Christmas Holidays in Southeastern Australia

Christmas and New Year is Summer in Australia, and it is perhaps not the ideal vacation spot at this time of year if one wants to get away from the permanent equatorial heat and humidity of Singapore. But Southeastern Australia can be relatively cool even in the Summer and my bet was that a few days in Melbourne followed by a week in Tasmania would be a welcome and salutary break from Singapore. It turned out to be a good bet.

After two rainy days in Melbourne, a break in the weather allowed us to go for a hike along the coast of the Mornington Peninsula on the Southern Ocean side. It reminded us of the Northern California Coast. Very similar rocky cliffs and rolling pastures can be seen North of San Francisco at Point Reyes for instance. This walk would have been idyllic if it had not been for the clinging flies that surrounded us. The woman at the counter of the cabin where tickets for a lighthouse tour were sold told us that, thankfully, the air was cool and they were not too numerous on that day, but that, on a very hot day, they entirely cover the beam of the cabin above the counter and she has to wear a hat with a net to protect her face.

A white sand beach on the Mornington Peninsula ...

A sand stone cliff with the most interesting colors.






Bruny Island in Tasmania ... a penguin rookery ... without the penguins, but still a gorgeous beach.




Satellite Island, a small island off Bruny Island, a bigger island off Tasmania, itself an even bigger island off the coast of Australia ... a very big island. Ah ... the clouds ...

En route towards Cradle Mountain-Lake Saint Clair National Park, Russell Falls in Mount Fields National Park.

Tasmania. Cradle Mountain-Lake Saint Clair National Park.

A hike in a rain forest along Lake Saint Clair. In the back of us stands Mount Olympus. In front of us, across the lake, Mount Ida. On the boat that took us to Echo Point, from which the Overland Track starts, the driver told us that the explorers who discovered this area had been inspired by the Homeric epics in naming the landmarks of this beautiful country. In the Iliad, Mount Ida is the mountain from which the gods watched the Trojan War. But here, nothing but calm and beauty.



A hike to Mount Rufus.



A stop for lunch on Shadow Lake at the foot of Little Hugel. One can drink the pure cool water of this lake.



Indifferent to our presence, an echidna is going about its business, foraging for ants in the dirt with its narrow snout.





Back in Hobart, festivities abound on the waterfront around the Taste of Tasmania. These bagpipers remind us of the hardy Scots who settled this land, as rough as their own, while Wild Oats rests majestically after having won the Sydney to Hobart race in less than two days, a thing of beauty ... a 98 foot long sailboat built for speed.

Serendipity on Christmas Day in Tasmania

If there ever was a fool's errand in Hobart, it was our search for a restaurant to have dinner on Christmas day. Yet, it resulted in the most extraordinary surprise ... but not of a culinary kind.

We had landed in the morning at Hobart's airport, after a short flight from Melbourne and gone immediately to visit Port Arthur, one of the first penal colonies in Australia. After checking in at our hotel mid-afternoon, we went to explore Hobart, which, on Christmas day, was deserted. Our hotel was in Battery Point, the oldest district of Hobart, on top of a hill with great views of the Derwent River and charming Victorian houses. A short walk down the hill took us to the Salamanca Market Place and the waterfront on the old port. This is where most restaurants are ... but the few that were not closed had been fully booked for weeks. We walked back up the hill in search of Kelley's Seafood Restaurant, recommended by our guide-book.

Kelley's Seafood Restaurant is a quaint old white cottage at the corner of two back streets of Battery Point ... but it was closed. As we were standing there wondering what to do next, we were overtaken by a couple. The woman turned around and, as she was about to address herself to Ellen, it came back to me in a flash: she was the Brasilian woman who helped take care of our children when they were infants in Palo Alto so that Ellen could have some time to practice her harpsichord. Her husband was studying for a doctorate at Stanford at the time. Ellen did not recognize her immediately, but, after she introduced herself to us, it was indeed Matilde, who was here in Hobart with her husband Jose, exploring Battery Point.

This was the most improbable encounter. We would never have imagined that we could stumble upon a couple of Brasilian people we had lost track of for more than 25 years; and in Hobart, of all places, at the end of the Earth, with only water between this Southernmost point of Australia and Antarctica. It became only a little less improbable after we learned that they were both at the end of a one-year sabbatical in Melbourne from their university jobs in Sao Paulo, but only marginally so, really. For this encounter to happen, we still needed to decide independently to spend time around Christmas in Hobart, to book rooms in hotels of Battery Point, and to wander in that area on the afternoon of Christmas Day.

We walked back to our hotel with them and talked for hours over some food (only room service was available) and a bottle of wine we had purchased at a winery in Yarra Valley and brought with us from Melbourne.

We exchanged email addresses and phone numbers, determined this time not to lose sight of each other for another 25 years! Ellen, who is not adventurous and would never have thought of visiting Brazil, now wants to organize a trip there.

This was, really, the most wonderful Christmas present we could have hoped for.

Shanghai, February 15, 2008

I am at the Nanjing Lu Bar on the 66th floor of the Royal Meridien Hotel, sitting in a comfortable armchair at a table facing Pudong, across the Huangpu River.

This hotel towers above the 1920s buildings of the Bund on the river, a few blocks away. These skyscrapers of the past are barely distinguishable, as they offer their unlit backs to me. But I remember their facades on the river, enhanced by lighting, when, 13 years ago, on my first visit to Shanghai, we were listening to the concert given in the park at the end of the Bund by the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra with the Shanghai Youth Orchestra. Thousands of Shanghainese were there, eager at the end of the concert to come close and touch those young American musicians with their blond or red hair. Caucasians still were a relatively unusual sight, even in this commercial city, in 1994.

Back then, the only tall building in the Pudong district across the river was the TV broadcasting tower, with its thin spire skewering two bulbous spheres, glittering with thousands of changing multicolor neon lights, as it is this evening. This TV tower still is taller than the Royal Meridien Hotel where I am, but it is now surpassed by a few of the modern skyscrapers of Pudong, now a city of millions that did not exist 13 years ago. I can barely see them. The tallest one, the Mori Building, which was supposed to be the tallest building in the world before Burj Dubai started its mind boggling ascent from the desert towards the sky, is not entirely finished, and only a few dim lights blinker at its top, hidden in the ever present Shanghai smog.

Between the Bund and the tall modern buildings of the center of Shanghai and the enormous skyscrapers of Pudong, the dark waters of the Huangpu River intermittently sparkle under the brightly lit boats it slowly transports on their dinner cruises.

At the table next to mine two young American businesswomen were having a heart to heart discussion of behavior at work (I could not hear the details over the background music). I thought for a while that they were going to get to blows, as their voices raised in anger. But they have now calmed down and seem to be friends again, and engaged in a lighter conversation, after having got rid of what they had on their chests. Good therapy, I suppose.

Another woman sat two tables away and was busy, as I am, punching keys on her Blackberry, but probably with a more businesslike purpose, as her eyes never rose to observe the city lying at her feet. Her date just came in and they walked off to dinner.

I will do the same and go explore what culinary offerings this hotel has for dinner, but on my own, as my date is 10,000 miles away.

I am drawn to Allure, the French restaurant of this French hotel, where I am greeted in French by the tall young chef, made even taller by his white toque. In this elegant restaurant nested in a corner of the vast hotel lobby, I have a light and delicious dinner (mushrooms in an emulsion of white beans with truffle shavings, a firm and perfectly cooked black cod fillet sitting on a bed of beet-roots in a reduced red wine sauce, and a thin-crust mango tart with a white pepper sorbet).

Finding such refined French fare in Shanghai is not a new experience, for I have already discovered on a prior trip that Jean-Georges Vongerichten has replicated his three Michelin star Jean-Georges New York restaurant in an elegant venue on the Bund, but finding more than one such place in Shanghai is a testimony of how cosmopolitan and sophisticated this city has become. I am looking forward to sampling on my next trip a third fancy French restaurant, Rouge, which I stumbled upon on the bank of the Huangpu River on the Pudong side during a walk on my last trip in December.


I decide to go for a walk before retiring to my room. Very near the hotel, there is a wide and well-lit alley for pedestrians, lined with shops, bars, food outlets and small hotels. It is cold, almost freezing, as indicated by a big neon thermometer on the side of a building, which marks 2 degrees Celsius. Nevertheless, on this Friday evening, many people walk in small groups, all bundled up in their padded winter coats, most of them rather cheerful.

I am surprised to notice that I am the only Caucasian, and I soon find myself the target of many solicitations. Pimps come to me offering "young girls", the most forward of a couple of young women offers to go drink a cup of coffee somewhere, and talk (a prelude, I am sure, to her objective of drawing me into a less innocent but more financially rewarding occupation). A bold girl detaches herself from a group of friends and approaches me, blurting out "You want sex, massage ... ?" A man comes close to me, holding in one hand a cup for alms, pointing to the exposed stump at the end of his other arm. I leave the center of the street and walk hugging the shops, trying to make myself less conspicuous.

This is the other side of Shanghai. Below the glitzy surface of luxury hotels and modern office buildings, there is still this seedy side of poverty. Most of the people walking in that street are in drab looking clothes, very much like what I used to see in my youth in Paris in the 1950s, as France was still recovering from the war. This is a clear sign that the vast majority of Shanghainese, even though they are much better off than they were 20 years ago, are just graduating to the lower ranks of the middle class.

Back in my hotel room (very modern, spacious and comfortable), there are other reminders of the fact that, even in Shanghai, the most commercial and open of the large Chinese cities, China has not quite made it yet to the First World. Bottled water on the sink in the bathroom tells me that I should avoid drinking water from the tap. And the water running from the shower head smells foul, which reminds me that, not far from Shanghai, heavy metals and other toxic substances seep into the ground from old leaky manufacturing plants ...

The morning after I am driven early to Pudong airport. The ride in this grey cold winter morning is made grimmer by the thick surrounding smog. Chinese people are paying a heavy price for their country's unbridled race to being the manufacturer of the world.