Saturday 1 - Wednesday 5 November, 2014 (diary)

Since I have been back from Europe it still felt very much like the dry season, with sunny days and low humidity. But yesterday suddenly the humidity started to rise and this morning (Wednesday) we had a major thunder storm with considerable rain : 16mm here at the farm.
Great, now everything is dust free and looks fresh. The mangos are rattling from the overhead trees onto my roof and the mango geese are having a feast as no-one of us bothers much about collecting the fruit.

At the AGM last Sunday both Shaun and I were elected unopposed as members of the Trailer Boat Club Committee, and I look very much forward to making a positive contribution to this club, a real friendly family club where I feel very much at home.

In the bridge club I am very active again, having resumed Intermediate lessons and starting a new Beginners course next Sunday.   I have also started composing our Social program for next year, with during early October 2015 our main social bridge event : a 3-day stay in Ubud the cultural center on the island of Bali.

I have never been much inclined to visit that island, but through my initial research have become aware of the inland village of Ubud, which is the creative and cultural heart of the island.

I have booked a hotel in Ubud for the last week of January to inspect its accommodation options and its many wonders.
Besides spectacular nature there are an enormous range of activities and fun courses to choose from. This would have a great positive effect on our planned stay there.
I only hope that the place is not too commercialised, but all the reports I have had so far are very good.

Thursday 6 - Monday 24 November, 2014 (diary)

Darwinites in general and members of our Bridge Club in particular are an enthusiastic mob of travelers, roaming every year around the globe to discover the world.

Barbara and Rosemary, two of our members, like me just back from Europe, walked parts of the Camino Francés this year. They clocked up 200km and 100km respectively, very good efforts compared to my modest total of 50km two years ago.

With Christmas in sight most of us are back in the fold, but a few are still traveling : two in Bali, one in Vietnam and one (Christine) in Africa. While I was in Europe many of our members enjoyed my Blog entries, and for me it felt like still being part of our club while far away.
Christine is an eloquent writer and is sending me now regular email reports on her African adventure. I, in turn convert them into web pages and post them on our bridge club's website.
I plan to do this from now on for all our traveling members interested in writing about their journeys.

I am very happy to be back in Darwin, I think that even from my childhood days I already had a yearning for the tropical environment and ever since I started living in it I have felt right at home. Traveling out of it, to Europe or even down south in Australia, I feel out of place and in a constricted world, way outside my own reality.
So in future, while I am still reasonably mobile, I will focus more on traveling to places within the tropical sphere, and my upcoming trip to Ubud on the island of Bali in Indonesia in January fits right into that notion.

Tuesday 25 - Sunday 30 November, 2014 (diary)

The days are racing past with me fully focused on bridge activities. I am running a series of refresher lesson of members with some experience as well as conducting a Beginners course, both on Sunday afternoons. It is going well and I am very pleased with the progress we are making.
I am also continually looking at our Bali adventure, now decided on to be held from 11 to 14 September, with several of us staying on for a full week.

If there is a tinge of sadness, or rather disappointment, shading over my days it are the continuous self serving political wrangles the Left side of politics (Labour, Greens plus a mish mash of dimwitted independents), that are holding back progress on the domestic front of this otherwise great country.
Unfortunately Australia has become a not so clever country, where democracy has totally failed and turned into mediocrity.
The Abbott Government has arguably achieved more in its first year than many previous Governments managed to do in a full term. Yet, the general public appears to be either ignorant or simply too dumb to grasp this fact. They are instead, like the proverbial mushrooms, fed on superficial shit (provided in bucket loads by TV and social media) and kept in the dark.

J.F.Kennedy once famously said that "when a single voter is ill-informed, democracy is in danger."
In Australia we are well and truly past this point, where not only many of the voters are ignorant but even a number of self serving politicians seem to be living in cuckoo land.
Will 2015 see some improvement ?