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Music

It’s my annual look back at the year’s travels. This year I started with Museums & Galleries, moved on to Cars & Bikes, then Animals & Wildlife, followed by Big Buddhas, 10 Books, Beaches and yesterday my favourite Aerial Views of 2010. Today it’s music.

In 2009 I caught four great rock concerts – Leonard Cohen and then Neil Young in Melbourne, Van Morrison at the Albert Hall in London, Al Stewart in Newcastle in northern England. Rock-wise nothing hit the same high in 2010, not even U2 on their 360º tour when it came to the Etihad Stadium in Melbourne. Too ‘big’, too ‘impersonal’, no ‘connection. ’ You might as well have watched it on a TV.

? U2 from my perspective


? Perhaps it would have been more like a rock concert if I’d been down the front – like my daughter Tashi and her boyfriend Kristian, this is one of Kristian Daely’s photographs from their perspective.

In fact the best rock concert of 2010 was Rickie Lee Jones, also in Melbourne, but at a much more personal venue, the old Forum Theatre. I’d been to one previous RLJ concert – 1990 in Tokyo.

? Tosca (and the conductor) in the Arena at Verona

There were a half dozen operas during the year including Il Trovatore and Aida in the ancient Roman arena in Verona, Italy. Now that’s a place where even the most uneducated opera-goer, me for example, will be blown away. Of course Maureen, the educated opera-goer in our relationship, went to more operas than me including a Ring Cycle in Los Angeles. I was in Hong Kong and Macau a the time. She said it wasn’t very good. Other operatic performances even included the Australian soprano Taryn Fiebig performing at our house for an Opera Australia fund raiser.

Of course there was plenty of other music from music talks at the Wheeler Centre, to pub rock (including the Lonely Planet house band Slabotomy) and even a chance encounter with a busking theremin player in the centre of Melbourne.

Aerial Views

It’s my annual look back at the year’s travels. This year I started with Museums & Galleries, moved on to Cars & Bikes, the Animals & Wildlife, followed by Big Buddhas, then 10 Books and finally Beaches. Today it’s my favourite Aerial Views of 2010.

I’ll quote again Joan Didion’s comment in The Year of Magical Thinking that ‘the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes. ’ Once again, there have been some wonderful views from the airplane windows over the past year. I’ve posted some of my favourites on blogs on flying across the Kimberley in a Cessna Caravan in June and flying from London to Lombok in a Beechcraft 1900D in October. The winding Sangu River as we crossed the coast of Bangladesh just south of Chittagong is one of my favourite aerial glimpses of the year. Here are some others:

◄ The long empty stretches of central Australia often features great views, landscapes where you think ‘so that’s where the idea comes from in that Aboriginal painting. ’ Followed by ‘and how did they visualize that if they’d never flown over at 30,000 feet?’ This central Australian view was taken from a Singapore Airlines A380.

A few hours later this volcano on the Indonesian island of Java poked through the clouds. Indonesia’s plentiful supply of volcanoes often provide great views. ▼

We stopped off in Thailand on that trip, en route to Europe, so Singapore Airlines provided the dawn view of the Thames as we came in to London’s Heathrow Airport. The A380s engines are about to swallow up Waterloo Station and the London Eye ferris wheel. ►

▲ Flying out of Ajaccio, the capital city of the French island of Corsica, there was this glimpse of a cruise ship a ferry and lots of smaller boats in the harbour. Ajaccio was the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte and for Christmas Maureen gave me Eau de Gloire, which some after shave dreamer decided conjured up the ‘water of glory’ which Bonaparte might have splashed on if he was trying to seduce Joséphine, rather than announcing ‘not tonight. ’ It features hints of maquis the vegetation which covers so much  of the island.

◄ Finally it’s Singapore Airlines again, but a 747 this time,  a nice view of wings and engines as we descended over the Riau Archipelago into Singapore. The Indonesian Riau Islands lie immediately south of the city-state and their industrialisation is a reminder of Singapore’s ever expanding economic influence in the region.

Beaches

To be honest I’m not really a beach person, I get bored sitting around and even without visiting any beaches I get too much sun during the year. Nevertheless I had several great days on an assortment of fine beaches on the Brazilian island of Fernando do Noronha and let’s face, if you’re going to do beach there’s no better place than Brazil. Except perhaps Australia.

? Beach on Fernando do Noronha

During the year there were two visits to Thai beach islands – Ko Samui and Phuket – but I can live without their beaches. On the other hand the Russians certainly can’t live without Phuket, they’ve totally taken over as the island’s number one visitors. And then there was a visit to Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk on the east coast of England. Not by-the-Sea or on-the-Sea mind you, next-the-Sea. A classic British seaside town and delightful. ?

2011

Wednesday 26 January 2011 – I’m joining in Australia day events in country Victoria:

• 850 am I’ll be the ‘Australia Day Ambassador’  in Penshurst
• 1100 am – a repeat performance in Hamilton

10 Books

There were lots of interesting books in 2010 – fiction and non-fiction, travel and standing still. Here are 10 I found particularly interesting, starting with 5 travel books:
 
Country Driving – Peter Hessler’s look at contemporary China from behind the steering wheel was my favourite travel book of the year. China today zig zags from weird to wonderful to downright scary and this book perfectly captures that acute variability.

Map Addict – Mike Parker is a clearly an anorak, British slang for a train-spotter (which come to think of it is British slang as well). Anyway he’s a geek, a nerd and obsessed with maps. A Tale of Obsession the byline says. It is.

One of the many little information gems in Map Addict: what do these four countries have in common: Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Yemen and the USA? They’re the only countries which still officially use imperial weights and measures.

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