| October 21, 2003 |
| I'm Back! [On Location] — poster @ 00:21:22 |
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Hi guys, I'm sorry this has got to be so short, I am just so busy... but I just wanted to let you know that I have indeed returned to the Northern Hemisphere, and to San Francisco in particular. arrived about 54 hours ago, on Saturday evening. In the meantime I'm pretty hard at the grind right now, looking for a place to live, and working on 3 deadlines. I'm really sorry this is so short, and also a couple days late. I love you all, and will actually talk to you via telephone as soon as I've got a roof & room of my own, and feeling a bit more sane. Take care, and ciao for now. — Doug |
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| October 16, 2003 |
| Where am I? [On Location] — poster @ 10:15:11 |
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I'm on a bus just coming into the town of... the imaginitively named town of... Townsville, it is. Guess all the other good names were taken or trademarked already. Anyway, I am truly, finally on my way outa this place. I was supposed to leave Australia on October 11 (and arrive in California on October 11, too), but then I delayed exactly one week so that I could go on a 4 day hike on Hinchinbrook Island, just off the coast about 1 hour south of where David & Tanny live (I'd been staying with them). that trip was very cool. They dropped me and a few other people off by boat on one end of the island, and then each person (we weren't traveling together or anything) had their own scheduled pick-up date at the south end of the island (mine was 4 days later). The trip was a little bit of everything... tramping down hot tropical beaches curving off as far as the eye can see, scrambling around like a spider on steep wet rocks above crashing waves, making a couple "iffy" crossings at high tide, spending up to a day at a time pretty much immersed in rainforest (rarely seeing sky), and also higher up in the mountains (it's a quite mountainous island) there were cloud forests, and again lower down in the swampy areas, estuaries and lagoons infested with salt water crocodiles (no swimming there, and definitely made at least one high-tide creek crossing with big long scuba-diving knife ready at hand... not that it probaly woulda' done any good (not that it did do any good, hell this isn't even Doug writing this, it's a crocodile. I ate him & he was good & then I dressed up as him, went home to Tanny & David Iverach & ate them also, and now I'm playing on his laptop, answering his emails...........). and higher up, away from those creepy, green-watered, crocodile-infested lagoons, there were some lovely rain-forest-ringed waterfalls plunging down into really, really deep swimming holes with clear water so you could see all the way to the bottom, and lots of friendly fish... called 'jungle perch', spotted things as big as trout that would follow you around... finally I started throwing bits of leaf into the water, and them snapping it up like fishfood made me realize what they were after... so switched to swatting and catching those big ol hairy rat-bastard biting flies (three kinds of them: blue, brown and black/white pinstriped) and throwing those into the water instead... my efforts were much appreciated by the fish-eyed fishies. Anyway, Hinchinbrook was very cool, delivered everything that was expected including---after the second day---lots and lots and lots of rain. spent one night very wet, basically sleeping in my tent in between two puddles of water, in a wet sleeping bag (didn't matter anyway, it was so warm), but after that I got my act together and traveled wet during the day but at least slept dry. actually it was because of that rain that I nearly had to delay my return from Oz yet again... some creeks were getting a bit dicey, a bit swollen with rain, and it was looking for a little while like I might have to sit it out for a day or two extra waiting for them to recede (and hence, miss the boat pickup and have to cancel flights). But alas, no, I am here now in townsville with my year worth of belongings bagged up here on the floor of my room in this hostel. I think I am the only person here without lots of tattoos. and hell, I don't even have one tattoo. whereas everyone else looks like they're getting an entire Aztec calendar tattooed onto their body one installment at a time, so that it will eventually merge into a single mass of scriggly, maze-like lines and faces with big block teeth and sideways pointing tongues that just covers them head to toe and negates the need-------if the tattoo is planned and executed just right, and capitalizing upon local topographical features-------for wearing any clothes whatsoever. So that's where I'm staying. tomorrow morning bright and early I'll fly 2 hours south to Brisbane, where I'll finally be able to plug in my laptop and send this maniacally rambling email. Don't be surprised, by the way, if you see bits of this email recycled into a group-email travel-log thingy (I'm just worried that with as much crack as i've smoked writing this one, I might not have enough left to do a half-respectable job on the group email---not without borrowing a bit at least). Oh yeah, so anyway, on the morning of Saturday 18 october (australia time) I fly out of Australia, to Auckland, switch planes more than likely, and then fly on to Los Angeles, arrive around mid-day on Saturday 18 October (caly time), and then switch planes, smuggle all my mummified monkeys through customs, and then board another plane and fly up to San Francisco late that day. Ok, I must go. Say 'hi' to all, and I will talk to you soon. — Doug |
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| July 28, 2003 |
| Piton de la Fromage [On Location] — poster @ 00:12:28 |
 Hello all, just another photo from afar... This one taken back during the summer, on November 16, 2002, on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, just south of the equator and east of Madagascar. it's a French colony, and while frequented by the froggies, it's pretty far off the beaten path for English speakers (or, 'Anglosaxons' as the people I stayed with disdainfully called them)... maybe 2% of the population speaks any English at all, and during a side trip to Cirque du Cilaos in the island's interior, I met people who'd never met a native English speaker before. don't ask me how I got by (especially since neither Spanish nor Ancient Greek are spoken there either—go figure)... via a clever mix of well-planned drawings, pantomimes, some valiantly but poorly pronounced bits of French, a whole heap of smiles and lots of enthusiasm... people generally found it endearing, especially in little hidden-away Cilaos, which is something of a horizontal island perched precariously among a sea of near-vertical (and sometimes overhanging) mountain slopes, some of them strewn with scree and some of them (especially the overhanging ones) positively carpeted in lush green wet fuzzy-looking tropical vegetation. There's tourism, there's ecotourism, and then—if you're so inclined—there's geneticabnormalitytourism. (also known as geneticabnormalityvouyerism.) Cilaos is a perfect place for this third type. While Reunion was being colonized and the dodos being slaughtered during the 1700's, the well-off people settled around the edges of the island where sugarcane could be grown, and the poor rabble settled in the mountainous interior in places like Cilaos which, up until the early 20th century, was not even connected to the coast by a road. (some of these towns are, even today, only reached by 1-2 days of pretty up-and-down hiking, or by helicopter.) The coastal dwellers referred to the poor people in the interior as the Petit Blanch Haute, which means the little whites up high—or rather, the white trash up high (anyone who knows French will immediately realize that Petit Blanche Haut isn't grammatically correct... I must apologize... unfortunately I am typing this from memory, since the notebook in which I was keeping a journal back then has already been shipped home). So isolated, so inbred is Cilaos that it's distinguished by two or three of its own genetic diseases that are known to occur nowhere else on earth. Yippee skip. Reunion is made up of 4 volcanoes. Three of them are extinct and eroded out to Cirques (the remaining mountains, though, still rise to 9,000-10,000 ft). The other one, called Piton de la Fournaise, is one of the most active volcanoes in the world, erupting pretty much like clockwork once per year. If you drive the island's coastal road, then as you run along its western coast, you find yourself cutting through a solidified lava flow every kilometer or two, each flow designated by a roadsign noting the year on which it occurred. the island grows by something like half an acre per year. About 36 hours before I departed back to Mauritius, Piton de la Fournaise began erupting (I personally think the whole eruption thing was the volcanoe's hystrionic response to my referring to it as Piton de la Fromage (mountain of cheese)). Anyway erupting volcanoes probably elicit the same response from most animals as would a (Warner Brothers-style) gibbering snarling salivating Tasmanian Devil.... I'm sure that once they've figured out from whence the lava is spewing, they probably head in the other direction. but not so for humans, and especially not so for Reunionians. Volcanic eruption watching is a pasttime. so my Reunionian friends Nicola, Stephanie and I piled into a car and headed for the hot stuff. This particular eruption was flowing down the same lava flow that first appeared in an eruption 11 months before. We parked near where that solidified flow had cut the coastal road, and, with droves of other people, climbed the flow to get a better look. This photo was taken well after dark. The head of lava in this photograph is about 1,000 meters away. The spot at the top where the lava is coming from looks in this photograph like a fire, but in fact if you were there you could tell it was two pulsing streams of lava spewing into the air—maybe 50 meteres into the air. During the final minutes before we left, a second finger of lava flow formed, and in about 5 minutes plunched through maybe half a kilometer of damp, virgin rainforest (I'm sure that up close it was a pretty steamy affair as all of that lush moist succulent foliage wilted and burned like spinach on the 2000 deg Farenheit frying pan of geothermal discontent).... you would see the lava pool up at the end of the flow, and then suddenly surge—in maybe 3-4 seconds—through another 50 meters of forest. Cool to watch, and a reminder of why we were watching from afar. ...it is 7:30 on a sunday night, I am sitting in a cafe on Brunswick St in Melbourne (the closest thing Australia has to offer to the Upper Haight in San Francisco), sipping the remains of a warm whiskey, and contemplating the thumbnails that i need to begin drawing up for a couple of stories that are in the works. Tomorrow morning it's off to Sydney, and then to Christchurch, NZ. it's been winter here for a while—nothing too extreme—but in Christchurch it will be winter for real. Here's hoping everyone is happy and well and enjoying a warm summer. — Doug |
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| July 15, 2003 |
| Happy Birthday [Miscellaneous] — Eric Fox @ 06:34:27 |
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Happy Birthday Doug, where ever you are! — Eric |
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| June 01, 2003 |
| Bat Cave [On Location] — poster @ 21:05:01 |
 This photo was taken March 3 or so, during my time in Papua New Guinea. During my time there I boarded one of those little tiny missionary aviation fellowship planes (cardboard box w/propeller) and hopped over to the little village of Herowana, which is up in the Eastern highlands, about 2-3 days walk from the nearest thing called a road. This photo is taken from just inside the so-called "Bat Cave", about half a day's walk from Herowana. It's hard to understand the size scale from this photo, but the mouth of the cave is actually quite large, and far away, and the stalagtites hanging down at the mouth are quite large, large enough, each one, to support and entire little jungle of its own. It rained all day long, and the half hour or so that we spent inside the cave was — despite the fact that we were wading an underground river most of the time — by far the dryest part of the day. The walk to the cave was your typical walk in the big jungle. Very viscous (mud) and very slippery: plenty of balancing on wet mossy muddy logs while crossing rivers. Peter, going barefoot and never needing his hands for balance, but rather always holding a machete in one hand and large, platter-sized leaf over his head (for an umbrella) in the other hand, was quite the pleistocene hunter-gatherer sight. On a couple of occasions the trail simply ended in (apparently) virgin jungle, and Peter would go ahead and hack a new path with his machete. (does this qualify as eco-tourism?) At the cave entrance, we paused while Peter harvested a few leaves from a medicinal plant growing there and stuffed them, like a bit of Skoals chewing tobacco, into his lip to dull down a toothache. What can I say about the cave? It was dark. I gave Peter my headlamp (our only light) so that he could lead us inside (well, unlike myself, he actually knew the cave, so it seemed like a good idea at the time). Once we were a couple hundred meters in, around a corner and truly in the black, the bats, a whole cloud of them, started flapping about. at this point Peter announced to me, "this is our protein" (which was surprising; most of our talking, what little there was, was in Tok Pisin; he knew very few english words and so I was pretty surprised when 'protein' turned out to be one of them). He took a few steps forward onto a sandbar in the underground river and then spent the next 10 minutes or so swinging his machete madly in the air at any bat that was unwise enough to swoop anywhere near him. Alas, he didn't actually down any of the flying, web-fingered rats, and so here I am always the bridesmaid but never the bride: 32 years old and still never having tasted bamboo-grilled bat. — Doug |
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| May 15, 2003 |
| Picsha 2 [On Location] — poster @ 02:18:28 |
 Hey peoples, here's one more for tonight. (Here's hoping I didn't accidentally attach a naked one of me instead). Another photo from Christmas Eve day. This photo was taken underneath the tree shown in the previous photo. Note the thousands and thousands of kangaroo droppings under the tree. As soon as you walk several paces away from the shade, the droppings quickly peter out and disappear. Takehome message here: if you're a roo in the Mundi Mundi Plains, this is where you spend your daylight hours... Well anyway, that's the way I experienced it on that road trip: if you were driving along in the afternoon (long after the roos have retired from their morning feed), and happened to see two trees on the horizon. Say the only two trees visible at all in any direction. Then once you arrive at those trees you're extremely likely to find a roo or two crouched under each one. Ok, good night. — Doug |
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| Picsha 1 [On Location] — poster @ 02:07:28 |
 Hey people, just a quick photograph... this is from my Christmas road trip that I took, in the area of Broken Hill, New South Wales... not quite in the middle of Nowhere, but rather somewhere on the edge of Nowhere. (Nowhere, in case you are wondering, is located in the general direction that the camera is pointed). This area is known as the Mundi Mundi Plains. Took this photo about 10am on Christmas Eve day. If the vegetation looks a little unrealistically lush it's only because this is a fairly narrow angle photo. In fact, this was the only tree in sight in any direction. but lots and lots of animal bones lying around (just in case you're looking for shade). — Doug |
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| April 30, 2003 |
| Games? [On Location] — poster @ 09:21:50 |
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Not that I don't already have plenty to occupy my time here, but.... You know those standard-issue games that always come with Windows? You find them if you go START--->PROGRAMS--->ACCESSORIES... and then there's a games folder that contains several, including Minesweeper, Taipei (or Majong), and a couple of cards games... These (especially minesweeper) have always provided me with good little 5-min breaks when I'd come to a log-jam in what I was working on (since I am not a gastroenterologist, I believe I can use the term 'log jam' in good taste)... and for whatever reason, the laptop that I got a few days before leaving the country doesn't actually have a games folder. and so I am forced instead to find other amusements like balancing saltshakers and twoddling turnips. If someone could email those games to me, I would be grateful. Especially Minesweeper. Thank you! — Doug |
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| April 25, 2003 |
| Shopping, Metung [On Location] — poster @ 12:14:54 |
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This has to be just a short quick note for now... I am in Melbourne for several days, staying at an editor's house. 10 pm sunday night I get on an overnight train which arrives back in Adelaide on Monday morning at 8am. Yesterday was ANZAC Day here (the Australian equivalent to 4th of july and Veteran's Day). I mostly stayed in (it was Friday) knocking off a full day of work. But in a few minutes I am headed out with my friend Rebecca to go shoe shopping. For me. I am still wearing the same pair of shoes that I bought in about November 2000...so they are about 2 and a half years old. At a glance they still look quite good, quite stylish, but on closer examination the leather has torn and separated from the soles in some places, and what used to be really thick soles by anyone's standards (well suited for walking on red-hot lava flows, I am sure) have actually worn through all the way to the leather under the ball of the foot... I am sure because I tend to walk and step with an aire of impatience and vengeance. Anyway, looking forward to new shoes. Have my eye on something bright and gaudy and green, but we shall see. Earlier in the week I was in the town of Metung, a little fishing village of about 400 people on the southeast coast of Victoria, where a network of lakes merges with the ocean. Metung is the hometown of my friend Rebecca; I was there with her. (Rebecca is one of my two housemates in adelaide.) Before that I was in Sydney for several days...was there to do some research for a story in nearby Wollongong (1 hour train ride south), and stayed with Tanny and David (family friends from way back when) while in Sydney. I think that's all for now. Off to get some sensible (or at least functional) shoes back on my feet, and eat raw fish and who knows what else. Enjoy your Friday evening there (it is late Saturday morning here). — Doug |
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| March 17, 2003 |
| Back! [On Location] — poster @ 01:14:58 |
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Just to let you know I'm back from Papua New Guinea, back in Australia... lest people worry... staying three nights in Sydney with Tanny & David, and then down to Melbourne and then over to Adelaide (home) where I will not have been in over a month. Sorry this is so short, I am quite tired, and still recovering from some nasty ebola-like thing that sank its toxic fangs into me a couple days before I left PNG. lots of stories to tell, but will tell them later. Nighty night. — Doug |
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| February 25, 2003 |
| Brisbane, Hoppin Malaria, Booba [On Location] — poster @ 07:53:05 |
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Just a quick "hello," before I take off for a little while. It's 10pm on a rainy Tuesday evening in Brisbane. Tomorrow I fly to Papua New Guinea... will be there until March 14 (when I fly back into Brisbane, Australia)... for purposes of writing about the hoppin' Malaria scene, and also hopefully having some fun (I had a probable second story there but it seems to have fallen through, freeing up a little time). By this time next week I will hopefully be somewhere in the Crater Mountain Preserve, slogging through the jungle and the downpour along some muddy single-track trail, trying to keep up with my toothless, pipecleaner-legged guide named Booba(*). ... or something like that. — Doug PS: (Itinerary info below is for family who might want to know where I am, everyone else feel free to ignore it.) I will be pretty incommunicado while I'm there (not a whole lot of internet connections in some of those places), and my itinerary (including the exact day I return to australia) will be pretty subject to change, but it will go something like this:
*Booba, I'm sorry to say, is a fictious character; but I will in any case be hiring a real guide. |
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| January 30, 2003 |
| Fires of Canberra [On Location] — poster @ 11:59:40 |
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No, I didn't burn up, burn down or even burn away. The fires you heard about (which destroyed a major observatory among other things) were probably in the Canberra area (over near the east coast). There are plenty of fires all over the country this season, but none of them near me. I am located very deep into the city of Adelaide...such that lots and lots of houses would have to go before me. Sorry this can't be longer, got to run and call some researcher who smashes cadaver heads for a living. — Doug |
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| January 11, 2003 |
| Rodrigues Fodies [On Location] — poster @ 11:54:22 |
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Today is a very low-key Saturday. Last night I was out late with my housemate and her friends, and then came home and needed to spend a couple hours slapping into shape a couple of newly-arrived / just-edited manuscrips so that I could shoot them back to the editors (one in Seattle, one in London) before going to sleep. One is on efforts to save two bird species and a fruit bat species on the tiny island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean (I visited that island in November to write the story ... and got to see my share of Rodrigues Fodies, which exist nowhere else on the planet ... just 20 years ago there were only nine of them alive, period; now there are nearly 2,000). The London story was on land mines and efforts to remove them from Afghanistan, Cambodia, Bosnia, Croatia and so forth. Some land mine expert thinks that in many cases we shouldn't clear mine fields at all, but rather just use them as agricultural land. I actually think he may be right. Today have just been relaxing, ate lunch out in the back yard in the grass in the sun reading a magazine. It's a nice back yard (been so long since I've had one), a little out of control around the fringes, with funky things like tall grass and Rosemary bushes and a fig tree and an apricot tree and a (probably) 2,000 gallon water tank on stilts and some funny little rat-like thing (maybe a marsupial, though, I think) that dashes out from under the water tank once in a while and grabs an apricot off the ground and runs back with it. Have also been watching my share of cricket...well, mainly did that at David and Tanny's house, but now have gotten interested in it...listened to a match on the radio on Boxing Day (Dec 26) as I drove through the middle of nowhere, and each evening catch the quick roundup of cricket results. — Doug |
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| December 27, 2002 |
| Merry Christmas [On Location] — poster @ 01:46:37 |
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Just a quick Merry Christmas from somewhere south of the equator. It is 10pm Christmas Eve here (3am Christmas Eve day in California and 4am Christmas Eve day in Arizona, I think). I am on the edge of Cawndilla Lake, in the SouthWest corner of New South Wales, Australia — pretty much in the middle of the Outback, in the middle of nowhere. My sleeping bag is laid out on a small tarp, which is laid out on the lake bed... it has been a very dry spring and summer so far, and the lake is quite low, so i've taken advantage of that by sleeping under the open sky rather than under the Gum and Acacia trees that line the lake. The edge of the water is about half a kilometer away, and everywhere around me is soft and sandy, punctuated here and there by tufts of green grass (versus brown, which is what most of it is away from the lake). There's not a cloud in the sky, and so there are lots and lots and lots of stars visible. There's a slight breeze and a few insects of various shapes and sizes crawling around on my computer screen (probably the only source of artificial light in miles and miles). Every couple of minutes I find that my cursor is moving around on the screen and I can't control it with the touchpad no matter how hard i try — and then realize it's not my cursor at all, but a bug crawling around. I should say: only reason "pancho," my trusty computer, is with me tonight is because this outing comes at the end of a working trip... it's somehow bizarre, but I already had him with me, had nowhere that I could leave him, so had to bring him. I arrived in Australia on December 2, flying into Perth from Mauritius, and plunged immediately into a couple of stories that I had to work on (arrived at 11:45pm, and the next morning was already interviewing some guy who says that rather than clearing minefields in places like Cambodia, we should use them to grow Kiwis, Cucumbers, Cumquats and the like. The day after that was spent interviewing some other guy who is going to great lengths to measure and model the mechanical properties of the brain, liver, and other soft, squishy organs (he's done extensive experiments to see just how squishy, stretchy, bendy and jiggly brains and livers are, and is now writing (literally) page-long equations to describe his results, as well as using lots of high-power computers to chug those equations out). Important stuff. After three days in Perth, I flew to Adelaide, where I spent much of the next week finding a place to live. Finally did secure a house which I will share with two other people (both Australians). I have just finished up a two week trip through Gold Coast, Sydney and Canberra, during which I worked like a dog, doing site visits, interviewing and otherwise researching two stories while writing another, getting fewer hours of sleep a night than I care to mention. But now that is over for the time being and I am as free as a bird. A couple days ago I caught a train from Sydney to Broken Hill, a little mining town which is only slightly less in the middle of nowhere than this place is. Stayed one night there. For those who are interested, I happened to stay at mario's palace, one of the hotels where "Pricilla, Queen of the Desert" was filmed. This morning I hired a car from Broken Hill and drove to this place, listening on the radio to sports commentary on the upcoming Dec 26 Australia/UK Cricket match (have taken a liking to cricket in the last week, after seeing the Australia/UK and UK/Sri Lanka matches on TV at David and Tanny's house in Sydney). I have seen countless emus today (they pretty much look like ostritches — at least in terms of size, ugliness and aerodynamics). And I have seen more kangaroos than ever before in my life. Literally hundreds. At daybreak you see them out in droves, diligently nibbling on anything green they can find. By 11am when the sun has come out and it's getting hot, they're lounging under bushes or trees, either sitting on their hind legs hunched over like a really big rat, or else lying on the ground, propped up on one elbow, like some full-figured Rubinesque beauty reclining half-naked on a couch in a Renaissance painting (and of course, flaunting their long kangaroo-esque eyebrows and wearing an almost human expression of serenity). By the time it gets dark, they're usually waiting at the side of the road so that they can make a mad dash for your front grill as soon as you drive by. Also have seen a couple small flocks of parrots (these are white, with pink breast and a bouncy crest of feathers on top their head). It has been a very good day. Tomorrow I'll drive another 300km to Mungo Lake, which has been dry the last 20,000 years or so, and is mostly sand dunes and some really funky wind and water-sculpted yellow sandstone cliffs. This is the place where they find the oldest human remains in Australia... bones up to 50,000 years old. the wind is counstantly moving the sand dunes around and exposing them. Hmm. Maybe if I'm lucky... Well I think that is about it. We have now officially entered the part of the night where bizarre and possibly threatening animal sounds eminate from near and far in the darkness. Over to my left, it seems that something rather large is getting eaten alive, and making a fair bit of racket about it. I will stare up at the stars a bit longer before going to sleep. Good night all. I think of you often. Have a great Christmas and also a good 'boxing day' (Dec 26). — Doug PS: Don't know when exactly you'll get this, as it may be a couple days before I find a place where I can hook up and send it. PPS: Just watched one of the brightest, most amazing meteors I have ever seen streak silently across a significant portion of the sky. PPPS: A little description of Christmas day as it ended up happening ... at 10am I passed through the town of Mendinee to get some gas. A very small town with one gas station/store. When I got there, maybe twenty people were gathered in the parking lot, around the back of a pickup truck where they had two kegs of beer on tap. They were all standing around in the hot sun drinking beer. Of course I was required to share a Christmas beer with them before leaving. Otherwise, much of the day was spent zooming along on dirt roads past intermittent stands of gum trees, sand dunes, emu and roo carcasses, live emus, live roos, etc, listening on the radio to an endless (and I have to say, nauseating) series of "christmas day the ozzy way" songs on the radio. It was the only radio station I could get. |
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| December 12, 2002 |
| Gold Coast, Adelaide [On Location] — poster @ 11:43:57 |
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I am currently in Gold Coast (halfway up the east coast, right on the water), and then will swing through Sydney and Canberra during the next week (all this is to research a couple of stories). While in Sydney I will actually be staying with Tanny and David. Very much looking forward to seeing them. Then on the way back home [Hyde Park] from Adelaide will pass (via train) through Broken Hill, a very isolated mining town in the dry red interior, just on the border between Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. I may rent a vehicle and explore the emptiness for a couple days while I'm there (the friend in Adelaide will not be there over Christmas, so I will in any case not be seeing anyone I know that day, so may choose to spend a quiet, contemplative Christmas camped in the middle of nowhere). Expect to get back to Adelaide on Dec 27. OK, must go, very very late and I must be up early in the morning to interview someone. — Doug |
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| October 29, 2002 |
| Flic en Flac, Mexico Feeling [On Location] — poster @ 11:39:05 |
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I am now on the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. Got here yesterday. It's wonderful and tropical and warm. Yesterday, three hours after getting off the plane from an 11 hour 50 minute flight, I went snorkeling and saw (in water that was barely 2-3 feet deep) a bright yellow trumpet fish that was 4 feet long. I followed it for a while, but it managed to out-swim me ... which was probably a wise thing to do, as the last time I saw a trumpet fish I ate it. But there's also another side to this place ... today I took a long walk into the nearby village of Flic en Flac, and felt what I call the "Mexico feeling": being conspicuously (even though I was trying to hide it) the wealthiest person in sight, being looked at by most people as purely an economic opportunity rather than a person. Such is life, I also experienced it in Estonia (a still relatively poor ex-Soviet republic, one of the Baltic states) a week and a half ago. Yuck. I like visiting these (often economically-depressed) out of the way places, but I think the 'Mexico feeling' will be the hardest thing to get used to. — Doug |
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| October 13, 2002 |
| US News Story [On Location] — poster @ 21:22:31 |
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Hey all, just wanted to give you a couple quick heads-ups... I have arrived safely in Scandinavia... am presently sitting in cafe in downtown Uppsala, Sweden... on Wednesday will be heading off on a quick (4 day) side trip through Helsinki, Finnland, and then Tallinn, Estonia (Tallinn is supposed to be a lovely, "old" walled city... aim ot find out first hand if that is true). Then back here for 2 days before going to London. The story I've been working on for US News & World report just came out today (yes it's on what seems to be my favorite topic of late... sex... will get mind out of the gutter soon). Anyway, I am mentioning it just because a few of you expressed interest in it (if you don't happen to be one of those people but somehow made it on this list anyway, please disregard this email and forgive my presumptuousness!). It's in the Oct 21 issue, which should be on the shelves today, Monday. It is located in the health section, in second half of the magazine. It's also available, in I believe a more limited version, online at www.usnews.com. — Doug |
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