General Update

Its not possible to write in an article format and cover everything - instead there needs to a be a grabbag to list what's happening in the background:

• Russian and Mongolian visas applied for and gotten
• Arranged the sale of my bike to a friend - necessary but sad
• Funds sorted - barring a crash of the Australian dollar I should have enough money to make it OS. 
• Issue regarding the importation of motorbikes back to Australia at the conclusion of the trip considered. Namely bikes must have been owned for 12 months before eligible for personal-import to Australia. This does not cover pre-1989 bikes. Conversation needs to be had to account for either eventuality: 1. the consequences of driving 23+ year old bikes 10,000 km over bad roads or 2. trying to sell unregistered imported, bikes in Istanbul.
• Means of accessing funds sorted - 28 degrees credit card. No currency conversion fees, no international transfer fees - you just pay the ATM fee ($2-4) when accessing Australian dollars in Armenia. Only issue that Iran has no Mastercard network.
• Galaxy S2 bought - with Russian Maps app installed. Russian Maps have both topographical map and open street map views, which can be precached. I added a 32Gb microSD card meaning that I can save a great deal of navigation data without having to access the 3G network. Voice activation needs to be tested.
• StarCom 1: Advanced bought. This should enable me to listen to phone calls, iPod, make voice notes, communicate over CB radio all through the one headset. Needs to be tested.
• Immunization Shots taken (one more round required).
• Method of powering all devices and keeping them in sight researched. Best method have all chords and devices encased in a tank bag, with transparent panel to view screens. This keeps everything simple - bag can be detached for security and is waterproof. Saves having to turn your handlebars into a work station from the stock exchange.

Still to do:

• Chinese visa to be applied for and flights home to be bought this week.
• Buy international simcard
• Work out exact conditions of CDP in Germany.

Life After Pimsleur

The ninetieth, and last, Pimsleur lesson started a lot like the first. My journey was the same at least. I walked out my gate, sweated up regent street to the crest of a hill, where it intersected with Cleveland, and then down its gentle undulation to Central station. By the time I rounded the corner into Kensington street, past the labourers directing traffic to and from the demolition site of the old Coopers brewery, I realised that there would be no kickline, no song where all the characters from the little Pimsleur narratives would assemble together, to sing me off into the Russian speaking world. 

In fact the Russian speaking world was far from open to me - having completed 90x30 minute lessons (45 hours) I was far from fluent - something that had seemed a certainty to have been achieved by this stage, when I had begun. In fact, instead of entire areas of conversation (like ordering at a restaurant for example), fully realised like completed panels of a stained glass window, I had only the barest outline - the ironwork that held the glass in place. I knew that I had made considerable progress, especially in comparison to my class mates at the continuing education course at Sydney Uni. This was because I was studying every day, and they weren't. The issue was that the progress in language was so difficult to quantify, if I thought about all I had learned it seemed considerable - but then I'd get caught in a translation from English to Russian and realise I didn't know the words for happy or sad. 

Regardless, having completed Pimsleur course, my relief and satisfaction turned to anxiety when I thought of my hardwon Russian vocabulary slowly eroding, no longer anchored to anything. The way I had learnt the language so far seemed perfect - Pimsleur kept the sounds in high rotation in my mind - a daily reignition of the spark that was now fading. I always returned to the main shortfall of Pimsleur which was that it did not explicitly teach you the rules of Russian grammar. While this might sound like a Steiner school - descriptive mode of teaching the reality is in a language like Russian the rules must be taught, children told to sit down, shut up and listen. Complementing Pimsleur was my CCE course, taught by, Katia, a middle-aged Russian woman with infinite patience and humour, who actually made the 2.5 hour grammar attack on Monday evenings, after work, palatable and perhaps even enjoyable. I learnt a great deal from these classes and, as a result, on Tuesday mornings the Pimsleur lesson was always much easier than the day before.

The problem was that these CCE courses, after my third term, were coming to an end too. I was now cast out into the world with more knowledge than a beginner but less than an intermediate. I tried several audio courses - including conversational Russian and Russian slang - to try and give me more legitimacy on the street when I'm asking "Which way to the post office, please?" All seemed far too difficult, dispensing great slabs of Slavic conversation, too quick and dense for me to decode, or little skerricks too fleeting to stick. It seemed I was not alone in my situation - scouring forums there seemed to be a bunch of people that needed a bridging course from Pimsleur III to intermediate. My hopes were briefly rallied with RussianPod101, "The fastest, easiest and most fun way to learn Russian". I became a member the instant I saw that they had Absolute Beginner, Beginner and Lower Intermediate courses - perhaps this was the bridge I was looking for. At least it was cheap - I paid $8 for one month and was able to download all the audio lessons in one go from their iTunes feed. The problem was the quality of the lessons - most go for about 10 minutes and although they are quite rigorous in the grammar (explaining the rules), the Russian content only constituted about 1-2 minutes of the lesson - the remainder was taken up with a lot of naff flirting between the male and female hosts and constant advertising of "premium products" within the lessons themselves. Some of it was funny:

"This tool is the perfect complement to the line by learn audio. Anna, have you seen this tool?"
"Eric don't make me blush"

A lot of it is pretty cringeworthy. 

Furthermore they say words then never return to them - so unless you listen to the same lesson again and again (making the flirting and smalltalk particularly nauseating) then you'll forget everything you learnt thereby wasting your time. I cancelled my membership after a single month.

My latest discovery is http://www.audialearn.com/. In the course outline it explicitly says it is "Suitable for students that may have completed Pimsleur III". I will begin this course on Monday and will see how it goes. I'm a little aware of the stilted delivery which could get annoying after a while. More news on this to follow.

St John's First Aid Class

It didn't begin well, M, having left his booking until the 11th hour, rang the head office to ask if there were any places left in Sydney. There weren't. At least in the location I had been given. In fact there was no class at all in the location I had been given, the building recently vacated, St John's premises moved from George Street to Clarence Street. Still the $190 had gone out of my account so I was in the class whether I attended or not.

On the morning of Saturday 17 March, rain hammered down, preventing any potential for motorbikes to be used as transport. Instead we climbed into a cab, the amiable, uniformed drive had his wet civilian clothes crammed into a plastic bag in the boot. We got there and went upstairs into a newly painted office - walked into the correct room which had half a dozen people inhabiting the bunch of chairs. Our instructor Malcolm, was no nonsense. He had been a school teacher for many years before specialising in becoming a St Johns instructor and it showed. The proceedings were in the teacher-student format - the long rambling anecdotes by some of the class were thinly tolerated but rarely expanded upon. A sweet mercy. 

The content was far enough away from a Personal Development Health class so that I could have respect for it (a hangover prejudice I had from school where the the health teachers were PE teachers with books and I always had a deep loathing for PE). Right off the bat they gave us what we wanted and we spent the morning learning the recovery position and CPR. The recovery position, done in pairs, was simple - check the scene is safe, call for help, check for breathing, move the patient on their side, clear the airway. If the patient was not breathing then we would have to perform CPR. This was done using manikins with a docile, sleepy expression on their inert faces. "30 compressions on the chest - to a depth of one third of the cavity. Do this is real life and ribs are going to break". The armless, legless manikins did not seem to mind until Malcolm took off a panel on the front of their faces to reveal a shocked empty eyes and a vacant space behind the nose. Terrifying. Our CPR skills were all evaluated, then next we were shown a promotional video for a defibrillator. 

Meet Joe Ordinary - he lives and works in London. The video begins with his voice over the top convincing us just how average his life is. Only its not, his job consists of having to deliver reports at ever earlier deadlines. As if this wasn't enough - there seems to be a chronic stationery shortage in this office and he seems to be the guy that everyone asks where this missing stationery is. All this is delivered in an accelerated series of flashes which conveys mounting tension. The only way out? Heart attack. CPR doesn't work (it only works in the event of flat-lining not erratic heart flutters). "It was curtains for me after that" Poor Joe. An alternate ending is shown, this time with a defibrillator close at hand. Joe lives to stock the stationery cupboard and deal with soul crushing deadlines for another day at least. 

The defibrillator is quite an amazing piece of hardware - pads are placed on either side of the heart - one near the right shoulder, the other a handspan below the left armpit. Once opened the defibrillator will take you through the procedure, tell you where to place the pads, monitor the heart rate and deliver appropriate shocks. With a theatrical flurry Malcolm shook the dummy as the charge went through. 

The second day we went through a series of scenarios, alternating with theory. We learnt how to deal with head, neck, abdominal and spinal injuries, broken bones, stings, poisons heatstroke, hypothermia. The subjects were diverse even if not conveyed in great detail. One interesting factoid was informing us to the existence of a white tailed spider and its sting which eats human flesh (arachnogenic necrosis). The accompanying anecdote was of someone that was unknowingly bitten, the poison lay dormant for a year and then this person began to lose flesh off their bone like a well cooked lamb shank  

The only disquieting thing about this course for our purpose was the continual emphasis on calling 000 - quite a distant prospect on the plains of Azerbaijan. Regardless enough was learnt to put us in better, if not, ideal stead in the case of an emergency. If we had more time I would do the remote first aid course. 

Packing Minimalism

November 2004. Marc, James and I stagger through the automatic doors of Heathrow and outside, into the adjoining bus terminal. It's cold, grey and ugly, the clouds sit low above the surrounding buildings forming the roof of the cage. Everyone seems to have bags under their eyes and are smoking like they are midway though a long prison sentence. I can remember thinking two things - firstly, that this is a strange place to escape to. I had lived in the same room for twenty one years, the curtains, installed just before I was born, still had clowns on them. I had assumed that I'd arrive in London to some fanfare not this insipid and pathetic vista. Not even the cold was intense enough to be impressive.

The second thing I thought was how the hell was I going to get this bag to my hotel. Marc and James were in the same situation and as we smoked our duty-free bought cigarettes our massive bags sat in an untidy heap like passed out Australians at Oktoberfest.

I can remember the tube ride from Heathrow to Earls Court. The carriages had seats along each wall, facing the centre of the aisle. They are designed for people, not luggage. We stood there, three boys, each with 100 Litre bags, in everyone's way. Each time the carriage lurched forward or slowed to at a station, the three of us were thrown down the aisle, to be collected at one end or the other, indiscriminately treading on shoe and boot alike. Luckily the people on the tube were more Englanders than Londoners and were to polite to say anything.

Eventually we traversed the six zones and alighted onto the platform. The only way that I could get up the stairway, to street level was to angle myself forward so as to form a counter-weight to my massive bag, hold only the handrail and heave myself up two or three stairs at a time. It was slow going. I can remember a glimmer of something which I now recognise to be the realisation of irony. Here I was - come to be free, tear myself from home turf  and history and weighing me down was this colossus of a bag like some grotesque hump, containing half my history in it.

Luggage invites metaphor - think emotional baggage for example. The actual meaning of these metaphors always hit the same registers - your freedom and movement are restricted by this "baggage" which is entirely superfluous to your needs. Thinking back to what I actually packed for London it was ridiculous. There were suit jackets, rain jackets, multiple pairs of shoes, that, through lack of use, slowly worked their way towards the bottom. By the end I could take a soil sample and tell what I didn't need by what I didn't by its relative position in my pack. As the trip continued and I accumulated various presents and items. I also got as strong as an ox By the end this 100 L albatross was packed to bursting point, weighing 40 kg, with weird protrusions and lumps it looked and felt like 20 cutlery draws had been emptied, then wrapped in a bedsheet.

This time around I am trying something different. I once read somewhere that when travelling to the US bring half the amount of clothes and twice the amount of money. I'd say this holds anywhere except the third world and I want to put it to the test having traded my 100 L Goliath for a more modest 40 L number. Its not enough to just scale down the operation though - it has to be done right. Apply minimalism to packing - reduce to just the necessary elements and derive beauty in function. In keeping with this concept, you bring as little as possible but what you bring has to be versatile, compact and rugged - the premium is on the right stuff not just not much stuff. Consider the bag itself - this time I am going with a hybrid which has both wheels, for pulling on the ground and straps for it to function as a backpack. It weighs just over 2kg and can have a daypack attached to the front.

Once you have the bag there are simple rules for packing:

1. Forget the formalwear - truth is you're probably not going to get invited to a Raj's weddings and if you do, the stripped back explorer look is going to give you way more cred than a suit that looks like it's been ridden hard and put away wet.
2. Mention the unmentionables - undies and socks for at least a week. You don't want to be washing the same pair every night and for god's sake spare a thought for them too. Irrespective of the state of your top layers - put on fresh undies and socks and you'll feel like a millionaire.
3. Digitize - sure it's going to be great to have half the literary canon of western civilization on that long train ride but is it worth having your spine bent into an ampersand? Get a Kindle or better yet audiobooks are awesome and can be listened to with the lights off so you're not going to piss anyone in the dorm off.
4. Pack for the season - look up the weather conditions of where you are going in advance, the average temperature range and rainfall, and pack for that. Cleave items unsuitable for this range from your packing list. 
5. Layers - are versatile - thermal underwear can be crammed into a pencil case and when combined with a shirt and a jumper can be just as warm as a big jacket. You don't need a different shirt for the cold as for when it's hot - you need one jumper.
6. Do a Practice pack - this sounds nerdy but the last thing you want is to be wandering into Sydney airport looking like a bag lady because you got too ambitious on luggage buying day for luggage packing day.
7. Buy a microfibre travel towel - when I went to London I bought a "bath sheet" from Debenhams which when subjected to geological amounts of pressure could be compressed into the size and density of a bowling ball. Ridiculous. Truth is even most towels will take up more room than their worth and be a sad soggy weight in your sack. 
8. Tear out relevant sections of Travel guides - your reverence for your books is going to have to play second fiddle to your reverence for your back. Why carry around weight that you're never going to use?
9. Beauty in function - learn to get off on economy of space. A Swiss army knife or a leather-man is beautiful because it's the product of so much thought, because you can stick them in your pocket and because it sets you free. Unless, of course, you forget to take it out of your carry on luggage.
10. General rule - when I thought about it, all the extraneous stuff in my luggage was the result of a bunch of "what-if" statements, made at home which never eventuated. Strip this mode of thinking while your working out what to bring. You will be left with what you actually need.

The Yearning

I can remember watching an episode of Press Gang as a child. Linda left the cramped offices of the school newspaper, running out in a huff because of something Spike said. I remember the next shot clearly. It was a long one, especially in this usually cloistered show. A suburban street was lined with oak trees on either side. For me the drama of the show was momentarily muted, drowned out by something imperceptibly alien about this vista. I was growing up in the suburbs and seen oak lined avenues many times before but nevertheless, I wanted to go there. I had a yearning to travel to that exact same spot and immerse myself in its differentness and somehow to absorb it.

I had more such pangs as I grew up and I began to notice a pattern emerging with regards to the type of vista that would conjure such a feeling. Firstly the vista could not be so original or its scale so awesome as to inspire awe. In this case it was impossible to form a connection to such a vista because it is just too alien, too far outside my day-to-day experience, to be able to imagine myself occupying the same world as it. A photograph of the Grand Canyon or a massive glacier, for example, would not instil the same flavour of yearning. Far more effective was urban or suburban scenes.


In 2010 I went to an exhibition on on New Topographics at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The photo exhibition documented everyday USA. Apart from its historical relevance, the museum was hard-pressed to describe why these photos were interesting, in fact going to fairly great lengths not to use the word "boring". I suspected that people were beginning to take interest in them because they had begun to be historically important. I remember something strange happened when I walked around the room looking at photos - the pangs of yearning went off again and again like a repeating gunshots. Whatever was the common thread between these pictures was most likely the thing that lead to this yearning. I was able to understand this feeling as the result of the following process:

•  The initial connection is made through recognising the scene as normal, in the sense that these scenes are contexts which the locals that inhabit them consider unremarkable. 
• Your mind searches through its store, trying to find something in your history to anchor the scene to personal experience but comes up with nothing.
• You then project yourself into the scene. The yearning arises from the hypothetical -
  "what if my life was that life?"

And that is the linchpin of the entire yearning. It is the moment when the frame of the picture simultaneously forms both a mirror and a window. The familiarity of that framed world allows you to project yourself in there while its foreignness, strips you largely of your history and allows you if not to live someone else's life, then to at least see what they would see. The yearning is the melancholy understanding that you are trapped within your own history and that history has set certain irrevocable parameters so that your course - no matter how wild its deviation from its former trajectories is still bounded and finite. The Yearning is recognition of the limits of your powers. Fundamental to this is the everydayness of the scene depicted because you may visit the place but the associated history that allows the world to become everyday is only possible is only a possible option to you at the exclusion of other places and histories. It is the end of the idea that everything is possible all of the time. The pang is the end of your part of your youth and through this it allows you to become a different person.

What is the relationship between travel and yearning? First it is necessary to draw a distinction between travel and tourism. Travel is a form of self-projection (literally and metaphorically) while tourism is a form of voyeurism, that is - travel you're inside the scene while with tourism you're outside of it. This distinction is so important because an aspect of yearning is empathy with the humanity of your surroundings - to sit outside and to watch it restricts this empathy. Rather, to be 'in it' and to experience its newness is to remove the melancholy note from the chord, thereby transforming yearning into fascination. This world - is now your world, like bubbles coalescing, and with it the parameters that define your path have grown.

The Map (updated 25/02/2012)

View Red Ink Run in a larger map

Tour Chernobyl

1:23:04am on April 26, 1986 Soviet scientists begin an experiment, shutting down the turbines in Energy Block #4 of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Power Station at Chernobyl. 1:23:58am extreme vapour pressure from a build up of steam in the cooling system causes a sudden explosion which tears off the reactor's 2000-ton upper plate. A few seconds later a nuclear excursion, a more powerful explosion accompanied by a huge surge of neutron radiation fires into the early morning sky.

By 1:26am, a fire alarm is raised and fire-fighters, both local and from the nearby town of Prypiat, arrive. The firefighters have on only their canvas uniforms which are completely insufficient to shield them from the radioactive caesium, iodine and strontium isotopes shot into the air from the raging fire. They are the first ones to suffer from radiation poisoning and are in hospital before the official party explanation of a gas explosion is abandoned. As people drink their tea on their front porches and watch the beautiful "kind of shining" fire in the distance unknowingly ingesting the radioactive dust, Soviet authorities deliberate and eventually give the order to evacuate an area of 300,000 hectares – which includes the city of Prypiat, population 30,000.

Chernobyl becomes a global event within just over a week. Gaseous airborne particles are measured in India, the US and Canada. The Soviet response of mass mobilisation of 500,000 reservists provides an approximate equation of manpower and nuclear power but never really indicates the cost in life and the effort and balls involved in the cleanup process.

The unprotected troops that throw out the sacks of lead from helicopters just above the column of radiation which shoots out of the reactors core. Of the 600 that do this – all will eventually die of radiation poisoning. Another example, is the miners, drafted from outside the exclusion zone. Given the task of working in three hour shifts, 24 hours a day they tunnel under the reactor, digging out a room to be used for a refrigeration unit to cool down the white-hot radioactive magma above. Consider this for just a moment, the sweat and the dirt, the heat and the imminent danger from tunnel collapses and trapped underground gasses all native to mining, exacerbated by an operation thrown together and run round the clock. Only now, you’re under a radioactive core and white-hot magma, which has already cut through the concrete supports of a nuclear power station, is now eating its way down toward your head. Failing to stop the magma would result in a cataclysmic explosion once it reached the watertable not far below. Radioactive steam would then shoot up contaminating the air while much of the water supply of Eastern Europe would be undrinkable.

But perhaps the most unsettling are the "Bio-Robots" – troops given the task of removing ultra-radioactive detritus off the roof of the reactor so a massive concrete sarcophagus can be placed on top. To give some idea as to just how radioactive this area was – the original plan was to have full sized remote controlled trucks do the work. These trucks had their interiors lined with lead and even then the radiation was so strong that it played havoc with their electronics causing them to go berserk – one flinging itself off the edge and into the melting reactor – a pretty terrifying prospect if you were then asked to replace it with yourself. The Bio-Robots had to sew their own protective suits in a single night and only then could work for 30 seconds at a time to minimize their exposure. They would do this only once or twice per person. There has been little documentation on the survival rates of these bio-robots but one would think it not good considering accounts the taste of lead never went away.

Eventually the hastily constructed sarcophagus was put into position, sealing off the core and smothering the blasting radioactivity to a mere trickle. Technically, the people of Prypiat were never allowed to return although some of the older members did, highly sceptical that an invisible thing like radiation could harm them, or just too old to care.

In 2010 the Ukrainian government opened up the exclusion zone to tours. They were running before, illegal but unchallenged. Why would anyone want to enter the exclusion zone, to cop a serious helping of radiation? Simple morbid curiosity? Perhaps. But I think the answer is a mix of the past and future.

From the moment the Berlin wall fell, and the door to the Soviet experiment was shut  forever, Soviet life stopped being a reality and became a relic. Any attempts to preserve a bygone way of life always comes off forced and sterile while to recreate one comes off kitsch and contrived. That's because usually there is no 30 km exclusion zone and the historical world has to coexist with our own. What is fascinating about Chernobyl is that the exclusion zone forms a reverential veil as if it's clear that you're invading another world instead of another world invading yours.

The authenticity would be pitch perfect too as the inhabitants by and large were evacuated and never returned. I was once told a story by a man that went there. He kicked open a door of a room in a abondoned hotel and saw a pair of pants folded on the end of the bed. That means that minus looting everything everywhere would be exactly as if it was lived in by Soviet citizens specifically because it was lived in by Soviet citizens.  In other words - you get to walk around in a world that really did exist by no longer does.

You only have to cast your mind back to last year to the Fukushima disaster to know that we're constantly rolling the dice when it comes to nuclear power. Taking this, and a quick nuclear warhead count, into consideration - it doesn't take a doom-sayer to entertain the possibility of mankind turning at least a portion of the earth into a gigameter-clicking wasteland. To anyone that has wondered "What will it be like after we're gone?", the Red Forest is an area inside the exclusion zone which has concentrated radioactivity. It is home to an increasingly diverse range of wildlife, including wild boars and wild dogs. The return to wildness is a particularly chilling note to strike considering domesticity is mankind stamping his own character on the natural world. Despite the legacy of centuries, within the space of a decade this stamp vanishes.

The empty city of Prypiat is fading too, and nature is reclaiming it. As the the billboards fade and the cement cracks, new saplings push through those cracks. Most buildings are now too unstable to enter but the vistas of long, overgrown, Soviet avenues, cars along its fringes would be profound. Within sight, down at least one of them on the horizon is reactor #4. No one is quite sure exactly what is happening under the concrete shell but there is still the hum of radiation, like a search beacon, alone and marooned in the night sea.