Random Observations of Lhasa

Golden ice.

While the freezing temperatures ensure that every man and his Tibetan mastiff pissing against random brick walls less offensive than, say, in a stifling New Delhi summer, it certainly plays havoc with a freezing Donkey trying to negotiate the already treacherous cobbles of Lhasa’s sidewalks in the early morning darkness; the golden, icy slicks sending him sprawling unceremoniously onto the filthy stones every couple of metres, much to the delight of the similarly rugged-up, although considerably more nimble youngens making their way to school.

Did somebody say dark?

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Tibet operates on a Beijing time zone despite being at least two hours ahead (in real time) of the distant seat of power, the Party Regime has seen it fit to dictate that all of Lhasa’s street lights be switched-off at precisely 7.55am, which happens to be approximately one hour and thirty minutes before dawn.

Under cover of darkness.

The opportunistic urbanites of Lhasa use this veiled, pre-dawn window to their advantage, thumbing their noses at Central Government directives to make Lhasa “a model National city” through forced clean-up campaigns, by disposing of their nightly waste water directly over the footpath.  While such practices might be great for keeping the street dust at bay in summer, in winter the frozen slicks encrusted with toothpaste, noodles, slimy vegetables and worse (given what goes on behind the greasy curtain hanging in the back of most of these shops), in addition to posing a potential public health risk, again make negotiating perambulation rather difficult.

Speaking of sex…

Adorning the many shops in Lhasa which sell ladies’ “intimate apparel” are larger-than-life hoardings of Western lingerie models sporting skimpy designer bras and panties in a range of fashionable hues.  You don’t have to get up too close to notice (although one has been known to do so) that despite the advertising, inside these stores you won’t find anything smaller than ankle to neck, cover-all undergarments in a range of fashionable beige; an inventory more likely to appease a grim Victorian school ma’am than a sultry seductress with come hither eyes.

And while you’re licking your chops over that one…

…you may like to join the thousands of Buddhist pilgrims who flock to Lhasa from the remote countryside in their crazy, fluffy headdresses, braided locks and bejewelled faces each winter to worship and prostrate themselves before Tibetan Buddhism’s foremost holy temples, monasteries and shrines, and while they are here, to visit the roadside dental stalls which specialise in gold caps and whiter-than-white pearlies (ridiculously white, really … I guess a mouthful of Clorox will do that for ya).  I can assure you it is quite a shock to be wandering along with the crowd and a sideways glance towards an open doorway revealing a short man in a grubby, blood-spattered (formerly) white lab-coat, cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth, holding aloft an enormous horse-needle poised for insertion into an old woman’s gums while her family strain to clamp her arms to the chair.

Almost as shocking as what you’ll find in the adjacent store, separated from the “dentist” by nothing but fly-blown air; the meat locker, filled to the ceiling with half-frozen, butchered yak carcasses.  Don’t believe me?  Well have a shifty at this.

The Lhasa Meat Locker.  Pic: Hagas

Zit Face: a heart-warming Christmas message

Call me an old, romantic idealist (oh, go-on), but what I love most about Christmas are not the massive haul of presents sitting beneath plastic pine trees, nor the mountains of land-fill generated by Chinese-made plastic crap, nor the crowded press of zombies wandering around shopping mauls (sic) at 2am just because they’re open 24 hours, but rather, what I love most about Christmas are the tales of love and hope; the celebration of solidarity, and the message that our loved ones, including ourselves, are the most important commodity in the world.

So I thought I’d dedicate this, pre-Christmas post to the message that no matter how down-trodden you may feel, or how abhorrent you think you are, there’s always someone who feels worse, or is more repugnant than you.

Over the years, I have gone to great lengths to make sure that this Blog maintains my anonymity, without outwardly telling any untruths (although that may be one of the few just there).  But I am about to reveal something about myself which could well oust me from my quiet, little, internet hidey-hole.

I suffer from disgusting, horrible, disfiguring acne.  It all started way too early, when I was 9 – just my luck getting acne at age 9, but my balls refusing to drop until I was 25! – and by the time I was 13, my doctor was scribbling down in his notes phrases like “visible lakes of pus” and “deep sinus fissures tracking to Norway”.

The awful thing about teenage acne, despite it leaving you looking like something which, in biblical times, would have seen you ejected over the city walls, is that the extent to which anyone really knows what to do about it is inversely proportional to the number of unsolicited opinions that are offered as to what to do about it.

The obvious approach one might have considered when, as a 13-year-old, one awoke to a pillow soaked in blood and pus for two-weeks running, would have been to consult a dermatologist.  However, due to the fact that every teenage kid in my school who had ever visited one of these witch doctors, while certainly having their acne cleared-up within a matter of weeks, was usually left with a face resembling The Somme in 1917, and thanks to the powerful drug regime they’d been subjected to, a bonus shoulder hump and a combination of breasts, falsetto and/or hairless groin (in boys), or no breasts, baritone and/or hairy arse (in girls).  So the dermatologist was never seriously considered as an option for me (I’ve never needed any help acquiring hair on my arse, thank you very much!).

What was considered, and adhered to for most of my teenage years, thanks to my parents placing stock in increasingly whacked-out opinions as to the cause of my acne, was a gruelling regime of either denying or increasing my intake of various food groups and “natural remedies”.

For example, thanks to one of my father’s old cricket chums, I was urgently taken off dairy food for what would have been the best ice-cream-eating three years of my life.  During this horrible period, a new brand of Belgian Chocolate ice-cream came and went, but not for Donkey.  Instead, the only treat going around for this crater-faced barnyard beast was jaffa-flavoured soy milk (what is it about the latent heat properties of soy milk that no matter how many days you leave it in the fridge, it still comes out warm?!).

Needless to say, the “dairy-free” didn’t stop the pus pouring from my facial pores.  Next, one of my mother’s mid-week golfing “colleagues” heard from a “well-respected naturopath” that seaweed was the go.  For about three months, I was forced to chew on semi-dried, stinking kelp every morning for breakfast.  My pimples maintained their proud stance on my schnoz and chin, for which I must admit I was vaguely relieved, as I was certainly reaching the limit of how much kelp I could stomach.

And on it went.  Obviously chocolate was considered and denied me fairly early on in the process L, and even though the acne remained, chocolate was not returned to my needy bosom for many years thereafter.  Raspberry jam was out.  Honey was withdrawn for a while.  Potato chips (surprise! surprise!), Coca-Cola … ok, to be fair, my diet wasn’t all that great, but which teenage kid’s is?

Then there were the topical remedies that were applied to the skin daily, twice daily or even hourly, depending on which women’s magazine such-and-such was reading; thistle milk, Vitamin E cream, lukewarm rhinoceros semen, tomato paste … the thing was that all of these “cures”, according to the “experts” down at Centenary Park Tennis Club, were not to be rubbed-in until no longer visible, but lathered thickly onto the face and left for the duration of the “prescribed” regime. 

Fortunately this line of treatment came to an abrupt end after a work colleague of my father returned from Rotorua in New Zealand and suggested I try using this thick, black, sulphuric tar he’d acquired which, he assured my Dad, was a sure-fire remedy against skin ailments.  So reluctant as always, and smothered in thick, black paste, I made the trek to school one day and was immediately dragged to the principal’s office and given a week’s suspension on a charge of racial vilification (no doubt the matter wasn’t helped when, in a snivelling mess, I shook my hands in the air and asked to speak with my “Mammy … oh I want my Mammy” – visual gag there; you might need to work on it).

All this ridiculous hokus pokus, disguised as treatment and remedy, despite going on for years, never did anything for my acne, and really only succeeded in making me miserable.  The real cause of my acne, or at least one of them, was eventually discovered, like so many breakthroughs in science, by accident. 

One summer, while mucking around on my skateboard (skaters being the only social group who didn’t seem to care much what you looked like), I slammed pretty badly off a small flight of stairs and broke my arm in about 723 places.  Apart from the pain I endured, not to mention being ridiculed daily by my peers for having to get my mother to wipe my 16-year-old arse (and for the record, it’s not true, people!  A person can adapt to left-hand wiping!), I was also unable to get into a swimming pool, which had, for years, been my only competitive sporting outlet.  Within a week of no swimming; with no dodgily chlorinated water infested with infant-piss and used band-aids, I was cured!  No more zits!

Years later, I came to learn that times of stress were also a trigger for an outbreak of fresh facial pustules.  When I mentioned this to my mother, she scoffed, “Oh yeah, sure, stress.  Exactly what does a teenage boy know about stress?”.

Hmm, I dunno, Mum, maybe it is living with two chain-smoking, staunch Catholics who consider masturbation a mortal sin, and who denied me all of life’s culinary pleasures in favour of a daily intake of seaweed and public humiliation?

These days I try to manage my stress in various ways, and this seems to help my skin a little.  But unfortunately for someone whose career involves a lot of international travel, one of the major triggers of stress which is guaranteed to send my face into volcanic eruptions and release a massive miasma of rank body odour (I’ll post about that another time) is international air travel.

Today was a lovely day in Melbourne, and I took the rare opportunity of a late afternoon flight to go for a morning swim down at the local pool.  I was feeling great when I got the airport, and was wearing appropriate clothes for managing my body temperature.  But after all the check-in procedures, and immigration, and finding the departure gate, I nicked into Sunglass Hut to see what they had going on, and while trying on a new pair of sunnies, I glanced in the mirror and noticed what the cocktail of chlorine and internal body oils had done to my face.

Feeling too embarrassed to hand the glasses back to the smokin’ hot sales girl (although she saved me the problem as she’d noticed my face on the way in and was definitely putting some distance between us), I dumped them on the counter and bolted for the loo.

As I stood up close to the basin, ejecting great globules of yellow and red fluid all over the mirror, my self esteem had hit an all-time low.  Although I was scared witless that some poor schmuck would walk in any minute, see what I was doing and lose their lunch, there was nothing for it; I had to purge my face of this vile infestation.

And moments into the process, it happened.  “Oh my God!  That is disgusting!”.  I froze in mid-squeeze, and turned sheepishly to face my denouncer; a well-dressed, Business Class-type traveller, dressed ready to walk off the plane and into a high-powered board meeting.  But to my surprise, the man in the suit wasn’t pointing at me, but rather at another man, of South Asian extraction, who I hadn’t notice come in, but who was standing behind me changing his shirt; his 432 rolls of belly fat and man-boobs any female swim-suit model would sell her only brain cell to have, flapping around all over the place.

I grabbed a paper towel, wiped the mess from my face, and got the hell out of their with Mr Business Suit not far behind me.

See, there really is always someone more repugnant than you.  Merry Christmas everyone.

Welcome to my world.  Pic: http://t1.gstatic.com/images

Road Trip

We're off on a road trip.  So we load-up the massive boot of the brown Kingswood with chips, biscuits, bread and sauce, an Esky full of beer, Coke and sausages, fishing rods and cricket bat, ball and stumps, strap the boards to the roof racks, load the tape-deck with the best mixed tapes of the year, throw the guitar and some cushions in the backseat, pick-up the girls (tight denim shorts, tans and bikini tops) and hit the highway in search of sun, sand, surf and who knows, maybe the odd bit of sex?!

Whoo hoo!  It's summer, I'm 19 and I'm off on a road trip with my best mates, some smokin' hot babes and a boot full of piss...

Hang-on, I'm not 19!  I don't drive a Kingswood anymore ... is this some kind of memory throw-back to the mid 80s? 

Hang-on, there were never any smokin' hot babes in my car when I was 19 ... is this some kind of morphing of my memories with youth-targeted TV and U-Toob advertising for clothes/mobile phones/flavoured-milk/pre-mixed vodka drinks?  Exactly what the hell is going on here?

Road trip?  What? ... now? ... at this age? 

Oh right.  Yeah, New Zealand ... North Island ... just me (no mates), smokin' hot Mrs Donkey (tan and denim, but a bit light-on in the bikini-top department – mind you, Wellington was only 2 degrees in the sun), Hambones strapped into the child safety seat in the back (no guitar, no cushions ... barely enough room as it is for the bairn and a folded-up porta-cot) and the boot of the respectably suburban Epica (a far cry from the Kingswood aesthetic) full to bursting with suitcases, stroller and jars of baby food (not a chilled beer or aorta-blocking sausage in sight). 

Road trips have indeed changed since I was a young buck hitting the road full of adventurous anticipation ... or at least since I was a young, luckless, awkward, acne-ridden virgin, sitting down in front of the TV and watching advertisements featuring beautiful young things looking cool and sexy at the beach and on country roads up and down the east coast, and realising the closest I was gonna get to that lifestyle was buying a carton of chocolate milk and drinking it on the bonnet of Dad's station wagon.  But I digress ... New Zealand.

New Zealand?  What would I wanna go there for?  It's exactly the same as here, only thirty years behind.  Let's get this straight - I grew-up in the outer suburbs in the 1980s, and I've spent the last thirty years decisively getting as far away from it as I could, both in time and space.  So why the hell would I want to return to orange Laminex tables, mission-brown carpet tiles, culinary home delights such as "beef and noodles", vegetables boiled to denture-friendly mush and tinned "two-fruits" for desert, or for that formal family occasion, the local "Chinese" specialising in sweet and sour pork, prawn toast and steamed dim sims (considerably more exotic than their less-authentic, fried compatriots available from the fish 'n' chip shop next door).

And while we're at it, I have to say that nostalgics are definitely the stereotype which I find the most irritating (next to New Zealanders, of course).  They bang on and on about milk bottles, 6-o'clock closing, hot chips served in newspaper and about how everything was simple, and tasted better and was cheaper "back in the old days".  How bloody ridiculous?!  Who wants to wake up at 5am every day to the sound of some arthritic old bastard with a smoker's cough tinkling bottles of curdled, unpasteurised milk outside your front door, or to rush like an idiot after work on a Friday to buy bread from the shops before they close for the weekend, or to have permanently tattooed hands and tongue from the combination of scalding chip-grease and lead-based newspaper ink?  Nostalgics are dishonest scumbags who can be annoyingly self righteous as much as they like, smug in the knowledge that no one will ever be able to call them on their wistful reminiscences because no one ever wants to go back there ... 'cause it was shit!  So again I ask the question ... why would anyone want to go to New Zealand?

But as is so often the case, despite my concerns at the idea, my machismo behaved true-to-form and I quickly caved to Mrs Donkey's "suggestion" that a trip to New Zealand to catch-up with some long lost friends would be just what we needed.  So one lovely, warm, spring afternoon, we set off in blinding sunlight for bleak, bleak Wellington, where the sky sits two inches above your head, where the shrieking rain falls sideways and where the trees don't sway in the breeze; they shatter in the sleet.  "Urgh", my stomach sank, "who'd live here?".

The answer to that is our good friends, E, J and G, who were waiting excitedly for us in the arrivals hall, their thick woollen coats, scarves and beanies a comical contrast to our shorts, t-shirts and chattering blue knees.  But their embraces went some way to warding off the forbidding chill as we headed off to see what this country was all about.

However, as would become a reliable feature of our New Zealand road trip, there were delays.  Donkey had been defeated in yet another round of persuasion from Mrs D and had forked-out a hundred kiwi dollars for a so-called "NeverLost" navigation device.  Unfortunately, the helpful instructions don't start until you can get the thing switched on, so we sat in the airport car-park for an hour with the howling wind threatening to blow the car into the adjacent concrete wall (like so many in NZ, decorated with a local artist's lame attempt at a life-sized scene from Lord of the Rings) plugging chords into various sockets and pressing buttons here and there to try to get the thing started. 

Upon achieving success, we started out on the highway towards the city.  In days to come, this device would signal a new era of ease and argument-free road travel, but during that first twenty minutes on Wellington's hectic motorways, our enthusiasm for GPS technology was dampened by Pythagorean feats of concentration in order to decipher the irritatingly grating whine of the Kiwi computer geek's wet-dream - a digitally-generated, sexy female voice with an accent straight out of West Christchurch; "Orr yup, Baybee, tiern luft ut mai luft nupple.  Orr yup, thut's ut.  Thut's toatully Choice, Bug Boy!".

By the time we rounded the point into Oriental Bay, however, things were starting to look a little more promising.  The sun was shooting down through the clouds in gorgeous, golden shafts onto the silver water, and a hip, cafe-lined promenade wound along the shore, along which, despite the wind, people lounged at tables mounted with tantalising, steaming mugs and glasses of chilled white wine.

By the time we'd made it to the hotel, I had passed a large proportion of the 17,000 cafes which contribute to Wellington's reputation as having more coffee outlets per capita than New York.  Add to that a tonne of cool-looking bars and restaurants, and our trip was starting to look up – perhaps New Zealand wasn't quite the 80s suburban throwback I'd been expecting. 

But tasting some of this coffee – the real proof of a nation's developing status – would have to wait just that little longer 'cause breakfast was near E, J and G's digs in Lyall Bay, and to get there, we were forced to get all Lord of the Rings and "...journey beside the silver bay before passing through the dark tunnel beneath the Mountain of the Old Queen, and there you will find the Bay of Gold".  Honestly, New Zealand, the sooner you get over this Peter Jackson crap, the better for all of us – call it what you like, but Mt Victoria is merely a hill, and a road over the top would have been a piece of piss – alright, Im just sayin'. 

While not quite golden, Lyall Bay was very pretty, and we wandered through its lazy streets, past white-painted, weather-board dairies which could well have passed for the suburbs in 1985, down to a rickety-old boat house with beaten-up, peeling wooden walls reflecting a century of sand-blasting, au naturel.  Definitely not the most promising locale for a decent feed, but my casual, and (let's face it) hilarious enquiries of our friends about where a bloke could get some smoked kippers for breakky, "Just like back in the Ol' Country" were being met with daggers from Mrs D, so I decided to put a sock in it and see what New Zealand was going to serve-up.

The building's forbidding exterior was merely a mask for what we found upstairs, however; a bright, warm, furious cacophony of rushing waiting staff weaving through laughing crowds of über cool Wellingtonians packed into tables, benches and onto bar stools as the hissing shoots of steam from the espresso machine and the shriek of frying bacon punctuated the gut-trembling bass of the Kiwi dub booming out over the sound system.  Everyone was happy and chatting to each other, and even the cheerful staff seemed in on the joke.

But the real winner for Donkey was not so much the convivial air, but rather what was being lumbered across the floor in shiny white crockery, and landing in front of the salivating sophisticates; possibly the finest, punchiest organic coffee this increasingly sheepish chump had ever tasted, followed immediately by Martian-transport-sized plates of tasty, organic, eggy goodness atop thick, sourdough toast, plump, juicy baked tomatoes and garlic-bloated mushrooms, with mouth-bashing basil pesto on the side.

By now ol' Donkey was supplementing this fine fare with a considerable serving of humble pie, and while this would have convinced a better man to re-assess his perceptions about what to expect from New Zealand, it should be understood that there are few lumbering hulks more difficult to rein-in than the irrationality of an egomaniac trying to avoid embarrassment.  Sure, others might have suggested that the throng of hip and the platefuls of yum in the room were undeniable proof of a progressive, culinary culture, and yet my ill-placed dogma continued, "But this might have been just a bit of luck; and perhaps E, J and G have deliberately guided us to the best place in the city for our first feed". 

More coffee was going to be required before any definitive conclusions could be drawn ... and beer ... wine'd be good, too.  Ice cream anyone?  Yeah.  I'm no soft target to be won over with a single, outstanding breakfast.  I grew up in the suburbs in the 80s.  I know what I'm in for ... let's get out of this funky cafe ... it's time to check out the real New Zealand.

Next stop ... the 'Real' Wellington.

Donkey's expectations of modern-day New Zealand ... stay logged-in to find out just how canny he is.  Pic:  http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jdumas/berendo/berenfot.html

Another political shit-fight

The biggest problem with the gentrification of the inner suburbs is ... me!

Like most of my recently-established neighbours, I too was born-with-a-silver-spoon-up-my-arse and brought-up amongst outer-suburban garden tea parties in literally massive, manicured backyards before seeing the light (y'know, that huge, increasingly hot, skin cancer-causing one in the sky) and deciding that such lavish living was unsustainable.  It was high-time to move closer to the city and to work on creating less of a footprint.

Just like everyone else living in the renovated nineteenth century houses up and down our street, we too have taken to reducing our household waste, and to trying to grow, rather than buy (from miles away and in some cases, other continents) part of our weekly dietary intake.

The problem with trying to do the right thing by Ol' Mama N is that the tiny backyards of the inner suburbs, designed as they were in the late 1800s, and since then shrunk considerably as households discovered the merits of kitchens and toilets, are becoming crammed with stinking bins of rotting vegetable matter with which to feed the exponential proliferation of newly erected, raised garden beds.

These postage stamp yards were never meant to house such festering filth, especially given we're all living on top of each other, with only a narrow, wooden fence line acting as a psychological barrier between honest citizens and drug-manufacturing, wife-beating, illegal immigrant-smuggling, terrorist-harbouring, pawn-peddling and weapons cache-ing neighbours.  "Don't worry", we all nod knowingly to ourselves over the racket of pounding body-blows and accompanying screams, "If we can't see it, it's not really happening".

At least, that's what we all said until we started smelling each other as well.  And now, thanks to the organic-promoting, food-miles-reducing, resource-conscious revolutions of the nouveau riche, a disgusting miasma of decaying vegetable matter hangs over the once sought-after real estate of the inner north, creating friction between formerly harmonious, cup-of-sugar-borrowing relations that is threatening to break-out in funk-induced, fence-breaching fisticuffs.

Local governments have been inundated with complaints from disgruntled neighbours demanding prosecution on public health grounds.  It is, quite literally, the biggest socio-political shit fight since the Chinese Market Gardeners got busted re-directing Melbourne's fledgling sewerage system towards the biggest pumpkins in agricultural history back in 1894, which saw White-Australian public resentment of the 'Yellow Peril' spill-over into cholera-induced, micro-genocide*.

Councillors have had great, steaming piles of manure dumped on their door-steps in the wee hours as threats for local government inaction on the issue, and the EPA has added an urban-stench-o-reading to their daily smog alerts.

This seemingly irrelevant issue is gaining legs as the hallowed chambers of Council meetings groan under the weight of unprecedented crowds, all screaming for an end to the festering fecundity, and in the aftermath of the recent, hung Federal Parliament, the sinister, 'Faceless Men' of the major parties have swung-in behind their Council stooges.

The fear is that the forth-coming State Election could end-up mirroring the Federal result unless urgent action is taken, and so it looks like the boat people will be left to their own devices for a while as the election gears-up to be fought on rather different ground, albeit the type that is infused with the stench of decaying organic matter.

For once it's not regular mud that's being flung by the Majors in an attempt to discredit their opponents, but rather rich, nutritious, organic loam.  Ironically, given that they were the ones who started this whole sustainable living gaff in the first place, it's The Greens who are being looked-to for a solution to the urban stench by furious residents with cotton wool stuffed up their nostrils; the Majors, as ever dedicated to their polling, remain reluctant to alienate themselves from either side, and are yet to take a significant stance.

So as this festering issue continues to gain momentum, and the rot sets in on another, otherwise insignificant State Election, some of us are taking action before it's too late.  The lid is off Donkey's compost bin, and the contents are being urgently worked into newly-erected garden beds in an effort to get our veggie stock well and truly established while the law still allows us to do so – the neighbours and their sensitive nasal passages be damned.  This is my patch of ground, and I'll make it as foul and unpleasant as I like.

* I know that 'micro-genocide' has gotta be a contradiction in terms but I've used it deliberately to match seamlessly with all the other stuff I'm making-up here.  No need to hit the history pages to check any of my historical facts, I assure you.

And there it is – the new garden bed.  Not bad for a tradie with no opposing thumbs!  Pic: Hagas

Undercover Donkey

There's this gawd-awful show on the tele at the moment called Undercover Boss, whereby some corporate high-flyer dons the company duds and goes and stands alongside his unknowing minions at the cash register, or behind the wheel, or digging ditches (not, I notice, cleaning toilets!).  I must confess I haven't watched this show, but judging by the ads, it seems that each episode ends up as a heart-warming, gut-wrenching, tear-jerking sob-fest as the Boss' ice-cold, ass-kicking corporate drive is melted in the face of the hard-luck stories and sheer anguish of his employees, with their terminally-ill kiddies, their animal shelters and their community service to struggling migrants.  Big Boss gets a free lesson in the "real values of humanity", and proceeds to handover cash and hand-out promotions as reward for their previously unrecognised, selflessness.

Honestly Channel 10, as if The 7PM Project wasn't bad enough!

Anyway, although not the boss of anyone or anything (and for good reason), I have recently found myself as Undercover Donkey in my workplace, but the only tears being jerked on this occasion were my own tears of excruciating pain and/or embarrassment.

I work on a hospital campus, and although I'm pretty far removed from the patients during my work day (again, for very good reason), I do skip-along to the horrors of the hospital cafeteria for lunch most days.  Now aside from the absolutely disgusting food that is served-up, the trouble with having lunch at a hospital caf is that you're sitting down to a plate of greasy, oily, barely-edible fare with a bunch of people carrying just about every communicable disease known to ape and man.

And the thing about hospital patients sitting down to a feed beside or across the table from you is that they're usually "wearing" hospital garments.  Why the inverted commas, I hear you ask?  Well because the thing about hospital garments is that ... well, they just aren't that conducive to being "worn".

Take the old man in the wheelchair who sat opposite me today.  He was attired in a pair of hospital-issue, one-size-fits-all pyjama pants – you know, the ones with the massive fly that leaves his Old Fella hanging out for all to admire.  I'm telling you, a sight like that can really put you off your rather limp, hospital cafeteria bratwurst!

And the same goes for those poor folk who come down from the wards wearing nothing but one of those white hospital gowns that "do up" at the back (inverted commas again, as there's a lot of space between those tie-up straps).  So again, try tucking into your hospital cafeteria carpaccio when some homeless-looking man's hairy arse-crack is winking at you through the substantial chink in the starched, white curtains!

Like most aspects of the public hospital system, one finds oneself coping with these kinds of horrors with humorous attacks on the kinds of people these semi-brain dead patients must be to get around in such an undignified fashion.

But then, I became one ... twice!  And I soon learned that their lack of dignity is not self-generated, but rather a dastardly bi-product of a cruel, uncaring public hospital system.

The first time I experienced this was during the birth of Lil' Hambones.  When Mrs Donkey was kitted-up in smart-looking, green, ER-type hospital scrubs and sent off to theatre, I was thrown a pair of white overalls by a midwife and told (with a barely-concealed smirk) that they were one-size-fits-all. 

Uh oh!  That phrase again ... one of two, standard features of all hospital-issue attire ... the other being that said attire can't be done-up.  So there I stood, in a tight, white, full-body suit, successfully parting my testicles in the kind of camel toe you'd expect to see on a deformed camel with a congenital, cleft toe, and just above these separated global hemispheres, the suit opened out, right to my shoulders!  Honestly, I looked like a cross between a young Sean Connery and Borat in his mankini.

"You're taking this piss!", I remarked to the midwife in a quivering falsetto, to which the sadistic bitch giggled that it was all they had and we had better get to theatre immediately.  T'was a good thing that the hoary old chestnuts had done their work, for they mayn't be the same again after the birth of Lil' Hambones.

And then again this week, I became Undercover Donkey, and again I came to have my heart softened towards my fellow demented, semi-clad diners.  This time I was heading back to theatre to have the scar left over from the removal of my festering alien parasite removed.  By the time I got to theatre, I was delusional from not having eaten (or more to the point, not having drunk coffee) for about twenty hours, so I didn't really take much notice of what they dressed me in before sending me off to the knife.

But when I awoke afterwards, with the usual early morning, post-slumber, anatomical male processes unfolding downstairs, I was mortified to discover that the smiling, caring, and not-unattractive recovery nurse by my side had been witness to the whole depraved scene thanks to my having been attired in hospital-issue, so-called "disposable underpants" which when adorned, being one-size-fits-all, was tantamount to wearing a tube of stretched, translucent, elastic gauze.

So no heart-warming, gut-wrenching story from this Undercover Donkey!  These hospital linen services are completely taking the piss!  It's a breach of patient dignity ... a breach of human-bloody-rights!  As they say in the States, I'm taking this all the way to City Hall! 

These old folk in big pyjama pants deserve better! 

These homeless folk in poorly-fastened gowns deserve better! 

And these recovery nurses definitely deserve better! 

It's time to take a stand against this blatant disregard for patients' dignity.  C'mon Julia Gillard.  C'mon Barak Obama.  C'mon Ban Ki-moon.  Give us zips!  Give us Velcro!  Give us buttons!  And please, give us something in our size!

Ministers finger fags

Any day of the week, Samoa is definitely one of the greatest destinations in the world; awesome beaches, wonderfully lush mountains, natural water slides off the sides of said mountains, fantastic beer, relaxed vibe (bordering-on-coma) and a serious commitment to food (my kinda peeps).

There're also the wonderful, friendly locals; always joking, laughing, dancing and singing, that make the place so welcoming and so much fun. 

Hang-on, did I just say "always friendly"?  That's definitely not quite right ... for starters, Samoans – all of 'em, at one time or another - suffer from the "musu".  This is a cultural phenomenon which, for no apparent reason, turns your normally laughing, joking, cheeky colleagues/friends/partners/waiters/hotel staff into brooding, inpatient, aggressive ticking-emotional-time-bombs in the blink of an eye. 

Seriously, the musu can easily turn a happy, convivial conversation into a spiteful verbal barrage.  For example;

Donkey:  Thanks for taking me to the pub last night, I had a great time.

Mose:     Hey no worries, Donkey, me-ol'-mucka.*  Yeah, it was really fun.  You're pretty good a darts.

Donkey:  You think so?  Ah thanks.  Yeah, I really enjoy it.  Wish I hadn't drunk so much, though.

Mose:     Ha!  It was kinda funny when you downed 17 Vailimas and spewed all over the pool table before passing out on the sea wall.

Donkey:  Urgh!  Don't remind me – woke-up with a washed-up, fermenting coconut next to my face.  Still, good fun.  How 'bout we do it again some time?

Mose:     Fuck off!

And that'll be it for Mose for the next couple of hours.  Next time you see him, he'll be his old self again.  Ah, the musu.  It can make inter-cultural relationships pretty difficult to negotiate for the uninitiated.

So as I was saying, apart from the musu, Samoans are great fun to be around; very generous with their time, their praise, their food.  Great people; very open to newcomers ... oh, unless they happen to be palagi (foreigners).  For those of us who aren't Samoan, there's a special kind of Samoan Pride (read: arrogance) which anyone whose been there for longer than a week will have been exposed to at one time or another.  It's not too bad, really; no violence or hate crimes, just a very Samoan way of talking to make you feel that you're less than the dirt under their shoe ... um, sandal.

Actually, this pride (read: arrogance) isn't only reserved for foreigners, but for all who are considered beneath the speaker in question.  So in the hierarchy of Samoa, a man will display arrogance to a woman, who'll beat-up on the kids, who'll have a stab at the dog, who'll take-on the cat, who'll chase the rat.  And we palagis are right at the bottom (luckily there's no plague in Samoa!).

At the other end of the spectrum are matais (chiefs) and church ministers.  These morbidly-obese blokes lord it over everyone, as the next story demonstrates.

Now this story is completely true (I think ... at least, I've certainly told it many times as though it's a true story ... I've even made it slightly better from time-to-time with a few Donkey-specials, just to make sure my audience is on-board ... so yeah, it's pretty true).

Many years ago, some foreign anthropologists from The States were conducting an investigation into the origins of the Pacific races.  They spent many years researching in countries all over the Pacific, and many years in Samoa, particularly.  At the end of nearly a decade of research, they offered to share (in person) their findings with the various countries of the Pacific, and were invited to do so in Samoa, where they would address a gathering of the Council of Chiefs.

This was back in the days before PowerPoint, but they had lots of slides, and went to great pains to ensure the audience understood the rigour of their research, and the ultimate findings that the peoples of the Pacific, including Polynesians, all drifted east from what is now Southeast Asia, settling, then moving on, then settling again.  They described key evidence of language, art, cultural practices, mythology and DNA as supporting these findings.

After a day of talking, explaining, demonstrating and answering questions about their research, the Paramount Chief stood up, and in the spirit of fine Samoan oratory, went on a one-hour verbal bender which can basically be summed-up as follows;

"Thank you very much for coming here today to tell us about your work.  But we know that Samoa is the Cradle of Polynesia; God put us here and from here all the Polynesian nations were settled."

Nods all 'round.  Paramount Chief ... who's gonna argue?  The researchers (both inferior and foreign) hung their heads, packed-up and went home.

Donkey, too, has come up against this closed-minded, unquestionable Samoan arrogance.  I was running a consultative workshop about health promotion; how to do it better in order to meet the needs of Samoa's most concerning health problems.

I'd wanted to get a few young people along to discuss the cause, and possibly throw-around a few ideas towards a solution to the very high rate of youth suicide in the country.  When I asked the gathering of Church Pastors and Village Chiefs why no young people had come along, I was informed by one particularly large gentleman who, despite his profusely sweating brow, managed to pull-off a spotless white sports-coat with nary a blemish, "We are the representatives of God here on Earth and we speak for our communities, which includes our young people".

OK, so by this time I'm getting the message, loud-and-clear, on the high rate of youth suicide.  "So," I asked, "what can we do about it?".

"Our young people need to be more involved in the Church ... they need to pray more and be closer to their parents and leaders, and especially to God".

Exasperated, I looked to my practical, street-savvy, scientifically-minded, Health Promotion colleagues for a life-line.  All I got were beaming smiles and,

Nods all 'round.  Church Pasters and Chiefs ... who's gonna argue?  This health promoter (both inferior and foreign) hung his donkey-head, packed-up and went home.

And now someone else has come-up against the ol' Samoan Pride.  This time it's an international climate change summit to which, for no apparent reason, someone decided to invite a bunch of senior Samoan Church Ministers.  And the result?  What is the Number 1 root cause of climate change? ...

... wait for it ...

Homosexuals!  Ha!

I love the line in this article from The Register, "...Academics were apparently thrown off their consideration of "Arts in the Age of Global Warming" and "Ecology in Poetry / Poetry in Ecology..."

Nods all 'round.  Church Pasters ... who's gonna argue?  Those academics (both inferior and foreign) hung their heads, packed-up and went home.

* OK, so clearly Mose doesn't talk in cockney-rhyming slang – I was just translating from Samoan into some kind of cross-cultural equivalent ... I think I nailed it!

Wonder-twin powers...activate!  The white-coated Church Pastors from Samoa power-up to tackle climate change in their own, unique, homophobic way.  Pic: adventist.org.au

Give ‘em an inch…

It’s great being back in Melanesia again.  Apart from the joy in being able to communicate with people in [something resembling] their own language, I have come to remember a few of the wonderful, and occasionally baffling things about these people that I’d previously known and loved, but of which I had completely forgotten.

“What am I, hard-of-smelling?”

Within an hour of hitting Vila, I was waiting on the dusty roadside for a “bus” to come along to take me into town.  Beside me was an old lady with a massive ‘fro and a brightly-coloured, Mother Hubbard dress, unashamedly staring at me with a massive, toothless grin.  I nodded, smiled, said “Halo”, smiled again, nodded again, winked, smiled again … but she wasn’t done yet; there’d be no looking away from my amusing spectacle.

Eventually, a beat-up, rusting old van with clapped-out suspension and bald tyres rocked-up and the mad old hag and I climbed on board, squeezing into the remaining two seats.  From this you might deduce that the bus was packed, but in truth there were only two others - young guys - on board.  The rest of the seats, comprising the back half of the bus, were taken up with two ridiculously-sized woofers which bashed out gut-thumping, island reggae beats.  I settled into the groove, and sat back to enjoy the ride.

As soon as we pulled off the curb, I received Repressed Melanesia Memory #1.  It is a fact of island life that fresh water is a scarce commodity for many communities, and as such, it is not uncommon for people to bathe only once ortwice a week, and this rarely with soap (an unnecessary expense for poverty-stricken households).  And so, as I sat in the sweltering bus, I remembered the all-pervasive, musky tang of Melanesian body odour.

To be honest, though, this is not a completely unpleasant odour – it’s actually quite a sweet smell, which is rather odd.  How is it that Melanesians - women and men alike - despite rarely bathing, and even more rarely with soap, they still smell a damn sight better than those fat blokes in the Australian public service who, despite sitting all day in climate-controlled offices, still exhibit great, wet, yellowing under-arm stains and smell like turds rolled in ground cumin?  Same goes for those pot-bellied, balding types in stubbies and blue singlets you sometimes get stuck next to on the train – ew!  Never mind the “poor, primitive natives of the Pacific with their backward cultures and heathen ways”, maybe island hygiene (or the lack thereof) is still far-and-away more advanced than your average Australian male?

Strange misconceptions.

It must be all those Hollywood blockbusters like Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland, not to mention the harrowing footage we see on BBC World every night from regions as far flung as Sudan, the Congo, East Timor and Haiti.  Whatever it is, I am ashamed to admit that the sight of a Toyota Hilux racing along a dirt road with a spear-bristling pile of young, black, male faces staring determinedly over the cab fills me to the core with cold, mortal fear.

What a wave of surprised relief I experience, though, when these young men turn that menacing grimace into a big, white, toothy grin, and a laughing “Halo” as they make their way across the island to their circumcision/initiation ceremony.  This is Vanuatu, you idiot, not Sierra Leone!

Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take a mile.

There’s nothing quite so uncomfortable when, as a waetman (foreigner) with comparatively shitloads of money, you’ve just opened and are ready to tuck into a packet of Twisties (a luxury food item, given average household incomes) when the seventeen year-old guesthouse maid walks by for a chat.  Clearly she’s not in a hurry to get back to work, and the stilted conversation seems to drag slowly by as the Twisties waft their tantalizing scent throughout the room.

Giving into my cultural inclinations, and also as a result of the guilt this have, with my great, big bag of corny, deep-fried snacks, feels before this young have-not, I course extend the packet for her to share my tasty treat.  “Thank you”, she smiles as she reaches for the pack, takes it from my hand, turns, and wanders off into the guesthouse.

Oh yeah, Repressed Melanesia Memory #3, one doesn’t share, one gives away.  Bugger!  I really wanted those Twisties.

Guess who’s coming to dinner?

I arrived late in the day to the quiet town in the remote southern island, and all the stores were closed.  In the dark, I found my guesthouse, and was feeling a bit freaked-out at the grotty, shoddy surroundings which would be my home for the next ten days.  With nothing to eat, and only a cold pipe for a shower, I fumbled through the gloom to my sleeping bag, tired, hungry and miserable.

Sometime in the night I was startled awake by a group of staggering men returned from sloshing kava at the nakamal, and I lay quiet and still, fervently mouthing my prayers for deliverance from being stabbed in the night by a pack of wired, tribal warriors, and done up the bum while my corpse was still warm.

In the morning, I staggered out onto the guesthouse’s mouldy, crumbling balcony to see two fat, old, greying men sitting before a well-set breakfast table.  They offered for me to join them and shared their bread, which I gratefully accepted and ate quietly while they farted, scratched their protruding tummies and chatted away in their local dialect.

While cleaning-up in the disgusting kitchen afterwards, the third member of the party, who’d been making the breakfast for the others, informed me that one of the two sitting out on the balcony was none other than His Excellency the Honourable Minister for Foreign Affairs, here on an official government visit to meet with his constituency!  Let that be a lesson to all those who think that national budgets in the islands are all blown on five-star holiday resorts for corrupt government officials.

Lord Voldemort in a Penis Gourd?

Vanuatu, like a number of other Melanesian countries, remains one of the last great tribal cultures of the world, with many people still practicing and following the tribal customs and beliefs of their ancestors.  Rather paradoxically, it’s also staunchly Christian, but like many parts of the world where a kind of hybrid Christianity has sprung-up, much to the chagrin of missionaries both past and present, so too Vanuatu enjoys a rather bizarre mix of belief in both the magic of the Holy Spirit, and the magic of the mountains, trees, rocks and sea.

And to further add to this crazy soup of beliefs and practices, modern technology has been well and truly embraced by all, so that today even the remotest communities have access to satellite TV, internet and mobile phones.

The clash of these ancient beliefs and modern technology was brought to my attention one day while out in the field with one of the engineers responsible for bringing essential water and sanitation facilities to remote communities.  This wiry, weathered bloke is one of the few of his countrymen to have completed both high school and tertiary education, and for the last twenty years, has travelled to every province and island in the country guiding communities to implement these positive changes for their health and well being.

Did I say every island?  Sorry, that should have been ‘every island but one’.  It’s hard to get information out of this bloke sometimes; he being always on his mobile phone, banging away in a number of different languages to someone or other.  One day, I was standing by him when his phone rang.  He looked at the screen before swearing and muttering something in his own dialect, and then turned the phone off.  I realised then that I’d seen this happen quite a few times over the previous days, so asked him jovially whether an old girl friend had finally caught up with him.

Rather than smile at my joke, he gravely explained to me that he will not answer a call that the phone display lists as an anonymous, ‘Private Number’, as this, he said, is likely to be a local sorcerer trying to put a curse on him.

Surprised by this response, and the fear in his eyes when he told me, I asked a few more careful questions and came to learn that the reason he’d never, in twenty years, visited the island of Maewo, was because it is a place of black magic, and he will surely be cursed by a local sorcerer if he goes there.

With that, he picked up his bag and headed-off to church.

But mostly it's the people that make it great.  Pic: Hagas.