Mary Zabell’s Christmas/New Year Update 2023/24
I’m outside, on a cricket field at Kinross Wolaroi College in Orange, central NSW, watching our eldest grandson’s first cricket match for this tournament.
Lachlan and his mother Christie are staying in a nearby hotel, while we’re settled into a cutie-pie, 100 year old Airbnb cottage. Orange is full of these charming, olde worlde cottages and as yesterday’s match was postponed due to a day’s rain, we managed a drive and walk around our area, admiring the beautifully kept homes from the 19th and early 20th centuries, hedges manicured with nail scissors, with period tiled paths and front verandahs.
I apologise for the very belated catch-up but India intervened as we travelled for seven weeks through that vast and amazing, frustrating and fascinating country. I certainly had every intention of writing a summary of 2023 as we journeyed around, but time, fatigue and other writings got in the way.
This year began with a road trip north to Lismore and cricket. Poor old Lismore. Even though it’s been battered and assaulted by flood after flood they gamely plugged on, and had redone the main field. I gazed up in awe at the 5 metre light poles around the perimeter which had been under water! Amazing that the town keeps coming back from these disasters, but how many more?
Lismore floods
Thanks must go to our friends Dot and Steve for their fabulous hospitality— you’re definitely on the ‘return to’ list!
We ended the first few months with short trips: Bali for five days, Vanuatu for a week and the Cook Islands for a week. All these excursions gave us an insight into our neighbours, the beauties of Bali and the Pacific Islands, and most importantly the wonderful people who live in these places.
Some of the beautiful people of Vanuatu
Vanuatu had been hammered by cyclones in early March and we ended up going out to the remote and minuscule Pele Island where the struggling primary school impressed us with the need to do something to help. Rod has been very proactive in getting classroom furniture organised (they virtually had no desks or chairs), teaching materials and other resources.
Vanuatuan primary school children
I include here the very amusing massage hour encountered in Port Vila…a memory etched in our musculature forever! But if you’d like to read the full story of our Vanuatuan adventure, you can click here.
Of course that particular day wasn’t complete without a massage. We opted for a local Thai business which cunningly included a Thai restaurant next door. We didn’t think to ask if one gave the other a discount. Damn! Booking ourselves in (no immediate alarm bells rang that there was no one else booked just then) we were ushered into a back room and asked to remove our shoes. All good. Then we were guided by rather grimly smiling Thai ladies (on reflection, that grimness was probably more resignation at massaging fat white people again) into what seemed to be an extremely poorly lit set of curtained cubicles, but which I was certain harboured raddled, mumbling opium addicts. It was so dark, the brown curtains adding a sepulchral note to the ambience, that when my masseur indicated the clothes on the bed and the receptacle for glasses and watch, etc I felt around like a blind mole in its burrow and demanded ‘Why is it so dark?’ in quite worried tones. By now I was convinced we’d stumbled onto either an opium den hidden in plain sight in Port Vila, or we were embarking upon some strange, ancient ritual which demanded dark, silence and complete submission to tiny Thai ladies with ridiculously strong hands.
She indicated the clothes again and in the dark I struggled to don a shirt clearly made for people of the more svelte persuasion. By this time, my patience was waning, and I called out that the shirt didn’t fit and so I was given a towel and, through sign language, told to keep my pants on. This last instruction was a tremendous relief, as you may imagine.
She began the torture with a big leg workout, stretching and pulling, bending and contorting, pushing and slapping. One of my feet was lodged in her abdomen and then she kneaded muscles long dormant. Boy did they wake up! By now I was starting to giggle inanely for no reason other than that we’d willingly submitted ourselves to this procedure and the realisation there was no getting out of it. Pushing my arthritic left ankle into positions it hadn’t seen since the womb, I uttered a faint protest as bones began to crumble. ‘Ah, sorry, sorry’ she murmured as I feebly smiled. ‘It’s alright’ I assured her, inwardly cringing at what future x-rays might reveal.
I knew this massage wasn’t going to end well
Eventually the leg massage section came to its merciful end, and I was inelegantly turned over to have the back section attended to. By this time, I had assimilated new pain levels, and this last half hour was a relative doddle. Even when she climbed aboard and straddled my newly displaced hips, I felt renewed strength in my limbs, a new ability to combat pain, but most of all, a deep respect for the strength contained in those tiny hands. We staggered outdoors after an hour, congratulating ourselves on being upright and mobile.
The Cook Islands are a stunningly beautiful array of land and coral outcroppings and generally, mercifully free of cyclones, unlike Vanuatu. I won’t bore anyone reading this with the convoluted booking procedure we went through with the last of our COVID credits with (un)-Inspiring Vacations. Suffice to say, we’ll never use that company again, under any circumstances. However, we so enjoyed our few days in Rarotonga that we’re determined to return.
Our highlights included a progressive dinner in local homes where Mama Nunu served the delicious ‘ika mata’, which is raw tuna chopped and marinated in lime juice, with finely diced cucumber and tomato, Mama playing the spoons for us after the first course, and later, our bus driver telling us his grandmothers had 22 and 24 children each. Yoicks… imagine doing THAT family tree, Rob!!
Ika Mata - Tuna chopped and marinated in lime juice, with finely diced cucumber and tomato
The cherry on the icing on the cake, however, was snorkelling with turtles in the azure waters surrounding the island, a privilege which will always be in our travel memories.
That’s me on the right 😃
In June, we organised (with grateful thanks to Rob Landsberry and Leslie) a family reunion at Centennial Vineyards in nearby Bowral to commemorate the twenty years since Mum’s and brother Kevin’s sudden death in 2003. Of course, we remembered Dad who’d died in 1985 and brother John who died in 2008. It was a wonderful weekend of family catch-ups, exchanges of news and priceless photo ops.
Rob has made an O’Brien family website with marvellous archival material and it’s an ongoing work so if you’re an O’Brien who hasn’t visited the site, please do so – just click here. You can access photos, video, and stories from the 2023 gathering by clicking here.
And then it was on to the magic of India.
India was indeed ‘incredible’, just as the advertising blurb describes it. It’s such a large, diverse and challenging country that my poor skills and limited space here will barely do justice to the people and their fascinating, yet somewhat frustrating homeland. We probably will never return, as we did two separate tours which did cover a large part of the country— Amritsar, Delhi, Shimla, Darjeeling, Kolkata, Varanasi, Lucknow, Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Mumbai, Goa, Chennai, Pondicherry, Madurai, Thekkady, Kumarakom and finally Cochin (Kochi).
The history of the Mughal empire, evidenced through those vast and imposing palaces and forts dotted throughout the northern parts, is inspiring and worth so much more time than we were able to give to it. Such ingenuity, such precision of architecture and stone masonry with beautiful inlays of coral, jade, lapis lazuli and other semi-precious stones! I ran my fingers along joins in the marble and couldn’t feel any difference in the smoothness where the inlaid stones were.
How about the fact that in one palace, the marble was polished with seashells so that it gleams, five hundred years after its construction! Of course, the Taj Mahal was a highlight, but for my money, I loved the ‘Baby Taj’, a smaller version built a little while beforehand and apparently the model for Shah Jehan’s monument to his wife. The Itmad-ud-Daula or ‘Baby Taj’ is nicknamed the ‘jewel box’ and indeed its use of coloured inlays is dazzling.
The colours of India are a happy memory for most visitors; saris worn by most women in a multi-hued exhibit of their love for ornament, the decorative arts and dressing up are everywhere and as we were staying in some very nice hotels which had wedding venues, we would sometimes see the lift doors open to disgorge a bevy of silk and satin clad ladies, with reds, yellows and blues, greens and oranges, the palest of lemons, and the brightest of pinks as they paraded their finery before entering the reception area.
The colours of India
Flower markets provide a dazzling spectacle of colour as well. Flowers are a huge industry in India as so many people take them as temple offerings. Garlands are woven, bunches joined with coloured string, stunning floral displays take centre stage in hotel foyers and markets are hectic, dirty, noisy and fascinating as vendors and buyers haggle over mounds of marigolds, weighed on small scales on the ground or they purchase bags of rose buds, jasmine petals or even bunches of herbs to offer to Shiva or Vishnu. The golden marigold is everywhere, and its sunny colours enliven the gloom in some of the very historic temples we visited. Statues will be draped with marigold garlands and temple elephants might be wearing a jaunty headdress of marigolds and trinkets.
Other highlights of the northern tour included a dawn visit to witness the sunrise illuminating Kanchenjunga, the third highest of the ‘Hee-mar-lee-ars’ as we learned to pronounce the Himalayas. At 2440m (8000’) we felt our chests constrict with the thinning air but what a moment of majesty as the rising sun beamed across the roof of the world and turned the last of the darkness into a silvery, pristine white theatre backdrop— suitably dramatic and a fitting closure to our time in the north.
Southern India provided a complete contrast to the north. We’d been warned about fiery, fish curries and a complicated history of Christian intervention and various East India Companies which flourished over the centuries of western colonialism. Of course the Raj era is known to many people and this story holds much interest for students of the subcontinent. The British East India Company (EIC) began as a private company in 1600, and was run from a tiny office in London, growing to be a global behemoth. At one point it had the largest army in the world and that’s probably when the British government realised that things were getting out of hand, and they needed to take over.
Our guide gently laughed and suggested that over two hundred years of British rule and the Indians still couldn’t be controlled or organised! Anyhoo, we visited several buildings from those times when the British Empire duelled with the French East India Company, the Dutch and Portuguese East India Companies, and eventually triumphed. We stayed in the old French quarter in Pondicherry, a disappointing remnant of those days but still preserving some faint hints of French influences. We pondered the great linguistic and demographic diversity of India as we’d met people in Darjeeling where 75% are of Nepalese origin and look just like every sherpa picture you’ve ever seen. We smiled at tall thin Sikhs in Amritsar with their intricately wound turbans. In Tamil Nadu we listed to a completely different language and then went on to Kerala where Malayalam is spoken and my two words of Hindi were useless.
The many diverse faces of India
In all, we basically went like the clappers to see as much as possible. Of course, the usual questions around poverty, disease and filth were raised as we observed the poorest of the poor living in some terrible slums or lying on footpaths and in doorways. Kolkata was perhaps the most impactful city in that regard, and we were forced to wonder whether the trickle down effect of growing wealth is indeed trickling down. According to one agency I read, the gap is widening.
Kolkata slum 😢
The cliches about India are certainly there for all to see: cows everywhere, disdainful and haughty, sleepy or friendly, we watched them nosing through bags of rubbish on streets, standing in the middle of an intersection with a hundred vehicles weaving and flowing around them, or being slowly walked into a farm compound for milking.
Pye dogs abound, wandering aimlessly through streets, markets and public spaces. Presumably someone feeds them, but they seem inured to their lot— a very Hindu-like acceptance of life. People are friendly, interested and keen to chat— cricket is a great conversation opener and as Rod is a cricket tragic, he was always able to have a quick chinwag with someone, especially as Australia was playing in Kolkata while we were there.
The food is plentiful and tasty and I believe we tried quite a few dishes largely unavailable in Australia. Three of the four of us got a little sick and at times I eschewed the local cuisine in favour of something bland and easily digested. Rod’s innards are apparently cast iron and he ploughed his way through many a butter chicken or other delight.
Haggling is always a bit of fun, but I do understand some people’s reluctance to indulge. I wandered out in Mumbai one day and haggled with a taxi driver to take me to a pharmacy. I shook my head, he shook his head, I walked off, he internally debated and then called out and we reached an agreement. He obligingly waited for me to make my purchases and so I ended up giving him the original sum demanded. Perhaps my haggling skills require some tweaking! In Kochi I bought a lovely, block printed beach shirt made from local cotton and dyed with vegetable dyes. Here there was no haggling and I handed over the money willingly. Sometimes you just know, you know?
Arriving home we prepared for Xmas and enjoyed a quiet celebration with Christie, Tim and the boys (Lachlan is 12, William is 10 and Thomas is 5), our son Tim (38) and a video call to David (34) who has just moved to Vancouver. A week of visitors ensued between Xmas and the New Year where we caught up with various nieces and nephews and their growing broods.
Here’s a pic of Christie and the boys at the Jamberoo Water Park in late December.
Christie, Lachlan, William and Thomas at Jamberoo
We hope this finds you all well, healthy and happy despite our poor old world’s continuing strife. We wish you all the best in life for 2024 and hope that this late missive explains why we didn’t get Xmas cards and letters out to people.
Cheers from the ‘gong…
Written by Mary Zabell, edited by Rob Landsberry who also added some photos, last updated 6 April 2024