There have been quite a few times in my life where I have wished that I could replay the previous 5 or 10 seconds. It has happened a few times when I bumped into things with my car.  That horrible feeling of “oh no what have I done?” You get out of the car and have a look at the damage and you think to yourself, gee, I wish I could have that few seconds over again.

When I smashed my car in the desert, I kept wishing that I could somehow miraculously have the recent past back again. It seemed like such a small thing to ask for, I was actually surprised that I didn’t get my wish.

But… but… if only?

As the wise old Omar Khayyam once said:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

Or as my old grandmother used to say:

“If, ifs and and were pots and pans there’d be no need for tinkers.”

Back in 1983 I was in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, walking along the shoreline at night when I saw this truck backing up on a pier to unload its cargo onto a boat. A couple of guys were behind the truck guiding it as it backed down the pier, when it suddenly broke through the timber decking.

It’s a pretty sure bet that the truck driver wished he could have had those few seconds over again.

I had to change the washers in my shower taps today and it got me thinking about how we take household running water for granted.

Back in 1982 tool I stayed in Morocco for about three or four months and one of the things that I really hated doing was getting water from wells. Many of the places I stayed didn’t have running water. Because Morocco is quite a dry place most of the wells are very deep, and it takes quite a bit of effort to haul up a bucket (about 4 L or a gallon) of water  50 m (about 150 feet). I never saw a well in Morocco with a windlass and the water in a bucket on the end of a slimy rope had to be pulled up by hand.

The people in Morocco wipe their backsides with their left hand (no paper) and one has to use both hands to pull up a rope. You can’t drink un-boiled water from the wells for the reason that they are all contaminated with E.coli.

In the town of Tarrazout where I stayed for about a month and a half it was always such a drag to go and get water, because there was only one well, and there would always be plenty of other people in front of you. It was usually women that had to haul the water and to me, it seemed to be quite a social event for them. Everybody would take their time just yakking away with each other, and quite often it would take me about an hour or two just to fetch one jerry can (25 L) of water.

What made matters worse in Tarrazout was that the village idiot used to turn up with a donkey, loaded with very big barrels and spent about an hour or two filling them up. Every time he turned up at the well all the women’s eyes used to roll.  They couldn’t stand him and you could tell it wasn’t because he was retarded.  It was because they had waited so long on so many occasions in the past, while he filled up his barrels.

I took the picture above when I was travelling between Tarrazout and Goulimine. The women were pulling up water from a well out in the middle of nowhere.  I couldn’t see any buildings nearby, they must have walked for miles and a very hot wind was blowing.

I’ve recently bought myself a new single lens reflex camera, and I’ve been itching to try it out.  So I went down town to photograph the young Catholic pilgrims that have come to Sydney for World Youth Day.

Let me state right now that I’m not a religious person, and that I’m not anti-religious either.  I wanted to photograph the pilgrims, because I knew that they would be colourful subject matter due to the fact that many of them had wrapped themselves in their country’s flags, and it would be interesting to document the phenomenon.

I have to admit that my preconceived ideas, led me to believe that I could go and look at the pilgrims dispassionately as though they were just some picturesque folk who follow some anachronistic dogma rather than decent people with deeply held beliefs.

On the television news, I had seen a few reports showing the pilgrims playing music and it all looked a bit lame. So when I went down to Hyde Park near St Mary’s Cathedral in downtown Sydney it came as quite a surprise to me, how much I enjoyed the music and watching the people dance to it. 

As I was watching a Spanish group of pilgrims playing the guitar and singing while about 50 people danced in a circle around them, a young neatly dressed Spanish woman came up to me and told me in broken English, that she was part of that group and that she wanted me to know that Jesus loved me the way how I was. I have a standard reply that I tell such people so that I don’t get involved in some long and tedious discussion about the Bible.  I always say, ” thank you, I know”. That always puts a smile on their faces, and they leave me alone because they think I’m one of them. All the same, it did it gave me a warm feeling that someone wanted to share some joy.

Strangely enough, later on, I found myself thinking about why she had said what she had, to me, and the thought occurred to me that maybe because I was unshaven and sporting the generally unkempt look that I cultivate, she might have thought I was some kind of bum, full of despair and she wanted to up-lift my spirits. 

This thought occurred to me because I know that in Europe most people take pride and care in the way how they look and they tend to dress a lot more fashionably and neatly than many people here in Australia. To compound matters, I tend to dress even more casually than most other Australians.  I can imagine that many of these straitlaced young Catholics from Europe must think we’re so poor here, because so many of us just don’t bother spending that much money or time and effort on our grooming.  Sydney is a generally a very relaxed and casual place, and many people have transcended the need to dress up all the time.

In my travels to various parts of the world I have seen series of painted statues on display in cities.  In Denver, USA, a couple of years ago there were differently painted fibreglass cows, all over town as part of a series called “cow parade”. In Vancouver, Canada there are painted orca all over the place. The cows in Denver, were quite interesting, but the orca in Vancouver were lame, lame, lame!

Here in Sydney for World Youth Day, much in the tradition of the cow parade, there are Jesus Christ statues all over town that have been painted in various ways.  I found that most of the painted Jesus Christ statues weren’t very well done, but I did find one that I thought was fantastic. 

 Covered in mirrors, this statue was called “Reflection”.

I suppose it is trying to communicate that we should reflect upon the life of Jesus Christ and the Scriptures.  As I looked at this mirrored statue, I found myself thinking about how we as human beings tend to project our own concerns on the world. Although the Bible says God created man in his own image, I have a sneaking suspicion that man created God in his own image, and the mirrored statue seemed to be a metaphor of how our religions reflect who we are and how we see our place in the world.

Not very far from the reflection statue was a group of Filipinos who are being led in song by a Spanish priest, who played the guitar.

The priest had a beautiful voice, and the Filipinos sang along with him with a result that wasn’t as polished but not too different to the video below.

If the city of Sydney is to be inundated with large crowds of people from overseas, you really couldn’t pick a better bunch than young Catholics. So very different to the hooligan English soccer fans that plague continental Europe every year.

The IMAX Cinema in Darling Harbour is one of my favourite buildings I’ve ever seen anywhere. 

Designed by Australian architect Lionel Glendinning, it’s an architecturally striking and perfect solution for a nightmare design brief. 

Situated between two overhead freeways (the red area on the satellite photo below) on an oddly shaped block of land usually wouldn’t help most architects come up with such an amazing design.

Glendinning has created a building that not only serves its purpose as a large screen cinema he has also designed a landmark that just yodels with the rapturous joy in amongst all the other bland buildings downtown.

It’s a masterpiece of aluminium cladding and a brave colour scheme. The building seems to be a combination of an aeroplane’s wing and a commentator’s stand at a motor-sports event. It looks fantastic as you drive by it on the overpass, and it almost makes you feel like you are on a race track on your way to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Every time I see this building it puts a smile on my face to think that such courageous and inventive design can occur on such an ugly and difficult site.

When my wife and I were in South East Asia last year I took these photos of some of the various mosaics and tilework that I came across.

This first example is of a Persian style, moraq tile mosaic from the front of the excellent Islamic Arts Museum in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

Just about everywhere you look in Thailand there is a temple adorned with mosaics and tilework made up from porcelain, mirrors and tiles. The most stunning examples can be seen in The Temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok.

Below is a close up of the patterns on the corners of the columns created with mirrors.

Below is an example of the Thai use of purpose made ceramic tiles.

In Vietnam much of the mosaic and tilework was made with broken porcelain and glass.

Back in October last year, my wife and I went to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to attend the Chinese wedding of our friends Claude and Jade.

As part of the Chinese pre-wedding ceremony tradition, Claude had to bargain his way into Jade’s family home. This involved arriving at Jade’s house with his groomsmen to haggle with her bridesmaids for entry through the front gate. The bargaining began with Claude, saying that he wanted to marry Jade, to which the bridesmaids began their demands.

Claude is a very quiet and thoughtful person who doesn’t have an extroverted bone in his body. The bridesmaids knew this about him and required that Claude declare his love for Jade at the top of his voice in five different languages. Claude was fairly easily able to comply with the language component of their demand but the bridesmaids like sharks sensing blood in the water kept calling on him to declare his love louder and louder. Whoever said that Asians are inscrutable and quiet doesn’t know Asians.  Jade’s Chinese bridesmaids were howling with laughter, with each attempt by Claude to satisfy their wishes and they raucously cajoled him into greater heights of embarrassment. The bridesmaids were merciless.

Finally, the bridesmaids relented and let Claude and his grooms through the front gate only to stop him at the front door. Jade was behind the closed front door and the bridesmaids told Claude that he would have to answers questions asked by Jade, and that if he didn’t get them correct, his best man had to apply make-up to him. Needless to say Jade asked so many questions that Claude was eventually covered in very badly applied makeup, accompanied by the very delighted shrieks of the bridesmaids.

The girls were loving it! Claude looked like he was going through a trial by ordeal.  It was very hot and humid and Claude was being dragged way out of his comfort zone.

The next step in Claude’s trials was to cross the living room to the bottom of the stairs, where he was once again stopped by the bridesmaids with their new demands.  I could see that Claude was starting to flag, and his spirits really dropped when he was told that he would have to sing a love song in French at the top of his voice to get up the stairs.

Luckily, Claude is a Francophone (which the bridesmaids knew) so he knew the words of a French song. The bridesmaids really enjoyed themselves as poor old Claude embarrassed himself once again at their pleasure.

After the song Claude and his entourage were allowed to the top of the stairs to the door and outside of Jade’s bedroom. The next demand by the bridesmaids was for money.  Basically they didn’t stop until they had everything in his wallet and only then did they let him through to see Jade.

The actual Chinese wedding ceremony was a surprisingly simple and brief affair.  The father and mother of the house, lit joss sticks and made offerings to their ancestors after which Jade and Claude did the same thing.

Tea was then made and Jade and Claude offered it to each other and then to Jade’s grandmother.  After tea, Jade’s grandmother then presented Jade with some gold, and that was it, they were now married.

The wedding reception was another thing altogether. It was held in a very grand hotel, and there were about 300 guests.

In February this year Claude and Jade had a lovely western civil wedding here in Sydney

The only graffiti I like seeing is clever stencil graffiti. I saw this brillant example painted on a bus shelter window in Bangkok last year.

I also saw some excellent stencil graffiti in Puebla and San Cristobal de Las Casas in Mexico two years ago in 2006.

If you’d like to see some interesting stencil graffitti in Slovenia taken by Grasswire click here

The Vietnamese think that dark skin is unattractive so many of the women who work outdoors keep most of their exposed skin covered.

Back in the early 1970s, Bukittinggi didn’t have very much to offer the visitor other than a visit to the local gorge, and the zoo.

As is usual, when one is travelling, I had met up with a couple of other guys, and we were knocking around town, when eventually ended up at the zoo.  As could be expected from a country that didn’t have too much excess revenue to spend on the welfare of animals, the zoo was a pretty ramshackle affair. Many of the cages made out of a light-gauge sheet of welded mesh that you see used in concrete slab construction, held together with thick wire.  Health and safety issues were merely an afterthought, as you could walk up to any of the cages and stick your hand in for a mauling if you so desired.

I made the mistake of shaking hands with a cute baby orang-utan, that had its arms outstretched through the rebar. It had the saddest most soulful eyes I’d ever seen. 

Almost human. 

The little orang-utan was about a half my height, but it had hands much larger than the average man.  I was totally misled by it’s placid demeanour, so I reached out to touch it’s hand. It softly and gently closed its hand around the mine, and we stood their holding hands looking at each other, when I felt its grip tighten and it started to pull me towards the cage. That hairy little thing was so strong, and with one arm it effortlessly pulled me closer to the cage as I struggled without success to resist. 

Like any little child, my hairy friend was trying to put the object of it’s curiosity, into its mouth.  Luckily, the two other guys I was with were able to pull me back just before my hand went into the gaping maw pressed up against the wire.  I won’t be doing that again!

The tiger cage was downright dangerous.  It was basically a large wire mesh enclosed area. The wire was about 6mm (about 1/4in) diameter and the spacing of the verticals and horizontals was about 20cm (approximately 8 inches) apart, so the tiger could stick its arm right out if it wanted to.  To ameliorate the chance of a tiger pulling a child through the rebar, there was a 1 m high galvanised pipe about a metre and a half away from the front of the cage. The side and back of the cage had sheets of recycled roofing material made of corrugated galvanised iron about 8ft (about 2.4 m) high, all around the perimeter except the front. To enable people to see over the corrugated iron there was a berm about 2 m high, built around the sides and back of the cage.

In the middle of the cage was a tiger, laying on a large log and it seemed to be asleep. One of the guys was I was with, an Englishman called Andy, for some reason I can’t understand, walked down the berm to the side of the cage and stuck his face up against the old corrugated iron roofing to look through one of the nail holes.

I was standing at the front of the cage when I saw the tiger, that we thought was asleep, which was facing in the opposite direction to Andy, suddenly, with amazing speed and agility spin around and leap the 6 or 8 m (6 or 8 yards) between it and Andy, to come crashing with an alarming bang, down on the flexible corrugated iron, smashing into Andy’s face and knocking him to the ground. Luckily, the welded mesh held and the tiger casually turned around and walked away after having made its point.

RESPECT!

Click here to see a small animation, I have made demonstrating what happened.

We rushed over to the fallen Andy to see that he was as white as chalk and in a state of shock with a bleeding nose. The poor guy was in a dazed and confused state for the rest of the day.  I bet Andy won’t ever do that again.

Sumatran tigers are the smallest tigers, but they still weigh about 300lbs (about 136kg) and I can tell you from personal experience, they are FAST!

When I was a kid and I saw those old Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller, I thought with my childish imagination that a fully grown healthy man would have a chance against a big cat but what I saw at the zoo that day, changed my mind forever about such things. In a contest between tiger and a man, my money will always be on the tiger as it would be no contest. I don’t even care if the guy was Chuck Norris. He’d be cat food.

Travelling in Sumatra at that time was an absolute nightmare due the state of the roads. To get to Bukittinggi I had already been on two, agonising 36 hour long  bus journeys. The roads were just dirt tracks with deep water filled holes in them that you could lose Volkswagens in.

The buses were very similar to the school buses that they use in North America, and as such, they have an extended rear end that hangs away over the rear axle, which of course increases the amount of movement one experiences when one is at the far end of a lever.

Being foreigners, we were always given the worst seats in the bus at the very back and because the seats had been designed to fit tiny little Indonesians there wasn’t enough space between the seats for us to put our feet on the ground.  To compound our discomfort our knees were permanently pushed up against the back of the seat in front of us, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but there were hand rails exactly where our knees met the back of the seats.  So for 36 hours at a time, we had the crap beaten out of our knees.  It was unrelenting torture.

I was absolutely dreading the two more trips, I had to make by bus to get to Medan to get out of Indonesia in time to avoid jail due to overstaying my visa.  I wasn’t the only one who felt this way about going on the buses again.  One of the guys that I met up with suggested that we both hitch hike up to Medan.  Any vehicle would have been better than one of those buses.

Hitchhiking was way better than the buses. Not only was it free, it was 1000% more comfortable. We followed the coastal road up to Sibolga, and then we had to head inland over the mountains to go north east to Medan. Just outside Sibolga, we were picked up by a small furniture removal truck. The seats of the truck were filled up with Indonesian so we had to lay down in the back on top of a load of empty acetylene bottles.  The road out of Sibolga climbs into the mountains up a very steep road, and the poor old truck that we were in, really laboured and struggled its way up. As slow as the trip was, at last we were moving forward, and laying on top of the empty acetylene bottles was way more comfortable than being in the back of one of those horrible buses.

Late in the afternoon and about three-quarters of the way up the mountain, we heard a loud bang and a truck came to an abrupt halt.  When we got out we could see a lot of oil on the road. When we looked underneath the truck, we could see one of the con rods had broken and had smashed through the oil sump.

The truck was cactus.

There wasn’t anything my travelling companion and I could do to help, so we thanked our driver and headed off up the road trying to get another lift.  Slowly, we walked up hill through the jungle as the sun went down. It got darker and darker as we walked through the night. The cars just passed us by without picking us up. We were starting to get a bit worried as we were out in the middle of a jungle wilderness. 

My thoughts started to turn towards my memories of the tiger in the zoo at Bukittinggi. If I had been in a vehicle and saw a tiger by the side of the road I would have been thrilled, but after seeing what had happened at Bukittinggi I didn’t want to meet a tiger out in the open.

After walking for about three or four hours our hopes were raised by seeing a hotel at the top of the hill.  Unfortunately, it was a hotel that was under construction.  We were getting a bit desperate for a place to stay, so we went into the unoccupied building site. None of the rooms had doors or windows, and much of the structure didn’t even have a roof on it yet. We found a covered concrete patio with about 30 or 40 cane chairs covered in plastic stacked neatly to one side.

Although the covered patio gave a shelter from any rain that might fall during the evening, it was still out in the open looking directly into the jungle. Both of us were getting a little bit freaked out by now at the thought that there might be tiger a short distance away, stalking us. So we decided to make a pile of all the cane chairs and crawl into the middle of them to sleep. Needless to say we didn’t sleep too well, as every little noise coming out of the bush made our hearts leap with terror.

All our panicky fear was misplaced, because in the morning, we woke up in one piece and still alive.

When I got to Medan I read in one of the English language newspapers about two old men who had been found dead in the jungle in Sumatra next to the dead carcass of a tiger. According to some of the local villagers, the two old men were expert exponents of the Indonesian martial art of “pencat silat“, and it would seem that they had been attacked by a tiger, while out in the jungle collecting wood. I find it absolutely amazing that two old men would be able to kill a tiger with their bare hands, feet and perhaps a machete.  Needless to say it is not much of a victory if you die from the wounds that you received, but they must’ve have been some really tough old guys. They’re probably in Valhalla now, sharing a drink with Ragnar Hairy Breeks and Egil Skallagrimson.

Nine years later in 1983, with the girlfriend from hell in tow, I arrived at the border between Guatemala and Mexico (between La Mesilla and Ciudad Cuauhtémoc), just as the sun was going down. Back then (I don’t know how the situation is nowadays) there was no public transport between these two towns at night. The distance between La Mesilla and Ciudad Cuauhtémoc is only about 4 km and since it was a beautiful warm and starry night we decided to walk along the road through the jungle. It was quite a nice walk, and the first couple of kilometres were very pleasant……. that was until we started hearing, a jaguar roaring in their not far distance.  I nearly soiled myself as memories of Bukittinggi came rushing back. I’m pretty sure we covered the last 2 km of that walk in record time!