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Big Buddhas

Once again I’m looking back over the last year’s travels. Today it’s 2010′s Big Buddhas. On 21 December it was Animals & Wildlife, on 20 December Cars & Bikes and on 19 December Museums & Galleries.

I encountered some big Buddhas during 2010, most recently the 45-metre-high seated Big Buddha figure which now looks out over the Thai tourist island of Phuket. Earlier in the year there was the much bigger Bodhi Tataung one (129-metres-high) overlooking a 95-metre-long reclining one in the Monywa area of Burma.

? Bodhi Tataung standing Buddha

? Paul von Chrismar, an architect who worked with Planet Wheeler on an orphanage project in Hoi An, Vietnam, sent me some photographs of another project he was involved with – a huge (60-metre, 20 storey high) seated Buddha image in Bhutan. It featured a metal skeleton with plates welded on the outside, a construction method similar to the Statue of Liberty.

Animals & Wildlife

There were no wildlife trips in 2010, no African safaris looking for the big four, no whale watching trips (although there was a visit to Australia’s last whaling station), no Antarctic visits to seal and whale colonies. Fortunately the birdlife comes right to my house in Australia – I’ve got backyard birds and I can watch my courtyard blackbird hop in and out of its nest as I type this.

? In fact I encountered my favourite birdlife in 2010 in the London tube, an ad for the Caribbean-flavoured Notting Hill Carnival with a lowly London pigeon wriggling into a much more colourful parrot outfit. We arrived in London on one visit and the same day encountered parrots in Hyde Park. ‘Grey squirrels on wings,’ thundered the Evening Standard newspaper, they’re pet escapees which have managed to make London home, despite the weather.

?A Hyde Park parrot

Then I fed the crocs and the fish (and caught one too) in Northern Australia and encountered jumping cats & Burmese cats in Burma. It was in Pindaya in Burma where I also met up with the biggest spider of the year, man-eating even. ?

Cars & Bikes

Time for my end of year sum up, on 19 December I looked at Museums & Art Galleries. Today it’s cars and bicycles. No change in the cars Maureen and I own in Australia – a Lotus Europa, a Mini Cooper S, a Toyota Prius. Or in the UK – no car at all.

▲ Techie installs an aerial on the roof of my Prius so we can chase our high altitude balloon in November.

But in the London I have signed up for the car sharing scheme Zipcar – car clubs as they’re known in the UK. During the summer I made an assortment of Zipcar trips around London or further afield. In a Toyota Yaris, Toyota Prius, VW Golf and Honda Insight. The longest trip was three days and over that period it was line ball whether I was better with the Zipcar or a regular rent-a-car, but on the shorter trips – a couple of times we took a Zipcar just to go round to a friend’s place for dinner – the Zipcar was much cheaper. Plus there’s the convenience, no forms to fill in, just pick the car up from its streetside parking spot, unlocking it with what looks like a credit card. So I’m a Zipcar convert. Although I don’t need it I’ve tried the Melbourne car share equivalent, Flexicar.

There were a few other rent-a-cars in various places, most peculiarly a Renault Vel Satis I had for a week in Corsica. The Vel Satis was a weird French attempt to make something competitive with a BMW 5 series by making it, well, weird. It failed.

Bicycles – no change in Australia – I’ve still got a Brompton, a Bianchi and a Wheeler. I used my Wheeler mountain bike on the Tour d’Afrique ride last year. In London I now ride a Specialized Sirrus, a ‘flat bar road bike’ which means a regular skinny tyre, 30 speed road bike, but without the drop bar riding position. I really like it and broke it in with a little three days ride from London to Paris. Followed up by a midnight to 5 am ride through the night from London to Brighton on the English south coast.

My Specialized has definitely got me out of London, but around the city I’ve done a lot of riding on ‘Boris Bikes,’ the London share bike scheme which launched very successfully while I was in London this past summer. I’m a Boris Bike fan as well! Yes my other city, Melbourne, also has a share bike scheme and interestingly the bicycles, made in Montreal, are identical. Unfortunately while the London scheme has been a big success the Melbourne one has done very badly, probably because Australia’s compulsory helmet law discourages casual use.

Museums & Galleries

OK, it’s time to look back over the last year. Starting with Museums & Galleries. Reading through my diary for the past 12 months there sure were a lot of them! Some highlights:

?  The Alexandria Library right on the Mediterranean Coast in Egypt. An interesting attempt to bring the greatest library of the ancient world back to life.

?  Statue of Captain William Bligh in Sydney

The Museum of Garden History in what was St Mary-at-Lambeth Church by the Thames in London. I was only there because you have to go through the museum (and then it feels like through the kitchen) to get to William Bligh’s tomb. I’ve had a long and ongoing interest in the controversial captain and his ship HMS Bounty, over the years I’ve dropped in on a long list of Bligh and Bounty locations. I’ve been to Tahiti (where he went to collect those damned breadfruits), to Bruny Island in Tasmania (where he stopped off with HMS Bounty en route to Tahiti), to Bligh Water in the Fiji Islands (where the mutiny took place), to Kupang on Timor in Indonesia (where Bligh ended up after his epic open-boat voyage), to Tubai Island (where the Bounty mutineers made a first attempt at finding a hideaway from British naval justice) and Pitcairn Island (where they finally ended up).   So going to pay my respects at his tomb was definitely on the list.

?  In Salvador in Brazil the Museu Afro-Brasileiro with a wonderful series of wooden bas reliefs by the well respected local artist Carybé, inspired by the orix

I Never Saw it Coming

On 15 December an overloaded Indonesian fishing boat attempting to get Middle East refugees into Australia ran ashore on Christmas Island, an isolated Australian territory off to the west of Java. The ship’s engine failed and the ship broke up on the rocky coast, at least 30 of the passengers died. The Australian media have been debating why the authorities never saw the ship coming. It hardly surprises me that they missed it, here are four other ‘never saw it coming’ examples:

31 December 1991 – 56 Chinese nationals on the Isabella land on a remote stretch of the Western Australian coast and nobody notices them until they’ve spent 10 days walking 150km to a Kimberley cattle station.

16 April 2003 – The North Korean freighter Pong Su stops off at Lorne, a popular beach resort in the Australian state of Victoria, to drop off a load of heroin. Fortunately a surfer sees them coming ashore because the Australian navy certainly didn’t. The Pong Su might have sailed all the way around Australia dropping off heroin at every port it came to before things went wrong at Lorne.

? Wait a minute, these aren’t poppies!

20 January 1980 – A lumbering old DC7 lands in a field in South Dakota, the crew abandons the aircraft and its cargo of 12 tons of Colombian marijuana.

? SAC Museum in Omaha

Check the map, presumably on their way north across the USA they’d flown very close to the Strategic Air Command base at Omaha, Nebraska which was no doubt on high alert for any Cold War Soviet intrusion? I stopped in at the SAC museum in Omaha in 1994 and the next day passed by where the drug-plane landed.

28 May 1987 – German teenager Mathias Rust flies a Cessna light plane to Red Square in Moscow. The cold war is still going on, but all that multi-billion rouble Soviet technology was no better at intercepting him than the American variety was at catching an ancient plane full of drugs.