Going to Lightning Ridge 2026

Julia’s travels 2026  

Its the first time for ages that I’ve done packing and I’m amazed at how much is technology - four chargers -phone,i-pad, hearing aid pod and watch. It seems excessive. Anyway we got under way after a night in at Finn’s place and set off for Mudgee, stopping for lunch at a curious little place called “29 nine 99 Yum Cha and Tea House”that specialised in dumplings. It was run, rather surprisingly, by two nice old ladies whose welcome seemed imbued with determination as they doggedly dealt with plenty of customers. Apparently they’ve never advertised but all came by word of mouth, as we had.  The proprietor of “The Cudgee at Mudgee” where we’d booked for the night told us it was special, and it was. The oriental theme of fans and ornamental bubbling fountains sat alongside large local artworks that covered the walls and in the fireplace was an earthy pot bellied stove.  You ordered a plate of pieces,six, eight or ten and chose a pot of tea from a long list and were given a bun at the end.

Mudgee seemed more prosperous than I remembered and rather graceful and sure of itself. Vineyards were all around. We had a good stop at one that had apparently been in the Lowe family for 200 years.  We sat in front of the wine barrels on an unexpected orange velvet sofa to taste Shiraz.  (Yes, I know, I broke my three week record of abstinence but what else could I do at a cellar door). We looked out on a magnificent spread of luscious grassland vines and hills as we sipped samples of what turned out to be very expensive wine.  I bought a couple of bottles, it being a holiday after all. When we wandered the lovely grounds we became aware of a stonemason’s work.  Slabs of granite with poetry in French and German as well as a big slab, memorialising a dog that was much loved despite murdering, among many other fellow creatures, five peacocks.

Next day we stopped at the excellent Mudgee Museum - just the kind I like, full of bits and pieces including a vast salt and pepper collection with a rather politically incorrect jolly black Mammy and pepper husband in it. It was tended by an army of volunteers.   There was a good hip bath which would have suited me nicely and also an enormous doll collection.  They were all standing to attention in their finery staring spookily at me.  I didn’t linger there but went into the courtyard where I’m afraid I committed a faux pas in assuming a table with lots of mugs and tea bags was meant for visitors and helped myself.  Gradually the whole squadron of volunteers filled the seats around a great millstone.  I prattled my apologies but nobody even cracked a smile. “Now you can get on with your secret business” I joked as I left, but that left them cold too.

We took a detour then to a place called Galargambone because we’d read of interesting art in the Main Street.  And indeed there was a lovely bullock train, eight bullocks, each different, all of them all made with huge skill out of wire netting. The Main Street itself was mostly little places that had been shops but now housed art works in their windows, all provocative and interesting.  A lady was walking her dog and we talked a bit about the town being so quiet and no coffee shop despite its touristic allure. She said all the young people had gone because they didn’t like hard work.  They’d asked her to run the cafe but she said she was done with all that.  She seemed happy to be living there but perhaps a bit lonely after all.  We talked a lot about how country places like this one could be kept alive.

Lots of driving then and we learnt the perils of booking on line.  We wanted a pub for a change hoping for a bit of human contact at the bar, and one called “The Thirsty Farmer” had good reviews so I booked. To be fair we were told the cafe was shut, as was the bar and Finn said “Humph, a pub with no beer, doesn’t sound good” but that was the half of it.  The whole place was under renovation with bare boards and no toilet paper and when Finn used his code an alarm went off.  We cancelled and went up the road to a really nice pub called Reggies with beer at the bar and people to talk to (and a bit of gossip about the disastrous pub down the road).  I also talked to a rather beautiful woman by herself nursing a beer can, who told me she was born to a black American soldier in London and had married an aboriginal guy and had lots of children.  A long list of her grandchildren was tattooed on her arm “But I’ve had some more since then”. She told me a lot about Lightning Ridge, and how not to boil in the Artesian Spring.

It was a bit peculiar sleeping in the little cell like rooms and being out of contact with each other until Finn taught me how to text instead of ring, which frightened the daylights out of him because it made him think it was an emergency.  So much to learn when you are an old lady.

Next day we drove on to The Ridge, and a longish, empty sort of drive it was.  I loved the landscape of scrub and small trees and felt they were on my side somehow.  This feeling increased when we got to Lightning Ridge, a marvellously untidy place where nothing is as it seems and the signs are surprising eg. SNAKE AND MOUSE MESH for sale in a place I bought a good hat.  I discovered today that the shop called Duncan’s Fashions is actually where the best coffee in town can be had and people meet and chat outside sitting at little metal tables.  I was there for a bit because when the temperature hit 36 degrees I reckoned I shouldn’t walk about any more, especially since my water bottle had leaked all over my wallet so I had nothing to drink and had to apologise whenever I bought anything. 

 

 I called Finn to bring the magic carpet, AKA car, and talked a while to a rather ragged guy with a dog on a rope who’d been here a couple of months and, like a few others I’ve spoken to said he would never go back. He was a scientist, he said.  Finn says the place is an open air lunatic asylum “in the nicest possible way” nevertheless, that seems rude.  What it is, is amazingly tolerant and full of dark humour.  A woman at a neighbouring table took over the roped dog so that the owner could go and get a coffee. People are warm and nice but withering under the heat at the moment and longing for March when you can sleep at night.

There is an excellent tourist innovation here called Car Door Tours.  There are Five colours of old car doors and each trip is signposted  by a string of blue, yellow, red or green cart doors, each numbered.  All four trips take you to fascinating places, mostly amongst the rickety humpies improvised by miners, as it is not permitted to build properly on a claim, which, costing $300 a year, makes for cheap living.  Nevertheless there are a few random weird buildings, namely a castle and a rather beautiful house made of beer cans and bottles with elegant windows fashioned from coloured bottles.  And all these dwellings, great and small, pop up far out in the stretching dry landscape of white humps of tailings and rusty vehicles and holes covered over protectively with tin or barbed wire.  If it were not for the Car Door guides one would be hesitant to intrude on these personal endeavours with their little shelters beside them.  I wondered what the aboriginal population made of these fellow creatures who had apparently gone mad and made holes and hills and all for what.

Finn asked me if I’d like to go noodling, that is scavenging amongst the many available hillocks of white stones but I said no.  Unlike panning for gold, the findings in their raw state seemed very discouraging and I bought a little bottle of scraps - a chip jar - in a shop.

The opal field that is an hour’s drive out of town has three pubs, themselves built of scraps of this and that but inside, not unpolished.  The Club in the Scrub was quite salubrious and a few weathered people gathered at about lunch time.  The only people I have ever seen who look as weathered as the old miners were at an anthropology conference where some attendees had lived in their study fields for enough years to almost kipper them. 

One special place we saw was The War Memorial, but, as we had come to expect it wasn’t just that, but a memorial to miners too, all with affectionate engraved comments under their names.

All the opal field dwellers seem a bit heat stressed at the moment and I couldn’t blame them - no aircon out there but allegedly clever tunnelling could cool things down a bit we were told.

Everywhere you go there are dark jokes and artistic renderings of life out there.  A guy (as in penny for the guy) half way up a ladder. Another, ghastly faced mock up of a miner, asleep in a bucket and so on.  However someone had made a labyrinth out of rocks and that had a sort of solemnity.  Boredom, I guess, is very much part of the opal quest as is perhaps finding yourself when all else has failed (hence, perhaps the labyrinth).

One truly lovely experience in Lightning Ridge is a dip in the Artesian Pools which are free to all.  The big one is deep and hot. No shallow end.  Funnily enough, just as one gets used to cold water after the initial shock, so it is with hot water.  It seemed intolerable at first and then I swam a bit and it was only just short of OK.  But coming out was wonderful and I felt quite high. “Like taking a pill” (not that I do) I said to an old guy there. “I don’t take pills and I don’t like that hot water either” he replied as he went on his way.  Well to each their own.  I’m definitely going back tonight.

The pleasure of people post Covid, sex and Cyrano

It has been a long time since I last wrote and I am surprised at how very different and uncertain things seem now, what with the dregs of Covid and Putin. Anyway after our long hibernation and masked expeditions life seems to be starting up again and so I’ll write. 

 

 I am on day twenty one of giving away alcohol.  I was feeling lousy and went to the doctor who ordered blood tests and when he read the liver function one said solemnly - no booze for a month.  I knew I’d been drinking too much, maybe partly due to the dreariness of these Covid times – at least a bottle of wine a day plus a delightful little cook’s drop while I made dinner and perhaps a little something with television and then oblivion till next day. Actually giving it up has been sad rather than agonizing. In the beginning I couldn’t sleep but that wasn’t a drama. I wasn’t working and quite like the quiet of the deep night. I replaced the cook’s drop with Hot and Spicy V8 with extra tabasco and lemon and that sort of worked.  Dinner with Grant, however, became rather monochrome.  No tipsy squabbles about this and that philosophical point, no maudlin reminiscing.  A rather quick adjournment to television’s offerings.  At least I got to see the end of the thrillers which I had to ask G about before.

 

Anyway we both went down to the our south coast place to oversee a termite eradication and meet up with son number three and his wife and little baby Yay. Alcohol nagged me a bit there. Durras used to be Liberty Hall.  ‘What happens in Durras stays in Durras’ was our motto. Now there’s nothing that needs to stay. After the termite business was concluded (at least we hoped so), Fredi had a fancy to comb through Vinnies (a charity shop) and I needed more Tabasco so Grant and I set off with her and little Yay in her car for Batemans Bay.  Having bought what we needed we sternly decided to get some exercise. (Not so long ago exercise just happened but the reclusive habits of the pandemic has made it a thing to decide on, it seems).  We walked grimly to the Water Gardens, a little known feature of the Bay.  

On a grey day the Water Gardens are not uplifting.  The first thing we saw was a shopping cart poking out of the water amongst the ducks.  The reeds are rampant and look as if they want to conquer the world. There is almost nobody there – just a disconsolate looking teenage girl sitting on a far away bench.  But there is a fine boardwalk over the swamp which we all stepped on to. After a bit I felt the need for a loo and told the others and said I’d catch them up."‘Go to the RSL (Returned Soldiers Club)” said G imperiously. “They’ll have one”. Actually I didn’t need to go that far.  The curator of the nearby local museum was just shutting up and perhaps because she was about my age she empathized with my need and opened up the museum again and escorted me past the intriguing exhibits to the Ladies.  I proffered my intensely felt thanks and set off back for the boardwalk.  Despite circumnavigating the swamp I could not find the others and cursed my careless ways with my mobile.  I passed the lone teenager on the bench and asked her if she’d seen Grant and Fredi plus baby.  No, she said, I’m just waiting for my mum but what’s your name and I’ll tell them I saw you. ‘Tell them I’m going back to the car.’ I said.  

 

I did the fifteen minute walkback to the car park briskly thinking there’s no way I could’ve done it three weeks ago.  I hailed a silver haired figure who looked as if he was Grant pushing a stroller (maybe Fredi had needed a loo too) but realized on getting closer it was an old lady pushing her walker.  I thought of the three jovial huntsmen who saw the moon

 

The first he said it was the moon, 

The second he said nay

The third he said it was a pincushion with the pins stuck in wrong way

 

I was comforted by the fact that others had made mistakes before me and all phenomena were open to interpretation and nothing wrong with that after all.

 

 I had fed the Bingo call, Legs Eleven into my memory when we left the carpark but there was a whole row of cars in row eleven and I did not remember what Fredi’s looked like – not even the colour.  I began inspecting each car until a woman said “Are you all right” “oh yes” I said, explaining the situation.  Then she said “I don’t like leaving you like this” as she drove off which did nothing for my self esteem.  I did identify the car in the end by the ACT number plate and a baby seat and a striped bag of shopping just visible through the dark glass but I didn’t fancy to hanging about.  The carpark was much more dreary than the Water Gardens, so I cleverly wrote a note on the back of an envelope FIND ME ON THE BENCH OUTSIDE THE COFFEE CLUB, put it behind the windscreen wiper and went up the escalator to wait on the said bench. 

 

 But there was already someone on the bench – a guy of indeterminate age, apparently rather drunk.  He’d got a shopping trolley to add authenticity to his identity as a shopper but clearly wanted to be left alone to doze and drink.  I’d happily have let him do that except I had to be on the bench in order to be found by Grant and Fredi.  I apologized for joining him and explained my problem.  After that a little conversation seemed in order. There was the weather (horrible) and an exchange of names (his was Paul) and then he sipped from his coke bottle again and dozed off.  I got restless after a bit and when he was alert again I told him I was going to check on the car and could he possibly look out for a man with a big white beard and a woman with green hair pushing a stroller.  As I spoke I realized how hallucinatory the image was, and hoped he could handle it.  But he said yes, he’d keep an eye open.  I went back to the car and perched on the bonnet and tried to write a poem about the carpark on the back of a prescription. After what seemed an age Grant, Fredi and Yay returned but in a panic.  Fredi had left her backpack at the RSL where they had erroneously been waiting for me. 

 

 So Fredi hastened back to the RSL and G and I went up the escalator again. I took little Yay, (who must be the most bewitching baby in New South Wales), with me to tell Paul that all was well at last.  Yay smiled at him (as he does to everyone) and Paul laughed and put his big brown hand on Yay’s little foot. Suddenly he said “But where’s the mother?”  I decided against explaining this last complication.

  As he decanted more alcohol into his coke bottle I asked, with some nostalgia, what he was drinking. Port, he said and I began telling him how I’d stopped drinking and how hard it was, but he’d drifted off again.  When Grant came however, I introduced them and he rose to shake Grant’s hand.  Fredi returned triumphant with her rucksack and we drove the fifteen K home, me thinking all the way of the tolerance and kindness of all the strangers that I had crossed paths with that day and what a joy for people not to be masked and impervious any more.

 

I want to write about a dream next. I know dreams are usually a bore but this one is relevant, I think to the last bit of today’s blog.

 

I was the only old lady in a group of amateur actors who had just finished a rather good performance.  They all seemed diminished and underblown now they were off stage. A young man came up to me out of the group and said “I could ask you to come home with me to share a bottle of wine and I could also ask you to stay for breakfast.  I said “Breakfast sounds lovely but you must see that I’m in my seventies” “No problem” he said and he cupped my face in his hands.  The next thing I remember is the sex which was unlike any that I’d had with other partners.  It was gentle and warm and intertwining and turbulent and sort of transcendental like a good meditation session. We seemed to lose our boundaries.  There was sparkling and an overwhelmingly sense of gratitude that bloomed into the night.  

 

The breakfast was good too. I remember the pleasantness of boiled eggs and smashed avocado toast with freshly ground pepper.  And then like all dreams it faded away.

 

Quite recently, and I think before the dream, Grant and I went to a movie that made me angry.  It was a sneak preview with free glasses of wine which I managed to pass by but which continued to tempt me through the trailers.  The film was ‘Cyrano’, based on an old story of a Count who was brave and poetic but, because he had a huge nose, felt diffident about courting his true love, beautiful childhood friend Roxanne.  When she tells him she’s in love with a soldier, handsome but unpoetic and stupid, in a spirit of service to the unattainable Roxanne he colludes with the young fool and writes his love letters for him.  It all ends in tears of course.

 

Now for some reason the director of the modern film chose to substitute the big nose problem for dwarfism and cast the very good dwarf actor Peter Dinklage in the role of Cyrano.  This could have been a really interesting thing to do if the director had bitten the bullet of the real possibility of sexual attraction between Cyrano as he was, and the beautiful Roxanne.  He could have chosen to have electricity at their trysts even whilst Roxanne was entertaining her delusions about her soldier boy but instead she and Cyrano patter blandly through the film and the deathbed kisses smack of pity rather than passion.  It would have been daring and difficult to have Cyrano and Roxanne as latent lovers but not to do so just turns this film into one more nail in the coffin of the bid of all those people with variations on the accepted physical norm to be seen as whole human beings.  While I recognize that a seventy six year old woman having a marvellous one night stand (with breakfast too) is the stuff of dreams – well I have had a full life already but so many other people with physical  variations haven’t and it’s right to accept and celebrate their wants rather than fudge their existence as this silly film did.

 

But all in all there’s much to rejoice in after the sequestered winter of Covid and it’s such fun to be out and about. Even though I’m looking forward to Day 30 and the rattle of red into a glass, abstinence has not been too bad.  Mind you its only Day 21 today. 

A first birthday party, a trampoline and making up my mind

Yesterday I went to my  youngest grandson’s firtst birthday party.  My middle son Eddy married Jun and they already have one son, Caiden, who is four.  He was born early and looked like a fairy child, tiny, delicate and dark eyed.  He was disconsolate, however, from the word go and cried and fed then cried some more.  He’s happy now and laughs and runs with other children but doesn’t smile when I come to the door.  He just goes away and gets me a little something – a ribbon, a biscuit.

The birthday boy, Callan was born bigger and looked fierce to start with. He resembled a little Eastern potentate who would rule (as in fact most babies do) without pity or mercy. Paradoxically though, he was an easy newborn, happy to be handed round like a kitten.  We all took our cuddle tax and he took it on board.

Anyway it’s his first birthday and Jun has made him an exquisite watermelon cake, adorned with kiwifruit and blueberries and little stars made out of dragonfruit. She and  Eddy and the kids have recently moved out of a modern concrete flat into this house which is beautiful in its old fashioned ordinariness.  It has a Hills Hoist and a huge grassy yard with a big tree at the bottom. It feels like the fifties when things were simpler and  I cannot help but slow down and relax. From the end of the garden where the barbecue is I can look back on the single storey house with its flyscreen that clacks as children chase in and out and we guests carry plates of cheese and salami and dips to the table, and the barbecue is touched with a match.

There has been an addition to the garden since I was here last – a fine trampoline, netted for safety with little wooden steps leading  up to a  zip which can be opened and shut.  For a second there crosses my mind the irrelevant image of a tiger slinking back and forth inside, along with the thought that we would be safe even so because of the zip.

Cousins Jacob and Ethan arrive and whoop at the sight of the trampoline and quickly all three cousins are bouncing and tumbling and making my fleeting image of the tiger seem tame.  More kids come and a bag of coloured  plastic balls is added and every so often like tiddlywinks they are shot out over the net to land amongst the quiet babies who have now arrived with their parents. We all insist on the zip being kept shut lest a child is catapulted out and injured.  But injury looks very possible nonetheless as, like little cage fighters, the kids  let loose their demons as they leap and call. A magician friend of Eddy’s has come now and blows up long balloons which he twists into swords for them all and it all looks a bit safer as they biff and battle together while the adults down drinks and pat babies and lament the election and the psyche of the majority of Australians who brought about the awful result.

Then it’s cake time and we warble the melancholy cadence of Happy Birthday ending with loud hurrays.

I almost didn’t come to the party.  I’ve had sporadic endogenous depression all my life and it’s been bad lately. The last time I remember entering what I somewhat melodramatically call “the valley of the knives” was in 2000 when Sydney was full of beautiful Olympic strangers and we were all advised to take leave time so as not to stuff up public transport.. I still remember a dogged slow African swimmer who kept on despite being embarrassingly far behind everyone else.  A good example, I thought, for us sluggish depressives.  Lots of people have described depression so I won’t do much of that.  Suffice it to say that it comes in sheep’s clothing.  It seems like ordinary forgetfulness, indecision and irritation until the wolf tosses off its disguise.  And that’s when the fun begins – suspicion, rage and suicidal ideation – spiky promptings to self harm.  But if asked if I’d ever thought about such a thing I would say no.  It’s ideation, not thoughts and seems to come from outside.  But it’s exhausting fending it off .  There are some strategies.  Julie Andrews sings in The Sound of music “Whenever you feel afraid, just whistle a happy tune..” And it works for depression too but the trouble is you’d need to whistle for ever.  I sometimes wonder if those people one meets from time to time who can’t stop talking are in fact just whistling a happy tune. Another strategem for me is audiobooks where amazing narrators create a curtain between me and  my minor madness. And then there’s death’s little sister sleep.  The delight of bed and pillows.  And her big sister alcohol,  jolly, mind numbing giving ease and tolerance at least until the next day.

What most surprises me is how it is possible to be a proper social person at an event like this, despite all the lunacy inside.  I chat and laugh at the party with the best of them and shut out for the time a dilemma that I have.  For the last thirty years I have been taking the antidepressant known as Prozac, and like me she is growing old and I’m wondering whether I would be better guarded by a younger drug.  I’ve been offered Effexor which allows more noradrenaline as well as seratonin to wash about the brain.  And who knows how sensible and down to earth that would make me.  But I am just a little afraid.  I’ve been serving Princess Prozac for so long. So what – she’s a bit unreliable – but to dump her for the youthful Effexor?  The issue is my commonsense self may not be there to fight back if he takes advantage of my trust.

Anyway  I go back to being a grandma at the party and put  aside decisions.  And I’m so glad to be here – green grass and fluorescent kids stuff, balloons in the trees and dips and carrot sticks and kebabs on the barbecue. There is a lull in the jumping in the trampoline and so I sneak up, pull open the zip and clamber in on to the gently yielding floor and lie down, looking up into the tree and the dusky sky. A little girl follows me in. She is the daughter of a trumpeter friend of Eddy’s.  She lies down beside me and we talk of this and that and gently duel with a couple of balloon swords. She says she likes her new house more than her flat… and then she asks me “Where did you come from?”  I wonder how to answer this deep question when the zip is breached and a small cascade of children enter and begin to bounce ecstatically. I am tossed and yell “let me out. I am an old lady”  They subside and I crawl to the zip and feel for the step.  It is quite funny, even to me.

My dream that night has me on a cruise ship and is so convincing that I wake up reaching out for some sense of place. In the dream I am threading up my loom on the deck, by the light of some tiki torches. I am using glowing scarlet cotton, capillary thin .  Each warp thread has to go through its little metal space on the  heddle, like putting a greyhound into the slips.  An omission or a doubling up will stuff up the whole bolt of cloth.  An authoritative and helpful person comes along with a beautiful pair of scissors with golden handles and dull  pointed steel blades that fuse tight with a snap.  “There’s one double there and three slots missing. Just cut it off and start again and then it’ll be perfect.”  I look at the scissors and the helpful advisor and know I won’t be cutting anything.  I’ll stay the way I am and put up with the gross bits.  The cloth will be good for something, I decide there and then.

Mirrors and the language of the soul. Also a correction.

I’ve just finished pulling the remaining shards of mirror out of the big wooden frame that used to hang over the fireplace and a lugubrious task it is. There is something a bit sinister about the other side of a mirror.  It is so dead and grey, the absolute opposite of the lively life confirming reflective side.  Add to that the nasty sharp points, and a broken mirror is one of the ugliest things around.  No wonder its supposed to herald seven years of bad luck (but I’m not going to dwell on that). It reminds me too of the Snow Queen’s mirror that shattered and how a splinter of it lodged in little Kay’s heart and made him forget Gerda, to say nothing of the trouble making mirror that ratted on Snow White so she had to hole up with the seven dwarves or have her lungs and liver delivered to the wicked queen, when her majesty was told by the mirror that she was no longer the fairest of them all.

Anyway it’s done now and perhaps I’ll make a nice wall hanging to go above the fireplace instead.

It is sunny and the Sydney air seems so pure  after Shanghai. I delight in taking deep breaths when my meditation tape tells me to, and I realise that the disturbance I feel after the Chinese experience is fright.   I have a huge respect for all that China has done to house and support its massive population but is a necessary prerequisite of doing that having horrible air?  Is some complicated outcome of our own messy ways going to rebound on us sooner or later? 

My other sobering realisation is that there are ways of thinking so different from those shaped by western words (a dark day, a light hearted remark etc).  Chinglish, as it is patronisingly called, is well known for its comical rendering of English but perhaps instead of deprecating it we would be richer if we read it for the insights it gives into the Chinese vision of things.  I still love the Shanghai Starbucks English advertisement  “Every shot with precision and passion”.  No native speaker could ever have come up with that, and yet how exciting it makes a cup of coffee.  

I have one addition and one correction to make to a previous blog.  On our penultimate day in China, Finn took us to a truly delightful place about forty minutes away from Jaiding where we were staying.  It was a water town built around canals which are all over the place because China needs them just as much as the Netherlands did for draining the swamps.  It was called Zhujiajiao and was bustling with Chinese tourists taking boat rides and shopping for everything under the sun in the little shops that lined the banks of the canals.  The glutinous orange pork portions and baskets of cooked egg yolks belong here and not to the old town of Linhai as I said in a previous blog.  This place was certainly not like a theme park that hadn’t opened yet.  It was enormous fun and Grant bought a little flute and I bought some floppy black trousers which Fredi says makes me look like a hippy’

It was such a nice day.

Tonight I am going to dip my toes into a modest choir experience in Glebe. Only about twenty people instead of 200 plus as is the Philharmonia Chorus which I found a bit intimidating.  But it’s lovely to sing and apparently they do Palestrina whom I remember from my boarding schooldays.  Hope I can still manage such things.  Bye for now.

Last day, back home and mirror mirror off the wall

I spent my last day in Shanghai with Finn and Grant and Fredi went to Shanghai Disneyland for some strange reason.

We had a good day spanning an aggressively orientalised tourist area jam packed with chains of Chinese people following leaders bearing flags.  We slipped into a rather tasteful department store and admired nice things but nobody else was there.  I wondered why. I would have expected a few crazy rich Asians at the very least but people seem to prefer to be in a swarm here.

 Then we went to the remnants of the old town. Not a bit like the prettified ones elsewhere. Narrow lanes had shabby hovels all the way up and down and many windows were fiercely bricked up. Excruciating tangles of rusty electricity wires ran above the doorways. Not far away a demolition team was at work. It was a bit creepy but good to have seen how things once were.But I don't think all the dwellers had gone. Now and then a washing pole spanning the lane would sport a pair of jeans stuffed with newspaper or a jacket with the pole through the arms.  Just drying, or a signal, like the trainers that get chucked over our wires? I don't know.  There was one solitary lady selling fish however.

I wanted to get some nice cotton for patchwork so we headed for what we hoped was a fabric market.  Enticingly a whole building promised "Soft Spinning Material". It was busy but not so much for buying fabric as ordering garments to be made.  I hadn't enough puff left in me to argue for the little half metres I was after and how on earth do you explain patchwork by miming. Now I think about it I should have been able to do it but my thoughts were heading to the airport.

We caught an amazing magnetic train which sped to the airport in twenty minutes.  I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been told while on it that there had been some fearful accidents "not technical, just a signalling matter". Humph.

The flight  on Eatern China airways was a bit gruesome.  The seats didn't recline and I felt I was slipping off mina all the way.  The solace of alcohol was not to be had. "Only five bottles for the whole plane" we were told on asking for refills.  There were films of great age and obscurity on the entertainment system.  I began an Argentinian one buried in subtitles both English and Chinese which was so boring I decided plain boredom was better.

On arrival, bless him, Eddy was there to meet us.  I could have wept since Grant had vanished the baggage hall and I was sure he'd had a heart attack somewhere in the airport - a not so melodramatic thought when we are in our seventies and carrying heavy bags. In fact he had gone to terminal 5 instead of 9.

It was good to see our little terrace again though someone had ripped open our mail, (not much gone) and getting inside we found the wire that holds the big mirror over the fireplace had rusted and it was spectacularly shattered all over the floor.  My Pollyanna thought was how lucky no children were playing lego when it fell but nevertheless there is a dark quality about a broken mirror which I could do without.

The whole week was amazing and I am hugely grateful to Finn and Fredi for bearing with us and our carnivorous ways, facilitating our purchases and guiding us through a world more incomprehensible than any I have ever visited.  

Linhai and the Light Oxygen Hotel

We caught the Very Fast Train yesterday and arrived in Linhai in three hours. It would have taken about ten hours were it not for being able to whizz along at 250kmh.  It didn't feel that fast from inside the train but I noticed anything interesting spotted from the window went by in a flash. Travelling this way is not as gentle and ruminative as old fashioned train journeys can be.

We are staying in the Anman Light Oxygen Hotel and it is funny. Our room is 999 and Fredi and Finn have 899.  They are obviously the honeymoon suites with sex toys by the beds and candelabras with little lamps instead of candles.  The furniture is imitation French regency with ornate legs and a plush buttoned sofa. There is a gracious modern bath and only glass separates the bathroom fro the rest of the room  which makes using the toilet disconcertingly public. I wonder what a shy honeymooner would feel about it.  On the glass is written something in Chinese and then in English "Dream Love Memory". The heavy window curtains swish open by themselves when you enter the room.

The panorama that the window looks out on to is rather cheerless. Shabby old four storey units crowd each other and their windows are black squares. In the distance are some mountains veiled in smog. Spiking up in the middle distance are seven groups of tower blocks and maybe because I've been living in one they seem more optimistic than the rest of this still scene.

Breakfast is unexpected but quite nice. Hot orange juice and a hard boiled egg with a choice of stir fried vegetables, not totally meat free however. I realise how hard it must be for Fredi to get anything Vegan in a public eating place.She let us eat alone last night and went and played on games in glass boxes where you try to catch a soft toy with a little crane. It is cheap but very difficult to win and rouses all the gambling instincts pertaining to poker machines. "I want that cat," says Fredi, "the one with the curly tail. Its mine"  But she didn't get it.

We went to the old town yesterday where there is an ancient city wall.  There was a very discouraging flight of steps stretching  up to a pagoda and at its foot a musician and a singer producing amplified songs.  An old man and his friend were swinging a heavy red rope for two kids to skip.  He was laughing at us so I took one end of the rope and swung for the children too.  It was a nice feeling, the heaviness of the rope and seeing the pleasure the kids took in their competence at this old fashioned game.

We wandered the lanes that made up the old town and saw gleaming orange bits of pork and duck and baskets of cooked egg yolks (What happened to the whites, I wondered) So many strange foods amidst stalls selling jade and pearls.  I bought a little green teapot. We found a little bar with a hipster ambiance and craft beers called after the Beatles.  I had a gin and tonic with an everlasting steel ice cube in it.  It was expensive and against his better judgment Finn asked the barman for a restaurant .suggestion. With lots of swapping of phones for interpretation purposes the needful knowledge was transferred and we got a Didi (the same as an Uber) which took us a long way to a huge hotel with a vast empty dining hall laid out as though for a conference.  Several kind waitresses tried to help us understand the menu even though we were a rather shabby looking bunch, very out of place there. Fredi and Finn were getting uneasy about leaping into the gastronomic dark. Eventually we escaped because they didn't accept credit cards but only used the ubiquitous phone pay system.  They urged us to come back with cash next day and gave us some snacks and insisted on paying for our taxi. Such kindness.

Money is both amazingly difficult and extraordinarily easy here. Locals (including F and F) have an app on their phones which allows them to tap the funny little cardboard squares with black and white barcodes on them that all businesses have.  You just kiss the square with your phone and pow - the transaction is complete.  Street traders and even beggars, I am told, have these squares thus effectively sidestepping the banking system.  Credit cards, however work hardly anywhere.  Cash is OK but its a palaver o get out of banks so we are clocking up a debt to Finn with his magic open sesame phone.

We went back to the old town which has been tenderly resurrected with paving now covering the open sewer that used to run there.  There are quite a lot of old people here. I saw a quartet playing cards and one cheeky old lady poked Grant in the tummy and cackled merrily.  Apart from the people manning the little shops that lined the narrow streets there were few people there.  Grant likened it to a theme park not yet open to the public and I know what he meant.  But three acts of kindness made us feel good.
1) We rang the bell to the police station by accident because the English translation above the door said "Information Centre" and we wanted a map. The door opened and we saw wall of screens showing different views of the town and several uniformed policemen. Clearly they expected us to have information for them rather than the other way round and once this was cleared up we turned and headed away.  In just a few seconds though a policeman rushed up behind us with a brown envelope containing a lovely map and three postcards which he'd found for us.
2) Grant was hellbent on finding a "bubble drink", some kind of liquid sago pudding drunk through a fat straw. Someone gave him an orange to console him when he couldn't.
3. F and F wanted to walk on the wall round the town but G and I were tired and wanted to stay put.  We found a hotel and though we could perhaps have tea and a place to rest. The hotel didn't do tea but encouraged us to rest in their nice outdoor lobby and provided cups of hot water. They were very solicitous and sent Fredi in our direction when she came to pick us up.

One other moment was good too. I caught the attention of a grandmother with her little grandson and went over to him and made him smile while she spoke Chinese which Fredi told me meant "Nice grandma, nice grandma".

This whistlestop tour is good in many ways - no emotional investment - pure observation but I am beginning to crave being able to understand more and being able to penetrate the strange script and the mindset that gives rise to its images. But I think I've learnt an awful lot about being an outsider and have huge sympathy for anyone Chinese who lands untutored in out space.

Shanghai's past and waxworks

Admiring the Shanghai Museum from People's Square

The Lonely Planet extolled the virtues of the Shanghai Museum so we went and looked at jade and porcelain.  I was a bit underwhelmed, perhaps because I know nothing about either and the signs didn't help much.  I was amused to note however that my Chinese co-tourists were a bit museumed out too.  Anywhere it was possible to sit was occupied.  The museum is free and numbers of visitors per day is limited.  Grant caused a bit of bother by buying a replica knife that was once used as currency in the gift shop and it showed up in the security tunnel. He wanted to give it to Fredi and Finn as a cheese knife even though they don't eat cheese. Then his fold up glasses looked horribly like a cigarette lighter.  But it was all ok in the end.

Shanghai Museum interior 

However the next museum we visited charmed and moved me and taught me so much about Shanghai.  It was located in one of the garish buildings which features a tripod and some glittery globes. This one wasn't free and I could see why.  So much care and delicacy had gone into creating a walk through time with waxwork figures, each expressive as an old master portrait.  There was a pickle trader in his shop with one hand up over the counter.  A fellow tourist posed  as though purchasing and touched the pale wax fingers.  I too touched them and was glad I did. A pulse of the past came through them to me. Dried fish hung in another shop and there was a section dedicated to the film industry with a very old film flickering on a screen.  It showed a naughty child being spanked. There was an opium den with a recumbent addict and a young girl gazing out of a window.

A wax shopkeeper in the Shanghai city history museum

 I learnt about the appalling behaviour of the British - how they drenched Shanghai with opium from India in order to trade for what they wanted.

A British opium dealer on the Bund

I want to know more about Shanghai, once monocultural, then exploited and abused and yet fertilised by the experiences brought by encroaching traders.  There was a French concession as well as a British one and also a Jewish quarter that was very hospitable to refugees from Germany in WWII.  Maybe this history of embedded alien cultures accounts for the urbane way in which we rare foreigners are ignored.  It is easier to go with the flow here in Shanghai than anywhere I have ever travelled.  Nobody seems to notice us.

Going with the flow

We had a very fiery fish soup for dinner and caught an Uber home. Ubers are called Didis here.