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Fading light

Only a short drive from the city, the Vienna woods are a popular outdoor destination. Starting right on the edge of the city one finds forested hills and pleasant walks. In fact it is so close to town that I went for a walk after work the other day.

The light was fading and I was struggling to hold my camera steady. Although my main lens is equipped with image stabilization I should have taken a tripod. The photos look good on the web and no doubt they will make good prints, but any accomplished pixel peeper will have a field day tearing apart the grain (from using ISO 800) and the blur induced by camera shake and wide open apertures.

Fire Salamander

A real highlight was the fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra) which I spotted next to the path. The ground was still wet from recent rains — this seems to be the salamanders favourite time to come out and play. I have only seen this comparatively rare animal on four occasions and the conditions (type of forest and wet ground) were always pretty similar. On the other occasions I always found a second salamander nearby. This one however decided to go it alone.

I wasn’t going to get any decent photos in available light, so I popped up the flash and grilled the little critter. He didn’t move a bit and I happily snapped around 10 pictures from different angles until I got bored. I hope he didn’t freeze for fright of death and that my camera flash really didn’t hurt his eyes.

All my images from this walk are in the Vienna Salmannsdorf album below …

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Thorny seahorse

Some people don’t really think of them as fish. The odd-looking members of marine cavallery are indeed a strange bunch. They have no obvious fins or any other visible means of propulsion, let alone the shape of their body — which is as far from the silver torpedo as you can get without leaving the animal kingdom.All in all just not very fishy at all.

Needless to say that these creatures have fascinated humas since the dawn of time, when the romans imagined Poseidon’s chariot being drawn by a team of sub-aquatic stallions that could breathe underwater.

When I started diving I eagerly anticipated the first encounter with this mysterious marine equine. The image of what to expect was engrained in my head from illustrations in comic books and children’s novels.

Gorgonian fan

On a dive at some far flung island in the eastern reaches of Indonesia I finally laid my eyes on a real seahorse — it was pointed out to me by a fellow diver. I strained my eyes but I didn’t see any fish or horse or anything. The other guy pointed at a large fan coral and the thing just wasn’t there, or to be precise it was very, very small.

The name pygmy seahorse has a ring of smallness to it, but I wasn’t prepared for something as tiny my fingernail. I looked up the rare little creatue in one of the fish books that graces the coffee table of every dive shop to familiarise myself with an all-together different animal.

Pygmy seahorse

The pygmy seahorse was the en-vogue critter for under photographers of the time. The fan coral where the little things hang out were swamped with eager critter hunters and their photo equipment that weighs and costs as much as a small car.

The common seahorse is scientifically known as hippocampus kuda. The name is nice touch – Kuda is the indonesian word for horse. So if the bearded boffin who named the creature had enough reason for some indonesian connection, why wasn’t I seeing them there.
On hundreds of dives around Indonesia I would only ever see pygmy seahorses, and many a diving fanatic did probably envy me for that, but I was still missing something — a proper seahorse. The thing that features on roman mosaics, graces golf club logos and dangles from necklaces.

I had to go diving in Croatia of all places to finally see a big seahorse. There are short-snout and long-snout seahorses in the mediterranean sea, and the afore-mentioned bearded fella could possibly list a bunch more.

After that I went back to Indonesia and found the big fellas even there. Lembeh Straits in North Sulawesi is a mecca for critter hunters. A real speciality in Lembeh are the hairy varieties – not really distinct species, but perfectly well adapted to an environment with lots of algae and other fluff. Covering yourself in the same fluff gets round the problem of being eaten. But in that respect, the yellow one wasn’t very clever.

The following album has a selection of seahorse photos in chronological order. You notice that it starts with the black seahorse from Croatia – well I didn’t have my camera yet on those first dives with all the pygmies …

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Feb 26 Bintan Island Indonesia

The quote from Stephenson got me started and another great quote came to my mind. This time it’s my favorite travel author Paul Theroux who commented on a certain type of traveller in “The Old Patagonian Express“:

Great hairy middle-aged buffoons complained at ticket counters and shouted, “Look, I’m a student! Do me a favor! He doesn’t believe I’m a student. Hey – ”
They were cut-priced tourists, idlers, vagabonds, freebooters, who had gravitated to this impoverished place because they wanted to save money.

Why did I think of this quote ?. Well I was going through some old travel diaries of mine to find suitable material for this blog. In a May 2000 page on my arrival in Bali, Indonesia I wrote about the local hotel rates :

Kuta – “Dua Dara” double for 40k, cheapest around are 30.000
Lovina - cheaper

The exchange rates (indonesian rupiah) at the time make that $3.75 – $5.00 per person per night, which hit me hard. I had come to tourist-infested Bali Island by way of Sumatra, where cockroach-infested rooms went for a piddly $1.20 – $1.80 a night.

Paul Theroux wrote about ME!!! OMG, I will never go to poor countries again because they are cheap – I will go there purely for spiritual enlightenment and check into a 5 or 6 star hotel. Sarcasm aside, he did have a point.

When I spent the better part of 2 years in Indonesia and other parts of South East Asia I often had the discussion with other self-styled travellers about the distinction between a tourist and a traveller.

Over time I condensed these infuriating debates into the following list of essential characteristics which get you the desired label of a “traveller”:

• stay only in hostels and family-run homestays (no hotels! Oh NO!)
  
• a heavy rucksack (extra marks for certain “cool” brands)
• have no money (or at least pretend to)
• brownie points for those who worked real hard to save up for the big ticket.
• More brownie points for the nastiest jobs.
• preferably lots of hair
• lack of companions moves you up the ranks,
  with loners earning the most points (couples needn’t apply, unless they’ve been on the road for 3+ years)
• actually being on the move!

The last one is actually important – Someone in Israel once remarked on several foreigners who lived in Tel-Aviv (in the mid-nineties) on day jobs and minor scams – They called themselves “travellers”, but hadn’t left the city for nigh on twelve years!

So I had to agree that by the end of my stint in Asia I had been guilty of at least some of these counts – notably the cheapskating one. I had to agree with Paul.

Not only did I learn to loathe such tedious discussion on who can him/herself call what, but also did I learn to loathe the people who devised such criteria. Most of them were only sitting on that beach, because their parents had given them some cash to fill time between university duties.

So I’d rather be an attentive and educated “tourist” than belong to that hypocritical, self-obsessed bunch of credit card tramps.

Now all I have to do is go there again, come back and write a best-selling novel about it all.

When Neal Stephenson wrote “The Baroque Cycle” he must have gathered an incredible amount of information about what life was like around the turn of the 18th century. But it seems that some inspiration was not quite so historical.

I stumbled upon a particular quote that I found striking, amusing and a bit scary:

The profession of politics would be altogether too disagreeable without compensations above and beyond what is strictly appropriate.

These words are spoken by Roger Comstock in a fictional conversation with Viscount Bolingbroke on the eve of the accession of Hanoverian George I to the throne of England.

I could delve into a discourse on corruption in the present age, but I found the Character of Bolingbroke to be quite captivating too.
The Visocunt will be known to scholars of the history of English politics, in fact his works are available at Amazon.com.

I have always wanted to try out Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature for something useful. So I looked up what the Late honorable Saint had to say about corruption.

The search found two hits, but the Viscount uses the word not in its political context. I had hoped to find 18th century insights on the pleasures of the ruling classes.

Page 88 makes me flad that Stephenson read this and possible countless other works in my stead and serves up a literary dish is more easily digested that this:

All our ideas of relation are framed by the comparison the mind makes of one idea with another…
I suppose a mistake most commonly, when we are thought to frame phantastical ideas of relations by a wrong comparison of real ideas.
I suppose we shall find on such occasions, if we observe closely, that the phantastical idea of relation does not arise so much from a wrong comparison of real ideas which the mind contemplates, as from a voluntary or involuntary corruption of the reality of these supposed real ideas.

My intellect may be encumbered to understand this, so I tried to grasp the second hit on page 298:

I proceed, therefore, in the same manner to observe that many ancient traditions might induce one to think that the unity of God was the original belief of mankind, and that polytheism and idolatry were the corruptions of this orthodox.

Now I start to think he is plainly wrong as it had been my impression that monotheism was a fairly late invention of an Egyptian Pharao who sought to strengthen his power base by simplifying the spiritual landscape of his minions.

Anyway, if you haven’t picked up a copy of “The Baroque Cycle” (it’s actually 8 books in 3 volumes) then do so soon and start reading. It’s a whopping 2600 pages in all and has taken me the best part of a year to churn through.

Don’t hold your breath for it to be made into a film very soon. It seems to be as unfilmable as The Lord of the Rings and that took 47 years to appear on celluloid.

I think I am slowly getting the hang of how this blog works. I am still playing around trying to find a suitable way of getting this website to work and look right. The most difficult decision was which theme to use. The Wordpress Theme Browser and the Wordpress Theme Viewer had so much choice of downloadable styles, so I tried a couple and tested them on my site. A major problem has been the compatability with Firefox and Internet Explorer and the ability to embed large (i.e. wide) photos.

Initially I quite liked the default theme, but that didn’t like the embedded photos which were wider than the space allotted for the main section running along the centre of the page. A lot of the other themes did have scaling problems too.

In the end I decided on the simple and functional Clasikue. Who knows if I still like it 3 weeks from now, but it’s a good start for now.

I have started to adapt it slightly, and I might use this theme as a model case to get to grips with eventually programming my own.