The Kimberley with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy

In my second summer of 2013 (that is, the southern hemisphere summer - and the first dual-summer year of my life!) I was lucky enough to get the chance to visit Mornington Widlife Conservancy, where the privately funded conservation charity, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, is working to preserve Australia's unique wildlife. I was particularly lucky in getting the opportunity to see a side of the operations that many tourists wouldn't usually be able to see.

Before this Christmas the longest flight I'd ever been on was the four-hour flight from Edinburgh to Athens. Now, having flown around the globe to reach Australia, the four hours from Melbourne to Broome seemed like nothing. Barely time to open your book!

Once we'd landed in Broome it was necessary for us to take a chartered plane to the remote Mornington Conservancy, where the roads and runway are red earth, and colossal termite hills the size of cows rise up above the grass in all directions. I'd never seen anything like it.

Zoom in. That thing that looks like a hut? It's a termite mound

On the runway I met the head researcher, Dr Sarah Legge, and the head of operations, Swanie. Then, over the next hours and days, I met a stream of incredible, dedicated scientists, ops and admin staff. Hours' travel from a town, living in flood-territory huts on stilts where a door left open may well mean a python sharing your bed, these extraordinary people are conducting research, making pizzas and raising children.

It was the oppressive 40 degree heat making my heart race, but I'd fallen in love with Mornington.

Bustards, spotted on day one. Australia's second-largest flightless bird

On our first afternoon we swam in Fitzroy Gorge, where the answer to 'are there crocs here?' was 'we've never seen them here'. A few of us swam to the far shore (I took a rubber ring... I've never been a strong swimmer) where we climbed up onto the rocks and saw Aboriginal rock art on the overhang. Despite being thousands of years old, the handprints were still vivid. I know I'm employing a fair bit of hyperbole here but the sunset was spectacular.

My photography skills can't do it justice at all

When I mentioned my interest in working in conservation Sarah was more than happy to invite everyone to take a closer look at the work they're doing. First, we were invited on a 'cat chase'. Exactly what it sounds.

Feral cats are causing huge problems for native mammals in Australia, each cat consuming roughly five of them per day. That adds up to a lot of mammals. At Mornington, Hugh McGregor is conducting his PhD research on the cats, and has tagged a number of them to track their movements. He needed to re-catch one of them to replace its tracker, and we were invited along for the ride. 

When we set off it was about five o'clock and still by no means cool; on the first day I'd had something of a panic attack about my body's ability to cope with the heat, but I'd adjusted to an extent when we set off walking at a fast pace into the bush.

Pretty soon we were fighting our way through some tall and (really, bloody) sharp spinifex. And we were getting no closer to the cat. After about twenty minutes we had to stop; one of the dogs, a Spaniel not quite made for the heat, had over-exhausted herself by running full pelt and covering about five times as much ground as we had. She lay down and stayed down while water was dribbled into her mouth. Our party had to split in two: those who would go after the cat - at a run - and those who'd stay with Sarah and Sally. 

I ran for about a hundred yards before I realised I was making the wrong decision. I was barely coping with the heat at a fast walk; I knew my limits. Lachy and I turned back and found Sarah. Once Sally had almost recovered, Sarah picked her up and strode through the spinifex carrying her while me and Lachy struggled along in her wake. 

Sally was restored by plenty of water and a dip in the river, and the second group returned one cat later. They had caught the cat and done the necessary maintenance without the need for even a sedative. Exhausted, we were back to camp just in time for stone-fired pizza. 

For our second lesson in applied conservation we were up at 4 o'clock the following morning to check on quoll traps (Hugh having stayed up with the traps all night following the cat chase!). The northern quoll is one of Australia's native marsupials, and their population is monitored at Mornington through trapping nights, during which the quolls are monitored in minute detail, including being tagged and weighed. 

Quoll-weighing

With Hugh monitoring the traps overnight some quolls had already been caught and released. Luckily, when we arrived, two of the traps were occupied! We were privileged to see some of Australia's native nocturnal mammals up close, and they were promptly released afterwards, shooting off before any of us could manage to snap a picture. Hence the lack of a picture. Feel free to Google.

The days we spent at Mornington were the highlight of my Australian Christmas holiday (and that's really saying something). Our daily adventures included helicoptering in to a campfire breakfast atop Fitzroy Bluff - undoubtedly the most spectacular breakfast of my life - to rock-hopping up a dry riverbed to a billabong below a dry waterfall, where water monitors shared the pool with us and a spirit (or a strange wind) stirred up trouble around the teapot.

Your typical Aussie breakfast...

The most memorable moment of the trip, however, is undoubtedly when our al fresco dinner on top of a hill took an unusual turn.

It was the rainy season during our trip, and we watched as some unbelievable rainstorms swept across the savannah. Lightning lit up the bluffs like the Battle of Helm's Deep was taking place beyond. And then one came rolling over us...

As we prepared for dinner, our hearts were stopped as lightning struck about a hundred metres from our dinner spot. The younger members of the group were shocked into tears, while one person worried his eyes had been damaged as he'd watched the bolt strike. I saw it from the corner of my eye and it certainly made me jump.

A few minutes later, someone noticed, a hundred metres or so away:

A bush fire had started.

Realising that the wind was blowing towards us, and with the fire rapidly expanding, the staff raced down the hill shouting to us to stay where we were, breaking off tree limbs as they went. Within ten minutes they had beaten the bushfire out.

Just your standard day working in conservation in the Kimberley!

The Travels of my Summer Journal

Early in 2013 I bought a blank unlined notebook from Paperchase for a fiver with the intention of using it for a creative writing project. After realising I wasn't creative enough to pull it off, I decided to dedicate the notebook to my summer travels, and wrote the title - Summer 2013, as you see above - on the blank cover.

In June the notebook travelled with me to Skyros, where I doodled horses all over the cover, practised a bit of Greek writing, and drew a couple of cats too. Oh, and Hara the dog, as you see just below the title. One evening my great friend, 10-year-old Julietta, asked me what my favourite number was (12)  and my favourite animal (do you even have to ask?) and drew this lovely design for me.

When the journal and I visited Romania, it became my lesson-planning brain-exploding outlet for confusion and frustration with the fact that I wasn't enjoying teaching. But there were good days too. As you see.

And above all, I used it to record day-to-day happenings, at first only items of particular interest (see below - ate my first chicken kebab), but with some increasing detail as time went on.

The journal ends abruptly on the 10th of August - the day I left it on the train. We got on at Lyon, and when I stepped off at Grenoble my journal was lying hopefully under the seat I'd been sitting in.

I despaired.

I called all the lost property offices along the train line, and after a few days I was prepared to give up hope. I wasn't getting anywhere. Then I received this email, entitled 'travel book forgotten in the train'.

¡ Hi !
Last sunday with my wife we took the train Bordeaux-Vintimille in the station of Marseille, and we found a notebook forgotten on a seat. Inside there is your mail adress. Is it yours ? If it is, we can send you by the post. 
Friendly,
[anonymized, of course].

The most amazing thing about my saviours is that my email address was only on the page where I'd written down my bank details. To be safe, I changed them all at once, but they had had my notebook for a few days I believe before they found the means to contact me, and all they did was let me know they had it.

Restores your faith in humanity, doesn't it?

So they posted it to the airbnb flat we would be renting the following week in Como.

Unfortunately, it arrived the day we left for France.

Fortunately, our kind Italian landlord made regular trips to the UK, and the next time he came over, he brought my package and posted it locally. When the notebook made it to Cumbria, I'd returned to Scotland for university. At last, when I returned home for Christmas, I was reunited with my journal, which officially travelled more extensively than I did in summer 2013.

2013 in Review and Plans for 2014

2013 was really my first adventurous year. In summary:

• In January I hitchhiked from Stirling to Prague - by car, lorry, ferry, foot and finally train. 
• During the spring semester I spent two weekends hiking around the Scottish Highlands and Trossachs
• In June I volunteered in Skyros again, via Athens
• In July I flew to Romania (via Italy..!) and taught for a month in the east
• From the end of July I visited (with an Interrail Pass) Cluj-Napoca, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Bordeaux, Lyon and Grenoble
• At the end of August I lived in an airbnb flat in Como for a week before spending a week (respectively) with one family in Sardinia (brief stop in Milan) and another in Chef-Boutonne.
• After working hard during the Christmas semester (earning, not studying, of course) I flew to Australia via Beijing, and spent Christmas in Melbourne and New Year at Point Lonsdale. 

And the highlights include but are not limited to:

• Finally fulfilling a childhood dream - visiting the Spanish Riding School in Vienna
• Learning to drive a horse-drawn cart in Romania
• Lying out in the field with the horses under a full moon in Skyros
• Enjoying the music of Grail in the Old Town Square, Prague
• Reaching the summit of 'Le Dent' in the Alps
• And finishing off the year by swimming with seals and dolphins in Australia.

Grail in full swing

There were low points too...

• Stubbing my toe so many times while wearing sandals that the nail turned black
• Cooking overnight in a Budapest bedroom without air conditioning
• And worst of all, learning of the death of a close friend.

The bad experiences, however, couldn't outweigh the value that travelling has held for me over the past year. And that's why I'm planning for another big adventure in 2014.

Plan #0.5: Improve this blog
As you can already see, I've given the blog a bit of a makeover, and in 2014 I hope to improve my travel writing skills and develop the blog further.

Plan #1: Driving tour of Scotland

In the second part of the university's spring vacation, Lachy and I are planning an epic voyage by car around the Highlands and Islands. Definite stops will include Inversnaid, Tomintoul and the Isle of Skye.

Plan #2: Purchase ticket to Iceland (complete)

On August 19th I will be flying from Edinburgh over to Reykjavik to spend a few days in and around the capital before heading to the far north to volunteer on a dairy farm with many horses, where I'll also be lucky enough to be taking part in the biggest Icelandic horse roundup in the country. If I can get a few days off, I wouldn't mind attending Iceland Airwaves, either; a big music festival in Reykjavik.

Plan #3: Return to Skyros (part two)

Sometime in October I will head back to my favourite Greek island to spend six weeks or so working with the world's greatest breed of tiny pony. And for the first time, I'll be working in weather my body can understand, and I might actually be quite productive!

Plan #4: Christmas in Cumbria and Hogmanay

Since the last Christmas season was spent with another family in another hemisphere, I promised my parents (well, my mum) that this year I'd be at home. And I am determined to attend Hogmanay for my birthday this year, something I've always wanted to do but - despite living so close to Edinburgh for so long - I've never done it yet.

Plan #5: (technically, this one is for 2015) Move to Australia

That's right. Lachy is transferring and I'm moving to Melbourne with him. Much adventure awaits. Much excitement, much excitement indeed. 

Hello Melbourne.

Losing Track of Time

This is a short post because I'm out of practice and because it's a short post.

Before I went abroad in the summer of 2013 I decided to stop wearing a watch.

I can be obsessive over punctuality and the time I spend on certain things and basically I was counting the minutes every day of my life. So when I set off for Greece I took off my watch and put it in my pink toiletries bag, just in case. I wasn't ready to leave it behind altogether. And it was a lovely 18th birthday present from my parents.

I didn't lose track of time altogether. I still have my phone and when I really need to know what time it is, I pull it out of my pocket and check, and I'm still rarely late. But now that the option to glance at my wrist to see the time isn't there any more, it's rare that I wonder how many minutes have passed. And I think that's a symptom of the fact that since I started travelling, I've been living a better life. A much more interesting, filled, and stimulating life.

Of course, I don't mean to say that we should all stop wearing watches. I mean only that those of us who, like me, used their watch as a measuring device to be checked regularly, as something that reminded them that they were wasting time and that made them always too cautious - those people should consider taking their watches off.

I took my watch out of the toiletries bag a few weeks ago and realised that it had stopped. A year ago, I would have panicked and had the battery replaced immediately. I couldn't help but smile when I saw it.

My Romanian family. Note the watch-free wrist

*

I know many posts about the summer of travelling are owed, and now a few about the Australian summer as well, and they'll come in due time.

Highland Weekend

Last Saturday, sporting exhaustion-hangovers from running a bop (for Skyros!) the night before, Lachy and I headed into the Highlands for a spot of hiking. It was the first time I'd been to the Highlands proper, not including Pitlochry (since I was a child at least, and all I remember is my mum saying 'This is the Highlands!' and me saying 'Why?') and we were headed to the village of Tomintoul. I'd heard of the village because of the Tomintoul and Glenlivet Development Trust, an initiative which is trying to regenerate the area and attract more tourists. Since there was no specific Highland destination I wanted to visit, why not select a rural village and play it by ear?

We took three trains from Leuchars to Dundee to Perth to Aviemore and a taxi from there. Our hostel's website had said the taxi would cost £24 but it unfortunately cost £50, rather more than I could really afford. Then again I could have just misread it since the next time I checked the website the price had changed - either way, it was much cheaper on Monday morning when we left. We arrived at the Smugglers Hostel, a converted village school building, where we were welcomed and shown around by Simon, who helped us plan our hike for the next day and lent us a map and a guidebook. The hostel gets its name from the whisky smuggling that was once prevalent in the area, and our hike the next day actually crossed one of the old smugglers' trails.

We took a quick walk around the village just before dark, then made ourselves some dinner in the spacious, clean kitchen, chatting with some fellow hikers who were making their way through the Highlands. We got a very early night. We were very tired.

In the morning we partook of the hostel's breakfast buffet, a huge, tempting spread of cereals, eggs, bread and spreads. Scrambled eggs on toast with a glass or two of orange juice - a damn good hiker's breakfast. Cereal just never fills you up for the morning. We left the hostel with our maps and packed lunches and promptly set off in the wrong direction, then found our way to the correct end of the village and set off along the wrong path again. My orienteering skills have never been great and Lachy was too polite to question me, so it was a farmer and a herd of cows that finally set us walking on the right path. But we did get to see some deer up close on our brief detour.

We walked the Speyside Way through some beautiful valleys and over a couple of hills, through an amazing forest. Within an hour we were far from any roads; the silence was beautiful. We had been planning to walk a circular route to Glenlivet but by the time we reached the place where the guidebook's walk began there was no way we were going to get the whole thing done before we lost daylight, so instead we walked for a couple of hours until we reached the village of Tomnavoulin and then walked back. We passed a total of three people (one group) the entire day.

When we were back in the village, we wandered around the local shops, and I bought some fudge and tablet for my brother while Lachy tried a few drams of whisky in the Whisky Castle and bought a bottle of something. For dinner we went to the Glen Avon Hotel where Lachy had a local venison burger, then to the Richmond Hotel where I had a veggie burger since the Glen Avon was out. We had a couple of bottles of Cairngorm beer, White Lady being our mutual favourite. Then an episode of Peaky Blinders and another early night following a very hard day's walk.

Tomintoul is a lovely village. There are plenty more walks I'd like to have a go at in the area, and the Smugglers Hostel made us feel so welcome, I hope to return many times in the future!

Teaching is Not My Calling and Other Lessons Learned in Romania

This summer I spent a month in the town of Suceava, Romania, otherwise known as Whitehaven, Romania. The reason I call it that is that, like my home town of Whitehaven, there is very little to do there. Yes, there are museums and shops and so on, but it took about two weeks to have visited every place of interest in the town, and unfortunately, we (myself and the other teachers from Scotland) were there for four.

Since I spent such a long time there, this won't be a day-by-day record of my activities. Instead, I'm going to organise it thematically, by lessons learned.

All right, this was a good day

Teaching is not my calling
This, I'd say, is the most important lesson I learned during July. As an English student I have often felt that I don't have many career options and one of the questions I get asked most is whether I plan to be a teacher. Well, I thought, I may as well see. So I signed up for ScRoLL (Scottish-Romanian Language Link) to see what it was like. Please note: I really have no problem with the programme, only with teaching. For the first two weeks I was teaching twenty-two 12-16 year olds in a classroom big enough for twelve. I struggled to keep up with my students, who were very good English speakers and difficult to palm off with colouring-in. In the second week, however, I realised they were so good we could easily take up two to three hours with discussion of who was the best superhero and whether the Harry Potter films were as good as the books. I got to know my students really well and we even hung out outside of class.

The second two weeks I taught 8-10 year olds. At first there were about twelve but when my friend Beth's class was reduced in the second week we combined our efforts and taught our classes together. This took a lot of the pressure off and meant we could divide the class into awesome Hogwarts houses and play games and have competitions with them. It was a lot of fun. They were very sweet, but they didn't speak much English, and some of them obviously didn't understand a word I said, and that was hard. Unfortunately, I don't have the patience for teaching, and since I used to be very shy and not enjoy standing up to give presentations, I found it quite hard to be the centre of attention for four hours a day. Lesson learned: teaching is not my calling.

I don't like meat
Over the year preceding my summer adventure I made a valiant effort to eat meat, despite having been a vegetarian for more than ten years beforehand. I thought it might not be easy not to eat meat when I was travelling, and to an extent I was right. Some parts were easy; I always loved saveloy and pork pies. Other parts were not; there was no way I could stomach a steak. I ate meat with greater frequency while I was abroad, getting stomach aches afterwards, and in Romania, after being sick for two days after eating some chicken, I gave it up for good (well, almost). I don't like eating it. The end.

I love beer
I knew this already, but the extent of it wasn't really clear until this summer. I spent my first two weeks in Romania with a family that didn't drink, and when I once had a beer in a pub with my fellow teachers, I received some pretty shocked looks from my host. Then, when I moved to a different family in my third week, we spent the first day at the extended family's shared cabin by the woods, and I was given beer after beer from one o'clock in the afternoon until I fell asleep in a caravan at five. Nothing like making up for lost time.

Family camping trip

Gypsies are not Romanian
I'm kidding. This was quite the contentious issue.

We drove past a guy driving a cart. 'There! There's a gypsy!' says my host. 'How can you tell?' I ask. 'Look at his face!' is the response I get.
We drive past another cart. 'Is that a gypsy?' I ask, pointing to a similar-looking man. My host laughs in scorn. 'No!'

Family member: 'The worst thing is, it says Romanian on their passports, so people think they are Romanian!'
Me: 'If it says Romanian in their passports, surely they are Romanian?'
Family member: 'No.'

There is a huge divide in Romania. My hosts drove me through a 'gypsy village' (part of their own village) and said 'The gypsies live like kings!' Their houses were no less ramshackle then the others. Which leads me to my next lesson.

Romania is like The Sims
It is traditional in Romania to buy land and build your own house. As a result, the landscape is dotted with huge houses in every colour. I really like the idea. In some cases I have to say it might have been wiser to employ a contractor. Others were architectural masterpieces. Many houses in the village were built around courtyards with a barn and a well which I thought was lovely.

Street in my village

Agricultural technology has not yet reached Romania
One thing that really struck me was the prevalence of carts and the near-absence of tractors. On two occasions I got to drive a neighbour's cart and loved it. We would pass several carts on the way to school, speeding by in our cars. Scythes are used to cut hay and the hay is baled up in the fields, piled onto huge sticks and wooden racks; no baling machines to be found. Agriculture seems to be one of Romania's largest industries, so its methods obviously still work - it just struck me, coming from a rural area where I've never seen a cart on the road but have been stuck behind tractors many a time.

In the driver's seat

I romanticise
The final lesson. Before I headed out to Romania, I read William Blacker's book about his time in Romania, Along the Enchanted Way. It was a wonderful book about falling in love with a gypsy and an agricultural way of life. Suceava, however, was a large town, not a tiny village with no tarmac roads (although I spent two weeks in one) and Romania is a twenty-first century country, not a historical wonderland. It is beautiful and I enjoyed my time there but it is not my country the way it is for William Blacker.

But I'm looking forward to find it.

Still pretty damn beautiful.

What this summer made me realise about my life

This summer, I was too busy with trivial thoughts like 'how am I going to afford breakfast' and 'now I'm in Berlin, where actually is my hostel' to have any startling revelations. Actually, this revelation wasn't really startling at all, even when it did show its face. It just gradually built up until it was glaringly obvious.

In my daily life I spend a lot of time at a desk. I sit at a desk to write my essays. I sit at a desk to translate Old English. If a book is particularly painful, sometimes I have to sit at a desk to read it so I don't fall asleep in my bed. I'm a hotel receptionist, and when I get to work, I sit at a desk. For an eight-hour stretch.

Sitting on a mountain. Preferable to sitting at a desk

Over June, July, August and a bit of September, I must have spent about eight cumulative hours sitting at a desk. I'm not saying I didn't sit. I sat at restaurants and on sofas and on the bed while I read a book (for pleasure, not for my degree!) but I barely even saw a desk the whole summer.

I never had sore shoulders or a sore neck, I barely had a single headache (apart from one strange week of tension headaches, but that may be because I'm not really used to sunlight...). I was tanned, and I felt strong for the first time in years.

Sitting on a horse. Preferable to sitting at a desk

Now I'm back in St Andrews, a town that I love, in a house that I love, with people that I love. That's all great. And the desk. The desk is back. I've already had to go to a physiotherapist about the ache in my shoulders and the pain of trying to maintain good posture and keep from hunching over my books is almost as bad.

Like all other fourth years I am continually battling The Fear about graduating in a year, but at the same time, it can't come quickly enough. I don't want to sit at a desk any more. 

As an English graduate I used to think I wouldn't have many job options, but then I started to get the message that English equips you to persuade just about anybody that you're the man for the job. One thing is kind of a given, though: you're going to have to work at a desk. But I'm not going to.

If you thought this might mean I know what I'm doing with my life - no. Of course not. I'm a fourth year English student. I know I like to write, and I don't mind spending an hour or two at a desk. I think what I want is to work with horses in some capacity.

For an English student, and a university student in general, this feels like a lot to admit. It's difficult to realise after three years that you're not doing what you want to be doing. But I am in the place I want to be. So that's enough for now. :)

This got way deeper than I anticipated! Next blog post will be about silly things that happened in Romania. Over and out.