Common Sense and Whiskey

Forgotten History

The RMS Titanic sank a hundred and one years ago today. Ships were dispatched from Halifax to recover bodies, since Halifax was the nearest big port with continental rail connections.

The Mackay-Bennet, a Halifax-based steamer normally used for laying communications cable, led the effort. Two days after the sinking she set out with a cargo of coffins and canvas bags, an undertaker and a preacher.

Over the next four weeks two ships from Halifax followed, the Minia and the CGS Montmagny. Altogether they and the SS Algerine, sailing from St. John’s, Newfoundland, recovered over three hundred bodies. Some were buried at sea, but 209 bodies returned to the Halifax shore.

Just 59 were sent away to their families. The rest, including the Titanic’s unidentifiable and unclaimed victims, were buried in Halifax, and local businesses donated bouquets of lilies.

•••••

An even more horrible tragedy still lay five years down the road. In 1917 Halifax harbor fell victim to the greatest conflagration of the Great War. I don't know if it's just me, but polling people I know, it sounds like nobody else knew about the largest man made explosion before Hiroshima, either.

 

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Halifax is a good-looking, purposeful, working town. With a population just under a million, it hosts 200,000 cruise ship passengers a year and some 40 percent of Canada’s defense assets. Nova Scotia is the world’s largest exporter of lobster and Christmas trees.

It doesn't look at all like a place afflicted. Perched on two rocky shores, Halifax and it's sister city Dartmouth, across the water, enjoy refuge from Atlantic storms, set back from the ocean. Still further back, the Bedford Basin affords a strategic ice-free port, invaluable in wartime.

With one of the world's deepest and most protected harbors, Halifax always prospered in wartime, from the Napoleanic wars and the War of 1812, and continuing to the onset of World War One, providing men and materiel for various war efforts.

Canada entered the Great War in 1914 as a colony, when Britain declared war on Germany. Canadians were just about unanimous in support. Halifax boomed, and harbor traffic ultimately rose to seventeen million tons a year, from just two.

By 1917, businesses were bursting. Industry struggled to keep up with demand. A quarter of the men in Halifax were serving overseas.

Foreshadowing the U.S. experience in World War Two, women took jobs formerly thought of as men's work. Ultimately, women's suffrage came to Canada in 1918, two years ahead of the United States.

The U.S. held to a position of neutrality. But after a German declaration of U-boat warfare against Atlantic supply lanes and the sinking of both merchant and passenger ships with Americans onboard, the U.S joined the Great War in April 1917.

The first regular, systematic convoy of war material from Canada left Sydney, Nova Scotia’s easternmost harbor, on June 24th, 1917. By October as many as 36 supply ships were assembled for each convoy.

The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax describes a typical convoy as five ships abreast with two corvettes out front and one on each flank.

Typically, freighters with deck cargo of tanks, trucks and tankers, other freighters with aircraft, and maybe a heavy lift ship with locomotives sailed alongside rescue ships and an oiler with fuel for the corvettes. A destroyer carrying the escort force commander brought up the rear.

Convoy traffic moved to Halifax from Sydney during winter, owing to the back bay, the ice-free Bedford Basin. The basin, with a surface area of just six and a half square miles, was jammed with ships.

•••••

By winter 1917 a jittery uncertainty had prevailed across the twin cities for months. The Canadians dragged submarine nets across the harbor each night to prevent German U-boats from sneaking in.

Voyages of Discovery, Polynesia Edition

Here's a little weekend reading, an excerpt from a coming article on Easter Island:

Conjuring up the downfall of the civilization can drive you mad. Puzzling out the timeline of Rapa Nui’s colonization can cause fits. Then there’s the whole moai thing, the conundrum of their abandonment.

Thankfully, imagining how the settlers got here is a beautiful thing, thanks to the work of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and a canoe called Hōkūle‘a, the inspired project of an artist and historian elected a Living Treasure of Hawaii in 1984, a man named Herb Kawainui Kāne.  

Precious little evidence remains of the physical form of original Polynesian canoes of exploration. Drawings from the same 1773 Cook expedition that called at Rapa Nui show double-hulled canoes at Tonga. Fragments of ancient canoes have been excavated on New Zealand.

A bog on Huahine, near Tahiti, has yielded pieces of a canoe. A petroglyph of a canoe found at Orongo on Easter Island (the center of the birdman cult, about which more later) suggests the possible ancient design. Beyond these tantalizing bits, as Herb Kane tells the story, there is no hard evidence.

So in designing the Hōkūle‘a, Kane made some guesses. He came up with a double-hulled voyaging canoe 62 feet four inches long, 17-1/2 feet abeam with a draft of two and a half feet and a total sail area of 540 square feet. This is the vessel that, since 1975, has traveled the Polynesian Triangle, New Zealand to Hawaii to Rapa Nui.

A member of the crew named Sam Low kept a dairy of the sailing to Rapa Nui, and it’s a gorgeous thing to read. Freedom and expansiveness flow from Low’s pen as he writes of the measure of a sailor’s days - sunrises, stacks of cumulus, “smoke,” a gray haze of salt and seaspray stirred into the atmosphere by strong winds, and sunsets.

Seeking to "discover" Rapa Nui, the Hōkūle‘a sailed from Mangareva, and called for a few hours at Pitcairn Island, Rapa Nui’s nearest inhabited neighbor, where the entire island, 42 inhabitants, put on a potluck dinner. Low writes of “VHF radios squawking in every home -- the island’s only reliable telephone service,” of “freezers and shelves crammed with tinned goods to tide people over between supply ships, which arrive once every 4 months,” of how mail is delivered by passing freighters, in watertight containers thrown overboard.

Pitcairn was the refuge of the HMS Bounty mutineers in 1789, and Fletcher Christian’s Bible survives in the 7th Day Adventist church. Brenda Christian lives on Pitcairn still, generations on.

Nainoa Thompson, the Hōkūle‘a lead navigator, devised a scheme for finding Rapa Nui at once ambitious and straightforward. Approaching from the west, the canoe would target a block of ocean starting 300 miles from Rapa Nui and extending two degrees on either side of 27 degrees south latitude, the island’s latitude.

Targeting a box 300 miles by 240 rather than a 64-square-mile speck would compensate for any mistakes the crew may have made in dead reckoning how far east the Hōkūle‘a had sailed from Pitcairn, or in estimating the canoe’s latitude. Beginning at the western edge of the block the Hōkūle‘a would sail up and down to the top and bottom of the box, zigzagging back and forth, and eventually, the crew hoped, pass within sight of Rapa Nui.

Sam Low's diary is written with grace and no affectation, and we’re as thrilled as the crew members when, just before dawn on October 8th, seventeen and one half days out of Mangareva, Max Yarawamai, standing lookout, spots Rapa Nui as a vague black line on the horizon, and the crew celebrates with garlic eggs for breakfast.

•••••

See more photos from Easter Island here.

Opaque Regime Watch

Two good reads today:

A Glimpse into a Mysterious African Dictatorship: Is Eritrea on the Verge? from Time

and

The secret lives of North Korea from The Independent

Eritrea is one of those countries most people can't quite put their finger on on the map (Clue: All you have to do is find Djibouti). The author and African correspondent Michela Wrong's I Didn't Do It for You is one of the only books about contemporary Eritrea I'm aware of, other than an odd, very handsome 2007 coffee table book called Asmara: Africa's Secret Modernist City by Edward Denison. As for North Korea, a couple of things: See this I mentioned last week, and here's a DPRK visitor we talked with on CS&W back in 2009.

Two New Things to Read

One's on the web, the other's a book.

Enjoy Where is Cuba Going? by John Jeremiah Sullivan, in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It's long and meandering, in a good way. Sullivan is as flummoxed by the Florida Cuban community and the embargo as everybody else is, except the Florida Cuban community and anybody who has to navigate through them toward election.

Just one thing - he writes:

"Barack Obama was going to open things up, and he did tinker with the rules regarding travel, but now they say that when you try to follow these rules, you get caught up in all kinds of forms and tape."

Since his wife is Cuban, he can enter Havana under rules that are different from the ones we used on our visit a few months back, so he wouldn't have any experience with the new rules. For the record, there is a little more paperwork than, say, flying to Paris, akin to the kinds of things you have to file to visit, say, Belarus.But it's no big deal.

And staring down the epic Cuban Embargo had us anxious and alert re-entering Miami, but immigration couldn't have been more bored to see us. We might as well have brought along those Cuban cigars I left behind.

•••••

I've also just been reading, and recommend Chasing the Devil: A Journey Through Sub-Saharan Africa in the Footsteps of Graham Greene by Tim Butcher. Tim Butcher is a former British newspaper reporter and war correspondent now living in South Africa, who has that knack for travel in places you probably don't want to visit.

His previous book, Blood River: The Terrifying Journey Through The World's Most Dangerous Country, in which he retraced Henry Morton Stanley's 1870 trek, was harrowing. In the new book Butcher sets out to cross Sierra Leone and Liberia. There's a particularly frightening section, and touching tribute, to two friends killed while reporting in Sierra Leone in 2000.

It's good stuff. Both Butcher books are worth a read.

Forgotten History: Halifax

Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Halifax has one hard luck history. Part of it is other peoples’ hard luck. But that only helps so much.

Fourteen years ago this month Swissair flight 111 fell into Margaret's Bay, just outside town, killing all 229 people aboard. The Halifax military bases responded. There are two memorials out on the bay.

After the crash, Ian Shaw, a Swiss national who last saw his daughter Stephanie when he drove her to the Geneva airport, moved from Switzerland to the tourist village of Peggy's Cove and built a restaurant called Shaw's Landing, to be near his deceased daughter. Shaw’s Landing only recently closed, Shaw presumably having finally worked through his loss.

•••••

As in the Swissair tragedy, when the Titanic sank in April 1912, ships were dispatched from Halifax to recover bodies, since Halifax was the nearest big port with continental rail connections.

Vignette: Encounter in Kenya

I once met a young man named Joseph Oyule on a trip to Mombasa, Kenya. We exchanged addresses and kept in touch for a while. Now, five years later, as I lay on the bed in a villa at the Kingfisher resort in Malindi, 75 miles (120 kilometers) up the coast from Mombasa, Mirja runs in and exclaims: "Guess who's here! Joseph Oyule!" 

He just shows up. Takes a two hour bus from Mombasa and a taxi, and here he sits. He’s young, smaller than I remembered, almost timid in his yellow polyester shirt with a too big collar, slacks and big battered wing tips. Joseph, Mirja and I sit and make halting small talk, alone in the still heat at the Kingfisher bar.

Two European female acquaintances are due for lunch, and I can see this particular fivesome isn't made in heaven, so I decide to take Joseph to a beach hangout called the Driftwood, for lunch. We hop a taxi.

Unrelated Travel Articles Tenuously Tied Together by Clothing

An Australian couple deplaned from Qantas flight QF94 because there were no complimentary XL-sized pajamas for them for the 15-hour flight from Los Angeles, the Melbourne Herald Sun reports. The A380 - and the up to 400 passengers an A380 can hold - were delayed about a half hour while the couple's baggage was off loaded.

Passenger Angela Ceberano:

"The cabin erupted in laughter when the captain announced the reason for the delay.

He said: 'Just to inform you all, the reason we've had the delay is because two of our first class passengers refused to fly on this plane as there was no extra large pyjamas on board for them.'" 

•••••

And this comes from an article by Michael Moynihan on foreignpolicy.com critical of the leftist slant of guidebooks to lefty places. He's quoting Lonely Planet: Afghanistan: 

"The burqa can be seen as a tool to increase mobility and security, a nuance often missed in the outside world's image of the garment. Assuming that a burqa-clad woman is not empowered and in need of liberation is a naïve construct."

Give the Foreign Policy article a read if you're so inclined. It'll only take five or ten minutes.

Absurd as the burqa quote is (and he finds more), Mr. Moynihan gets a little overwrought about guidebooks describing leftish places in leftish ways. He decides that

"The problem with guidebooks to countries like Cuba, Iran, and North Korea is not that they encourage travel to rogue regimes ... but that they consistently misinform tourists about the exact nature of those countries. The solution isn't to stop traveling, but to travel wisely, not mistaking grinding poverty for cultural authenticity or confusing dictatorship with a courageous rejection of globalization."

Whew, got it. Cuz there I was just about to book myself into Pyongyang after being misinformed of its exact nature by the History section of a Lonely Planet guide.

And is sure is a lucky thing that the solution to lefty guidebooks isn't to stop traveling, huh?

Grasshoppers and Spiders and Africa, Oh My

Working on a new e-book about the African safari experience has got me poking around into my photos from Africa. Here's one I reprocessed yesterday. It's a huge, finger-sized grasshopper from South Africa. Click it to make it bigger.

And while we're in safari mode, here's a random, short bit from the upcoming e-book. It's from a walking safari in Zambia:

Rains from November to April flood the Luangwa river system, and from then until November it's perfectly dry. The water will dry and recede and force the animals into greater and greater concentrations, with more and more conflict and danger from predators, but for now, there is peace, there are lagoons for crocs to eat catfish and places for hippos to eat and live apart from the river. The grass is still green and tall and thick, and Aubrey shows us how hippos change the landscape as they come and go from the river, creating an indentation on the water's edge that grows when it rains, collapsing the soil into gullies and washing it into the river.

Other animals use the trampled paths, that extend far up onto land, and sometimes hippo trails even evolve into rivers. We set out away from the river on a hippo path old and wide enough that there's a sandy bottom maybe half a meter wide with the grass on either side. Can't see ahead of us or to either side beyond the grass and Isaac pushes on toward a stand of mopane trees.

Azawad Doesn't Sound as Fun as Timbuktu

Whether you're one of Robert D. Kaplan's critics or admirers, his piece yesterday was a useful primer on the lay of the land, and the feel of things in the Sahara.

Those of us who are reluctant to vacation in a place they might be killed are crossing Timbuktu off our lists, at least for now. As a substitute, I recommend Angry Wind, by Jeffrey Tayler. It's on my list of ten great adventure travel books.

This'll Be Fun. No Really....

I could have killed an entire group of feeble old people. I mean, grabbed them, walkers and canes and all, and tossed them one by one over the side. It was on the Norwegian coastal steamer, the Hurtigruten, and all I wanted was a  cup of morning coffee before we left the ship.

No big deal. I'll take that in a paper cup. Don't need a stirrer. I don't need a top or one of those insulating grips for the side. Just a single bloody cup of black coffee.

But I was queued behind 39 elderly group tourists who, God bless 'em, had SAVED ALL THEIR LIVES FOR THIS, and who, for some reason, because they weren't in Toledo, or Wichita, or wherever it was they came from, but on their TRIP OF A LIFETIME in A FOREIGN LAND, were way beyond their abilities in a cafeteria line.

They had the same keen grasp of logistics and situational awareness as the guy in front of you in the grocery checkout who doesn't help bag the groceries, so the poor old bent over clerk does that while he stands there and stares out into space all entitled and bored-looking, and then once it's all done and the clerk says it's $73.19, only then does he think to get out his checkbook.

At the checkout end of the cafeteria line it was like all these people saw these FOREIGN COINS in their hands for the first time and they WEREN'T NICKELS DIMES AND QUARTERS. And one by one, all 39 froze. What were they possibly to do?

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Paraguay, Chapter Twelve

Here is Chapter Twelve of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We're publishing each chapter here on the blog (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book at Amazon.com, at BN.com, or direct from EarthPhotos Publishing. Here's the Kindle version (just $6.99). Click these photos to make them bigger. More photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the Paraguay Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

12 PARAGUAY


The farthest back water washes to a national capital must be Asuncion, Paraguay. It’s as if its residents didn’t ask for the honor, but the capital had to be somewhere so they amiably accommodated.

Maybe parts of Africa are less vital. Think Ouagadougou, maybe, or Bangui. Even somnambulant Vientiane, which is in Laos, shows more vitality than here, smack in the middle of South America.

They’d rolled up the streets by the time we installed ourselves in the Sabe Hotel. The front desk spoke not so much as “hello.” No English. Here in the national capital.

The TV wouldn’t work until tomorrow because it was New Years Day and they couldn’t get anybody out to fix it, but it was a nice enough place. A picture hung partly over the window in the hallway. That was a little strange.

I was out early in the morning, through the business district and down to the Paraguay River. It wasn’t very big, downtown Asuncion, and it wasn’t very busy.

There was the main Plaza de los Heroes, down a few blocks, and Asuncion had a building modeled after the Pantheon. Sales ladies’ tables along Avenue Palma offered up the usual languid market fare: watches and underwear and (allegedly) Nike clothes and plastic toys. Birds were loud and it was hot hot hot by 8:45.

Down at the river, General Francisco Solana Lopez’s white-washed mansion, started in 1860, stood shuttered. Beyond it, children pumped water at a clutter of squatter shacks. A sand spit stretched out to two rusting shipwrecks, resting over on their sides, just on the edge of the water. Here in the national capital.

The breathtaking Asuncion waterfront.

But let’s start at the beginning, which was a few days earlier.

Winter in Finland - 6

 

My wife Mirja and I traveled to Finland last month. Here's the last in a series.

And so we’ve come to Saariselkä, Finnish Lapland, and we see that it’s possible to live inside the Arctic Circle. It takes a little more work, bundling up and all, and you need a plan before you go outside. There’s no idle standing around out there.

But there are even a few advantages. Dragging your groceries behind you over the ice on a little plastic sled called a pulkka is easier than carrying them. There’s a word for the way you walk: köpöttää. It means to walk with tiny steps, like you do to keep your balance on the icy sidewalk.

Plus, other humans live here, too, and they seem to get along just fine. Infrastructure’s good, all the transport is in big, heavy, late model SUVs. There isn’t the choice of goods you might like, but we have that problem in our little town of 600 in Appalachia, too.

Once I would have thought “selling time shares in Lapland” was a punch line, but now we have a friend who does just that. And much to my surprise, a completely full 757 flew us back down to Helsinki (and a full Airbus flew us up) and they were doing three planes from Saariselkä to Helsinki the day we flew back.

In fact, the local folk of Finnish Lapland are entirely swallowed up by the tourist onslaught they’ve created. There are 13,500 hotel, lodge, igloo and rental apartment beds around Saariselkä. And the goal is 4.5 times the number of visitors by 2020.

Kuukkeli was the only grocery in walking distance. It’s part of a chain, and a bit of a dry goods and souvenir store, too. You could buy the usual Finnish dark breads and sausages and ready to eat heat-and-serve paistos, casseroles made of beets or mushrooms or potatoes and ham. And tins of moose, bear, elk and reindeer.

A word of advice: Just capitulate on the reindeer thing. Do not try to resist.

Winter in Finland - 5

 My wife Mirja and I traveled to Finland last month. We continue our series.

 Hyvä asiakkaamme,
Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa.
Se on tällä hetkellä epäkunnossa
Ja savuttaa sisään.

Dear customer,
Please don’t use the fireplace. It is for the moment out of order and the smoke comes into the apartment.

Ärade kund,
Vängligeninte sätta eld på spisen.
Der är ur function och skall röka in I huset.

Now wait a minute! We might need the fireplace. It’s LAPLAND and it’s -16C outside.

But the nice lady explained that they only manage these little apartments, they don’t own them, and fixing the fireplace involves a capital expenditure. That will require a meeting to authorize funds, and we’ll be gone by then.

Well, everything turned out just fine. The apartment was mightily insulated with a double door entryway and a great heater and sauna.

And I had fun with the translations. I took “Ärade kund” as a plea in Swedish to be kind and understanding, and in the Finnish, Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa, I imagined they’d decided to confide to the natives that stupid Ethan had messed up the damned fireplace again.

Winter in Finland - 4

 My wife Mirja and I traveled to Finland last month. We continue our series.

4

A rainy, snowy mix Monday morning. We set out at 6:00 a.m. for Helsinki for an 11:15 flight to Lapland. This weather would shut down Atlanta for a week. Here, we just got in the car and drove.

Through town and onto the highway. Slushy and slippery. We sped along in the dark and I swore we’d slide off the road sooner or later, at a hundred kilometers per hour, with one lane good, the other ice.

Finnish law requires winter tires for winter. Winter tires wear out the roads, though, so Finnish law requires that they be changed back in summer. And the winter tires did the trick, and we didn’t slide off the road.

•••••

At the floating market in Can Tho, Vietnam, sellers hoist a bamboo pole from their boats and attach one of each of their fruits, to advertise that today, they’re selling pomilons or star fruit or coconuts. In the same way, totems rise at exits along the highway in Finland, lighting the fog that swirls around them in the perma-dusk.

Brilliant neon signs climb the poles: Pizza! Market! Gas! ABC! 24H! Credit Cards!

(When I thought ABC was the Finnish Alcohol Beverage Control, I was hugely amused that their logo is a hand flashing a thumbs-up. Alas, ABC is an ordinary store, and the government toddy dispensary is called Alko.)

Teboil! Neste! Those are both gas stations, often credit card only, with no attendant in sight. Teboil is part of the Russian Lukoil group.

Then we were back in the dark, and the big trucks (including those extended tandem jobs) threw slush, and I was pretty sure we’d perish on the way to the airport. But gradually it got warmer, motoring south, and all we needed were a couple of degrees to melt the ice on the road.

See photos in EarthPhotos.com's Finland and Lapland galleries.

And see previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3

 

Winter in Finland - 3

 My wife Mirja and I have a cabin on her family's land in the Northern Savonia region of Eastern Finland. We visited for Christmas. We continue our series.

3

Tonight it’s grown colder. Not by much but you can tell. We’ve spent the afternoon in Finnish tradition, lighting candles at ancestors’ graves. We visited four cemeteries, in Leppävirta, Saahkarlahti, Luttila and near here, at Koönönpelta. We’ve seen the patriarchs, men who fought in the war of independence, fathers and grandfathers and great uncles.

Shops were locked tight, so the cemeteries were the most populated places in Finland. So many candles at so many graves that it made you think Finns born around here stay around here.

Such a majority of graves were lit that 1. There must be an entire industry supplying the candles (They look like they all come from the same factory. They’re sheltered by a particular casing to keep snow from putting them out), and 2. Peer pressure must turn people out so that Uncle Hari’s isn’t the only unlit grave.

Winter in Finland - 2

My wife Mirja and I have a cabin on her family's land in the Northern Savonia region of Eastern Finland. We visited for Christmas. Here's a little about our trip, part 2.

2

Oh my, are we full. We hit our little town of Varkaus at 5:30 in the afternoon, not so fresh from the U.S. and firmly in darkness. Up at the farmhouse there were plates and plates of Christmas food, rossoli, ham and sinappi, Finnish mustard.

Pirrika (a kind of potato bread staple) and egg butter. Karelian stew (the pan gravy is just outstanding). Sieni salatti, which is a salty mushroom salad picked in the late fall, pickled in a brine with onion, finely chopped and mixed with a touch of cream. Pickles homegrown and homemade by Risto. Potato and bacon casserole.

Risto has taken a cooking class and much of the food is his, wielded with flourishes of the chef, like whole peppercorns. Tomorrow holds the promise of pancakes (whole milk, not 2%) and homegrown berries. And it’s not even Christmas.

•••••

The ride up from the airport at Helsinki can be done in 3-1/2 hours in summer in the sunshine, but it took over four this time. Mirja’s brother Markku did us the honors, whisking us away from the arrivals hall.

Down at the very south of Finland there was snow in the (dark) fields, but not much. The top of the grass poked through. Roads were dry and clear and it was effectively dark at 3:45, so it was hard to feel like it was mid-afternoon.

Markku was patient with Radio Suomi (Sumoi is Finnish for Finland), but a song with the lyrics, literally, “dee dee dum” in call and response, finally did it. On another channel YLE, the Finnish government broadcaster, has an English newscast now and then. When they say it, it sounds like “Wily English news.”

Road signs indicated things like “beware of moose, next 14 kilometers.” The particular type of halogen they use on roadsides combined with the low clouds to cast orange patches of light just off the highway, just far enough away so you couldn’t see why they were there. The orange color somehow felt warming.

We stopped halfway so Markku could have coffee and a pastry. I didn’t envy him. It was dark and he’d already driven all the way down earlier in the day. And I’m afraid I wasn’t the champion companion, either. Mirja did that duty. They sat up front and caught up in Finnish, and I lay down in the back (as much as you can in a Kia) and slept.

Finns have a well-developed roadhouse culture. Maybe it’s because the highways are monotonous tunnels of darkness. At intervals, oases of services perch by the exit, all together in one complex. There will be fast food and sit-down cafeteria-style grills, newsstands, groceries and ABC stores, toilets and gasoline.

This rest stop had a grocery called Ako, so we went to get odds and ends, things like the licorice flavored candy called salmiakki that Mirja loves. It was disorienting here under halogen in the dark in the snow in the middle of nowhere, seeing everybody so busy - people of all ages, the parking lot and the store and the restaurant all full, families with children sharing a meal, young men smoking and hurrying by, people coming and going. It seemed like the middle of the night, but it was the middle of the afternoon.

See photos in EarthPhotos.com's Finland and Lapland galleries.

And see previous posts in this series: 1

Winter in Finland - 1

My wife Mirja and I have a cabin on her family's land in the Northern Savonia region of Eastern Finland. We visited for Christmas. Here are a few thoughts, in six parts.

1

There’s an expansive view across the lake from the cabin, and more lights on the far shore every time we visit. It’s just about the ideal temperature for winter, hovering a little below zero Celsius, with just an ankle-high cover of snow.

Mirja’s father Risto is a tree farmer. He has outfitted the old farmhouse up on the road with a particular Siberian variety of Christmas tree. There’s a Finnish pine from here on the farm in the cabin.

Mirja is deep into something she does every first night in Finland. She builds a big birchwood fire, parks by the fireplace and immerses herself in Finnish TV.  It doesn’t really matter what’s on. Tonight being the 23rd of December, it’s mostly about Joulopukki (Santa Claus – literally the “Christmas goat”). Well-loved Finnish entertainers are sitting for interviews and performing for Christmas. And Mirja’s enjoying her native language.

There’s a half hour of news: Pictures of destruction in Syria. Extended coverage of tributes to Vaclav Havel, Czech audio with Finnish subtitles. Dispensation not to worry about calories over the holiday and quick lists of ingredients for traditional holiday dishes. And not a single report from a mall.

I sit outside to survey the lake. It’s much less frozen than last time. The ice is only firm very near the shore.  On our last December visit we rode horses and a sleigh across the lake. This time you wouldn’t even walk along the edge.

Northern people will know this, but it’s novel to me. Here near the shore, where unfrozen water runs by the ice, there’s a constant chatter, like maybe mice rooting around inside a wall, except sharper. When a big wind blows from one side of the lake to the other the semi-frozen surface farther out sends up a big, more profound rustle.

See photos in EarthPhotos.com's Finland and Lapland galleries.

The Allure of the Far Away and Exotic

Here's a ruse we hadn't seen: The local boys use signs with people's names to get access inside the pass control gates, then they make like officials who are going to open up another pass control lane for you, grab your passports and expedite you through the lines, with the acquiescence of the real pass control clerks, for tips.

They're on you like a glove until you tip them, at which point they're joined by the baggage cart cadres just outside the pass control desk. These guys artfully monopolize all the available baggage carts and attach themselves to each arrival.

The pass control expediter got a dollar though he demanded ten. At least his scam was novel. Plus, we kind of needed our passports.

But we'd been through the baggage cart game quite enough on this trip to Africa, thank you, and we simply told the little round fellow who appointed us his (thank goodness we knew enough French), "We don't want your help, we will not pay you, go away," and he smiled and laughed and thought it was all a big joke and didn't begin to move until I rested my hand on his shoulder and repeated the same words slowly and more gravely. Finally he shook his head at the terrible wrong to which he'd fallen miserable victim and slowly walked away, but he was back at the curb for one last try.

Welcome to Abidjan.

- Tuesday, 21 March, 1995, from the collected dairies.

Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

Fun for Frogs in Fiji

The first we heard of a cyclone was Monday afternoon in Port Vila, Vanuatu. We sat, pouring sweat, at a terrace on the only proper street, trying to lunch on burger and beer, but ultimately deconstructing a thing on a bun that started with the kitchen sink and then added beets, onions, carrots, eggs, bacon, cucumber, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, salt, pepper, chillies, ketchup - and maybe a tiny little speck of free-range, no insecticide Vanuatu beef. In there somewhere.

Next table over a bright pink, corpulent fellow told his ni-Vanuatu lunch mate "Bluh bluh rain, bluh bluh cyclone bluh Fiji."

I leaned out from behind my mound of discarded non-burger and inquired.

"Yeah," he said, "It's southeast of here toward Fiji. We just had a look at it on the internet and it's a big mean thing. It's what's been causing all the rain."

Since we were bound for Fiji in 18 hours this was notable, although just then it was sunny, hot and about 600 per cent humid in Vila. We were just in from Espiratu Santo, another island in the Vanuatu archipelago where we'd passed endless sunny days in relentless, blistering sun.

But in the taxi home we heard the cyclone warnings in three languages on Vanuatu's only AM radio station, with a particular warning for the southeast island group centered around the cult-and-volcano island of Tanna. By now the cyclone had a name. May I introduce you to Jo.

Pretty Far Off the Map in the South Pacific

This week, a couple of quick little impressions about flying in and around the Vanuatu archipelago - Here's one, another in a day or so. Pictured here is an outrigger off Espiritu Santo Island, Vanuatu, and there are a few more photos in the Vanuatu Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

The Vanuatu domestic flight terminal is like the one in Nepal, and probably a dozen others we haven't seen yet. If you're a desperately underperforming, poor country in the first place, your inclination is to spend your tiny wad on the international terminal for transits and arrivals, your countrymen and the hardy few who venture by plane beyond the gateway be damned.

It's just the way it is.

Our flight from the capital to Espiritu Santo island this morning would stop at Craig's Cove, Ambrym Island. I broke out my map of Vanuatu and found two airport symbols on Ambyrm Island. Which would it be, I asked at the check-in desk.

Blank looks. Much consultation. Studying the maps. Asking the boy in the back, the baggage boy.

No one knew, but eventually I found it, a light blue marking of a physical landmark, not a town, and that brought grateful smiles from the check-in boy.

The door to domestic departures spoke three languages - English, French and Bislama. Respectively, it read: Passengers Only, Reservées aux Passagers, Pasensa No Mo. We filed in.