Before leaving on our trip I knew that I wanted to buy something from the old bazaar in Sarajevo as I knew that Sarajevo is one of the last remaining places in Western Europe were there was still a Turkish influence.

Whenever I travel I like to buy something really nice from the area where I’m visiting. 

I’ve always thought that the cheap souvenirs that are on sale in so many places aren’t worth buying and that it was much better spend much more and buy something really good. The trouble with Western Europe is that it’s a first world place and anything very nice is going to cost real money of the kind that is just too rich for my blood.

Sarajevo, because of it’s recent history of war, is a country that is struggling to get back on it’s feet and it felt particularly good to leave a chunk of money there. Places like France and Germany don’t need our money like Sarajevo does. Needless to say, I still try and get the most I can for whatever I spend and when we decided to buy a hand embossed metal tray in the Turkish style by the noted coppersmith Sahib Bašcauševic (mentioned in the UNESCO book on Traditional arts and crafts of Bosnia and Herzegovina) I was ready to haggle to get the best deal.

Sahib Bašcauševic’s work is sold in a store located in the old bazaar by the very cultivated and self assured Mido.

Mido is one of those types of people who really knows his stuff and doesn’t mind telling a person when they are in the wrong. When I said I was interested in silver plated copperware instead of the tin plated stuff, he asked me why and when I said, “because the silver plated copper was better”, he calmly but forcefully said to me, “you are wrong” and then went on to explain why.

I can imagine that not too many people can handle such a response and would’ve tossed their plaits and stormed off in a huff. Knowing that I don’t know everything helped me cope with Mido’s directness and I was glad that I stuck around to get the skinny on the advantage of tin plating over silver plating.

Apparently hundreds of copper goods can be coated with a very fine coating of silver with just a few coins electrically and very quickly, but the trouble is that the silver wears off very easily. Tin plating is much harder to do because it’s manually applied with some skill and is much harder wearing. Mido then went on to explain that although many foreigners buy his copperware for decorative purposes, it’s all actually made to be used and the value of an item was based not only on the skill of it’s decoration but also on it’s utility and not just a few microns of a semi-precious metal like silver.

When it came to haggle, Mido made it clear that he wasn’t going to knock much off the price, pointing out that the tray I wanted took over a week to produce by one of the best craftsman in the country. I did get Mido to drop his price a bit but when I pressed him to take another $25 off, he said, “that sort of money won’t make you a poor man and it won’t make me a rich man so let’s stop here”. He was right of course in the face of such truth I just paid up. To be honest, I didn’t mind at all because it was a pleasure dealing with someone who was so straight up and we all pay for things that we value more than the money that we hand over.

The south western states of the U.S. is one of my favourite areas in the world. There’s something about the wide open spaces and big skies there, that I can’t put words to, that resonates so deeply within me. It’s not a landscape that provides an easy living to people born there, let alone someone like me who is genetically more suited to cooler and wetter places and for that reason it puzzles me that I’m so attracted to it.

My attraction to such landscapes reminds me of some dialogue from the movie, “Lawrence of Arabia”. Feisal says to Lawrence;

“I think you are another of these desert-loving English.
No Arab loves the desert.
We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert.
No man needs nothing.”

On the way back home from a weekend away, we passed through some lush countryside today.

For many people around the world such scenes would be common, but here in Australia after so many years of drought, such scenes lift the spirits of us Australians.  The shot below looks more like England than Australia.

 Usually, the grass is brown all year long.

On the weekend, my wife and I went to visit some friends of ours in Wentworth Falls, which is about an hour’s drive west of Sydney in the blue Mountains. Our friends have a house which is only about five minutes easy walking to Wentworth Falls (a total drop of 187 m or 614 ft) in the photograph the below. 

With their local knowledge, our friends took us walking for several hours along the cliff line so we could get much better views than are usually available to people who just follow the groomed national park tracks.  The falls are on the edge of the Blue Mountains National Park, which is joins up with two other national parks, the Kanangra, and the Wollemi (where the prehistoric Wollemi Pine was discovered), which when you join them all up together cover a larger area than the country of Belgium.  The whole area is listed as a World Heritage Wilderness area.  It is a truly vast and ancient place. In years past, I’ve climbed many of the cliffs and I’ve been on many overnight hiking trips in the valleys below. 

On the top of the ridges, strong winds blow constantly, and the soil is very poor making it very difficult for many plants to thrive.  The vegetation that can survive such torturous conditions, tend to be shrubs no higher than a metre or two, which have either very thin water conserving leaves or prickles. 

In the more protected and wetter valleys below, very tall eucalypts such as the blue gum thrive.

Hiking in the blue Mountains is a bit different to walking in many other parts of the world, because most people tend to start in the low lands and walk uphill into the mountains, but in the blue Mountains you start at the top and you walk down into the valleys.  The reason for this is because the road follows the ridges. It’s very rugged and steep terrain, therefore quite of few people have been lost, because they have underestimated how rough the country is and overestimated their fitness and abilities. 

In most parts of the world, the common wisdom is that if you get lost you follow the rivers out to the sea.  If you were to do that in the Blue Mountains National Park, you would probably starve as it would take a fit person about two weeks to follow the rivers through very dense bush out to the coast.  If you are ever lost in the blue Mountains, the best strategy to get yourself out of trouble is to head east and walk uphill to the ridges so you can meet up with the highway.

Since my wife (Engogirl) is an engineer, specializing in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), we often visit bridges and dams just to geek over them. We go to so many dams and bridges that I even have categories for them in the menu on the left.   

When my wife was at university I used to help her with her assignments (mainly taking photos of dams and drains) and over time I have learnt to enjoy and appreciate such seemingly unlovely concrete things.  As a matter of fact, even the drainage by the side of the road have become interesting because I know more about the reasoning behind their design and what goes into making them. I now notice things like the size of the slots in the drainage grates or the distance between the drains and the camber of the roads and how it affects the placement of the drains.

Last Sunday we decided to go and have a look at the new Sea Cliff Bridge between Coalcliff and Clifton just south of Stanwell Park where Lawrence Hargrave conducted his famous experiments in aeronautics with box kites.  Bald Hill in Stanwell Park, which overlooks the bridge is still a very popular place for people wanting to enjoy the reliable up-drafts.  On any weekend, there will be plenty of people who are either hang gliding, flying model gliders, or just plain gawking all along the sea cliffs in that area.

For years there has not been a reliable way to follow the coast by road from Sydney to Wollongong, due to the steep terrain which caused frequent rock slides. After a very big rock fall in 2003, the original road was permanently closed and the Sea Cliff Bridge was commissioned.  Two years and $45 million later, the bridge was completed in December 2005.

The coastal road between Sydney and Wollongong has now become somewhat of a tourist attraction thanks to this beautiful bridge. It’s quite a nice walk across, as the bridge as it affords spectacular views of the pounding ocean below.

The Sea Cliff Bridge is such a sexy piece of engineering, that it has been featured in various ads and shows about engineering. Here’s two videos. The first video is a Shell and Ferrari commercial which shows an F1 driving over the Sea Cliff Bridge in the rain about halfway through the ad.

The second video is a jingoistic and sexed up Australian engineering association promo about various engineering projects here in Australia it has some nice footage of the bridge, about halfway through.

Both my wife and I love the South Western States of American. The scenery is fantastic and the food is incredible. Back in the early autmun months of 2005 we went to the USA and drove from Las Vegas to Santa Fe.  On the way we stopped of at some of the most beautiful places on earth. My wife’s favourite place was Zion National Monument and the Grand Canyon was mine.

As you enter the Zion park you first see the Patriarchs.

The whole park is a rock climber’s wet dream with the most beautiful sheer walls of perfect Navajo sandstone.

In the middle of the park there is a really nice little restaurant that is staffed by people who are totally blissed out by what beautiful surroundings they work in. It was like the environment was giving a contact high to everybody who moved through the landscape. Both my wife and I were really impressed by how genuinely pleasant everyone we met at Zion was.  I guess it’s pretty hard to be unhappy in such a place at such a nice time of the year. It was a totally different vibe to the one given off by the staff at Yosemite.

On the road out of the park you pass a natural arch.

Along the way to Santa Fe we also visited the north rim of the Grand Canyon, Monument valley, Hovenweep and Bandelier National Monuments. All amazing places.