TASHY TRAVELS

Every Sunday, I am going to upload a post about the different countries I have visited and/or lived in since 2002.

I can assure you of some interesting stories.

AUSTRALIA 2 - PART SEVEN

This last blog about my time in Western Australia is a little bit angry, in so far as I ever bother to get angry. I have a habit of always wanting to trust my fellow-man but never really believing I should. Quite often I am eventually proved right and so it was here. It also occurred, much later, with the girlfriend I shared these adventures with but she took things to a new height, or possibly depth.

In July 2004 we moved from our accommodation in a family home to another house-stay but further outside Fremantle. I had celebrated my birthday by having a picnic on the beach, something I could rarely manage in England. Here, it was mid-July, mid-winter and the temperature was mid-twenties. And soon I would be middle-aged. I do plan to live to 120.

At that same time we parted company with our web-master. He was an English guy we had been introduced to in Poland and, after having gone through 3 Polish companies who all failed to do what they said on the tin, it seemed that at last we had found someone with whom we could work.

But, once we had left Poland, things didn’t go as planned. We wanted to update our site weekly on a certain day. It hardly ever happened. There was always a problem. I was losing patience and he may have noticed this in my emails and calls. Then we were subject to a very clever, but rather stupid, con trick. At the time, I didn’t know that I was also being conned in another way too. The guy told us that he had managed to get us sponsorship from Apple. Brilliant, we thought. It would give us about 40% of what we needed for our first year of travel. He also announced that he had been back to England to sort this Apple thing out and visited Subaru who had also offered a car.

Suspicious, although with no proof, of other things that were happening far closer to me, I was wary. All of this sponsorship happened shortly after I had told the guy I was unhappy with his work. I asked for a copy of the sponsorship agreement and he emailed a contract that looked genuine. It had Apple headings, was fairly legal in its terminology, and needed our signature. I did notice that the wording was similar to that I had used in the contract we had with him but legal language is legal language. I asked when we would receive the money. He gave me the name of his contact at Apple and said we should just let him sort things out.

But the website was still not being updated when we asked. By now, we had many contacts in WA and we were saying look at this and look at that, and nothing was there. We had this contract with this guy and I didn’t want to break it so I provoked a reaction from him and he told us he didn’t want to work with us any more. In the rather strained phone call, I asked about the sponsorship and he said he didn’t know if it would go ahead if he wasn’t involved. This surprised me as I didn’t think a junior in Apple, his contact, would have a say once the company had sent out a formal contract. I asked for a phone number to speak to her.

By the way it is never my intention to name names of people who have deceived or cheated me in any of these blogs. I know some people today, and one in particular, thinks it is clever to publish all manner of lies about other people. The police in many countries will tell you that in many ways they are powerless although legislation is being introduced here in the UK to make such posts, blogs or statements a criminal offence and hopefully it may be back-dated. To me it is just plain bullying even if the statements had any truth at all. It’s not even remotely clever although it can be very, very funny if you react to it in the right way. I actually know of someone who when they split from a partner, found all his email contacts and sent out a vitriolic, vindictive letter to his friends, telling them confidential things about this guy. Most people who received it found it a great laugh and in the end the joke, and indeed the humiliation, was on the sender. As my mother used to say, “you can’t change a leopard’s spots”, and I am sure this person would do the same thing again and again. For my part, I follow something I once read Sir Richard Branson said and ignore such behaviour and don’t stoop to react, respond or, most importantly, be affected by it but I can see how those with less inner strength and less certainty in their own actions might be really upset and stressed by such brutal behaviour against them. After all only I know the real truth of what I have done, why, how and when and I never did an educational project with my first wife nor have I ever been sued by anyone in my whole life.

But back to this guy, I immediately phoned the number he had given us at Apple and asked for the lady. No one had heard of her, So I phoned Apple in London and explained the situation. They had no knowledge of any sponsorship deal. I sent them the contract and they said that in Europe they did not even use the word ‘Apple’ in contracts. I don’t remember what they did use. The lady was most apologetic, partly because she hadn’t thought about times and phoned me at 4.00 am. She said I could take it further but there wasn’t really anything they could do, although it did seem a criminal offence. We tried to do something but being 12,000 miles away made it virtually impossible. It should have been a lesson learned but sadly, as you may find out, it wasn’t. But now it is.

So, we didn’t have the deals we thought, which was annoying but not fatal. The worse thing was, we didn’t have anyone to update our website. The guy had been doing it all by uploading the code rather than using a content management system. He had given us the passwords to access it. I think it was now around the beginning of September and just 5 months till we were hoping to start. There was, and is, excluding my children, only one person I ever trust to do a job properly. He annoys me immensely by being a perfectionist but I know if a job has to be done at a certain time, he will do it. So he did.

I decided to learn HTML and do our own website. First I checked what had been done. Then I started making little changes to see what happened. It was a definite suck-it-and-see approach. I got a book from the library. My humble apologies to Fremantle library because I forgot to take it back. By early October I had completely rewritten our website. I worked sometimes 18 hours a day. But it was there and we began to upload the projects the schools had done.. Having done all this, we made a big relaunch thing and had coverage in Fremantle papers. The Mayor agreed to become a patron and the council helped us as much as they could.

The newspaper article about the project was quite funny. We had not yet been interviewed when the photographer arrived. He had been given a brief précis of what we were doing. He suggested meeting at the harbour. Nice background I thought. He lined us up and took some shots. Then he moved us around a bit and asked which boat was ours. ‘We don’t have a boat’, I said. ‘Well how are you sailing around Australia’, he asked? He had assumed that we were sailing around Australia instead of travelling around.

By the way, I make a habit of this do-it-yourself approach. In the 1980’s I learnt video editing because I wanted to make one for training purposes and no one would do it the way I wanted. Then, back in Poland, when we made those pilot TV programmes, it wasn’t being edited as I wanted so I spent time in the production company studio learning Pro-Cut and editing one of them myself.

Then, all my long hours of hard work were rewarded. As you found out a few days ago, November was festival time in Fremantle. In fact, it was the annual Fremantle Festival. We were asked if we would be able to attend all the events and upload our site, daily, with photos and a written report of what we had seen. Whilst it was topical for locals to follow, and look out for a photo of themselves, it was intended mainly to attract attention, world-wide, preparation for the centenary celebrations the following year. From our point of view, it was superb practice for when we were travelling.

Everything looked really promsing and 2005 started with a birthday. My girlfriend was 30. We had a bit of a party at a friend’s flat overlooking the Indian Ocean and I tried to get candles for a cake but the shop had no number 3. I improvised by placing two crossed sparklers between a 6 and 5, this is turning into a Maths lesson again, and it worked beautifully. Except when the sparklers burned out, it looked as though she was 56, making her older than me at the time.

Then, a few days later, we saw, almost first hand, how perilous life can be in Australia. Bush fires. Large areas of bush were burning near Perth. The blaze was, it transpired, started on purpose by an arsonist sometime on a Saturday and was rated among the worst to affect Perth in decades. It burnt through about 15,200 hectares of state forest and, in the same area, a second, separate fire had burnt 1,300 hectares. Over 300 fire personnel, trucks and four water-dumping helicopters were fighting the blaze.

Thick smoke was covering Perth and was severely affecting visibility and penetrating homes and offices through air conditioning systems. Something that was essential during the hot weather to keep people cool was now becoming a health hazard. The smoke was also creating hazardous conditions for the city’s elderly and people with respiratory and heart conditions. People were advised to limit the time they spent outdoors and the ones with health problems, children and the elderly, were told to stay indoors as the dense smoke and ash caused coughing, shortness of breath and was obviously dangerous for people with these conditions. Even where we were staying, some miles away, you could see bits of ash, flying in the air and we could see, far in the distance, a big white mushroom-like cloud.

It’s incredibly sad to see the forests disappearing in fire, knowing there is so little we can do to save it and knowing that just one person, one human being, caused it. It reminded me at the time of a song by John Denver I particularly liked. It’s all about falling in love with nature and also about those who deface, exploit or just destroy it, often for monetary gain. It actually wasn’t written by Denver but by a lady called Tracey Wickland about a situation in her own area.

It was also around this time that the tsunami had hit parts of Asia. The tragedies of all this made the disaster that befell us seem pretty insignificant although, at the time, we were pretty devastated. As I have said, we were ready to start our journey in February and, before returning to Europe for a visit, we went along to the immigration offices in Perth to renew our visas. I didn’t foresee any major problem; we had supporting letters from several people and organisations. We sat down with the immigration officer and he took our passports and checked through them. Then he left the room, carrying my girlfriend’s passport. He was gone for some time and when he returned the news was not good. Apparently, unknown to me because I don’t read Polish, she had clause on her visa saying that although it was a 12 month visa, she had to leave after 3 months. I know this sounds weird and, to be honest, I never understood it, but it was there.

He told us that she was officially in the country illegally and she would have to leave. Once we explained the situation, he was as helpful as he could be, gave us 10 days to sort things out, but there was no change. We had to go and, at that stage, couldn’t return. In fact, we had planned to leave then anyway, having got a deal with Royal Brunei on a couple of return tickets but, unless we could persuade the higher authorities quickly, we would not be allowed back into Australia for three years.

I immediately set about trying to appeal the decision and, indeed, had lodged that appeal before we had to leave. It was a sad way to go because, this time, I had really enjoyed the life, scenery and work possibilities in Australia. I still believed we would have been better off in England but we had almost made it work ‘down under’.

I may not have mentioned this but ever since I was 19 I had always wanted to go and live in Australia. In those days, it seemed such a long way away, no, there were aeroplanes, but my mother said what would happen if she was taken ill, she might never see me again. I should point out that she was younger than I am now and lived for another 27 years. Still, sometimes we do what other people want and I did. For the rest of her life she kept telling me she didn’t know why I hadn’t gone to Australia, I would have loved it. Mothers can be a bit forgetful over certain things can’t they?

And again here, I had done, quite willingly, what someone else had wanted and it looked as though, yet again, I was having to do a rethink. We left Fremantle at the end of January, the temperature was 41C. After a longer than planned stop in Vienna, I thought we flew in at 6.00 am and our connecting flight to Poland was at 7.20 am when in fact it was at 7.20 pm, we got back to Poznan. The temperature; –20C. I was kinda dressed for Perth and people gave me funny looks. By the way, you may know I am a bit of a stickler for the correct use of English so using the word ‘kinda’ may surprise you. Some years ago a Canadian friend of mine, when scripting an imaginary conversation between us because she got bored waiting for my email reply to hers, had me say ‘kinda’ and I kinda liked it.

But what I didn’t kinda like was the situation we were now in. A whole years work seemed to have been wasted. I suppose, in as much as every experience makes you a better person, our time in Fremantle wasn’t wasted. In fact, if you look at the work done by the kids, my own learning curve and the people we had met, it was a bonus. But, I had been doing all that to set out around Australia and then onwards with our project. That had gone, or so it seemed. Where to now? What now?

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