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Category: pollution

Our seven steps in Dal Lake (exploring the light and dark of Dharamshala Mother Country)

Sep 5, 2024 | beneficial flora, children's learning, culture, dogs, edible weeds, food culture, foraging, goats, interspecies relating, lifemaking, love, magic, medicinal plants, mushrooms, politics, pollution, raising boys, social warming, storytelling, travel | 34 comments

 

We have been asked a number of times in India what our religion is. We reply, we are animists. Then we are asked, but who is your god, your gods? We answer, Mother Country. Our response feels inadequate because our animism is not rooted in the past with developed belief systems or dependency on a story. Rather, it is an in-and-out-again presence with the living of the world.

At traditional Hindu weddings in India the groom leads the bride around a sacred fire. The couple take seven steps, each one representing a blessing – food, strength, wealth, happiness, progeny, cattle and devotion. Throughout our two weeks living in Dal Lake, near Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh in the north of India, these seven blessings travel with us. They travel with us, in us, through us, connecting us to everything here.

We arrived in Naddi above Dharamshala on dusk, and went exploring.

and out of the clouds came this friendly Gaddi goatherd.

We spent a night in a mouldy room with a stellar view, and only one double bed despite the advertisement stating three singles.

We have inflatable mattresses with us, it was cheap and cheerful, and the next day we left our packs in the room and went walking for the morning.

The temperature was cool and the tributaries flowing. This region has three main seasons: summer, monsoon, and winter. It is monsoon season now, and it rains every day from July to September.

On our walk we recognised old friends, uncensored and unrestrained, growing autonomously in the mountains,

and came to shrines where daily offerings are made.

We crossed Naddi River,

and took masala chai and omelette at a stone built café on the other side.

We began making connections here,

but we had a mouldy room to leave and the promise of a cricket park to get to.

Just down from Naddi is Dal Lake, which boasts a well loved public cricket pitch. Teams are chosen, Woody a little nervous at first, clouds cover the lake, cattle watch on.

Just up from the pitch, Bittu runs a chai stand he’s had for seven years. He’s thirty now, and ready to walk the seven steps with a goodly woman, arranged or otherwise. He played Patrick’s guitar and the two men had a yarn,

while Meg and Woody set out on foot to look for a room close to Dal Lake’s cricket pitch. They door knocked at guest houses, some of which were closed as this is the off season in Kangra district. They eventually found Pong Dam View, under renovations.

We hired two musty but not mouldy rooms, which meant Woody’s parents, who like to wake early could get up, do morning stretches, make tea, make love, make blog, without waking the growing boy, who is a 12-hour-a-night sleeper. There is also a little kitchenette. We opened all the windows and doors and let the fresh mountain air flow through.

The kind owner of the home stay, Kali Dass, a retired soldier, gave us a 2/3 discount for staying long-term, so room 1 at Pong View Dam Home Stay became our little sanctuary for a fortnight. No other guests stayed during this time. A quiet sanctuary from which we stepped out from each day to go exploring, and where, across the road, another guest house and café was situated, sporting this truism at the front door.

Back in Australia we heard the news that the Labor Party have set up their own disinformation reporting site urging their believers to dob in what they deem as ‘disinformation’. Yes, we should absolutely trust a government and their supporters to hold the measure of truth on behalf of everyone else – it’s always worked well in the past.

The past is very present in India. Gandhi, like Mao in China, is the only fella on the notes here,

and his glasses appear everywhere as a potent symbol for the man who led the country to independence.

While in Dharamshala, over two nights, we watched with Woody the 3-hour film, Gandhi (1982) for a historical insight into how India moved from British colonial control over many different tribal peoples, to the modern nation-state republic (annexed off from Pakistan in 1947), it is today. We’ve also been reading the court statement and associated literature of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse,

and listening to Tibetans in exile here in Dharamshala speak about the intransigence of the Chinese government towards Tibetan people, culture, language and sovereignty.

As we write, the Dalai Lama is returning to his home-in-exile here in Dharamshala, after surgery in New York. The Chinese government continue to call him a separatist, which is an odd label and demonstrates how they either don’t understand or care for the beliefs and wishes of HH or Tibetans. (It also gives us context for why it was made so difficult for us to travel to Tibet from China. Foreigners are granted a two-week visa to China, but then need a permit to get to Tibet, which ordinarily takes 20 days, and you have to be chaperoned for the entire time by an accredited travel agent).

Sympathy for Tibet in this region is pronounced,

which contributes to the ongoing beef between India and China. One afternoon, while we were playing cricket, we witnessed two Tibetan dancers perform on the banks of Dal Lake.

It was joyful to behold such culture making.

The continuous attack on indigenous peoples globally is global capitalism’s conversion process of lively, connected souls into moribund consumers. Some colonial-capitalist institutions are brutal and unashamed in how they treat first people, like the Chinese government in Tibet, the Israeli government in Palestine and US-NATO alliance all over the world. And some are more subtle in how they foster the conversion process, like the lesser nations of the Five-Eyes countries, who increasingly participate in what we call institutional fascism. That is a trust-us-we’re-experts-go-back-to-your-shopping kind of fascism. Because there is no boot stomping, few see this fascism by bureaucratic stealth, rolled out by sophisticated propaganda.

Tibet’s sovereignty was once an important issue for leftists in the rich countries, but seemingly not now for The New Normal Left, who seem to be engaging in purity politics, dividing people into correct and incorrect categories. Purity politics is dangerous ideology as it strips away nuance and diversity of approaches; it is projection warfare predicated on fear and desire. Rather than a turning towards an open relationship with life, with shadows, with underworlding and knowing oneself, the dark is feared,

and ideology takes over.

The two performers at Dal Lake dance their culture into presence and away from fear. Dancing, not war, represents for us the spiritual anarchism required for this era of growing censorship and government overreach. Incorporating both the light and dark occurs in mature cosmologies. The Christian influence in the west has in large part attempted to cancel the dark, and the cult of scientism has carried on this peculiarity into the present. By not being in relationship with darkness, the tendency to mythologise that one is only a force for good comes into play. (See Charles Eisenstein’s brilliant The Sith: A political allegory). This conceit – that the dark cannot inform, give to, or challenge our civilisational hubris – is dangerous. There is no reflection, no shadow world, no trickster to learn from. For us, Mother Country is both light and dark, and this is why we are mother country animists, and why we find kinship with animisms in India.

The assassination of a political opponent did not bring about the reunification of India, as Nathuram Godse had hoped. We have played cricket with Indian soldiers on holiday here in Dal Lake, who express to us that they’re spending their youth keeping “terrorists” out of Kashmir. The continual bloody legacy of the 1947 partitioning into two separate nation states, India and Pakistan, which Gandhi created (albeit with great reluctance), has never gone away. Similarly, the assassination of Trump will not free America from systemic corruption and stop Congress from effectively being a chamber of bought stooges acting for the military and pharma industries, and others. Likewise, violence against China will not bring about Tibetan liberty. The persistence of culture and eldership, however, will.

Tsundue, a mutual friend of friends back home, filled us in further on the Tibetan story here. Tsundue was born in Dharamshala, after his family fled Tibet in 1959, and he and his wife have raised a family here. He too spent some of his youth at Ladakh with a Tibetan unit of the Indian army, resisting Chinese government forces there. Today he is a father, artist and beautiful soul.

If Kamala Harris wins office there will probably be global nuclear war. The Democrats are a New Normal party; they are a war party, and since 2014, when Obama allowed Democrats to receive money from Pharma, they have become a Pandemic Industrial Complex party. American politics is not some fairytale of good guys and bad guys. Rather, it is a culture war between working class discontents on the right and the bourgeois institutional fascists on the left who have abandoned them. There are no good guys, though redneck anarchists like Oliver Anthony, come close.

Dancing is what is required in this present moment, and just as with the truism painted on the wall of the guesthouse above, the monks filming this joyous display of life to share the story of Tibet’s continual culture making, is creative-political dancing. It is joyous sedition. Counter propaganda. Art has always performed a role of subversion, and there is no time like now for artists, poets, writers, filmmakers, anarchists, permies, neopeasants and musicians to joyously and playfully counter the propaganda of the global machine conglomerate.

There is a buzz here, currently, for the return of the Dalai Lama. He has been based in Mcleodganj in Dharamshala since 1960, when he fled Chinese state aggression after the Tibet uprisings, and set up the independent Tibetan government in exile here.

We booked in to hear him speak,

though his lecture was postponed, no doubt due to his health. It is not certain how many more Dalai Lamas will live in exile. China, via economic warfare, is probably set to become the world’s superpower as the US empire crumbles. Or, perhaps Artificial General Intelligence will devour the entirety of humanity in the next handful of years, who knows. But what is clear to us is that all rigid structures, all tightly controlled places, all inflexible dynamics, all static dogma, all government overreaches always signal fragility, sickness and inevitable collapse.

The antidote to all this is forever dancing at the propaganda, fear campaigns and inflexibility of wrong story authority,

and thieving when it brings liberation and laughter,

and daring to enter underworlds,

and connecting with earth others,

and practicing social and labouring solidarity,

and Himalayan thrifting,

and sharing joy through the shared love of a game,

and beholding the majesty of mothering mountains,

and giving where possible to people in need, while not being suckered by a well crafted racket,

and staying with the contradiction of beauty and barbarity mixed in the same moment,

and helping strangers without need of reward or flattery,

and learning from those more accomplished at being relaxed and oneself in private or public places,

and following, for a while, the flags of others with open curiosity, despite fomenting for ourselves our own processes and prayers unshackled from another’s authority,

and singing and playing more delicious life into abundant life, as guests in another world,

and occasionally grooming oneself, on the event of a shared birthday, and honouring the Dharamshala artisan (thanks Suninder!) who helped perform the operations,

and passing on our knowledges to youngtimers,

regardless of our species.

While there is much to learn from the world’s religions and spiritual movements here in Dal Lake, Naddi, Dharamkot, Dharamshala, McLeodganj, et al, we are finding more kinship with the wisdom and lifeways of monkeys,

and bulls,

and raptors,

and russula eating slugs,

and sow thistles,

and mountain clouds,

and street dogs,

and goats and their goatherds.

Pankaj is the son of Gaddi shepherds, and has, along with his kin, taken the family’s goats and sheep up into the higher country for summer browsing. The family normally has a flerd (a flock-herd) of around 50 animals, but a few seasons ago a snow slide took out half of this number. In the evenings we have walked up the mountain to Naddi, and Pankaj and other family members have cooked us some of the best curries we’ve had in this region.

Pankaj makes the paneer cheese that goes into the Kadai Paneer curry dish from his own cow and buffalo milk, and on one occasion the family offered us a goat curry, not normally on the menu. The Gaddi are people of dear interest to us. They are Indo-Aryan, semi-pastoral peoples living mainly in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. They are made up of many different cultural groups, and for generations they have been herding their animals through the high countries of northern India. According to locals, and the god Shiva himself who, it is told, has a special affection for them, the Gaddis are a graced and gentle lot. In the mid-twentieth century, they inspired the Punjabi romantic painter, Sobha Singh, to create his famous, Her Grace the Gaddan, which is hung in many  guesthouses in the district.

We asked Pankaj whether our tracking senses were right to call this a tiger print, which we came across on one of our forest walks.

He confirmed our suspicions and spoke of how the tigers come into the villages after the snow melts each year, hungry after the winter, but they are around at any time. The way he spoke about this most revered animal without fear and with respect was beautiful to hear. On a number of nights, we walked home from his restaurant through the dark, awake and alert to the presence of tigers, but not fearful.

Monkey business here in Dharamshala is not always welcome. Apart from taking banana offerings from a shrine, we watched monkeys stealing corn cobs from a sleeping street food vendor, and use power lines as jungle vines to swing from tree to tree, sometimes bringing them down.

This particular cheekiness is another learning from India, which we can apply when necessary. If governments use communication lines to control us further and silence dissent, as is already happening around the world, then we will dance those lines down. Maybe our monkey dance in this instance will be reverting to dumb phones, and going off line. Monkeys ridicule the slingshot stones projected at them by house and store owners. Back home, since Covid, we have been slung labels such as conspiracists, selfish, right-wing and stupid, and even likened to colonists who intentionally brought small pox to Aboriginal communities.

A new study, a metadata analysis, published a few days ago claims that 3% of people who took Covid vaccines died suddenly. This adds up to millions worldwide. You may want to read the study before it is censored, cancelled, smeared or taken down. Remarkably, we were in a grass roots community group with the person who wrote the above opinion about the unvaccinated being intentional super spreaders. We were fighting institutional fascism in the form of overreaching local laws with her, before Covid entered the room.

We are reflecting here that we are still in the wound of Covid, and perhaps monkey business is another way to help heal that wound when dialogue or deep listening circles are not possible. Perhaps this is why we are so drawn to monkey trickster energy here in Dal Lake and the little villages nearby,

and not just one kind of monkey business.

Nor can we get enough of cricket with the local fellas.

We played cricket with many local kids when school let them out, and many men and women.

These Punjabi tourists, who played ball with us, got out their boom box and created a spontaneous dance party. Having written about dancing through the morning in this blog, the dance was invited in the afternoon, and Patrick jumped in, while Woody declined but picked up the camera.

The dance went a little like this:

There has been much joy in these hills. Many steps of learning and living. One teenager turned to Patrick behind the stumps and said after facing a delivery, “Bowling is a beautiful art”.

Another cricketer we played with said, “In India cricket is cultural.” On Patrick and Woody’s birthday, we went to Dharamshala Stadium.

Meg took this photo of the birthday lads with their new annual haircuts.

Many Indian tourists also visit this northern temple of the game. As well as being cultural, it is often said cricket is a religion in India. Players like Tendulkar and Kohli are considered gods here, though the game is not parochial and other countries’ cricketers, especially Australian, are also revered and enthusiastically spoken of. Harmission, Jashan’s cousin in Punjab, was named after Steve Harmison, an English cricketer.

Integrating this game and other chance encounters with dance and cheekiness, with permacultural neopeasantry, with mother country animism, with subsistence-resilience, with spiritual anarchism, and with observation, connection and curiosity are our seven steps in Dharamshala.

Before we left Dal Lake we made a little offering to the local cricket shrine.

Namaste 🙏🏽

All the little and big offerings of Thailand

Jul 25, 2024 | appropriate technology, bicycles, biodiversity, ceremony & ritual, climate change, dogs, economics, food culture, Industry science, medicinal plants, pollution, street food, subsistence economy, travel | 31 comments

 

We’ve been pollution-sick again, which has been inhibiting our enjoyment of this rich and colourful country.

Patrick and Woody have had it worse than Meg, but each of us have have struggled in our own way. Blackwood is also experiencing homesickness: “I miss our food, I miss my ball on a string, and I miss my friends at Forest & Free.”

When booking transport over the past 12 days in Thailand, we have found it best to stick with people on the ground and avoid the national railway or bus websites. While digital, cross-language communications might improve over time, it currently doesn’t match pointing, grunting, nodding, shaking, laughing or any combination of body gesturing to get on the right train, ending with a khawp khun kha/p!

What we’ve also found difficult about being in this beautiful country, apart from our own participation in what we dislike most about global tourism, is the homogenisation process that is creeping in everywhere there is development. An example of this is the Safety First signage that proliferates through the country.

We think the ‘Safety third’ ethos of the early Burning Man festivals is wiser. Without a little daily danger or risk, our bodies switch off, they lose an alertness, which we think pre-disposes people to becoming accident-prone and even compliant. We’d prefer to live in a world where sharp metal lugs stick out below bus seats,

and rusty metal blades come out of the footpaths,

and a billion or so unleashed dogs inherit the streets by day and night, than live under the cult of safetyism. We’ve loved beholding the autonomous culturing of dogs in Thailand. No one fears them here. When we think of life back home, walking with Zero around Lake Daylesford, there is always one, if not five people who recoil with horror that our little scruffy is off a lead. Oh, Zero! you would love it here!

How western imperialism appears to work as a global-machine-conglomerate is to covet all the major issues of ‘the global village’ into a set of preordained arguments. These arguments are never framed by independent, bioregional, democratic, or indigenous thought – although there’s a fair bit of theatre in places like the UN and in universities that purport heterodox or alternative voices are heard – instead, they are created to serve large global markets, which always have a homogenising effect. That’s why this Thai motorway looks like it could be in South Melbourne, sans the signage.

Because the human world is now so advanced in preordained, market thinking, solving problems is difficult. Climate change has been a theory in the orbit of scientists since the 1930s and yet the machinations that reportedly drive climate change have only steadily worsened over 85 years. To make things worse there’s now a very large industry that’s grown out of ‘Climate’, a kind of Jevon’s Effect industry, making those who are financially welded to it hard to trust. Big money has a way with decision making that the empire is perennially blind to. This is why it is so hard to trust the expert class.

By contrast Monks here live with little and ask for their food, which encourages acts of generosity in the culture. They are trusted and loved.

When we crossed the border into Thailand in this weird little space shuttle of a van,

we came to realise that our fellow passengers were Malay dopenauts who’d come to the only country marijuana is legalised in southeast Asia. When they alighted, we too got out of the van and stepped into light rain falling in the little city of Hat Yai.

We changed currencies,

and found a family-run establishment to buy lunch.

Across the road from where we were to stay that night was a friendly little family-run garage.

By day they service motors. By night they serve beer and pork, and punters cook a ‘set’ or two on little drop-in table BBQs.

As we’ve travelled we’ve tuned our eyes to seek out local tree crop fruits that come with their own thick-skinned packaging,

and have sought out local snacks such as grilled banana,

which are sold wrapped in banana leaves.

And, as everywhere, we like to buy direct from growers’ markets.

In Thailand we delighted not just in the dogs that are left to dance on their own accord, but the plants too;

and in the technologies that quieten the streets and produce no exhaust;

and in the vegetables cultivated locally and sold proudly by growers;

and in the overhead lanterns that mark such a street a night market;

and in all the little,

and big places of ritual, offering and worship;

and in all the kind gestures we’ve witnessed, such as this lady bus conductor eyeing an elderly man who had no hope of reaching the bus stop in time, request to the driver to stop, then urge him to back up, before helping the oldtimer up the steps and into a seat.

The driver was not in the least bit annoyed by this delay in his proceedings.

It took us a few goes to leave Hat Yai. We’d booked our tickets online, and so we thought this was our train,

but it was two days early according to the computations of our tickets. We managed to get on one later that night,

which took us to Surat Thani. We arrived just after midnight in a bit of a blur,

and were thankful for another kind lady, who waited up and let us into our tiny room.

While in Surat Thani we did some day tripping,

We took a local bus, then a truck,

to a market, where we ate Shrimp Pad Thai,

which came in this beautiful little leaf bowl,

and bought bananas with sticky rice.

Later in the day we went in search of a nearby agricultural cooperative, only to find the gates shut and no one around.

We reacquainted ourselves with an interesting weed on the walk there. Mimosa pudica, which we were first shown back in Timor Leste by Sebas, who called it, Shy Maria, is a herb that responds dramatically to being touched, going from upright to prostrate at the slightest feel.

Mimosa pudica is not the broad cut-leaf creeping plant that dominates around Meg’s feet in the photo above, but the small little fern-like leaf plant she is gently caressing. You might have to zoom in to see. We found this paper on the benefits of this sensitive medicinal plant, which states, “[i]t majorly possesses antibacterial, antivenom, antifertility, anticonvulsant, antidepressant, aphrodisiac, and various other pharmacological activities. The herb has been used traditionally for ages, in the treatment of urogenital disorders, piles, dysentery, sinus, and also applied on wounds.”

Plants offer us the possibility of rewiring our nervous systems,

and appropriate technologies offer the possibility of maintaining or recovering our health,

and humourous exchanges offer up the possibility of living with lightness.

Prachuap Khiri Khan is a town by the sea. We stopped there for a night, walked from the station via the food market,

dropped our bags, where we took this photo,

and walked down to the ocean.

Subsistence and local market fishing at the scale of these little boats will never dismantle biodiversity in the world’s oceans.

Only ‘feeding the world’ via the global-machine-conglomerate will do that, as Patrick’s teenage love, Karina, unpacked in her film Blue.

The next day we were back on the rails. An old rattler, hot, noisy and fumesy. We all started off well,

looking out to the rice fields and lyrical wirings,

but as the day continued, and it got hotter, and the dirty squalls coming into the carriage refused to bring comfort, we all started to fade.

By the time we reached the outskirts of Bangkok,

a city of 17 million people, we were fairly wasted.

Although, Meg still had a little spirit, and so we awarded her this watermelon for being the most resilient member of the band.

We’d booked online a little cheap room near the station,

but didn’t know it was right in the middle of a western tourist zone. You know: beer, pizza, cocktails, dope, all night revelling, maybe a dash of Pad Thai and Houellebecqian sleaze. The only picture we took here doesn’t really capture it, rather we were once again collecting photos of vines growing over powerlines.

Woody and Patrick pretty much slept for two days and nights. It was a low key anniversary of Patrick and Meg’s, and Zero’s 14th birthday. Happy birthday little fella! We miss you Zero. Thanks for loving him in your home Black Cockatoo!

The pollution in Bangkok was next level, and after we’d slept through it for a few days, we hightailed it out on another hot, old rattler.

This six hour ride was gruelling, especially for Patrick. It is the combination of heat and pollution that is so harsh for this fella who has spent most of his life in cool mountain fields and forests. Patrick hadn’t had asthma since he was in Hong Kong, 27 years earlier. In Bangkok and on this train he struggled to breathe,

and if he didn’t go to bed when we arrived at our hotel in Nakhon Ratchasima and do 4 rounds of Wim Hof breathing, he would have required a hospital ventilator. The breathing method opened up his air passages, which brought a few hours of peace and rest, before he started burning up. He then spent the next two nights and days in and out of fever. He fasted, drank water, dried his sheets over the oven-like balcony rail outside our room, and collapsed back into bed.

When we all surfaced from this time, which included having to change hotels for another night of convalescing, we walked straight out into a street festival the locals had put on to raise money for the monks.

In leaving Nakhon Ratchasima, we thought we’d mix up the transportation a little,

and jumped on a bus,

to Khon Kaen.

We loved the stick food on offer here, though trying to buy food naked has been a challenge in Thailand. Shopkeepers seem to need to close the deal by wrapping your purchase in plastic. It takes a watchfulness to arrest this urge.

The following day we headed to the Khon Kaen train station,

where we were met by this little remnant life force.

We waited to catch the last train we were going to board in Thailand,

and that afternoon travelled to Nong Khai on the border with Laos. Feeling better than we have for days, we had dinner with the locals who have a penchant for green chairs,

and red shrines.

To get into Laos the visa process is a little complicated. So we have had some days here to wait, and to look across the river to the path we have chosen to get to India. Myanmar is too dangerous to cross at this time, and there is no longer a ferry or boat option across the Bay of Bengal. Hence why we’re here, in the north of Thailand.

We’ve been on the road seven weeks now and we’ve just hit another sweet spot here in Nong Khai.

Wherever you are in the world, Dear Reader, we hope you too are experiencing a sweet spot in your life. Sending much love to you from us here, and thanks so much for following along on our journey.

A mixed bag of fruit – some edible, some toxic (Maleny to Hervey Bay)

Jun 22, 2014 | bicycle touring, bow hunting, free camping, pollution | 4 comments
We left the lovely Gary in Maleny and headed west with the promise of some downhill cruising. 

But before we descended the high country we found some familiar friends, Slippery Jacks (Suillus luteus) in a typical spot, underneath a copse of pines.

These mycorrhizal (symbiotic relationship with plant roots) mushrooms have pores instead of gills, as you can see in this picture. As far as we are aware there are no poisonous pore mushrooms in Australia. At the bottom of the hill we found a free BBQ and while Patrick cooked our haul of slipperys with herbs and eggs from Gary’s, Meg checked Zero and Woody for ticks.

We were making our way to Kenilworth when we came across this lovely park. Wow! Imagine how Australia could be transformed if this was the norm rather than the exception.

The further inland we rode the more we had the road to ourselves and the more we didn’t have to listen out for cars and could engage instead with our creaturely intuitions.

We arrived in Kenilworth mid-afternoon and found the local artisan cheese shop we had heard so much about. We bought 500 gms for $3 and set about devouring it in record speed.

We have become big eaters on this trip. Food is our major fuel and we burn it off at a rate of knots. Getting the right kind of fuel sometimes proves difficult so seeking out forageable foods, organic farms and gardens, small growers and producers and community grown goodies has become a significant part of our daily performances.

By the time we left Kenilworth we didn’t have much light left to find a camp, and not long afterwards Patrick’s right gear cable snapped. We pulled over at a little park just out of town to see whether it was suitable for an emergency camping spot when David, who lives across the road, appeared, inviting us to spend the night at his house. David and Patrick quickly got to work to make the bike rideable for the next day’s ride. Thanks David!

A number of people live at David’s in varying forms of permanency. This is Carl, who cooked us all dinner on the wood fuelled fire. Carl is a descendent of the Bigambul people and a survivor of the stolen generation.

Carl’s indigenous name is Purri, which means spiritual hunter and he told us a little about his time out bush living on bush tucker, hunting feral animals and employing bush medicines to heal himself, specifically talking up the power of the Bangalow palm (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana) to strengthen bones, although he didn’t divulge the specifics of how to use it. He told us his family, who live on country, are very sick, which he puts down to fracking in the area as their illnesses followed the development of nearby CSG drilling. Carl is also an artist. While at David’s we met another talented man, Keith, who shines in making traditional long bows out of bamboo. Keith kindly oiled our bow with Tung oil and gave us a cover to protect it from the weather. Thanks Keith!

The following day, after farewelling our new friends, we faced a 60 km ride to Gympie, to the nearest bike shop. Despite David and Patrick’s hard work on the bike, the tandem had just three working gears. It wasn’t going to be an easy ride, but it was a beautiful day and beautiful country,

and again not much traffic to worry us.

We arrived in Gympie for a late lunch. Patrick was especially exhausted, sorely missing the other 24 gears on the hilly entry into this large regional town, large enough to support two bike shops. Dave, at Pedal Power, is a fellow tandem rider and his shop was the obvious choice to look for extra long gear cables. Thanks Dave!

Fellow cycle tourer and writer Greg Foyster told us we must avoid the Bruce Highway at all costs, so from Gympie we mapped our route to do just that,

and headed west to Widgee, stopping at a mid-week garage sale where the owners were moving to a wetter region because they couldn’t afford to keep buying in their water.

It was at this sale we bought Woody his first bow and arrow for 50 cents.

Later on, after arriving in Widgee, Patrick gave Woody a lesson,

We toured around the town on dusk looking for a place to camp,

and when we found it, the afternoon’s warm sun wasn’t the only gold we discovered.

Early season loquats (Eriobotrya japonica), one of our favourite autonomous fruits. Loquats are a rare species that has adapted to many climates, and like the Australian Ravin (Corvus coronoides) has followed us from home all the way into Queensland. The Widgee community centre made for a great overnight stay and the next morning we used the cricket pavillion to string up a line for our dew sodden tents.

As we have moved away from the (politically) green belts of southeastern Queensland, the roads are getting more dangerous. Sure, there’s less traffic, especially the ones we’re carefully choosing, but drivers seem more oblivious to cyclists than anywhere we’ve been so far in Australia. We decided to start documenting this phenomenon, riding with our camera ready – this truck literally drove us off the road and lucky for us there was something to ride onto.

We stopped for lunch in Woolooga, a town that boasts a pub, an Indian resturant and a town hall. Two whopping floods in the past decade have submerged the town.

We tried all three local establishments and the public toilet block, finishing at the pub to ask for directions and road advice.

On the way out of town we came across these two future community-scaled coolamons,

and we picked up some vegies for the evening meal.

We arrived in Gundiah at beer o’clock,

and Zero got to work charming the locals.

We pitched our tents at the back of the hotel, took a warm shower, and hit the hay.

In the morning we were gifted some organic home-grown kale by the lovely Alison. Alison’s five year old son Banjo had grown the kale in his own garden on the family’s farm. Thanks Banjo! Alison has recently returned to the cattle farm she grew up on and is looking into the ways she can work with her father to transition the farm to a more sustainable way of operating, reminding us of the great film, A Farm For The Future.

We rode on to Maryborough, making yet another crossing of the Mary River west of Tiaro,

and came across our first sighting of a pineapple farm.

In Maryborough we found a garden stall selling these tropical delights and used a $2 coin we had earlier found on the road to procure one of them.

We eagerly found a park in which to devour it. It was the best tasting pineapple we’d ever had.

On dark that park became home for the night.

We woke early, packed up the tents wet and rode east towards Hervey Bay. We would have to wait for the fog to lift to dry out our wet things.

We were completely exhausted when we arrived. We have travelled 260 kms in the past six days, having not really found a place to properly rest, and quite troubled about the mental state of some drivers on the road. What’s more, we arrived in Hervey Bay to find these kinds of attitudes:

World damaging vehicles in; low impact bikes and dogs out! And, is that bumper sticker the Iron Cross cradling an Aussie flag?? Woah!

The churches in this part of Queensland seem to be getting bigger and bigger and the architectual aesthetic appears to celebrate not critique industrialisation.

We’ve also found a general compliance to rules here in Queensland, which we haven’t seen elsewhere. If we ask someone in the street for a good place to free camp we get moralistic responses, as if rules are there to be obeyed regardless of their idiocy or oppressive nature. This sort of compliant culture really plays into the hands of manipulative authority. We took to the beach to find some solace.

We think we’re getting close to turning south. This is a big decision for us as it has been seven and a half months of slowly moving north. Weatherwise it makes sense to keep heading north for a while longer, but we may have to don some winter woollies and start our descent. We hear it’s all down hill on the way home south.

The Newcastle moment

Mar 2, 2014 | camping, cars, family, family on bikes, pollution, social warming, spear fishing | 6 comments
Newcastle would have to be one of the most likeable Australian cities. ‘Keep Newcastle Weird’ was a slogan we admired on the streets. It is a great place to find your own sub-culture and it has a climate that sings to be lightly dressed and loosely behaved. The scale of Newcastle is probably the key to its liveability, and the coastline, which is highly accessible, is transformative.

We had made a few local friends from our previous adventure in 2009, but never fathomed making so many others this time around. Some of whom invited us to stay with them, like Fiona and Phil that featured at the end of the last post, and Michelle and Tom and their boys Sonny and Max, who put on a bonza BBQ on our first night with them.

This artist as family clan playfully call themselves Boghemians. Of an evening and in dream states, Zeph and Zero became part of the art of this vibrant home.

Riding through the streets we met stay-at-home dad Billy and his kids Charlie and Isabelle. They were riding around on a cargo bike Billy had brilliantly fashioned from mostly reclaimed parts.

Billy invited us back to his home where we were able to put Woody down for a long sleep. Billy and his partner Amy, briefly home from work, hosted us for lunch, while Charlie also had a snooze.

We stayed and shared meals with Suzie, Dom and Bowie,

a gorgeous family Fiona and Phil had introduced us to and who live near the Sandhills community garden. Suzie, Dom, Bowie and Fiona all help out in the garden, which has been growing steadily for eight years under the direction of this remarkable person, Christine.

After a week of couch surfing and rich social life we decided to hang out for several days in Awabakal country. We headed south, climbed some hills and set up camp in Glenrock Reserve,

a two kilometre beach walk to the Glenrock Lagoon, where there was fish to catch,

and coastal greens to gather and cook.

Pigface (Carpobrotus glaucescens), we have found, is not always palatable. Sometimes the leaves are very astringent and leave an unpleasant film on your teeth. The best we’ve tasted them is when we’ve gathered young leaves and cooked them well on a fast heat with fish. We are realising we could live well on just fish, coastal leafies (Warrigal greens, Bower spinach and Pigface) and one or two other things. But there is still so much to learn.

The key is camping close to these food sources, something not always possible when the population is large. After three nights at Glenrock we again, by chance, met another lovely family who invited us to stay with them. Meet Gavin and Beck and their kids Barney and Lottie.

Gav and Beck had cycle-toured throughout Europe pre-kids and were intrigued we were doing it in Australia with children. We traded notes around saftey and the improvements local governments need to make for cycling to become a more dominant mode of transport. When car lanes become exclusively bike lanes we will start to see more and more people on the roads commuting, touring or just pollutionless having fun. Afterall, we may as well adapt now, the end of oil is on its way as our friend Charlie McGee will happily tell you.

While exploring Newcastle we came across this sand filter just off Nobby’s Beach. It is designed to process the pollution from cars and stop it from entering the water catchment and the beach.

The sand filter’s storyboard lists the lethal ‘cocktail’ of chemicals that cars produce (including lead, nickel, chromium, copper, P.C.Bs, Manganese, Zinc, Cadmium, P.A.Bs, Oil and Grease, Dioxine, Sulphates and Detergents) that end up in our streets and in our environments. With this list alone how are cars legal?

Is it possible to work towards industrialism’s end, not just through scholarly texts but actually lived? We say Yes!

But love miles (or love kilometres) are sometimes difficult to reconcile, as we too are finding. Because of the power of fossil fuels people have spread out around the globe. Meet Zeph’s lovely mum, Mel, who is Woody’s guide-mother and who lives in our home community over 1000 km from Newcastle as the ravin flies (there are no crows in Australia).

Throughout our year of supposedly low-carbon travel, Zeph will return home to see and stay with his mum on a number of occasions, and this will generally mean a number of highly polluting transits. AaF gave up air travel the year before we became carless in 2010, and even though the overall trend for us is a slow movement away from fossil fuel dependancy we can’t help but compromise at times, especially for love. Marrying values of care for the earth with care for each other does at times create contradictions. This is typical of transition, but it doesn’t undermine our household’s challenge of moving to a low-carbon existence, and teaching our children the skills and ethics to do so. Imagine if the norm in our society was to walk, ride and catch public transport, and cars were the exception?

The last time we were in Newcastle we flew here to take up an artist-in-residence project at the Lock-up Cultural Centre. We loaned bikes from the Newcastle Bike Ecology Library and became friends with Gerry Bobsien, the then director, now chair of the Lock-up. It was Gerry and her family that we had originally come to visit in Newcastle this time, but it took us a few weeks to hook up as we were inundated with chance invitations to stay with generous others.

Gerry (far head of the table) and her youngest child Polly (close head of the table) introduced us to their friends Rhiannon and Steele (either side of Polly). Rhiannon is one of the art teachers at Polly’s school, the Newcastle Waldorf School, a school that actually allows children to climb trees, hug calfs, get muddy, learn about growing food and making great things, like canoes. Zeph and Polly really hit it off,

and Zeph was keen to go to her school the next day. Rhiannon and Gerry arranged it, and after a day of immercing himself in probably the happiest school he’d experienced, the rest of the AaF were then invited to spend the following day talking to students about our trip and our practice. We spoke with Rhiannon’s awesome art class about making performative ecological and activist art.

We spoke to the year 10 students about renewable energies, the history of oil, and why we’re travelling around the country on our bikes. And, for Polly and Zeph’s class, we took a foraging walk, identifying dandelion, chickweed, flatweed, wild strawberry and spear thistle.

Polly’s dad Jeremy (above) is also a teacher at the school and responsible for teaching children to make all manners of things from wooden spoons to functional canoes. The AaF don’t usually endorse schools as places of learning fit for the future, but this school is definitely an exception. The students are happy, relaxed, fulfilled and are allowed to be children. The staff are also treated well and that seems to reflect how they then teach. We were invited to one of the staff’s delicious and life-affirming lunches,

which was concluded with some delicious, in-season baked fruit. This is when gift economies are at their best; when both parties are generous and both recieve beneficial gifts.

Because Zeph’s twelfth birthday is almost upon us and we’re away from his mates from home, he and Polly got to work to throw an impromtu (no gifts) beach party,

inviting all the kids in Polly’s class. The weather, however, had other plans and not everyone braved the cold.

Some of us hung back from the water and got into the serious business of eating.

We’ll be very sad to leave Newcastle and all our old and new friends, but our time in this lovely centre is coming to a close. We have once again what we call itchy pedals, and feel the call to part company with settled life and get on our freedom machines and sail north.

What ever you are doing and however you are travelling we hope you have gentle winds in your sail.

Riding the coast: Wamberal to Newcastle

Feb 15, 2014 | family on bikes, fishing, free camping, homeschool, pollution, social warming | 9 comments
Perhaps this ex-hire tandem wasn’t such a great idea. On our last evening in Wamberal, Patrick’s seat post socket snapped. We were so relieved it happened here and not between Tallangatta and Tumbarumba or somewhere really remote, and we were additionally relieved because another sweet family that we’d met in a children’s playground invited us to stay for the night. 

Meet Andrew, Mandy, Krys and Marie. We swam in their pool, admired their chooks and hugelkultur, and were treated to dinner. The central coast certainly shared its love.

Also meet Kevin from Cougar Fabrications in Erina. Kevin and Phil fixed the tandem and had us back on the road in fifteen minutes (for a mere fifteen dollars!). These kind men really brought us much relief with grace and warmth and good cheer. 

And then, after an easy morning’s ride, we stopped in a park for some lunch near The Entrance and were graced by fellow bike tourer Tom.

We invited Tom to camp with us, but warned him we are slow travellers. He was in no rush himself and we set about looking for a camp spot together.

We swapped notes on touring and the art of free camping in an increasingly private world. We pedaled and sniffed and sighted a little laneway that led down to the water’s edge north of The Entrance.

It was a brief co-existence with Tom but he wasted no time immersing himself in family life. We hope to see him again at some point down the track. A truly beautiful dude.

We parted ways the next morning and continued our slow trawl up the coast to Budgewoi where we rode this old bridge onto a little island to camp for the night.

We are getting pretty used to camp life. Every tool and resource we carry must have at least two purposes, as Meg demonstrates here with some local olive oil, used for cooking and for cleaning skin in a post-bathroom reality.

People often ask about Zephyr’s schooling as we travel. Our simple reply is this is school on the road, for all of us. However, a minimum of half an hour of reading a day applies and Zeph has just finished writing an article for NSW youth magazine unleash, which explains our project from his (almost twelve year old) perspective.

On leaving our little Budgewoi island we shouldered the busy Old Pacific Highway and came across telling signs of the times,

signs we didn’t even have to hack or bust or edit. They seemed to already speak for themselves.

While the Abbott government is selling the country off to more global corporate power, gas frackers, big coal and every other colossal polluter he can rustle up from his big black book, we are biking the country, poaching free camping spots, and improving our fishing.

We exchanged fishing knowledges with fellow free campers, Gary, Rob and Maé in Swansea,

and learned from experienced fishing folk such as Abdul,

and these fellow non-Abbott voters.

We also practiced more Artist as Family trash retrieval while teaching our boys about the ecological problems of line fishing, not just large-scale indiscriminate commercial fishing.

For the first time on our trip we came across patches of autonomous Warrigal Greens (Tetragonia tetragonioides), also known as Indigenous, sea or New Zealand spinach.

And we were relieved to jump on another rail trail utopia, the Fernleigh Track, which enabled a cruisey and very social ride into Newcastle,

where we were spontaneously chaperoned by a fellow Fernleigh Track cyclist into the city

where we did a little shopping,

and restocked our local honey stores.

Within the first hour of our arrival in Newcastle we received two invitations to stay. The first from this awesome couple, Fiona and Phil, who we’ll stay with tonight.

The social warming dimension of this trip is truly astonishing. We look forward to a couple of weeks getting to know Newcastle again. Last time we were here, nearly five years ago, we worked on this project. Coming into Newcastle today reminded us of why we love this big town so much.

Highland hopping; blackberries and carp

Jan 16, 2014 | blackberries, fishing, free camping, pollution | 4 comments
Having set up the tents and locked up the bikes we have walked into town to see what purchasable foods are on offer. Towns like Wallacia, we’re discovering, generally sell all kinds of the wrong sort of things. It is another hot day and the traffic tries to outcompete the male cicadas, whose shrill cacophony reaches fever pitch in the heat of the day. We walk back to our river hideaway with unloved bread, oats, juice and some tinned corn to help tempt fish onto the end of our line. We dwell on the magic of free camping, little or no amenities, just tree shade and river water and a nearby tap for drinking. We swim in the lovely cool water and some who come down to fish tell us they are horrified we are swimming in that dirty muck.

As we travel from state to state we’re finding many Australians are frightened by unsterilised environments and approach such autonomous places with contempt and dread. If we reply to such a phobia at all it is with something along the lines of: fish guts and duck poo are prefered friends over a cocktail of municiple-sanctioned corporate chemicals, or maybe something a little less wordy. We rarely if ever get sick. In fact it seems that the rougher we live the healthier we feel, provided we are eating well. Up in town we saw visions and heard stories of unwellness and hospitalisation, my father’s gone back in for treatment, the cancer has come back, said one obese woman. What sort of society allows foods that make people so unwell? While we’ll occasionally indulge in hot chips and industrial bread if there is nothing else, there is no better antidote to such impoverishment than the autonomous foods we are finding along the way. Foods such as blackberries (Rubus),

which, like plums, apples, spinach and grapes don’t need ad men to persuade us to eat them and are unparalelled sources of bioflavonoids and rich in Vitamin C. Like raspberry leaves, blackberry leaves make a great bush tea and are high in iron, magnesium, potassium and B-vitamins. Of course, we have to be careful with these generous autonomous foods because they too are often treated by councils on ideological grounds, which big chemical companies profit from. We always check the leaves and surrounding vegetation first to ensure they haven’t been sprayed. Straight off the plant there is nothing quite like this free, sweet medicinal treat. Well, perhaps except for this gorgeous plant.

Echinacea (Asteraceae), according to Medical News Today, is used to treat acid indigestion, chronic fatigue syndrome, diphtheria, dizziness, genital herpes, gum disease, malaria, migraines, pain, snake bites, rheumatism, septicemia and bloodstream infections, streptococcus infections, syphilis, the flu, tonsillitis, typhoid, urinary tract infections and vaginal yeast infections. We simply dry the flower heads and make a restorative tea with them. Although various university conducted studies have found varying results regarding the benefits of Echinacea, most likely none of them observe what other foods are being used in combination. If you try to throw in a delicate plant medicine on top of a diet of industrialised food the results will most likely be poor. Similarly, finding the right place to camp means getting proper rest from the intensity of bike touring, which is another type of medicine based on our wits not our wallets. On leaving Moss Vale, following the awesome bike track along the Wingecarribee River to Burradoo where the autonomous roadside apples were almost ripe to pluck,

we joined a continuous stream of bike-unfriendly traffic from Bowral to Mittagong before we were able to relax in apple orchard country at Yerrinbool and join the Old Hume Highway. This was the first bike touring leg of our trip that included Zeph, who came to join us in Moss Vale at Xmas. So with our full tribe of five beings on two bikes, we set off for Thirlmere Lakes National Park, 52 km away.

In order to have the freedom to live well and experience the profound fullness of this country we are having to write our own laws, which we believe are closer to Aboriginal sensibilities than European legalities. There are notices and rules everywhere, no doubt made for a growing number of dickheads that refuse to respect the land and its diverse critters and ecologies. Thirlmere Lakes does not accept dogs, camping, people after dark and in some places even the innocent bicycle is banned. With only our bikes to hide from rangers in the bracken understory we set up camp as the mozzies descended.

While in the park we kept Zero on a lead, not because his poo is polluting (he doesn’t eat canned or commercial dog biscuits and we bury all his organic wastes, and ours for that matter), but because there are signs around the park telling us 1080 poison bait has been put about. Zero may chase away but never catches birds such as this swamp hen perching out of harm’s way,

Rabbits are Zero’s preferred game, although he’s not much good at hunting them. So, in such a location, we devise that his potential to negatively impact the ecology is extremely low. Three thoughts emerged while we were at Thirlmere Lakes. Firstly, there should be exemptions for walkers and cyclists who wish to camp in all National Parks. There must be rewards for those who travel lightly in this day and age. Secondly, the use of 1080 is the very opposite of an environmental solution because the entire food chain is affected, not just the feral predators at the top. Once again governments are giving damaging chemical companies power by buying these non-solutions. Thirdly, it is not littering, we reflected as we picked up other peoples’ rubbish in the park or came across dumped waste,

that is the problem. All species litter. It is only now what humans leave behind that is damaging. To mitigate toxicity in our environments, business should be taxed heavily on all products they produce deemed to cause a negative effect by what is left of independent science. These would include such things as fast food and supermarket packaging, pesticides, plastics, petroleum products and poisonous baits, etc. When we emerged from our lake hideaway in the morning we were greeted by a happy group who go by the name of the Picton Puffers,

who offered us hot drinks, apple strudel and home-grown peaches. One enlightened soul from this gang of walkers and runners sang the praises of Sweden, who have laws that state that land owners must give one night’s access of a patch of ground on which travellers can camp. After a little research we discovered that this universal ethic is called Freedom to roam, and in Sweden is specifically called allemansrätten (the everyman’s right). Despite our increasingly privatised country, Australia is large enough geographically and still small enough in population to devise and implement our own rules for respectful, non-damaging and frugal travel. But alas, there are forces about that are against this ancient will-to-roam, as recently articulated by fellow camper, Bill Garner in The Age. We left the Puffers at Thirlemere Lakes, travelled on to Picton and camped beside a small creek that ran beside the town’s botanic gardens. We were told by the friendly council gardeners (who knew we were camping illegally and who encouraged our adventures) that the creek was inhabited by giant eels.

We didn’t come across any eels though there were plenty of ducks, prompting us to explain to the younger amongst us that semi-domesticated birds in a park are not fair game for food. We have never caught eels in Australia, although Meg caught and ate some in New Zealand many moons ago. They are something on our long list of autonomous meats we wish to hunt.

Another free meat that none of us have caught or consumed is carp, which is considered an environmental menace. So when we put up camp near the banks of the Nepean River near Wallacia

and set about fishing for Bass with surface lures, we very unexpectedly and unconventionally landed a good sized bottom-feeding carp. The young local boy who actually caught the fish was about to throw it back (after having his photo taken holding it) when Zeph asked whether we could have it. We knew carp would be good eating, despite the bad press it has in Australia, and after a little online research found that carp need to be eaten straight away or put on ice because as its body temperature rises it releases histamines that give the meat a muddy flavour. We did neither of these things, instead hanging the meat in night shade while we slept

and cooking it for breakfast the following day in olive oil we’d bought in Sutton Forest, organic garden-grown garlic we’d bought in Tumut and roadside toms we bought in Warregamba.

The result was delicious and we honoured this life by devouring every skerick of its wonderfully edible self as participants of the web of ecological life.

In order to move towards an ecological culture we need to become the biological controls, participatory ecologists (as our sensible friend Russell Edwards would say) and ecological playmakers (as we would say) that industrial culture has all but perverted in its short life. We need to reinstate a non-waste, non polluting sensibility in everything we do. It is not possible to do this if we go along with mainstream modes of living and ideologies, especially concerning travel and food consumption. All the prejudices surrounding the edibility of this now common fish dissolved with each mouthful. No muddiness was detected despite the Nepean being a heavily disturbed river with motor boats and storm water damage. People just aren’t hungry enough, proclaimed Meg.

Carp now joins our growing list of desirable autonomous foods that need to be eaten on the long march from economic to ecological rationalism.

After a few days on the Nepean we left our blissful river camp of muddy swimming and fish treats and headed towards Penrith in near heatwave conditions. We decided to stow Zero in a box and jump a train from Penrith up to the Blue Mountains to escape the scorching heat that was daily progressing in the foothills.

We spent a hot afternoon in Katoomba looking for a place we could secretly settle for a while and nearing dusk we met Shane, an awesome local who completely read our needs. He gave us a tour of some hidden locations,

from which we chose our quiet little camp spot,

a ten minute walk to the heart of town, and only a two minute amble to this hidden away billabong.

Shane, you are the embodiment of the universal spirit of the freedom to roam. Thank you! We will rest now and wash,

and bring you shortly, dear blog reader, a post or two of our Blue Mountains’ adventure.

Signing off with love and lessons learned for the future,

AaF.