Change in the time of sunrise throughout the year

I heard someone announce the other day that now that we are past the date of the winter solstice, the length of the days will increase by one minute every day until we get to the summer solstice.  Today is the 4th of January, 2012.  According to the Environment Canada Weatheroffice website, the sun rose at 8:48 a.m.  So will the sun rise tomorrow roughly one minute later than it did today?  The facts are available for checking as these kinds of astronomical observations are calculable and detailed lists of all kinds of related data are readily available on the internet from reputable sources.  What do these sources say?

The sun rose today in Thunder Bay at 8:48 a.m.  It will rise at the same time for the next three days.  From the 8th until the 10th it will rise earlier, at 8:47 a.m.  From the 11th to the 12th it will rise at 8:46 a.m., and so on.  By January 31st the sun will be rising at 8:28 a.m.  That's 20 minutes earlier than it rose today and 27 days from today.  So at the moment the sun must be rising less than one minute earlier each day.  If you look at a list of sunrise times for January you can see that the rate at which the sun is rising earlier is increasing.  That is, the sun is rising earlier faster.  While at the start of January it might take four days for the sun to rise a minute earlier, towards the end of January it is rising a minute earlier every day.

On the 1st of February the sun will rise at 8:26 a.m. while on the 29th of February it will rise at 7:39 a.m.  So from the first day to the last day of February, 28 days later, the sun rises 47 minutes earlier.  That is more than one minute earlier for every day of the month, on average.  In January it was less than one minute earlier for every day of the month, on average.  By looking at the list of sunrise times over the course of the month you can also see that the trend is one of the sun rising earlier faster.  That is, at the start of the month the sun is rising roughly a minute earlier each day but by the end of the month it it rising by roughly two minutes earlier each day.  When will the rate at which the sun is rising earlier stop increasing and start decreasing?

In March the sun rises earlier by two minutes almost every day.  But if you find a list that also shows the length of the days, something significant happens in March.  At the start of March the length of the days is increasing by 3 minutes and 30 seconds each day.  By the middle of the month day-length is increasing by 3 minutes and 33 seconds.  The increases in day-length have been getting larger since the winter solstice.  On December 22nd of 2011 the length of the days stopped decreasing and started to increase as we passed the shortest day of the year.  Sunrise and sunset times follow this trend: at around the shortest day of the year, the sunrise time stops getting later each day and begins to get earlier; the time of sunset stops getting earlier and starts to get later; the length of the day stops shrinking and starts expanding as the sunrise and sunset times move away from each other leaving a longer period of sunlight between them; the sun is in the sky for longer each day.  Back to March and the rate at which the time of sunrise is getting earlier and earlier.  In the middle of the month the sunrise is getting earlier and earlier by about 3 minutes and 33 seconds each day but then it starts to fall, rising 3 minutes and 32 seconds earlier each day.  By the end of March the sun is rising 3 minutes and 31 seconds earlier each day.

By the end of April the sun is rising 3 minutes and 7 seconds earlier each day.  Sunrise is still earlier each day.  On the 30th of April the sun will rise at 5:39 a.m. (6:39 a.m. if you put your clock forward for daylight savings).  The latest sunrise occurred close to the winter solstice, on the 1st of January, at 8:49 a.m.  By the end of April it is more than three hours earlier.  The time of sunrise will continue to get earlier but the rate at which this will happen will slow down until the middle of June when the sun will begin to rise later each day and the length of the days will start to decrease again.  The summer solstice will occur on the 21st of June when we will experience the longest day of the year.

Although the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, occurred on December 22nd, the latest sunrise occurred on January 1st, only four days ago.  However, the earliest sunset occurred about a week before the solstice.  So while the sun was rising later and later up until a few days ago, it has been setting later for the last two weeks.  The sun does not start rising earlier on the same day that it starts to set later.  There is a gap of about two weeks where, in the winter, the sun is rising and setting later, and then in the summer, it will be rising and setting earlier.  I don't know the reason for this but our clock is an artificial linear measurement superimposed on a natural diurnal (means daily) cycle that varies and wobbles in all sorts of complicated ways.

Sunset in Bobcaygeon, Ontario, in December 2011

Visa versions verified: Common-law conundrum capers

I just made my fourth call to Canadian Citizenship and Immigration to hone my understanding of the process and in seeking confirmation of what I understand about the process and the implications of my circumstances and choices.  Completely expectedly, the whole process is rather unwieldy and inscrutable, requiring many readings and re-readings of guides and documents and forms.  Ultimately I must build a pyramid at the base of which are all the individual actions and results that will support my application for permanent residency, like visiting a local police station to get a record of traffic convictions and infringements, going to Western Union Offices in Toronto in a failed attempt to wire money to an invalid recipient in Taiwan as payment for a police clearance, and buying a new red folder especially for housing the guides and forms and other components of the permanent residency application as it develops.  These individual actions form the base of the pyramid and support components a little higher up, for example, the receipt by me of an official police criminal record certificate that evidences my clean bill of good-citizenry health for the period that I lived in Taiwan.  A little further up are the larger stages and steps, such as submitting my complete application for the permanent residence and extending my tourist visa after the regular six month period has elapsed.  At the very top of the pyramid, closest to the heavens, is the penultimate event on which the entire campaign with CIC is built: the grant of a permanent residency visa for me, allowing me to come and go across Canada's borders as easily as a mosquito might cross the borders.  And then, like a mosquito, I can suck Canada's blood and potentially give it malaria.

Here is a summary of what I now understand about the process.

I can apply from outside or inside Canada for my permanent residency.
Both ways have two stages but the stages vary between inside and outside application.

Inside application: stage one - assess sponsor and applicant, 9 months; stage two - medical, security, background checks of applicant, 9 months; both stages @ Mississauga CIC office.
Outside application: stage one - assess sponsor, 45 working days, Mississauga CIC office; stage two - assess applicant, 8 months, done at relevant CIC office outside Canada (in my case, Sydney).

I want to be able to get part-time work while studying but I need a work permit or visa.  Outside Canada, I file an application for an open work permit with my application for PR and it should come through when my PR does.  I am not sure about this.  I think I can automatically work if I have a permanent visa.  So it would be about  months before I was able to get part-time work.

While my application for permanent residency is being assessed, I will be here on a temporary resident visa or tourist visa.  This is valid for me for 6 months.  It should expire before my PR is granted so I will apply for an extension and shouldn't have to leave the country or go anywhere.  It would be granted because of my common-law relationship and pending PR application.

After nine months when my PR is granted, it will be available from Sydney.  I would have to communicate with them about how to get it.  They might be able to mail it or I might be able to get it from the relevant embassy here in Canada OR I might have to go to Australia to pick it up.

Great.  Now I am more certain about what I am doing and how to do it.

Crisis in Canada: Chaos and Confusion

Well, once again I am surrounded by a cloud of uncertainty and difficult choices. It's stressful and it requires some deal of education and investigation before decisions can be made and actions taken.


Andrea will be studying at Lakehead University this coming semester. She will be studying for her postgraduate teaching qualification. That's fine for her but it leaves me standing in a pool of cold dilemma. I don't have a work permit for Canada and it may take up to nine months before I get one, at the same time that the first stage of my application for permanent residency is approved.  Nine months in Canada without working would be an awfully long time.  Sure, I have a full-time course of study of my own to pursue but I was really looking forward to being able to work part-time so that I could earn some money to put towards our living expenses and also because my course of study is completely online and I'm going to need ways of being involved in the local community.  I couldn't just study at home all the time; that would drive me crazy.  What am I going to do for nine months if I go and live with Andrea in Thunder Bay while she is slogging through her education qualification?  I could try to get some cash-in-hand work; I get the impression that I might be able to get a bit of that.  And I could also do some volunteer work and maybe set up a language exchange too, to practice my Chinese.

I need to recapitulate the progress that I made today.  I spent almost the whole day working towards making decisions about what to do about our recent change of plans and priorities.  Although I am ready to take a break from this behemoth of logistical challenges that has risen up from the circumstances that surround us, I need to pull together what I have learned and accomplished from the day.

Andrea is more or less committed to doing the course at Lakehead.  Wherever I am, I am going to be doing my online occupational health and safety course.  I want to be with Andrea (or at least I don't want to be separated from her for a long time) so I will need to be in Thunder bay with her.  I was really looking forward to getting a part-time job in Thunder Bay but it seems that I won't be able to legally work in Canada until the first stage of my application for permanent residency is approved and maybe until the second stage has also been approved.  The time for processing differs markedly between an application made in Canada and one made outside Canada.  There are two stages in the process of getting the spouse visa: Stage 1 involves assessment of the sponsor; Stage 2 involves assessment of the sponsored.  Completion of the first stage of processing takes 37 [working] days outside Canada but 9-10 months in Canada; completion of the second stage takes 7 months outside Canada but 9 months in Canada.  So in total, an application made outside Canada takes about 8-and-a-half months while making the application in Canada will take about 18 months, almost a year longer.  But work is a problem.  I can submit an application for a work permit with my application for permanent residence in Canada and I think it will come through when the first stage is complete.

I just realised two things while reading some of the guides.  The first stage of the application outside Canada is an assessment only of the sponsor.  The first stage of the application in Canada is an assessment of the sponsor and the sponsored which explains why it takes so much longer.  I don't know what the implications of this are.

The other thing I realised is that there is a difference between temporary residence permit and temporary residence visa.

I also made some phone calls about getting a refund on our plane tickets if we are not returning to Australia next month.  Expedia told me that because we has started to use the tickets I had to contact the relevant airline directly.  I called Air Canada and found out that our tickets are non-refundable although for a fee of $50 we can change the date up until three months from the date on which we first used the tickets.  So I can call them back and change the date of our return flights up to the second of August.

That's enough for today.

A run to start the day in Busselton

I got up at 6:30 this morning and ran the longer route that I have started running.  I tend to go for a run on every third or fourth morning.  I have been wondering how long my new route is and so I mapped it on Bikemap and now I'll paste it in here as a record.

Running route 923289 - powered by Runmap 

Career Prospects: consternation over courses

I realised over the course of the weekend that I have more questions that need to be answered before I can go ahead and structure my expectations for the future around doing the Master of Environmental Health (MEH).  Later this morning I plan to call the coordinator of the MEH course at Curtin in search of answers.  But, as always, a big part of making decisions based on the best information that you have is knowing what questions to ask.  Knowing which questions to ask comes from identifying gaps in your knowledge and identifying assumptions you might have made without foundation.

The first thing I might mention to the course coordinator is that the list of course coordinators for the School of Health might be incorrect or outdated.  I wrote to the course coordinator for the MEH course over a week ago and waited patiently for a reply for a week before trying to call her.  Even then I had to leave a message on her answering machine.  I did receive a call later in the day from a different member of staff who informed me that he was the course coordinator, not the woman I had been trying to contact.  Thus was a week of worry wasted.

I will ask him about career prospects.  In assessing and comparing the Post-grad. dip. in Occupational Health and Safety (PDip OHS) and the MEH programs, I thought that the career prospects for the two groups were quite similar and so the MEH won my commitment because I thought the work might be more interesting.  But having had the time to reflect on and process what I had read and from rereading some of the course information this morning, now I am not sure that the two courses will launch me towards a career at the same velocities.  I get the impression that MEH graduates generally start off as Environmental Health Officers while some find employment as "Scientific Officers in government and a wide range of other fields including the food industry and environmental management".  That sounds promising but I haven't seen any real indication anywhere of career prospects and the demand for graduates.  In contrast, the PDip. OHS page includes a section headed Career Opportunities wherein graduates' career prospects are described as excellent and their salaries being above average.  I need to ask the course coordinator about what this means.  For the program area Health, Safety & Environment more broadly, apparently "Employment opportunities are excellent, with the majority of graduates gaining positions before graduating and over 90% employed within six months".  That sounds great and it does sound like I wouldn't have trouble getting a job after I graduate (or before) but I wonder about the prospects for career progression.  In addition to that last reassuring line about graduates and salaries, another page about environmental health careers proclaims that, "the only course in Western Australia recognised by the Australian Institute of Environmental Health, a member of the International Federation of Environmental Health".  Later in the same page you can read that, "Employment opportunities for graduates also exist with health agencies in overseas countries".  That is very reassuring for me, given that I expect to live in Canada with my Canadian partner in the future, and suggests that the Curtin qualification will be well-recognised overseas.  The same page also suggests that people in this area earn between forty and ninety thousand dollars a year.  That is a lot less than the salary suggested for health & safety professionals on the Health & Safety careers page - fifty-five to three-hundred and forty-five thousand dollars per year!  I think I should ask the course coordinator about this too.

Another query I need to direct to the course coordinator concerns my suitability for the courses.  To do the MEH I would need to complete a few bridging units before spending 18 months completing the course.  In contrast to that, to qualify for the PDip. OHS you need, "A bachelor degree in an appropriate field plus at least two years’ work experience" while qualification for the Master of OHS entails, "A Bachelor of Science plus at least two years' relevant post-qualification work experience. Your work experience will be assessed on the basis of your level of seniority and responsibility, job description, work-based referee reports, publications or other written reports and short courses or conference attendance".  I don't think I qualify for the Master of OHS but perhaps I could get into the PDip. OHS.  I need to clarify this with the course-coordinator.  If I was able to enrol in the PDip OHS, would I be paying the more expensive rate for the units, something like $1,700 per unit?  Would I need to complete some bridging units in order to enter into the PDip. OHS?  More questions for the course coordinator.

Another query I would like to settle regards study methods for the bridging units.  Last time I spoke to the course coordinator he suggested that they are available online, i.e., over the Internet.  This would be wonderful as it would allow us to live and work overseas teaching English somewhere for six more months while I study part-time.  At the moment the Curtin website lists these units as being available either internally or externally (by correspondence).  I need to clarify this if I can.

The last question I have concerns how well I might travel with my career, if and when we relocate, overseas.

Career prospects: Environmental Health and Safety

Environment, Health and Safety.  This is a  nice area that sits next to - and sometimes on the laps of - Public Health and Occupational Health and Safety.  The respective courses seem to share some of their units with each other.

Yesterday I talked to the course coordinator for the post-grad diploma in Environmental Health and she gave me some priceless information that has inspired me.  This is the course on which I would set sail to gain a qualification in Environmental Health.  I don't really have relevant experience or background in the area or in biology, microbiology, or chemistry, so the first thing I would need to do a a bridging course.  This bridging course is not a self-contained course in itself but rather I would do three of the first-year units from the Bachelor of Science (Health Safety and Environment) undergraduate degree.  This would take one semester and when I had successfully completed these units I would drop out of the BSc and enroll in the Master of Environmental health.  I actually only want a post-graduate diploma but a comparison of course fees in the two courses leads coordinators to suggest taking the Master course and exiting when I have completed whichever intermediate award I want.  So I could do all the units that would get me a post-grad dip and then leave the masters program with that qualification.  The cost benefit would be significant: enrolling in the post-graduate diploma would mean paying $1700 per unit while enrolling in the masters program would cost me $900 per unit, for the same units!  That's almost half of the cost.

So what is environmental health and safety about?  It involves contributing to creating and maintaining environments that promote good health, and managing environmental factors that may have a negative effect on people's health.  These factors could be social, physical, chemical, biological or psychological.  It could involve working with problems involving waste-water, noise-pollution, light-pollution, food safety and hygiene (a big one), and the many problems arising from artificial environments.

The course at Curtin (in environmental health) streams students towards either being an Environmental Health Officer or into a research area.  It occurs to me now that either way I think I would be happy and that I needn't be put off by thinking that this course would mean committing to being an environmental health officer (which in itself wouldn't be a bad thing).  During my first year I would have plenty of time to make a decision about what I wanted to so with the second year and I could always study the other stream in the future.  Reading graduate's stories, I think that graduating from either EHS, OHS, or from public health with a proactive bent and positive attitude will allow me to take my career places.  I guess I just need to decide.  All of them are good.  Reading through the graduate stories, the stories that interest me the most are definitely in the field of OHS, EHS, and public health.  I also get the impression from reading these stories that once you are working in the area, you can complete additional relevant units or courses that will make you more employable and improve your job prospects (and earning potential).  That would be a career.

I think I can sum up my relationship to university education and work like this: interest in what I was learning - high; academic competence and achievement - medium; utilizing experience of study to acquire good employment - poor.  One of the things I have realized with time and experience is that you have to make your qualifications work for you and you need to get whatever experience at applying them that you can.  It is one thing to learn and another to learn how to applying that learning.

I guess I've done everything except decide on which course to pursue.  It comforts me now that I see these pathways as watery rather than as a series of straight sticks.  I mean that there is a lot of mixing and cross-over on the other side of graduation.  I need to be a fish because A fish can swim wherever it wants as long as it has a continual stream of interconnected water-bodies and that is what lies on the other side of graduation from any of the courses I am interested in.  I think I will choose environmental health and safety.

Career prospects: Public Health

Right now, what do I know about public health and what do I want to know?

I think that Public Health involves perhaps working especially for government to organise and manage health services.  Actually I don't know much about it.  Time to find out.

The post-grad dip in public health offered through Curtin Uni requires a specialisation in either epidemiology and biostatistics or in public health.  The epidemiology and biostatistics major involves learning about epidemiological methods and how to use them appropriately, learning how to apply them in investigating the determinants of health and ill-health, evaluating health care programs to see if they are worth running and how effective they are (probably with a view to financing them), making sure that I can manage all stages of a research investigation.  The core units are about infectious diseases and the epidemiology of these (so the study of infectious disease, causes and vectors and interaction with public health policy, cultural practices, behavioural change, etc.), health research methods (ways in which we can study health), foundations of public health (how did the field start and how has it evolved, what is it now), biostatistics (mathematical tools for determining effects and patterns of variables interacting and for describing variables related to health), research methodology and more stats, and so on.  The optional units sound pretty interesting but I don't know how they fit into the course because the core units already provide nearly 200 points which is what is required to graduate.  I think there is room for one optional unit in the 200 points, or you could do some extra work I suppose.

The other stream of study, the public health major, ...

Where does this course get me?  I read the short precis for environmental health and that sounded very interesting.  That was about the interaction between people's health and environmental factors, biological stressors, pollutants, air pollution, water and waste management, noise, built environments, and global climate issues.

One of the problems with this course is that it seems to be designed for people already working in a health-related area who want to upgrade their skills and knowledge to a new level whereas I don't work in a health-related area and don't already have a relevant background from which I am branching out.

The best option that I can see right now for capitalising on acquiring a qualification in this area is to apply for the Department of Health's graduate recruitment program.  However, this would be very competitive and I'm afraid of being stumped if I failed to gain a place.

I have started thinking that environmental health would be an awesome field in which to operate and it is closely related to both occupational health and safety and to public health.  The problem is that is is much more applied science based and courses seem to require previous background in science subjects.  If I could not get into this course directly maybe I could do bridging courses or enter one of the other two fields with a view to moving sideways in the future (if I still want to do that then).

That's enough for now.  Something else has come up, namely a course of study that would get me into Environmental Health and Safety in 18 months (including some bridging units).  Cool.

A & A cycle from Broadwater to Smith's Beach and back

Andrea and I finally got around to going for a good long bicycle ride.  It was a beautiful day for cycling: the sky was perfectly blue and cloudless yet the sun didn't fry us and the Aeolus didn't send his winds against us.  By the end of the trip we had done about 65km and then we went for a swim, made a delicious dinner of rice noodles and fried vegetables, and then I did this while Andrea went and had a white wine with one of nice neighbours.  Nice day.

The map embedded below includes several photos. 

Bike route 852286 - powered by Bikemap 

Career Prospects: Occupational & Environmental Health & Safety

This is where I start writing and brainstorming individual pathways and careers.  First cab off the rank or first close-to-the-use-by-date milk marked down for a quick sale is Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety.

I'm not even sure of the relationship between these two areas.  What I want to do in this post is define the job and to investigate courses of study and qualifications, career prospects (especially overseas), and try to get right into what I might be doing day to day, hour to hour.  I also want to try to get an idea of the overview of the field, the philosophy that drives the process.  Let's begin then.  You will know it is time to turn the page when you hear Tinkerbell ring her little bell like this: [BELL RINGING].

Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) is about managing risk and minimizing damage to persons and property in the workplace, whatever kind of workplace it is.  Curtin's postgrad dip. in OHS requires 12 months of study, four per semester.  The curriculum comprises six core units and two optional units of study.  Some of the optional units of study sound pretty interesting.  Occupational diseases involves a bit of toxicology and epidemiology and an introduction to the history of occupational medicine.  There is a practicum option where you do a literature review of a particular area, design a program (of data collection?) and collect data and do the analysis and report the results.  There are also optional units in relevant law, risk assessment, health impact assessment, and a unit specific to mining OHS.  The core units cover accident prevention, compensation, injury management, ergonomics, safety economics, hygiene and chemical safety, and safety technologies.

The prospects for health careers in OHS are very good although I don't know if that is across the field or whether all those prospects are tied up in the resources industry.  The course at Curtin is all off-campus so I wonder whether that would allow us to live overseas while I did the course.  Perhaps Andrea could do another year of teaching in Asia and I could do some tutoring part-time while studying.  Perhaps we could move to Canada and Andrea could also get on with whatever study she wanted to do.

It is proving quite difficult to find a good web site for searching for OHS/OSH/HSE jobs across multiple countries.

That's as far as I get today.

Career Prospects: Vocational Veracity

Right now I need to write.  I need to think.  I need to brainstorm.  I need to think about jobs and the future and study.  Besides thinking about what I want to do I need to think about how I want to think about it and how to go about investigating it.

These following factors are critical in deciding on a course of study or career:

Money: I want to be able to earn a decent wage doing whatever I am going to do.  My days of working to make enough to cover my living expenses and sundry occasional expenses are over.  I want to be able to afford to travel and buy a house and generally afford a secure future for my own family.

Prospect of living and working overseas: We really miss living and working overseas.  There are plenty of occupations that would transfer to a foreign labour market.  It would be awesome to be able to live somewhere like Taiwan but earn some serious money.  It would be great to have the kind of employment prospects that would make me employable across the world; imagine living and working in Russia, or Singapore, or Hong Kong, or Japan, or Canada, or the Czech Republic, or in Chile.  Cool.

Employment prospects:  I am not in the mood to qualify in something only to have to battle to carve out a career for myself or have to exercise great patience waiting for vacancies and promotions to come up as the older members in the occupational pool reach retirement age and free up some space.  I want to be involved in an area where there is a demand for the knowledge and skills I will graduate with, and where I won't have too much trouble getting a job, and then later, getting a better job or looking for promotion.


Personal interest:  Whatever I do needs to offer me some kind of personal fulfillment.  There are plenty of jobs that I could mange capably and do very well yet not enjoy at all.  I don't want to commit to something that will be unsatisfying and not stimulating enough for me for the next 20 years.  I want my job to be challenging and interesting and rewarding and dynamic.  I want to have to think and create and write and help people with it somehow.  I certainly don't want a job that makes people's lives worse or harms the environment.  Ideally I would like to be paid to do something that I was inherently motivated to do.  Inherent motivation.  Something where I would start work on any day thinking that what I was doing was important; something purposeful, something that had a point to it, not just creating and moving paper around.


Length of time required to attain a qualification:  This is a really important criterion.  I could choose to study anything really but do I really have the luxury of spending the next four years just to complete an undergraduate course again?  It might be worth it if it was something I was very passionate about but there's nothing like that for me.  There are lots of things that I am interested in and that I think are important but nothing in particular that stands out for me.


I need to weigh up all these factors and perhaps other factors that I haven't thought about here or have missed in this summary.  It is a very difficult time for me and a difficult decision to make.  Perhaps one of the most important parts of the consideration is trying to get my head around imagining me doing the job and imagining how I would feel doing it.  For that I need to know about the jobs and what they involve, from the immediate perspective and the day-to-day work, to the larger perspective and how my job fits into a wider society - what it means.


I have a lot of investigating and thinking to do.

Decision Time: Michael Buble and the rest of my life

I have a lot to think about right now.  I feel pretty stressed and I'm fighting off the waves of cause and effect that threaten to overwhelm me.  I'm trying to make big decisions about the future and come to terms with circumstances as they are and as we want them to be.  All kinds of things need to be factored  into the equation: there's the fact that I have an undergraduate Bachelor of Arts degree with honours in Psychology.  It would be a shame not to capitalise on that somehow and it might save me years on starting from scratch with an undergraduate degree in an unrelated area.  And there's the consideration of the transferability of any career choice I invest in; I need to be able to uproot my career from Australia and replant it it Canada (looking towards a future where we start a family).  And then there's the personal question of doing something fulfilling that challenges me and that I can enjoy doing as a career.  Will Occupational/Environmental Health & Safety be challenging enough for me and give me the scope to branch out into related but more interesting areas if when I want to change tack a little later on?  If I chose Public Health or EOHS would I be aiming lower than I should be?  Should I ignore my circumstances and choose what I want to do, rather than opt for a choice of compromise weighted on the pull of other factors.  I have to make a decision that could shape the rest of my life and my career, not to mention the effect it will have on my future family and relationship and other circumstances of living.

Today I start a temporary job: helping to set up for the Michael Buble concert at the Sandalford Winery near Margaret River.  The job involves long hours of work and will be exhausting but it is only temporary and allows me the flexibility to allocate time post-completion to more important things, the rest of my life, for example.  I am nervous about this first day of work, of course.  But when I glance at the bundle of considerations, complications, and concerns that I have mentally shelved under "The Future and the Rest of My Life", Michael Buble becomes just another internationally famous artist coming to my part of the world.

Cycling discovery: Ambergate Nature Reserve and Emperor Hirohito

Six ante meridiem.  The new cellphone alarm melody that I chose upon the evening before last is unnervingly peppy.  Today we had planned to go for a bigger bicycle ride; inland and away from the beach into a part of the Vasse region that I am unfamiliar with.  We broke our fast on toast and jam (homemade and bought from a little old lady at the local Vasse community markets last Saturday who tried her best not complain about how the authorities had recently told her that she had to stop producing jams and caked for sale unless she met the standards of a commercial kitchen) and saddled up for the ride.

Our route kept us away from most of the early morning traffic and we discovered a new source of farm-direct eggs (four dollars for a dozen at an honesty-box roadside stall out along Kaloorup Road).  The most significant discovery we made on our ride was the Ambergate Nature Reserve: 75 hectares of natural bush land, a small isolated remnant of what the whole plain used to be covered in.  There is a short bush walk that winds its way through the reserve so we will go back in the future to have a better look and explore the area.

I just finished reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and found it to be a surprisingly good piece of science-fiction considering it was first published in 1895.  I have moved on to a biography about Japan’s emperor Hirohito (b. 1901; d. 1989) who was also a marine biologist and published several papers, a lot of which seem to concern hydroids, whatever those are.  I’ll read on and see how far from objective the author can lean.

Close to the ocean and almost back home again.

Bike route 816698 - powered by Bikemap 

Tuesday morning bike ride

Just another day in Busselton.  We woke up to my cellphone alarm at six-o’clock.  After letting my brain idle for five minutes and blinking at the early-morning light penetrating our bedroom window at light speed, I peeled the comfortable layers of bedding away from me and made a few basic preparations for a morning bicycle ride.

Fortified with two Satsuma (blood) plums and a mugful of water, I wheeled my lightweight road machine out of the doorway and onto the street.  Quiet.  Cool.  Sharp sunlight.  A very gentle breeze chilled me slightly and I lodged it firmly in place as my main motivation to cycle hard so that I could warm up.  I headed out to the highway and crossed over it and then rode through the new housing estate to the pedestrian/cycle pathway that shadows the road to Margaret River.  At the Vasse General Store I took an unfamiliar road striking out left to the west.

I passed paddocks for grazing and vineyards for picking.  The road ran very straight, flanked by tall trees on either side that created a shady tunnel.  A conduit to somewhere.  I cycled until I saw a small old shack, dilapidated and rustic.  Perfectly rustic.  I took a couple of photos and then began the cycle home.  Another day in the world.  Another day of possibilities and perils.  And breakfast.

Back to Life, Back to Reality...

Like an old song from the 1990s (or maybe it was the 1980s) normality has descended upon me and I find myself sitting in Busselton in Western Australia on a Friday afternoon settling in for the next four months.

My last post on Blogger was yet another report on a cycle excursion through the back blocks of Taiwan.  It has been months and months since I wrote the last post on this fine virtual journal.  I couldn't possibly go on without first explaining to nobody in particular why I may as well be writing about the life of a completely different individual.

I was living and working overseas for about five years, first in South Korea and then in Taiwan.  There are plenty of expatriates who have adopted these countries as their homes for the foreseeable future for reasons I can guess at; perhaps they just don't want to return to their own country; perhaps they enjoy a better standard of living in their host country; perhaps they have an ongoing relationship or have married a resident of their host nation.  These are all understandable reasons and I can empathize with the sentiments behind all of them.  However, in the case of Andrea and I, continuing to live and work as English teachers overseas became an unsustainable future.  These days the word unsustainable immediately brings to mind ecological and environmental associations.  Forests might serve as a useful metaphor for describing what I mean when I use the word unsustainable in reference to our lives overseas (then again, they might not; I haven't really thought this through).  For healthy forests you need a rich foundation (the soils) and an adequate ongoing supply of all the inputs that forests need (sunlight, water, air, etc).  Our roots reach into community to anchor us and keep us upright.  But community was something that we lacked and had a hard time establishing and maintaining in our host countries and we were also a long way away from our families.  And so our foundation was weak.  As for receiving an adequate ongoing supply of prerequisite inputs, we missed easy access to nature and natural environments; we yearned for the opportunity to explore our interests by joining local clubs and making new friends; we lacked for a deeper engagement with the society in which we participated, partly due to a poor grasp of the dominant language and also partly due to cultural differences.  We weren't getting a full and adequate supply of holistic nutrients that we needed to sustain us long-term.  Our forests looked okay at first glance but a closer examination would reveal that there were serious deficiencies and that the forest was not as healthy as it appeared.

One other serious reason for not wanting to remain any longer in Taiwan was that we would like to be able to start a family and be able to provide good support for children.  Being an English teacher might pay the bills and allow DINKs to have some fun but it's not a career move that provides a good foundation for a family.

So we finished our contracts with our respective schools and came to Australia to start the rest of our lives.

There's a lot more to say about all this but it will have to wait because I have a dinner date with destiny.

Ciao

Taiwan's Southern Cross-Island Highway: Day 1 - Tainan to Laonong

Rare are the mornings in Taiwan when I do not eat breakfast at our table out on the balcony of our apartment, overlooking the few blocks between us and the harbor to the south and the coast to the west.  If we are in Tainan then you can be pretty sure that I will break each night-long fast with a bowl of oatmeal at that balcony table.  It is a nice table, wholly wooden, comprised of sturdy pine without any varnish or sealant.  The table is flanked by two swiveling bar stools.  The balcony is modest but clean and decorated with the natural greens and browns of the many potted plants which hang and sit about, doing nothing much besides photosynthesizing and softening what would otherwise be an austere and lifeless space.  I sit, eat my oatmeal, admire the views of the harbor, the ocean in the distance and the sky above us, the sounds of the birds flitting about on errands to which I am not privy, and the cars and people crawling about on the ground ten floors below.

The horizon to the east usually vanishes in a haze of unknown composition - pollution, humidity, and dust are all prime suspects.  But just occasionally the air will be clear in the morning and when I gaze out from our balcony to the eastern horizon I see the mountains - quite a distance away but imposing and compelling.  I don't know why but I am drawn to them.  When I see the mountains dominating the skyline, they make the sprawling city of Tainan seem diminutive by comparison and I want to throw everything else away and be off, moving towards those valleys, peaks, gorges, inclines, and declines.  But inevitably I prepare for another day of work and head instead to my school where life is lived not so much as an adventure as a mundane ordeal of noise and attention. 

This terrible situation could not be allowed to go on forever, my yearning to be amidst the mountains stymied by the exigencies of day-to-day life.  And so during my one-week long vacation at the end of April (2010) I was finally able to pursue the distant but persistent quest that had grown from a seed of an ethereal vision to a real plan built on intent.  I intended to take the Southern Cross-Island Highway over the central mountain ranges of Taiwan to the eastern coast.

Andrea rode with me on the first day of the journey.  Here we are about to begin cycling from outside our apartment block.

Bathroom and orientation break at a gas station north-east of Tainan.

The much anticipated first ice-tea shop stop on the journey.  This one is one instance of a franchise called Tea and Magic Hand.  That might sound a little strange on its own but the title sits comfortably among other tea-shop franchises in Taiwan with names like Jack Boy, Tropical Fish, Three Tea House, Ah-Z, Black and White Drink, Lingo, Red Sun and so on.

No matter what length, thickness, diameter, or variety of bamboo you are after, you'll find it at Uncle Chou's Bamboo Shop somewhere on Country Road no. 178.  And that's all they sell - bamboo poles.  I don't think I will ever see a store like this one back in Australia.

On a lonely stretch of Expressway 84 between the townships of DaNei and YuJing, you can find an awesome shaved-ice shop.  They only do two flavors - strawberry and mango.  But it is some of the best shaved-ice you will get in Tainan County.  The shop is connected to the greenhouse where they grow the strawberries themselves and for all I know they also grow the mangoes themselves somewhere nearby.  As the next photo taken just down the road demonstrates, YuJing is Mango's Hometown.  Apparently.  The shaved ice and the ice-cream are both awesome anyway and after riding for a couple of hours in the sun they are even better.

YuJing - Mango's Hometown.  It's official.  Mango has certainly done well for herself since she moved to the city.

At a small park just before the intersection of the Expressway (84) and Provincial Highway 20 we ate all of a small watermelon we had bought at a fruit shop earlier in the day.  And then it was time for us to go our separate ways - Andrea back to Tainan to prepare for work the following day, and me onwards along route number twenty towards the central mountain range.  No sooner had I embarked upon my solo tour than a light rain began to fall and I donned my cheap plastic raincoat and pedaled on.

Provincial Highway no.20 is an amazing road.  From an unassuming beginning at the Nanmen Rd/Gongyuan Rd traffic circle in downtown Tainan it runs all the way across southern Taiwan: eastwards across the western plains of southern Taiwan, over the central mountain ranges, passing through the Maolin National Scenic Area, Yushan National Park, and the East Rift Valley National Scenic Area, and then joins Provincial Highway no.9 near the west coast for the last stretch to the city of Taidong.  From now on I will be calling the no.20 the Southern Cross-Island Highway (SCIH).

A little further along the SCIH this old collapsed bridge prompted me to wonder about what lingering typhoon damage I might encounter crossing the mountains.  It had been eight months since Typhoon Morakot hit the island and Tainan City seemed to have largely forgotten about it.

The town of JiaXian and the JiaXian bridge.  I don't know whether the old bridge was destroyed or damaged by Typhoon Morakot but I know that they were working on this construction project for a long time*.

A panoramic view of the under-construction JiaXian bridge over the CiShan River.

After a meal of fried rice and soup in JiaXian I continued along the SCIH to the town of LaoNong.  In Laonong I found the local elementary school and set about finding someone to ask for permission to pitch my tent on the school green space.  After poking around empty classrooms I found some teenagers who gave me the go-ahead I needed.  As I began to empty bits of tent and bedding from various bags I was approached by two of the teenagers I had met earlier and another young woman.  It turned out that they were all teachers at the school and the friend had been brought along to meet the foreigner because her English was held to be better than any of the others.  During the course of the conversation I asked about the condition of the SCIH and was told that it was closed, prompting in me a sense of panic and uncertainty, a sinking feeling that this endeavour was going to be over before it had begun.  After our exchange of pleasantries was over I finished pitching the tent and headed across the road to the local 7-eleven.  Sitting at the bench next to the window, eating my cold noodles with vegetables, I attracted a small horde of local kids who put my Chinese language skills to the test, not to mention my capacity for dining under intense scrutiny while being interrogated.  Eventually a 7-eleven employee shooed them away and I was left to contemplate my plans for the following day.

Lying alone in my tent that was barely long enough for me and which did not block the light from the powerful flood-lights installed around the green space, I uncomfortably found my way into sleep while the local stray dogs barked and scampered around the school.

___________________

 I have mapped my entire route on the Bikemap website.  I've included some photos and comments along the route.  Go to www.bikemap.net/route/471071

*Writing now in July I can say that the new JiaXian bridge has been completed and finished in a stylish shade of pastel purple (the color of taro ice cream - JiaXian is Taro's Hometown after all) with a dynamic lighting scheme that can be appreciated after nightfall.

Taiwan's Southern Cross-Island Highway: Day 2 - Laonong to Tianchih

On Monday morning I woke up in my tent at one end of the green-space inside the running track at LaoNong Elementary School.  I could hear talking, some laughter, and a lot of clapping.  While I started to pack away my things inside the tent, somebody turned on some lively modern dance music that mixed with the other sounds that I could hear.  Upon emerging from my tent I saw that at the other end of the running track a morning aerobics (dare I call it 'dancercize') class was in full swing.  I gave them a friendly wave to indicate that my sudden appearance didn't imply that they had woken me up.  It was good to see the old folks (one man looked particularly old) beginning their day in such an energetic way.

The young teachers I had chatted with on the previous evening had told me that I should move off the green-space before the students began arriving.  As I loaded up my bicycle and trundled over the highway to the local 7-Eleven I saw that there were already assorted girls and boys milling about with more students gradually trickling in from all directions.  I availed myself of the store's bicycle pump to inflate my tires; it really is hard not to be drawn to 7-Elevens for the wealth of conveniences that they concentrate in one small building.  I had been planning to eat some kind of breakfast food in the store as well but was thoroughly put off by the amount of attention I was already receiving from various young onlookers.  Had I purchased any foodstuffs and begun to eat in front of them, I felt sure that they would have broken out into a paroxysmal frenzy fueled by intense curiosity and so I left the packet of instant oatmeal on the shelf where it slouched and headed off towards Baolai.

As I rode I tried one of the bananas I had picked up the previous evening on a stroll around LaoNong.  I bought them from a stereotypical little old Taiwanese lady in a stereotypical little old Taiwanese general store.  When it came time to pay for my fruit she amazed me by picking up her abacus - HER ABACUS - and doing abacus things with it to produce a price.  I couldn't read the abacus, this skill having been phased out of the Western Australian educational curriculum fifty-or-so years ago, a little while before I existed, and so I had instead to rely on her interpretation.  The bananas were too far from being ripe anyway and joined the other agricultural detritus on the side of the road between LaoNong and Baolai.

Arriving in Baolai, looking across the river to the town.  Baolai was (and still is) yet another casualty of Typhoon Morakot.

In Baolai I found a Mei and Mei breakfast shop and helped myself to a big breakfast that would fuel my aspirations for the rest of the day: a fish burger, a tuna omelet, a soy milk, and a coffee.  Not being conspicuous enough to inspire a crowd of prepubescent onlookers, it was very soon time to move on.

This is as far as I had gone before.

Less than a minute after leaving the breakfast shop in the center of "downtown" Baolai I had reached the edge of the community and where I wanted to stop to appreciate the moment.  This was as far as I had been along highway 20.  Last time I was here I came with friends and we went white-water rafting down the river nearby.  In the sheds at the end of the highway we had been jostled by the throng of other rafters-to-be as we nabbed equipment in preparing ourselves for the excursion.  The whole place had been buzzing with an orderly chaos.  Now, as I looked at the sheds at the end of the highway, I could see signs of dereliction.  There hadn't been any white-water rafting here for a while, probably since Morakot.  Nonetheless, I was about to cycle onto an unfamiliar roadway and I felt that my adventure was only now about to begin.

My next big destination would be the Meishan Visitor Center situated just inside the boundary of Yushan National Park.  I discovered that the way there had been broken by Morakot and since repaired.  There were construction vehicles and construction projects and reconstruction projects underway at intervals along the highway.  I rode on a lot of new road although I didn't know if it was supposed to be a permanent or temporary route.

At the Meishan Visitor Center with Formosan Black Bears (taxidermified)

I arrived at the Meishan Visitor Centre after a long ride through a landscape that felt to me like a testament to the ultimate power of natural forces over all the schemes and devices of humankind.  My main priority in the visitor center was to establish exactly what kind of condition the SCIH was in.  Was there still a continuous route across to the other side of the island?  Was it open?  Were there still sources of food and water available along the way?  I had heard conflicting reports from people on my way here and I thought that the staff at the visitor center held out the best hope for an accurate assessment of the chances of success of my aim of cycling the SCIH.  I was dismayed when the girl working at the counter told me that the road was closed.  Closed?  But what did this mean?  When I pressed her for details she asked me to wait while she called for backup from somewhere upstairs.  Meanwhile, I wandered around the visitor center admiring the displays, reflecting on how few people would now be coming to see them.

The girl at the counter seemed to forget about me and after some time I approached her again to prompt her to call for somebody else.  This time her call for action brought a short middle-aged man trotting down the stairs, still wrangling with the buttons on his shirt.  This man told also told me that the road was closed.  When I seemed doubtful he took me to a free-standing noticeboard that displayed a rather official-looking notice.  He interpreted the notice for me - the road is closed - and pointed out the official seal of the Government of Kaohsiung County printed (or stamped?) across one corner of the notice in a wonderfully vibrant shade of red.  I was, by now, starting to think that the road was really closed.  I engaged the man about the specifics of the SCIH's condition and at some point during our conversation his attitude suddenly changed from "You cannot" to "Maybe you can try" after which we discussed the finer points of my proposed undertaking.

Upon leaving the center I asked Mr Visitor Center if I might pick a couple of the peaches from the trees growing outside the center.  Throwing profuse gratitudes at Mr Visitor Center and with my free fruit securely stowed in my backpack I headed up the hill into the somewhat unknown.  Around the first corner I came upon a roadblock consisting of two freestanding traffic barricades, the kind with diagonal black and yellow stripes.  After hesitating for fear of crossing some kind of boundary separating the legal from the illegal, I rode around them and onwards up the hill.  My first intended stop was a restaurant that Mr visitor center had told me was about twenty minutes along the road.  After about thirty minutes I couldn't see any signs of food or beverage provision and was beginning to suspect that Mr Visitor Center had confused 'minutes' with 'meters'.  A small blue truck, only the second vehicle that I had seen on the road (the first being a policeman who looked at me as he passed on his motorcycle, inspiring in me an anxiety attack because I thought he was going to get angry at me and tell me to turn around) appeared, coming from around the next bend, and when I stopped the driver he confirmed that the restaurant was indeed about twenty minutes behind me.  I cursed a bit and headed back down the hill to the restaurant twenty meters from the visitor center where I had started.

At the restaurant I ordered a big noodle soup and called Andrea to update her on my progress.  I thought that I had better call now as the availability of cellphone coverage in the mountains seemed so uncertain.  I bought another bottle of water before getting back on my bike and on the road.

The road was scarred and torn open in places.  Some stretches of the road way had been repaired with a mixture of dirt and rocks compacted to create a hard but rough surface.  My ride up into the mountains became a ride and walk up into the mountains as I hopped off my bicycle for the rough stretches and rode on the original smooth stretches.  Off.  Walk.  On.  Ride.  Off.  Walk.  On.  Ride.  Off.  Walk.  And so it went on.  There were not so many construction vehicles and no tourists at all and I couldn't help thinking that I was lucky to have the road all to myself, quiet and peaceful.  At one point I had to stop and wait while a grader operator moved rocks and dirt around on the way ahead until he saw me and allowed me to pass safely.  The damage here looked recent and as I trudged past the idling machine in my thin, yellow, plastic raincoat with a light rain falling everywhere around me, I wondered just how stable this landscape now was.

Somewhere between three and four o'clock in the afternoon things suddenly got foggy.  The clouds seemed to have descended on the mountains and visibility became quite bad in places.  The moment had taken on a surreal quality and I swam through the misty silence along the highway.  And then the silence withdrew as the air was filled with the sounds of a large truck and some other large vehicle and I pulled into the public carpark and restrooms at JhongJhihGuan.  It quickly became apparent that the construction workers were leaving, that the carpark no longer saw a lot of tourists, and that the restrooms were no longer connected to a water supply or power supply.  A signboard told me I was now at an elevation of 1,930 meters.  After a brief stop during which I considered the current state of things along highway 20 and let myself worry a bit about what I would find (or not find) up ahead, I pressed on, hoping to find a suitable place to put up my tent for the night.

I finally reached the police station at Tianchi and was relieved to find it open and occupied.  I was really glad to know that there were still people in the area, just in case the road collapsed under me while I was cycling and I was forced to drag myself, semi-conscious, up a ravine and seek assistance.  I chatted with the three policemen at the station and got some more water.  One of them was munching on a cob of corn and, now sure that I wasn't going to find any restaurants or shops open, I tried not to think about dinner.  The friendliest one of the bunch told me that the temperature would drop suddenly at nightfall.  He checked the thermometer inside the station and returned to tell me that it was currently 14 degrees centigrade.  I wondered what these men spent most of their time doing now that the highway was closed and they only had construction workers and monkeys to contend with.  When I asked them if I could pitch my tent next to the station they suggested that I try what I assumed was a campground about fifty meters down the road.  I expressed my gratitude for their warmth and welcome and moved on, my body temperature having dropped enough so that I had begun to shiver.

At an elevation of 2,280 meters I reached my home for the night: the abandoned public restrooms and carpark at the Tianchi trailhead. A pair of symmetrical stairways flanked by white railings climbed from the highway upwards and out of sight somewhere above.  On the other side of the road a small building housed the public restrooms, now abandoned, lacking electricity or running water.  The clouds wafted in and out of the area and promised rain soon.  I decided to set up my tent in the restrooms.

Abandoned public restrooms at the Tianchi trailhead.

Everything set up for a very quiet night.

I managed to anchor my tent pegs by directing them through the metal grates and into the wall of the ditch below the floor of the bathroom.  Before getting into my sleeping bag I walked back up the ramp to the carpark (at highway level) and tried one of the two peaches I had picked from the trees outside the visitor center.  I had no other food and only limited water.  I was a little disappointed to discover that the peach was only really ripe on one side and I was forced to throw away half of it.  It had begun to rain in a light yet drenching way and the sky was darkening.  As I lay in my sleeping bag inside the tent the silence was a little disquieting when combined with the thought that, in one of the most densely populated countries in the world, I was all by myself on an abandoned highway with only an unripe peach to look forward to for breakfast and I couldn't be sure that the road I was following would carry me over the mountains.  I was not going to sleep well.

___________________

 I have mapped my entire route on the Bikemap website.  I've included some photos and comments along the route.  Go to www.bikemap.net/route/471071