Winning the holiday of a lifetime – stays in a dozen of the Leading Hotels of the World – with economy class airfare and enough spending money for a pizza now and then made for an entertaining trip. The holiday of a lifetime was certainly that, but perhaps not in the way originally envisaged!

Torture in Turkey, missed connections, encounters with assault gun-toting soldiers, lost luggage, sudden sickness, rustbucket boats and planes, soakings… This could be the holiday from hell!

But it’s also fabulous views from vast suites, exquisite service, meals to die for, unexpected friendships, lazy days lounging around the pool, private tours of incredible sites. And sights.

This is a down-to-earth look at places most of us can only dream of, whether they are the Ritz or the Peninsula, waterfalls that make Niagara look sick or ancient cities stretching across the empty Syrian sands.

I learnt a lot about places and people from this book, and it’s a pleasure to have a friendly Aussie guide.

Some readers have moaned a little about the trouble Tiana takes to try to fit in. A backpacker at the Ritz. Embarrassment and uncertainty are big themes in this book, especially at the beginning. But isn’t that what this book is all about? If it was some jetsetter jotting down notes on the five star hotels along the way, it wouldn’t be worth reading. It would be pretentious. It would be flung out the window.

The charm of the story lies in the unexpected serendipity of it all. The grand prize falling in the laps of two people who have to count every cent along the way.

As an aside, this book came to me quite by chance, at a Canberra meetup of BookCrossers, swapping books. You can always find the BookCrossing table – it’s piled high with books, and the people who might have been strangers moments before are chatting about Jane Austen – or Dan Brown – and the adventures of the books rival the narratives.

The book was bought on a flying visit to Australia by New York based Cari. I first met her at a Canberra BookCrossing meetup, and since then I’ve gasped at her amazing travels. She’s seen more of my country than I have myself, and when she showed me around Hiroshima and I was reduced to an emotional wreck, it was her fourth time and she was keener on capturing the pink perfection of the sakura cherry blossoms. Not unmoved, just making the best use of the moment.

It was fun to see her excited over being at the top of the Empire State Building. She pulled out her phone and called her Mom. Even though she was a New Yorker born and bred, it was her first time as much as mine.

And, in a fore-echo of this book, the last time I saw Cari was last July, when she took us out to a Mets ballgame and we showed her around our hotel room. Our room at the Waldorf-Astoria.

We might have checked in clad in cargo pants, our colourful nylon bags humbling us, smuggled in Subways and refrained from ordering room service coffee, but it was still the Waldorf, snapped up in an unbelievable online deal, and we HAD to show it off!

Since finishing this book, somewhere over the Pacific on a day made fuzzy by the dateline, Cari has passed it on to BookCrossers around the world. Netherlands, US, Poland, Japan, back to Australia… Absolutely Faking it

The book’s travels mirror those of the author!

Bottom line? It’s not great literature, and to tell the truth I find the sort of breathless-Aussie-girl-exploring-the-world style of travel writing a teeny bit irritating, but the story itself is well worth the reading. Why? Because why is that we’ve all looked at the competitions for these amazing prizes and dreamed of winning it. Well, Tiana won the prize, and she has shared it with us. We could be walking through those golden doors in our sweaty shorts and torn t-shirts, and the way she tells it, we are.

Here are the photographs that go with the book, including the glorious photograph that sealed first prize, taken by the photographer husband of the writing wife: Absolutely Faking It Photographs

And here is Tiana’s travel blog. Looks like she has found her niche and loving it! Every Day is a New Adventure

What an astonishing read! Frank has a charming narrative way. Unforced, straightforward and utterly engaging. He owns the reader.

And what a tale he has to tell. Poverty so desperate that even the commissioners handing out assistance to the poor are shocked at the conditions. Father drinks the dole money, children scavenge for lumps of coal, mother has to beg, the children are clad in rags.

Skeletons with ragged hair and rotting teeth, Frank and his surviving siblings somehow manage to exist on charity and rare employment in 1940s Limerick. This isn’t an action book, just a fairly straightforward coming of age memoir, but the honesty and immediacy sucks you right in. You are there, fainting with hunger and weak with cold, clinging to life in some pungent slum, where the sewage floods through the tumbledown hovel you call home, and the height of paradise is cold fish and chips scrounged from a drunken soldier.

The Irish patriotism, language and rain fill the pages. You almost have to wring it out after every chapter. If it’s not the waters of the Shannon, it’s the winter rain. Or the tears of the reader.

What a read!



View all my reviews

Is Arlen a snappy dresser or what?

Perhaps Guy Lombardo put the case a leetle better than I:

Managua, Nicaragua, what a wonderful spot,
There’s coffee and bananas and a temperature hot;
So take a trip and on a ship go sailing away,
Across the agua to Managua, Nicaragua, olé! olé!

Located on the link of land connecting the two Americas, Nicaragua has had several capital cities since gaining independence, and at last, in a compromise between the two rivals of León and Granada, the capital was settled on an indigenous community halfway between, on the pleasant shores of Lake Managua, and the new city is now ten times larger than either of the rivals.

Heading down to the mall to look through Myers or Macys is not really the way they do things throughout the developing world. You want clothing – or a meal or a haircut or a chicken – you look through the market. Here you’ll find Arlen, swinging her merchandise direction from clothing to shoes with far more ease and grace than Grace Brothers.

Her Kiva loan requests have been modest, and her bright clothing and anxious smiles have brought her global support. Smile, and the world smiles with you!

I live in Canberra, so my vote doesn’t count.

Well, not much, anyway. John Howard used to say of Canberra, “Funny place. Looks like Killara (a leafy, upper-class suburb in Sydney), votes like Lithgow (an industrial town).”

Canberra is a safe Labor city. Only once has a Liberal member held one of the local seats, and that was when the Australian Labor Party thought so little of the voters that the outgoing member – a minister in the hugely unpopular government of Paul Keating forced to resign over the “sports rorts affair” – referred to the transition as “like handing over my baby”. The Labor candidate at the by-election was a lesbian party hack, who failed to resonate with the family voters of Tuggeranong.

This election, both local members are resigning, and once again party hacks have been rewarded with safe seats. The people vote for the party, not the person, you see.

I don’t believe in safe seats. The representative takes the voters for granted, the electorate is ignored by both the Government gravy train and the Opposition election promise bandwagon, and the local member is generally someone who wouldn’t be able to win a marginal seat, but must be rewarded for his work in the party.

In any case, a representative from either of the two major parties will give his primary loyalty to the party, not the people.

So I’m voting Independent this election. Independents have the devil’s own job getting elected, but once in they tend to stick. The voters are delighted to have a representative in Parliament who raises the issues that matter to them, who isn’t beholden to party bosses, and doesn’t vote the party line.

I’m well aware that no Independent candidate will win more than a handful of votes, but that’s fine by me. Firstly, I’d like to encourage them. Secondly, public election funding kicks in at 4%, and having $2.50 of taxpayer money given to one of the major parties on my behalf just because I voted for their hack candidate gets right up my nose. I shouldn’t have to pay to vote, even if it’s not coming directly out of my pocket, it’s still money that could usefully be spent on something positive, like health or education. I’m going to vote for an Independent candidate who isn’t going to get 4% of the vote. So long as he or she isn’t too obnoxious in their views.

But, Australian voting being of the preferential nature, I have to number all the boxes, and that means I have to put one of the major party candidates ahead of the other. It’s unlikely that my vote will ever be counted, as the ALP will probably receive an absolute majority of votes and preferences won’t be counted, but just in case, I’d like my vote to count towards making the seat marginal.

Marginal seats tend to attract more government attention and a better class of candidates. The marginal seat of Eden-Monaro, just across the New South Wales border, is a case in point. It is loaded down with Commonwealth-funded projects, and the local members have always worked hard to win or retain their seat. They work for every vote.

And that means I’m going to put Liberal ahead of Labor (and any minor candidates I really detest, such as the mildly-mad Socialist Workers Party or the gibbering idiots of the Democrats).

Of course, my vote will have minimal effect. Through some shonky dealings over the years, the 350 000 residents of Canberra elect just four MPs, compared to Tasmania, where 325 000 voters return seventeen representatives. My vote will count for 0.001% of the total. It’s more a matter of making me feel that I’ve done my tiny best.

—Skyring

The photo

From The Border Mail. I was actually looking for a free photo of a shepherd – sheep, crook etc. but this one leapt out at me. It’s brilliant – a re-enactment of Tom Roberts’ The Shearing of the Rams. Or possibly Leunig’s version:

Just a few more pages before I nod off. And before I knew it, the end was reachable. And achieved.

Wow! What a textbook – three textbooks in fact – of how to write a thriller. This is not Dan Brown’s exaggerated style, cheap but effective. This is the real deal. A good story, larger than life characters, exquisitely plotted in exotic locations with forensic detail.

The book pulls you up on its back and gallops away with you.

And then flies away up into the air. Pegasus carries you on and you hold on tight until the last page is turned and you are back on solid earth again.

The conclusion to the trilogy, and though it stands up on its own, it really helps if you have read the preceding two in the series. To help get the locations and especially the characters straight. There’s a blizzard of both in this book.

After the almost non-stop action of the previous book, a lot of the story is almost sedate, with back-room plotting, surveillance operations, meetings and meals. This is not to say that the plot is in any way less gripping – on the contrary – just that you are not going to get quite as solid a diet of gunshots and axeblows as in the previous book.

There is violence, certainly, but much of it is telegraphed in advance. Even the surprising tying up of one loose end.

A courtroom drama in the end chapters. Swedish law procedures are obviously quite different to English law. A lawyer is able to question several witnesses at once, for example. That struck me as quite odd, but it works in the book.

I’ve given it five stars. Not for the great literary merit of the writing. Realistically, it’s what you’d expect from a journalist. But for the intricate plot, the complex characters – and their relationships – and the way it drags the reader along without resorting to too many simple tricks.

View all my reviews >>

Following on from The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, this book increases the pace. By about half way through the book, you might as well give up, cancel everything, find a nook and a jug of strong coffee and finish it. You won’t be able to sleep or concentrate on anything else, and you will be of no use at work or to your family.

It helps if you have read the first book in the trilogy, for background and getting to know the characters, but this story stands alone. A few new characters are introduced – some explode onto the page, some are shadows and rumours – but they are all colourful.

It might help to take a piece of paper to keep everyone straight. By the end of the novel there are police officers, doctors, psychiatrists, journalists, lawyers and other villains coming out of the woodwork.

There are twists galore, and the reader is kept guessing for most of the book before it all comes together from several different directions. That’s half the fun – reading on until you find out the answer.

The other half is the action, and there’s plenty of it. Stieg Larsson is a master at describing what’s going on, giving plenty of forensic detail, right down to the pizza boxes in the corner, maintaining the pace, and cunningly concealing his surprises. There’s a scene in a warehouse that is beautifully set up and if you are not gasping for breath by the end of it, you need a checkup. Or more coffee.

A map of Sweden would help. Maybe someone has set up a Google Maps template for the action. I’m tempted to go visit Stockholm on my next trip to check out some of the locations. It sounds like a well-ordered, pleasant, comfortable place to live. Apart from the homicidal maniacs wandering around attacking people.

Echoes of Miss Smilla in the odd title character. A pintsize powerhouse, she has extraordinary abilities, and she needs every one of them and more to survive.

There’s a scene with a fox towards the end of the book that will stick in your memory for a long time.

I put this book down, drew breath, and reached for the next in the series. It doesn’t let up at all.

View all my reviews >>

There’s something about Kiva microfinance loans that fills me with optimism. A feeling obviously shared by the members of the team, dressed up for the photograph.

I’m wondering why they called their group Obama. I guess it’s the Tanzanian connection with US President Barack Obama. I dare say that the Kiva Team Obama thinks so as well, as they joined me in lending money to Saraya.

The group’s fifth loan through Kiva, aimed at improving the guesthouse Sayara runs in Dar Es Salaam. I managed to dig up the loan page for the second loan, and there’s another photo of the group:

I channel my taxi tips through Kiva, recycling the repayments into more loans and while it’s not much, at $US25 a shot, it’s something that makes me feel a useful part of a global team.

And isn’t that what it’s all about? We’re all part of the same planet, the same biosphere, the same human family. Individually, there’s not much any single person can do – unless maybe he’s the President of the USA – but together, Yes We Can!

They got in on the main city rank, now re-opened at a third the original size. “Can we stop at a bottle-o first?” one asked.

“Right-oh!” I replied. “But where are we going?”

“Formule 1″

“You beauty!” I thought to myself. The Formule 1 motel is one of those cheapo deals out on the highway. $59 a night for a basic room and the dining room is a vending machine.

But it’s a nice long fare.

We went through Braddon, stopping at the Bottle-O there. That’s the trade name, and it’s a good one. Well-stocked grog shop, free parking outside, off-licence to print money, it is.

One of the two young men went inside and I hit the “Pause” button on the meter. It was going to be a good fare and people who stay at cheap motels are reaching into their own pockets to count the pennies. I look after them.

The guy in the back seat, a fairly chunky sort of fella, caught sight of the “Route 66″ keyring I have bluetacked to the dashboard. It’s one I bought at the Route 66 museum in Chandler, OK last year, and I keep it there for daydreaming purposes. That half day spent exploring the old road between Tulsa and Oklahoma City was a very happy one!

“I’m going to ride Route 66 next year with my father,” he said. “We’ll pick up the Harleys in Detroit, ride them to LA, and ship them home.”

Wow! What a trip! This chap immediately had my attention.

His mate got back in, with a six pack of Jim Beams to help the night ahead go down, and we set off on Canberra’s own Mother Road. Northbourne Avenue.

We talked Route 66 and the USA all the way. The food, the cars, the motels, the people. I mentioned that I’m planning my own father-son trip along Route 66 next year. From the other side of the generation gap. Myself, my son and my daughter.

I had lusted after a rental Mustang, but looking at the reviews it sounds like it wouldn’t be as much fun for the third person, sitting in the cramped back seat, peering out through a couple of tiny side windows. I’d be doing a lot of the driving, but some of the time it would be me in the back seat, and I wanted to enjoy the experience.

So we’ll likely hire something with a bit of size and a bit of style. A Chrysler 300C would be ideal. Lots of room for people and baggage, space for extras, a bunch of buttons to press and an image that is unmistakably All-American.

Not as much fun as a Harley, to be sure, but I’m not a Harley kind of guy. I wished my passengers the best for the trip, put my foot down and whipped off in a cloud of dust for the airport, where I watched the planes climb into the night sky and sent my thoughts with them.

Earlier that day, a package from Amazon had arrived, containing a DVD: Route 66: Producer’s Picks.

Not a lot to do with Route 66 as such, but for the feeling of driving through Sixties America in a classy car, there’s nothing to beat it. The black and white scenes, the corny live-to-camera adverts, the unforgettable theme music, the guest appearances of later stars, the thought-provoking plots, and above all the lifestyle, it’s a pleasure to watch.

I’ve got a bunch of maps and guidebooks, any number of websites, and all my dreams to keep me going until next year.

Terry Pratchett likes jokes. He likes to set them up, he likes to – shazam! – reveal them, he likes to play with words. He writes entertainment, and he writes satire.

He’s light entertainment, occupying a peculiar halfway point between satirising the present and the genre of fantasy.

He’s also in that position where, after a successful career, he can write anything he wants and it will be bought by the millions. It must be hell being his editor. Hell that editors scramble for.

This book was suspiciously heavy for light entertainment. I’m not sure where it could be cut, though, just saying.

As with most of Pratchett’s Discworld stories, this one is an episode in an ongoing saga. Many of the characters and settings are familiar, we meet a few new ones, we chuckle at a few old jokes, we enjoy old ones.

There, that’s a quarter of the book done, just setting the stage for the rare new reader. There’s not a lot of detailed description – it’s all well-crafted – but we still get to learn about the King of the Golden River and the workings of the Patrician’s office – the Oblong Office – all over again.

We meet – or rather re-meet – Moist von Lipwig, from “Going Postal”. This time he’s making some real money and sharing adventures with some of the characters from the previous tale.

Terry Pratchett must have been inspired by the Global Financial Cooling. This book is all about money and banks and trust. In a typical Ankh-Morporkian way. The Royal Mint coins the currency, usually spending more on minting the coins than the coins are worth. Some of the smaller ones are handcrafted at enormous expense. The impressive facade of the Royal Bank conceals a great many dark secrets, not least the source of the glooping sound from the basement.

Von Lipwig takes all in hand, and at the occasional peril of his life and the gold-ish standard, finds a solution. Along the way there are golems, small dogs, small gods, necromancy under a new name, a wizard with round eyeglasses, things stuck in drawers, romance and ripe fingers.

It’s all good.

Nothing earthshaking. A few good jokes, a few good lines, a few good scenes.

View all my reviews >>

Rudd, naturally, denies being the source of the leaks.

I’m in mixed minds about our new Prime Minister. On the one hand, I like a lot of her attitudes to life. On the other, she’s a political animal ever since university, having had no “real” job (much like her Liberal opponent Tony Abbott, it must be said) and I find it hard to warm to such creatures.

Her policies are pragmatic – in that they solve immediate political problems – but hardly practical or cost-effective in the real world. Her “Building the Education Revolution” program was a classic case of inefficiency and waste – though at least it didn’t kill anybody the way that the prized Home Insulation Program did.

As for Rudd, I was prepared to give him a go, but when all that emerged from his office was pretty speeches, smiles and delays and denials – not a solid program in sight apart from the stimulus package of giving every taxpayer a few hundred dollars, which naturally was wildly popular – I gave up on him. As did the Labor Party, obviously.

And now we find that someone high up in the Rudd government – headed by a man notorious for making enemies and holding grudges over the decades, described as being “fuelled by rage” – has been leaking damaging information on the new Prime Minister during a crucial election campaign.

I’m sorry – I don’t want either of these people running the nation.

Not that I think Tony Abbott is a safe pair of hands neither. His proposal to prevent illegal immigration by “turning back the boats” seems to me to be a way to solve the problem by drowning asylum-seekers.