Some more pics of San Fran that really should follow the post below...sorry

 The afternoon after we arrived in San Fran we decided to walk from where we were staying near Haight Street to the Castro district - which didn't look far on the map - but of course the map didn't show all the hills we had to traverse! Anyway it was a great walk and we passed by lots of interesting houses and gardens and we marvelled at the weeping rosemary...in this example it formed this magnificent curtain

 By the time we got to the Castro it was just on dark. The giant rainbow flag was unexpected but welcome. We had a great meal here that night and then decided to walk back home again - although this route didn't take us over so many hills.

 The kitchen of the airbnb apartment we stayed in.  The owner or renter, Zach, was staying in NYC so he was letting both his bedrooms out - one to us and then the other to two different couples during our stay.  This apartment was beautifully fitted out.  Enormous kitchen.

 The National AIDS Memorial Grove is situated in the Golden Gate Park which was just at the end of our road. The Circle of Friends was a large area within which a giant circle made up of the names of people who had died of AIDS were inscribed.  Thousands and thousands of names.

 A fun thing that we did, among many, was to see Wizard of Oz on this giant screen, accompanied by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

 On our second last day we took a bus trip to Muir Woods.  This is a really nice pic of Steve on one of the bridges that we pass as we walked through the forest.

Homlessness is a huge problem in all the cities we visited but it seemed that there were more people living on the streets in San Francisco than any other city.  Some locals explained that this was because homeless people came to SF because of the milder climate and the more progressive social policies and practices.  Some people we spoke to reckoned that homeless people (and among them were a very large number of people with mental illness) were given one way tickets from other cities to travel to San Francisco.  So in this pic there lives a man underneath that sheeting. He sat in a wheel chair and covered himself up with the tarp etc and left his suit case next to him.  I took this pic a couple of hundred metres from where we were staying.

San Francisco

 Our final destination was San Francisco. We flew into a beautiful sunny afternoon and after taking the train and then taxi we managed to get to our airbnb apartment which was just a few minutes stroll from the oh-so-famous Haight Street, and within a minute or two from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury.  We had five days to explore this magical city.  As with our other destinations we hopped on an open top double decker bus and spent a few hours being driven through and around the city - including driving across the Golden Gate Bridge - which was sooooo cold and windy.  But stunningly beautiful.

 This is one of the groovy houses a few doors up from our apartment building in Oak Street. The wooden houses in San Francisco are simply fabulous and our wonderful guide on the open topped double decker bus was able to tell us all about the various genres of housing style including the classic 'painted ladies'.

 Lots of touristic cliche images in San Francisco - the bridge, a cable car like this one, Alcatraz in the pic below.  We took a cable car back to Haight Street one evening and though we didm;t hand out the side we still enjoyed it. Public transport in this city on the street includes buses, trolley cars (which have been sourced from all over the world and painted up to authentically resemble what they looked like when they were carrying people in New York, Milan, or wherever else, and cable cars. We had wonderful weather most days we were in San Francisco except one

 when it was quite overcast. This is a pic of Alcatraz - which alas, we didn't get to.  Next time, hopefully.

 The Golden Gate Park was just a few minutes stroll from where we were staying and we spent much of one day strolling through the park. We spent some time admiring the tropical plants in the Conservatory of Flowers, wandered more solemnly through the AIDS Memorial Grove and then spent several hours investigating the exhibits at the California Academy of Sciences.

 On our second last day we took a bus about 45 minutes out of the city to Muir Woods where we were able to walk amongst the redwood trees. This was a beautiful forest and the redwoods towered above us, although the giant ones with the huge girths are elsewhere in California. We managed to spot a black tailed deer though.

While we were in San Francisco we saw the touring version of Pippin (we  had seen it in Broadway a few weeks earlier but this version included among the cast the fellow who had played Pippin in the original 1970s version as Pippin's father; the daughter of Lucile Ball, Lucy Arnaz as the grandmother; and the fellow who originated the new Pippin in he revival - so we just had to go.  We also saw a hilarious musical review called Beach Blanket Babylon - see pic above, left...apart from being so funny and so musically brilliant, the show also featured the most amazing hats - check out that hat!  We also enjoyed The Wizard of Oz accompanied by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
The other pic on the right is looking up Castro Street, dominated by the giant rainbow flag. This is the 'gay and lesbian precinct of SF and we had dinner on the street on our first night, lunch with our friend Andy who was visiting for work and we almost took a gay and lesbian history walking tour (expect I buggered up the day and we were waiting on the Sunday when it had actually taken place on the Saturday.  Stoopid me).
Anyway, we loved San Francisco. Our apartment was beautiful, the weather was fantastic, the city is glorious.

St Catherine's, Canada

I had such good intentions of blogging about St Catherine's a week or so ago and now here it is, my final night, before I leave tomorrow at 5.3am to get the shuttle bus up to Toronto airport to fly to Chicago.
So I shall do my best to do some catching up, now.
After I left Singapore I flew to Hong Kong where I transited, boarding my flight to Toronto.  Now this was a good moment because it when I was upgraded.  Seriously, Air Canada upgraded me to business class. All I had done when I was at the check in counter was simply ask for an aisle seat if possible and when the woman handed me back my boarding pass she said that they would try their best but couldn't guarantee that they could.  I thought this was a tad odd until I looked at the boarding pass and it didn't have a seat allocation. I was mildly disconcerted by this.
When I got to the gate I told them that I didn't as yet have a seat allocation and was told that they were working on it and to come back in 15 minutes. And then another 10 minutes.  Well all I can say is that it pays to wait patiently. Because when they did eventually hand me my boarding pass the seat as 10A (a window)...Now I was chuckling away to myself thinking how funny the whole thing had been and I still didn't have an aisle seat when it occurred to me that 10A seemed to be awfully far up the front of the plane. I examined the boarding pass more closely and this time saw the word 'Business'. OMG!  I thought of course that there had been some terrible mistake and as I handed the boarding pass as I was about to enter the tunnel to the plane someone grabbed it off me and took it away. 'Hmmm I thought' this is where they will come back and very apologetically explain that a working class lad like me could never fit in business class and that it had all been a dreadful mistake.  As the Air Canada person came back towards me I steeled myself for the inevitable anticlimax when she whispered to me 'we've upgraded you. Have a great flight'.
The smile was on my face until I was half way across the Pacific! 
I won't bore you with the champagne upon arrival and champagne whenever I asked for it...or the menu from which we selected our meals...or the comfortable full length bed that my seat became...or the amazing attention from the flight attendants....but it has definitely spoiled me!

Arriving in Canada almost three weeks ago, I was whisked off by shuttle bus to St Catherine's a city of about 120 000 people about 75 minutes south east of Toronto and located in the Niagara region.  Indeed Niagara Falls is only about 25 minutes down the road.  I visited these a couple of weeks ago.  What a strange, crazy place - with the stunning falls, the beautiful parklands and the tacky, kitschy, sideshow alley-like roads leading down to the Falls. 

I have been based at Brock University, in the Department of Tourism Management where I was given the title of Visiting Scholar and had my own office.  It's been a very enjoyable and productive time. I've been working on the analysis of some of my Singapore data as well as mapping out a couple of projects with a colleague from Brock.

I've been living in a lovely all, vast home which is a ten minute bus trip (plus another ten minute walk to the bus stop) from Brock and the neighborhood is full of interesting birds and squirrels.

The Canadian people are oh so polite and genuinely so and it has been a lovely few weeks.  On Sunday I caught a bus up to Lake Ontario which is at the northern extremity of the city and spent a few hours exploring an 'eco-park' and also Port Dalhousie.  I left Brock today at about 1pm, came back home, did my washing and then started packing before strolling into 'downtown' a 20 minute walk, to Gords, a bar with a lovely beer garden, where I had a couple of pints of raspberry ale and a California burger.  Life is good!

And it gets even better when I meet up with Steve in Chicago and we begin Our Great Big American Adventure!

Just some random pics from Singapore

 The male panda at the River Safari

 A small family group of wild boars on Pulau Ubin...once prey to the tigers that lived on this island and Singapore itself

 This little kid pushed his luck and got even closer to this long tailed macaque and the monkey charged him.  However, the monkey chose to stop his charge before he made contact with the kid....he could have easily bitten him had he wanted to. 'What's that on your face, Sharon?' 'Oh it's a monkey bite, Mrs D'

 amazing aquaria at the River Safari....this one had giant catfish in it

 Amazonian otters

manatee

Singapore then Canada

OK, so I'm very late with my final Singapore posting.  What can I say, I've been busy!  So my five weeks in Singapore was very good.  I managed to collect sufficient data from my observations at the various captive and non-captive wildlife tourism settings which of course was my reason for being in Singapore.
I ended up catching a nasty cold virus the second last week I was there which really knocked me around well and good...I don't think it was the flu, just one of those nasty viruses that give you sore throat, runny/blocked nose, horrible productive cough and saps all your energy.  By the end of the five days my bed and my room and I came to the end of our reasonably friendly relationship...well I suspect that the bed and bedroom didn't have any position on me, but I did of them.  The sheet and doona cover must have had a high polyester component because they just didn't feel soft against my skin...I had been able to tolerate this while not sick but the sickness accentuated my discomfort and so my last week or so on the bed was awful.  The pillows were way too thick as well...but otherwise I'm not complaining, of course.
Once I began to have an appetite again it took me several days before I could stomach anything remotely spicy - which made things rather difficult to find a reasonable meal around where I lived, but I managed.
Some highlights of my stay were camping on Pulau Ubin, a small island off the coast of Sinagpore where my mate Kumzy and I hired mountain bikes and cycled around and across the island....though being hauled out of our tent under torchlight by three police men at around 9.30 at night to check our ID was a little disconcerting - particularly as I had no ID.  But they seemed happy with me writing my Australia address on a piece of paper, so the incident didn't end in tears - or an overnighter in a gaol cell. What else? I visited a frog farm; I visited the (Barely) Live Tortoise and Turtle Museum - this was not a highlight - indeed a lowlight. At least a thousand tortoises and turtles most of which were not kept anywhere near at a standard that they should have been kept.  Very sad indeed.  And the place had something close to 40 pig nosed turtles which is incredible! I suspect there would be nowhere else in the world which has that many individuals of that species (they occur in NT and in southern New Guinea - which is how these would have ended up in Sinagpore....smuggles out of New Guinea.  Apparently hatchlings were a popular aquarium pet in Singapore in the 60s and 70s and so these guys represent the animals that managed to survive and grow into adults...and of course way too big to house properly in an aquarium I  someone's flat....although having said that, each of these was confined to a three foot aquarium with about 4-6 inches of water depth....each turtle however was about 30-40cm long.
But easily the professional highlight was giving a talk at the Zoo to Zoo, Night Safari and River Safari staff about the findings of my research.  An hour talk stretched into 90 minutes and at the end of the talk several senior staff (including the head of 'zoology') wanted me to repeat the talk to the senior executive.  There was some talk of me coming back later in the year to do this.  Then the education staff who missed my talk invited me to meet with them on my last day at the zoo and again we met for about 75 minutes. It was a lovely feeling to see how there was such a practical application of my research to zoo educative practice.  So I was happy with that.
My last two days I spent in the city - doing some last minute research - like dangling my feet into a fish spa and having so-called 'Dr Fish' scrape off my dead skin cells - and also visiting a frog farm. I also visited the Kranji War Cemetary at the very extreme north of the island to locate the name of my great uncle who had died during WW1 on the wall of fallen soldiers.  My cousin Jackie had asked me to do this and I am so very glad she did.
So after five weeks and observing almost 10 000 visitors at the various wildlife parks, I packed my bag for the last time and caught a taxi to the airport to head off to Canada.

Singapore....a little late I admit

OK, so yes I completely agree it has been a rather long time since I last blogged.  And yes, I had all these intentions of blogging on a weekly basis, updating you all on the amazingly brilliant life that is mine. But alas, I am so bloody tired by the time I get home that I have little energy and zilch creative forces left in me.  But, tonight is the night, when I sit myself down at the laptop and get back in touch with all of you Mutterers.

Tomorrow marks the third week of being here in Singapore and I have another two to go, flying out on Monday 11 August for Canada.  So let me give you some details of my life in Singapore. Well it's certainly not Larnook, nor even Lismore, for that matter.  I live in a housing block comprising many tens and tens of high rise apartment buildings at a place called Lakeside, which is almost as west as the train line runs - from memory there are only four stops after Lakeside. Central to the city it isn't but it only takes 40 minutes on the train until I reach the CBD and I've only been going in to the city for a treat once a week. It's about 45 minutes via two trains and a bus to get to the Zoo/Night Safari/River Safari which is where I do most of my data collecting, which again is fine.

The public transport system in Singapore is, of course, superb, and very inexpensive, and all I have to do is tap my EZI-Card when I get out of the trains or buses and away I go.  It's just a matter of topping up whenever I start to go low on credit.  $20 usually lasts me a bit over a week.  Most of the time I have to stand on the trains - they are usually quite full, but always orderly and ultra clean. Many times when I'm making a connecting train I simply walk out of one train and across a few metres of platform and into the waiting train.

I am living with a very nice fellow called Ross, who studied in Australia at the ANU and then lived in Sydney for another 13 years. I have the second bedroom. I have breakfast here, then take a Pink Lady apple from New Zealand for lunch (Zoo food is way too expensive) and I eat dinner at one of the many food places within the housing complex.  My dinner usually comprises rice with a selection of meat and vege dishes and comes in somewhere between 4 and 5 Singapore dollars.  I usually have a can of Tiger beer (upping that to a 600ml bottle on Friday and Saturday nights).

The work I am doing has been very interesting though parts of it are now quite tedious.  I have three studies I am doing: one is to examine the extent to which visitors to the Zoo and River Safari 'engage' with 8 different signs each of which has an overt conservation message. It is all observational so I basically sit myself down where I can keep the sign under surveillance and then record whether visitors walk past the sign and not see it, see it but keep walking, or stop and read it (I time them at this stage). I also record whether they touch the sign, point at it, read any of it out aloud, talk to their kids or companions while at the sign etc).  I set my sampling goal at a lofty 1000 visitors per sign and I will make this.  It has become pretty tedious though because after about 500 people the patterns of engagement had become pretty obvious.  But you will have to read the journal article I will subsequently write if you want to find out more.

I have become quite good friends with Omar the male white tiger - the interpretive material near the tiger exhibit is one of the things I am looking at, so I usually spend an hour or so each day and watch him and his good tigress when there aren't any visitors occupying my attention.  Unfortunately he actually killed a man who jumped into the enclosure in 2011. The death of the man at the jaws of Omar was actually filmed by someone who witnessed it and is posted on YouTube if you want to see it. I am drawn to the video for some reason, as macabre as that sounds, and drawn to looking at Omar and wondering what he must have thought to have been presented with this unfortunate man (who apparently jumped in because he wanted to suicide).  Anyway, most of you probably won't want to watch this - and don't worry I have no desire to join Omar.

The next study is when I get to stalk visitors in the Australian Outback exhibit.  This requires me to skillfully and stealthily follow an unwary person around while they are in the exhibit, timing how long they spend looking at each component, what they do, how many photos they take etc etc etc.  No one appears to have noticed me noticing them so far.

My other study is a broader one examining the way in which the Singaporean tourism industry frames animal encounters - how do tourists encounter animals within Singapore, how do animal encounters become incorporated in the destination marketing of Singapore etc.  For this one I have to visit all the animal-based tourist attractions, captive and wild, as well as other more obscure animal-tourist interactions such as the fish spa I am going to tomorrow on an island called Uban, which is a 20 minute bum-boat ride from Singapore proper.  I'm actually going to camp on the island which should be fun and then on Monday (which is a public holiday because it is the end of Ramadan) I am going to one of Singapore's nature reserves to observe visitor-monkey interactions.  Then it's back to the Zoo, Night Safari, River Safari for the rest of the week.

I do data collection every day so as I said, by the time I get home, I am knackered.

I have collected a sh*t load of data, however.

OK, well I think that should do for now.  I'll post again before I leave and include some pretty pics and then I shall post from St Catherine's in Canada.

Icy cold at Larnook

 So due to the magic of the 21st century, well I guess it's last century technology isn't it, anyway, whatever...Here I am in Singapore where the days range from 30-34 degrees C while Larnook and the northern rivers generally, at least away from the coast, has been copping lots of frost.  Apparently, we had some very nasty frosts last week. Julia stayed at our place for a few days last week and this is what outside looked like on Saturday morning.  It's never been as heavy as this in the almost six years we've had Larnook....I just hope our more frost sensitive plants don't die.

And here's Bluey looking as if he's thinking 'please don't send me outside just yet'.  Of course not, he was snug as a bug in a rug inside the house.  Very comfy, just near the fire.