Room With A View

This was taken in 2004 whilst on the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. It is part of a photo-essay I was creating on 'Doors and Windows'.

The Very Big Adventure...Revised

We're not going to Mera Peak anymore. The company we chose to go with no longer operates out of Australia and their Kathmandu office never replied to our queries....so now, we've signed up with Peregrine Adventures to attempt Island Peak, or Imja Tse. It's 6,189m high, so a little shorter than Mera, but technically harder (so we've been told!). We're really excited about it cos it means re-visiting Gokyo (and another attempt for me to get to the top of Gokyo Ri), crossing the Cho La once more, up to Everest Base Camp, over the Kongma La (which we missed in 2003 cos of heavy snow), through Chukkhung and onto Island Peak Base Camp.

So, the whole adventure is now: a trip to Tibet, going to Tibet-side Everest Base Camp, then onto a pilgrimage around Mt Kailash; around Annapurna Circuit, with side trip to Tilicho Lake; and Island Peak. 3 whole months away! And only 158 sleeps to go.....

Tibetan Flag Flies Over Caboolture

Friday 10 March marked the 47th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising against the Chinese invasion, which ultimately led to the fleeing of the Dalai Lama into exile. The Tibetan flag is outlawed in Tibet. The Australian Tibet Council approached local councils around Australia asking if they would fly the Tibetan Flag on March 10. The council I work for, Caboolture Shire Council, was one of the few that agreed.

For more information about Tibet and its struggle for independence see Australia Tibet Council's website www.atc.org.au, Free Tibet Campaign website www.freetibet.org and the Tibetan Government In Exile website www.tibet.com

Google Sells Out

Check out this website www.noluv4google.com to pledge your commitment to breaking up with Google on valentine's day.

As a librarian I am committed to the concept of freedom of information. For Google to snuggle up in bed with an evil empire like China and design search parameters that deny people access to information, purely for the sake of money, makes Google morally bankrupt. I will be breaking up with Google from February 14 2006 and finding a new search engine to use.

Stop Whaling Petition

Go to www.whalesrevenge.com to sign the petition to stop all whaling. The aim to get 1,000,000 signatures.

Could the real me please stand up?

Yesterday I found myself in a small windowless interview room, with two people flashing gold badges at me and wanting to "ask me a few questions". A very long way from where I had planned my day to go, I must say! Smithy and I were going to the city to 1) renew my re-entry visa 2) wire our trip deposit to Nepal 3) fax confirmation of said deposit to Nepal 4) buy a new Lotto ticket and 5) visit the travel agent who acts for the company we want to use to climb Mera Peak. All pretty straightforward, you would think...

So, first things first, let's go to the Dept of Immigration and get my visa. I'm a Pom with permanent residency, but need a visa to be allowed back into the country if I go overseas. My last visa ran out last year. So this trip was mainly to find out if I needed to produce all the original paperwork proving my permanent resident status again, or if I could just be reissued with a new visa. Turns out, I can just get a new visa. Take a number and wait. We sat and waited, making satisfied sounds to each other about how efficiently the queue is moving along...quite a surprise for government bureaucracies. Within 15 minutes, my number is called and off we trot to Cubicle 18. Looks like we're going to be out of here in under half an hour! I tell the officer that I just need a new visa and hand over my visa. We're all chatting and joking when the officer, let's call her Jane, taps at her keyboard repeatedly, tsks, mutters 'Won't be long' and walks off. Comes back in a minute or too, taps the keyboard again and leaves with my passport in hand.

20 minutes later, back she comes. There's bit of a problem that she is not able to discuss. Could I please fill in as much of this form as I can and her manager will be here in a minute. 20 minutes after that, Jane returns with her manager who wants me to go upstairs to answer some questions. What's this all about? I ask. It's that fake passport isn't it? He can't answer any of my questions, if I would just come with him. They are waiting for me upstairs. Can Smithy come too? Of course she can. As we head to the lift, I tell the manager I've never had any problems before. Got my first visa no dramas, why the problems now? Sorry, he doesn't know anything.

Up we go to Compliance and Investigations. Good grief! We're kept waiting another ten minutes or so, then the investigator comes out and introduces himself (let's call him John) and leads us to the little interview room so I can answer questions about how I came to be in the country, and how I came to have this passport! There's another investigator in the room - Jill, shall we say - and they both flash their badges at Smithy and me so we know they really are who they say they are. It's about now I wish I had a gold badge of my own so they'd know I was really who I say I am!

This is about a fake passport. Back in 1998, a supposed friend stole my ID, got herself a passport in my name and used that as proof of ID to get a loan which she then reneged on. How did I know all this? The loan company rang me wanting to know why I had missed my first payment!

It took a lot of interviews with police and the loan company to get my name cleared and exonerated from any responsibility for the loan. Meanwhile, my 'friend', Joanne Cole (her real name) had fled the country on my passport. Many calls to the British High Commission later I was assured that the episode would not hamper my own efforts to get a passport when the time came....and it didn't. Nor, fortunately, was my credit rating impaired - I did include a statement of past events in case my name had been blacklisted - and I've travelled in and out of Australia happily and without incident over the past three years.

I tell John and Jill that I emigrated here with my parents in 1970. I relate the above story, tell them when I got my passport and give them details of my last trip overseas. They leave the room for 20 or so minutes to check some details. Smithy's muttering that she won't leave my side. She'll bail me out if they arrest me. She won't let them deport me without a struggle. She's a great comfort, a tower of strength is my Smithy.

Finally, back come John and Jill and it's all smiles. Apparently the fraudulent passport has been flagged and it tripped the system recently and they had to verify that I was the real person. They showed me a picture of Jo and I confirmed it was her. Smithy was speculating that whatever she had done, it had to have been after I got issued with my first visa. I suggested it had to have been since we arrrived back in Australia in 2004 as I hadn't had any hassles returning that year. Neither John nor Jill would give details, but they gave me my passport back and John took us back downstairs so I could get my visa, telling me he would put a very clear note on my case file that I was legitimate. We had to wait again, then got called back to Cubicle 18 with Jane, where I finally got to hand over $120 for a new 5-year visa. Jane said 'You have no idea how much she (Jo) has messed things up for you' and she confirmed that Jo had tripped the system in the 2003/2004 period.

So, an hour and a half after entering the building, we finally got back outside, with me clutching my passport with its hard-won visa stuck securely inside!

My only concern now is that when I finally do get around to taking out Australian citizenship, I'll be denied as a 'bad', 'undesirable' character cos of this bloody fake passport business. Jane reckons I should be OK, but a statuary declaration outlining the situation probably wouldn't hurt.

I've wanted to track this jo down for years and give her a good punch on the nose for what she's done. You can imagine how I freaked when, shortly after moving to Brisbane in 2000, I went to join the library and was told there was someone else of my name already joined! I mean, mine is not exactly a common name and the stolen ID thing was still pretty raw. The idea that that low-life was passing herself off as me made me anxious and pissed off, but there wasn't much I could do unless I wanted to stake out the homes of every person in the White Pages with the same initial and surname as me. After awhile, the whole thing faded - not forgotten, but no longer an anxiety. Then in 2004, Smithy and I entered the Gold Coast Half Marathon as part of our fitness regime for our upcoming trip to Nepal. Out come the results, and immediately under my name, is that of another woman with exactly the same name! It's that woman who's also a library member. And I know it's not low-life Jo cos she's a big fat slob who couldn't outrun a cold, let alone do a half-marathon! There is another, legitimate 'me' out there! Weird!

Anyway, the rest of the day went as planned, albeit slightly behind schedule. We've now paid our deposits for Annapurna Circuit, Mt Kailash/Everest Base Camp trips and flight to Lhasa from Kathmandu. It's all systems go now! Yihaa! Confirmation of deposit duly faxed, chat to travel agent accomplished, lotto ticket checked (didn't win a brass razoo) and new one bought. Then it's home for bit of a lie down to recover from all the excitement.

Rice

Another one of my favourite photos taken in Nepal. This one is of rice fields. What I liked about this image was the tenacity of the rice to grow, and hang, on to the slightest bit of earth - in this case, the bank of a stream

Another year older

It was my birthday yesterday. Smithy gave me Sue Fear's biography, a sleeping bag liner and a beautiful carved marble frieze with 5 Buddhas in various poses. Lovely lovely lovely. We lolligagged around for a couple of hours, then surfed a bit on the net looking for maps of Tibet, before getting ready to go out.

The wine club we belong to was coincidentally having one of its tastings yesterday and we thought that a fine way to spend my burpday. A leisurely couple of hours sailing up and down the Brisbane River on the Kookaburra Queen (paddle steamer without steam), sampling some fine champagnes, whites, reds and scrumptious liqueurs.

Then it was off to New Farm Park to meet up with friends for coffee and a chinwag, which was really nice.

After a hot and sweaty walk over to Kangaroo Point and those wretched steps, we settled down with dinner and a couple more glasses of wine and watched some telly. A fine birthday!

And today Mum's card arrived with $50 tucked inside (ta Mum!) and a parcel from one of my sister's came too. That had a little lantern with candle in it (ta Lo!)

I'll have to go shopping on Wednesday and organise cards and gifts for Mum and Dad's birthdays - 8/11 and 14/11 respectively. Yep...3 Scorpios in the family!

Movie time!

Hooray! Hooray! I have finally been able to make workable DVDs of the films we took whilst trekking in Nepal last year. So now we have a little collection of homemade movies on DVD! Annapurna Circuit, Kathmandu and Everest Region. Up til now, we've only been able to view the films on the computer.

We're particularly pleased about the Everest one because it originally seemed that the footage had been corrupted - lines of pixelation running through the scenes. But, I gave it another try capturing it to computer and this time it was clear! There must have been some dust in the camera the first time I tried to capture it. So now we have a great little movie of our trek to Gokyo and Kalar Pattar!

So now, I'm looking at transferring some old videos onto DVD. And we recently bought software so that we can record our vinyl LPs to the computer then burn them to CD. Smithy and I are slowly working our way through our record collections. Once we've finished we'll be able to put the LPs into storage under the house. We have great fun making labels and case covers as well as going on quite a trip down memory lane as we listen to the LPs.

Spring has sprung

Seems that summer is already here after just a week or two of lovely spring weather. In comes October and increased water restrictions and the temperature soars into high 30s - Celcius, that is...90+ Fahrenheit. And we've had the first bushfires of the season.

But the good news is.....there's cricket on the telly!!!! Australia against the world and beating them in 2 one-day matches, with one more one-dayer and a 6-day test still to come. The games have been played under the closed roof of the Telstra Dome in Melbourne, so can someone explain to me why Andy Symonds had his usual sunblock on his lips???

October's arrival has meant a step up in our training program. There are now only 340 days until we leave for Tibet. So now we're walking 5 days a week (well nights as it's been far too hot before sunset to step outside!) on our Kangaroo Point circuit, which is about 7km in distance and includes a gruelling 106 steps up the side of a cliff. Oh the straining calves, heaving lungs and wobbly legs as we struggle to the top! But soon, soon we'll be trotting up those steps with no bother at all.

We've also cut back on the alcohol consumption - enjoying a wine or two only on Friday and Saturday nights - and are eating a little less as we both want to lose 5-8kg. So far, it seems to be working cos the scales are telling me I've lost 1kg already!

Sing For Water

Went with a group of friends to a free concert in the Brisbane botanical gardens last night to celebrate the end of another RiverFestival. The concert was made up of a mass choir of about 450 voices from 19 different choirs from around southeastern Queensland, including the Brisbane Lesbian and Gay Choir...who all looked fantastic donning bandanas during their individual performance to create a glittering rainbow of colour!

Other performers included the Briscoe Sisters, a trio from Far North Queensland (FNQ), Troy, Trevelyn and the Tribe, which featured a traditionally decorated Aboriginal man playing the didgeridoo and a Zimbabwean woman as co-singer with the Aboriginal lead guitarist.

The drawcard performer was the lovely Kate Cebrano. The aim of the concert was to celebrate the role of the river in Brisbane's life and the importance of water to us all. It was also a fundraiser for WaterAid, funding and supporting water projects in Papua New Guinea.

A fantastic evening, wonderful talent and, of course, with a name like Sing For Water, what did it do half way through Kate's set but start to rain!!!

Thresholds

I took this picture in Bhaktapur, Nepal as part of a photographic essay I'm working on based on doors and windows in Nepal. Check out my website at www.geocities.com/ldimmock for more photos of my travels in Nepal

A spring in the step

Smithy got the all-clear last week from the chiropracter to start walking more frequently, so to celebrate we headed off to do what we call the Kangaroo Point Circuit, a slightly more arduous walk than what we have been doing, and incorporates a 106-step staircase cut into the cliffs. We had gone no more than 100 metres when I fell into a grass-hidden hole and sprained my ankle!

Ouch! Hobbled home and applied an ice-pack. A week later, it still is not happy. Grrr! It's been one damn thing after another for both Smithy and me. Good job we still have 12 months before embarking on our big Himalayan adventure! We gonna need all the time we can get to get back into peak condition!

We bought a small home gym resistence machine on Saturday and had a fun time slotting Part A into Section 3 and tightening with Bolt z! It all looks very impressive and at least I can work on my quads and biceps whilst waiting for the ankle to heal.

We also bought a wind-up torch each. Fantastic idea! No batteries required! We first saw them advertised in the New Internationalist catalogue as part of a range of items, including radios, that all work on the wind-up concept. Revolutionary technology for developing countries! People don't have to worry about affording batteries, or disposing of them. We bought ours from Bunnings Hardware. 1 minute spent winding gives 30 minutes continuous light. Just the thing for those late night dashes from tent or lodge room to the dunny!

At a standstill

13 months to go until the big adventure! Smithy and I are still struggling with mobility problems, so the training regime hasn't yet been taken to the next level. In fact, I suffered a wee setback on Friday when some ignorant b*#*&#$ smashed into the back of my car and drove off! Leaving me gobsmacked, whiplashed and with a hole torn out of the back panel of poor little Hilda Hyundai!

Having missed the Gold Coast Half Marathon and the Bridge to Brissie fun run, we had set our sights on doing the annual Hike to Help Nepal, run by Nepal Australia Friendship Association (NAFA) and using that as our launching pad for cranking up the training. We usually miss the Hike cos we're in Nepal in October, but this year will be home...alas, no Hike is planned this year! Oh well, we'll just have to do our own private hike. Hopefully by October, we'll both be a lot fitter and stronger than we are at the moment.

Be still my beating heart

I learned this week that I have an ectopic heartbeat - extra heartbeats or heart skipping beats. It's benign, but had me worried for a bit...no good having a weak heart if I want to go climbing mountains and trekking through the Himalayas! I've had to switch to caffeine-free coffee and cut down on alcohol - if I hadn't already given them up, I would have had to stop smoking too!

Hopefully, this will be a passing condition. Apparently, perimenopause causes it and quite a lot of women get it...something to do with estrogen levels, I'm told.

Smithy and I went to a giant CD and DVD sale last weekend and she found a CD called "Himalayan Trekking Songs"! Goes without saying, that we bought it. A lovely collection of Nepalese folk songs, including the perrenial favourite Reshim Phiriry.

We also went to the Kathmandu Winter Sale and I bought a new Gore-Tex raincoat for half price. That's gone into the "Trekking Trunk", along with some new waterproof trousers, ready for the big adventure next year. We also both found great hats that give lots of shade and fold up into a little pouch - they're in the trunk too!

I love to go a-wandering along a mountain track...

There are only 15 months to go before my girlfriend, Smithy, and I head off for our 3-month trip to the Himalayas! This time, we'll be going to Tibet...travelling into Everest Base Camp then across the country to do a 3-day pilgrimage around Mt Kailash. Then back to Kathmandu to meet up with 2 friends from Melbourne who are joining us on the Annapurna Circuit, with a side trek to Tilicho Lake. Back to Kathmandu we'll farewell our friends and head east to the Khumbu region to try and climb Mera Peak, the tallest trekking peak in Nepal.

People ask me why I like trekking so much, and why in Nepal. For one thing, the mountains don't come much bigger than in Nepal. For sheer majesty, you cannot beat the Himalayas. And, you have to work to see them. No driving a car and pulling up beside the road to enjoy the view.

A quote I read a while ago really sums up what trekking does for me. It said "I go to the mountains to learn how to live better in my own world". When you're out there on the trail and there are no newspapers, no TV, no radio, phones, nothing to connect you to the world you come from, you really do become uncluttered and begin to realise just how unimportant so much of what we fill our lives with and yearn after really is.

I come back from the mountains refreshed and relaxed. Each time, I come home feeling more content with what I already have and with loads more respect and humility towards the many many people who are getting by with oh so much less than me. I come home knowing that I can make a difference...that the $4o a month I spend on child sponsorship is effective, cos a dollar goes a long long way in a country like Nepal.

Mainly though, I love trekking in the Himalayas because it is so awesomely spectacular!

Raindrops keep falling on my head

Well, winter seems to have finally arrived here in Brisbane. Up till now, you would hardly know it was winter. Blue skies, sunshine, temperatures in the low to mid 20s (in the 70s on the Fahrenheit scale), everyone still getting around in T-shirts.

In fact, the only real clue as to the season so far has been the wonderful aroma of wattle blossoms wafting into the car as I drive to work. But today it's actually chilly and it's been raining all day...could this be the end of the drought?

There was a story on the news the other night. It had been raining out west...very welcome rain that had been falling for two days...and there were kids out there who had never seen rain! Hard to comprehend, isn't it...all these 3, 4 and 5 year olds who had no idea or experience of rain...

What on earth????

National days of protest? Prime Ministers expressing sorrow? People demanding refunds on their tsunami donations? All because a young woman was convicted of drug smuggling and sentenced to 20 years!

Where are the national days of protest about other injustices around the world? China's conduct in Tibet for the past 50 years, for example. 12- and 14-year old Australian Vietnamese jailed in Vietnam for another. People dying from starvation whilst fat Westerners buy the latest weight loss pills....

Why isn't John Howard sorry for all the other convicted prisoners sentenced to long or life terms in prisons around the country and world?

And since when did charity come with strings attached?

May Day

Brisbane is putting on a birthday party for Buddha this weekend but I've been too busy catching up with the ironing to go to the celebrations....had to settle for burning some incense and ringing a bell before a picture of Buddha instead.

I've recently learned how to make movies using my computer and am about to "capture" our video footage of last year's trek to Gokyo Lakes and Kalar Pattar to edit and burn to CD, then I'll have a go at burning the movie of our Annapurna Circuit to DVD ready to take to Melbourne next week to show a friend who we're hoping to inspire to come with us next year....

You know when winter is on its way when the wattle begins to bloom and its perfume wafts in through the windows....mind you, we're still wearing t-shirts and shorts. Winter in the tropics is a doddle!

April showers

So much for my big plans of posting at least once a week....

After a 5okm drive to work, full day's work, 50km drive home again, go for a walk, cook tea and cuddle with my partner I'm too buggered to even turn on the computer, let alone think about blogging.

April 22 is a redletter day in my calendar, cos it's the end of my stint of full-time work that began January 4. No more 6am alarms 5 days a week - well, 6 days really cos I get up early on Saturdays to go walking with Brisbane Frontrunners. I'll be back to 3 day weekends - Hooray hooray!!!

Lots of ups and downs this week....hurt my back on Monday, but made a digital movie from our footage of Kathmandu. Learned of a bomb threat made against us at work (we're a public library for gawd's sake), but won $60 in GoldLotto. Threw another sickie on Thursday cos my back was killing me and I hadn't slept a wink all night, but finally got around to downloading some of my favourite music into my recently purchased mp3 player.

And it's been raining for the past three days. Yipee! After months and months of boring old sunshine, we finally have some much needed rain and the garden's got a touch a green about it again.