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I have a vague intent of looking into how NZ has improved European-FN relations, but my vague impression that they were farther along that road and CA (or AU) is anecdotally confirmed: 1. FN translations, including but not only place names, are much more common and often appear before the English version. That said, products in grocery stores are unilingual English. 2. People casually say "Kia Ora", which I guess is Maori for "G'Day", in a way that suggests they're not just doing it for tourist performance. 3. According to our excellent guide, NZ has 40 FN's, 38 of which have concluded reparations with the NZ government; he implied that they usually consist of cash payments, in CHC's case $700 million, as well as, at least in some cases, things like free uni. I'm curious to what extent self-government, judicial lenience and the concept of "their own nation" is included; also, how they participate in government. 4. This is ultra-anecdota...

I haven't really read anything on the LGA crash, beyond the headlines, but it sounds like a controller error. It's crazy easy for that to happen, at the moment of things like a truck crossing a runway, the whole house of cards is generally dependent on a human remembering where everyone is and what they're doing. Not that hard, but easy to get distracted for a moment and forget that an Air Canada jet just touched down on the runway that you just cleared a truck across. I say "generally dependent" because after a somewhat similar crash in LAX a few years back, there was talk of installing sensors to back up the controller. I don't know how common that is, though, or, if they work equally well for trucks as they do for airplanes. Also, airports in general have a radar that covers the ground area called ASDE (Airport Surface Detection Equipment) that I would think would have shown both the truck and the plane converging. I think that is really only intended for u...

You all might know I find fuel logistics interesting, here are a few things I learned: 1. About 10% of gas sales as premium. Some cars require it to avoid knocking. Premium doesn't directly increase power, but without it, modern engines degrade performance to avoid knocking that would otherwise ensue. 2. Refineries produce an interim product that is not what you put in your car. A bunch of blending happens at the terminal (eg. where the pipeline ends and they load it onto trucks). Final blending happens at the pump - when you buy premium it is is mixing mostly the same gas as everyone else with a small amount of much higher octane gas. All grades are delivered on the same truck, they have multiple compartments. 3. You know how futures contracts work, to protect buyers of commodities like fuel from price hikes? It turns out that at least in USA, airlines don't use them. So whatever Iran War price hikes happen are directly hitting their profits and prices. 4. Airline stock prices...

Not that it really matters, but I'm doing a way worse job than usual keeping up with trip blogging. Oh well. It's all been very busy and I'm kinda lazy. We've been in Christchurch two days now and are heading off into the mountains this morning. --- You might remember that Christchurch had a big earthquake a while back - 2011 to be exact. This event dominated the walking tour that we went to yesterday. I think this is the 4th guided tour we have done, they have all been excellent. Anyway, they had 2 major earthquakes. The first, in 2010, was stronger but further away and caused minimal damage. The second, in 2011 at around 1 in the afternoon, killed around 170 people and damaged around 80% of the buildings, many of them beyond repair. As a result, much of CC has been rebuilt since. There are no buildings more than a few stories because while permitted, it's not economic to build anything tall and meet the new building codes. --- CC is lovely. It's only around .5...

I am a huge believer in routines and streaks, and I also often reach for a spreadsheet when some project arises, so naturally I have a spreadsheet of routines and streaks. As is usually the case, it has totally gone to hell during this trip. I haven't touched Spanish or Italian in three weeks. But, running has been going great. As the YVR marathon is less than 40 days away, I was worried about maintaining my weekly schedule of long runs; I have more or less been successful with that. I did 25k this morning here in Hobart. My goal is to always do more than the run prior, and hopefully hit the low 30's before the real thing. I am usually time constrained because my spouse wants to get going, the nights are getting longer in the southern hemisphere, and I'd rather avoid running in the dark on unknown terrain. Hobart is the capital of Tasmania and has a population of around 250k; similar to Reykjavik, it feels much bigger than that. We're going to explore a bit today, and t...

We have been keeping a little list of "things that are different in Australia" and without thinking it through rigorously, I think the single best thing might be: Server-less ordering and paying. About half of restaurants have QR code menus, from which one orders and pays in advance. The only time you see a server is when they drop the order off. No tips. Generally, no waiting. This system has the small drawback of sometimes making you wait in a line, but it's a small hassle compared to waiting for the server all the time. The other half have a system where you go up to the bar and order your own; for drinks, you carry them back to your table; for food, they bring it when it's ready. Also no tips. Waiting, but only for the actual food preparation step. Four HUGE thumbs up for this system! --- On the other hand, a surprising thing about pubs in Australia: often, not always, utterly charmless. They often look like someone rented a storefront, put down the cheapest possi...

I've been ruminating on Brave New World a lot over the last few days, in part while driving. It turns out that Aldous Huxley wrote a ton of stuff, much of it with similar themes, and I'm curious to read some of those. The book has a gigantic multi-part preamble that talks about the book and also Huxley himself critiques his own book and talks about what he wished he had done differently.  Smart people seem to be divided on whether BNW is a blueprint or a warning. Huxley was pro-Eugenics, believed that parliamentary democracy was absolutely hopeless (he lived through the UK government flailing around uselessly, in hs view, trying to deal with the great depression), and that a highly structured caste system, with smart people in charge, was the way forward. He also hated the US, in ways and for reasons that most of us would probably understand, and thought that the greatest tragedy of the WW's is that it gave the US a clear path forward to dominate the world, and expected the...

As I have no doubt mentioned before, I have a list of 10 or so "smart person books" that I aspire to read (first in the series was "Age of Innocence", which I liked a lot, but took two tries). Mostly, I will get these from the library as I don't expect to like most of them. However, I broke down and bought one on our trip west of Melbourne: I am pleased to report that this book was very pleasant and easy to read. It describes an alternative way that we might organize society and is somewhat, but not entirely, dystopian. The good part is that war and disease and hunger and even interpersonal conflict no longer exists, work is optional, and everyone has sex all the time. The bad part is that this is mostly achieved by aggressive reproductive engineering that deliberately makes a big chunk of population too stupid to realize what is going on (eg. by depriving fetuses of oxygen and dousing them with alcohol). Also, a safe type of heroin is safely and constantly used...

We're officially exactly 1/2 way through the trip now, and, on the north east coast of Tasmania. Unfortunately, the weather continues to be a challenge. After a really pleasant 12-hour crossing, we arrived in Devonport and finally gave in - bought a second hoodie each to deal with 10-ish degree temperatures, and boy, that was money well spent. There have been bits of warmth here and there, and not much rain, but overall, cloudy and much cooler than we had anticipated. (I was worried it was going to be too HOT). I am afraid NZ is likely to be similar, as it is at the same latitude, more or less, as Tas. Fiji, on the other hand, should be solid warmth.

A couple more interesting things about "commerce" in Australia. --- When you sell your house, there are two systems: a) about the same as ours, where people come and look at your house and if so inclined make an offer, which you might accept, etc. etc. b) you announce an auction date. People come and look and, if so inclined, come to your auction. The auction is run by the realtor and is, approximately, in the format you see on TV - people outbidding each other, in the room at the same time, someone going "go I hear 2 million, 2 million, going once..." and so on. According to our friends both are common, it's a decision of the realtor and the seller, there is no overriding reason to do one or the other. I am hard pressed to think of a compelling advantage to either system. From anecdotal evidence, Australian house prices are even more horrifying than Canada (a bit odd since both countries are full of underused land). I have no idea if Australian realtor routinel...

Last weekend Sam competed in the "Back Yard Ultra" in Abbotsford (they happen all around the world) which has an interesting premise: You have 1 hour to travel 6.7k. You can run, jog, walk; speed is not important. Anybody can run 6.7k in an hour. It's a light jog. (I generally run 10k in 1 hour, on a relatively slow day). Participants keep doing this, repeating 6.7k laps in under 1 hour, until they can't. The winner is the last person standing. Speed is not important; the only value in doing it in 1/2 hour (easy, if you're only doing one...) is that you have 1/2 hour to rest before the next one. Sam did an astonishing 16 laps, that's 107km over 16 hours. According to him: harder than the Ironman.

We did a "real crime" walking tour yesterday, mostly because it was very highly rated and took us to a new side of the city. The presenter, Michael, was just great - friendly, passionate, easy to listen to, well organized. With that said, the tour was a bit boring. As one would expect of any big city, Melbourne has a seedy past full of prostitutes (whose bosses were, generally, other women); mafia (which they called "the combine"); and complicit police chiefs. Hearing about all the individual characters and their stories had my mind wandering quite a bit, despite the quality of the presentation. I guess it would have resonated more if it had been names and places that I knew better, like "Bill Vander Zalm in Shaughnessy" or whatever.

I might have mentioned that Australian restaurants, etc. charge a 10% surcharge on weekends (15% on holidays). I'm not sure if this is a custom or a law, but, it is based on a minimum wage -law- which requires premium wages on the same basis. Actually, the Australian labour department publishes an incredibly detailed minimum wage law that attempts to categorize every job and assign a unique minimum wage to it, with adjustments for things like: under 21, disabled, apprentice, weekends/holidays etc. (notable by absence: geography, but I might have missed it). They have a similarly byzantine seeming system to assign minimum holiday and severance. From what I could gather, a Starbucks coffee slinger earns $25 base, $27 on weekends and gets 4 weeks severance pay with 2 weeks notice. A$ and C$ are more or less equivalent, within a few %. As per my Chilean friend, although Australian prices are much higher than Canada, so are the wages, and on balance, in his opinion (he mostly works as a...

We are keeping a list of small, different, and generally awesome things about Australia. This one might be #1 on my list: Not a great picture, but stores selling sushi like this are everywhere. In Canada, I am only aware of a) sushi restaurants where you have to wait, or b) packaged sushi in supermarkets, which is not that common, not that good, and available in limited combinations. In Australia, they have tons of immediately available, individualized, and awesome sushi of different types. The rolls shown above are about the size of a short hot dog bun, cost about $5 (probably would be $4 in Canada; Australia is SO NOT CHEAP), and are awesome++++.

Yesterday, we (somewhat randomly) went for a tour of the MCG - Melbourne Cricket Ground, which is enormous (even by US standards) and gorgeous. They play both cricket and AFL (Australian Rules Football there). Tour was A+++ despite my near total lack of interest in this topic. The guide was an older guy (there was a group of guides at the start and the average age must have been north of 70, all men) who exuded love for both the sport and the venue. On the one hand, I am a bit envious of people who have this sort of passion for anything, including professional sports. On the other hand, I wish that passion were invested in, say, finding alternative energy sources. (Spoiler alert: it doesn't matter how much alternative energy we find or how well it works. We will still keep on burning ever more oil, gas and coal). It was fun to learn a bit about how cricket and AFL works. AFL sounds like rugby, likewise super-violent, and nobody wears protection, as a sort of badge of honour. Cricke...

We heard our first fairly reliable (not confirmed) rumour of flights from Australia to Europe being cancelled. Allegedly, flights to North America are still OK. I caught myself checking the web sites of the three airlines in our future. All of them are cancelling flights to the middle east, but none talk about fuel problems. Were we to bolt on Friday, a flight home is $2200. Next week, $4500. The week after, $8500. In June, only $1000. This is without the benefit of any sort of comparison shopping, so it may not be quite that scary. Were we to bolt, some of our accommodation is refundable, but none of the flights are, so it would probably cost us in the $10k range. I think we are going to soldier on and hope for the best. We are headed to Tasmania ("Tassie") on Saturday. It occurs to me that it's probably better to be stranded in Melbourne than Tasmania, but, it also occurs to me that if they were to cancel the ferry due to lack of fuel, that might be the thing that sent ...

We spent yesterday with Pete and Karen, who we had met on our river cruise in Austria in 2024. Super nice couple, have travelled quite a bit but always lived here in Melbourne. Two mildly interesting things about Aus life: 1. They both have private health insurance, something like $200/month, on top of the public system. Everyone who can afford it (they seem to be middle class) does. The public system is OK, but you tend to have to wait too much; with their coverage they would expect to get pretty much anything they need within a day or two. If they had a major issue like needing emergency open heart surgery, they would likely still use the private system, but, the public one would probably work fine and move you to the front of the line as required. This is more or less exactly how everyone I know in Europe and Latin America describes their relationship with health care. 2. They get a government pension, and nothing else. Richer people might have more savings, obviously, but typically...

We made it to Melbourne. The weather in our last stop, Lakes Entrance, was decidedly chilly with a strong breeze, but we made the most of it. I think LE is sort of to Melbourne as Kelowna is to Vancouver, about the same distance and where city folk escape in the summer. Full of small motels and touristy activities. Melbourne is huge, only a bit smaller than Sydney and twice the size of Vancouver, on the ocean. Its downtown feels very busy and cramped, like any American city would, minus the guns and ever present threat of violence. I'm not sure how the Iran War is playing in Canada, but we're officially, but not extremely, worried about fuel supply. Apparently Australia has no (or little) refining capacity and buys all its gas from Japan, China etc; China has formally suspended jet fuel deliveries. So, it is possible that getting home is going to be a problem, not to mention continuing our road trip. We are keeping topped up and hoping for the best. Gas prices don't seem to...

While noodling around the Australian Parliament I came across a wall covered in pictures of current senators and MPs. I was really surprised by how many women were up there; it looked like at least 50%. In fact, it's not 50%, but it is in the high 40's - a bit better than Canada. I was not so surprised by Canadian MPs but I didn't know we had a significant number of women senators, but apparently we do. Anyway, not sure about Canada, but in Australia, all of this is abetted by quotas. These exist at the party level only, but I think all major parties have them. The ALP, their labour party, has a 40-40-20 system aiming to have 40% of each gender minimum. They implement this by making sure the required #s are in primaries of "winnable seats", eg. they don't just dump women into unwinnable ridings and call that good enough. Interestingly, from the Australian government web site, neither Canada nor Australia is in the top 10 for female politicians; and even more i...

We're in a small coastal town called Eden, which is the most SE point we will be - from here our route turns west towards Melbourne, which is about 580k and, for us, 2 more nights. Weather yesterday finally turned 10/10 awesome so we had a mostly beach day. At one point we were on a nice sheltered beach with maybe 20 other people around and a massive seal was swimming around in the water between the people. I forgot about kangaroos. I thought they were a desert / zoo thing, but, in Canberra, I saw them wandering around a city park, the same way we might see deer - just minding their own business. They are a bit smaller than I would have thought, between a very large dog and a very small deer. We also see them as roadkill every now and then.

Today, we did a tour of the Australian Parliament ... 45 minutes and not bad, it focused on how Australia came to be, and didn't get into government structure (unfortunately, but, I knew that in advance). Australia united six former colonies (?) in 1901, following referendums in each. These are the present day states of New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, Southern Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania. There is also one large territory (Northern Territory) and the Australian Capital Territory, which consists only of the city of Canberra. Among Australia's few flaws, one might add: low effort in naming states. Slightly interestingly, referendums were a pro-federation landslide in all except New South Wales (which includes Sydney), where it passed 51 / 49. The one in Western Australia was done a year after the others. -- All this got me thinking about Canada - sorry, I didn't know this, but in case you didn't either: well, I did know that central Canada and most of ...

We're in Canberra, which is a 1.5 hour ish drive inland from the coast on a mostly exceedingly windy and steep road. It's about 2,200 ASL here (Calgary = 3,500) but higher enough that it's noticeably cooler. This is the capital of Australia, supposedly located here because it's halfway between Sydney and Melbourne who could not agree on which should get the honour. Despite being gently advised against it, I wanted to visit Canberra because of Bill Bryson's writeup: I don't remember the exact words, but he was not overly impressed and found it a very odd city. It's somewhat special in that, apparently, it was purpose-built and designed up front, rather than growing organically and somewhat chaotically as most cities do. My main impressions are a) huge amount of green everywhere; b) somewhat unkempt, grass not cut and sidewalks generally strewn with bits of sticks and so on; c) large fake looking but nice enough lake in the centre, d) lots of roundabouts, some...

We're waking up in Hutchisson / Jervis Bay, no more than 1/5 of the way to Melbourne, which is more or less our destination. Tomorrow we will head inland to Canberra and hopefully visit the Australian parliament among other things. Also we decided to rearrange things slightly and add one night to our Melbourne time, for 5 total. Melbourne is huge, about the same as Sydney (5.5m). Our guy in Sydney told us that for many years it was the richest city in the world, due to nearby gold mining. Last night we met up with Elizabeth and Andrew = our friends from North Vancouver who are retired Air Canada with free travel privileges and come here 1x-2x per year. Going to go for a casual walk today and then they head back to Sydney and Vancouver next week. I finally thought of a small negative about Aus: like many, probably most countries: cars have right of way over pedestrians, both legally and in practice. It is up to you to stay out of their way and time their crossing, they will not stop...

One of the other couples on our Sydney tour was a young couple from Wuhan ("where the virus came from!"  - their words and way of introducing themselves) on their honeymoon. The new wife had studied in Russia, in Russian, and was also 9/10 fluent in English, as well as "Shanghaiese" (their term). Very impressive. (Short discussion about where the virus came from - many Chinese people think America created it, but these guys thought it came out of a wet market. Last I read in The Economist, there was good evidence that it DID come from a lab in Wuhan - but no evidence that it was intentionally released). TBH I was a bit intimidated by them at first but they were very pleasant and I regret not having made more of an effort to milk them for information about what it's like to be a 100% Chinese resident. He had also spent 6 years in USA studying and mentioned that when he returned to China, the biggest shock was that cash had virtually disappeared - everything is Al...

Another interesting aspect of paying for routine small purchases in Australia occurred to me. We bought a (very) cheap, may not last even our three weeks, beach chair for $9. The total bill was ... $9. No tax! Well, yes tax (10% GST, I think), but unlike in Canada, it's always included in the price. We paid cash so no credit card fee. So: Australia: credit card fee separate, tax included (also: no tip). Canada: credit card fee included, tax separate (also: tip). Only charging credit card fees to credit credit card users (and therefore making them separate) is a hill I would die on, but I'm less sure about separately itemized taxes. It seems to me like a good idea to make people aware of what things attract a tax and what things don't, as well as, how often we pay taxes (even though I would also die on the hill that taxes are, in principle, a GOOD thing). (Though one can easily argue that consumption taxes are the least-good good thing).

  This is EVERYWHERE including buying a $8 coffee. Awesome. Thank you for not forcing me to contribute to Amex profits. Also, no tipping !!! It is getting harder and harder to think of things that are better about Canada ;), perhaps the possibility of sub-$8 coffee.

I forgot to mention something Matt explained to us and was interesting enough to Google afterwards: From 1901 until 1975-ish, Australia had a "White Immigration Policy" designed to maintain a near-100% UK or UK like population, and it worked. The key feature was a "dictation test" which basically nobody ever passed. Candidates were required to read passages like this one aloud and the border control guy had authority to reject them based on how good he thought their pronunciation was. Isn't that a misplaced apostrophe, by the way? Plus, I'm pretty sure I could tell a lion and a tiger apart. I guess they are talking about just the skeleton, but that goes against the "hairy adornment" reference.

Our "first full day" anywhere tends to be hyper-active and today was more-or-less so. Hilit by a 4 hour walking tour by Matt, a native "Sydneysider" who was stereotypically friendly and charismatic. Since I know y'all are history buffs, allow me to fill in a very very few corrections to the extremely vague Australia back story, courtesy of Matt: Everyone knows that Australia began as a place for the UK to dump its convicts. This was the plan from day one - as opposed to having a small colony and deciding to turn it into an open air prison, their first major arrival was 11 ships and 800 convicts. At the time UK had a plentiful supply of convicts in part due to high crime levels in part due to returning soldiers who couldn't find work in the UK. Most were there for fairly minor crimes and on a 7 year sentence, but as the colony improved, it became more attractive to just stay permanently. FN relations (slightly interesting that they use the term FN, I don'...

Day 1 of 42 (ish) is in the can and I have nothing interesting to report, but nonetheless, I wanted to mark the occasion. The longest flight I have ever taken (16 hours), starting the longest out-of-Canada trip I have ever taken (45 days), was extremely full but otherwise very uneventful and passed quickly; lights were low the entire time and my spouse slept pretty much the whole flight. We navigated the immigration and car pickup faff with minimal hassle, also the driving on the left thing, and got to Hotel Bondi at around noon. Went for a run (horrible; way too hot; running after 8 AM in a warm climate is never a good idea), hung out on the beach (huge, surfers everywhere), walked down the coast for quite a while, went for dinner. Yes, it's THAT Bondi; where that big shooting happened; there is no serious evidence of it (TBH we were wondering where EXACTLY it was but don't know the answer). Just a few cops and a drone buzzing around overhead (slightly annoying). Sydney is res...