Tag Archives: Street Art

Off the ship and into Darwin

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Thursday 22 August – Yesterday was a day spent at sea making the transit from the Kimberley to Darwin. The day was therefore spent mainly doing end-of-cruise admin – repacking the suitcases, paying the bills, that kind of thing.  There was one important event to attend, though. Although we’d avoided most of the “social” activities on board the ship, the guides had organised a photo competition, which, of course, is catnip to me. There were four categories in which to submit entries – Landscape, Wildlife, Social and “Wild card” (i.e. anything at al). Unsurprisingly, I had no candidates for the social category, but  I did submit entries for the other three. And, ahem…

(and another photo was a runner up, too, in the wild card category). One lady won two of the categories with a couple of cracking photos, but sadly couldn’t be there to celebrate her success, as she had Covid and was confined to her cabin.

By about 6pm we could see Darwin in the distance, albeit not very clearly. The lack of clarity in the view was almost certainly down to what we think must be a bush fire somewhere in the area.

The smoke gave some nice atmosphere to photos as we approached,

and then we had arrived.

It would have been possible to leave the ship for a wander around, but we expected to do that after we finally disembarked, so we concentrated on having a few final free cocktails….

As is normal with these things, next morning we were flung off the ship in very short order; out of our cabins by 8am and off the boat by 9.

We were staying in the Vibe Waterfront hotel, as were several other passengers, so APT had laid on a coach to take us there from the port – a lengthy drive covering a total distance of about 500m. On the way, though, the driver gave us a couple of useful tips about places to visit and to eat.

It being not long after 9am at this point, our hotel room wasn’t ready for us, of course. So we went for a walk. Obviously.

Darwin’s not a big place, but it has some interesting things to see, which Jane, in her usual organised fashion, had scoped out for us. The hotel itself is in the Waterfront area, a redevelopment, i.e. gentrification. It has its own small but perfectly-formed beach,

which fronts a water park

in an area which seems pretty nice for a leisurely swim., protected from those nasty ocean waves

(though we discovered later that they can turn them on for you if you want).

At the end of the wharf which protects the waterfront area is a uniquely Australian exhibition.

which, although it doesn’t say it on the door, is also dedicated to something that unsurprisingly figures high in the local consciousness:

the wartime bombing of Darwin (February 1942).

We went in to take a general wander round and were immediately bossed about in a very organised way by a lady who was clearly part of The Management; she told us about a simulation of the attack which happened every 20 minutes, as air raid sirens went off, and an immersive screen showed a visualisation of what it might have looked like.

We were then ushered into a small film theatre for two “holograms”: one told the story of the genesis of the Flying Doctor Service, including how it became Royal; the other was the story of an American general on the scene of the bombing – both done really quite well, and very interesting.

The bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942 was the largest single attack ever mounted by a foreign power on Australia. On that day, 242 Japanese aircraft, in two separate raids, attacked the town, ships in Darwin Harbour, and the town’s two airfields in an attempt to prevent the Allies from using them as bases to contest the invasion of Timor and Java during World War II. Darwin was lightly defended relative to the size of the attack, and the Japanese inflicted heavy losses upon Allied forces at little cost to themselves. No wonder it’s something that still looms large in the folk memory here – although relations with Japan nowadays are cordial.

The centre also has a real Flying Doctor aeroplane there.

There was a VR setup which gave one the chance to see the Flying Doctor service from the point of view of both patient and pilot.

The hologram film gave an excellent overview of the development of the RFDS, starting from its inspiration: the case of someone who had to travel hundreds of kilometres and wait six days for treatment after a major farming accident. This inspired the Reverend John Flynn to look for ways to solve the problem of communicating and delivering medical care across the remoteness of the Australian interior.  The combination of nascent aviation capabilities and a pedal-driven radio proved to be a successful one, allowing the service in time to grow to its current roles: nationwide, the service has over 80 aircraft and includes flying dentistry and flying mental health services alongside emergency and primary medical care.

The Flying Doctor Service was allowed to add “Royal” to its name after HM Elizabeth II visited in 1954; she talked to people over the pedal-driven radio, though I bet someone else did the pedalling.

All in all, it was a very worthwhile and interesting hour spent at the centre.

We went back to the hotel, but our room still wasn’t ready. So, after a coffee, we went for another walk. Obviously.

Downtown Darwin is on a plateau somewhat higher than the Waterfront, and is reached via a lift (well, you can use the steps if you want, but the temperature was around 30°C, so sod that for a game of soldiers).  We passed some handsome buildings, such as Government House,

the oldest colonial building in Darwin,  and the Northern Territory Library, which is a very imposing building.

Outside the library, a group of Masked Lapwings were having a barney

and we saw an Orange-Footed Scrubfowl, scrubbing about very orange-footedly.

We then headed for Austin Street, which is noted for its street art. It is indeed very varied and colourful.

By this stage, the temperature was well into the 30s, and so we headed back towards the hotel. We passed the site of the Darwin Festival, an 18-day event which is due to continue until 25 August,

and the Anglican Cathedral, which is definitely an Interesting Church

albeit a closed one; it was possible to see inside through the front door, though.

Some White Ibis (“Bin Chickens”) were squabbling outside.

Our route back to the hotel also took us near another Darwin unique, the WWII Oil Tunnels. These were tunnels built as underground oil storage tanks, in the aftermath of 1942 Japanese bombing of the above-ground ones that were already there.  The enterprise was a massive engineering undertaking, with many problems and false steps along the way; and it wasn’t a massive success.  11 tunnels were envisaged, and six were completed by the end of the war, and so weren’t needed by that stage, although tunnels 5 & 6 were used for storage of aviation fuel during a confrontation with Indonesia in the 1950s.

Tunnels 5 and 6 are now open to the public. For a fee, of course.

It looks like a tunnel, but actually this is the interior of one of the tanks

This engaging sculpture can be seen at the junction of a couple of the tunnels.

Even after all this peregrination, our hotel room was still not ready, but we sat in the blessed cool of reception for a few minutes and then were at last admitted. Actually, the room is pretty good – plenty of USB charging points, plus a kettle, Earl Grey and milk in the fridge. And face flannels in the bathroom, something that seems to be standard over here, whereas it’s disappointingly lacking in most other countries we’ve visited. Including the UK, I might add.

We had a really very good late lunch/early dinner at a bus-driver-recommended restaurant, Snapper Rocks, just along the way from the hotel and retired to our room to rest and prepare ourselves for the morrow. We are due on an all-day outing to visit Litchfield National Park, which on the face of it offers many diversions, termite mounds, waterfalls and crocodiles among them, so it would seem an interesting day awaits. Let’s see how it turns out.

 

 

 

 

No Fundy Sundy

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Sundy Sunday 2 October 2022 – Our itinerary for today featured, as its main event, a tour round the Bay of Fundy, a bay some 90km north of Halifax, on the border with New Brunswick. “Tour” in this case, meant a hike of about 17km in total, and the reason for going there was to witness the tides, which are the highest in the world – as much as 50 feet between low and high water levels. We had instructions to present ourselves at the Maritime Museum entrance, about 15 minutes’ walk away, at 0830. So we got up nice and early (‘coz we’re on bloody holiday) and shot down to the hotel lobby at 0730 to discover that breakfast on Sunday didn’t start until 0800.

Bugger.

There wasn’t much we could do about that, so we just dressed ourselves up in the expectations of a cool (10°C) windy (northerly, 20mph) day (yes, I know that’s mixed unit systems. Deal with it) and set off breakfastless to our rendezvous.

Which didn’t happen. No-one turned up to collect us.*

To be honest, we weren’t altogether surprised. Jane had tried to contact the operators of this particular tour to confirm things, and there had been no answer on their phone number over a couple of days. We gave them until 0900 and then gave up, but used the time in going back to the hotel to see a few new things on the streets of Halifax that we’d missed before: artworks;

a shack which would offer the Canadian national dish were it open, which thankfully it wasn’t;

more artworks;

some buildings of curiosity – the Pacifico Dance Club and the Press Block, the remains of which are shored up in dramatic fashion in order to act as façade for new apartments yet to be built;

and a chance to get some photos on the Grand Parade unobstructed by the celebrations of other folk – the town hall, the monument and St. Paul’s Anglican Church, the oldest building in Halifax and the oldest Anglican Church in Canada.

So we got our breakfast after all. Having partaken, we rested a while and then went out for a walk. Obviously.

Before we had our chat with Tim the concierge, he had been giving another couple some tips about places to go and things to do. Jane had earwigged this and used it formulate a Plan B – take the ferry across the harbour to Dartmouth and take a late lunch at a restaurant called the Wooden Monkey. So we walked to the Ferry Terminal via the Historic Properties

which now house various small boutique-y businesses.

I noted this highly retro offering in the ferry terminal.

The ferry is astoundingly good value for money. Two dollars will get you across the water to the Alderney Landing in Dartmouth and that price also includes what they call the “transfer” – a return journey if undertaken within two hours of the start. The only hurdle put in our way was that not only did they only accept cash, but also you had to proffer the exact amount. We managed to get some notes from an ATM (which was erroneously marked as Out of Service) and thus some change from a change machine, but this was the first time that only cash was acceptable for such a long time that I had given up taking any with us.

Anyhoo… the ferry journey gives some decent views in the 10 minutes it’s in motion: views of Halifax city

(our hotel visible between the two buildings), including the large Casino complex;

a view of the Alderney Landing, unsurprisingly;

and a view of the two major bridges across the water, the Macdonald Bridge and, through it, the Mackay Bridge.

Seeing the two bridges gave an opportunity to reflect on something I’d never come across before we visited Canada (first mention of it was in my brother Chris’s blog post on his earlier visit here) – the Halifax Explosion of 1917, the largest man-made explosion before the first atomic bomb. On the morning of 6 December 1917, the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the area between where those two bridges now stand. The Mont-Blanc, laden with high explosives, caught fire and exploded, devastating the Richmond district of Halifax. 1,782 people were killed, largely in Halifax and Dartmouth, by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured, many by flying glass. It’s amazing that I’d never heard of this incident until this year.

Dartmouth is quite a large area in Halifax, but the downtown part near the ferry terminal is quite limited. We had time before our restaurant reservation, so we walked around a bit. Obviously. There’s a waterside trail which features a couple of curiosities: the propeller of HMCS Macdonald, broken by ice when assisting another vessel in crossing the North West Passage (astonishingly the damage was only discovered later in dry dock);

the World Peace Pavilion, dating from the 1995 Global Economic Summit and containing symbols of peace from nations around the globe;

and a decent view back over to Halifax.

We had an excellent meal in the Wooden Monkey,

(above – the lift lobby going up to it from the ferry terminal)

which takes local produce and environmental issues very seriously. My theory about the restaurant name was that it was called such because it wooden monkey around with the quality of its offerings (actually, we were told that it came into being in the Chinese Year of the Monkey when wood was the element associated with that year).

Afterwards, wandering back for the return ferry journey, we came across more artworks.

It really is a pleasure to see such trouble being taken, pretty much wherever we’ve been in Canada – and Alaska – to use art in various forms to make places more attractive. I hadn’t got a mental picture of Halifax before I arrived, but such a bounty of interesting and quirky touches was not something I had expected, and they make it a nice place to be.

Whilst waiting for the ferry to go back to the city, I caught sight of this chap in a wheelchair, nonchalantly doing stationary wheelies; very impressive balance and control.

And, as we walked back to the hotel, we passed yet another mural that we hadn’t seen before.

We decided to try to find a Pedway route back to the hotel, doing which gave us this final nugget about the city.

One hopes the future will see the place developing and improving itself even further. It’s been a pleasure discovering the city. Even though we missed out on the Bay of Fundy hike, we’ve had a really nice two days here.

We leave tomorrow to go to the final new adventure before we return home – St. Johns, Newfoundland. Here’s hoping that our last couple of days on this nine-week odyssey will be a pleasant conclusion to what has been an excellent holiday. Join us, if you will, to find out….

* It turns out that there has been a miscommunication between the various agencies behind our intricate and ever-evolving itinerary. Our UK agency had thought the Canadian agency had nailed it down whereas the local operator had cancelled. It’s a shame, but it did mean we had a more relaxed day here.

Taking Steps in Montréal

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Friday 23 September 2022 – For our first full day of exploring Montréal, we settled on two aspects we wanted to prioritise.  Neither of them was particularly likely to be in evidence near our hotel, and walking to them would have taken too much time, so we decided to use the Metro to get us about. Apart from anything else, we both feel that using public transport in a strange place gives one a greater feeling of connection with it; Montréal is really the first place on our long trip through Canada where using it has made sense, so we were glad to take the opportunity.

The hotel is connected to RÉSO, as is the nearest metro station and it only took a small amount of blundering about to enable us to find it. We bought 3-day passes, which would give us unlimited use of the system whilst we were here.  I tried to use the transaction to split a 50-dollar note, as we were running short of smaller denominations, only to be told that the transaction was card only – something I suspect is true in many places across the city now.

The Metro here is not a particularly intricate network – just three lines – but the Orange line suited our needs.  I am quite impressed with what we’ve seen of the Metro.  It’s clean,  reasonably frequent and has modern trains which run, like many Paris Metro trains, on rubber tyres.  There are some nice design points in the way it operates, too.

Station announcements are clear, lights tell you which side to disembark, and they also warn you when the doors are about to close by turning red.  There’s a mobile signal throughout and altogether it seems a very good system.

Acting on recommendations from the esteemed Ian Burley, we aimed for Jean Talon, which features a well-established market.  The area is well out into the suburbs and does have the same air as some of the (nicer) banlieus of Paris.

The market is very substantial, and looks like a typical sort of market you find in France,

with lots of wonderful-looking fresh produce, meats and cheeses.  There is a considerable variety of some things,

such as these varieties and colours of aubergines and cauliflowers, the like of which I’d never seen before.

On the way to the market, we saw examples of one of the two aspects of the city we were keen to explore – street art.

Some items are very obviously formal works of art.  Others are more difficult to distinguish from upmarket graffiti.

The city staged a festival of street art for 2022, and Jane had found a website which gave an idea of where to find some examples that were part of this festival, as well as some pieces that have been in place for longer.  And we found lots and lots of examples, one or two of which I’ll share in a moment – just be patient. But, after leaving the market, we also came across the other aspect that we (Jane, particularly) wanted to see: outdoor staircases.

The city has a phenomenon called a “plex” – a building with apartments stacked on top of each other.  In many cases, external staircases are used to reach the upper ones. The basic reason for this is to save space on internal staircases.  There’s an interesting article giving more detail here.

We reached a section of the city called Little Italy,

no, really,

and found that these external staircases can be found in profusion here. So I got my camera out and Took Steps:

The (mostly ironwork) staircases look interesting and artistic on a nice sunny day such as this one; what they must be like to use in the ice and snow of a Montréal winter I dread to think…

Our route towards more examples of street art was the Boulevard St. Laurent, which is a busy and quite crowded main road.  One block to the side of it, though, is Clark Street, which is much quieter and more pleasant, and also contains many examples of these external staircases.

It also has a segregated cycle path along much of its run through Little Italy, which makes stepping off the pavement unwise without checking carefully in both directions. Here are a couple more instances of these interesting cultural oddities.

Even the less attractive ones are interesting to look at.

We also saw a few other oddities as we walked along:  what seems to me a risky way of exercising dogs;

A Catholic church with an unusual architecture, offering services in Polish, Italian and English (only open on Sundays, so sadly we couldn’t peek inside)

and the absolutely massive building which once housed the Canadian Warehouse Company.

But now: the street art.  There is a lot of it – it’s A Thing in Montréal, much more than anywhere else we’ve visited in Canada.  There are all sorts: grotesque;

abstract;

advertising the business;

fantasy;

fanciful;

flashy;

and unfathomable.

Sharing all the photos I took here would be too cumbersome, so I have created a Flickr Album with 44 examples, if you’re interested to see more.

The one thing that we noted about every single piece of street art we saw was that they were all, every single one, defaced by graffiti, which I found very saddening.  In fact, there was graffiti everywhere we looked and its utter ubiquity leaves me with a less than favourable impression of the city.  Sure, every city has its graffiti, but there’s so much here that it renders even the attractive bits ugly in my view.

In the midst of all of this (vandalised) street art, we discovered we were (a) hungry and (b) near a deli recommended by the indefatigable Ian Burley – Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen, famous for its smoked meats.  So famous, in fact, that it has its own Wikipedia entry. And so famous that the queue to eat in the restaurant is, well, quite famous.

Jane spotted that there’s a take-out section,.  The queue in there was quite substantial, but very fast-moving.

We got a Smoked Meat Sandwich each, (with a pickle, already!), and actually scored seats at the very back of the shop; I can report that their pastrami is delicious, but you really must make sure to have napkins or tissues to hand, as the portions are vast and tend to leak everywhere.

Clark Street actually runs all the way into the city, and is much preferable to walk along compared to St. Laurent.  It also has some really interesting houses along it.

On the other side of St. Laurent to Clark Street there is a square called St. Louis,

which is also surrounded by some really individual properties.

As you get towards the city, having passed through Little Italy and Little Portugal

you reach Chinatown, which is quite small, but has four gates.  This is the main one (through which you can just see the far gate)

and then, before you know it, you’re by the Old Town, and in our case, near the Basilica Notre Dame,  Like almost everywhere, it was under maintenance –

I guess when you have winters like they have here, you have only a limited window in which to get things fixed, but another thing I found oppressive was the ubiquity of roadworks and other construction projects going on.

Anyhoo.

We went inside. It’s quite a sight.

It’s another telling example of the opulence of Catholic churches as opposed to the more austere Protestant approach to worship.

You’d have thought we’d have had enough by now, but no – we were near the Old Port and there was The Wheel.

You can’t see something like that on a sunny day and not want to ride round it, can you?  So that’s what we did.  To be candid, there are so many reflections once you’re in a cabin that photography can be quite unrewarding, but we managed a couple of reasonable photos between us as we went round.

The last one of these, the “galleon”, we subsequently found out, is set up as a kids’ adventure playground, with all sorts of places to climb around; a nice idea.

And that really was it for the day.  We headed back to the nearest Metro station and thence to the hotel for a much needed glass of something cold before retiring for the evening.  The day was long but interesting, with many charming aspects of Montréal to balance against its ineffable scruffiness.  We have one more full day here; who knows what we shall do with it?  I’m pretty sure Jane Has A Plan… come back and find out, eh?