK.

Total air travel for 2009: 58,425 air miles (94,034 km).

2010 has already kicked off with a round trip to Washington DC, and the question people are asking is ... where next?

Watch this space! But meanwhile, maybe I'd better get out there and plant a tree or two. I think I have carbon debt.

Around the world in 58 days

So many people have asked me about this that I'm just going to post it here for posterity. Well, I suppose if you tell them that you've been around the world, they'll want to know where you mean, exactly. After all, you can't go everywhere. Can you?

This, therefore, was the official itinerary of Bruce's Grand Tour 2009.

===========
4 August: depart Helsinki, Finland (Finnair)
5 August: arrive Kyoto (rail) via Osaka, Japan

11 August: depart Kyoto (rail), arrive Hong Kong via Osaka (Cathay Pacific)

13 August: round trip to Guangzhou, China (boat, road, rail)

15 August: depart Hong Kong, arrive Singapore (Cathay Pacific)

17 August: round trip to Melaka, Malaysia (road)

18 August: depart Singapore, arrive Perth, Australia (Qantas)

22 August: depart Perth, arrive Darwin, Australia (Qantas)

26 August: depart Darwin, arrive Alice Springs, Australia (Qantas)

29 August: depart Alice Springs, arrive Sydney, Australia (Qantas)

2 September: depart Sydney, arrive Auckland, New Zealand (Qantas)

9 September: depart Auckland, arrive Easter Island via Santiago, Chile (LAN)

13 September: depart Easter Island, arrive Santiago, Chile (LAN)

17 September: depart Santiago, arrive Buenos Aires, Argentina (LAN)

21 September: depart Buenos Aires, arrive Montevideo, Uruguay (American)

25 September: depart Montevideo (Iberia)
26 September: arrive Madrid, Spain

29 September: depart Madrid, arrive Helsinki, Finland (Finnair)
===========

Excluding Finland but including Hong Kong SAR separately, on the entirely spurious basis that it has its own immigration controls, that makes 11 countries in 58 days, with a total scheduled flying time of just over 78 hours.

Those are the bare facts. The photos are on Flickr. More travellers' tales may follow. At last. Now that I can include Thailand, and Ohio, and....

People, people, everywhere

It is little more than two months ago that my companion and I returned from our Indian adventure. As has been noted, the whole experience was so intense that some substantial processing time is needed to internalise the things that we saw and did. Add to that the various setbacks that have surfaced since our return to Finland, and you have a reason why it has taken so long to blog anything much about the trip.

Now, however, I flip to the pages of my travel notebook. On the road out of Delhi, I scrawled the words "wall-to-wall people; what do they all do?"

The sheer number of people was quite amazing. Take one example from the desert city of Jaisalmer. At the hotel, one of the staff (a charming older chap known to the rest of the staff as 'the boy', who would engage you in pleasant conversation for as long as it took you to twig that a tip was expected) guided us to the hotel gift shop. The lights were off and all was quiet. It was undoubtedly shut. Except that it wasn't. Immediately we approached, the lights snapped on and we suddenly had four or five shop assistants showing us clothing and souvenirs.

I was reminded of the children's television series Mr Benn, and the quote "as if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared." I have no idea how these guys spent the doubtless long hours without customers. They must simply have been sitting and waiting, because there was no delay to fetch them, as there would have been in the West. Furthermore, whereas in Europe you may expect one or two people to be doing a task, in India that number is easily doubled or tripled or more.

Such an abundance of humanity must surely lead to a different view of life than in a more sparsely populated country. In Finland, for example, I experience crowds as aggressively indifferent places. (Yes, that is an oxymoron; but yes, it does make sense.) On the other hand, in Finland, a group of people is unlikely to form around you to just stare, as happened to us straight away in India, when we entered the Jumma Masjid mosque in Delhi with our guide. Yes, that can be intimidating, even if the stares are merely inquisitive.

All told, though, for an Indian in India, with friends and family all around, the feeling in a crowd must be something quite at odds with that of a European in Europe. Perhaps the feeling of constant familiar company is warm. Perhaps the feeling is supportive. Perhaps the regular Indian seems happier than the regular European because they are so often in this sort of situation.

Perhaps I'll never know.

The curse of the cobra woman

So here I am. It's been a while.

The summer trip to India was stunning. Normal western terms of reference do not apply. The entire experience was so intense, so out-of-the-ordinary, that I'm still mentally processing. No doubt things will emerge here in dribs and drabs. For starters, check out Flickr.

The first week was a real high: heading into the Thar Desert surrounded by goatherds, camel carts, and the amazing forts of the Rajputs; discovering the incredible Golden City of Jaisalmer. The second week started on a similar high, in the dreamy white (well, off-white) city of romance, Udaipur, and the country retreat of Deogarh.

Then, on the road to Jaipur, our karma seemed to change. Waiting in our car at a railway crossing, we drew the usual attention of the local beggars. This time, it was an old woman with very few teeth and a cobra in a basket. Even if we hadn't been urged not to hand out money in the streets, opening the car window to a cobra seemed like a bad idea, so we ignored the woman as much as we could until the train passed and we drove on. I get the feeling that this left us with some sort of shadow. Since that encounter, a couple of old traumas have re-awoken.

Firstly, in Jaipur and Agra, my companion and I started to become unwell, which, on the last day, culminated in a homeward journey dominated by several hours of unremitting stomach cramps. On return to Helsinki, this was confirmed as salmonella. At 7 years old, I was hospitalised with salmonella and complications, so this ailment already carries enough bad karma in my mind. In any case, I was unfit for travel to Japan, so that leg of the summer didn't happen.

Secondly, on returning to the autumn season of theatre rehearsals, I fell awkwardly and triggered another complaint that has figured large in my medical history: a dislocated shoulder. The repetition does not make the injury less painful, and I needed a double dose of two different types of hard stuff to knock me out enough to get the joint back in place. Further surgery may be necessary to stabilise the condition at last. I am typing now slowly and left-handed.

So, as I said, here I am. Sitting at home with my second successive sick-note, remembering the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the rights and wrongs since my last blog entry. Arm in a sling, about to take my final dose of anti-malarial medicine, and hoping that simple passage of time will lift the bad karma of the beggarwoman with the cobra.

Where do hairdressers come from?

For some time I have been fascinated by the number of hairdressers in Finland. Where do they all come from and whom do they all perm? I still have the Yellow Pages from when I lived in Jyväskylä, in Central Finland. There were 146 hairdressers listed in the Jyväskylä region in 1998. Compare that to the 24 dentists or the 51 electricians. (Or the 6 psychotherapists. Or the 1 theatre. One!)

There seems to be the same peculiar overclipping in Leppävaara, the district of Espoo where I live now. To check this properly, I decided to relive the days of secondary-school geography fieldwork to see what the statistics show.

This is a raw list of the shop-fronts that I pass on my 15-minute walk home from the railway station. It does not account for the main shopping centre nor the main road, so is not a survey of Leppävaara as such, but let's take it as random and therefore vaguely typical. Get your bar charts ready. Here goes:

1 aquarium,
1 beauty parlour,
1 chemist,
1 diving-equipment shop,
1 doctor's surgery,
1 electrical engineer,
1 estate agent,
1 flea market,
1 gift shop,
1 gym,
1 osteopath,
1 solicitor's office,
1 tattoo and body-piercing parlour,
1 Thai massage parlour

2 banks,
2 dental surgeries/laboratories,
2 restaurants,
2 supermarkets,
2 video rental shops

3 kindergartens,
3 pizza take-aways,
3 pubs

and

8 hairdressers

Granted, Leppävaara is quite well-stocked if you're looking for a Quattro Stagioni to go, a tropical fish for your collection, and a quick rub-down. But that ratio of hairdressers is alarming. And I'm sure there were more of them a couple of years ago, before the beauty parlour and the osteopath moved in.

So what's it all about? I looked around. I did not detect a particular coiffuredness among the local populace (many of whom were sitting on benches, bottles in hand). I remain puzzled.

However, this little outing did lay to rest another idea that I had, which was that Finland also boasts an unseemly wealth of florists and undertakers. But maybe they're on the other side of the tracks.

The end of the kick?

A Kick up the Balkans
Postscript

And so the publishable diaries of my time in Bulgaria come to an end. With more of a whimper than a bang, it must be said. Though, as I have noted a couple of times, it is my understatement that often takes my breath away in retrospect. The records continue after this date, but not in a form easy to manage or communicate.

But in case you have missed any highlights so far, my adventures led me to:

• witness the election of the first non-socialist government since the Changes;
• breathe a lot of chlorine;
• get stuck in a snowbound train in the middle of the Balkans;
• sit through risks of explosion (nuclear and otherwise);
• get used to vodka for breakfast;
• lose all sense of direction and hope in a dark, faceless housing complex;
• spend a lot of time in the dark with no hot water or electricity;
• impersonate a French diplomat;
• receive vegetable insults from the Turkish police;
• find a different sense of direction and hope in a different faceless housing complex;
• direct a school play at the 670-seat city Opera House.

That's not a bad list for the first year. There is a very basic Google map that marks a lot of the places involved.

Following the petering out of normal service in the diary department, I would go on to visit my colleague in Varna, spend a month recuperating in the UK, and then return to Bulgaria for a year in Veliko Turnovo. In this wonderful university town, I would lose one love but find another; finally get around to visiting Romania; have glandular fever misdiagnosed as syphilis; and ... but let's leave those stories for another day.

Update: The full story of Year 1 is no longer available on this blog, but can be obtained as an ebook on Amazon or Lulu.

What I will do this summer

A certain breed of Finn greets midsummer, arguably the biggest national holiday in these parts, with gleeful melancholy. They can be heard to bleat that the days get shorter from now on and winter will soon be with us.

No, no, no! Midsummer is when summer begins. I'm still psychologically tuned to the British school holiday cycle, where work goes on into July and breaks for August. The best is yet to come.

So what will I do with my hard-earned days and cash this time round? Well, big plans are afoot. Last year I went west. This year I go east.

First up, towards the end of July, is India. It is maybe not the sort of place that I would normally consider, and maybe not the sort of place one should go alone. It will be the monsoon season: hot and damp. I've got my visa and have started my vaccinations. The malaria tablets come with a warning of possible psychotic episodes. Which may be handy when suffering from stomach cramps and being held to ransom by a taxi driver in the middle of the Thar desert. But two weeks doing the Golden Triangle of Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur, plus other bits of Rajasthan, sounds so exotic, so unique, who could say no?

Second up, after a few days of recovery time in Helsinki, is Japan. I have amazed myself by going for a second destination that is likely to serve severe culture shock. Normally the flights are hideously expensive, but I stumbled on a package that includes the travel and six hotel nights for about half the usual price of an air ticket. It was a sign. It was to be mine. A week in Osaka. My August meditation will be Nipponese.

Dear me

What sort of people send themselves postcards while on holiday, eh? Well, I do, as I confessed a while ago to the always understanding nmj. And now that I've booked myself an Easter break in Ljubljana, I'm wondering what sort of groove I'll be able to send myself from there.

So just for the sheer wackiness of it, here's a taste of previous missives to myself.

8 August 2006, Hilo, Hawai´i

singing frogs; tropical rain; red mustangs, pick-up trucks

31 July 2006, Vancouver, Canada

condominium blocks; street life (in all ways); Bohemia; trolley buses!!; coffee shops; microbrewery beer

29 July 2005, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

Fantastic! A place to retire to!

25 July 2005, Lugano, Switzerland

Tik und tak und tik und tak. Here and now .... mmmm.

29 December 2001, Castries, St Lucia

Simply relaxing under a palm tree!

Alas, the wonder of Iceland (August 2001) had me so utterly gobsmacked that all I could manage from Reykjavík was a blank.

Reasons to be cheerful

Nowhere and nobody is perfect, and it is easy to be negative in blogs. Or at least I have found it so recently. Let me take up the matti challenge and try to achieve some balance. It takes the form of one of those dreaded lists. Things about Finland that are just great.

1. Summer nights
A cliché maybe, but I still remember the wonder of walking down the main street in Tampere in full daylight at 4 a.m. Even now, further south in Helsinki, I get a buzz out of being able to read a newspaper in natural light at midnight. In June and July, that is.

2. Lapland blue
You stand under the clear blue sky with the temperature at twenty below freezing and with the sun just peeping over the horizon. The land is flat and open all around, and the snow is bathed in deepest blue. There is total silence, apart from the occasional rustle of a reindeer. You feel as if you are in a magic spell.

3. Smoke sauna
A rare treat these days, but worth waiting for. Wood sauna is wonderful and a distinct step up from electric. Smoke sauna, an immersion in steam and the smell and feel of wood smoke, is another world entirely.

4. Aki Kaurismäki films
I have been critical of mainstream theatre, but Kaurismäki hits the spot. This is where it's at. My current favourite is Kauas pilvet karkaavat (Drifting Clouds), which achieves an unfair amount of gritty optimism.

5. 24-hour hot running water
Any time, day or night, a hot shower for as long as you want. Air conditioning is another matter, but that's pre-empting the next list!

From England with plastic bags

Most bits of Bruce are back online. Some bits are still catching up on some well-earned kip. Other bits are waiting for the New Year before emerging.

Returning from England - the realm of eternally late trains and silk-smooth beer; a haven for men with anoraks and plastic bags - I look into my suitcase and wonder what I can learn about myself from the things that I have taken the trouble of bringing back to Finland. All wrapped in plastic bags.

Item: six-pack of salt and vinegar crisps

Item: Branston pickle

Item: lime marmalade

Item: six sticks of Blackpool rock

Item: toy fireman's helmet

Item: collection of old photo albums

Item: Olbas oil, pastilles, and inhaler

Item: Marina Lewycka novel 'A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian'

Oh dear. Stop the analysis there. I don't want to know.

To tip or not to tip

With theatre-person happeningfish heading for Canada this week (bon voyage, h:fish), I have been reminded once more of my own North American adventures over the summer.

One thing that I really had difficulty getting a handle on was tipping. The people in Canada were just so wonderfully and sincerely friendly that it seemed on the verge of rude to then pay for the service relationship with a waiter or tour guide. I think I even offended a couple of bar staff by suggesting that they should add the cost of a drink for themselves onto my tab. Apparently that's not how it's done. But they were so helpful in giving large denomination banknotes as change that it was impossible to find an accurate 10% or 15% in cash.

Even more embarrassing were the coffee houses (I preferred the local Blenz to the imported Starbucks), where the glass jar by the cashier's elbow showed clearly how miserly one was being with the huge piles of one-cent coins that it was impossible not to accumulate.

Things were slightly easier in Hawai´i. At least they gave change in small denominations, making it easier to count out the tip. In addition, the service, though friendly, was not as personal as in Vancouver, and so it was easier to peg it down as a professional transaction and leave the 15% behind.

Of course, there are always exceptions. I fondly remember the waitress in Hilo, at Cronies, who told me that I had a great smile. It was fortunate that we were already half way to the exit, because I had just finished the most wonderful Mai Tai and would have left her my entire wallet! But, being a soft European, I just grinned sheepishly and dived out through the door.

Cartography can be really frustrating

What an amazing thing it is to stand in the dusk and watch land forming. The Big Island, Hawai´i, is volcanically active, and the signs of lava flows are not hard to find. Especially when the lava has run straight across the road, cutting it off. Then one can trek a short distance across the cold, jagged lava that spewed from the ground a couple of decades or so ago, and see the red glow of fresh, hot lava pouring over the coastline, and the steam plume rising as the lava hits the waters of the Pacific below.

I imagined that the human figures standing silhouetted against the steam plume had to be a team of cartographers. The younger ones happy that they were being kept in work, redrawing the government maps. The older ones sighing that their life's ambition to chart the islands accurately was being forever thwarted.

Are tourists dumb or what?

As well as the heights of Mauna Kea, this summer's jaunt took in the Pacific coral reef off the western coast of the Big Island. We were only a maximum of a hundred feet below the surface, but it was clearly a different world down there, with the colours changing as the water absorbs the light from the surface.

The reef, to my uneducated eye, looked healthy. There were wonderful little yellow fish, called tang, and small shoals of snappers and butterflyfish cruising around. A couple of sea urchins crawled around on the bottom. And I tried to remind myself that coral is actually an animal, and not a plant as it can easily seem.

It was a fascinating glimpse into the life of things that we often only see in aquaria or on the plate at exotic restaurants. But at the start and the end of the trip, why oh why oh why did the submarine tour company insist on playing badly recorded sounds of Klaxons blaring and a voice shouting 'dive, dive' and 'fire torpedo'? Was this our war on coral? Do they think tourists are dumb or what?