It’s official. The Long Way Home is over. We’re back in Australia.
And Melbourne General Cemetary has some plots available:
A Melbourne tram: more rules than Switzerland.
We can’t really procrastinate any longer. Australia is too close to fit in another stop on the way there.
A stinking hot walk to the coffee shop. The pictures say it all.
Marti walks on Kuta beach.
Pocari was a wrestler. Apparently suggesting a drink is similar to his sweat is not a bad marketing exercise.
Kavli. Hearty, thick Kavli…
We had a horrible coffee at the ‘world’s best airport’, Kuala Lumpur, before heading to Ubud where we found a latte BETTER than I remember Melbourne’s!
Flying over the equator.
A spectacular, and spectacularly wet, morning walk with Peter up a ridge between two raging rivers.
Just before leaving Australia in 2004,I spent weeks working on an architectural scene in Kuala Lumpur for my employer. It was a view of the centre with a newly constructed hotel by the new Sentral Station, with the Petronas Towers in the background showing close proximity of the hotel. Most of the scene was incomplete, including an absence of logos to the building top, electricity not supplied to the rooms, scaffolding, unfinished train station and more. I lived in that scene for days at a time, turning on lights (copying illuminated windows from elsewhere), creating the logos and attaching them, placing monorail carriages on the lines, and generally cleaning up a massive construction site.
Last night I found myself walking around this scene. Our hotel room looked over it and not much had changed – they seem to have completed what I did in Photoshop over six years ago. It was very surreal, like being a Lego man in a 3D version of a giant scene that I’d painfully worked over in 2D and knew every square millimeter of.
Nearly back in Australia, it’s been a full circle.
The Le Meridian and Hilton hotels and KL Sentral station. A new construction site has replaced a parking lot which I had tidied up so long ago on a Macintosh computer.
Flying in to KL – still north of the equator (just) but not far from the southern hemisphere now.
Hotel view.
No Duratrans? You’re on camera too.
Roti for breakfast. Can we stay another day???
Unfortunately I couldn’t get a photo of Mr Nikos Mitsou. He was whisked away in his wheelchair for his connecting flight to Melbourne too rapidly. Nikos sat next to us on the plane from Athens to Abu Dhabi and told us much of his long life story.
Born in 1910 in a village which from 1930 until today has been named ‘Ktistades’ after the occupation of most of the occupants (Ktistes – builders, or more precisely, stone masons). Nikos’ father was also a builder and owned two strong mules which transported stone and mortar to construction sites. In 1943, the Germans requested he load his mules with arms and munitions to resupply the military positions of the occupying forces. He refused and was knocked in the head. A strong man with a height of nearly two meters, he got back up immediately and retaliated, knocking two soldiers down to the ground. He was then escorted to a superior, who had him severely bashed and thrown in a shallow spring to drown. He wasn’t discovered until four days later by his family.
Between 1955 and 1959 Nikos worked building stone houses in Laconia and Messinia, in the southern Pelopponese. After this he gained employment with a large construction company based in Lamia. A few years later he was accused by the ruling military junta of being a communist and faced exile. Instead, he managed to get on a ship bound for Australia.
Nikos now lives in Noble Park near his children. This was his last trip back to Greece, he says – aside from his age, he found the place disgusting, full of garbage and cigarettes and smoke. His trade as a stone mason has been abandoned by the Greeks and is now belongs to the Albanians.
Perhaps we’ll bump into him in Melbourne…
Dates stuffed with roasted, peeled almonds and then dipped in chocolate. Tastes just like a chomp bar!! But much more delicious.
These guys weren’t interested in free cologne samples.
A man picking dates at the airport.
The Acropolis museum, day and night.
View from the museum.
