Baggas’ Blog

Tonight I find myself in Townsville, in the north of Queensland. Never been here before, in fact this is the furthest North I have been in Australia thus far (I’ll break my south record next month when we go to Tasmania). I’m here for a three day course in Travel Medicine, starting tomorrow, as part of my Masters degree.

My midnight flight from Perth to Brisbane was delayed by an hour last night but thankfully I slept pretty much the whole flight, even though I didn’t get the window seat I requested as I volunteered to move so a couple could sit together. In spite of this I think I was asleep before we took off and woke just before descent. Then it was a short flight from Brisbane up here to Townsville.

I had a short nap after checking in to my hotel and then took a drive around. Certainly is a scenic place - I took a walk along a beautiful beach called the Strand with views across to the mountainous Magnetic Island. Then I took a drive up Castle Hill - a steep rocky mountain which dominates the landscape, towering above the city. I drove past many people walking up and felt a bit lazy but I was tired from flying and have a bit of a cold so I don’t think I would have handled the climb very well. Driving or walking, it’s well worth the effort - the 360 degree views are spectacular! I’ve got a few photos but for some reason flickr is not letting me upload any (something to do with the hotel’s net connection) but here’s a Mobile Me Gallery of today’s photos. Driving down the hill I mostly coasted in neutral and let gravity do the work - not sure if that’s a bad way to drive or not?

Anyway, after a steak dinner and a brief dip in the spa here it’s time for an early night to catch up on some more sleep. First day of Uni classes for me tomorrow since 1999 so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

This weekend we wanted to get away for a couple of days for our tenth anniversary. Since neither of us had been here before, we decided to visit Adelaide. 

I doubt Adelaide would be a place I’d plan on visiting regularly, but it’s been nice seeing somewhere new.

A few observations :

• Adelaide airport is nice - better roomier, cleaner, easier, and better resourced than Perth
• Adelaide city, although smaller, has more going on after dark than Perth - plenty of places open, people everywhere, music pumping
• Rundle mall - good place to shop. Just seems to go on forever.
• Seem to be a lot more street people and mentally ill people here - maybe they are just more visible
• hard to understand the pedestrian crossing rules here - cars trying to turn while people are crossing the road - a little scary
• does this city have freeways? I’m yet to see one.
• the city of churches label does seem apt - only other place I’ve been to with a similar concentration of churches was Nashville (great city, lovely feel, nice people, awesome music!) Uniting church seems big around here.

Today we took a drive around the Barossa Valley and enjoyed a scenic trip back via the Torrens river valley and Adelaide Hills. Plenty of nice vineyards (didn’t stop at many though, although had a beautiful lunch at one), more Lutheran churches than I have ever seen in my life. In terms of natural beauty and general tourist appeal though, the Barossa isn’t a patch on Margaret River.

Mia has been wonderful this trip. Slept well in plane, car, hotel and when out & about. No major problems. Six months old and already a great little traveller.

Well my schedule is officially looking pretty insane the next two months. I had to break the news to Chas, our church music director, last night, that I will be away a fair bit between now and Christmas. Between travel, and hospital on-call weekends and study I’ll be limited in the amount of Sundays I can play, although I’ll still try and pitch in as much as I can (especially since I’ve only just got my new Telecaster guitar, and need to “run it in” a bit more..)

Earlier this year I was feeling a bit of a case of travel withdrawals. After travelling to Africa (3 times) and around the world to the UK and USA in the last two years the prospect of a year with no trips away was not something I relished. I well and truly have caught the travel bug. I even like hanging around airports, hotels etc (Jen would say I’m a bit mental.) Having said that, with Mia being born this year, a break from travel has been the right thing to do.

But in the next 2 months we’ll be making up for lost time. Starting next week - Jen and I (and Mia) are flying to Adelaide for the weekend to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Then two weeks after that I’ll be off to tropical Townsville for 4 days for a course in Travel Medicine as part of my Masters degree. And in November we’ve booked in a family holiday to Tasmania for a week - a place we’ve recently been inspired to visit for the first time. In amidst all that I have uni exams (first is on Monday) and assignments, and hospital cover, and birthday parties, and a home group weekend down south, and much more. So it’s going to be a bit of a roller coaster ride for our family, but hopefully all good. I’ll keep you posted.

United Airlines offers in-flight iPhone and iPod Connectivity | The Apple Blog

Over the last couple of years I’ve spent many hours on planes, huddled over my iPod watching shows and movies on the little screen. In fact I watched the first three seasons on Battlestar Galactica (awesome show) in this manner. And almost invariably if you look around the cabin on any flight you will see several people with those characteristic white earphones in their ears. So the above story definitely appeals to me and I’m sure many other travellers. In a nod to the increasing ubiquity of these devices, United Airlines have installed iPod connectors in some of their planes so you can browse your iPod or iPhone and watch or listen to your own content on their screens, as well as keep your device charged. Certainly beats huddling over a tiny screen and definitely good to have more choice beyond the usual in-flight entertainment. Hope this comes to Australia soon…

In other iPod news, I noticed today that you can now purchase some TV shows via the Australian iTunes store. Only a couple of years behind the rest of the world! Hopefully movie rentals will follow. My guess is they’ve finally got their act together and done this because of the upcoming Australian iPhone launch.

Miss Mia’s first travel booking

Originally uploaded by baggas

For some reason I thought this was cute, seeing Miss Mia’s name in print like this

Jennifer and I are going to Adelaide in September for our anniversary for a few days, and Mia will be coming along for the ride.

Jetlag is all in the stomach - www.6minutes.com.au

This story just popped into my inbox, which suggests that it may be easier to reset your body clock when food is scarce. In other words, fasting before a long flight might help reduce the amount of jet lag you feel. This data is derived from animal experiments and has not yet been validated on humans but it’s worth thinking about.

If nothing else it just gives one more excuse to avoid eating dodgy airline food…

Ever become aware of a stupid habit you have when someone mentions it in themselves? This happened to me this morning in church where Mark mentioned the habit he has of packing far too many books whenever he goes travelling, even if it’s just for the weekend. I too am seriously guilty of this - I pack 4 or 5 books in my suitcase if I’m going away, only to get maybe one or two of them read.

But what’s worse, no matter where I am, I’m always drawn to look in bookshops and wind up bringing back several more books in addition to the ones I took with me. The last 3 times I visited Uganda I brought back at least 4 or 5 books each time (with the justification that ‘you just can’t buy these books back home’) - one of which was a massive 3kg textbook that I ended up having to pack in my luggage the other 3/4 of the way around the world through another 3 countries! Crazy. I can see one attraction of Cambodia (where ob1 was) perhaps being that there is less likely to be a big English language press there and hence less books to tempt me.

The other stupid thing I do is that I am too ambitious in my choice of reading material for travelling. Rather than picking something quick and light, I have a tendency towards choosing books of serious literary or theological cred, only to find that airplanes, airports and even hotels (especially when the kids are around) are not the best settings to try and tackle these sort of tomes.

So, my take home lessons for travelling readers (or reading travellers) are :

1. Choose fairly easy to read, (relatively) lightweight books.
2. Only take 1 or 2 books maximum. If you run out, you can always buy more along the way.
3. If you’re like me, factor in the fact that you almost certainly will acquire more books in your travels, and accordingly allow room in your luggage for that eventuality.
4. Guidebooks can be useful but I’ve found photocopying the relevant sections to be worthwhile. If you know you are only going to be in a couple of cities in a country, then copy those pages and leave the other 90% of the book at home. That way when you move on from that country you can simply leave your photocopied pages in the rubbish.
5. Taking novels set in the country you are visiting is a good way to prepare yourself for your visit, and might also lead you to reading some books you might otherwise have not considered (for example I’ve read a few excellent novels set in Uganda that I probably would never have read otherwise)
6. Consider books in digital format…. I haven’t done this travelling but a few years back I went through a phase of reading PDF books on my Palm Pilot whilst doing long quiet ICU shifts. I read the entire Dune and Wheel of Time series in that way.  Great for saving luggage space but for me this idea has one huge drawback - it violates my whole “books as furniture” principle - just like I prefer a physical copy of my music rather than a purely digital one, I like having books to hold and put on a shelf. There’s just something about holding a book in your hands and turning those pages that a digital reader can’t replicate. This is perhaps why, although I have 19 different bible versions on my PDA phone, I still do virtually all of my Bible reading in physical Bibles (preferably leather ones that sit nicely on my lap but I’m getting way off topic now…)

Anyway if anyone have any other tips they want to add to the list I’d love to hear them. All this talk, and following ob1’s blog of his travels over the last week has got me a bit “travel sick” (I doubt that’s the correct term but I’m using it in the sense of the opposite of “homesickness” wherein I’m actually seriously missing being in airports and on planes and in strange countries - Jen would say I’m crazy). I’ve got no plans to go back to Uganda this year, since we have a newborn baby and wouldn’t want to leave Jen and 3 kids for 3 weeks or so - plus I haven’t heard at all from them if they are actually doing a Watoto medical team this year.. but if another opportunity was to present itself for I’d be seriously tempted to jump at it…