Exciting adventures brewing!

A speedy and unpretty entry as once again I don't have my camera cord on me, and limited net time.

I'm in Gympie and it feels like summer. I guess this feeling will only increase as I move further north, which is what I'm doing. A lot further north... because exciting plans are afoot!

Next week I'm being joined by my intrepid friend Ryan to cycle from Cairns to Alice Springs via the Gulf of Carpentaria. Click here to see our approximate route- all 2,200 km of it!
All a flurry of preparations, figuring out how much food and water we'll need to carry for some true remote riding. Perhaps the hardest part has been figuring out how to get to Cairns, but we finally have a standby relocation car organised from Brisbane to Cairns for $5 a day.

Just briefly, highlights of the past week have included: a full day workshop in making sourdough bread, sourdough pikelets, kimchi, sauerkraut and fruit wine with Elizabeth Fekonia, which I paid for in a day's labour, building worm farms and painting; adventuring with my friend Rachael to the tranquil Boreen Pt where ducks and the moon were reflected in the sighing waters of Lake Cootharaba; relaxing at the house of Jim (my aunt's brother) and wife Kay, soaking up their beautiful gardens, marvelling at Jim's ingenuity in fixing my kickstand (hooray, no more searching for trees and posts for leaning!); and reading three novels in as many days. Photos coming asap.

Onward and upward!

Seeds of Sunshine

This past week I've been wwoofing and exploring the sunshine coast hinterland, happy to be moving slowly in this very hilly country. On my way I revisited the Glasshouse Mountains (pictured above), greeting the mother mountain Beerwah, having previously climbed Tibrogargan, the father. After climbing the range up to Maleny I went to an Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, a good day for talking and thinking big picture. I got rained on when camping again, of course.

I rode, pushed and staggered up my steepest hills yet (30% slope!) to reach my first wwoof hosts of the journey- the Desjardin family at a beautiful property called Whispering Trees with a lush permacultural family garden. With them I enjoyed sweeping vies (all the more sweeter for that 30% slope struggle), spent some quality time with weeds (remembering that a climate where you can grow anything all year round is equally hospitable to a whole host of vigorous opportunists) and reconnected with my penchant for cake decorating, for Juju's 12th birthday.

On Saturday I learnt the basics and philosophy of seed saving at Yandina Community Garden. Elizabeth Fekonia was our vibrant and engaging teacher, inspiring us all to play our little role in preserving diversity of food species and boycotting international agribusinesses and their hybrid seeds. Hopefully I will be able to hook into some of Elizabeth's other workshops, as she teaches all sorts of food fermentation, preserving and permacultural wisdom in the area. Afterwards there was a community pizza lunch- $1 for a beautiful sourdough base which you piled with your own topping (or toppings kindly donated to an unprepared traveller) and slid into the frog-shaped cob oven. With a belly full of pizza I enjoyed wandering around the impressive gardens, in particular their lush aquaponics system (pictured below).

Now I'm staying with the lovely Gemma, who I met at the Dreaming Festival, in Peregian, where I am happily exploring all this community has to offer- markets and free music in the sun on Sunday, seed collecting with the Coolum community nursery this morning, and right now the Coolum library- I do love a good library.

I'm going to explore this area for another week or so and then head off with a bit more momentum- exciting plans are afoot, keep tuned in for their announcement!

Munching and Meandering in Brisbane

Every day my journey continues, my gratitude deepens. Gratitude for being free and able to have such an unstructured time in my life, enabling me to follow my instincts; to awake not knowing what the day has in store, and to take up opportunities as they come along. Gratitude for the moments I share in peoples' lives, and the colourful glimpses that they give me of their passions, projects, homes and ways of being.

I'm also getting better at answering peoples' questions along the way. To 'Where are you from?' I now comfortably say that I am a nomad (although generally acknowledging my Bathurstian roots, I do not live there, nor is Sydney my home; sometimes people just want to know I'm Australian, asking the question on a different scale). To 'What made you want to do this?' rather than mumbling 'I dunno, I just did' (unable to pinpoint a reason, as what exactly makes us do anything but everything that has come before?) I am finding ways to speak of the joys of travelling slowly, of feeling, breathing and smelling the landscape, and of having an adventure, of course. And to the ever arising 'But what will you DO next?' which at first I resented- sometimes giving half hearted examples- I am finding ways of explaining that the point for me is not to know. The point is to be open to being transformed by this journey, this country, and to be truly present without a plan (goals, aims, and types of experiences I seek, yes, but not a rigid plan). To acknowledge the limitations of an environmental science education taken in lecture halls and laboratories and get out into this 'environment' they spoke of, and into the community and gather true wisdom and learnings. And learning opportunities were truly bountiful in the time I spent in Brisbane. Part of repaying my gratitude for that involves sharing it with others. So whether they are things you might like to connect with when up this way yourself, whether they spark ideas for your own life or community, or for sheer interests sake, I am going to share some snippets, and I hope at least a few people get something from them.

Food, Glorious Food has been a recurring theme for me in the past weeks, as is a pattern in my life.

• First and foremost was a community workshop and tour about Food Sovereignty put on by the amazing folk from Food Connect as a part of the first visit of delegates from La Via Campesina (LVC)to Australia. LVC is an international movement of peasant farmers (peasants literally meaning 'people of the land'), working among other things for food sovereignty, which they define as
  
  
  

  the RIGHT of peoples, countries, and state unions to define their
  agricultural and food policy without the “dumping” of agricultural commodities
  into foreign countries. Food sovereignty organizes food production and
  consumption according to the needs of local communities, giving priority to
  production for local consumption. Food sovereignty includes the right to protect
  and regulate the national agricultural and livestock production and to shield
  the domestic market from the dumping of agricultural surpluses and low-price
  imports from other countries. Landless people, peasants, and small farmers must
  get access to land, water, and seed as well as productive resources and adequate
  public services. Food sovereignty and sustainability are a higher priority than
  trade policies.

Food sovereignty moves beyond the idea of 'food security', which doesn't say anything about where the food comes from or how it is grown, bringing together a whole range of issues from ecology to justice, gender to health. The conference brought together farmers, food activists, researchers and interested citizens to discuss ideas of food sovereignty, relate them to the Australian context, and share stories. The 4 LVC visitors, from Japan, South Korea, East Timor and Indonesia, shared stories of LVC and issues that farmers face where they come from. It became clear that many issues faced by Australian farmers are occurring all over the world- the decline of rural communities, particularly the drain of youth to the cities, ecological decline, and loss of power and voice in the face of corporate interests. The second day of this event involved a bus tour, visiting an organic cereal farm, just about to harvest their first experimental crop of rice! (pictured at top)

• Food Connect themselves were one of the most shining examples of positive alternatives to the current food system, although many stories, dreams and plans emerged over the two days. Food Connect is a blossoming community supported agriculture scheme in Brisbane, bringing beautiful local organic produce to Brisbane residents and giving farmers a reliable and fair price for their work.


• I also enjoyed visiting Northey St City Farm, a fertile and diverse environmental education centre, community garden and public meeting place. Not only did I salivate over their fruit trees and lush market garden, admire their highly productive compost system and fondle a smorgasbord of seedlings in their community nursery, I also danced around a roaring bonfire at their winter solstice party and had a small-world experience at their Sunday organic markets (reuniting 7 individuals who had last been in one place in the tiny town of Cann River, Victoria- hosts, guests and guest of guests..)


• At the same markets you can now taste the delights produced by 'Culture Club', a group of people who get together regularly to skillshare on making fermented and cultured foods. The night I went they were making cheese, tempeh, beer, kimchi, sauerkraut and some other thing I forget the name of. Hooray! The only shame was that I couldn't learn it all in one night, but the door to that world has now been opened, and I can't wait to learn more.


• Culture Club was hosted at Turnstyle, one house of several in the Brisbane suburb of Highgate Hill that has opened it's garden and space to the community. I helped shift a load of horse poo the other day to get some of the neighbours' gardens going. Turnstyle also boasts a community bike workshop, woodfired pizza oven, impressive library, and events such as film screenings, life drawing and 'stitch-n-bitch's. All from the initiative of a few creative individuals who decided they wanted to interact with their community in a meaningful way.
• Speaking of food (in case you hadn't noticed) I went to see Food Inc, highly recommended.

Other Stuff!

I've spent so long writing about food that I think I'm running out of capacity to coherently describe much more, so I'll resort to a brief list of some stuff left over.

• Open-mic nights, poetry nights, busking and street art- bountiful opportunities for people to creatively express themselves and be supported in doing so


• Exit Through The Gift Shop- proclaiming itself to be 'the world's first street art disaster movie'. Yay.


• Bangarra Dance Theatre- beautiful. Inspiring me to move my body in more expressive, creative and playful ways (a necessary antidote to the round and round and round that my days involve..)


• The Dreaming Festival. I was going to write a whole entry on this but don't even know where to begin. Go! I left feeling so in love with the world.

Thankyou to all the lovely and generous souls I met in Brisbane, for opening up your worlds to me. I'm thinking of doing more posts like this (sharing my learnings) so feedback is appreciated.

Brisbane adventures (the Right Place at the Right Time)

Woops! Where did June go?
Sometimes a place can sneak up on you. When you're least expecting it, you get drawn in, enticed down a chattering, meandering path where one thing just keeps following another, welcomed with feasts for the senses, the intellect and the heart, and before you know it, a month has passed! Which is a rather convoluted way of saying 'I like Brisbane' and of apologising for the prolonged silence on the blogging front.

How delicious it is to have the time and the freedom to stay long enough to get a real sense of a place. To make friends and move spontaneously through my days, taking up opportunities and invitations as they arise. I feel that my time in Brisbane can be summarised as being in the right place at the right time (or perhaps it is more that I have moved into a relaxed and open way of being where the right place is Here and the right time is Now). That place has not involved sitting in front of a computer, which is nice, but leaves me with a dauntingly large bag of stories to share. So as not to overwhelm (whoever happens to read this, or myself), I will tackle it in nuggets, returning to my letter-writing strategy of 'short but frequent' (far more productive than long but never-completed in my experience).

Every city has many faces. Each person experiences it in their own way, which may say as much about them as it does about the city itself. So I have no delusions of being able to describe Brisbane accurately or capture its spirit. Yet of all the travellers and residents I have spoken to about this city, two simple words seem to repeatedly emerge: friendly and relaxed. It may sound a cliche, but the Brisbane I have discovered is a place where people have the time and willingness to get waylaid by conversations with strangers. I suspect that the slowly pulsing river running through the heart of the city has a powerful influence here, encouraging slow meandering over linear haste, and providing abundant locations for lazy picnics in the sun (if we gave our cities and index of picnickability Brisbane would rate highly). Speaking of sun, the weather here must also surely contribute to this atmosphere. As much as I have defended the joy of a crisp winter day and real seasons, I have been revelling in this concept of t-shirt weather in July (although don't get too jealous people- Brisbane recorded it's lowest maximum in a decade last week, it hasn't been sunshine all round).

One of my favourite conversations with a stranger occurred while reading a book waiting for a friend. A man approached me saying 'I see you are reading, are you a reader?' and proceeded to introduce himself as the complete James Joyce Appreciation Society of Brisbane, explaining that it was in fact Bloomsday. After speaking for a while I said that I would keep an eye out for a copy of Ulysses in my travels and give it a go.

'Oh no, I wouldn't do that if I were you.'

Confused face (if not even the James Joyce Appreciation Society appreciates James Joyce then what hope is there for the rest of us?).

Turns out this fellow is a playwright, and while reading Ulysses decided he hated it so much he was going to write a play called Death by Ulysses. Only when rereading the book to get material for the play did he decided it was actually rather good. Good luck to you, wherever you are JJASB, and thanks for making me feel like I myself was in a book.

Other ways that Brisbane has endeared itself to me include friendly and helpful railway staff (imagine! pay attention STA), extensive and easily navigable bike paths, with friendly drivers to boot, and abundance of free live music and open-mic nights, and a lovely quirky sprinkling of street art and knit graffiti.

Not that I have spent this whole month in Brisbane- I have been on a number of adventures into the surrounds, both solo and with company. In my first week I caught the ferry across to North Stradbroke Island for some beach wandering, bird and dolphin watching (alas no whales, 'tho 'tis the season) and a dip in the serene tea-tree stained Brown Lake. My next foray was a combined train-cycle trip to Woodford for the Dreaming festival (more on this later). Last week I returned to the same area in order to explore the spectacular Glasshouse Mountains (Spangled drongo! possibly my favourite bird name ever), climbing Mt Tibrogargan, the father mountain of the family of volcanic plugs scattered across the landscape. It felt good to use my legs for something other than going round and round, clambering up the steep rocky side of the mountain, and the reward was soaring views in all directions (see picture below), including to Brisbane and the coast. My friend James has also been a willing co-conspirator for day trips: up Mt Coot-tha for views over Brisbane at sunrise, and yesterday to Boondall Wetlands for mangrove meandering and time with the birds (mangrove gerygone). All this within a stone's throw of Brisbane- not only has this city been easy to slot into but also easy to get out of.

At that, I pronounce this nugget big enough.

In the next few days I hope to share stories of the Dreaming Festival, Food food food, and a bunch of exciting community projects happening here in Brisbane, as well as eventually some information about cycle-touring gear (information I wish I had when starting out).

Mail can be sent Post Restante c/o Eudlo Post Office.