The latest generation of X-ray machines being used to scan checked baggage in the US will apparently fog films. It’s probably only a matter of time before everyone is using these systems, so start carrying your films in your hand luggage. And even then, take them out if they want to re-scan your bag. Info on Kodak’s site.

South Africa’s sleeper trains used to be famous. The Premier Classe is a luxury silver service sleeper train, running on a couple of routes out of Cape Town and Johannesburg. There’s nothing like this in the Antipodes, in fact you’d probably have to catch something like the Orient Express to get the same sort of experience anywhere else in the world (there is actually a network of even fancier sleeper trains in SA, called the Blue Train; I don’t know what you get for your money on those, but I can only imagine they’re very nice).

Cape Town train station is busy and noisy, much like you’d expect a third world train station to be, actually. The long-haul buses arrive there too, and there’s a market on the corner outside. Never fear, though, for the intrepid long-distance traveller the Premier Classe has its own lounge where passengers wait for the train in comfort, while being served food and drinks. When you get on board the train your bags are waiting for you, in your cabin with your name on the door. If I sound a little cynical about all this, it’s mostly because I found the whole experience a bit otherworldly. I hadn’t realised it was still possibly to travel like this, at least not without coughing up for a first class ticket with someone like Emirates. I could definitely get used to it, though…

Leaving Cape Town, we were talking to a man who’d lived there his whole life, and was pointing out lots of interesting things. A consequence of this was me taking many photos that I now can’t recall the significance of: never mind, it was still fun. It seems to be a universal rule of train tracks that they exit cities via the least attractive route. In Cape Town that meant a smattering of shanty towns (sorry, either informal settlements or townships, depending how much infrastructure they have), abandoned industrial sites, and ugly housing developments. There were some more attractive suburbs poking their heads through, however.

The landscape out through the back of Cape Town is nothing short of dramatic. Jagged peaks, Table Mountain’s little brothers and sisters, thrust almost straight out of a flat plain, tall enough for each to collect its own personal cloudbank. Every vista out the train window had at least one of these monoliths forming the background. Gradually we left the city behind and rose up into the hinterland. The Cape region gets its rain over winter: while we where there it was high summer and the inland parts were very very dry. It was as we climbed into the interior through the gathering dusk that we had one of the most magical experiences of the whole trip. Midway through the five-course dinner, with the view outside a rolling scrubland, there he was: a gemsbok, minding his own gemsbok business until my wife’s highly trained bok-spotting eyes chanced upon him.

Gemsbok (with the “g” to be pronounced as a throat-clearing noise, by the way) are the most beautiful bucks, with long straight horns and sharp colours. Seeing one in the wild out the window of a train was very exciting, and we had to restrain our enthusiasm lest the other passengers think we were odd. Although we were the only foreigners on the train, so the other passengers probably just assumed we were odd anyway. I noticed the lack of tourists when I caught the Overlander in New Zealand too: do people not catch trains when they visit other countries?

I don’t want to spend forever harping on about the Premier Classe, although it was very nice and I do recommend it. South Africa in general does service very well, and the people on the train were excellent even by that standard. Overnight, the train goes back down to the coast: previously it used to follow the Garden Route to Port Elizabeth, but since a major washout along that way it now turns back inland to Oudtshoorn (pronounced something like “Oudstroon”, with the Afrikaans rolled “r”), so you wouldn’t see the sea unless you stayed up pretty late. When you wake up in the morning you’re back in the fynbos, and after breakfast you pass through a spectacular red-rocked gorge, with cliffs that reach out over the train track in places. The only real deficiency of the Premier Classe service is that they don’t tell you much about the countryside you’re passing through. I have no idea what that gorge is called. There was still plenty of wildlife to be seen, I’m not sure that the ostrich farms count, but birds of prey and stotting springboks certainly do. The prickly pear farms were interesting, also. Eucalyptus trees are everywhere in the arid parts of South Africa: seeing a farmhouse with a few tall eucs in the yard is a positively disorienting experience if you’ve spent much time in Australia. They are a weed, in case you were entertaining any doubt. South Africa, southern Australia and New Zealand form an unholy trinity of weed-species-swapping.

As the day wore on we began to descend back towards the coast, with many a whiff of hot train brakes (I’m not complaining, I quite like that smell: funny how it’s so distinctive, though). The track began to run alongside the road, and people in cars were waving as they went past, just as people had waved from back yards as we passed through the small villages inland. Port Elizabeth is another one of those towns that presents its least attractive side to incoming trains, and to add insult to injury the station in Port Elizabeth is situated underneath a snarl of motorway overpasses, where distinctly under-employed looking groups of guys hang out. You get the private-lounge Premier Classe treatment at your destination, too, but we weren’t there for long. Someone came to pick us up and take us to magical Kasouga…

Pics on flickr

Thirty-six hours of travel, twenty-two of them in flight, landed us tired, smelly and jet-lagged in the noisy chaos of Cape Town airport. Cape Town airport is supposed to have been renovated for the soccer world cup, but in that case someone should tell the scaffolding guys to take their stuff home. Cape Town domestic was full of dust, people and a hot gusty wind; eventually we found our pick-up and left.

Cape Town is actually quite a big city, but its heart, and the bit most people think of, is the area around Table Mountain and the waterfront. Being a sub-tropical city perched beside a cold sea (the Agulhas current runs past the Cape, and it’s cold, less than 15 degrees Celsius most of the time) Cape Town has weather like Auckland on crack; different every day, changing in hours or minutes from grey and rainy to pounding tropical sunshine.  Table Mountain itself looms over it all like a mad sandcastle, or something rejected from the Mordor set for looking unrealistic. Topping out at a smidgen over 1000 metres tall, you could have breakfast at Cape Town’s thoroughly urban waterfront and be on top of the mountain for lunch if you were even moderately ambitious.  The last 700 metres is almost vertical, the slope itself scattered with blocks of stone fallen from the cliffs higher up.  Clouds swirl and boil around its edges and ravines every time the wind changes, including the famous tablecloth. Lion’s Head Rock makes for an equally-improbable sentinel, although if we’re talking lifelike rock formations the lion’s backside is more realistic than its head: oddly enough, that bit is called Signal Hill.

The tablecloth was down when we took the cable car to the top of the mountain, although we still got good views on the way up, and an otherworldy experience walking around on the Mountain’s flat top. The view is interesting: despite its importance as a port, Cape Town doesn’t have a natural harbour. Ships waiting to dock just anchor out in the bay, and the port itself is composed of artificial piers. Not far out in the bay is Robben Island, where Mandela was so famously imprisoned (note for young players: if you want to take a trip to Robben Island, you need to book well in advance, like we didn’t). The Mountain itself (and the other peaks in the area) is composed of extremely hard grey sandstone, uplifted from the seafloor in relatively recent geological times. Unsurprisingly it’s studded with fossils and strange inclusions.

Being good biology geeks, we also did Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens, and being New Zealand biology geeks we spent a lot of time going “hey, that’s a weed!”. They weren’t of course, rather they were plants native to the incredibly diverse Cape flora that have done rather well for themselves in other parts of the world. Agapanthus is from the Cape, for instance.

Getting around in Cape Town was interesting. As tourists, we like to walk to see the sights. Apparently white people don’t walk in South Africa; the pedestrians in Cape Town were overwhelming black. Actually I have more to say on this, but it’s a topic for another post. Public transport isn’t great. Ten years ago the taxi-van drivers were engaged in a pitched war (bombs, shootings) with the bus drivers, the upshot of which is no local bus services other than a couple of tourist-oriented circular routes. Locals get around by driving, or in South Africa’s famous taxi-vans (if they’re poor) or taxis (if they’re well-off). The taxi-vans are commonly referred to as “black taxis” and although they have a somewhat dubious reputation, the single one we caught wasn’t bad; unlike a proper taxi you negotiate the price up front, which I  quite like. Cape Town in generally felt fairly safe: my better half used to live near Johannesburg, and she got twitchy a couple of time by force of habit, but to me it felt the same as any other city. Keep your brain half-way switched on and your eyes open, and you should be fine. On a related note, though, lots of the  natural attractions that Cape Town is famous for aren’t in town at all. If we’d stayed longer, or if we go back, a hire car seems like a good idea.

I’m interested by the smell of new countries. The area around Cape Town had an amazing smell, wild and pungent and animal. I would have said it was the smell of millions of wildebeest and every other animal that stalks the human subconscious, but when we got more into wildebeest subconscious-stalking country it wasn’t there. So I don’t know where it came from, but it certainly made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and said “Africa!” to me in no uncertain terms.

We left Cape Town on the silver-service Premier Classe sleeper train, bound for Port Elizabeth.

Update: pics on flickr.

Back from Africa, and you’ll get a more substantial post once my body clock agrees with the assertion that I’m in New Zealand.

In the meantime, go and buy this. I’ve been collecting rough cuts of these songs since Ellis started putting them on his website, and everyone I’ve played them for has found something to like. You can even listen to them for free first to whet your appetite. Go on; I’ll wait.

Duty free will be confiscated if you attempt to take it through international transit. Welcome to Australia… The Perth skyline makes a dramatic silhoutte against the sinking sun. In the other direction the low forest runs right up to the end of the runway, and the perspective stretches unbroken to the horizon. I’d forgotten how incredibly flat Western Australia is.

Past midnight New Zealand time, and another 4 hours until our plane leaves at almost midnight Perth time. Racing the dawn half-way around the world until we land in Africa.

Some dairy farmers in Canterbury want to start cage-farming cattle. Federated Farmers are as usual right behind their men, possibly because agreeing with the Greens would cause an ideological feedback loop that could blow their tiny minds apart.

Grrrr.

Do these people not read? New Zealand’s international reputation for being clean and green and cuddling fluffy ducklings while happy cows tap-dance around lush green fields is crumbling like a pile of manure left out in the rain. That reputation is a major point of difference that our export sector use to differentiate themselves in markets that are geographically remote, and flooded with competition. It is worth money. With the way information now sloshes from one side of the globe to the other in a matter of hours, it’s becoming obvious to consumers in Europe that we’re actually carbon-belching river-polluting freeloaders, and now these clowns want to provide pictures of cows living in cages for the Guardian to put beside an article about food miles? Remind me again about how F F are supposed to be looking after the interests of their members?

There’s a local consumer angle to this, too. It’s taken years, but finally you can buy free-range bacon and chicken at the supermarket, while free-range eggs are now practically a mainstream choice. If New Zealand farmers start keeping cows in cages, I don’t want to buy the resulting products. Will bottles of milk and blocks of cheese be labelled as to the type of farm they came from? I doubt it. Fonterra are a monopoly producer who treat milk as a bulk commodity. The nearest any of their products come to point-of-origin labelling is handful of boutique lines based on A2 milk (update: actually the A2 milk isn’t theirs, see the comments).

Surely it’s time we had more than one dairy company in this country? And maybe some representatives from the farming community who had more than two brain cells to rub together?

Enough is enough. I’m sick of it, do you hear? Every time I turn on the radio or open a newspaper I’m confronted by some idiot politician or half-wit commentator making some stupid comparison between New Zealand and Australia, invariably at New Zealand’s expense. Generally this is followed up with the immortal threat about everyone leaving here to go there. Well, I’ve done that and come back, and I think it’s a bloody stupid comparison. If you want somewhere to compare New Zealand to, try New Caledonia. Or Jamaica. Or even Ireland. Any post-colonial island nation would make a better comparison than Australia, and they aren’t even our closest neighbour (and we certainly aren’t theirs). Here are nine whole significant reasons why Australia is not New Zealand. Anyone who wants to compare the two countries needs to come up with good reasons why most of these aren’t important.

Money

Australia is rich. Not the kind of rich that you get by fiddling with the fine details of your tax system, but the kind of rich you get by being up to your eyeballs in mineral wealth. If you extracted all the iron, aluminium, uranium, and gemstones from Australian soils and dumped them on top of New Zealand, we’d sink down into our subduction zone never to be seen again. And that’s not to mention fossil fuels. I don’t think any ports in New Zealand have freighters lined up out to sea ready to take on cargo, but that’s what happens off Newcastle every day of the week.

Taxes

Unlike all the numpties who witter on about this, I’ve lived in Australia and filled out tax returns there. Australian tax rates are as high as New Zealand’s (I think the highest rate is higher, not that I ever paid that) but you can’t just take that at face value because their system is way more complicated. There’s the tax-free threshold, that effectively slides all the tax brackets upwards. Ordinary wage-earners can claim all sort of slightly dishonest stuff back on their yearly tax return, including the fee of the accountant who helped them fiddle their return the year before (yes, it’s formalised Jobs For The Boys: imagine the stink if someone suggested that in NZ). Being a registered business in Oz is relatively simple and requires no overheads if you’re not actively trading: I’m still registered, even though it’s four years since I last wrote an invoice.

But it doesn’t stop there. Australian life is full of fees that are effectively taxes, even though they go by different names. Under 25 years of age and live in NSW? It’ll cost you about $800 just to register a car. Doing a return trip to Sydney airport from the north of the city will cost you the better part of $20 in tolls (unless you want to go the back way, which will cost you about 3 hours of your life). Australian banks charge even worse fees than New Zealand banks. Flying out of Sydney Airport costs $70 in departure taxes, and $7 per head to use the train station (update for clarity: $7/head is the “gate charge” for the airport station, because it was recently built; the actual train ticket is on top of that). Parks in NSW charge per day for entry (and not just a gold coin donation, either). All of which skims over the largest and most frightening Australian cost-that-isn’t-a-tax:

Liability

New Zealand’s ACC scheme is really very good. No, seriously, it’s really very good. You can argue the details of funding and eligibility all you like, but the real magic of a system like ACC is that it protects individuals and businesses from liability. If you have an accident and injure yourself on business premises in Australia, that business is liable for your medical costs. Even if it wasn’t their fault. Even if you say yourself that if wasn’t their fault: your medical expenses are going to come out of somebody’s hide, so get busy suing the entity with a legal liability. A friend of a friend broke her back riding a horse with a small firm, and was forced to sue them to cover her (considerable) medical expenses. They were bankrupted by the case, and the business no longer exists. When I was labouring on a building site in Sydney, my boss charged me out a $35 and hour, and every hour paid $6 of that to his insurance company to indemnify himself against me getting injured (the scheme is called Workcover and is a shining example of why privatising ACC won’t work). That $800 car registration is composed in large part of third-party injury insurance: potential medical expenses for people in other cars (it doesn’t even cover the driver of the registered car!).

The reason all this ends up being so expensive is that it’s not actually injury insurance, it’s liability insurance: protection from being sued. Guess what the second most litigious state in the world is, after California? Nope, you’re wrong: it’s New South Wales. Where no public scheme for treating injury or damages exists, then morally and financially people have to have a legal right to sue. It’s a terrifying system, it costs a fortune and woe betide anyone stuck on the wrong side of it (see the horse-riding business above).

Federalism

Want bureaucracy? I fell over myself laughing when the ACT party propaganda I got in the mail before the last election said that reducing bureaucracy had been successful in Australia (then I burned the leaflet, buried the ashes at a crossroads, and disinfected my eyeballs, just in case). Here are the levels of governance that most Australians live under: shire (local) council, city/regional council, state government, federal house of representatives, senate. Each of those layers is a real governing body with real power to affect lives. And that’s not counting extra overlapping layers like transport authorities and police (state and federal for each).

In fact calling Australia a nation is almost only true by a technicality. It’s a genuine federation with a high degree of power and autonomy for each state (with the exception of Territories, which are controlled and funded from Canberra: the Northern Territory stays that way because it would go broke as a State). Each state loves its paperwork, and the structure of government means that federal laws and regulations supplement state laws rather than replacing them. Does your brain hurt yet? Bear in mind that while laws are laws, regulations require someone to notice and care in order to enforce them. So while (for instance) Australia has Federal emmissions regulations for cars, 90% of cars on Australian roads would probably fail the tests that were in force when they were new.

If the same degree of autonomy applied in New Zealand, Auckland would have gone ahead and built the original vision of the Harbour Bridge, complete with enough lanes for the next 50 years and provision for walking. That’s exactly what happened with the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a hugely ambitious project where they continued building right through the Depression, defaulting on loans from England and running the state on cash when the Federal government came with lawyers to freeze their bank accounts (it’s a fascinating story, I’ll see if I can find the relevant documentary on Youtube). Find it hard to imagine that happening in New Zealand? Me too.

History

New Zealand was one of the last places on Earth to be settled by humans. Australia has a local culture that stretches back over 40 000 years. Even if you only consider European history, the contrasts between New Zealand and Australia are marked, and quite fascinating. The convict story is well know, of course. What’s not well known outside Australia is how badly prepared those convict settlers were. They nearly died. To be precise, they nearly starved to death: they were so woefully prepared that they tried to plant their crops in April, the southern hemisphere autumn. There’s a whole lot of extra stuff behind this, to do with England’s class war of the time and prison hulks bursting at the seams on the Thames. New Zealand was settled from England slightly later, and they tried to set up a little middle-class English paradise in the South Seas, at least in part via the skullduggery of the Wakefield Company and other profiteers who were, shall we say, economical with the truth.

For all that the Australian federation included (and still includes, actually) provision for New Zealand to join, they were very different places in those days. At roughly the time when the race-based land wars were in full swing in New Zealand, Australia had clashes like the old-fashioned class-war of the Eureka Stockade: both struggles against the English state and aristocracy, if we’re honest, but so different in their context and repercussions. And let’s not forget to compare and contrast the Treaty of Waitangi with the terra nullius bullshit they tried to pull in Oz (I’ll come back to that shortly).

Conservatism

Australia is slow to adopt new things. I’ve mentioned the backwards feeling of Australian rural towns in previous blogging, but the country as a whole doesn’t really embrace change. New Zealand does. Almost every shop in New Zealand has EFTPOS (and it operates in real time), and that happened within about 5 years of it becoming available. New Zealand had (IIRC) the fastest uptake of Internet connections of any country in the world; the very first Internet link came into the country in 1992, and by 2002 well over half the country had access to an internet connection. This is social, too. New Zealand’s Bill of Rights is comprehensive, and came into force in 1990. Australia still doesn’t have a Bill of Rights, nor plans to introduce one as far as I know, in 2009. Religious lunacy has generally been given short shrift in New Zealand public life, but it’s more tolerated in Oz; both Jonathan the Coward and Kevinoseven are publicly Christian in a way that no New Zealand leader has been in recent years.

Xenophobia

There’s no pleasant way to say this. Australia is a rascist country. That’s a fact. I lived in Sydney for nearly five years, and in that time there were two race riots: Redfern and Cronulla. If you follow the news, you probably heard about Cronulla, but you may not have heard much about Redfern. That’s because the rioters in Redfern were brown. Worse, they were indigenous Australians: Aboriginal. They way Australia has treated its native people is truly appalling. Ambiguous legal status until 1967. Subjected to a military occupation “for their own good”, on their own land, in 2007. Lots of people have heard about the Stolen Generation. Fewer people know how the stolen children were selected; they took the kids who looked whiter. Not out of some weirdo idea that those kids would be smarter or should be looked after, no no. They took those kids because they thought they might actually be white, because there was a culture of raping Aboriginal women for entertainment. Within living memory some people in Australia had permits to shoot Aboriginal people. Some did it for fun, without a permit. That’s not to mention the White Australia policy. I’m not making any of this stuff up. It makes me incredibly angry, and it’s one of the reasons I no longer live in Australia.

Wait, I’m not finished yet. Australia isn’t just against you if you’ve got brown skin. The government wasn’t keen on people who talked funny, either. The much-vaunted multiculturalism was a policy of assimilation, not integration. As in “you will be assimilated, resistancee is futile”. Johnny is a Greek but his kids will be Aussies: as it turns out, that’s because Johnny’s kids will get the shit kicked out of them at school if they don’t act like little ocker Aussies PDQ. If you’re ever in Adelaide, go to the migration museum. It’s fascinating and terrifying at the same time (Australia refused entry to Jewish refugees after WW2: oh, the irony, it burns).

This is country that re-elected a Prime Minister on a platform of keeping the brown people out, as recently as 2001. Look up the Tampa affair if you don’t believe me.

Climate

Australia is a desert country. New Zealand is a garden, by contrast. Most of Australia’s land area just isn’t arable, except by extremely extensive stocking (those famous outback farms the size of Belgium, supporting as many cattle as about 2% of Belgium). Droughts in Australia last for years, not months, and they don’t necessarily follow a predictable seasonable cycle. Furthermore, a lot of the land in Australia that should technically be arable is tropical, and history has shown many unlucky punters the hard way that the tropics just don’t support conventional agriculture. You can grow sugarcane or mangos or bananas in the monsoonal tropics, but try and relocate your enterprise from Victoria to the Northern Territory and you’ll find out just how many insects and fungal diseases live in the tropics, and just how voracious they are with no cold season to slow them down. Australia’s tropics are particularly exciting places: a saltwater crocodile in your rice paddy would add an extra dimension of challenge to planting and harvesting.

People who live in temperate countries (like all the commentators comparing New Zealand to Australia) don’t appreciate what really hot places are like. I didn’t live in tropical Australia, but I had the misfortune to try and deal with Queenslanders a few times… don’t expect to get anything out of Queensland over summer. All the denizens are collapsed near a beach, sucking languidly on XXXX(**) and waiting until April to sort out that order.

And then there’s the bushfires.

Wages

Leaving the best until last. Australians wages are higher than New Zealand’s, it’s true. Until recently I would have said that cost of living was higher too, but with the amount of rent I’m paying in Auckland I’m no longer sure about that. Anyway: we hear a lot about closing the wage gap with Australia. No problem guys, do you have a time machine? No? Well you can borrow mine for the purposes of illustrating the point. Swirly FX and Doctor Who music…

Once upon a time, actually for years and years, wages in NZ and Oz level pegged. Not only was the average wage basically the same, but they rose neck-and-neck. There may have been pockets here and there where you could earn a lot more (in the mines, for instance) but basically in 1990 you could hop the ditch in either direction and not expect too much of a pay cut. In 1991 New Zealand got the Employment Contracts Act, and wage growth stopped dead. For ten long years, average real wages in NZ barely moved at all, while Oz went into a huge economic boom and wages continued to grow as fast as they ever had. “Closing the wage gap with Australia” means reeling in that ten-year difference, with interest, at a time when the Australian economy is still going great guns, while New Zealand continues to begrudge every penny that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line of our favourite monopolist… Do I sound unconvinced? I am. Not that Australian politicians are much better, but they don’t need to be. They just need to stay on the horse’s back. If NZ really wants to close the wage gap, we need to catch a horse, and a faster horse at that.

(**)A liquid almost, but not entirely, completely unlike beer.

Via Worldchanging:

The thing that struck me (as it has before) is that no-one in Europe wears a helmet.  I don’t use my bike for transport as often as I should, and one of the minor irritants behind that is what to do with the helmet when I get where I’m going.

It’s illegal to ride a bike in New Zealand without a helmet. Largely this stems from a campaign by a woman whose son was paralysed after being hit by a car, but in hindsight a campaign aimed at car drivers might have made more sense. I know of a trauma surgeon in Wellington hospital who refuses to wear a helmet. He claims to have seen too many cases where they did more harm that good. Wearing a helmet also makes cycling a much sweatier experience in New Zealand’s humid cities.

Having started young, I feel naked on a bike without a helmet. But I increasingly see the perceived danger as being from cars, rather than the likelihood of a fall. And you need something like a motorbike helmet to properly guard against those kinds of impacts. I don’t really know where this line of though leads, but it’s alive and well and living in my head.

I’ve just imported all the posts from my old blogger site. That’s everything before October 2008 in the archives.

So if you wanted to, you could go through those old posts and use subtle cues to plot the mental state of someone living far from home and doing a PhD. Just don’t tell me about it, because I was there.

Ariana Osborne. I’m not entirely certain what Ariana does, other than make Warren Ellis look good on Teh Interwebs, but her blog is a constant stream of interesting stuff. For design-and-writing-geek values of interesting. Needless to say, I love it.