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Ews on the Loose #2: Afros & cherry blossum
Ews on the Loose #1: Powder & Chopsticks
Moose Report #5: Nerriga & Naas
Moose Report #4: Thunder, termites & a truck full of interesting cheeses
Moose Report #3: Sydney & the Blueys
Moose Report #2: Backcountry snowboarding fun
Moose Report #1: Coast Trip!
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Picture, if you will (and I'm sure you will), the only two Europeans at a "70s Nostalgia Disco" in an isolated ski town. Picture them on the dance floor, pulling out wild dance moves like "The Tark". Could they be any more conspicuous? Yes. Yes they could. All it takes is a couple of free beers and a pair of complimentary afro wigs, courtesy of the bar... We tackled the ancient Japanese art of karaoke with the same unique blend of enthusiasm and mediocrity. But this time with the added difficulty of knowing neither the words nor the tune to any of the Japanese songs that we sang. Musical talent is not usually a pre-requisite for karaoke, but at 3 in the afternoon when all you've had to drink is copious amounts of lemonade and coffee, it would come in handy! As would being able to read the subtitles... In Japan most karaoke takes place in discreet booths, so the humiliation involved is at least limited to a few friends (in our case, one!) rather than a bar full of strangers.
While our Japanese is (slowly!) getting better, we still stand out like a cat in a chicken coop. The lack of other foreigners here makes us the object of much curiosity; when running the gauntlet of large groups of schoolgirls we are greeted with raucous cries of "Hello!", "bye bye", and "kawaii" (cute. This usually relates to one of Tanya's eared hats!) But we have been amazed with the patient and good-natured response that we have received, and everyone's generosity. With the Coming of Spring, we have been lucky enough to be escorted around the local temples, restaurants, and monkey hot-springs by various ridiculously kind and friendly locals. The food here is at times challenging, ranging from raw jellyfish to fermented beans to pickled locusts. (We gave the locusts a miss.) We have also been to hanami, the annual cherry blossom viewing festival, which traditionally takes place on a picnic rug with a beer in your hand. En route we saw 20 monkeys in a tree!
We have also been chuffed to have no less than THREE visits from friends in the last month - Claire (of Canberra fame), Kate and Goddo (Kiwi friends from way back), and Jeannie (who put the silent J in Wellington). It was SO nice to see all of these people, and much fun, giggling, and gossiping ensued (and in one case, a fondue party). There is nothing like 2 months of (if I may coin an incredibly poor pun-expression) "nonversations" to make you appreciate a weekend of mutual understanding!!!
In other spring-related developments, the (shall we say) drastically soft snow conditions of late have given rise to some nightmare moguls. We saw one guy fall into one, disappear from sight in its murky depths, and re-emerge up to his waist in mogul! The Japanese appear undeterred and attack the numerous mogul fields with a zest that can only come from masochism, even queueing up for this honour.
They've thought of everything here. The toilet seats are heated for the weary skiier. The cars, like a more conservative version of Night Rider, are equipped with an electronic female voice which politely advises of upcoming corners and curves. And getting to the top of a hill need not involve undignified exertion, when there are chairlifts to take you up, and travelators to get back down!
A big up side of all this convenience and automation is the ability to buy 750mL (!!) cans of beer from vending machines at any hour of the day or night. Which is nice.
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Konnichiwa! Ohisashiburi desune? Ogenkidesuka? Watashitachi wa genkidesuyo!
Right, take that feeling of confusion, add three bowls of rice and 6 crumbed servings of an unidentified kind of seafood, and you will have some idea how we feel! We are sitting in our little room with tatami mats and futon bunks having just had our daily trip to the onsen. The onsen (traditional Japanese bath / hot spring) is basically a big communal (but segregated) naked spa! You wash yourself on a small wooden stool at wee shower stations and then hop in a big, insanely hot
pool from which we emerge looking like well-cooked crayfish. However, we are already getting used to the steamy heat and it is great for sore skiing muscles. Of which we have many. The hotel has a rental shop that we can help ourselves to, so we can both ski and/or board at will. Cunningly having brought absolutely no snow clothes, Andy was decked out on her first day in a huge blue "Pelikan" jacket and a pair of safety-orange pants that would defy the visibility limitations of a blizzard, nay, an avalanche. Safety first, after all.
Speaking of skiing, did we mention the powder?! We got surprised looks for skiing in a blizzard the other day but the fresh snow was tooootally worth it :) Happily, it is snowing big juicy flakes right now. Which is good, because today we were too hungover to ski, or in fact do anything but lie in bed for 5 hours between work shifts! Last night we attended our first Japanese party, which commenced by entering a large room in which about 20 people were sleeping, and rudely awakening them
to facilitate their impending intoxication. (They took it well.) Several delicious beers later, we had befriended several Japanese skiiers and had understood a surprising amount of the proceedings. But there is a reason Brocky never ran a campaign entitled "An Asahi a day keeps the doctor away"...
It turns out that the Kiwi guy who worked here before us was fluent in Japanese and even wrote Kanji, and this led them to expect we might be similarly competent. I think they have noticed that we're not... If the constant "Sumimasen, wakaranai" (sorry I don't understand) didn't give it away, the numerous blank looks and inability to follow simple instructions that we claim to have understood certainly would have! But our vocabulary is steadily expanding to include the names of obscure
kitchen implements, knitting needles, and different ways of saying "sorry" or "what?". Everyone here is incredibly patient; explaining the intricacies of hospitality work using only their hands, slowing their speech to "bumbly" pace, and laughing good-humouredly at our regular linguistic blowouts (including, but not limited to, Andy's propensity to greet visitors by shouting "delicious", in lieu of "come in").
This part of Japan is beautiful, and full of most endearing volcanic cones thoroughly coated in snow, on which reside similarly endearing fir-esque trees which get weighed down by enormous amounts of snow each time it precipitates. The landscape reminds me of sleeping dragons, with their bony wings and legs sticking up everywhere. We are in the Shigakogen National Park, which overlooks the valley in which Nagano sprawls smoggily. The pollution is quite amazing, and was particularly bad
when we first arrived. After it snowed the first time the air cleared and we were astounded to discover that just on the other side of the valley are the North Alps, a HUGE towering spine of quite tectonic-looking mountains. They are very snowy and quite good-looking, and it's quite amazing to think that we couldn't see them through the pollution!
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The last two weekends have been full of intrepid-ity and excitement! The one before last I ran my first ever climbing trip to Nerriga, an exciting new crag steeped in mystery and intrigue. Well, not NEW per se (it was discovered in the 90s, and lots of climbs have been bolted there, but not many people climb there yet)... but definitely mysterious and intriguing (at night it hunts by starlight in a black taffeta cloak). Nerriga has a lot of things going for it, like: the camping 5 minutes drive from the climbing, next to a river!!; the short (by aussie standards) drive from Canberra - under 2 hours!; the bakery in Braidwood, which has the BEST chicken pies, donuts, apple turnovers, and other baked goods (not that I know from experience or anything); the Nerriga pub, just down the road from the campsite, in the middle of nowhere, and with Ned Kelly on its roof! ...oh yeah and the climbing's awesome too! Our intrepid team of climber-explorers (me, Katie, Tim & Bison) started off at the Wig & Pen slab (n
amed after a pub in Canberra - an excellent start) and climbed lots of short little climbs including... my first ever lead!!! A 14 on bolts (for the climbers out there). That was pretty much the highlight of my day, although everything else was awesome too! Bison even put up a new route but declared it not worth naming. After we'd climbed out the Wig & Pen slab, we retired to the Nerriga pub for a quick pre-dinner beer, then settled in to our (awesome!!) riverside campsite and made awesome gourmet pasta and (of course) witty reparte / fast show jokes.
The next day proved discouraging for me climbing-wise (I fell off everything and whinged a lot) but I think everyone else enjoyed the harder climbing we did. And our intrepid team gained two members, when Andrew and Cheye showed up from Canberra (which was nice). Later in the day, when Katie and I became tired and lazy, we formed the Crux-Dodgers - an intrepid team who will go to any lengths to avoid the hardest part of the climb. Including crawling sideways across the rock face to get around it!!! Later on Bison and Tim got a quickdraw stuck up a climb and had to call in the Crux Dodgers to get it back. The trip home was accompanied by our melodious singing of our new theme song (to the tune of Ghostbusters): "When your gear is on the wall, when you think you're going to fall, who're you going to call? CRUX DODGERS!"
Last weekend was a double whammy adventure, with my first ever rogaine on Saturday, and another day of glory at Nerriga on Sunday. Whoa!! (I am still recovering). For those who don't know, a rogaine is kind of like orienteering but different... basically you get given a topo map with lots of checkpoints on it (each worth a different number of points) and you run around in the bush getting to as many points as you can (using, of course, your excellent Ewing navigational skills) in the allotted time, which was in this case 6 hours. It was SO much fun! The satisfaction of finding your way to a point is immense, and to my surprise we got to each point virtually without trouble! Tim and I were in a fierce battle for pride, as we had bet Katie and Saravan a beer that we would beat them, but even so it was just so pleasant out in the bush and it was a gloriously sunny day and there were SO MANY ROOS!!! All over the place, and they were huge and fluffy and reddish and they kept jumping everywhere!! I went nut
s, repeatedly. Boomers! (That's apparently the word for big male roos. How funny is it? Quote from Rudyard Kipling, on Old Man Kangaroo: "He was gray and he was woolly, and his pride was inordinate" and "His name is Boomer. He hasn't got any other name; he lost them all because he was so proud."). We were in the Naas Valley (cue puns about Naasty, which it wasn't) and it was all green and unburnt, which is unusual for forest around here. BRILLIANT!!! After you finish it turns out they feed you copious quantities of awesome food, including CAKE!, and that was just the best ending to a fantastic day. I can't wait for the next one!
Now, having already ranted about Nerriga once in this ever-growing, all-knowing, bare-feet-showing tale of capers, I will try and keep this bit to a minimum, but I just HAVE to gloat about all the leading I did on Sunday. Three and a half more climbs!! Two 15s, and a 14, and a 2 (which only counts as half). I know that doesn't mean anything to most of you but I am just so chuffed with myself! And on the subject of gloating, me and Tim won the beer. Grrrrreat!
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It's thunder season!!! The days are warm & muggy and the weather is like a cat that finds itself half way between a steak and a bowl of cream (indecisive, but with no time for chasing its tail). We had a CRAZY thunderstorm yesterday, with hail the size of golf balls in some places (!!!) but not in Canberra. There were pretty solid displays of lightning though and somewhat Fiordland-esque rain. AND I was woken at 4am because the thunder was so loud! Its all quite exciting but a poor time to have ripped one's dearly loved Goretex jacket on a chicken wire fence while climbing over said fence to go look at the "dangerous cliffs" that were too wet to climb anyway. Waaaa! (The damage is not serious but I have sent it off it be fixed. Once again, drought-breaker T swoops into action, ensuring a solid period of rain for Canberra while her Goretex is out of town!).
Aside from the weather, I have been woefully short of things to report. Weekend-wise I am in the midst of the Trifecta of Learning (three weekends packed with, well, learning. I guess the name says it all!). The weekend before last was a climbing course in the Blueys with the Australian School of Mountaineering, which was AWESOME (now I know how to haul someone up a cliff!) but unfortunately my CATNUT indicator went off the scale when I tried to write about it so I am going to have to leave it.
The weekend just been was a leadership weekend with the mountaineering club in Namadgi (a national park in the ACT). That too was awesome, and we got to do all kinds of play-acting and scenarios and navigating and for once my over-preparedness was seen in a gold-star and two big ticks kind of light! (Well, I didn't get laughed at anyway). Ah HA. We did an interesting exercise in navigation, where we were driven somewhere with pillow cases on our heads (so we couldn't see) and dropped off with a map and no idea where we were, and told to find our way to the star on the map. My group functioned very well in terms of group dynamics (can you tell there's a but coming?) BUT completely failed to work out where we were in the few hours we had! We were sort of on the right track but fooled by our complete inability to assess the height of hills. Ah well. We had lots of fun doing it anyway!
The other really cool thing we did was a whole lot of "scenarios" where one person had to be the leader and someone would pretend to be bitten by a snake or have hypothermia or refuse to go on because they want to go home and play quake (good one, Gumby!!). It was surprising how much the situation could really seem stressful even though it was all play-acting! The first one I got was where half the group refused to go one way, and half the group refused to go the other way. You can imagine, with my persuasiveness, authority, and decisiveness, how THAT went!!!
So I learnt a lot in the weekend, including not to hug termite mounds. Did you know that termites are little pale squirmy things (not entirely failing to resemble maggots)? I didn't! This gem of information was illuminated for me when I found a number of said termites crawling on my shirt after hugging the biggest termite mound in the WORLD! Well pretty big anyway. Certainly hug-sized. The crawly little termites were discovered some time later, as I was in the midst of treating a "snake bite", prompting some mixed acting/squirming ("You're not going to die... Ah!!! they're disgusting!!... now lots of people get bitten by snakes and most of them survive... yuck! excuse me while I take my top off").
Meanwhile, back in Canberra, our hero has a busy week of, well, eating mainly. Tomorrow night is The Greatest Pie Night Ever, to mourn the departure of Katie from Yarralumla next week :o( This time I will try to document this hallowed tradition with some photos so you guys can share the Glory that is The Pie. (Got up, worshipped the great pie. Ah, bed.)
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This weekend I a' been mostly wearing... shorts! And that's because it's just got warm here!!! Tim and I spent the long weekend (which it was here, crazy aussies and their non-synchronised holidays) in Sydney and the Blue Mountains lapping up the warm weather, with the heady and highly evaporative scent of Sports Gel Sunscreen following us around like a persistent dog. Alright that's completely untrue but we WERE very sunsmart and did also see two little dogs in a funny car-bike thing parked in Blackheath. (They weren't persistent though). On the drive to Sydney we saw: big ads for grass seed with attendant grass- and seed-related puns; ALPACAS!!!!; roos with fuzzy faces; and a plane taking off on a runway that crosses the highway RIGHT in front of us. Cool!! The alpacas were classic, we got out to look at them and they came running across the field to inspect us. One was very big and woolly (like old man kangaroo but not grey. I think his pride WAS inordinate though, and he seemed to have been strippe
d of his regular meal times). I think we'd better have a recommended reading/viewing list for non-Ews! Today's titles are the Just So Stories and the Fast Show...
Anyway, we stayed in Bondi, and went swimming in the sea which was SO clear and blue and golden-sanded, mmmm, and visited Darling Harbour where there was a cool interactive water sculpture and a million funny ibises flying in and out of palm trees (Dave, remember the ibises?!) and went to a 3D imax film about elephants and lions and leopards which RULED! (a-grrrr). And I rang Andy from a cafe in Bondi, and discovered that she was freezing cold & skiing on Mt Ruapehu somewhere which seemed very odd as I was hiding most industriously from the hot sun. The wonders of modern technology... (the phones, not the weather).
On Sunday night we drove to the Blue Mountains. At this point Tim broke the golden rule (not the "never take your edges off on a steep slope" version, the "never let Andy or Tans nav" one). The Ewing Navigation went better than expected, although at one point we did imitate the motion of a cat chasing its big fluffy tail, or perhaps a conker, ie circular. We camped up in the Blueys after I performed a stunning parallel park in what turned out to be angle parking. (Insert rant about lovely trees and warm sunny days). It was nice to be out of the city! We had a plan to spend a leisurely morning eating brekky at a cafe, and do a bit of climbing in the arvo, and in fine style we finally arrived at the rock about 3pm!!!! But one ball of alpaca wool the richer :o) (the knitting shop was sort of on the way...)
Well, climbing ensued, and I was on the brink of leading a 10 on bolts but fortunately Tim went up first and said "erm, it's a bit run out, maybe you should come up on top-rope and see what you think" and lucky I did because it was really scary! and I was super glad not to be leading! Well my Climbing and Alpinism Terminology: Number of Unrecognisable Terms (CATNUT) indicator is telling me I have exceeded the acceptable number of climbing terms in one paragraph, so I had better stop talking about climbing...
The drive back from the Blueys is always looooong (it's about 5 or 6 hrs and you've always been climbing and it's always late) and this one was especially long thanks to a stunning, and more typical, piece of Ews navigation, coupled with Xtreme Tiredness. These two factors are best described through exerpts of conversation...
When Navigation becomes Consternation: What went wrong on Oct 3rd, 2005
Tim: That's our exit
Tans: But it doesn't say Canberra!
Tim: Mmmm, true, I wonder why that is?
[the exit approaches]
Tans: I'm not going to turn left here
Tim: Why not?
Tans (changing lanes): I'll tell you why in a second, I'm concentrating
[the exit passes]
Tans (smugly, obviously feeling clever): Well, on the way to the Blueys there was a sign that said Canberra so there should also be one in this direction, so I don't think that was our exit at all! [very triumphant]
Tim: But that's the exit we always take on the way home from the Blueys, it's for the number 9 which takes you to the Hume Highway
Tans: Oh.
[Tans thinks, computing the fact that Tim has been to the Blueys a lot more than she has, and also that she has never driven home from there and in fact has no idea how to get back to Canberra]
Tans (in a very small voice): Oh.
Too Tired To Talk? A study in the obligations of car passengers
This is a sample of the conversation we had for the last hour or so of the drive, when I think Tim was probably legally asleep but nonetheless refused to break the rule of "whoever is shotgun must stay awake and talk to the driver". It proved to be much more amusing than the usual conversations with tired passengers, and as such was rather effective at keeping me awake!
Tim: I bit the end off my hydropod once.
Tans: Oh no! Did you manage to fix it?
Tim: What are we talking about?
Tans: Hydropods.
Tim: Ahhh! Yes, I bit the end off mine once.
Tans: riiiight...
Tim: I don't like dogs!
Tans: ha ha ha, that was a pretty random turn of conversation
Tim: why? what were we talking about?
Tans (in hysterics): Hydropods!!!
At any rate we got home safely and it looks like this is a HUGE moose report so I shall leave it at that. As Canturf (the grass company) would probably say... I can't be grassed writing any more, so seed you later!
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BACKCOUNTRY RULES!!! I just spent a weekend getting fresh tracks in Australian backcountry powder... in the middle of September!!! This was the first mountaineering club first trip I'd ever led (and as such I may have exhibited a modicum of mother-duck like behaviour, earning me a chorus of "quack quack quack" most times I spoke). We set out for the hills on Saturday morning full of enthusiasm if not confidence in the weather (a blizzard was forecast). Four of us (me, Katie, Clancy and Rich) were on snowshoes & carrying our snowboards, and Tim was on alpine touring gear skis with skins (!!!! I was enthralled by this gear, which I had never seen before. You can put alpine touring bindings on normal downhill skis. The bindings can quickly be changed from having a fixed heel like normal downhill bindings, to having a free heel as in cross-country / telemark skis. This means you can quickly glide across flat ground, and with the aid of skins you can climb even quite steep hills, then once you get up a hill
you can just click the heels down and ski down downhill-style. Awesome!!!). By the time we had walked to a slope deemed suitable it was snowing a bit, and the weather slowly got worse all day but we were pretty sheltered from the wind... in the end, boarding in a blizzard turned out pretty well for us as the constant snow just filled in our tracks as the day went on and left us with a continual supply of fresh powder! The snow was surprisingly light for this late in the year and it was BEAUTIFUL to ride! It was an utterly, utterly awesome day. At one point I sat in the snow, watching all the falling flakes and feeling so lucky to be out amongst the snow & the snowgums & the creeks & the hills. Some of the flakes that landed on me even had classic snowflake structure going on!! It was pretty cold though and the regular climbs back up the hill were necessary to keep warm. By the end of the day we were all wet, cold, tired, and ridiculously chuffed. We walked back to the cars, spread all our stuff all over the
nordic shelter at the car park, and were about to brew up when we were told they were closing the shelter. I don't think they liked us very much because it took us quite some time to pack up all our wet manky belongings that we had just strewn about the place. So we threw chains on the car and bolted back to our campsite at Island Bend (where happily we had already set up the tents the night before) and made the BEST spag bol ever (1kg of mince!!!) under the shelter of a large tarp, because it was snowing a bit even at the campsite.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of a possee of currawongs attacking our dirty plates, which we'd left out in the hope of their being cleaned by precipitation (so to speak). I think currawongs might be a bit like keas, they seem curious & keen to get their beaks onto anything (particularly if they're not supposed to!). The wind was no longer roaring through the trees & I emerged to find a gloriously sunny day and a skirrick of snow across the ground. BRILLIANT! Clancy and Katie cunningly set up a washing line between a few snowgums, and we hung all our wet clothing out to dry in the sun. This gave us an excellent excuse for a leisurely start to the morning. During said leisurely start, Andrew (another of our friends) randomly turned up from Canberra bearing bakery goods!! Well, not quite randomly (the Auspicious Trip Leader may have forgotten that he'd said he might turn up). He was on cross country skis so that made three disciplines in our group. How very multi-cultural and so on. We eventually got
going and very quickly discovered that in sharp contrast to Saturday, it was HOT! My fleece lined snowboarding pants suddenly seemed like an inferior choice (quite frankly I won't use them) and I wished I had brought my shorts! (Say, furry brown ones with a tail...) I also discovered the first ever documented advantage of boots that are a size and a half too big: you don't sink into the snow! Clancy was most unamused to discover that even when I was "breaking trail" he still fell through all my boot prints. I told him he could have my fairy wings next trip ;o)
The snow was deep & slow what with all the sun on it and lots of stacking was done by all. Only one person ended up in the creek at any point though... he he he! I did fall over and end up with snow up both the front and back of my jersey a few times though. The next day I could hardly MOVE at work I was so sore, particularly my neck. (I kept yelping whenever I moved my head, attracting some funny looks at times). What else can I say? We had another fantastic day in the powder, and dragged ourselves back to the cars around sunset where we headed for the burger-filled utopia of Cooma. Mmmm. The Longest Drive Home Ever ensued, featuring me talking nonsense in an attempt to keep awake (I was not driving!). Backcountry powder in September? BRILLIANT!!!!
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This weekend we went down to the coast! In the immortal words of Rudyard Kipling we were "warm but not at all astonished" (although no bi-coloured python rock snakes spanked us with their scalesome, flailsome tails). In fact it's not entirely true that we were not astonished, as the forecast was for cold, wet weather, but we mostly had sunny warm-ish weather. Which was nice. Katie (my flatmate) has a bach (Aussies: see the dictionary) on the coast and we stayed in there in glorious comfort and knat (knitted), watched videos, ate Katie's Amazing Magic Salmon, and drank wine. And explored the rocks! Which, for you kiwi rock geeks, are rather like the basement on the west coast of NZ (grrreat). And I collected a million shells of all kinds, saying "Shell I take these home?". On Sunday it was warm enough to convince us to run in and out of the water for a "swim" which was refreshing to say the least. The beaches on the coast here are BEAUTIFUL! I can't get over how clear the w
ater is. And there are all these nice trees coming all the way down to the sand. After our duration swimming training we took off to climb Pigeon House Mountain. Captain Cook named it thus, saying it "resembles a square dovehouse with a dome on top and for that reason I name it Pigeon House". There is a photo - I don't know about you but a pigeon house was not the first thing I thought of!!! Repressed English sailors...
Anyway we had a lovely walk up the, err, Pigeon House and could see all kinds of amazing plateaus, and the coast, from the top. And all the way up were these wildflowers, it was like a magic garden! I won't rant on too much. Oh but how could I forget the historic town of Mogo? Where we ate icecreams and I restrained myself from asking Miiister Fiiife to help us with our Mogo Mogo more than 5 or so times.
