Big news

 Well, how about that? Some good news! Though with a tinge of sadness, of course. This is Burma who was, until just a couple of months ago, the star of Auckland Zoo. Never mind tigers, giraffes, even orangutans and rhino, the sheer bulk of an elephant is always going to make the most dominant impression. Plus, Burma was sweet and lonely, having been on her own for the last two years since her companion went overseas - as Burma was meant to too, but it fell through (not literally, thank goodness).

But finally a new set-up was sorted, a herd for her to help found after too many years of loneliness, and she was trucked then flown away in her specially-built container. Right about now she should be meeting her first fellow herd member, another female, with three more including a young male to follow later. Add in a much bigger enclosure with varied terrain, and the comforting presence of her keeper, 25 years in the job and now also translocated, and it looks like being a happy ending. Yay.

There are still, though, plenty of elephants in other countries not just imprisoned in zoos, but also being made to work in poor conditions - I’ve seen them myself, in India and Thailand. I’ve even, ashamed to say, ridden on them a couple of times in tourism set-ups. Those are starting to disappear now, hooray, as we all become more aware, and there are some really good sanctuaries working hard to rescue them from poor conditions, like Elephant Hills in Thailand, where I haven’t been, and the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya, where I have.

African elephants are too big and wild to be domesticated and mistreated like Asian ones, but there they are not only poached for their ivory, but also get caught in nasty bushmeat snares, fall into wells and are attacked by farmers wanting to protect their crops. The Sheldrick Trust does brilliant work rescuing them (expensive business - helicopters are involved) and looking after orphans till they can be released again (expensive business - takes years). Their nursery just outside Nairobi is a great place to visit, and it’s guaranteed you’ll want to support them (I do). 

King Charles is following in my footsteps today

Having (see Update, right) officially given in to the inescapable fact that all my blog connections are now disaster-related, I could hardly ignore today's horrific anniversary. Eighty years since the Red Army arrived at Auschwitz and stunned the world with what they found.

I visited the site in 2012 and, while I can't remember what today's Wordle was, I can still feel that awful combination of shock, disbelief and depression that just got stronger and stronger as we were shown around by Monika, the granddaughter of a survivor. The focus and organisation that went into making the whole process impressively efficient was in its way almost as appalling as what was actually done there: ie the murders of more than a million men, women and children, 90% of them Jews, plus Russian POWs, gypsies, homosexuals, and Poles. 

The place was neat, and empty apart from shuffling groups of silent tourists like ours, listening to our guides giving the numbers, the details, the stories. We were shown the displays of mounds of hair (the Nazis harvested 7 tonnes, for use as ropes, or woven into cloth - "exploiting corpses," Monika said), tangles of spectacles, heaps of assorted shoes, piles of labelled leather suitcases (they thought they were going to a new life), stacks of crutches and artificial limbs. Nothing was wasted, even the victims' ashes used as fertiliser in the fields.

We went through the brick barracks where the prisoners slept crammed into tiered bunks, exhausted after 11-hour days of physical labour on starvation rations. They, of course, were the lucky ones - most went straight to the gas chambers, though some were selected for whimsical medical experiments.

We went into the courtyard to see the rebuilt Wall of Death, where prisoners were shot, and the two sadistic punishment posts for hanging people by their wrists, which were tied behind their backs. 

We saw the tiny standing cells in the blacked-out basement, each one metre square, to hold four prisoners. We passed the yard where they all stood for the daily Appels, which sometimes took 12 hours (the record was 19). We went into the gas chamber, which masqueraded as a shower block but it was Zyklon B gas that came out of the ceiling vents, not water. Next door was the furnace, with a cleverly efficient transfer device for loading corpses into the flames. And then we stood and looked at the gallows where SS Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss was hanged in 1947.

We drove then to nearby Birkenau, to see the row of reconstructed wooden barracks, each one crammed with 3-level bunks. Thin walls, no windows, open latrines, stifling in summer, literally freezing in winter, overrun by rats. Outside is the railway line, which ends here, in both senses. Beyond were the foundations of row after row of more barracks, destroyed by the Germans before they fled.

"Forgive, but never forget," said Monika. And remember, too, that this not a uniquely German phenomenon. People all over the world have done, are doing, similar things - if perhaps not quite so efficiently.

Have a good day.

Open wide

It got a bit regal in Auckland’s port today. Not just one, but two Princesses: Royal (left) and Diamond (right) (starboard?). Unusual to have two ships together from the same cruise line - I wonder if there was cameraderie or competition between the passengers? Anyway, together they poured over 6,000 people into the city, most of them seemingly queuing up to take the ferry across to Waiheke (wise decision) or wandering away along the waterfront into the Wynyard Quarter - also very pleasant on such a sunny day.

With some time to spare and spirits to bolster before a visit to the dentist, I went that way myself, to inspect the new pedestrian bridge that is finally in operation. It’s pretty smart, and operates faster than the old one, opening up to let boats in and out of the inner harbour. I also approve of the new swimming area nearby, which was in good use, especially by kids doing manus (jumps) off the thoughtfully provided platform - pleasing that the water in the port is sufficiently clean for all that.

Though it’s always impressive, in a slightly head-shaking way, to see so many so very expensive boats of all sorts moored at Wynyard, I connected better, in the Maritime Museum, with the Shackleton exhibition there. Big photos and paintings of South Georgia’s penguins, icebergs and mountains (which regular 😀 readers will recall I have seen in person), and of Shackleton and his crew, plus the incredibly primitive two-lifeboat shelter on Elephant Island (er, ditto) where they spent 4 horrendous months awaiting rescue (thanks, in huge part, to Kiwi Frank Worsley) - and also of the doomed Endurance icebound in Antarctica (*cough*). What a jaw-dropping story that is.

(Dentist visit went well, thanks for asking. No disasters of any sort today. Oh, apart from that giant iceberg that’s just been reported headed for South Georgia that’s going to maroon all the penguins and seals, and starve them to death.)

Orange = Black

Since this supposed travel blog appears to have morphed into a trail of disaster reports, I feel obliged to note the major one that happened early this morning (NZ time). It is, of course - deep sigh - the inauguration of that ghastly, ghastly man whose stupidity, selfishness and ego will have wide-reaching and long-lasting ill effects on not just societies and economies around the world, but the actual planet, and all the life that, so far at least, exists on it. 

While nobody here, so far away yet still so vulnerable to the Orange One’s whims, is downplaying the threat he poses, it’s kind of comforting how our media have united, in a classic Kiwi response, against his claim, in a long and boastful list, that the USA first split the atom.

To be (teeth currently gritted) fair, he’s not alone in this misconception. Regular 😀 readers will recall my pointing out several times - here and here - that, despite the official-looking claim in the Willis Tower in Chicago, it was Lord Ernest Rutherford, a NEW ZEALANDER and Nobel prize winner, who first discovered how to split the atom. We’ll gloss over some of the less positive results of that process and just concentrate on how Trump’s false claims to achieving that split are actually uniting our nation. Such a shame that the U of the S is now officially suspended for the next 4 years.

 

Surrender

Ok, I give up. There’s no escaping it. That whole connection thing (see above, right) is just crap these days. Life would be, personally, much less agonising if I hadn’t travelled to places that, inevitably it now seems, will at some point pop up on the news because of some awful thing happening there. It’s such a long list now, and the latest entry is, of course, poor Los Angeles.

The reports of those horrendous wildfires are truly shocking: the number of them, their extent, their apparent inextinguishableness, and the deeply saddening before-and-after images of street after street of destroyed homes, now literally just ashes. Not just homes, but lives, memories, hopes. Beyond awful. 

Of course, given the state of the planet, other places in other countries have burned up too, but it’s in the nature of LA to grab the headlines; and, for me anyway, there’s the connection that my last overseas trip, back in the Before Times of early 2020 - in fact, almost exactly 5 years ago to the day - was to that city.

Regular 😀 readers will remember that, as well as doing the official Viking cruise line promotion thing, I took the chance to do a charity dog walk in Runyon Canyon. See top photo, sigh. It was fun, getting off the streets, walking a cute dog, observing all the others out in the canyon enjoying nature, gazing across the valley to the Hollywood sign, all that. It was, admittedly, dry and scrubby to my eyes, but still, a welcome break from tarmac and skyscrapers, and clearly appreciated by the locals.

See you back here again after the next disaster…

Merry Christmas (insert own festival here)

 

It’s Christmas Eve, hot and humid, and the beach is calling - as is the frog in the pond. There’s nowhere better for me to be, for which I am grateful. I hope all of you reading this (especially my regular 😀 readers) have a fun and cheerful day tomorrow, and enjoy the rest of the holidays as well.

I’ve learned now to make no promises re more regular future entries to this blog; and to stop wishing for a better year coming up. That never works. But fingers crossed things get no worse, eh?

Best wishes, all. 🎄🎁🥂🤞

Plane facts

As a distraction from the big events happening today - that’s the Melbourne Cup, of course, and Guy Fawkes (oh, and some people in the US colouring in a circle) - here’s a remarkable sight.

It’s a decluttering-discovered postcard (itself an almost museum-worthy object now) sent to me by my father from New York, where he was on a business trip. It was to congratulate me on reaching the momentous age of five, and to wish me all the best in starting “proper school”. I’ll draw a veil over the date, but we all know that’s way (way) back last century, eh.

Anyway, this plane. Look at it! SO BLUNT! What on earth were they thinking? I mean, even back then they surely knew about wind resistance, didn’t they? Or maybe they didn’t - now I’m remembering vertical grilles on cars, and upright train engines, and so on. Wow. It seems so obvious now that you’d want to be all pointy so you could slice through the air, for speed and reduced fuel consumption. 

The details on the back of the postcard say that the Stratocruiser was powered by four Pratt & Whitney Wasp Major engines, and could cruise at a blistering 325mph (that’s 520-odd kmh for us modern types). I’m surprised it could even stay up in the air, dawdling along like that, at half the max speed of an A380. I mean, this was only 20 years pre-Concorde! It was a double-decker, though, well ahead of the 747 and A380. 

Anyway, connection: the Stratocruiser was built by Boeing, and apart from of course having flown in many of their planes, I have been to their mind-blowingly huge factory at Everett just north of Seattle. The assembly hall there is so big it generates its own climate inside, rainclouds and all. You can't take interior photos because they're paranoid about you dropping your phone or camera 4 storeys down onto a plane. Or a person. The tour takes an hour and a half and is obsessively detailed, but interesting. Did you know that light-coloured paint weighs less than dark? Shows how dedicated Air NZ is to the national (rugby-derived) obsession with black. 

Oh, and though I never flew in Concorde, I was once at Heathrow waiting to take off behind it, and our plane was dramatically shaken by the blast from Concorde’s engines as it roared off down the runway. That’s the closest I’m ever going to get to supersonic. I can live with that.