Ethan's unpolished surf blog

Four firsts!  First time out on my own board.  First time surfing a reef break.  First time surfing in the Indian Ocean.  And my first encounter with a shark in the wild.  The last was actually the least consequential.  It was probably less than three foot long, said by one of the people there to be a “Billigong”* shark (see my note at the end), a very interesting looking thing.  It had a shovel head and sort of whiskery things around it’s mouth, and was sort of spotted.  Everyone else at the beach was pretty excited about it too.  For some reason it was nosing around right up on the edge of the beach.  I was able to get nice and close, and even touched its tail - it didn’t react.  A silver-haired guy who was taking pictures of surfing in lieu of actually surfing while his shoulder healed from surgery told me he’d never seen one behaving like that before.  ”Generally they stay under rocky lips a little further out.  They aren’t aggressive, but if you step on one, he’ll uh…” “Give you a chomp?”  ”Yeah.”  This one wasn’t looking too good.  I didn’t want to bother the poor guy too much, so when it moved further up the beach I left it alone.  Ten minutes later I went looking to see how it was doing but there was no sign.  Maybe it was feeling better?

That happened as I got out of the water at Yallingup - beautiful place by the way.  When I first arrived early this morning it was looking fast and steep from the lookout platform above and to the side.  Getting out into the lineup was more involved than anyplace I’ve been before.  I asked an older surfer who was stretching out on the beach how to navigate though the rocks and the reef and he started to explain while I nodded, but as the story increasingly complicated he just gave up and said, “Ah, just follow me out.”  I hadn’t suncreened up yet, so I was forced to just watch and try to remember what he did.  Indeed, it ended up being pretty complex.  (I think this is something which will be a common theme here at these W.A. reef breaks.)  You wade out over about 20 meters of sand, then when you get to the rock, you jump on the board and paddle out until the water gets too shallow to paddle, and stand up.  Try not to get knocked down by waves as you walk on slightly submerged reef, then when it drops off, jump onto the board and turn right between a couple of rocks, then turn left again to open water and paddle straight out until you are out of the wave break zone.  Rest.  Turn right again and swim 30 meters to get into position to catch waves.

I only caught three of them, though.  The first time with a new board can be a little tough, and it isn’t really the right board for this break, which I just learned is more of a longboard break most days.  And in fact most surfers out there were on longboards.  I did have a tough time catching waves, but as the session went on I started to notice that nobody was catching them easily.  You’d see someone trying to get what looked to me like a nice big wave, in perfect position, paddling like crazy, eyes bugged out, and they’d still miss it.  So maybe it was just that kind of morning.  

I probably bought a board that is slightly too short for me, too: 7’4”.  I know it can’t be much shorter than ideal, because I’ve been on two boards that were only two inches longer than that and I loved them.  Also this one is 1/4” wider than the last one, and that’s said to be worth 1” of width, at least when it comes to floatiness.  And the board is thick, too, so probably I’m fine.  

So after a few hours of that I rode some whitewater back most of the way to shore, and walked on some shallow reef before dropping back off into a deeper, sand-bottomed part that before finally climbing onto dry sand.  After a chat with the silver-headed photographer about other surf breaks to the south and a quick shower off of myself and the board, everything piled into the rental car and off I went south to find more waves.  I turned the car towards the water every chance I got and so got a look at Smith Beach, Injidup Point, and Moses Rock, where I surfed another two hours.  It was pretty much a repeat of earlier when getting out into the surf, but there were only two other guys (one with a surf helmet - there’s one of those in my future) out there, where there were a dozen at Yallingup.  And Moses Rock is a point break, which was more like what I’m used to.  (Still sort of a reefy place though!)  I had more luck there and got a couple of long rides, the first one of which felt took me at pretty good speed into pretty shallow water.  Thrilling!  As is usually the case I positioned myself closer to shore and the point than the other surfers in order to get more, but probably lower quality, waves.  As the onshore wind picked up and the waves got choppier and more broken up I turned the board towards the car.  A mildly harrowing return to shore and I called it a successful session.  Walking back on the beach I ran into tons of these funny looking, kinda large cartilaginous trilobyte-like things all over the place on the beach.  There were smaller versions of the same thing at Torquay.  I’ll have to Google them and report back to you.  For now it’s time to drink some more water and get back out there for the last session of the day.  

* The guy who told me it was a “Billigong” shark was mistaken.  There’s no such thing - it was either a Spotted Wobbegong shark, or due to its small size the very recently described Floral Banded Wobbegong shark (Orectolobus floridus) or the Dwarf Wobbegong shark (Orectolobus parvimaculatus).  I’m going with the last because the size is more in line with it and because it’s such a newly identified species and therefore cooler. 

The thing about a diary or journal or a blog is that it tends to be neglected at times.  Then you feel like you need to backfill with some description of what you were doing as the blog or diary went un-updated.  Except those kinds of posts suck, because you end up saying, “Let’s see, if I remember right, first I did X which was pretty cool, then I did Y, that was all right…”.  The feeling is all different from a journal, where you write today about today.  So I’m going to skip filling you in on going back to Melbourne, flying to Tasmania to meet my great friend Rob Dymond, hiking the famous Overland Track (but if you have to qualify something as famous, it isn’t.  Who ever referred to “… the famous actor Tom Cruise…”.  No one, at least not since he became famous.) through the rain, wind, mud, mosquitos, sunshine, wilderness boardwalks, bog, leeches (yes, on me, sucking my blood), vomiting (no, not me), smoky cabins, daily peanut butter rations, Wallabies big and small, mischeivious Australian Possums, cute Quolls, rasping Tasmanian devils, gum trees, glaciated valleys, great conversations, short days of hiking, monster days of hiking, photographing big views, summitting small mountains, making new friends, solidifying an old friendship, waterfalls, coffee and a return to civization, a lovely old city built by convict labor, a brewery tour and dozens of more things.  Oh, then there was the ANZAC day memorial service before dawn in Hobart, four hours in Adelaide, the train ride across the Great Nullarbor Desert and half the continent, the bright floodlights of the mines of the Kalgoorie goldfields working around the clock, Perth, new friends, a boat ride, bicycling around Rottnest (“rat nest”) island, Quokkas, big black lizards, fantastic white beaches and the sight of big big curling waves.  Then there’s today.  That’s always the best thing to write about.

So: Today I rented (“hired”) a car and drove south from the clean, cheerful, and orderly mining boomtown (1.6 million people) of Western Australia, for what I really came all the way to the west coast to do: surf the big waves of the Indian Ocean.  The drive down was great.  I had been a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to see well to my left past my surfboard (yes, I finally bought my own surfboard!  I’ll tell you how I like it after tomorrow when I first use it.) which was riding shotgun.  (Which puts it in the left seat.  In Australia you drive on the left side of the road and the steering wheel is on the right.)  Unlike the greater Perth area, which often reminded me of northern California (but then I’ve said that about a lot of places in Australia) the land towards the south reminded me of nowhere I’ve ever been.  Sort of unique trees, like gum trees but sort of bushier than what I’ve seen before.  Some very nice looking farms and vineyards.  Quite green.  Still pretty flat.  Kind of smoky, which appears to be from burning slash piles from logging.  It’s Fall here, the equivalent of early November back home, so the wood smoke really smells right.  But the temperature is far from eastern Washington crisp.  The weather since I arrived here in Western Australia (the other WA) has been basically perfect.  Not too hot, not too cold, crystal clear blue skies.  An amazing place.  I really like it here.  So does everyone I talk to.  

It’s funny.  The freeway here is very modern, very much like what you’d see in the USA, but the gas station, much like others in Oz, remind me of America when I was a kid: old style pumps, no fumes collectors, often a sort of sleepy little store.  It’s nice, but I get the impression that the priority is on public goods, and if higher taxes to pay for them leave the citizens personally somewhat poorer, so what?  The result from the backpacker perspective is better public transport than the USA, but perhaps less rich individual citizens.  That’s often a good trade, especially since material goods are known to make little difference to a person’s happiness once you get anywhere near as rich as we are in the the USA and Australia, and in any case we humans mostly just blow our weath seeking higher status anyway, which is a zero-sum game.  I’m far from decided on what the right balance is.  But I will say that the Australian choice is way better for tourists like me.  And of course in that way Europe is best of all.  

For a full throated opposing view, take one of my roommates at the Perth YHA hostel.  He’s French and was eager to tell me that back in France, “… it’s shit!  I want to work, but they say, no, you cannot work more than 35 hours.  And the tax, it is is too much!  I like to work!  It is much better here in Australia and in America - you can work as much as you want!”  He wants to stay here or in the USA.  I forgot to tell him that if he does he needs to go independent someday.  He’ll probably figure that out though.

By the way there’s a massive economic boom going on here in W.A. right now, driven by very good times in the mining industry.  A cheerful blokey Kiwi (New Zealander) fellow who was one of the guys in the dorm room with me at the Perth YHA hostel was getting things in order to start working in the mines driving one of the huge Tonka trucks.  Two weeks of twelve hour days followed by one week off.  His starting salary: $100,000 Australian dollars per year, about $92,500 American dollars.  Not too bad - when I was four I drove Tonka trucks for free ;).  By the way, Americans under 30 years of age can easily get a “Work and Holiday” visa to try working in Australia and see the country while doing it - so if you’re young and restless and don’t have anything better to do, you could do a lot worse.  Email me (info@reatlas.com) and I’ll tell you what I know. 

Right, back to today.  So I arrived here in Dunsborough, on the southwest coast of W.A., within the great Mecca of Australian surfing: the Margaret River region.  I tried to make it out and surf after I checked into the hostel here but the last two surfers were getting out as the sky darkened when I arrived and I’m just not willing to surf a reef break I’ve never seen before by myself in the dark.  Man, the place looked fantastic, though.  Big, quick swells creating steep waves without a closeout in sight.  A-maze-ing.  So it’s going to be a pre-dawn mission tomorrow.  Time for early bed.

Here’s something I wrote but never posted because it wasn’t finished. It still isn’t, but there’s no sense in letting it sit around more. It isn’t getting any better. ;)

Saturday morning, Apr 3, 2010 On bus from Melbourne to Geelong:

I’m headed to Torquay, the spiritual home of Australian surfing, to watch the annual Rip Curl surf competiion and maybe catch a little surf myself, too. I haven’t written since I got to Melbourne and I’ll write about my time there some other time, I hope. For now I’m headed south to the coast.

Observations from the bus from Melb to Geelong: Flat land here, lots of flood irrigation. Plot sizes comparable to the Yakima Valley in Washington state. But of course with a much different natural plant life around - more like the San Francisco Bay Area except flat. Far, far flatter than anything I saw in NSW or QLD.

Now I’m entering Geelong. This side of town, at least, is kind of a craphole. Not that bad for a sort of post industrial refinery town. Just not great.

OK, I just switched buses at the Geelong station and barely caught the 9am to Torquay and Jan Juk, which by the way is exactly the bus that I was going to catch if I had gotten out of Melb at 7am like I would have if I hadn’t left my rain jacket at Kerry’s apartment, where I was staying in Melbourne. Awesome! I am *so glad* I went back for it. Paying two cab fares kinda hurts but having this jacket at the beach will be well worth it. I should point out that if I were in the States I wouldn’t have gone back. I’d have just planned to buy a thick fleece at Torquay for less money than the two cab rides would be. Then I’d have the fleece I’ll need for the Tasmanian hike. In Oz one values one’s physical stuff more because manufactured products are more expensive.

The funny thing is that even Geelong has some pretty nice parts that we drove through. I think Geelong gets the least respect of anywhere in the state of Victoria. And even it seems OK. That says good things about Victoria, and Australia.

On the bus is a dude wearing some hipster clothes and a thick cotton jacket with surfer hat (i.e. fake trucker hat) and longish hair. Kinda looks like Kyle, our surf instructor back at Crescent Head, come to think of it. So I asked him about what’s going on and got some rundown about the competition. The dude sitting behind him I had pegged for a surf spectator but turned out to be a pro photographer from Norway who had surfed a little in Norway. Yep - definitely a Norwegian, but of the scragly white-blond hair, slightly feral type.

OK, just got a glimpse of the ocean - that’s always exciting! The edge or Torquay is more suburban than ex-urban. Surprising number of very modern architecture homes.

(This post is out of order.  I haven’t brought you up to date yet, but I wanted to get this out because it’s full of anticipation.)  Torquay!  Surely the world’s home of surf, or at least surf products.  I just made a purchase and it is really satisfying because 1) it is a smoking bargain, and 2) it will keep me warm.  It’s a wetsuit, normally about $225, but I got it at the low low price of $70 from the Rip Curl outlet store, one of dozens of surf stores here.  There’s just something about things that keep you warm that make you happy, you know?  I already have a better, warmer Billibong suit waiting for me back in the states, but I really didn’t think I would want it on this trip.  It turns out that the water down here on the south coast just isn’t that warm.  To tell the truth I really wanted a wettie back in Sydney too.  This will probably work out great because I should be able to sell it when I leave Oz for what I paid for it.  The only thing I worry about is having to schlep an often bundle of neoprene around.  This is going to be by far the bulkiest thing in my pack.  <shrug>  I’ll just have to deal with it somehow.  Having paid so little for it makes it much easier too, because I can leave it hanging and unsecured in places without being so concerned about theft.  If it gets stolen, oh well.  That’s true of everything in my pack except the laptop I’m typing this on.  So I also rented a great board across the street from another place.  

So enough talking about mere commercial products!  Tomorrow is a surf day!  I’m going to hit some beaches between here (Torquay) and Bells Beach.  Bells is where the big competition is happening, but they quit every day with plenty of daylight left, so I might get a chance to surf it too.  That’s mostly to say that I’ve done it though, as there’s been a strong onshore wind (that’s bad) in the afternoon every day lately so it might not be any good.  That onshore wind means I’ve got to make an early early start of it, to get waves while the wind is light or even blowing in the opposite direction (that’s good).  5:30am would be the ideal time to wake up to be in my suit and carrying my board to the beach at 6.  That should be doable as I’m already pretty sleepy at 6:50pm.  Hitting the sack early tonight.  Dawn mission tomorrow!  Get stoked, people!

(Written on Tuesday, March 30) 

I’m in the airport.  Looks like I have only a few minutes before my plane to Melbourne boards.  Let’s see what I can write here and on board the aircraft. 

So: yesterday, Monday, March 29, was an adequete day, nothing special.  After a morning of doing laundry (and hunting down a bug in my code while wearing my top sheet as a skirt) I wanted to get downtown to finally get entry to the NSW State Library.  I made it to the CBD in my usual way, the 380 bus, the made the quick little walk to the libary.  Finally it was open - success!  Then it turned out they had an excellent free locker system so I could stow my little bag.  Great!  And plenitful free wireless.  Great!  And some good quiet places to read.  Great!  And… you can’t actually browse any books, you’ve instead got to find a book you want on the catalog system, then turn in a request slip for it.  Fifteen or twenty min later you have it.  Suck.  Unbelievably stupid.  This is not a library - this is book warehouse.  They had a tiny number of browseable books - maybe a couple thousand - and some magazines.  I’d estimate the books in the *gift shop* make up 5% of the browseable books in the building.  Atrocious.  Sad.  Want to browse books?  Go to Abbey’s bookstore or the big one with the Japanese name.  And that’s just what I did but it was a wild goose chase as neither one, nor Adnocks (or was it Monacks? EDIT: it’s “Dymocks”) was open past 7.  At that point there was nothing to do but go home.  It was OK; I got some more good reading in, then planned out much of my time in Melbourne.  

Earlier I had left the library and walked to the same place in “The Rocks” where I had a great $10 steak and chips (with salad) a week earlier for a repeat.  That didn’t work out - it wasn’t a big thick steak this time, kind of a lame thin one.  Another rule of travel - don’t double back.  Always move on to the next thing.

Saturday was great.  My backpackers has an amazing deal on surfboards: free rental.  So when Aaron Iba suggested we attack the waves at Palm Beach again on Saturday I was in.  Unfortunately I don’t remember exactly what happened.  I do recall that Aaron got two hours of lessons from the mobile trailer-based surf school on the beach and that he got a lot out of them.  Again, it just doesn’t work to hope to learn from your friends.  You need good instruction.  I think I stayed out of the water due to insufficient surf but then surfed in the afternoon with Aaron and had a good time.  I think a little swell started to kick up.  See, this is the problem with writing your updates even only a few days later - you forget things.  So Saturday is lost to me.

Sunday I got my surfboard from the backpackers as soon as the front desk opened at 8am.  Unfortunately I was perhaps a little too chatty to the guy working the front desk and he got the (entirely correct) idea that I was going to take the surfboard someplace other than Bondi Beach, which is against this backpackers’ silly rules.  So after I got a half block away, he ran out and *chased me down* and questioned why I was walking the wrong way - away from Bondi Beach.  I told him I was going to pick up my friend, driving his car because he was in a hurry the previous night and let me drive myself home (true) and that we would be headed to Bondi Beach for the day (false).  No go.  ”You have the board in your car driving in that direction.  Only towards Bondi.”  So after much hassle and waiting I was back on the road with the surfboard.  You might think this is a lot of nonsense to deal with just to use a free surfboard for a day, but in the Bondi Beach neighborhood surfboards are rented for $75 a day and up, and this was a particular good board for me: a 7’6” mini-mal from NSP (New Surf Project).  I had used it twice already and loved it except that it has a dimpled rubber footpad thing on the tail that hurt my right big toe every time I went from paddling to standing.  (My toe is in pretty sad shape right now.  The rest of my feet have recovered from the beating they took on the epic week of surfing in and around Crescent Head.)  So yeah, it was worth it.  To me anyway - I feel kind of bad about dragging Aaron into this little backpackers’ drama, especially since it was he who was providing the transportation, and a majority of the enthusiasm to surf as well, as I am getting a but snobbish about what waves I want to spend time on.  Plus I’ve been feeling beaten down by the Sydney sun.  Seattle is more my kind of latitude.  Even better is the sun (when it shows up) in Scandinavia - a very mild presence, low in the sky.  Heaven.  So after navigating with only minor difficulty back to Aaron’s apartment building in King’s Cross, I switched to the passenger side of the car to man the Google phone and GPS.  We picked up Aaron’s friend Jess and finally got started driving out to Palm Beach.  The conversation on the way out was outstanding.  Jess is planning a business venture in Bejiing (where she is from) in the luxury food category which sounds like something that could be really successful.  I really think she’ll start making good money right off the bat.  We talked about other things too, like what Jess’s wide-ranging experiences in education.  She’s really smart, and certainly could have graduated from medical school or law school as her mother wanted, but she just wasn’t interested in working as a physician or lawyer and so has gone her own way.  Of course Aaron and I congratulated her on making the hard choice to live her own dreams instead of those of her family - always hard and perhaps doubly so in her culture.  A very cool person.

The surf on the south side of the bay was pretty flat so we kicked it off surfing in front of on the far (north) side of Palm Beach’s parking area, which put us in about in the middle of the bay.  The surf, if I recall correctly, wasn’t too bad, but after a while it got flatter too, so we decamped to the next bay to the south, Whale Beach.  Whale has a left-breaking (meaning you would ideally surf from your right to left) point break.  It turned out to have a much bigger wave going on so we surfed it for a pretty decent session.  The waves were quite a bit bigger than anything Aaron had done before, but true to form he attacked them with gusto and did better than one should expect given his limited experience.  Aaron’s surfing friend Itai happened to show up with some mates so we had quite a nice group going.  The wave energy level ended up biting Aaron a little - his hand got hit pretty hard by one of his fins which put him out of commission for the day.  He iced his hand and chilled on the beach with Jess while I got in one last session (which would be my last in Sydney).  We drove back to Syd and decided to get some dinner, so drove to Newtown, the hipster neighborhood immediately south of U Sydney.  Jess recommended a Thai place there and indeed it was awesome.  The seafood flambe thing was unlike anything I’d ever had and the other food was outstanding too.  Many thanks to Aaron for treating me - again.  I owe him for that, for driving me around but even more for the conversations.  We’ve talked a lot of shop in the time I’ve been in Sydney and it’s been great.

My notes about Thursday, March 25.  Please excuse the minimal capitalization:  

-morning: pre-work (for aaron) surf mission to Bondi beach with Aaron Iba.  I sucked, didn’t really catch any waves legitimately.  still fun.  free surfboard, NSP 7’6”, which i liked. not a great place to surf - most waves closed out. weird currents too.  *tons* of swimmers in the way.

-walked home, did email.

-finally headed out to Paddington neighborhood.  sadly I missed the once-weekly tour at Victoria Barracks, thus no admittence allowed to the grounds, says grouchy gate guard

-so walked around Paddo north of Oxford street.  got some photos here.  quiet, pretty, dull.  but impressive numbers of kids for a sophisticated part of a big city.  you’d never see that in san francisco.   seattle is less natal too.

-had no idea what to do or where to go before U. of Sydney engineering bbq (which I was invited to on tuesday) and movie.  decided the great CBD bookstore Aaron mentioned would be the place (perhaps I could find Judea Pearl’s PRIIS which i left at home?) so caught a bus towards Circular Quay, got off it at Hyde Park and walked down Park St. to the Queen Victoria Building.  beautiful inside.  really like what they’ve done.  great colors.

-walked into Abbey’s bookstore.  not that big (tho the scifi/fantasy part of it was located elsewhere) but the science and math part was MAGNIFICENT!  I was blown away by the math section.  At least an order of magnatude more math books than Borders (in the states.  Haven’t looked for math books in Borders Oz yet.)  took a picture (actually two pics, the section didn’t fit into one photo!) thumbed thru a bunch, bought ripley’s book on neural networks and pattern recognition that peter norvig recommendes.

-had to pee, was directed back to the QVB.  super nice public bathrooms.  i can assure your that NOWHERE in San Francisco, let alone the financial district, sf’s equivalent of the CBD, would or could you have such a nice public bathroom.  

-back across Pyrmont swing bridge, walked south out of darling harbor area, thru ultimo and some other neighborhood.  headed for U of Sydney.  walking thru the plaza/patio of the student union bldg saw an obvious art gallery opening. people standing around chatting with wine, hummus, babaganoush, sundried tomatoes, olives, fruit plate, rice noodle wraps, etc.  i walked over and joined in.  it was nice. the art was a bunch of mirrors which was somewhat pleasing.  very nice red aussie wine.  talked with a couple of asian girls who were liberal studies majors - they also seemed to be working the free food & drink but seemed way way less jazzed about it than USA students would be.  you don’t see that nice of grub in free food events on campuses in the states often

-it got a bit dusky.  i continued on for the engineering bbq, hidden in a courtyard of an eng bldg - EE I think.  free beer and sort of spodie / mojito, along with popcorn, sandwichs, and later, sausages,  i ate four i think

-helped with cleanup, walked west and south thru darkened and mostly solitary campus - pretty nice. made a pit stop in other student union bldg.  read parts of student newspaper that was 90% about America due to Obama’s trip (which was postponed at the last minute - too late for the poor editors to come up with another issue!  they grumbled a bit about that.

-walked thru St Andrews College (“a residential college within the University of Sydney”), and past some dorms which ended right into bustling Newtown.  I liked Newtown - very young and energetic and open late.  this would be the place to have a tech startup in Oz so far among what i’ve seen.  i got some negative attention due to my “Bondi type” look - sun bleached short hair, tan, white sort of shiny longsleeve Underarmour shirt (not tight though, pleasently loose), and sandles.  shorts weren’t boardies, though, more like khaki.  so maybe a bit of Paddington mixed in which would be even worse to the hipsters.  got some guff from a drunk hipster dude.  whatever.  

-with a little advice from helpful Oz and Austrian (yes, Austrian) strangers I rode the train then bus back home.  tired - slept well once again.  

Wednesday, March 24 was mostly did a travel and planning day.  Got a late late lunch at Bondi Beach RSL, see my previous post: “Jeez, I just finished another classic Aussie steak and chips lunch special (which always seem to come with great spring green salads) at the local RSL (like the American Veterans of Foreign Wars) club on the beach but I’m getting hungry again from writing this…” then figured it was time to get touristizing so I grabbed a bus north to the South Head of the entrance to Sydney Harbor (aka Port Jackson). Walked that - pretty interesting.  Port Jackson really is an amazingly good natural harbor.  Captain Arthur Phillip claimed upon discovering it that it was the best in the world and he’s probably right.  Took lots of photos and vids. (That was me, not Captain Phillip)  Then Watson’s Bay - I’d have camped out there and worked on my laptop except I couldn’t find any cafes with net access! Pretty typical in Oz, sadly.  Not that I completely blame them - a cafe full of people on their laptops isn’t as much fun as one full of people who aren’t.  Also I understand that laptop people like me don’t spend much given the amount of space we take up.  Anyway, I got on the bus headed towards City (i.e. the CBD) got off twice (paying $3.60 each time I got back on, which sucked) when I saw a promising cafe, both times didn’t work out.   Nice views of Watson Bay, Vaucluse, Rose Bay and Double Bay - lovely, leafy, wealthy neighborhoods all. Finally ended up hiking from sort of the bottom of King’s Cross up to Oxford St. and caught a bus back home, which didn’t give me quite enough time to wash up a little before Aaron Iba and David Greeenspan were to pick me up for dinner. Worked out though - they were running later than me.

Really a great dinner with Aaron and David.  We talked about Google and Facebook mostly.  Food was good too - very beefy.  I got the Boer-style sausage.  That is a lot of beef in two days, at least by my recent standards.  

Monday, March 22, was a great geek day, one of my best days here yet.  Started out meeting Aaron Iba and David Greenspan for lunch at their workplace, the Google Sydney office.  Their new office is on Pyrmont peninsula, west of “The Rocks” and part of the Darling Harbor area.  It takes two busses to get to Pyrmont, and I would still need to walk a ways, so it looked like the easiest and maybe quickest thing to do would be to just take one bus then walk in.  So with plenty of time to spare I got on the bus, rode it out of Bondi Beach past the narrow storefronts of Bondi Junction and King’s Cross, and into the central area to Hyde Park in the CBD (central business district) where I got off and started walking west down Market St.  Market, and I think the CBD generally, has lots of modern big buildings and an impressive number of beautiful old ones too, all the way down to the swing bridge that crosses the lower end of Darling harbor with good views of the Maritime museum, convention center and the entire Darling harbor area. 

Google was actually pretty hard to find as its building only has a big Accenture sign on it.  Getting checked in at the lobby was easy enough.  Aaron came by with a friendly handshake and we went to a delicious lunch.  At Google, if you don’t already know, that means staying in and eating whatever the company chefs are making that day.  And the chefs are outstanding.  So: some kind of tempeh curry thing which seemed to include a pumpkin or squash (great), beef with gravy (not bad), grilled Maylaysian style fish (great), jasmine rice and string beans, several more curries, including one chicken one that was really good, and bunch of other things I liked but don’t recall.  Then to the salad bar for some spring greens (fresh and good, I always love those), cold smoked salmon (lox) on fresh spinach leaves (great), along with the usual fresh fruit and whatnot that you find at a very nice salad bar.  There were also some soups and steamed veggies that I didn’t bother with - I can make those myslef on this trip.  :) Dessert was a Lychee fruit in coconut milk and tapioca balls thing that was great - two bowls of that for me.  Jeez, just before writing this I finished yet another classic Aussie steak and chips lunch special (which often seem to come with surprisingly great spring green salads) at the local RSL (like the American Veterans of Foreign Wars) club on Bondi beach but I’m getting hungry again from writing this. 

But far better than the excellent, and for me large, meal was the conversation.  I ended up talking with some of the old Appjet team, Aaron, David and J.D.  (J.D. was new to me.)  At one point J.D. looked over at Aaron and I in the middle of our animated conversaion with an amused look and asked, “Are you guys really talking about MATLAB?”  Well, yeah, but also about Clojure, and especially Incanter, which is a really great library that I think of as Numpy for Clojure.  Aaron showed me what he was doing with Compojure, the cool web framework for Clojure, and JQuery.  Good stuff, and plenty of wide-ranging talk. 

There were surprises for me at Google.  For one thing, the place seemed to be entirely made of up of open layout work areas.  I would have a tough time tuning out visual distraction in that environment.  Distracting sounds are easy enough to deal with - that’s what earplugs, headphones, earbuds are for - but I find visual distraction is just as bad and harder to block.  In fact I’ve turned myself face into a wall in coffee places back home many times.  It looks odd, but it works.  Also, although the place was pretty stylish, it mostly didn’t have the playful kind of thing that Google offices are famous for.  Thoough there was a meeting room just off the reception with a table and chairs bolted to the ceiling in a sort of mirror image of the ones you use on the floor.  It was a bit disconcerting, which is the idea: to stimulate strange thinking.  It also had an impressive wall of plant life behind a rusted and weathered Google logo behind the receptionist.  That looked great.  

On my way out I made myself a rice milk latte with one of their big beefy Italian espresso machines.  That thing was awesome, though I didn’t really use it right at first.  I ended up making a triple, sort of accidently - does that partly explain the big rest of the day?  Yeah.  The rest of the day rocked.  The Maritime musuem nearby was good but not great.  The problem with human history musuems in Australia and the USA is that we just don’t have that much history (exclusive to us, that is.)  So some there were good displays of some Aussie martime stuff, but of course the best stuff is the earliest stuff and it was mostly not present, having sunk or been otherwise lost.  Or in some cases already on display elsewhere, like the anchor of Capt. Phillip’s ship, which is in a triangular plaza in the CBD.  Still a pretty good musuem though.  There were some beautiful wooden sailboats tied up out front, including a replica of Capt. Phillip’s ship, and some crazy sexy boats inside, too, like the tiny wood racing skiff with the giant sails.  

Then a walk south and east thru the rest of the Darling Harbor area, which is all very nicely done, to the Powerhouse musuem. This is *really* cool.  Tremendous tech, science, engineering and design museum.  (With a top floor dedicated to placating organized pressure groups.  Thus there was some silly crap up there at the time.)  I took a lot of photos.  Highlights: one of Robert Goddard’s “hoopskirt” rockets - so cool.  One of James Watt’s first steam engines - the only working model in the world - very very tall.  An Apple I.  A Heathkit computer that might be the same model as the one my grandfather assembled in his den.  Some great old musical instruments.  A “Lockheed” chair - really, really cool looking but probably uncomfortable… except I just looked it up and it turns out it was already a retro design when new; made in 1986!  So lame.  Replica of Galileo’s telescope and a quiet, really well designed area to watch slideshows / presentations of galaxies, and whatnot - great dark place to hide out from the relentless Sydney sun.  A walk-thru replica of the interior of the ISS.  A replica of the 1966 Soviet robot moon rover - it bears some resemblence to our modern Mars probes.   A zero-G simulator (actually more like “spinning slowly in space” simulator.  You feet are still pressing into the floor as hard as ever.  Still cool.)  Intersting - from what I’ve seen Aussies are way more into space exploration than you might expect - certainly much more so than Euros.  Perhaps something in the “New World” national character?  I think so.     

So I left the Powerhouse musuem quite happy and satisfied, and walked southeast to U of Sydney.  I like to walk around universities in places I go.  It’s usually interesting.  This one was no different.  Of course the engineering bldgs were all the ugliest, worst designed buildings on campus, same as in the USA. So, so lame.  Why do the people who most need a sense of design get so little opportunity in school to develop one?  Looked and looked for the Comp Sci bldg, wandering into Econ and several others, and the Aquatic Center / fitness center.  Eventually found the Comp Sci building (they call it IT, BTW).  Totally different world.  Plenty of money flowing around - it’s a very new nicely architected glass building with some kind of investment fund or capital management for the engineering school or something on the top floor.  I’m curious about what it was but sadly everyone was gone by the time I got there, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone.  Satisfied with all of that, I walked back to the Aquatic / Fitness Center and poached a workout.  I’m planning to go do that Monday morning for my workout and shower, too.  Then I’m already in a cool part of town!  OTOH I’m now lugging soap around.  Ah, that’s not so bad.  I’d like to get a chance to talk with some people about statistical machine learning, but we’ll see.  Melbourne could be a better place to do that anyway.  But what else will I do here in Syd other than read my new book and code? ;)

Anyway, then I was going to walk home, but noticed the stdent union had a bar that spilled outside - cool!  I walked around that a bit, then went to catch a bus, then thought, why go back to bed?  I should stay here.  So I went into the bar and joined a team for the trivia night sponsored by “Women in Engineering”.  Sadly it was the last question of the night, and mostly Oz questions anyway.  But I had a good time.  Much beer flowing around.  I made a few friends!  Talked to a fellow on my team who had spent some time in canada, including Vancouver and also talked a lot with a guy named Pat about politics and Oz and USA history while walking back to the CBD to catch a bus to Bondi Beach.  Finally caught the 333 bus and went home, tired.  Couldn’t keep eyes open on bus.

Great geek day in Syd.

Dear reader, I’ve got to apologize to you for this blog.  I am abusing you by writing it in such a long-winded manner.  I called it my “unpolished” surf blog because I really mean it to be a diary, for the enjoyment and edification of my future self.  But this being the era of exposing one’s life on the web (concurrent with the “age of data”; that’s no coincidence) I figure I should share it.  The problem is that I just can’t justify the time needed to polish it, to tighten it up, to make the writing as clean and purposeful as a wiring schematic.  So pay attention to the title!  ”Unpolished” comes before “Surf” and this blog isn’t always going to be about surfing, but you can count on it being always unpolished.  In a sentence, I’m sorry the posts are long; I don’t have time to write short ones.                             

I had a pretty great half-day of surfing Friday morning, our last session of the camp. We went to the beach break in the middle of the Crescent Head bay again. Ross and Kyle walked us over the seawall to have a look at what the swell was doing there. What it was doing was going pretty big (relative, as always, to what that break normally does or is capable of), bigger than anything we had yet surfed. “You want to try to surf that big stuff, Ethan?”  Hell yes.

They asked how many of us wanted to surf it (as opposed to driving back to Plomer Point). I raised my had and sort of waggled it around a little in the old tradition of students everywhere trying to seem like more than one vote. I only had two fellow beach break supporters. We had done a lot at Plomer Point, and so some time at a different break would be nice. On the other hand Plomer has huge advantages: it’s a point break and is sit on your board to rest and collect yourself, riding over the waves in a place where they don’t break before paddling a few strokes closer to the point to catch something. That also means you can better dial in the sort of wave you want, picking and choosing. By comparison, when you are at a beach break, where the waves are going directly at the shore, the entire length of the wave reaches the shallower place in the seafloor which causes them to get steep and break more or less at the same time. So they only directions you can go to dial in the kind of wave you want is closer to shore or further out, which is a big problem. You basically can’t hang out closer to shore because the bigger waves will already have broken to whitewater and will sweep you back in. Or they will break right atop you, necessitating a quick dive (which causes your board to pull you a bit towards shore) at best. At worst it tumbles you and yanks your board and you all over the place, and again pushing you further towards shore. This is called in the states, “getting worked”. Not sure what they call it here. Also in Plomer’s favor is a sort of bandstand / deck thing with a big roof so you can get shade and watch the waves. It’s got some downsides, like the seafloor there (where you surf, I mean) is all rock (thus my feet are feeling pretty cut up at the end of the week) and of course we had done a lot of it already. But the decision was taken to stay at the beach break and see what we could do. I was thrilled. 

I can’t overemphasize how much I learned this week. The interesting thing is how many important things I learned concurrently with my classmates / surf buds / comrades / friends, i.e. I went surfing about 20 times between from the year 2001 to 2010 without learning things that I should have learned on day one. Again, I need to get better at seeking out formal instruction. My new knowledge includes the eskimo roll (where you turn turtle on your board and ride whitewater out underneath it) which is an amazingly effective tactic when paddling out, improved paddling technique, and perhaps most importantly I’ve started to develop an eye for finding where the rip current is pulling water back out. (The rip calms waves down, often making them mushy and often preventing them from breaking until they are almost on the beach. You can paddle through this.) These skills and a much improved sense of patience now can get me out through a fairly difficult beach break, where the breaking waves are trying to shove you back to shore. There was a time when I thought I could learn all this stuff from the web, like I learn most things, but surfing isn’t well represented on the web. I guess surfers prefer to surf than blog. The broader point is that the interactivity of having a live instructor who can correct your errors the second you make them is a HUGE improvement over reading things on the web. In practice it meant although I had already read about *all* of the techniques I learned from my instructors this week, none of them had stuck. I couldn’t use any of them and didn’t know what I was missing.

I’ll write more later today, partly about how much I’m going to miss my classmates.