So this blog has been silent for some time now, and also deviated significantly from it's original purpose as a travel blog. Neither of these things particularly upsets me as a) I haven't had a whole lot to write about and b) Once you settle in a place travelling doesn't exactly take up much of your time.
Anyway as we are leaving Perth in just under 6 weeks now I wanted to see if I could get this bad boy cranking again, particularly for the purpose of recording our 6 weeks travelling through Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand before hitting the UK for (possibly) a couple of years. We have passports, we have visas, and we have half of our flights booked (with hopefully the rest sorted out this evening). We bail at the start of May and fly into London on June 15, probably just in time to contend with the rush hour tube-goers. It'll be a good test for us I'm sure...
So really the last few months in Perth has been a combination of enjoying the most of what we like about the place, namely for me our friends and the weather, with trying to get our savings back on track for SE Asia and setting ourselves up in England. We have both taken on extra work in the weekends - I've been supervising in bars at two of the local stadiums. That meant I worked the first AC/DC concert, which was madness, but as we went to watch the second on it was cool to get a double dose. We've seen a couple of other gigs recently, the highlight definitely being Lupe Fiasco at Metro City. Talib Kweli is here in mid-April, so I might have to make that my send off gig...
We have been back down south which was lovely, and our trip to the Gold Coast to see our mates from Wellington was awesome. I have been back to wonderful Wongan for a week of work, and actually managed to enjoy myself this time, largely because we hit the pub on St Patrick's day. Just now (literally in the last hour) we had the first proper rain since mid-November, and it cam in the form of a monster storm. It hit 32C here today, and yet we have just had golfball sized hail stones. There is debris everywhere, our substation was hit by lightening, the roads are flooded and because of all the windscreen detergent build up on the roads since November, they are also slippery and bubbly.
I'm going to sign off with a photo from our recent trip to Gracetown, but I hope to be back soon, and I look forward to getting some blogs in from Asia :)
If you want to learn a bit more about climate change, the talks at Copenhagen, the science behind it etc etc, a really good resource is www.350.org - a group pushing for a limitation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm). We are currently at 387ppm, and the poli poli poli politicians gathered at Copenhagen are discussing a target of 770ppm.
I could go on but I think 350 does a much better job of explaining things.
Check out the 350 website, and get informed!
Grace's red-backs
Random spider
Praying mantis
Australia recently overtook the USA as the highest per capita carbon dioxide emitting country in the world.
It was set to pass emissions trading laws in parliament before the Christmas break. The Opposition had reached an agreement with the government to pass the legislation. The proposed law was monumentally weak, committing to only a 5% cut in 2000 emission levels by 2020 (when we were all supposed to be below 1990 levels in two years time, had we abided by the Kyoto Protocol). However, it was something.
This morning a vote was taken on the leadership of the major Opposition party, the Liberals, and Malcolm Turnbull lost out to Tony Abbott by one vote. A vote was then held on whether or not to back the emissions trading scheme, and the result was a fairly emphatic 'no'.
So Australia, the world's biggest per capita carbon dioxide polluter, will as always 'wait and see'. They will wait to see what comes out of Copenhagen, which could be a whole lot of nothing. Rather than be proactive, and act in the interests of their children and grandchildren they will risk their already depleted rivers and parched lands, not because the proposed legislation was not ambitious enough, but because there are still far too many climate change deniers walking the halls of parliament.
Well done Australia, well done...
It was only a couple of days ago that I wrote about wanting to see a snake in the wild, and today I got lucky! As I said early there have been a few sightings at work and today one was seen very near to where we were harvesting barley in the experimental plots. We went over to have a look and saw that it was a juvenile dugite, over a metre long and very fast moving. It was thin enough to be able to move in and out of the bird netting surrounding the plots (an area of about 2 hectares), and was pretty hard to see unless you knew it was there or if it moved. We tried to contact the guy at work whose hobby is to catch snakes, however he was not around so we sent a warning email to everyone and carried on with our harvesting (with one eye on the lookout for the snake). While it was a juvenile and not particularly big it would have been a bad situation if one of us had been bitten, and there are bigger ones around as there is bushland just over the road from work. I will be more watchful of where I put my feet in the plots from now on!
