Weekend in Adelaide

Sometimes the deities smile and the reasons we become academics converge and we have a great time as both scholars and lovers of life. This last weekend has been pretty good. I presented a research paper on Friday, curtesy of the Business School at University of Adelaide. The topic was my ongoing study on application of Complexity Theory to undrestanding consumer/market behaviour. There were many more people in attendance than I had anticipated. People went away saying that it was worthwhile and there were lots of questions that got me thinking more clearly about where next to take the project, so it was definitely worthwhile for me. On Saturday I ran a workshop on Best-Worst scaling and how to link that in with conjoint measurement. That went for an hour longer than expected and again everyone felt it was worthwhile. Amongst those two events I was able to catch three shows as a part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, and take in three wineries in the Adelaide Hills, and then finally join a wine-botelling party rn by the Adelaide Uni Reds club. Overall an excellent weekend. There's a niggling feeling however that I didn't really cover some of the obscure aspects of Conjoint modelling, so perhaps I should visit again. We're thinking maybe I cold be available for a seminar the day before the "Wine Crush" festival in Spring. And there may be some issues rising in a research study into consumer preferences of wine that could bring me back. I'll see if I can make it.

Scuba diving South West Rocks

These images posted, with permission, from the Gallery at fishrock.com.au

A belated post summarising a part of my journey to Sydney from Brisbane. My first plan was to make a circuitous route from Brisbane along the coast and then inland to the town of Manilla over perhaps two weeks. But that really was going to be more driving than it was worth.

First stop was South West Rocks, about an hour North of Port Macquarie, where I took pot luck on accommodation, staying two nights at the Sea Breeze Hotel right on the water overlooking Port Macquarie beach. I met a couple of lovely people there - Kieran Hartley and his friend Suzanne Ison. I'll be keeping in touch with them.

Next day I went scuba diving! Port Macquarie has some of the most amazing diving that I have yet experienced. The main feature is an underwater cave. At 126 metres long and completely dark inside. Each entrance is guarded by a wobegong shark, not the cute little half-metre creatures that you'll often see on reefs. These fellas were each more than two metres long, and their mottled brown and black colouring made them just about invisible on the sand amongst the shadows and rocks, until you right on top of them! Fortunately they seem to be used to divers appearing nearly every day and they just ignored the group. Also in the cave in abundance: squid, eels, huge reef cod.

Just outside the caves were giant batfish that would swim up close to look you in the eye and then quietly swim off.

The second dive was equally wonderful - about thirty metres from the cave is a trench which serves as a nursery for Grey Nurse sharks. There must have been nearly 100 sharks cruising around us, from new-born pups to big old creatures over 2.5 metres long. Grey Nurse sharks may look fierce, but they're actually quite gentle and safe, so long as you don't do anything stupid, like try to pet one or flash photograph up close. Fantastic. I would have stayed another day to dive some more but I felt a cold coming on, and equalising your ears on the way down is difficult and painful with a cold.

Diving was brilliantly organised by http://fishrock.com.au/

Paragliding Rainbow Beach

Acknowledgment: Picture by Stefan Brandlehner on Flickr i.e. those are Stefan's feet, not mine. But they could have been.

I've been wanting to fly Rainbow for a while now. In fact I and two of my flying buddies, Tashi and Reid, had arranged to go there several weeks ago, but the weather forecast was not encouraging. Now that I'm heading off to live in Sydney the project had taken on some urgency. So I headed up on Boxing day morning and returned last night. Despite the season, there was room for a one-man tent at the camping and caravan ground.

Rainbow Beach is a little over three hours drive North of Brisbane. It's the staging post for 4WD enthusiasts and beach-fishing types to cross by ferry to Frazer Island or to drive along the beach at the edge the famous Cooloola National Park The "shorter" route, calculated by whereis.com or your GPS navigator, has you driving for nearly 100Km along corrugated dirt roads to Rainbow. Maybe this is a practical joke, or practice for the 4WDers, but the sensible route is North to Gympy and then across to the coast. I shan't make that mistake again.

Youtube video of Rainbow Beach

Jean-Luc, the local instructor and tandem flights operator, is not very interested in anyone who is not a paying student: when I asked him for a site briefing, seconds after handing up my club membership fee, he told me not to land on the beach in the bathing area. That's it. So I asked others who were a great deal more helpful on letting me know where the potential rotar and other turbulent spots were, and the better approaches for landing. In the end that's all that was really needed because it's the easiest flying ever.

The tricky bit is dealing with the venturi effect on the Blow when launching and landing. Beyond a certain point on that part of the sand-dune, the wind is completely horizontal but blowing at 15+ knots. Touch-down is gentle but the moment you try to collapse the canopy then you are dragged backwards. Everyone but the local experts seemed to get caught. I did better than many, thanks for good training from Phil Hysteck. And the f***ing sand gets into everything.

On Friday I had a flight of nearly two hours, happily cruising up and down the sand dunes up to about 275 metres above the ground. On Saturday afternoon I had another flight of about 2.5 hours doing much the same but practicing a lot more various control maneuvers. I only came down because I could feel I was becoming tired and sun-burned, and really needed a drink of water.

Who knows, with a decade or so more experience, I may be as good as Tex, from the Conandale club near Melany, here in this other YouTube video, when he and some friends flew Rainbow Beach about a month ago.

Paragliding Beechmont

I'm progressively getting better at paragliding. I'm still pumped after an excellent flight this afternoon at Beechmont, inland from the Gold Coast. Ridge-soaring and some thermals that kept me up for more than 40 minutes!

Next weekend we'll be up again. These pics taken by my daughter, Grace.

That's me with the orange wing with "silver" trim. Tashi Sherpa has the custom purple wing.

Charles has arrived

My grandson, Charles Francis Fleming, was born last week.

Mother, Lauren, is tired & sore but very happy.

Charles is healthy.

Father, Mitchell, is beside himself.

And I am officially old.

[Wt: 8 lb (3.6Kg) All fingers and toes. Feeding well.]

Queenstown December 8-11

I came to Adventure and Party City with the intention of taking another bungy jump off a high bridge, but that hasn't happened yet. Two days were spent with colleagues from Griffith Uni taking a brief holiday after the conference - main activities: drinking, eating, drinking, bonding, slandering previous heads-of-department, current deans, pro-vice-chancellors and associated sociopaths, and drinking. Worth doing.

Now I've converted an Introduction to Paragliding day into a full course! The Intro day was exhausting. And painful. The day involves learning how to make a safe takeoff, and a relatively safe landing. Takeoff involves racing downhill as fast as you can trying to imitate an angry goose - chest and head down, arms stretched out high behind your back holding on to the glider controls. The result usually is to pull the glider in front of you so that it pulls you over onto your face, or lower one hand/control just slightly so the wing moves suddenly to one side and lifts/pulls you over like a judo throw so you trip and tumble. Eventually you get it right, and like all things that require practice it seems to be quite natural, and you leave the ground. This is when you start to learn how to land. With the beginners' hill you're never more than a metre off the ground so landing is really about just continuing to run fiercely downhill. As you improve you move to the higher steeper training hill and you glide further and then learn that landing is about using the controls/breaks properly so that you don't continue to land face first. Helmets are good. With each learning experience you get the opportunity to contemplate how improvement can be made as you gather up the glider and the lines, very carefully just so, in order not to get them tangled, plus the harness and carry the whole lot back up the hill. The hill is steep to begin with but seems to get higher and steeper as the day goes on. With my final run I had a great takeoff and then landed nicely, then had to carry everything back about 300 metres over boggy ground, long grass and then the hill. I didn't feel like doing much of anything else for the rest of the day.

The second day of gliding was so much easier! I'd been threatened with another practice flight or two but other people wanted to get going so we just went straight up to near the top of Coronet Peak. The launch site is the car-park of the ski resort, about 1000 metres above the valley and about 4 Km from the landing zone where I'd been practicing the day before. Launch can't be done half-heartedly or hesitantly - one has to commit. And the result is exhilarating.

I had three flights from Coronet Peak that day and improved each time. In constant radio contact with either the launch instructor or the landing instructor (well I could hear them, they couldn't hear me) I was talked through basic turning so I can comfortably do 360 degree turns, figure eights, and proper weight balancing and trimming the wing as I went through thermals. It's all about relaxing, not trying to fight the wing. Thrilling.

No flying today. After driving around to two different launch sites the day was cancelled because of poor wind conditions. My course is interrupted for a day but the paragliding business is hurt too. The company's bread & butter is tandem flights for Queenstown tourists. Ten bookings had to be cancelled today - about $2000.

Hopefully I'll be able to complete my course in the next two days. Time is running out before I have to head for Christchurch and then home to Brisbane.

Oin a theeratishun now!

The ANZMAC conference in Dunedin, New Zealand, was a lot better than expected. I arrived a couple of days earlier to attend the Doctoral Colloquium with one of my PhD students, Jannie Adamsen. Jannie found it all really helpful to meet with other Doctoral candidates, potential examiners and professors who may be able to offer advise. It was fun for me too. Good to see how other candidates tackle their problems and how other supervisors manage. Some students were doing trivial rubbish, some were trying to solve all ultimate questions at once, and some were doing stuff that could be really useful.

And It was really gratifying to not hear a single mention of the "five chapters model" for a PhD - a rigid template approach that seems to me is designed for witless students, and supervisors with zero abstract thinking skills.

The good people at CENGAGE (was Thomson Learning) had set up a big display featuring the new Marketing Research text book I've written with Steve Ward (Lead) and Ben Lowe. It looks like we've succeeded in gaining quite a few new adoptions for the text too.

My two papers were well received. One even won the Best Paper award in the Marketing Theory stream. That was quite a surprise and quite a buzz. The paper was on the application of Chaos/Complexity theory in modelling Word of Mouth processes - evidence perhaps that time-wasting and fiddling about on a computer can come of something.

First two days in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is a wonderful country! I'm here for only a week and my dear friend Amal KarunaRatna, with whom I started my PhD program with about 20 years ago, is my host.

It's also a poor country. Crippled by a constant war between the Singhalese Sri Lankans and the Tamil Tigers in the North for the country, plus inept and corrupt government and inefficient bureaucracy, the country has only rudimentary basic infrastructure: roads, schools, and other services. Bureaucrats are so poorly paid that things get done only when they're bribed, or they're commanded to by their bosses, who have been bribed. Teachers and hospital employees are terribly poorly paid. Today our driver, Mohinda, was picked on by a tired and frustrated police officer and was fined 1000 Rupees (about $13), about two day's pay. To take care of the fine, we had to go to one place to get the forms to fill out, then another place to actually hand over the cash, and a third place to recover the driver's license that was confiscated to ensure the fine was paid. These offices were blocks apart.

Of course the situation was not helped with the terrible tsunami in December 2004. Last evening we drove past the railway line section that was washed away, causing a train to overturn, killing 1000 people. We're staying at a seaside resort hotel near the Southern city of Galle (pronounced Gawl) where there are still the remains of destroyed boats, and the cracked foundations of buildings that were washed away that day. This hotel has rebuilt or refurbished most of the ground and first floors. No one knows how many thousands of people died from that tsunami. It must have been terrible. The famous cricket grounds at Galle are still under repair. Despite the donations of cricket fans around the world and the special campaigning from the Australian team, little money has yet arrived to finish the job. Fortunately, the reconstruction of villages has been good, and a campaign to build and supply replacement fishing boats to villages around the country has been very successful. More importantly, the sense of community in all of the villages has helped the shattered lives of those who lost family, or were orphaned. The people have shown extraordinary resilience.

I was privileged this afternoon to visit Mohinda's village and meet his two beautiful children, plus his aunt, who brought him up, and cousin, whom he calls his brother, plus various other children, family members and friends. I couldn't really follow who was what. And that was the point - when Mohinda's wife was dying last year, people from all over the village came to help take care of the children and his wife when Mohinda was had to work and was unable to be there. This is not just because Mohinda is so well respected and well liked in the area, this is the normal and expected thing here. At least in the villages and towns.

This post must seem awfully bleak. But the country is definitely not like that at all. The people are friendly and helpful and always smiling. And despite the poverty, they are extraordinarily generous. Most villages have little traveller's booths on the edge of the village where people can have food and drink at no cost. It's simply a responsibility taken on by the village to help others who are on a pilgrimage. It's a part of the Buddhist philosophy that has been a part of the Sri Lankan culture for more than 2000 years.

And the food is fantastic!

More very soon.

Gallipoli

I took a couple of days off to see Gallipoli, the site of the WWI fiasco that killed thousands of Australians and New Zealanders (and French and Canadians, and Britons) in a useless attempt to capture some territory held by Turkish forces so as to control the Bospherus Strait, linking he Mediterranean to the Black Sea.

Many more Turks also were killed, so it's of great importance to them as well. More importantly, the Turkish defense was commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, the man who soon after lead the Young Turks movement, essentially a political rebellion against the old military guard, that created a united Turkey. Ataturk saw that long prosperity for Turkey lay with the progressive West rather than with the East. So the story of Gallipoli is something that all Turkish children learn about.

Kemal Ataturk; (Inscription on Gallipoli Memorial put up by Turkey in 1934, also on Ataturk Memorial at Tarakina Bay, Wellington.)

"Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well."

Conference in Braga, Portugal

From Braga, Portugal

I probably didn't give Braga, Portugal, a fair chance. After all, the VirtualTtourist website lists the 800-year-old city as one of the beautiful cities in the world. It also says that in a very religiously conservative country the people of Braga are the most conservative, verging on fanatical. It certainly showed up in the city's total lack of any nightlife - I went searching for a cafe or bar where there would be people listening to music and talking. There simply aren't any. Maybe it's just that I was in Academic conference mode.

The food served at the conference dinners was interesting though. The staple seems to be dried salted codfish, reconstituted in water or milk, served on beans, or inside a pastry, or on bread. And of course thinly sliced ham. That's it. Even then perhaps I'm not being fair. Salt cod (water), salt cod (milk), in pastry (three kinds), on bread, mixed into beans (three kinds), sliced ham, tomatoes, cucumbers. Think through all the permutations and combinations and you could go for weeks without having the same meal twice.

The conference however was a great deal better than I expected. An ineresting highlight was a recital from the University of Minho's Society Tuna, a medieval-style singing troupe. They were very entertaining.

Madrid & Barcelona

Madrid and Barcelona were way too rushed. I spent too much time messing about making arrangements for trains and flights to and from places and too little time just enjoying the places themselves. Anyway, I did get to see some of the wonderful architecture of Gaudi in Barcelona: Park Guell, Casa Batllo, and the cathedral, La Sagrada Familia - still under construction.

I got lost in Madrid trying to reach the Prada Museum via the back streets and instead found, in short order, the red-light district, some very up-market apartments, and the financial district where I stumbled into an art gallery just opening an exhibition of neo-realist photography spanning the fascist periods of Spain and Italy through to the late'50s.

I should have slept on the train from Madrid to Barcelona but instead spent most of the night in the dining car with a Peruvian family man with a US green card who takes a class in Madrid every Friday for his accounting qualification, a Canadian IT specialist on his way to the PARTY island of Ibiza, and a Tennessee grad-student here to improve his Spanish. The Canadian was trying very hard to persuade one or all three of a group of 20-something purty young thangs (all business/marketing grads, so I shut up) to join him in his rented apartment on Ibiza.

In the Barcelona streets I found the markets where all manner of seafood that I've never seen before were on sale, butcher shops offered beef and lamb and pork, with detailed descriptions of each animal's feeding, age, and location of their farms, and of course so many varieties of fruit and vegetables. Street performers included a troupe of Ecuadorian singers and dancers, and a quartet of tango dancers, all fabulous. I sat in one of the dozens of outdoor cafes in the warm evening air of the boulevard La Rambla for real Paella washed down with about a litre or so of sangria, which has the delightful effect of having no effect, until you stand up. All the bars were packed with tourists and locals watching the futbol game between FCBarcelona and the other Barcelona team that no-one supported.

Less than a block from my hostel, hidden at the end of an alley I found a lovely old cathedral, the Basilica del Pi, in which that night there was a concert of Spanish guitar masterpieces by Manuel Gonzales "considered the leading guitarist of Spanish music". It was great, technically perfect, but I prefered some of the same pieces in the tougher rural Spanish/ Italian manner of Joe Petane, a wonderful old friend of my father, who still plays despite failing health.

So now I've just arrived in Braga, Portugal, to attend a conference. It's only been a couple of hours so I can't report much, but you can't say anything bad about a country where a bottle of beer costs less than a can of softdrink.

Habdallah

From Last days in ...

I succeeded in my first solo crossing of a Cairo street today, and I rode four times in a Cairo taxi in the last two days. So, having faced death, it's time to move on to another challenge. Off to Madrid where the Basque separatists have just announced that their "permanent ceasefire" has expired and they're all set to restart their campaigns.

I'm in the cafeteria at Cairo airport. Like all airports, it's a monopolist's paradise - I've just paid the same for a bottle of water as I paid for two people to share a huge lunch earlier in the day.

From Last days in ...

My guide and friend, Mr Ibrahim, took me for a walk through some parts of old Cairo yesterday afternoon and today. Wonderful history of course, most of which went in one ear and out the other. Not that I was uninterested, but it's hard to keep track of which sultan built which grand mosque to honour which brother he had murdered in order to gain the sultanate most of an millennium ago. I'll need to do some reading. Some of these magnificent buildings are being repaired - past due after 600, 900, and 1200 years. Today I was fortunate enough to be invited to climb up to the top of two of the minarets (baksheesh is expected). They're tall and narrow and the railings are not much above knee high, so it required a bit of nerve, but they do offer a fabulous view of the landscape below and across the city.

From Last days in ...

Yesterday also was the anniversary of the end of the 1967 war with Israel. Mr Ibrahim had been picked out of the people sitting in a cafe to give a Vox-Pop comment for Al Jazeera Television. His comments were to be expected: the Israelis, supported by an ignorant and fearful US, don't play fair. And Ibrahim is no zealot. He has been told that, even though he is an enemy of the people, he will be protected by some of his neighbours when the revolution comes because he has been so helpful and friendly towards the young people in his neighbourhood. The Islamic Brethren seems to be keen to move Egypt back to the 16th century as a caliphate. These power-hungry hypocrites seem to be gaining some support from the disaffected, angry young men of Egypt who have been let down by an over-stretched education system and a job market that offers little hope for those with little education or skills. And inequity is very clear: They must watch in amazement as I happily spend a days wages on a bottle of soft-drink. TV is constantly showing classic B&W movies from the 1950's, the heyday of Egyptian cinema, which show happy young people, well-dressed in Western garb, dealing with university, choosing a career, home-making and looking forward to a prosperous Egypt. Surely they must ask, "Why don't I have this?" But it's only a tiny minority that seems to harbour any resentment towards tourists, foreigners or even Americans.

Over the last two weeks I've walked and sat and eaten in some places that most people I know would regard as pretty dodgy, and I've never in any way felt uncomfortable or in any danger. (Okay, in an Aswan tea shop a man did rather assertively help himself to my fresh bottle of water.) Indeed I think that just about everywhere I went I met and talked with all sorts of people who were genuinely good honest caring folk. It's been a real pleasure.

Yet another change of plans

From Diving in Dahab

I'm staying an extra day in Dahab. I ate with the professional dive instructors from my dive shop last night and I was invited to a party tonight: a local restaurant has just recruited a former student of Jamie Oliver and this is his opening show. Why not stay? I miss a day in Cairo, and almost certainly loose any opportunity to easily take a day-trip to Alexandria. An excursion I'll have to look forward to for the next trip.

From Diving in Dahab

I made two more dives yesterday, this time armed with an underwater camera borrowed from the dive shop. I've posted some of the results to the online picture gallery:

From Diving in Dahab

But I've probably finished my diving for a little while. My ears and sinus's were taking a beating, so better to let it go for a bit. So now I'm just taking walks along the shore. Life's pretty tough.

From Diving in Dahab

Dahab on the Red Sea

I'd seen just about all of the amazing temples and monuments that I could handle for the moment so I made a spur of the moment decision to change my plans and take the plane from Luxor to Sharm El Sheikh on the night of the 29 May. My booking agent in Cairo and the people at the Luxor airport couldn't have been more helpful. They cancelled my train trip and hotel and bus for the next two days and rearranged to have me collected at 12:30am in Sharm El Sheikh and driven the 120 Km to Dahab. This has saved me more than two days of travelling and sitting about, and give me more time near the Red Sea and back in Cairo. Service and courtesy towards tourists in Egypt is very good. If they could get the toilets to work it would be great.

So here I am in Dahab, about half way down the East coast of the Sinai Peninsular. On a clear night you can see the lights of a Saudi city that no-one around here seems to know the name of. The Red Sea is THE place in the world to enjoy scuba diving. Here in Dahab I can literally walk 20 paces down the beach from the dive shop, part of an hotel complex, and drop into an other world of corals and fish and colour and wonder. Tonight is my second full day (3rd night) in Dahab and I've already taken five dives, each with different depths and challenges (underwater navigation, deep dive with nitrogen narcosis test, etc.). Tomorrow I'll take two more and then I'll have my Advanced Open Water ticket which entitles me to endanger myself in deeper and more difficult ways. Features so far have been sites like The Caverns, which involves transferring from the shallow beach-side water to deep water through a series of passageways through and under a coral ceiling, and Blue Hole, where the one-metre deep water, ten metres from the beach, drops like a cliff edge to 110 metres. (You don't go to the bottom - you would die). Then we glided over a relatively shallow saddle in the coral to the open water where the depth rapidly goes to 800 metres and the coral wall is filled with all types of creatures, including some very large groper, millions of tiny multicoloured reef fish, plus sweet-lip, parrot-fish, lion-fish, moray eels, barracuda, rays, anemones, soft and hard corals. It's just fabulous.

I've just finished a very pleasant meal of Egyptian salad and babaganoush whilst sitting on Persion rugs in the open air under a full moon with reflections on the calm waters of the Red Sea. Life is good.

Aswan to Luxor via Fallouccah

Rushed for the first part but wonderfully relaxing after. The 3:30am start to drive 300Km to Abu Simbel was a pain. Wonderful temple, incredible feat of engineering to move it up the hill away from the waters of the Aswan dam an' all, but was it worth the time and heat and fatigue? Not really. Still, I suppose I can now say that I've done it and seen it.

The two day ride down the Nile in a felloucca was just magical. I was so tired after the train ride and the early start the day before that I was exhausted so time spent just lying about and watching the scenery and chatting with some very interesting fellow travellers, or learning from our host, Captain Mohammed, and his regular visits with mates along the way.

An interesting side trip was a visit to the once-a-week camel markets in Darow - the largest in Egypt - where camels are brought in from Sudan 1500Km over 45 days for sale to traders, farmers, racers and butchers. (A young eating camel goes for LE4000, a racing camel for LE6000, a working camel for LE8000, and a mother and calf for LE12000)

My fellow travellers included Devin, an American pharmaceuticals sales rep taking a year off, Maria, a Melbourne fashion buyer on her way to visit with relatives in Greece, Robert and Elleanor, two Londoners taking a late honeymoon, and a French couple who rarely said anything.

Not being able to bath for two days and all sleeping in the open on the boat is probably not the best for many people but we all enjoyed it. Pooh pooh to those Agatha Christie wanna-be's on board those giant stink-boat castles - them with their air-conditioned ensuited private rooms, roof-top pools, and bars serving ice-cold beer. They weren't experiencing the true Egypt as we were. The bastards.