Welcome to our travel blog. You can email us if you wish at 2albatrosses@tpg.com.au Scroll up from the bottom of the page to follow our recent travels in chronological order, and click on any photo to see it full-size. See the archive at the bottom to view older posts. Happy Reading. Walter & Lee Tuan
We’d barely packed the fish in the freezer when Lee Tuan packed her bags and flew to Milan. There she joined three “old” friends from her Singapore days for a long-planned trip to see some of the sights of Italy.
Follow Lee Tuan’s adventures with her friends Audrey, Anne and Esther, on their Italian tour blog Mama Mia
Baird Bay is special. It’s just one of a myriad of small bays on the coast of Eyre Peninsula, not particularly well-known at that, and with only a tiny settlement of houses and fishermen’s shacks. But what it does have in abundance is X-factor; it’s a place where well-worn clichés like pristine and idyllic really mean something.
From Venus Bay we stopped off on the way to see the strangely beautiful Murphy’s Haystacks, a selectively weathered granitic outcrop standing in broad-acre wheat country. Having decided to end our fishing trip in style, we checked into Baird Bay Ocean Eco Apartments, easily the most salubrious accommodation on the bay (and excellent value for money for the keen fisherman, as each of the two apartments comes with the use of a powered boat moored just a few metres from the front door). Open the door, step on to the sand, hop in the boat and head down the bay – a fisherman’s dream come true.
The modern, stylish, well-appointed apartments constructed of rammed earth and timber are part of an eco tour business built up over the past 15 years or so by a visionary and tenacious couple. What they have created in this remote place is impressive. Each morning during our few days here we could hear different accents on the beach as people from around the world arrived to join a unique and wonderful tour - to swim with sea lions.
Having previously been up close and personal with sea lions, we used our time at Baird’s to, surprise surprise, go fishin’. Baird Bay is a good spot for King George Whiting and Garfish. We were hoping to catch some of the latter, but down the ocean end of the bay where we were located, it was whiting on the bite at dusk each day, so we concentrated on these with pleasing results.
Dinner doesn’t get much better than savouring King George whiting steamed with ginger while looking across the sand onto another spectacular Baird Bay sunset.
Seven days in Venus Bay passed quickly and in what seemed no time at all it was time to move further up the coast. But not before one last dawn visit to Mount Camel Beach, our favourite fishing beach - it rarely lets us down. This time we fished with some renewed and new acquaintances we met at the caravan park – Barb and her husband Tom, Peter and his wife Carol, and Annie and her husband Bob.
Our first baits plunged into the cold ocean water before the sun peeped over the horizon to greet the day. And the fish were waiting. It wasn’t long before the bags of Australian salmon and ocean mullet began to bulge. The mullet at this time of year are big, and delicious eaten fresh. We all caught plenty of these, but none equalled the whopper hauled in by Tom.
The early morning action at the beach doesn’t last long. By 8.30am it was all over, and time to clean the catch, pack our bags into the car and head north. Now with garfish on our minds.
From Cowell we travelled further west across the width of Eyre Peninsula to the coastal town of Elliston, and then north to Venus Bay. We’ve been coming to Venus Bay for a week or so each year for the past few years; it’s a tiny, peaceful settlement on a large, shallow bay connected to the Southern Ocean through a narrow channel between two rocky headlands. The bay itself is very protected and safe, but the entrance to the ocean can be hazardous when the run-out tide clashes with the incoming ocean waves, generating large, sometimes perilous, swell at that point. Only a few weeks ago two young men drowned at the entrance when their boat capsized in the swell after a rope fouled their propeller.
Not having a boat, our preferred fishing spots were nearby Mt Camel surf beach, and the local jetty. In a midnight session on the latter we scored three dozen tommy ruff and trevally, and in a dawn session on the beach we hauled in two dozen big mullet and salmon. The tides are big at this time of year and having neglected to store our gear high enough up on the beach, it was all washed away by a large wave. It wasn’t a pleasant sight seeing our items racing towards the ocean when the wave receded, particularly our camera. Needless to say, the dunking rendered its electronics insensible, but surprisingly in the days since, as it has dried out, it has regained all its faculties. Like us after a big night on the turps.
This morning we were up before dawn again to fish a rocky ledge on the shore of the bay about a 40 minute drive away. We were hoping to score some large flathead, but never saw one all day. But we did land some nice salmon, including a monster that we released back into the water, several garfish, a flounder and again a stack of tommy ruff. Another good day piscatorially speaking.
Of course fish now features big on the menu; crumbed, battered, steamed, stuffed with chilli and ginger and fried. There’s nothing like fresh fish eaten the day it’s caught.
First stop on our fishing trip was the coastal town of Cowell on Eyre Peninsula, about five and a half hours from Adelaide. We fished from the rocks and beach north of nearby Arno Bay to gather a hard-earned bag of tommy ruffs. Dinner was a very nice tommy ruff linguini. The following morning we were on the Cowell jetty just after dawn with our crab nets, in pursuit of blue swimmer crabs.
Located on the shore of shallow Franklin Harbour that is bordered in places by mangroves, Cowell is possibly the best place in the state to catch these delicious crustaceans. We had a good morning, snaring about two dozen of them. Blue swimmer crabs are beautiful looking creatures, although their powerful claws can be a painful trap for the unwary, as I found when I was silly enough to drop my guard for a moment and rapidly felt one of my fingers being crushed. Ouch! It was no easy matter to prise the claw off with a pair of pliers. Blood and Band Aids followed.
Back at our shack, Lee Tuan quickly turned four of the blue swimmers into crab sushi for lunch, and another four into crab soup for dinner last night. And tonight it was stir fried chilli crab on the menu.
Winter in China is cold. But fortunately the worst of it was over this time when I spent February there for my next round of classes. The air in Beijing, while well below zero, was extremely dry and highly charged with static electricity, making for a few painful jolts when things were touched with an outstretched finger. But with a warm coat on, it was actually pleasant walking outside in the late afternoon. On a day off I took the sparkling Beijing subway into the city centre, about 10 km from the hotel, and wandered across Tiananmen Square and around the perimeter of the Forbidden City.
My second class was in Zhejiang province in the city of Hangzhou, considered by many Chinese to be the country’s most beautiful. Like everywhere in China, there are hundreds of construction cranes lording over the sprouting shells of 35 storey apartment blocks, and growing signs of affluence on the roads and in the shops.
When my work in Hangzhou was done, a high speed train glided me to Shanghai where my third and final class was held, also for one week. In a lucky coincidence, my daughter Jane who works as a flight attendant with Emirates Airlines and lives in Dubai in the Middle East, was one of the cabin crew on Emirates’ Saturday flight to Shanghai. We spent a day together wandering around the city centre markets and amongst the skyscrapers of Pudong District, stopping for a coffee and pastry in the cosy cafe on the 4th floor of the English Department store Marks & Spencer, before braving the cold outside one last time.
A pleasant September weekend activity in Adelaide each year is the ‘Bay to Birdwood’ vintage and classic car run. Hundreds of eye-poppingly (is there such a word? – there is now!) restored cars travel in a 70 km long procession from Glenelg on the coast to Birdwood in the Adelaide Hills, home of the classy National Motor Museum. One year it’s the turn of veteran and vintage cars, the next, classic cars from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It’s the largest, most long-standing motoring event for veteran, vintage and early classic vehicles held anywhere in the world.
The 2011 run was for classic cars, and even for non petrol heads like us, it was a great day. The polish and finish on the cars have to be seen to be believed, and with many of the owners dressed in clothing of the relevant period, it was like stepping back into our teenage years (thankfully minus the pimples this time). Swarms of people admired the cars while the period bands played in the central arena. Even Elvis Presley put in an appearance - we hadn’t seen him since Vegas in 2007 and he’s still in pretty good shape with his voice in fine mettle.
Winner of the 2011 award for the best presented car was Peter and Lynda Ninnis of Swan Hill with their magnificent 1958 Ford Skyliner. You can see some more pictures of the cars that made this year’s run here.
Come early September it was time to return to China for my next classes, this time a week in each of Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai. With no wider travel planned this visit, the month passed quickly and I was in Shanghai in what seemed no time at all for the final class, this one in the modern suburb of Songjiang on the city’s outskirts.
On our day off we visited Qibao Ancient Town, originally established a thousand years ago in the Song Dynasty, and now absorbed within the Shanghai metropolitan sprawl about 20 km south-west of the city centre. These days Qibao is a tourist haunt with the usual myriad of trinket, tea, clothing and food snack stalls. We later strolled through the nearby Long Hua Buddhist temple complex, its location marked by an equally impressive tall pagoda opposite the entrance.
But it wasn’t a pleasant day for walking in the heat and humidity, and after returning to the hotel we waited until after dark before venturing out onto the streets again for a return visit to the excellent cafe strip with great Chinese food at prices that would please the most tight-fisted Finance Director, a 30 minute walk away past a lakeside plaza on which hundreds of people were doing their nightly “ballroom” dancing.
We arrived at Berlin’s Tegel Airport a week ago to discover that our Air France flight to Paris was cancelled due to a computer malfunction. We joined the long, glacial queue to get a replacement flight and got to the service desk five hours later! By this time all direct flights to Paris were full, but thankfully two tickets on Lufthansa via Dusseldorf were found for us. In the event we arrived in Paris a few minutes before midnight, much later than planned, but at least on the same day.
We had a fairly lazy week in Paris but made good use of the subway, and our feet, to wander around the city centre and along the banks of the Seine to see the sights and feel the atmosphere. As I did nine years ago, then with our kids in tow, I climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe for the great view down Champs Elysees and across to the Eiffel Tower.
We spent Saturday in hilly Montmartre in north Paris. After a look through the imposing Sacre Coeur Basilica we walked up and down the cafe-lined streets, nipping in and out of patisseries to check the offerings. We finally settled on the crunchy bread rolls, hams and tarts from Le Grenier a Pain, and along with a bottle of French wine and a paper bag of Provence apricots from Le Verger Saint Denis (“A Votre Service Depuis 1947”) near our hotel on Bonne Nouvelle Boulevard, we had the makings of a divine picnic lunch / siesta combo. Not much work was done that afternoon.
We saw two very different concerts in Paris. The first was a violin recital in 13th century Sainte-Chapelle built by Louis IX, a beautiful building with walls almost entirely of stained glass. The second was a Cyndi Lauper concert at Olympia Theatre on Boulevard des Capucines. We wouldn’t ordinarily have gone to a Cyndi Lauper concert but we were intrigued to read that Charlie Musselwhite was in her band, and that she had recently won Billboard’s Blues Album of the Year Award for 2010. It seems that zany Cyndi has made one of the more surprising personal reinventions. The concert was great, the crowd was wild for Cyndi, and as always, Charlie’s harmonica was smokin’.
When the curtain fell, it fell not just on the concert, but on our trip too, for this was our last night in Paris and the last night of our trip generally before heading for home. We stopped en route in Singapore for a day to visit Lee Tuan’s relatives, and had dinner outside by the beach in warm, balmy air overlooking the harbour twinkling with the lights from more large freight ships than you could imagine could be anchored in the one harbour at the same time. Singapore food is the best – we had the mixed satays with peanut sauce, grilled stingray, Singapore noodles, Hainan chicken with rice, and fresh whole coconuts. After saying our goodbyes we headed for the airport, flying out at midnight and arriving in Adelaide at 8am, happy to be home after four months away but less so at crossing paths with Winter.
