Heatwave Damage, Extreme picking

Granny Smith apples burnt by the summer heatwave........ the pear picking has ended, and what a season it was, the heat was unbelievable, in the eleven seasons I've done here it was really something else. Jenny and I resorted to a style of picking I had until now thought a little extreme, only for "hungry" pickers. To beat the heat we purchased "miners" lamps, worn on the head, and began our picking day an hour and a half before first light, thus despite having to retire early for the day due to heat stress we still picked our usual number of bins. The funny thing is we actually enjoyed it, and when the weather finally cooled down we continued the practice. Picking pears under the stars in peace and quiet........ now the burnt apples have begun, which can't be picked unless dry, and these autumn mornings can be dewy, so we start work at gentlemens' hours these days......

Fruit and Fire

The weather has been incredably hot. There were five consecutive days with maximum temperatures in excess of 40 degrees celcius. Then there was a cool change one day and it only got to 39 celcius. The contract pickers which were going to be Malaysian but turned out to be Chinese and Iraqi, as well as the handful of regular pickers including Jen and I, couldn't pick much past noon, when the heat became overpowering. Fruit was cooking on the trees. The trees were shutting down in the heat which stopped the fruit growing and has made problems with undersized fruit. Then a weather forcast a couple of days before saturday february 7 came out saying that the saturday would bring high winds and high temperatures in the mid 40's, raising the risk of possable bushfires in the tinder dry eucalypt bushland and fully cured grasslands of victoria. We were given the day off work. The day broke many records, Melbourne recorded it's hottest day on record at 46.4 degrees celcius (115.5 Farenheit). Here in Shepparton I saw thermometers reading 47 and 48 degrees. The fears of fire became a reality, and they have been widely reported elsewhere. It is the worst natural disaster in Australia since european settlement. The nearest fires to where we are were perhaps 100km away, and we were never in any danger here, there has just been alot of smoke turning the sun and moon red. There are still fires burning and it is a very sombre time here in Victoria at present.

2009 Victorian Bushfires
2009 Southeastern Australian Heatwave

things have taken a turn

There have been some developments down on the farm. There is a heatwave here, and in all of Victoria including Melbourne, four - perhaps five consecutive days are forcast to be over forty degrees celcius. This has affected the growth of the fruit. Warm nights help growth but extreme heat during the daytime shuts the trees down. It also gives the apples sunburn making them unsalable. The pear trees have a fantastic crop but it is mostly a very small size.
A bigger and more worrying development though, the farm I've worked the fruit season on each year for the past ten has merged with a larger company -"merged" was the word first circulated but as the days pass "takeover" might be closer to the truth, at least insofar as the running of the farm goes. The pickers quarters on the orchard here are by this time of year full, the lawn has tents scattered about, and I'm meeting people from Oz, Nz, Germany, France, Finland, UK, Japan, Korea and a handful of other nationalities. This year the place is all but deserted. The new "entity" will be using contract labour to do the picking, that is to say one person, a third party "contractor" will bring in a load of pickers who work for him to do the harvesting. The farmer pays him, he takes a cut from each bin picked and then pays the pickers. Most contractors are just parasites who make a sugarbag o' money through other peoples hard work. It seems this contractor will be bringing a load of Malaysians to do the picking. We will probably have no picking job here after this season, and the farm owner has said as much, though at least he has offered to find us a spot on another farm if we want.

Harvest report

The heat is on now, we've already had a couple of days (including today) into the low 40's celcius. The apricots are finished, peaches and pears are just beginning, but the heat is making life uncomfortable, especially being out under the sun all day.

Taiwanese tucker

The week before Christmas

It's been a strange summer in Shepparton, hardly a day over 30 C so far, when normally we would have already hit the 40 C mark more than once alrealy, and the wind had been blowing alot making the past month seem more like a South Island summer than a northern Victorian one. There has been rain at least once a week, also very unusual for this time of year, it's great for the apples and pears but has caused big problems with cherries and early apricots, rain at harvest time causes the fruit to split, the cherries become unsaleable and the apricots only good for jam.

Little to say

Not much to report. Working on the main farm monday to friday, a different farm saturday and sunday. Been thinning peaches, apples, plums, and repairing irrigation sprinklers. That's about it at the moment.

Adult Engrish/Chinglish site

Well worth a look.......

http://adult.engrish.com/

Australia

Xu Xu is back in the land of Oz. I arrived back to my apartment on the orchard, the front door unopened since I was last there in early june. I was greeted by the daddy long legs spiders which had woven their webs throughout the three rooms, covering me as I enter. There are also numerous black house spiders, which I always take as a good sign as meaning there are no poisonous white tail spiders in the rooms. This could just be some class of urban myth but it is known that the black house spider is the favourite prey of the white tail. The flyscreen edges are the favourite dwelling places of the mean looking black house spiders, which keep to themselves and I like to have around, as they are very adept at catching any flies that manage to get inside. Sometimes I catch a fly or two and throw them into a web and watch spidey come out and grab it. There are soooo many flies outside, which is par for the course in these parts.
Work - currently I'm busy thinning peaches, which will be finished this week and followed by some apple thinning before the first harvesting of the season begins in a couple of weeks with apricots.
The crop is looking good this year with the exception of the plums which are disappointing.

Chinglish part eleventy nine

Thanks again to engrish.com

Last post from Taiwan ..... for now

This will be my last post from Taiwan for some time. Tomorrow I fly to Australia to work in the fruit orchards of northern Victoria's Goulburn Valley.
I leave just as ex president Chen has been arrested and detained pending charges of graft, bribery, forgery, money laundering and illegal possesion of state assets. He is also one of the few world leaders with the guts to stand up to the Chinese communist party and it's goverment. His arrest is making news around the world, and depending on the editorial stance of various news outlets he is either a crook or one of the few world leaders with the balls to stand up to the Chinese. Which is he? He is both.
The Taiwanese judicial system will deal with him, fairly or otherwise, but to many he will always be the hero of Taiwanese independence.
I believe that that the Taiwanese government is correct in choosing to engage with the mainland government in dialogue, but I also believe that Taiwan is, and must be recognised by the rest of the world as, an independent nation, providing that that is the will of the Taiwanese people.
As for me, my posts will likely become slightly less frequent, as I will have more limited internet access, and will be busy with work, but I'll do my best to post regularly. I'm yet to replace my stolen camera, the crazy exchange rate fluctuations of the currencies I use mean that it is cheaper for me to buy the camera I want in Australia rather than in Taiwan.
So it's goodbye Taiwan, for now anyway.

Taitung, Chenggong, Hualien - 台東 成功 花蓮市

Man it was good to get outta the rat race of Taipei! Even though this weekend I'll be back in the boondocks working again among the trees of the Zurcas orchards in rural Victoria, I wanted to head down Taiwan's rugged and relatively sparsely populated east coast. I took a train from Taipei Main Station, following the coastline down to Hualien then heading inland passing through the Eastern Rift Valley, a land of tropical fruit orchards and rice fields. Stunning scenery. I arrived in Taitung (pronounced Taidong) to discover that the hostel I was planning to stay at had shut down, so after wandering about for a while I checked into a cheap but clean and friendly hotel for three days. Taitung is a very laid back coastal town, the beach is clean but rips make it unsafe for swimming. There is an airforce base just out of town and military jets often fly low and slow over the town on their approach to the runway. I spent alot of time on the beach and in a coastal forest park with shady paths, birdwatching huts, a butterfly reserve and rowing lake. One evening around dusk while sitting close to the surf upon one of the many great ugly concrete wave breakers placed here and there along the foreshore I saw a waterspout for the first time. A great tornado of black cloud perhaps a kilometre offshore lifting water from the oceans surface. Wow. Leaving Taitung suitably relaxed and less pale skinned than when I arrived I caught a local bus up to the fishing port of Chenggong, the town itself is nothing special but the port with it's large and small fishing boats coming and going was a fine sight. The harbour itself is protected by large concrete walls in the ocean - neccesary protection from the frequent summer typhoons. I was lucky to be there for the auctioning of the days catch. I saw swordfish, yellowfin tuna, barracutta, and perhaps two dozen other sorts of fish which I have no idea the names of, black, blue, silver, orange and even a few stripey ones. It was a real treat. Saw some hard as nails fisher men and women too, harder than nails I reckon. Even the women chew betelnut in these parts. They didn't pay much attention to me though, they were just busy getting on with their tasks. I saw a couple of really cheap looking hotels in Chenggong, but they didn't look too inviting so I continued up the coast by bus to Hualien, the largest city on the east coast. I had the large comfortable bus to myself for half the journey, and was joined by another passenger who bummed a Yuan(NT$) from me for the rest. Oh, there were a dozen or so aboriginal junior high school students who got on at one small town and who got off at various spots in the next, the whole time engaging in lively banter with the driver. The east coast is home to many of Taiwan's aboriginals of which there are nine tribes. There is evidence that suggests they are related to New Zealand Maori. They certainly look the same. The coastal road offers some stunning scenery, and traffic during weekdays is sparse, it reminds me of parts of New Zealand's South Island west coast. Spent a night in a hotel in Hualien, where I visited last year, enjoyed it just as much as last time. Perhaps if and when I return to continue my Chinese studies it could be at the university there...... Taipei's charms seem to have worn off for me. At about eleven thirty I recieved a call to my hotel room asking if I needed a massage. What service! The whole time I was away I spoke nothing but Chinese, which was hugely satisfying. I'm now back in Taipei for my last few days in Taiwan - on friday night I catch a plane to Melbourne, Australia......

The American Federal Reserve should be watched very carefully

They are currently engaged in some very dodgy business......

A lot happening, but I'm heading off for a few days

There's a lot happening at the mo', here in Taiwan, in the world, in the life of Xu Xu. Taiwan is hosting a high level official from mainland China for important talks, for the first time since the end of the Chinese civil war sixty years ago. This is a fantastic development and a (not "an")historic event. Unfortunately the pro independence Democratic Progressive Party is opposed to the talks and is behind most of the protests being organised. The DPP's view is that China is the communist enemy and should not be engaged in dialogue. My personal view is that Taiwan should be recognised as an independent country, and when I first came to Taiwan I supported the pro independence DPP. I now have very little faith in them, their former president, Chen Shui Bian is a corrupt crook, a thief and embezzler, many of their members of parliament are prone to violent outbursts and extremely stupid statements, as are many of the partys' supporters. There are a great many thugs among their members and supporters. I believe daialoge with the Chinese can only be helpful to the current situation. The Chinese representative is under heavy police guard, to protect him from irrational DPP protestors. It's very sad for me, a supporter of Taiwan independence, to see this.

There is an election in the United States of America tomorrow, the result of which will have ramifications around the globe. There is also an upcoming election in my home country of New Zealand, which the rest of the world probably couldn't give a damn about.

As for Xu Xu, he has perhaps spent more than enough time in the megopolis of Taipei. His Chinese language studies have finished, he went to an evangelical mass conversion and a buddhist retreat in the space of a couple of days, and seems to have started referring to himself in this blog in the third person. It's still another couple of weeks before I head to the isolation of the Australian orchard for another season of fruit and flies, and later in feburary a world of backpackers who will come to struggle with the same. I'm escaping the city tomorrow morning, heading for the east coast backwater of Taitung for a few days. I'll be away from the internet and away from as much Taiwan and world news as I can manage until about the tenth.

Taipei Franklin Graham Festival

At about this time of year Jenny and I as well as our other arts and crafts market friends are making preparations for a government sponsored circus festival, which has been running these past couple of years, held at the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei. We were all quite puzzled at the decision not to hold the event this year, as it has proven to be very successful in the past. I was walking through the CKS Hall area today, and found that a huge festival is indeed taking place, starting tonight. However it is no circus festival, it is the Taipei Franklin Graham Festival. I had no idea who this Franklin Graham is or why there should be a festival in his name, but it turns out that Franklin Graham is the son of evangelist Billy Graham, and he is on a crusade around the world continuing his fathers work. Franklin Graham has called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion." And on september 14 2001 on CNN he stated "And I think we're going to have to use every -- and I hate to say it, hellish weapon in our inventory, if need be, to defeat these [terrorists]. But let's use the weapons we have, the weapons of mass destruction if need be and destroy the enemy."
This guy seems to me to be some kind of intolerant religious fundementalist nutjob, but I could be wrong. It seems strange that the Taipei government would give such exposure to this kind of crackpot, but perhaps it's on the grounds of religious freedom of expression. I might wander down there tonight to see what it's all about. I wonder if he will be asking people for money.

Japanese Swimming Pool

See it HERE, thanks to Japan,Baby

Xu Xu's big day in Zhuhai

The grand day began in Macau, that outpost of Portugal which still retains so much fine european architecture, the plaster and paintwork constantly under attack from the humid air and rising damp, where a good coffee and a decent slice of bread can be found in the same establishment, that gambling haven now drawing in more bucks and bigger developments than Las Vegas, like The Venetian with it's indoor canals complete with puffy clouded blue skies painted on and european featured employees singing and punting camera toting tourists up and around the bend, while less game punters look on with amazement, content to browse the super luxury brand stores catering to the mega rich or casino lucky or desparate... yes it began here on a local crowded bus, which was unneccesary really, I could have gone to any big casino and boarded a free shuttle bus to the frontier (or to another casino, the ferry or helipad to Hong Kong) but ol' Xu Xu wanted local an' he got it. The frontier pays lip service to the days gone by, there is the old border gate on the Macau side, which is now just a monument, this border (pictured from the Chinese side) is an airport-esque development which during opening hours has a constant stream of mostly mainland chinese coming and going, you might want to allow an hour to get through..... the city on the other side is Zhuhai, gateway to China, and also a "special economic zone". All this meant to me was that I could get a special three day visa to enter Zuhai at the border, without the hassle of getting a normal Chinese visa. Just needed to find the office in the immigration building, fill a form, hand over either HK$150 or RMB$160 (Macau Pataca not accepted) and wait five minutes. Sorry Americans and British, you're looking at about HK$1000 for the same visa. While waiting in line to have passports examined we are entertained by a video featuring Jackie Chan and an Australian family with the message that buying counterfeit goods is a really bad idea and could get you into whole lot of trouble.
Once through (actually before) the plate of hot chillies I ate the night before while half cut caught up with me, so I made for the conveniences. I had heard from many sources about the state of toilets in China so thought I had better use the government's best in the immigration building. It wasn't a good sign of things to come. There was one western sit down type (although I do also like the asian squat), but the seat had been stolen and the last time I had seen such filth was in a small Moroccan town. At least there was a door. No paper though so I decided to wait. Right on the Chinese side is a two storied underground shopping mall. This place is big. As soon as you go down the escatator you will find a miriad of stores selling cigarettes, liquor, food, clothing, bags and watches, the last three at least for the most part being FAKES. If you are in the market for some counterfeit Rolexes, Omegas, iPhones, Louis Vuitton, Prada, you name it, then this is a good place to start. You need to have honed your haggling skills, and quality varies from poor to pretty good, but it's a fun place to spend a couple of hours, the shopkeepers will be constantly calling out to you, some will speak english, many won't.
Perhaps now I will write a few words concerning public behaviour. Living in Taiwan I have become accustomed to a certain amount of spitting, pushing, and general rudeness. Perhaps my standards are too high, but there is no nice way to say this. Many Chinese men are purely disgusting in the way they behave in public. Spitting, swearing, discarding rubbish, pushing, I don't want to generalise, but even if it's only 30% of the population it's more than enough people who show less respect for others than your average street dog or cockroach. There can be an amusing side to this, when in Macau I happened to be walking past a bus stop when a large group of Chinese workers had finished work for the day on a maaasive casino development, and were getting on the bus. The scrum was amazing, I've never before seen people climbing over each other to get on a bus! One bloke would get on, then grab the arm of his mate still three people back, and try to pull him over the top of the others! It actually meant that the bus filled up very slowly, as it was difficult for any one person to get his whole body through the door!
Leaving the underground mall I went for a walk around the local streets. Perhaps I picked the wrong street, as less than an hour later after buying a cache of toilet paper and finding another grotty toilet in a department store I discovered a zip open in the back of my bag and my camera gone. A few days later that pisses me off more than it did at the time, the loss of the pictures more than the stolen camera.
I struck an arc up a narrow alley which took me past a local brothel, the girls lined up outside for my perusal. Macau has it's share of these too, when I'm with Jenny I don't attract any attention but when alone it's a different story. In Macau however the girls merely called out to me, here in Zhuhai I was grabbed by the wrist and prevented from walking any further! It was quite amusing and after a few seconds the girl let me go. Prostitution is open, obvious, and big business both in Zhuhai and Macau. Even in the Venetian casino in Macau, the biggest in the world, I was approached by a girl asking if I wanted a massage.
That afternoon I stopped for a beer in the pedestrian street which is lined with kiosks which double as bars and cafes. The friendly serving girl was from Hunan province and she told me about her time in Zhuhai, about the sort of people who go there, the prostitution scene, the counterfeit goods (a couple of years ago there was a spate of fake beer). She didn't have a passport and had never been to Macau or Beijing or anywhere outside China. She had also had her purse stolen on the same street where my camera was taken, and said it was a notorious strip for pickpockets.
While having my beer I saw a local cop encouraging a homeless man to leave the pedestrian street by kicking him in the arse when wouldn't walk fast enough, a local prostitute finish her carton of drink and just throw it down on the street, not drop it, but but give it a good chuck in a busy street as soon as the straw came out of her mouth.
At around eight in the evening I made my way back over to the Macau side of the border, wondering if they would have any interest in whether or not anybody had stocked up on counterfeit goods. They were not interested, although I never saw any such products for sale in Macau.
Despite having my camera nicked, I actually had a fun day in Zhuhai, and would go back given the opportunity......

Back from Macau

I've just come back from a week in Macau (and a day across the border in China). I had a great time there, given the choice of visiting Hong Kong or Macau I would take Macau every time. While many of the Portugese residents left around the time of the handover to China, parts of the town still have a very european feel about them, and the old Chinese streets still have a very "old China" feel. And then there are the massive Casinos, drawing tens of thousands of mainland Chinese every day into Macau to gamble. I don't intend to write about the history of Macau, there is a junk load of information in the net. I was going to put up a couple in interesting photographs, but when I was across the Chinese border in Zhuhai, I had been there less than an hour and a pickpocket stole my camera. I can buy a new camera (in fact I surprised myself at my lack of emotional response to the discovery of the loss) but I lost a shit load of un backed up photos. That is still annoying me, as every day I remember different photos I had stored on an almost full 2GB memory card. Anyway, I'll write more about the trip in the next couple of days.

Strange, I did lots of "everything else" and had quite a good day.......

More on Romanisation of Chinese Characters

Romanisation of Chinese characters in Taiwan is a bit complicated. The "world standard" if there is one is hanyu pinyin, which the government here (KMT) has just declared the official system. The previous govt. (DPP) under Chen Shui Bian was fiercely nationalist and anti mainland China (considered them the communist enemy) and didn't wan't to use the system used by mainland China so stupidly decided to make up their own system called tongyong pinyin. The system itself has both advantages and disadvantages over hanyu pinyin, but as hanyu has become standard in non Chinese speaking countries it put Taiwan at a disadvantage as documents produced in Taiwan using tongyong could only be understood with some difficulty and confusion. There are still alot of companies and schools using older systems as well, such as wade-giles , yale, chinese postal map, MPS II , and others. Complicating things in Taiwan is the fact that city and county governments might be either KMT or DPP, so despite the national government declaring Hanyu the official system, it's up to local government to erect public signage, and individual companies can employ any system they choose, probably depending on what they have historically used or their political leanings. Also, updating romanised signage is not a high priority here, there are not large numbers of foreigners in Taiwan. Students wishing to study the Chinese language in Taiwan for the most part need to learn a phonetic system called bopomofo which takes about a week to learn (that is to say you will be given a week to learn it) and is far superior to any of the romanisation systems. It also can be placed right next to the chinese character so pronunciation of an unknown character can be immediately known without refering to a different text or dictionary. It is also a convenient input method for computers and text messages.
Wikipedia has an excellent article on Romaniation of Chinese in Taiwan HERE.