Australia's East Coast

The east coast of Australia is among my magic places. Everyone, I hope, knows a place like this, a place where for them everything feels perfect, where the wind and the plants and the sky feel right, where beauty envelops and the mind turns to the expectation of joy and relaxation. For me Australia is a nearly perfect blend of cultures and landscapes. If you take the California coast, mix in a bit of English culture, toss in an odd variety of tropical birds and hopping mammals, stir in some juicy Hawaiian reef breaks, add a dash of South Carolina's numerous harbors and bays, throw in a valley resplendant with wineries, and then at last remove about half of the people, you'd get something close to Australia's east coast.

During the Southern Hemisphere winter, the place is a surfer's dream come true. Winds predominate from the west, keeping the t, sansurf cleanly groomed for most of each day. Numerous headlands jut out into the coastline, creating peeling point breaks, each lined with soft beaches ranging in color from nearly white to sandstone beige. There are rocky reefs at each headland and some areas of cliff too so there are powerful reef breaks added to the mix. The water is often quite clear and tends towards the blues that I've seen more often in the Caribbean or Pacific Islands. Water temperatures in the winter average around 65-70 degrees Farenheit, positively steamy by California standards. The weather is pleasantly cool, without being cold, and winter storms push through bring surf and rain every few weeks.

Shane and I flew direct from LAX to Sydney on the new Virgin Australia service. I have only good things to say about Virgin. New planes, great service, lots of entertainment options, and, best of all, no excess baggage fees for surfboards. In the U.S. and Europe surfers are increasingly treated like second class citizens by the airlines. Fees to carry boards on flights have increased from an average of $50-100 round-trip in the 1990s to an as much as $300 on American Airlines today. Moreover, since the fees are per leg of the flight if you fly open jaw to three cities you'll pay $450. These fees are absurd given that the average cost of a new surfboard is about $450 and that the boards weigh less than 10 pounds. But what really irks me more than anything else is that golf bags, which also require "special handling" and weigh many times more, are not charged these fees. British Airways has gone so far as to refuse surfboards completely. Meanwhile, Virgin Australia cheerfully counts the surfboard as a piece of checked luggage. Partly this must be because Australians understand surfing better. It's a mainstream sport over there. Regardless of the reasoning, they'll be getting my business in the future, despite their new sexist ad campaign.

The flight is 14 hours but leaves at 11:3o in the evening so we were able to sleep for much of the flight.

Over the course of just under two weeks we managed to explore Sydney, numerous coastal towns, the Hunter Valley and its wineries, the college town of Newcastle, Barrington Tops National Park, many coastal parks, and Brisbane.

Cambridge University and Greenwich, England

Cambridge has many more high-end shops and many fewer hip and youth oriented businesses than I'd have guessed. The resident eggheads must really be serious about their work. The town doesn't give any sens of being dominated by college students, though you see them everywhere on foot and bicycle. King's College Cathedral, where we attended a Evensong service, is a massive stone marvel of medieval engineering. Endless stained glass panels fill the 30 meters or more of open wall space on either side. They were all removed, buried, and then replaced during WWII to prevent destruction by Axis bombers. At dinner we enjoyed traditional pub grub in The Eagle, across from King's College. Collectively we had all the classics: bangers and mash, fish and chips, and steak and ale pie. It was here, just a table from where we sat according to a plaque on the wall, that Watson and Crick first told their peers about their discovery of DNA over a pint of ale and dinner. The scientists had apparently been dining and drinking in The Eagle for months before they came to their revelation. Sadly, nothing inspired came to my mind, but the food was good and it was pleasant to hear and see some of Cambridge undergraduates having a fine and noisy time at the famous table.

Back in London, we had a drink in Notting Hill and visited the bookstore from the Hugh Grant film. It's actually a very good travel bookstore. The neighborhood was more eclectic and racially mixed than I expected. Lots of Caribbean influence.The weather here in May is very similar to southern California in January. It's cool, without being cold, blustery, and it threatens to rain often. I find it pleasant, but then I don't have to live here, do I?

On my last full day in England we headed to the Royal Observatory. Strangely, I almost forgot to make this trip. Thank goodness my father remembered my intention to visit. It's a requisite stop for any geographer visiting London. Not only is this the most famous marker of the Prime Meridian, the line that artificially divides our world into Western and Eastern hemispheres, but it also houses the famous clocks that John Harrison invented to solve "the longitude problem." In fact the observatory was established way back in 1675 in order to serve as the official arbiter of measurements of all sorts in England. The Observatory was built where Greenwich Castle used to stand. This castle is where Henry VIII housed many of his mistresses since it was close enough for a quick visit. The grounds today are gorgeous parkland of grassy hills and tree-lined pathways. The Royal Maritime Museum shares the park with the Royal Observatory.

We managed to get a look at all four of John Harrison's remarkable timepieces. Harrison, for those who are unfamiliar with the story, was a self-taught watchmaker who over a period of 43 years built five incredibly accurate watches to aid ships in the determination of longitude (east-west location). The method is simple, if you have a watch that is accurate. You simply set the accurate watch to Greenwich Mean Time (London time). While at sea, you note the moment that the sun reaches it's apex (true noon). Since the earth rotates at a fixed and predictable rate, it is then simple division to figure out how many hours (and hence miles) you are from Greenwich (360 degrees around the earth; 24 hours in a rotation; hence, each hour of time equals 15 degrees of longitude).

Captain James Cook used Harrison's chronometers on his second and third voyages in the Pacific and found them to be incredibly accurate and useful. They certainly fell within the standards set out in the Longitude Prize offered by Parliament in 1714. Sadly, though, Harrison was never awarded the ₤20,000 prize. Over the years he was awarded a total of ₤18,750, the last payment of which was ₤8,750 given to him at the age of 80, three years before his death. Notably, he was never officially given the prize. It was never awarded to anyone. The main reason for this was the bias of the Board of Longitude against a self-taught workingman who solved the problem in a simple way, without the use of astronomy nor Newton's beloved calculus. It was only through the intervention of King George that Harrison managed to get any recognition at all. If you're still interested in this fascinating historical episode get ahold of Dava Sobel's erudite and entertaining history of the events, Longitude.

The maze-like London Underground is justifiably famous. Trains whisk you off to your destination every two or three minutes at most stops in central London. I was surprised by the extreme depth of many of the tunnels. I suspect that the Thames and all of that water is part of the reason for this, but New York has the Hudson and the East River and still I found the escalators descending to surprising depths in London.

The map of the "Tube" is also quite famous. It's iconic cartography allows us to make sense of what is in reality a very complicated geography. Stations become colored dots. Lines are brightly colored and remarkably geometric. Scale is distorted to encourage comprehension, not to represent physical distances.

Visiting the British Museum was a highlight, just as expected. The Egyptian exhibits and the Elgin Marbles (which Greece rightfully wants back) are fantastic and left me awestruck but the real surprise was the reaction I felt to seeing the sculptures from the Assyrians at Nineveh and Nimrud, both of which were located in what is today northern Iraq and flourished in the Neo-Assyrian period from 911 B.C. until the sack of Nineveh and the fall of the Assyrian empire at the hands of the Chaldean Babylonians in 612 B.C.

The sculptures and reliefs, like those I saw from prehistoric periods in India, are graceful and powerfully beautiful. Like the Parthenon scultures, which they pre-date, they mostly depict military, ritual, and royal events. The scale of the sculptures again baffles a viewer today. Massive winged lions and bulls standing over ten feet tall and weighing 30 tons guarded huge entrance gates made of cedar and held together by sculpted bronze bands. Relief sculptures depict battles involving huge numbers of warriors, chariots, horses, and camels. Soldiers wield spears from the ground while carrying massive shields. Riders on horseback draw bows. Men stricken by blows fall from their horses or collapse to the ground beneath the weight of their attackers. Camels in particular, which are rare in Hellenistic art, are lovingly depicted.

What's so amazing to me about these sculptures is how much they look like the cartoonish images in my childhood mind of such times, replete as they are with wine jugs, chariots, agricultural scenes, lavish costumes, and strong young bodies. The images in my mind were shaped by films and comic books that were obviously drawing upon collective impressions from the excavated ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. Many of these ruins were found in the 19th century and must have created quite a popular stir.

Still, seeing the real sculptures, even dislocated as they are from their geographical context, aids in the imagining of the ancient past. Like many children raised watching black and white films, I came to think of the past as drained of color, as a pale and sad precursor to the rich, colorful, and pleasurable life people live today. Years of study and imagination have made the past more real to me, but sculptures like thes and those at Khajuraho in India require me to see the past as tangible, filled with sensual pleasures and terrible agony.

Jet Lag, London Ale, and Travel Buddies

5-9-2009

YHA St. Pancras Station
London, England

Arrggh, my head! Brits drink ale as if the supply were running out and they've got only this one last chance to get fully pissed. I haven't seen so many attractive, intelligent people loaded to the gills with alcohol so early in the evening since my college days. In fact, the bar at The Water Poet near Liverpool Street Station was blanketed with empty pints by 7:30 PM. It was like something of an errant fraternity party. Outside on the street a collection of more empties stacked on the curb grew larger by the minute. Periodically, one of these would smash to bits as some banker fresh from work inadvertently kicked one over. What's more, this scene was repeated every few blocks throughout London.

Anyway, I arrived in London on Thursday morning after just three hours of sleep on the flight from Boston. I made it my goal to stay awake until sundown so that my circadian clock might have a reasonable chance of setting itself straight. This meant that I wandered around Bloomsbury and the British Museum in a fog of fatigue and caffeine that by evening approached hallucinatory proportions. Now I know what those zombies in Shaun of the Dead felt like. I'll be going back to the British Museum today to appreciate it from the vantage point of the living.

When I finally fell asleep that first night after simple pub grub (a decidedly average chicken burger) and a very good locally-brewed half pint at Mabel's Tavern it was about 10:30 PM. My sleep was restless, interrupted as it was by ambulance sirens, the sweaty heat of my room, and odd dreams of being lost. When I eventually rose from bed the next day at 12:30 PM I was so shocked by the hour that I suspected my watch of malfunction.

It took me most of the three hours to bathe, dress, and fully awaken. When I did finally depart the hostel, I headed to Tralfagar Square and the National Gallery. The museums here really are wonderful. It's great to be able to wander in and out without cost. I'm truly at liberty to enter just to appreciate one or two rooms or even one or two paintings and then to head off again in search of tea or a used book, only to return again later. I appreciate the paintings more fully this way, instead of rushing about trying to see everything in a museum. The individual works get lost in the context this way and I can't give them the attention they deserve. How many of those artists suspected their works would be displayed next to hundreds of others and viewed by tourists rushing past at high speed?

After a half hour spent drinking tea and people-watching on Tralfagar Square and an hour in the National Gallery, I wandered into the handsome church that sits next to gallery. This, it turns out, is St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Inside a small ensemble was practicing a Bach piece so I sat in the pews and enjoyed it greatly. Churches in England and Europe have incredible histories, of course. For example, both Handel and Mozart performed in this very church. There is a candlelight concert tonight at 7:30 PM and I hope to attend if tickets are still available.

While wandering about I made contact via text message with Luis and Stefan and Anna, all of whom I'd met on the Thailand tour. Luis is Portuguese and Stefan and Anna are Austrian but all live in London for work. It was this group, and a few of their coworkers, that I met at The Water Poet. After the pub, Stefan, Anna, myself, and Anna's brother Oliver all headed off to get some bangers and mash. Sadly, their favorite shop was closing so we ended up instead at a fine, or at least expensive, Italian restaurant. It's odd to be hanging out in London with locals who are actually from somewhere else. I may have learned more about Austrians than about London. Still, great to have something social to do. Traveling can be a terribly solitary business.

Chile and Argentina

Some Thoughts on Differences between Chile and Argentina

Argentina and Chile share many obvious cultural traits. The most obvious of these is the Spanish language itself. There are many others. People are thin in both cultures. Dress in the cities tends towards fashionable European styles. There are however interesting, if subtle, differences between Argentina and Chile. While people were clean and fashionable in both countries, this was especially true of the Argentinians in Buenos Aires, where even those out jogging sported carefully coordinated exercise outfits and expensive hair cuts. Also, while both cultures are reserved in public, the Argentinians are a bit more boisterous, especially the young.


The cities look quite different too. Whereas sidewalks in Santiago were clean and level, in Buenos Aires they are chaotic and cracked and absolutely mined with dog shit. In Santiago, the architecture is for the most part functional and utilitarian, in Argentina much of it is grand and elaborate. Buenos Aires' wide boulevards, nineteenth century apartment blocks, and mansard roofs are deliberately reminiscent of Paris, albeit a Paris after 100 years of literal decay. In Chile, graffiti is rare, outside of Valparaiso's artistic district. In Argentina's cities amateurish tagging covers every structure at ground level.


Argentina's national debt is about 50% of GDP. In Chile, where there are explicitly anti-cyclical policies, it is 5%. Amazing. In the U.S. this figure is about 45%. Moreover, U.S. household debt (credit cards, mortgages, etc.) now stands at about 100% of GDP. Chile's experiences with 500% inflation caused by excessive government spending without taxation to pay for it clearly helped their politicians do the right thing. Meanwhile, Argentina is likely to default on its debt obligations for the second time in ten years. Sadly, it looks like Americans may have to learn our lessons the hard way. We seem to be headed for a debt and inflation spiral and there is no public interest in making the tough choices of higher taxes or large spending cuts.

3-12-2009
Hotel Vilafranca
Providencia, Santiago, Chile

Chileans are a sedate bunch. Over two days in Santiago and another in Valparaiso, I rarely heard a Chilean shout or raise his voice. In fact the only exception to this was a preacher in the main plaza shouting fire and brimstone in Spanish at the top of his voice. Even on crowded streets during rush hour there was little noise from the crowds of well dressed young people heading to and from work. Moreover, in the afternoons and early mornings almost nothing happens. The city doesn't seem to stir itself awake until about 9 or 10 AM. Add to this that most businesses, including restaurants, are closed on Sundays and the place feels downright sleepy.

Santiago is a pleasant, if nondescript city, shaded as it is by many Sycamore trees and full of prosperous, industrious people. The Mapucho River and a tributary rush off the surrounding mountains and down through town itself. This life-giving water is brown with silt eroded from the mountains and moves rapidly through the city even during these summer months. In Los Angeles and other Mediterranean climate regions it never rains during the summer. The same must be true here and yet the rivers flow. I assume this is snow melt from the nearby Andes. How frightening to think that as the world warms this flow will initially increase as glaciers melt but then will essentially cease as the glaciers disappear. For the time being, however, Santiago seems to have access to water.

A fantastic metro system efficiently and safely shuttles thousands of people all about the city center on wide streets and More than 8000 buses complement the metro. The result is a city with few of the traffic problem I've seen all over the world, but with much air pollution emanating from the thousands of buses, diesel trucks, and old cars. Architecture in Santiago is for the most part unremarkable. Many of the largest buildings are of the bleak modernist industrial sort. Large apartment blocks from the 1960s and 1970s dominate the skyline in the Providencia neighborhood and the center of the city. The principal street through the area is a broad high traffic street named Avenida 11 de Septiembre (September 11th Avenue). This is a reference to the day that Salvador Allende's presidency was ended by Augusto Pinochet's U.S.-backed military coup. Few Americans know that the CIA was so involved in this illegal overthrow of a democratically-elected government that U.S. planes actually bombed the capital. After a few days of fierce fighting around the Presidential Palace, Allende took his own life as the rebels took control.

There are scattered large houses of the wealthy in Providencia, the neighborhood of our small hotel. Bellavista has somewhat more interesting low structures and a number of interesting restaurants and shops. Earthquakes are a real problem in this part of the world and I get the impression that most historical structures were destroyed at one time or another. As a result, the city seems to have been built largely in the 20th century. In fact, the largest earthquake ever recorded was here in Santiago in 1960. It registered a massive 9.5 on the Richter scale. This is nearly 1000 times more shaking than the Northridge quake brought to Southern California in 1994.

Chillenos are materially better off than the residents of any other Latin American country I've yet visited (Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador). Houses, cars, and clothing all suggest that the basic needs of the people are generally met. Moreover, over three days we were never approached by a beggar of any sort, a statement I could not make if I was traveling in a large U.S. city or in most less developed countries.

I am pleased to see that, as in Ecuador, there are many people who use bicycles for both transportation and recreation. In this neighborhood is not uncommon to see a well-dressed young woman casually biking home from work in the evening along a quiet side street lined with sycamores.

We visited the Presidential Palace, which is currently occupied by Michelle Bachelet. Both Chile and Argentina currently have women in the top political positions. Banners hung from a government building near the palace announced the celebration of the "Dia International de la Mujer" (International Day of the Woman). In a grand plaza in front of the palace there is a statue of Salvador Allende, wearing his signature square black framed glasses. The broken remains of the actual glasses, a single shattered lens and half the frames, are on display at the National Historical Museum just a few blocks away.

People seem to like the current president, Senora Bachelet. A website claimed her popularity at 62% and Alexander, a young bartender at the airport, told me that Bachelet is "muy buena.". Among other things she has pushed incentives and aid to those who want to buy homes and has increased spending on education. He has three young girls so these initiatives are important to him. He has managed to buy a house and his job at the airport is a good one. Moreover, Chile's economy is by law anti-cyclical. Money is set aside by the government during boom times and when copper prices are high, copper being the most important export in Chile. When times are rough, as they are sure to be in the next few years, these accounts are drawn down. It will be interesting to see how Chile fares in the recession now that I understand something about this policy.

We arrived in Valparaiso by public bus. The buses in Argentina, as I've found in many countries, are excellent and are used by everyone. The trip takes about one and half hours in each direction and the cost was less than $5 each way. The trip takes you from the dry, almost desert climate of Santiago over low forested mountains and then winds steeply down to the sea just as you arrive in Valparaiso. Thick fog enveloped the bus at about the halfway point.

Valparaiso, Chile is a crusty old port city at the base of small mountains that force it against a foggy bay. The city's downtown is in the narrow strip, no more than a few hundred meters wide, between the ocean and these hills. Numerous old acensors, or funiculars, make access to the hilltops surrounding the center easy. Just as a less sophisticated person can sometimes be more outgoing, Valparaiso, while less polished than Santiago, seems more vibrant. The sidewalks of the main street were packed thickly with Chillenos shopping and going about their business. We walked briskly with them, weaving through the crowd as one must in any busy city. Prior to the construction of the Panama Canal Valparaiso was one of the most important ports in the world. Evidently it lost stature and importance as shipping traffic moved northward, but it remains a functioning port. Most people seemed well off enough, but these were not the wealthy that I'd seen casually biking and strolling in Providencia back in Santiago. Most of the grand stone buildings lining the bay are coated with a veneer of grime and decay, but they are still functioning. Sailors in uniform and crewman from merchant ships are mixed into the crowds of pedestrians. Off to the northwest lies the new beach resort of Vina del Mar. Inland the coastal mountains rise, covered in forests of Eucalyptus and pine.

We rode an ascensor to the nearest hilltops where great old mansions and colorful old apartment blocks cling precariously to the slopes packed tight together. Narrow staircases and winding roads lead up and down the mountains. The area has experienced a revival as a hip artists colony and the evidence of this was everywhere spray painted on the walls. A number of fine restaurants reminiscent of Europe gaze down upon a fine broad view of the town, the port, and the bay. We had a relaxed lunch in one of these, gazing alternately at the view and at a beautiful infant boy at the next table.







3-13-2009
Hotel Bohemia, Mendoza, Argentina

Very little happens here between about 1:30 and 5:30 PM. It's a true siesta. Shopkeepers pull closed the heavy iron bars that guard their wares. Pedestrians disappear. Auto traffic becomes primarily taxis. Things don't get really rolling again until 7:00 or 7:30 PM when the traffic returns and the streets are full of workers and uniformed students rushing home or to one of the many parks or street side cafes in town.

Mendoza feels very southern European. Fashionable people eat at street side cafes under colorful umbrellas along lovely one way streets lined with sycamore trees. The heat is tempered by the evaporation of water from thousands of irrigated trees and plants and by the shade created by the same. Like in the Mediterranean the air is very dry and the heat not so oppressive. People are slim and fashionable and smoke too many cigarettes. Uniquely, canals called Acequias line most every street. These deliver life-giving water from the nearby Andes to the trees and fountains that are everywhere in town.

Parque San Martin, named for Argentina's liberator, is nearly a third of the city. It's a beautiful grassy park filled with massive trees, pedestrian walkways, a large artificial pond, a gymnasium, an Olympic pool, a number of stadiums, and a large hill. Throughout the park, more acequias flood the land bringing lush vegetation to life. This in a place that averages about ten inches of rain a year, an amount that's roughly similar to San Diego or San Antonio. We walked through the park on a Saturday. Many of the locals were out doing the same. Others were riding bicycles or walking their dogs or rowing racing boats in the lake. It's a pretty idyllic place, really, though all these trees seem to be wreaking havoc on my allergic sinuses.

When I first moved to California, I found it chock full of gracefully aging automobiles no longer seen in Rhode Island. However, California has nothing on Argentina. Here French and American cars from every decade back to the 1960s are common and proudly cruise the streets. Peugeout, Citroen, and Ford dominate but there are Dodges and Mercedes and BMWs of all these eras still running here and most are proudly polished.
Mendoza is of course most famous for it's wines and wineries. The same water that makes the city a garden allows nearly 1200 wineries to flourish, some for well over a hundred years. Today the area is producing some very high quality wines, particularly of the Malbec variety. We spent one charming day touring a few wineries with a hired driver, Marcello. Marcello, a middle aged man with two young girls, lived at one time on the west side of Los Angeles, but returned home to Mendoza to raise his family. Achaval-Ferrer was our first stop. All of the wines at this very young winery (it was started in 1999) have received Wine Spectator reviews of over 90 points. Nearly the entire production is shipped out for export so we were able to taste only wines that were in various early stages of maturation. None of them were yet ready to bottle and yet they were all excellent even when premature. They claim to use more than twice as many grapes per bottle as is typical and I don't doubt it. The wines they are selling now, the 2006 and 2007 vintages, will not be ready to drink for about five more years. None of their wines are filtered. An unusual step in the production process involves aerating and mixing the maceration to allow excess alcohol to evaporate since the density of grapes can send alcohol to 18%.

While we were in Mendoza, we also visited a number of other fine wineries. At Hacienda del Plata met Chrissy, a young woman from Canada who has reinvented herself in Mendoza. Lunch was at La Cava de Cano, a unique restaurant in the renovated basement, "La Cava," of the former governor's home. I was able to easily practice my Spanish with Diego, who attened Ohio State for three years before returning home to Argentina. The first course was a classic and massive assortment of Italian-Argentinian antipasta. In additon to the traditional Italian assortment of cured meats, olives, roasted garlic, mushrooms, anchovies, artichoke hearts, and various cheeses, there were roasted nuts, various breads, sausages (including blood sausages), and dried fruits and fresh vegetables. After all this then they bring you pasta. All the while, Diego poured bottomless glasses of a very nice 2004 Cava de Cano Syrah. If you can still manage it, desert and a liquer and, if you choose, a cigar. We passed on the cigars but tried the desert and Pisco.

After lunch, we visited Carmello Patti's one man winery operation. Carmello and his family moved to Mendoza decades ago from Sicily. He raises few, if any grapes, and instead focuses on winemaking. He personally showed us his winery and signed my bottle of 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon.
3-15-2009
The Central Andes and Aconcagua













































































3-19-2009
The Secret Garden B&B,
Puerto Iguazu, Argentina

The falls are truly remarkable, but much of their spiritual luster is lost amongst the hordes of tourists and the carefully manicured footpaths everyone walks to wind their way around the various viewpoints.

There's even a tiny light railroad that escorts everyone to the upper falls. This is better than a load automobiles driving about, of course, but visiting Iquazu is more about checking it off of your international tourism checklist than about communing with nature. We did manage to take a long, sweating hike through the forest. The number of butterflies and moths of all colors we encountered on this trek rivaled anything I've seen in Costa Rica.

John Fernandes is the owner of the Secret Garden B&B. He's a witty, cynical man from India, despite his Latin surname, who was raised largely in boarding schools in England. After I lamented to John that so many of my travels allowed me very little contact with local people, he took me to visit the property of a family of squatters that he has befriended. Gunter's homestead was fascinating. He's been living on the property for four years as a squatter. He's very proud of the fact that "all this was just forest" when he arrived. John explained that few, if any, people in town have a title deed for their homes. "As far as I know, I'm the only person in town to get an official title on my property." Gunter simply moved to the forest on the edge of town, cut down the forest and got to work collecting and cultivating orchids and growing fruits, vegetables, and chickens for his family of six. The two youngest boys followed us about and hesitantly posed for pictures under their father's stern direction, slingshots sticking out of their back pockets all the while. The teen-aged son and daughter were more reticent. I suspect John has introduced them to many guests and I hope these young people didn't see our visit to their humble homestead as an indignity of any kind. Gunter is either very much older than his wife or years of hard work have weathered his skin. I suspect that he is about 15-20 years older than his wife.