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Zellerfeld, Harz Mountains, Germany

Four hours on the autobahn north of Bamberg brought us to the Hartz Mountains in Lower Saxony, in the heart of Germany.  The mountains cover an area 90 km long and 30 km wide and straddle what was previously the border between East and West Germany.  Mining for copper, silver and lead began here more than a thousand years ago with one of the principal mining centres being the twin town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld.  But this is just one of many small towns in the Harz region now cocooned within spruce forests and inter-connected by winding forest roads.  Two of the towns, Goslar and Quedlinburg, have been World Heritage listed due to their magnificent historical old town centres, their ancient “half-timbered” houses, and their nationally significant castles and palaces dating from the era when current day Germany was a collection of separate principalities ruled by Kings and Princes. We based ourselves in the old-fashioned resort town of Bad Grund and spent a few days touring around the Harz.  We had a particular interest in Zellerfeld and returned there several times.  In the late 1840s the local mining industry fell on hard economic times; its underground mines had reached such depths that the costs of production were high and uncompetitive, at a time when world oversupply had depressed metal prices.  Zellerfeld was then within the Kingdom of Hanover and the Hanoverian authorities encouraged and assisted mining families to leave the Harz and emigrate overseas, particularly to South Australia.  One of those families was Heinrich and Friederike Spohr and their seven children.  It was obviously a huge, emotionally wrenching time in their lives – they knew when they set out that they would never see Zellerfeld or the Harz again, and their welfare in the new world was far from assured. But it was certainly good for me that they did make the voyage, for had they not, I would never have been born.  Heinrich and Friederike were my great-great grandparents.  Along with 260 other emigrants, the family set sail from Hamburg on 5 October 1854 on the sailing ship Johann Cesar and arrived at Port Adelaide 84 days later on 1 January 1855. We spent a couple of hours inspecting the excellent Zellerfeld mining museum (“Oberharzer Bergwerksmuseum”), and on our last day in the Harz, chanced upon the Thursday night famers’ market underway in Zellerfeld as we passed through on our way back to Bad Grand after spending the day in Quedlinburg.  We stopped for awhile to mingle with the friendly Zellerfeld crowd and to try the roast pork and herb rolls, beer and apple strudel while listening to the enthusiastic nostalgia band performing in front of the museum.

September in China

Come early September it was time to return to China for my next classes, this time a week in each of Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai.  With no wider travel planned this visit, the month passed quickly and I was in Shanghai in what seemed no time at all for the final class, this one in the modern suburb of Songjiang on the city’s outskirts. On our day off we visited Qibao Ancient Town, originally established a thousand years ago in the Song Dynasty, and now absorbed within the Shanghai metropolitan sprawl about 20 km south-west of the city centre.  These days Qibao is a tourist haunt with the usual myriad of trinket, tea, clothing and food snack stalls.  We later strolled through the nearby Long Hua Buddhist temple complex, its location marked by an equally impressive tall pagoda opposite the entrance. But it wasn’t a pleasant day for walking in the heat and humidity, and after returning to the hotel we waited until after dark before venturing out onto the streets again for a return visit to the excellent cafe strip with great Chinese food at prices that would please the most tight-fisted Finance Director, a 30 minute walk away past a lakeside plaza on which hundreds of people were doing their nightly “ballroom” dancing.

Down Memory Lane …

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View Full Album	* Bryce Canyon, Utah, USA  * Yuanyang Rice Terraces, Yunnan, China  * Livestock market, Kashgar, Xinjiang, China * Emei Shan, Sichuan, China * Isle of Berneray, Outer Hebrides, Scotland * Karakoram Highway, Xinjiang, China * Demilitarized Zone, North/South Korea * Temples of Angkor, Siem Reap, Cambodia * Monument Valley, Arizona, USA * Tiger Leaping Gorge, Yunnan, China * Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia * Villages of Guizhou, China * Mormon Choir, Salt Lake, Utah, USA	September 2011 – China October 2011 – West Coast fishing March 2012 - China April 2012 – Taiwan September 2012 – China Search this blog

Prague, Czech Republic

All the hype is justified – Prague is perhaps the most beautiful city in the world.  Our five days here rushed by as we went back and forth across the Vltava River to see the sights and experience some of what Prague has to offer.  We saw the usual tourist attractions like the enormous Castle complex that towers over the city, the fantastic old town square, and block after block of ornate, well-preserved buildings.   And there’s no shortage of things to do after dark too.  We saw a hot blues band in the grungy Pop Museum, the classy Prague Big Band at the Reduta Jazz Club, the show Black Box at the Image black light Theatre, and a classical music concert at the Spanish Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter.  Perhaps the best of the museums was the Convent of St Agnes dating from the 13th century, now housing the Czech National Gallery’s fabulous collection of Bohemian and Central European medieval art from the 13th to mid-16th centuries. 

Paris, France

We arrived at Berlin’s Tegel Airport a week ago to discover that our Air France flight to Paris was cancelled due to a computer malfunction.  We joined the long, glacial queue to get a replacement flight and got to the service desk five hours later!  By this time all direct flights to Paris were full, but thankfully two tickets on Lufthansa via Dusseldorf were found for us.  In the event we arrived in Paris a few minutes before midnight, much later than planned, but at least on the same day. We had a fairly lazy week in Paris but made good use of the subway, and our feet, to wander around the city centre and along the banks of the Seine to see the sights and feel the atmosphere.  As I did nine years ago, then with our kids in tow, I climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe for the great view down Champs Elysees and across to the Eiffel Tower. We spent Saturday in hilly Montmatre in north Paris.  After a look through the imposing Sacre Coeur Basilica we walked up and down the cafe-lined streets, nipping in and out of patisseries to check the offerings.  We finally settled on the crunchy bread rolls, hams and tarts from Le Grenier a Pain, and along with a bottle of French wine and a paper bag of Provence apricots from Le Verger Saint Denis (“A Votre Service Depuis 1947”) near our hotel on Bonne Nouvelle Boulevard, we had the makings of a divine picnic lunch / siesta combo.  Not much work was done that afternoon.                We saw two very different concerts in Paris.  The first was a violin recital in 13th century Sainte-Chapelle built by Louis IX, a beautiful building with walls almost entirely of stained glass.  The second was a Cyndi Lauper concert at Olympia Theatre on Boulevard des Capucines.  We may not ordinarily have gone to a Cyndi Lauper concert but we were intrigued to read that Charlie Musselwhite was in her band, and that she had recently won Billboard’s Blues Album of the Year Award for 2010.  It seems that Cyndi has made one of the more surprising personal reinventions. The concert was great, the crowd was wild for Cyndi, and as always, Charlie’s harmonica was smokin’.  When the curtain finally fell, it fell not just on the concert, but on our trip too, for this was our last night in Paris and the last night of our trip generally, before heading for home on Singapore Airlines.  We stopped en route in Singapore for a day to visit Lee Tuan’s relatives, and had dinner outside by the beach in warm, balmy air while looking out onto the harbour twinkling with the lights from more large freight ships than you could ever imagine could be anchored in the one harbour at the same time.  Singapore food is the best – we had the mixed satays with peanut sauce, grilled stingray, Singapore noodles, Hainan chicken with rice, and fresh whole coconuts.  After saying our goodbyes we headed for the airport, flying out at midnight and arriving in Adelaide at 8am, happy to be home after four months away but less so at crossing paths with Winter.

To Dunnet Head & John o’Groats, Scotland

We rose early on Wednesday to join the long queue of vehicles waiting at the Stornoway dock to board the 7am ferry back to the Scottish mainland.  We docked in Ullapool shortly before 10 and headed north along the coast, turning in now and again to check out some of the seaside villages along the way. We also stopped briefly to inspect the roadside ruin of the 15th century Ardvreck Castle, the scene of much violence throughout its life with murders, executions and sieges by both traditional enemies and quarrelsome branches of the MacLeod clan.  Not surprisingly the place is now comprehensively haunted, most notably by the weeping daughter of a MacLeod chief who drowned in Loch Assynt after marrying the Devil in a pact to save her father’s castle.  Or so the story goes.   Eventually we came to the north-west tip of the mainland and turned right to traverse the width of Scotland, reaching the east coast at around 6 pm after a long day in the car.  The distances weren’t so large but the road was often single-lane and winding, and in a couple of places we had to cut back on ourselves for many miles to get past some long and skinny lochs. Our destination for the day was Dunnet Head, the most northerly point on the UK mainland, and only a few miles from John o’Groats on the east coast.  Looking out to sea, all that was between us and Iceland now was Scotland’s Orkney Islands, clearly visible just a few miles offshore.  We checked into Windhaven Cottage on the Head, glad to be off the roads now awash with water from the bucketing rain of the last hour, and made dinner of the oak-smoked Scottish salmon we’d bought at a roadside stall earlier. Thursday was for walking and we began with a four hour hike along the beach from John o’Groats to the Duncansby Head lighthouse, then along the cliff tops past the impressive Duncansby sea stacks, home to hundreds of nesting sea birds.  It was an atmospheric walk, what with the wind, the strong smell of the seaweed, the soaring squawking birds and the menacing-looking waters of Pentland Firth that rush around the coast at this corner of the UK mainland.  We crossed some heather-covered countryside and ambled past a sheep farm, home to some very friendly lambs that insisted on trotting with us along the fence line, bleating endearingly as we went.  They seemed to be having great fun. We took a second cliff top walk later, this time shortly before sunset at Dunnet Head.  We hoped to see Atlantic Puffins, comical looking birds with brightly coloured orange legs and bill, but proficient flyers and operators on the plunging cliffs along the coast here.  Our patience was rewarded just as we were about to give up when we finally spotted a small group of them fly in from the sea and land on a grassy knoll hugging a cliff face.  It was a pity they weren’t closer but even at that distance they were unmistakably puffins.

Loch Coruisk, Isle of Skye, Scotland

We came to the beautiful coastal village of Elgol in southern Skye and bought tickets for Misty Isle bound for Loch Coruisk across the bay.  While waiting for the boat to arrive we had our regulation picnic lunch in another idyllic spot. Misty Isle was crewed by father and son team Seamus and Stuart – more polite and proficient service providers you could never hope to meet.  Once across the bay we scrambled over the rocks to be greeted with an exquisite view of the Loch framed by the craggy Black Cuillin peaks. It was an exhilarated group that returned to Misty Isle after an hour of exploring the Loch, and we got under way again for the return voyage just as soon as Seamus and Stuart had dispensed hot tea and shortbread to the passengers, under the watchful gaze of the seals lolling in the sunshine on the rocky outcrops.

Isle of Berneray (Bearnaraigh), Outer Hebrides, Scotland

From Uig on the north coast of the Isle of Skye it’s about a two hour sailing west into the Atlantic Ocean on a Caledonian MacBrayne ship to reach the Outer Hebrides. This 130 mile long island chain consists of about 200 islands, only 10 of them inhabited.  We docked in Lochmaddy on North Uist, one of the larger islands but semi-submerged in a landscape of peat bogs and fresh water lochs. We headed north immediately and across the short causeway connecting the tiny, atmospheric island of Berneray (Bearnaraigh), population 130, just 3 miles long and a mile and a half wide. Berneray had its heyday in the early 1800s when the island was intensively cultivated for potatoes and grain, and the processing of kelp to make potash for the soap and glass industries provided a lot of employment. But ruinous economic times arrived in the mid 1800s when potato blight came to the island, coinciding with the decline of the kelp industry.  At the same time, the Island’s land owner saw the opportunity to make better profits from sheep farming than from the unreliable rents collected from poor, struggling tenant farmers.  The outcome was the clearance of many residents from the island, similar to what was happening across the Scottish Highlands generally.  Through a combination of intimidation and inducement, 22 families were cleared from the Borve crofts on Berneray in mid 1855 and their passage paid to Australia on the sailing ship Royal Albert that docked on 1 December 1855 in Port Adelaide, South Australia, after a four month voyage half way round the world.  One of those families was Donald and Effie McCuspie and their four daughters; Flora, Catherine, Marion and Mary.  It was obviously a huge, emotionally wrenching time in their lives – they knew when they set out that they would never see Berneray or Scotland again, and their welfare in the New World was far from assured.  But it was certainly good for me that they did make the voyage, for had they not, I would never have been born.  Donald and Effie were my great-great grandparents and Flora my great-grandmother. We spent a couple of hours in the Berneray Historical Society rooms housed in the old Nurse’s Cottage.  Berneray residents speak Gaelic as well as English and have a strong interest in genealogy.  With a few clicks of the keyboard of the Society’s computer, Mrs Wilson (who came to Berneray from England on holiday many years ago, fell in love with the place, and returned to live here) was able to locate information on the McCuspie family, back to the 1600s!  And there was now another lead I was also interested to follow.  Back at the giant Angus MacAskill museum on the Isle of Skye, Angus’ family tree was displayed and I was intrigued to see on it some names and dates I recognized.  With a few more clicks, Mrs Wilson confirmed what I now suspected: Angus and I are cousins!  More precisely, Angus MacAskill and Donald McCuspie were first cousins, which makes Angus and me first cousins four times removed.  It certainly came as a surprise to learn I was related to the largest ever recorded man in the world, although our shared genes obviously don’t include those that gave Angus his colossal stature.  Still, this new knowledge seemed to promise an added measure of future protection from everyday travails, and I thought for a moment about the verbal fisticuffs I sometimes have with a friend when we’re arguing about our different political opinions.  “Kristos won’t dare mess with me now” I chuckled as I lumbered out of the cottage, taking care as I imagine all close relatives of giants do, not to hit my head on the top of the door frame as I went out.            We spent a couple of days walking and driving around Berneray to absorb the remote but friendly atmosphere of this charming isle, and to see a few interesting historical sights.  Like the standing stone Clach Mhor at the top of Beinn a’Chlaidh, and nearby traces of a temple dating from 1,800 BC, believed to have been used by Sun worshippers.  We also located the ruins of Donald and Effie’s house, now just a pile of stones, and the place on Berneray’s south coast where my cousin Angus, the giant MacAskill, was born in 1825.  And on Saturday we drove south to see three other islands connected by causeways; North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist.  That’s as far as we could go in the Vauxhall – the next most southerly isle is Barra and an ocean ferry is needed to go there.

The Quiraing & Dunvegan, Isle of Skye, Scotland

We’d yet to see the north of Skye, so we motored through Skye’s largest town, Portree, and on up the Trotternish Peninsula to the coastal village of Staffin.  We passed two heavily laden backpackers on foot and stopped to ask them where they were headed.  “To the Quiraing”, they said.  This is a spectacular rock formation caused by massive landslides millions of years ago – we intended to go there sometime, so we offered to take them now.  They were a French couple from Lyon intending to camp and walk in the Quiraing for several days, and they were well-equipped with some very heavy duty cameras and lenses. We said goodbye in the car park at the top of a long, steep, winding road and set out on our own walk for a couple of hours amongst the fantastic landforms perched high above the ocean.  Later, at Kilmuir on the other side of the peninsula, we inspected the memorial to the brave Flora MacDonald who risked her own life in the early 1700s to help Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from the pursuing English, and some old Scottish crofter houses displayed at the interesting Museum of Island Life.  The following day we drove around the Waternish Peninsula, passing Dunvegan Castle, the home of the Chiefs of the MacLeod clan for 800 years.  In Dunvegan village we looked through the museum devoted to the life and exploits of Angus MacAskill, the world’s largest recorded healthy, non-obese, man.  Angus was born on the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides in 1825 and grew into a giant, seven feet nine inches tall, weighing 425 pounds and with a chest measurement of 80 inches.  He was extremely strong and his feats of strength became legendary in Cape Breton, Canada, where the family had emigrated when Angus was six years old. In his mid twenties he embarked on a five year theatrical tour throughout North America to display his colossal stature, a venture that made him an affluent man.  Although quiet by nature and a devout Presbyterian, Angus enjoyed the occasional tipple and once jokingly walked into a tavern, picked up a 140 gallon whisky barrel, and drank through the bung hole.  We ended the day with our own wee dram of single malt at the Talisker distillery near Carbost in central Skye, following an interesting tour of the whisky production process.  

Fort William, Scotland

We reached Fort William in the Scottish Highlands after two overnight stops from London; the first at Kendal in the Lakes District in northern England and the second in the Scottish village of Taynuilt in Argyll District.  Fort William is an ideal place to spend a few days – Ben Nevis keeps watch over the town, and there are some great sights close by.  We spent Saturday driving along the shore of Loch Ness to Inverness, stopping along the way to see the ruins of Urquhart Castle perched above the water.  We made a picnic lunch in an Inverness park and saw a newly married bride and her kilt-clad groom emerge from a church to the strains of loud, melodious bagpipe music.  There was no mistaking that we were now in Scotland. On Sunday we drove through grand, dramatic Glen Coe to the south-east of Fort William, and the smaller but equally impressive Glen Etive.  Many hikers and campers were out and about enjoying the sunshine and spectacular scenery.  We made a detour around Loch Leven and came across a hard-to-beat picnic spot overlooking the Loch towards the peaks of Glen Coe.        It was all sweetness and light on Sunday, but this place was the site of one of the darker chapters in Scottish history – the infamous February 1692 Massacre of Glencoe.  The MacDonald clan had been tardy in swearing allegiance to the English King who, miffed, decided that they needed to be taught a lesson.  The Campbells were enlisted to do the dirty deed, and on the morning of the 13th, after enjoying the MacDonald’s hospitality, turned on their hosts after breakfast, murdering 38 and ultimately causing the deaths of others who fled into the wintry hills of Glen Coe.  Charming.  I wonder how anyone with the surname Campbell fares finding a B&B in these parts today.