When I was a skinny, pimply kid of 17, my mate Mark and I were pretty keen to go to the first year university students’ BBQ being staged by the students’ rep council. My older sister’s boyfriend at the time was a member and he assured us that there would be plenty of meat and beer and it would all be free. We young males, fresh from our draconian ruled all boys’ high school were also pretty keen to have a look at some girls who might be different from the poor things we’d ogled for years just because they had the misfortune to live in the same suburb and therefore catch the same bus home from school each day!

I spied this absolutely gorgeous girl talking to a guy I couldn’t stand, Harry, who had also attended the same school, but seemed to have an easy charm with the girls that we couldn’t match at all. I encouraged Mark to join me and emboldened by a couple of ales, we approached the two girls and managed to keep up quite a lively conversation for a number of hours, getting rid of Harry quite quickly and losing all track of time. I was amazed at myself but totally mesmerized by this girl…she seemed like a goddess to me: I’d never experienced such a moment. That was it pretty much for both of us we recall: it was then just about the logistics of making it all happen. That day was February 26, 1980 and it was 30 years ago!

We certainly didn’t have such a romantic dalliance this weekend, but we did have a lot of memories and amused ourselves with most of them. My bold statement to my grandmother that night, “I’ve just met the love of my life” seemed grossly overconfident of me, but very prophetic! The love of my life and I had a fairly usual weekend, but we did enjoy the weather today and went on a long walk, visiting some of our old haunts in the local vicinity that we haven’t been back to in years.

It was great to wander through the neighborhood, re-visiting parks and lanes and streets and alleys that we don’t normally travel these days. We noticed lots of changes along the way, but we highly entertained in the wet market alley in Shilin. All the excitement of Chinese New Year seemed to be over, but today must hold some special significance as burning incense fills the air, crackers are being jettisoned with increasing regularity and volume from our nearby river bridge and the omnipresent drums have been beating out their dark and mechanical rhythm through the day and evening.

The wet market’s food is always a sight, and not always a good one. The trays of colourful fish look fresh and cool lying in their ice beds, but the dripping fat of slaughtered pigs along with their misshapen heads on hooks is something we could do without! The charm of this market, however, is its coarseness: no one stands on ceremony here and if you don’t like it, you just don’t enter its murky depths! Not only is fresh meat and poultry and seafood for sale, but hawkers extol the virtues of the latest miracle oils, stallholders offer samples of cereals and honey and fried food while in between there are clothing outlets both budget and higher end, jewelry stores and hardware shops. You can pretty much get anything you want! Some temple boys provided great entertainment with their bobbing and weaving dance carrying their portable altar and the associated sounds were deafening and their entourage dirty, rough and many in number.

We eventually wandered home the long way round, crossing the bridge over the river with gardens and cycleways below and the whirring MRT in the distance. SOGO provided some takeaway sandwiches for our lunch and we settled in to watch some Twenty20 cricket in the second game between Australia and New Zealand. All in all, a great weekend, full of nostalgia and good times! Photos: market curiosities, a vista from the bridge and the curiously named “Pocari Sweat”! Cass is now reading "$20 a Gallon" and I'm reading "The Cement Garden"

 

Chinese New Year lived up to its reputation for miserable cold weather, although we both agree that it has been one of the most relaxing holidays we've ever had. The dreary conditions were just the right catalyst for guilt free sleep ins, pretty much total lack of exercise and just a little bit of excess in terms of eating and drinking!

Even though the rain and cold didn't relent for the week, until (surprise, surpise) late today, we did try to get out and about whenever we could. After my trips to the beach last Saturday and Monday, I'd pretty much given that up, so we planned to head downtown on Tuesday to check out the bright lights of Taipei East. Safely sequestered in a succession of gleaming warm trains hurtling beneath the city streets, after our underground changing and re-routing, we got a surprise when we emerged to see the rain had even intensified down here. Instead of heading further afield, we ducked into the first available building from the station, newly opened and lavish exterior suggesting something neat to spy inside.

Just as we expected, Hsin Yi's newest shopping building is even more plush and opulent than the last one. It seems that if you want customers to come in, it just has to be bigger and better! Inside, the use of space was decadent, the floor, walls, balustrades and ceiling adorned with marble, the cavernous space housing surprisingly tasteful displays of lanterns for Chinese New Year and various fountains and pools gurgling away in corners to keep the punters entertained. The usual mix of high end fashion and product boutiques were good for a window shop, but the B2 "Gourmet Food Court" was just that. We ate at "Fat Angelo's" where the wood fired pizzas looked good and our meals both made a pretty good attempt to emulate our yardstick restaurant, The Northern Star Cafe in Newcastle(they didn't make it!). The various other food outlets and speciality delis were pretty cool and one upmarket wine shop housed many bottles of Australian Petaluma and Henshkes along with the Penfolds range, which we were pretty impressed with. 

Another day we took the car out to B&Q, as I'd threatened last week. It was a targeted choice, mainly because of its underground carpark. We wandered around, bought a few supplies, bits of hardware we'd needed for a while and marvelled at all the "product". We extricated ourselves from there just at the end of my shopping breaking point, which isn't very long, and then headed to SOGO to eat some Thai food for lunch (you guessed it: also an underground carpark!). It was packed and they were turning cars away, so we kept driving all the way to Beitou where we entered the tightest underground carpark I've ever seen, straight below the Royal Host. 5 levels of underground parking rabbit warren had me fearful for the car's duco and also any mild claustrophobia we may suffer from. Luckily, we escaped unscathed, had a great relaxing mid afternoon meal before setting the GPS to find "home". Cassy seemed overly worried that I'd crash the car as I was pointing out all the remarkable (!) features on the GPS instead of keeping my eyes on the busy greasy road, but once again, we made it unharmed!

We eventually got to our Thai meal last night after I'd spent some time over at Wal's place setting him up with his new iPod and some good downloading software. Cass had been out in the afternoon too, but she had braved the Taipei bus transit system to visit her old mate, Joe the Jeweller. Joe has been working on some earrings for Cass for a while and she took delivery of them. They are to celebrate a very special milestone in our relationship which occurs next Friday, so I'll write more about that next week. All I'll say is that it involves the number 30(!)

We had a great meal and Cass pulled the lucky red envelope from a plastic case full of them and won us $500NT off our next meal there. It was the top prize and the waitress was very excited for us, so much so that we thought she might have won a prize too. Back home again today, we had Wal around for the UFC beamed live from Sydney, then a break for a couple of hours before watching the Twenty20 game between Australia and the West Indies. It's been that sort of holiday: not even tempted to set foot outside!

As karma usually has it, the weather is set to be warmer and dryer starting tomorrow for our return to work. Photos: Virg'nMary helping Cass with her school work on the laptop, various shots of the opulent interiors downtown and shots of our eating experiences! There's also an example of the Taipei peculiarity of straightforward labeling: noone is any doubt as to what this building is!

Cassy is reading the unputdownable Barry Maitland's Dark Mirror and I'm still on $20 a Gallon.

Chinese New Year holiday always brings out the very worst in Taipei’s weather conditions. We were sweltering in 30 degree heat a day before the holidays, but as soon as Saturday arrived, it reversed to type and became 12 degrees of drizzly rain and whipping, biting wind. It’s remained that way until today and is forecast to get even worse in the coming days!

I left Cass home snug in bed on Saturday and again yesterday as I searched the northeast coast for surf. Dan and I met up on both days, yesterday had the whole family with him. We got some pretty good, pretty big stormies on Saturday at Green ball, but had a futile search yesterday and just chased the waves from beach to point. It was very frustrating!

One thing that did lighten my mood a little was my fancy new GPS system, which I bought a week or so ago and hadn’t had the chance to test drive. It works really well, and even though all the names of the roads are written in Chinese, it still does the trick. It has a pretty small screen and is fairly basic, but it does everything I want it to do. Testing it out on known routes it has done an excellent job, so I’m confident when we travel farther afield it will help out.

Of course, we’ve been treated to a cacophony of firecrackers at all hours of the day and night, but we’re so used to it now that it has little effect. One thing I don’t think we’ll ever get used to is the droning constant singing that drifts across from the temple on the other side of the river. It’s hard to describe, but perhaps imagine a vinyl record slowed down to about a tenth of its original speed, lacking any kind of tune or musical merit and mix in the wailing of a cat on heat and you’ll get some idea!

Cass has cooked up a big batch of pumpkin soup which we’ve enjoyed for a few meals already and we’ve managed to get out and about during the breaks in the rain to stroll around the neighbourhood. There’s not been a lot else to do as all businesses have been closed for the last 4 days. We’re pretty confident a lot of them will start opening up again today, so we’re going to take the car out to B&Q (hardware house kinda thing) and then maybe even onwards down to the HsinYi area of 101 to get some late lunch/early dinner. We’ll see how energetic we are at the time!

We slept in till 9.30 this morning. You know how the accumulated effects of work, life etc build for a while and when you get a break it all just hits? It’s a bit like that for us this week. I’ve managed to succumb to a minor cold as well, so the dreary conditions are extra incentives to pretty much do nothing at all. We’re reading, watching movies, petting the cats, getting out for some exercise when the weather permits and pretty much doing nothing else at all…..bliss!

Photos: a very strange and very large bird we spied outside the tennis courts opposite, some Chinese new year decorations at school, the famous “pencil” Shi Dong elementary school near our house (see the size of those pencils?!), some wild Green Ball surf, a man praying in the park and the garden of our neigbour out the back. You can see we haven’t strayed too far from home this week!

 

The Twenty20 cricket match between Australia and Pakistan was the catalyst for a great together at our place on Friday afternoon/evening.  Wol, Lewy, Gurecki and Dave Millard all attended along with me and Cass of course and we had a rollicking good time. I got a stack of pizzas from a new and very bargainous pizza joint nearby (Mayan Pizza) and we feasted on them and various other snacks and beverages as well as a few refreshments. I made a conscious decision not to have any beers because I was very keen on doing a dawn patrol out on the coast to try to catch some swell. The game was frenetic and entertaining and Dave is slowly warming to the charms of cricket after a life-long affair with his national Canadian ice hockey. Gurecki had to leave about 2/3 of the way through to deal with his garbage (the quirky system we have as explained on these pages quite recently) and the others made it to the end.

Saturday found me driving out to the northern coast alone very early, with Cass still home snug in bed. Dan was meant to be joining me, but his wife Nicky was pretty sick so he had to stay home to look after the kids. I was really surprised to find I was the only surfer around and eventually spotted a pretty good wave rolling in off Jinshan Point. I haven’t surfed Jinshan for a long time: unlike the good old days of eight, nine years ago, the beach is far from deserted normally, with every would-be surfer and their entourage making a bee line straight for this iconic northern break. Saturday was a different story however. It was a little spooky paddling out through the harbor, punching through the main break and sitting on the point all alone in the early morning mist. Sharks?  Other perils? What is going on? I enjoyed the consistent glassy four footers for a couple of hours, and then paddled in, still all alone. I finally figured out the possible reasons. It is Chinese New Year next week and everyone is furiously preparing their houses for an influx of visitors and also all weather reports indicated a very strong wind for the morning session. There was hardly a breath, in fact, what there was turned offshore and cleaned up the waves. Anyway, apart from the spookiness factor, I was well pleased!

We had a nice lazy Sunday, our usual late and long breakfast accompanied by selected clippings from The Herald which Mum continues to send religiously….thanks Mum! We then began to watch the one day cricket before I decided to watch UFC 109. Quite magically that seemed to spur cassy on to do something different, so she got ready and then wandered over to Mingde Rd to do some shopping! When she arrived back it was time to once again watch some cricket which we did in the afternoon. At about 5 o’clock I took off for the train station, destination Luxy nightclub, the flash and the hip of Taipei’s Dunhua district. Was I losing it? Clubbing on a school night? Mid-life crisis? No, in a very clever piece of marketing to fill their otherwise pretty empty club on a Sunday night, they were the venue for  “Destiny v Demons” a mixed martial arts extravaganza, much like the UFC, but a definite step down in class. By the time I got there I’d talked to Dave on the phone while on the train (Dave Ivo) who couldn’t make it and Wol, who could, and would meet me outside Xhongxiao Dunhua station for the short walk to the venue.

It was a crazy scene all night. There fighters of some accomplishment being mis-matched against guys that looked like they’d just walked off the street. Wol and I were convincing each other that we could have taken care of a couple of them (a wild exaggeration, no doubt!). As the program moved on through the night, we saw some very skilful action and some great fights. The in between fight action was entertaining and bizarre. The Luxy dancers were trying their best to look sexy, but even though very cute, appeared more like 14 year old girls playing grown up. The ring girls had spectacularly obvious fake boobs, the Taiko drummers were solid, but the entertainment of the night came from the famous Taiwanese “Face Change”. This incredible guy danced around in a cape to some traditional music and at regular intervals would change his face mask, seemingly at will. It was a dazzling display of sleight of hand, and nearly elicited the applause of the night! There was a strange mix of people there too: dedicated fight fans, both foreign and Taiwanese, obnoxious foreigners who proceeded to give all of us a bad name by yelling out all sorts of inappropriate rubbish, and the general Taiwanese curious, who must have gone away scratching their heads at this strange new brutal but completely mesmerizing sport. Anyway, suffice to say it was a long night and I wasn’t exiting the MRT station at Mingde until nearly 11 o’clock. Another terrific, but certainly off beat Taiwan experience!

I’ll include a few great shots of last night’s action as well as the deserted Jinshan Point. Virg ‘n Mary have also recently commandeered “Mike’s Chair” so there’s a shot of them on that as well. Cass is reading The Abstinence Teacher and I'm reading $20 a Gallon.I've also just published another article with my writing partner, the great Gurecki, called The Power of Reading Transcends the Trends. You can read it here if you need a sleeping pill!

The Yangminshan national park really is an incredible natural asset for us to have so close to us, the lower reaches nestling in just above section six of the main north south road, just a 5 minute scooter ride from our place. Within minutes of entering the lower reaches of the paths and trails, you can feel worlds away from the hustle and bustle of Taipei, and the perfect weekend weather was a great opportunity to get out amongst it.

I did just that, despite nursing a bit of an injury, and it was terrific to get out in the sublime conditions amongst the greenery and beside the rushing streams. I find myself drifting off a little walking these trails: it’s a good thing, because sometimes I snap out of my revelry and realize I’m nearly at the end of a section and have somehow solved a few minor problems without even giving them too much thought. I also have a rather strange habit of replaying Chinese phrases in my head and sometimes (not always!) have a little better understanding or memory of them at the end of the walk.

Cass took the opportunity to have a little sleep in on the weekend after a big week preparing for and then hosting her book club at our place on Friday night. It was a great success, even though I think she’s getting a little sick of cooking a pavlova every time they come. Some of the other members love it so much they just insist that it be on the menu! She cooked them some Tex-Mex bean entrée kinda thingy (no doubt this is a very strange description of the dish for which I’ll be chastised) and the old faithful “Salmon muck” (same!), also known as Salmon Mornay, which is one of our all time favourites. The “girls” didn’t eat it all, so I’ve been the beneficiary of some very tasty leftovers this weekend..yeh!

I’ve suffered a flare up of an old injury I had back in the triathlon days unfortunately. My regular aerobic regime of either climbing stairs, or replicating this climbing on a seriously inclined treadmill was going extremely well until I recently started feeling an odd pain in my right knee. It seemed vaguely familiar, but I knew it wasn’t a medial ligament problem (which I had surgery to alleviate some years ago) so dismissed it as just a training ache. Soon enough I realized why it was so familiar: it was the old overuse injury of the iliotibial band stretched down my right leg over the outside of the kneecap. I’d stupidly stopped wearing the orthotics that had corrected the problem originally, as I was “just walking” and not doing the crazy distances I used to pound out on hard surfaces. I was so stupid! I’ve had to start using the orthotics again, and I’m slowly building up strength ….I just hope I haven’t worn it away too far! Anyway, I’m getting the idea that I have to just be a touch more careful in my training as a person of advancing years!

As Chinese New Year rapidly approaches, our thoughts have turned to how to get rid of a stealthily rising amount of “stuff”. In years gone by, residents would just start dumping all manner of unwanted furniture, appliances etc etc on street corners where city workers would come along in trucks to collect it. The trouble was that other people would join the party until the piles of rubbish would start encroaching on the road and inhibit traffic flow! In order to stop this, individuals can now telephone to have stuff picked up. We have arranged for a truck to come tomorrow morning, so we’ll leave the stuff out tonight. We have old computer monitors, keyboards, fans, a clothes dryer, an old TV and DVD player etc etc. This was a little confronting for us as we realized that all this stuff was bought brand new when we arrived and it has gradually either broken down or become obsolete…how long have we been here now?! Anyway, we’re looking forward to a good old “spring clean”.

We’ve just got this week and next before we get a week off for Chinese New Year, and that will be welcome. Photos: (I’ll post this evening) are all of little spots along the trails of lower Yangminshan.

I’ve been consumed by my own inertia today, so this will be brief, because it’s relatively late and I’ve got very little to report! We’ve been watching the one day cricket streaming live from the SCG today, where Australia has just beaten Pakistan comprehensively. We’re now watching the Australian Open night session on TV. You know the old saying, “You can take the boy out of Australia but you can’t take Australia out of the boy…”? Well, living proof right here!

Cass and I have both enjoyed the day, partly because it is dreary old day outside and very uninviting. The surf has been sloppy and unappealing too, so what to do? We did make a sortie out last evening to go to one of our favorite restaurants, Aubergine, and it didn’t disappoint. After that, we went across to the cinema complex and saw the very quirky, entertaining movie called “The Men Who Stare At Goats”. It had the proverbial galaxy of stars, all doing something more bizarre than their peers,. George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges were just some of them. The plot is far too complicated and strange to describe, but Cass summed it up quite neatly when she said this morning that the main theme appeared to have been, “Please be nice to one another”, yet they went to very convoluted lengths to say it! Well worth a look though, quite thought provoking.

I’ve been drafting another article all about reading, electronic readers, libraries and sustained silent reading that Gurecki and I will publish somewhere hopefully. We take it in turns to get the first draft out and then pick away if necessary (often we think it is not). It’s good to collaborate on these things though: we think it adds a touch more gravitas to our drippings! With a PD day coming up for both of us tomorrow, hopefully I’ll get some time to “take some notes” with the laptop while some “expert” is droning on…might get a bit more done.

Well, that’s about it for us this week….a very standard week at work and neither of us got motivated to plan anything special for the weekend…maybe next week! Photos are from our day a while back on the far side of the Danshui river at Bali. I'm reading The Colossus of Maroussi written by Henry Miller in 1939...it is absolutely brilliant.

Taipei has slowly dipped her toes into an icy bath and her feet are now submerged as well. The feeling is uncomfortable but bearable, but you get the sense that the cold and damp are slowly soaking into your body, chilling you from the inside out. It’s not that cold thermometer wise, but the bone chill factor is way up there. The other possibility is that after years watching the Taiwanese dress up like Douglas Mawson whenever the temperature drops below 15, we’ve turned into nauseatingly weak cold weather wimps!

I have been taken over by iPod touch fever this weekend as I finally discovered latterly that I could indeed upgrade my iPod’s software to partially replicate many of the iphone’s functions. That’s the trouble with being a sad tech geek who eagerly anticipates the “next big thing”. Even though I bought what could well have been the first iPod touch sold in Taiwan (after having been on a waiting list for a month: I know, if it wasn’t so sad it would be tragic), I also fell victim to the geek’s curse of early uptake. Of course to boost the initial flush of sales, the 2nd and 3rd generations can do all sorts of things the early models can’t. Anyway, the super new software update has allowed me to put all sorts of applications on the iPod as well as finally working its GPS capability which until now had lain frustratingly dormant somewhere in all those tiny little diodes and chips (I obviously have NO idea what I’m talking about!). Suffice to say, that apart from my incredibly romantic side coming to the fore on Saturday evening, Cassy has been an iPod widow apart from the few times when I’ve exhorted her to check out the “wonders” of my various “apps”…she’s a very patient woman.

We celebrated our 22nd wedding anniversary in style on Saturday evening. My aforementioned romantic streak extended to booking the famous Taipei 101’s Diamond Tony’s “Panorama” restaurant for our dinner date. Yes, this is the same restaurant I named in a drinking session a few years back, the same one we went for our 20th anniversary and I believe, even though 101 has just slipped into 2nd place as the world’s tallest building, it is still the world’s highest restaurant from the surrounding ground. I had booked a booth this time on the south side, which had a great view of the city action to the south and west, so even though not quite as special as last time, it was still very spectacular.

We got all dressed up and cabbed down, were let in by a security guard to a huge private lobby on Hsin Yi Lu, before clicking across the vast marble interior to an escalator. The check in girls escorted us to the first elevator which took us to the 60th floor in no time at all, before we changed elevators to get to the 85th floor. It was all very swish, as we were greeted by name at every juncture then shown to our booth. This restaurant is all class, but somehow without the slightest hint of pretension: a good mix. The menu had changed a little (for the better) and all our courses (6 of them!) were superb. We had a 2005 Victorian Greenpoint Shiraz as an accompanying wine and the whole evening was fantastic. The décor in the place is just out of this world: the full size Venetian gondola as a bar centerpiece is exquisite and the amount of marble in this place rivals the most palatial of Roman venues.

Today, we’ve spent indoors pretty much watching the cricket streamed live from Hobart. The subscription I took out a few weeks back is really paying off: unbidden, the people who run the site have just increased the size of the feed so the picture is even clearer when we beam it onto the TV. Wow, I just love technology! Before I go too geek nerdy again, I’ll finish the tech talk with just one more comment. Using Facebook via the iPod to update my status produced some really unexpected results. Heaps of people commented on the update concerning our anniversary, friends and ex-students alike…it was really quite touching. When I need a little boost next time I’ll have to remember that!

Photos are all from before, during or after our Panorama experience: portrait before we left, Taipei by night 85 floors up, vertigo inducing urinal experience, the gondola, Cass with some of her favourite wines and my Facebook page (double click on any image for a slightly larger version).

Stop Press: We just received an articulate and entertaining email from our nephew Michael and he tells us he just received a 3rd gen iPod touch for his recent (12th) birthday. I despair of the hard work I'll have to do to keep up with these digital natives!

We’d threatened to walk along the meandering seashore of Keelung County before, but spied an opportunity and made the best of it. The weather was abysmal last time we visited so we did a scout by car and planned to get back one day. The small car park at the start of the walk held another small treasure across the road, a trail that wound its way through some impossibly steep looking slopes before descending again just a few hundred metres from the starting point: next time! The walk was as pleasant as we’d hoped and we admired the craggy outcrops of rock and the deep colours of the China Sea as a foreground to an unusually diverse set of sea craft bobbing up and down in the light swell. Just about at the end of our walk we spied the unexpected “Mykonos” in its 3 stories of “Greek” glory. This is a must return visit in summer when the umbrella deck up top will have endless views of the coast. As it was we took advantage of a coffee and cake and even though we might have a little trouble with the all Chinese menu, we’ll be sure to give it a crack next time.

Sunday’s sensational weather was another lure to get into the great outdoors, so after a leisurely morning of sleeping in and slowly breakfasting, we hit the road. Our destination was Ilan County, about an hour’s drive away, the hitherto unremarkable flat plain of endless housing, shops and typical Taiwanese city living. The jewel in Ilan’s crown is the town of Jiaosi and more particularly the waterfalls and mountain trails of Wufongci (Five Flags).

We were quite dazzled by Jiaosi’s charms on the way in and the way out of the waterfalls. It is a really bustling metropolis, full of hot spring hotels of every persuasion, budget right through to 5 stars. It had a really good vibe and we would never have guessed. Our normal practice is to whizz through with scarcely a glance on the elevated expressway heading south to Nan Ao, dismissing Ilan as a horrible slum…how wrong we were!

We wended our way through the backstreets of the town, ever higher and heading west into the mountains from which our expressway tunnel had just burst. The countryside was fresh and gorgeous, the sights and smells particularly different. After parking down the hill a few hundred metres we made our way through the obligatory alley of specialized stalls, little eats and local curiosities. One couple were selling what appeared to be the engorged roots of some mysterious plant, painted up to (supposedly) resemble certain animals…weird! Another man had a huge photo of his father as a backdrop to his local honey stall: but Dad was covered head to toe in bees. Places like these do tend to set the scene for something special to come!

The first two drops of the waterfall were very spectacular and although not at full flow, the crescendo of water dropping from a great height, the spray-making rainbows shimmering near the base and the clean fresh feel of the place were quite dazzling. They’ve done a surprisingly tasteful job of the viewing platforms and pagodas as well. Garish colours were non evident and the simple red sloping roof of the little pagoda was a great entrée to the waterfall itself. The highest drop was off limits to visitors unfortunately, due we think to building works or repairs to the stairs and paths. Not to worry an excuse to re-visit and also the reason we discovered another trail and a picturesque hidden church higher up the mountain.

We kept walking higher and higher after being disappointed with the closure of the high trail and discovered a delightful Christian church, completely circular and set amongst manicured grounds with panoramic views all the way down the valley and out to sea. It was most impressive and Cass spied a road winding away ever higher at the rear of the church. It quickly petered out into a rough track and was on an incline all the way. We walked along here for about 45 minutes, all the while wondering where it was going and meeting parties of folk coming back down the trail, all kitted up with packs and supplies and most of them a fair bit older than us! We thought if those old tools could do it, so could we! (That reference was for you Xris). As it turns out we didn’t find anything more than a path that just continued and continued, but we enjoyed the bush walk, the amazing views and the serenity immensely.

The car then navigated its way back to Tienmu, contending with a mild traffic jam in the 13km tunnel and delivering us safely home in the early evening. I think we’re both ready to face another week of work after all that outdoor activity. I’m still reading “The Portrait of a Lady” just a little at a time at night so it will be ages before I finish it and Cass has been captured by the large feline beast in “The White Tiger”.