Travellin' Penguin

Focus on Dervla Murphy

Posted on September 30, 2021 by TravellinPenguin

How I admire this woman. Really…….admire……her.

Dervla Murphy is no doubt familiar to anyone who reads a lot. However if one reads a great deal of travel writing she is one of the very best.

I have heard of her for years. Maybe even read one of her books years ago but not sure. Maybe I just think I have read her as I have read a lot of travel writing in my life.

I downloaded this book as an Audible last week as I was becoming tired of books about books, readers on trains, readers in libraries and it all became a bit of a melting pot that seemed to wear thin as the quality of some of these books were less than ideal.

I have always enjoyed Travel writing or diaries the most as an audible format. I have come to the conclusion unless one sits right down and listens or is confined to a space, novels seem to be harder to follow as an audible text. That could be me though as I do get distracted much more with audible anything than written words.

So on to Dervla. I am listening to her 1965 published book Full Tilt. She buys a bicycle and names it Rozinante (Ros for short) after Don Quixote’s horse. She is Irish and living in Ireland. In 1963 she decides to set off riding Ros from Ireland to India going eastwards across Europe.

In 1963 single women didn’t do things like this. No mobile phones, no internet, no money to speak of.

Dervla Murphy grew up poor. She left school at age 14 to care for her disabled mother. At the age of 10 her parents gave her a second hand bicycle and her grandfather sent her a second hand atlas of the world (Wikipedia).

She later stated in life she was never afraid of her trips though she did have some pretty harrowing experience. Over the years she was attacked by wolves in the former Yugoslavia, (this happens in Full Tilt and she pulls her pistol out of her pocket and shoots one, killing it and scaring the other two away); threatened by soldiers in Ethiopia, and robbed in Siberia. In Full Tilt she awakes one night in her small accommodation and finds a very large muslim man uncovering her in bed and as he climbs in beside her, again she pulls her pistol from under her pillow and shoots into the ceiling and watches him leave the room very quickly.

She had her critics in life. She had a child in 1968 and chose to raise her daughter alone. This was not an acceptable practice in Ireland. She made enough money from her writing she didn’t care and she her daughter travelled more as her daughter aged.

She was also quite political regarding activities in Ireland, women’s rights and regarding the plight of refugees.

Evidently she wrote an autobiographical book called Wheels Within Wheels in 1979 and I will certainly be following up with that one if I can find it.

The guardian featured her towards her later years once she decided to give up travel writing. She is celebrating her 90th birthday next month at the end of November. What an incredible life she has had. The link to the Guardian article is here.

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Other news in Tasmania? Not much. Spring has arrived with a bit of fanfare. Lots of wind and rain. More rain expected in the next few days. Enough to cause floods I understand. The temperatures are still chilly with bits of sun here and there but not enough to get used to. So doing a lot of reading and have continued with walking and exercise.

We woke up not this last week but it only lasted an hour or so.

I have had some good news on the photography front but will discuss that later. An excursion, a competition win I hadn’t expected, a new illustration of the Penguin and a friend from a fellow photography friend. Will share that in the next post.

Will consider renting out for a weekend.

Dogs are fine but Ollie wants to go out every ten minutes to see if the sun is out and he can lie next to his fence and warm himself in the sun. He comes back to the house ten minutes later and bangs on the door to come in. He loves lying outdoors in the sun but hates the cold grass. Not a weather tolerant dog at all. Peanut seems more outdoorsy than Ollie at times. She never cares how muddy she gets and I recently submitted a photo of her to the Sydney Morning Herald Weekend magazine. They have a type of good news gallery and their email about the article happened to arrive in my inbox at the time I was looking at a photo of Peanut with mud on her face. The article was saying to people send in any photos or other items that are ‘feel good’ items. So I popped Peanut’s photo in and received an email back a couple of days later they will definitely put it in their gallery. The journalist thought it was cute so I will finish on that note.

Until next time…….stay well and keep smiling even if you do have to grit your teeth!!

Animals, Fiction, Non Fiction, Pam's Photography

A Bit of Delightfulness

Posted on September 18, 2021 by TravellinPenguin

There are many wombats at Cradle Mountain. Wombats have a hard shell on their rear so when in their burrows they can raise up and crush a predator if needed. They also have a pouch that faces backwards.

I edited a few more photographs from the Cradle Mountain Trip. I have a really cute dogs photo that makes me laugh and I hope you will chuckle a bit.

I have a few books to briefly write about and just some natter going on in my head. So let’s get started.

We’ll talk about a couple of books first

I am now 99 pages into Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman for the Fullers Bookshop shared reading. We read some of it in the reading group on Monday. Our facilitator, Ebi is a German man who really studied this book for more than a year and knows his Russian/German history inside out. We stopped several times to discuss features of the story or to hear some more history.

Then we had to read another section at home as it is such a large book and we have 12 weeks to finish it. I am really enjoying this Russian novel about the war between the Russians and Germans. I might add we aren’t doing too bad either with the Russian names either.

I have given up on the Shirley Hazard Collected short stories because I don’t have the patience for them. She is an excellent writer and her characters are developed well and her locations are descriptive. I do like the writing and will read other novels by her. However these stories were written in the 1950s for the most part and with all that goes on socially around women’s issues (and many other issues) in Australia, I am having difficulty going back to the time in a book at the moment.

Most of the stories have been about men lusting for younger women, boring descriptions of their wives, unrequited love. The entire book is a description of disappointment (which she does very well) but against the suffering endured in the Russian book I just want them to all go away. I made a small chart of the type of men and women described in the 40% of the book I did read.

I have been reading about the short listed Booker nominees this week too. Jason Steger who is Literary Editor for the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald has a newsletter that he sends each Friday. This week’s newsletter is about all of the problems with the Booker Prize, the criticism, the rules. I found it very interesting.

As I can’t attach this newsletter I will send it to anyone as an email to anyone who would like to read it. Email me at: travellinpenguin at gmail dot com.

So speaking of the Booker shortlisted books, you can find them online with google, (Booker shortlist 2021). I won’t go into the shortlist today though there are a few I’d like to read. I did start with Patricia Lockwood’s book No-one is Talking About This. It is very much stream of consciousness around the world of Twitter. As I don’t use Twitter and have never been interested in it I found the book bored me to tears. I actually downloaded the Kindle version. As I didn’t care for her book Priestdaddy that we read for book group a year or so ago. I didn’t want to spend a lot on this one. I read 35 to 40% of it then threw it down in frustration. I really couldn’t bear it. I looked up the reviews on Good Reads and found about 50/50 between ‘love it’ and ‘hate it’. I think I am too old for it. I’m sure she’ll find her audience who praise it but it won’t come from here. I was actually within the time period I could return it to Amazon. As I never return things to Amazon they allowed a refund which I happily accepted.

In the meantime I heard a podcast about Anthony Bourdain and as I’ve not read him before I downloaded his older book Kitchen Confidential. I began that last night and am really enjoying it. It is biographical as well as discussing the restaurant business, warts and all. The two American men on the podcast I was listening to, There Will Be Books, gave a good description of what they enjoyed about the book and it isn’t all peaches and cream when it comes to criticising the chef or wait staff. You have been warned. Bourdain has another book out recently, put together by others since his death and Good Reads reviewers pan it as an overrated grab for money on his name so I wasn’t interested. Kind of what happened to Harper Lee’s last book published after her death.

My copy of Womankind magazine arrived this week. It features the Arab world this month and I look forward to delving into it. Womankind is published bi-monthly.

That’s it on books for the moment.

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Now on to photography. I have a few other photos I edited from Cradle Mountain that showcases our wonderful wilderness areas in Tasmania.

Enjoy the photos. I was quite happy with them.

The wilderness area is full of these ferns. So green and beautiful.

This photo was taken by Kerri Huang, who gave me permission to post. She was a fellow
member of our tour at Philosopher Falls.
It is a truly beautiful area and there may be an elf or a hobbit who lives here. Just wonderful.

Next I have a wonderful snippet about Peanut and Ollie. I take the bus into town two or three times a week to go to the gym or run errands. Mr Penguin is often off to his gym and doing his errands so the dogs are home. As they play hard in the mornings they are ready for a sleep in the afternoon. They curl up on the bed that is under the window in our front room that is on the second story above our garage. Great views all around.

They have figured out one of us is often on the bus. The bus goes by on weekdays every 30 to 40 minutes. When they hear it, they pop up from their bed, look out the window and watch for a few minutes to see if we come walking up the drive. If not I assume they go back to sleep. If we are on it, they follow with their little faces and greet us enthusiastically at the door. No-one is ever happier to see us than our dogs. I snapped this photo with my phone last week as I walked up the driveway.

Well, that is about all that happened this week. I look forward to seeing what others are doing with their time and their reading.

Fiction, Pam's Photography

Cradle Mountain Part I

Posted on September 12, 2021September 12, 2021 by TravellinPenguin

Well, I survived the Cradle Mountain photography instructional tour. We had lots of fun and our guide, Luke O’Brien did a brilliant job of organising, instructing and generally putting up with our quirks for four days.

Weather was laughable. The tour began at 7:30 am Tuesday morning this past week. There had been a very heavy wind and rain storm through Monday night into Monday morning. It was serious. We had 60 to 100 kms gusts of winds and our neighbours house had part of their roof removed. I heard later there were a few roofs that were lost in and around the state. When we arrived at the hotel at Cradle Mountain in the afternoon, trees had come down and the power had been out everywhere in the area. It came back on as we arrived.

We had all kinds of wind and rain Wednesday and Thursday we were absolutely soaked. We walked with our heavy backpacks, dressed in layers of clothes (did I mention temps of 1 to 5 degrees C?) dripping wet up and down rainforest paths. Ankle deep mid, hundreds of stairs to see out of the way waterfalls, freezing hands and had the best time. Lots of laughs, great photography instruction, scenery like nowhere else in the world and the best food back at the hotel. Friday morning we left Cradle Mountain and drove through snow that had arrived during the night. Home safe and sound Friday night just after dark and my own bed never felt so good. I thought my muscles would never recover but they did. Thank goodness for all the fitness training I have done over the past few months. I don’t think this 70+ years body could have done it otherwise.

Luke O’Brien has a webpage that showcases his photos and you can find it HERE.

I didn’t get any reading done as I was in bed early as we planned sunrise shoots that were to begin at 5:30 am but sadly the fog and clouds were ground level so they didn’t happen. Neither did the night sky photography. But we made up for it. The photos I’m sharing today are from the beginning of our trip.

On the way home I did begin listening to the book Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams on Audible. It is described on Amazon as:

The story is an absolute joy . . . A captivating and exquisitely crafted debut’ Sunday Times bestseller, Heidi Swain

‘Absolutely captures the magic of reading and libraries’ Louise Hare When Aleisha discovers a crumpled reading list tucked into a tattered library book, it sparks an extraordinary journey.

From timeless stories of love and friendship to an epic journey across the Pacific Ocean with a boy and a tiger in a boat, the list opens a gateway to new and wonderful worlds – just when Aleisha needs an escape from her troubles at home.

And when widower Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to connect with his bookworm granddaughter, Aleisha introduces him to the magic of the reading list. An anxious teenager and a lonely grandfather forming an unlikely book club of two.

Inspiring and heartwarming, The Reading List is a love letter to storytelling – its power to transport us, connect us, and remind us that a new beginning is only a page away…

I need to catch up on Shirley Hazard’s Collected stories first before I begin again on the Reading List. I should be on the 12 story and I think I’m only on the 5th one. Need to crack on to those.

I have an interesting week ahead of me. Monday night we start the shared reading of Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman at Fullers book store, the chunky Russian novel we will be immersed in during the next 12 weeks.

Tuesday night Fullers is hosting a poetry night to celebrate the Australian National Reading Hour day. PA limited number of people registered to participate and each person who wants to stands in front of the group and reads a favourite poem. The poem cannot be something that person wrote (thankfully). We are allocated 5 minutes each. If people don’t want to stand up and read, someone else can read it for them.

I thought I’d read an American poem I grew up with during my primary schooling years, Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Paul Revere was born in 1734 and worked as a Silversmith and Engraver. He was a real patriot and was best known for his midnight ride to alert the colonial militia in 1775 to the approach of British forces before the battles of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution.

“The British are coming! The British are coming!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dramatised this event in this poem written in 1860 and published in the Boston Transcript publication at the time and the following. year in the Atlantic Monthly just as the American Civil war was beginning. It is quite dramatic to read and should be within the five minute time frame. It should be fun.

As the broadcasters say….”and folks- that is the week that was.” Enjoy the photos from our beautiful state that is…….Tasmania.