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It’s very rarely that I eat Chinese food any more, now that I’ve been so thoroughly spoiled by years of traveling to China; it’s an order of magnitude yet rarer that I enjoy it.

Sydney’s fu manchu, I am pleased to report, serves what I would call “contemporary Chinese” dishes that are both delicious and inexpensive. Its dining area is small, simple, and modern, bearing none of the gaudy trappings that we’ve come to associate with Chinese restaurants in the English-speaking world.

I recommend that you attend to their premises and put food in your mouth. Not too much. Mostly plants.

fu manchu
249 Victoria Street
Darlinghurst, Sydney

Some friends came over last weekend, and said that the inner courtyard of my apartment building reminds them of a prison cell block. Of course they’re completely right, and now it’s all I can think about when I step outside.

I’m willing to put up with it for these few months — though Milhouse’s father would not look out of place in this apartment — but one thing I could tolerate no longer: the knives.

After enduring for weeks knives that were so dull that they were long past being dangerous, I discovered that they could not cut cold butter and my bottomless patience was exhausted.

It was suggested that if I were limiting myself to exactly one knife, it should be this 18cm santoku:

Using the Global santoku is like watching girls make out. I thought that I was keeping my knives sharp in Boston, but I was badly mistaken, and I cannot rest until I’ve learned to replicate this factory edge.

I bought a bushel of tomatoes, just to cut them up.

I sang a song while I did it.

I was invited to see the venerable Aussie band Weddings Parties Anything tonight, for the Perth stop on their ten-year reunion tour. [further research in Sydney has suggested that when conversing with someone born after 1980, it may be more accurate to substitute "little known" for "venerable" --ed]

The Fremantle Arts Centre is a great venue: it has an outdoor stage, is near the train station, serves reasonable-enough beer, and has a pleasant, sloping, grassy knoll on which to place one’s buttocks.

WPA reminded me most of an Australian Great Big Sea — one of my favourite Canadian bands — the comparison to which was laid further bare when the setlist reached Knockback in Halifax. Canadians will also be fondly reminded of a particular feature of The Barenaked Ladies’ live programme, except that the Weddoes only have to shield their eyes from handfulls of ten-cent coins, rather than the sharp corners of rocket-propelled boxes of Kraft Dinner.

One of their most famous songs owes its notoriety to a combination of an extremely catchy tune and an extremely grippy theme, for A Tale They Won’t Believe is a six-verse recounting of a true story of outback cannibalism in Tasmania’s younger and marginally more human-flesh-consuming days.

If you think you’d enjoy Great Big Sea with a little more cannibalism and a lot more Aussie (is that redundant?) you should grab the 1998 album They Were Better Live; I found a used copy for six Earth dollars.

Well, another summer of international cricket has ended in a close and exciting, but ultimately disappointing, fashion. Just like last year they couldn’t get the job done when it mattered, but this time it was fairly predictable. The batting hasn’t been in form since the middle of the Test series, and having lost six veterans to retirement in 14 months, it will be a very different side that takes the wicket in the West Indies in May.

Not that there wasn’t enthusiasm. That picture doesn’t really make clear the knock that guy took; Symonds is built like a brick shit house.

Sometime between 22:30 Friday night and noon Saturday, my — I say my, but in fact I was borrowing it — 50cc scooter was stolen. From off-street, underground parking!

This would not have been completely trivial. It has a steering lock that keeps it held in a steady left turn, as well as one of those D-shaped bike locks through the back wheel. We reckon a handful of burly guys just picked it up and put it on a ute, to deal with the lock via an angle grinder someplace where the noise wouldn’t be noticed.

I’ll find out on Tuesday if the apartment building’s public liability insurance will cover it. Either way, I guess I’m going scooter shopping this week, but I have no idea how to store it more securely than last time.

To my surprise, the woman who took the police report said that if it’s found, I might not get it back right away if they need to go over it for forensic evidence. Either there’s so little crime in WA that they’re desperate for practice, or they like to make people feel unrealistically optimistic about the odds that these crimes are ever solved. And they’ve never seen The Big Lebowski.

At least there were no contents to steal this time.

I’ve been growing steadily more ill the last two days. It is safe to say that this is shaping up to be the worst weekend of 2008.

This was going to be the latest in a no-doubt seemingly-interminable series of aeroplane posts, but our destination this weekend is the one part of Western Australia that gets reliably lousy weather, even in the summer: the southern coast. In that regard, this weekend was predictably disappointing. In almost every other regard, it was an excellent diversion.

The conditions were fine for an IFR arrival, but my American instrument rating can’t be applied to my 3-month licence validation, probably with good reason — I imagine that IFR flying in Australia is more like far northern Canada than the US, in the sense that radar coverage is virtually nonexistent.

As you plan your Denmark holiday, keep in mind that searching for information about this 2,500-person town, whose nearest major town is Albany, is predictably difficult. These destinations are not the typical results for those search keywords.

Along the way and in Denmark itself are fabulous wine country, for which accommodations must be made. Just as in the Barossa Valley, it is the little wineries nobody’s heard of that occupy both ends of the spectrum. Some are a bit of a disaster, but others are a delight.

The last winery we had time for was Mariners Rest Wines, whose somewhat campy nautical theme was eventually revealed to have a more tasteful origin: the winery is owned and run by an ex-Naval officer and his wife.

The first round of tastings were nothing to write home about, and indeed we may not have stayed if we hadn’t been unceremoniously marshaled out to the rear porch for cheese and bikkies, whereupon we discover a veritable grove of tangelo, walnut, and avocado trees.

We sat outside and talked to the owner-wife for a while, who was crazy as a bat, but very nice. She periodically darted into the main room to gather samples of their other offerings — a couple of which were in fact quite good — giving us time to offer hypotheses regarding what the poor people might be getting on to at that stage of the afternoon.

Regular listeners will have already made the mental leap to the end of the story, in which my arms are laden, overflowing like some kind of vegetarian Scrooge McDuck, with avocados in various stages of ripening. I ate a ripe one with supper that night, another on bread for lunch the next day, and they were the most perfect and delicious butter ever to come off a tree, blemished in none of the ways that avocados trucked two thousand miles from the source tend to be. All store-bought avocados of the past and future will be judged against these, and inevitably fall short.

Do not be fooled by his aesthetically pleasing yellow bucket: those waters are antarctic, from the glacial oceans of the deepest south, unfit for man nor beast.

Which is a shame, because Green’s Pool is very effectively sheltered from the raging ocean by a series of boulders 50-100m out to sea. If only it were warm.

These are the famous Elephants’ Asses Rocks, which the local tourism bureau is very pleased about.

On our way out of Denmark, we detoured to nature’s own Treetop Walk, a literally more pedestrian and accessible version of what was to follow (and what has come before). Although it’s somewhat lacking in adrenaline when compared to its sister sites, it is every bit as shockingly beautiful to be up in the canopy.

The gigantic poles that hold up the structure are made from a particular steel blend that’s designed to rust superficially, to complement the environment as much as possible. This is not one of those poles. This is one of those poles.

(complete photoset)

The return journey is nothing if not long, but there was another tree-related attraction located conveniently near the midpoint of our travels.

It’s called The Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree, but there is no explanatory material of any kind, so I’m going to assume it’s dedicated to the original 1973-74 lead singer from iconic Sydney band AC/DC.

This is not to be confused with the Gloucester Tree, but you would be forgiven for doing so. They are both in Pemberton, and internationally tall.

The internet cannot even begin to get its story straight about how tall the Gloucester and Bicentennial trees are, but the preponderance of the evidence seems to suggest that, at any rate, the Bicentennial tree is taller. The top platform may or may not be at a height of 72 meters.

Unlike the Gloucester Tree, there is a little platform about 20 meters up, where you are advised not to proceed further if you’re pregnant, have a heart condition, or are not at least this tall.

Please enjoy the aforementioned instrument conditions.

We wonder if anyone has ever fallen to their death. It seems hard to imagine that it’s never happened, but the internet turns up no relevant facts.

(complete photoset)

I’ve been in Perth for twelve weeks now, but so busy that I haven’t left the city at all.

There is plenty to see and do in Western Australia, but those sights are almost all very far apart from one another. Enter the light aeroplane.

It was a busy day at Hyden airport.

INVISIBLE AIRPORT

You don’t get the reference, and that’s fine; it doesn’t make you a bad person.

It’s hard to believe after the flying of last summer, but I’m pretty sure that Wave Rock is the first time I’ve operated on an unsealed runway. It’s extremely well-maintained, the kind of nice, flat runway that is probably almost effortless in a climate that never experiences frozen water.

I think it gets a daily commercial flight from someplace, probably Perth, so at 1000m long it’s about three times as much runway as I need. Not that I’m complaining.

the walk from the airport is through a dead, barren wasteland

I live in the desert that is Perth, I spent a few days last summer in the eastern deserts, but this is the most desolate place I’ve ever been. It looks like the bush was torched and then salted, lest anything ever grow again, which is probably not as far from the truth as it sounds. Farmers are constantly fighting a war on salinity.

It’s almost all you could see in any direction, except for the road back to the airport, and it radiated death.

the famous wave rock, object of my visitation

There are many internet web home page sites that will tell you all about the rock itself, the algae that adorns it, and the catchment area of which it forms a part.

I will tell you that it is very tall, about 15m, and a pretty interesting rock. There are a lot of details, for someone with enough forethought to bring a macro lens. But I really preferred the climbing around on top part.

The aeroplane is a tiny speck.

February in the Australian desert is very hot

Please let there be no misunderstandings, false impressions, misconceptions, or misapprehensions. It was 38 earth degrees in the shade, of which there is none.

I had a short delay clearing security on my way out.

Would I drive four hours in a car, each way, to see Wave Rock? Probably not. Maybe once. Almost certainly not twice.

But 90 minutes each way was a pleasant journey (its own reward, it is said, and rarely truer than in the aeroplane) and an interesting destination. It has the important benefit of the airstrip being 500m from the main attraction.

(Complete photoset)

sea urchin fish

short-tail stingray fish

starfish fish

yellow striped fish

silver fish

(complete set)

Fabulously busy lately, so here’s a party-time link roundup FOR PEOPLE TO READ OR WHATEVER:

• interesting how the “racist” newsletters weren’t, in fact, racist at all, if you actually read them. (top tip for journalists: reading comprehension still important)
• Cato’s Dan Mitchell on Ron Paul’s tax plan
• the story behind Boony’s record-setting 52 beers on the flights from Sydney to London, 1989
• the advertisement that I tried to link to last year. somehow it’s slipped past the hawk-eyed copyright owner and escaped into the wild, where the public can view it.

I’m reading this Human Performance and Limitations book, in preparation for the written half of converting my FAA licence to an Australian one. It is fascinating, in sometimes-unexpected ways.

For starters, you can tell it was written by an Australian: “The maximum recommended alcohol intake over a period of one week is 21 to 28 standard drinks.” Four drinks per day, every day, is apparently within recommended tolerances.

It gives ancient advice regarding flying and scuba diving. Modern advice is to allow at least 12 hours after a single dive before going above 2,000 feet; 18 hours after multiple dives. This book recommends 4 hours, and suggests that even that may be unnecessary until above 8,000 feet. Some people would consider this advice to be criminal for a book printed in June 2007.

It also contains some interesting things I didn’t know — if it can be trusted, after that dodgy scuba advice. Like the fact that noises of 150 dB or more will cause sweating to occur between the fingers and under the collar. (!)