The big day has arrived - the day I present my work to the world at the first conference I’ve attended at an international level. I was rather nervous all the way in on the bus to the congress, but ignored my butterflies to focus on the first session of the morning.

I was very worried about how it would go to begin with, but once I had the first person dealt with, it was quite easy and I soon began to enjoy it. After all, as Dave reminded me, I knew the work better than any other person there, so I was the one in control of the situation.

My poster proved to be very popular, mainly because not much work has been done in the area I’ve been researching, and many people were interested in the numbers I was finding. Many of the posters were largely ignored by the masses, but mine was besieged with queries for half an hour after the poster session was officially over. Okay, so perhaps “besieged” is a strong word, but certainly “popular”.

One person reading it asked how many soil samples were taken, and that he hoped I’d had technical assistance and not had to do them all myself. I replied that I had a beautiful yet gullible partner in Diana (”come on Di, let’s go do soil sampling, it’ll be more fun than last time, I promise!”) and he felt that she should have been given credit to her. I’d like to make it clear here that the offer was made to her and she turned it down.

At the end of the day, I sat around with Dave Chapman and a couple of his old buddies from his days of study in England, drinking beer. Yes folks, that’s right, drinking beer. The beer over here varies from pretty bad to very bad, but there is a quite acceptable one called “Skol” (gotta love a beer with instructions!) which I’ve become partial too.

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The first day of the congress, and the reason for all this travel.

Diana sat in the room all morning, debating with herself whether or not to go out on the streets by herself, before finally deciding to do so. No problems at all. We were expecting the population of Brazil to all be light brown to black in skin colouration, but it turns out that there are people here with paler skin than us. Nobody with red hair though…

Returning from her walk, she watched a lot of programs dubbed into Portugese, such as the Fresh Prince of BelAir, The Simpsons, Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry cartoons, which was very strange. Some of these programs are even enhanced by the lack of English.

I arrived back at the hotel just before 8pm on the shuttle bus, with tales of grand disorganization. Basically, the people organizing the congress know how many people are at which hotels. However, rather than just running a bus to the one hotel in Piracicaba where people are staying, they make every bus go to every hotel, meaning that it takes forever to get home, and some buses were arriving with one or two people on them.

Added to that was the debacle where all the delegates left the presentation room, and went to the top of the hill where the buses had been boarded the previous evening. We all stood there for about quarter of an hour before finally someone investigated and found the buses were going to collect people at the bottom of the hill, 10 metres from where we’d all just trooped from.

Internet access at the Colina Verde is pretty scarce. There are six computers for the hundreds of delegates attending the congress, and of course, everyone wants to send an “hello, I made it to Brazil okay” email to family and friends. Two of the six computers required a password to get online, but nobody knew the password, not even the official people there to assist. On another computer, one man was taking the time to show his wife how the internet worked since she would be bored for the next few days and might want something to do. She was one of those people that loses the keys on the keyboard too, meaning she will hit the “W” key, and then remove her hand from the keyboard and look for it again, as though it might have moved. I think we have our SPOTD winners.

Diana found the drivers of Piracicaba to be maniacs, which was not overly surprising. We’d read in the Lonely Planet guide that in Brazil, the motorist is king of the road, and pedestrians have no rights. Certainly the concept of coming to a stop is lost on them. “Pare” is the equivalent to “Stop” here, but it has been loosely interpreted from “Give Way” to “Go Like The Dickens!”, based on what we’ve seen here in the drivers. Indicating directions of travel is optional, it would seem, and horns are a tool that make the car in front of you magically disappear so should be used at all hours of the day.

The congress was quite interesting though - many people I knew as only names on scientific papers were to be found there, and it’s quite odd to say to yourself “oh, so that is Professor X” as you look at them in person. Some people are exactly what you’d expect. Others are completely different in looks and manner. Still, there is plenty of congress left to check out.

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Despite the alarm clock being set for the wrong 12-hour period, we still woke in time for breakfast. Not quite knowing what to expect, we ended up gorging on bread, jam, fruit salad, watermelon, pawpaw, honeydew, bread rolls, ham, cheese, banana cake, lemon cake, chocolate cake, chocolate wafer biscuits and five different types of juice.

After breakfast, we went for a walk (read : waddle) around the city, since we were apparently right in the central business district. It is a loose term, since many houses and shops are located right next to one another, and everything is a big mix. It’s nothing like Melbourne or Shepparton where all the shops are located in one place and all the houses in another. Quite charming in a weird sort of “glad I don’t have to walk all over town looking for something” way.

The footpaths in the town are of two quality levels - incredible or none. It seems that if you want to have a nice bit of footpath in front of your house or shop, you do it yourself, and if you don’t, well, don’t expect the city to do it for you. As you might imagine, Di was enchanted with the prospect of uneven and loose bricks to walk on, given her eyesight, and expressed herself on the subject a few times by the end of the walk.

We could see one ornate building out our hotel room window (after looking past the immediate shambles) and went to see what it was. Turns out to be a school, and the large dome is the church part of it. Most shops were closed because it was Sunday, so we went back home.

Watching a little TV, we were amused to find “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” on the box, with the voices dubbed over in Portugese. Only one little problem - the songs. They could not alter the voices in the songs and still get them to rhyme so they left them in English and provided subtitles. This has to be the only movie where you are ever likely to see written on the screen:

DUMPA DUMPA DUMPA DI DOO

Fell asleep again, as it seems we were more affected by the jetlag than we thought. Got a call at 6:30pm telling us the bus to take us to the cocktails was there and if we wanted to be on it, we’d better get down there in the next two minutes. We raced down to the lobby and then sat in the bus for 10 minutes before it left.

Arriving at the Hotel Fazenda Fonte Colina Verde (the congress venue), we checked in and received our name tags, with Di very chuffed to get one as well. The drinks were due to begin after some opening speeches. Taking advantage of a very jetlagged audience, the monotone of both speakers actually put some people to sleep in the crowd, while many others wanted to just give up and do the same. Not overly exciting, I have to admit.

In the IGC proceedings, I got a bit worried when I could not find my paper. It turned out to be in a different section to what I’d been told, and I found it eventually, but there was a minor feeling of utter horror when believing my first published work was not able to be found in the text. Fortunately this feeling went away soon enough, and I was able to get back to becoming numb at both ends during the presentations.

After the speeches, the drinks and nibblies appeared and we got stuck into them. There was a very odd pink drink that seemed to be some sort of local beverage, or at least, some sort of local beverage served to tourists. Went down very well and tasted very sweet.

Took the IGC shuttle bus back to the hotel, arriving after midnight. Falling back into bed, I looked forward to the 5:30am alarm with a measure of trepidation.

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Let me say right now that if American Airlines wanted to take on the terrorists of the world in a “how to drive people insane” contest, they’d win hands down. First of all, they showed an episode of “Everyone Loves Raymond” which was, as is par for the show as a whole, designed for the mildly retarded. They then aired three repeated versions of their “shop with us duty free” commercial, and then left the television screens dead for a few hours. At one point, we awoke to find a movie playing in the middle of the night, and barely a soul awake to appreciate it. Compared to the previous few hours when everyone was waiting for the shows to continue, it was peculiar to say the least.

Adding to this misery was the fact that they stopped the intake of fresh air on the flight. Investigations revealed someone thought it was too cold, so they had turned off the air conditioner unit. With a ten hour flight, the body heat of so many people turned the air to a stifling stinking stagnant air that reeked of body odour and general humanity. Our eyeballs were so dry in their sockets that I ended up getting a cup of water specifically for the purpose of rehydrating my sockets.

All this, and completely unable to walk anywhere in the cabin because the guy next to me speaks only Portugese and we can’t communicate what Deep Vein Thrombosis means.

Arrived at Sao Paulo eventually (never quite been so glad to get off for fresh air, and Sao Paulo does not have air that could be considered fresh at all!) and checked through customs. In all probability, if we had been wearing clown suits, and handed him a banana and a small rat when he asked for our documentation, he most likely would not have noticed. Yawning all the way through the procedure, he dutifully stamped our passports and handed back one original and one copy of the entry forms we’d had to sign upon our arrival.

The bus to Piracicaba (pronounced “pirra-si-car-bar”) was delayed, but we set off on our jaunt at 1:30pm. En route, we stopped for lunch and it was about then that it occurred to us that we knew no Portugese. Luckily, we had an English speaking assistant there to help us out, but still, we figured it would be a good idea to learn a few basic words to get us through the next few days.

As we drove through Piracicaba, a town of 300,000 residents, I watched with some interest when we stopped at traffic lights, two men with a large dog each. One of the men was peering through the railings of a garage door, and then handed his dog leash to the second man before silently clambering through the bars. Obviously up to no good, he was our first example of street crime in Brazil. Luckily for us, I thought, we were going to a much better part of the town. Two blocks later, the bus pulled up at the Nacional Inn.

We met the woman from Araiby Viagens (the travel agent organizing the IGC) who was to be our translator for the next few days, then went upstairs to sleep. Our room was described as “very comfortable” in the rating scheme for the IGC program, but frankly, we’ve seen a lot better. The air conditioner did not work, there was a funny moldy smell in the air, and the bed consisted of a 3″ foam layer on a wooden base. The mattress, incidentally, did not fit the base at all. For $US66.00 ($AUD132.00) per night, this was a bit of a surprise. Looking out the window, our immediate view is of a house with a large hole in the roof, and a burned out high-rise hotel block.

We got a new room immediately, this one with a working air conditioner and collapsed 90 seconds later, waking just in time for dinner. After dinner, the time to total loss of consciousness was again about a minute and a half, and we slept through the night without moving.

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It was a dark and stormy night, the night before we were due to take off around the world and see the sights on every foreign shore. Or at least some of the foreign shores. We broke our jinx of Diana causing delays to the flight, and QF101 lifted off on time, bound for Los Angeles. We had organized to get seats where there are only two seats per row, in order to get more leg room, and settled back in the economy class level of comfort.

It was a very odd experience to depart at 12:15pm on the 9th Feb, and then land at 7:10am on the 9th Feb, after being in the air for so long. Of course, nothing being as smooth as it could be, we almost did not land when we came in. The wheels went down, the plane approached the ground, the flaps went up, and all was looking set for a lovely landing. With a mere 60m to go from the ground, the plane abruptly lurched skyward once more, and we left the city of Los Angeles once more.

The captain of the plane came on to the intercom a couple of minutes later to sarcastically inform us that this scenic tour of the city was thoughtfully provided by the tower control. It turned out that the plane that had landed before us was supposed to turn off the runway to it’s gate, but had missed the turnoff. As a result, we were left with insufficient runway space to land, since there was a plane sitting on the tarmac still. The second time around, all was perfect, and the prior plane had a decent navigator, so we made a definite descent.

Stupid Person Of The Day (SPOTD) was the woman in front of us who, when she reclined her seat the whole way, pinning my legs, was asked if we could come to some arrangement where she only half reclined her seat, so I could still move. She haughtily informed me that I should go find another seat if it was a problem. Needless to say, she made a pleasant journey over the next few hours with constant lessons as to the bony nature of my knees in her spine.

We caused all manner of problems with the forms to fill in so we could get past customs. Do you have a US visa? Yes. Then you need to fill in this form. Are you in transit only? Yes. Then you need to fill in this other form. Okay, so which form do we need to fill in? Um, both of them because the flight crew don’t know. Get on the ground and the woman at the information desk tells us that both forms are incorrect and we need another form. Present all three completed versions of the form to the guy at the customs gate who takes the transit one, and throws the other two in the bin. Simple as that, really.

Since we crossed the international date line, there were two chances for the SPOTD. Our second winner was the woman at the Los Angeles airport who woke us both up to see if we wanted to contribute to the “South East Asian Mother And Daughter Refugee Fund”. This is without doubt the most specific cause I’ve ever heard of, and given she was of south-east Asian appearance herself, it was most likely just a scam. We politely informed her in our broad Aussie accents which bus she was most welcome to take in order to make it to Hades in the least possible time.

After we went through the metal detectors, we looked around the lounge and then wandered out again, knowing we’d have to go through the metal detectors again. The second time through, I was getting my stuff off the conveyor belt and turned around to see Di being escorted over to another table. A female staff member there grabbed a swab and wiped down the handles of the bag with it, then pronounced it okay to go through. We were very curious as to what sort of test waving a piece of a hankerchief over a bag was, and found out that it was testing for the presence of explosive residues. I laughed and made a comment to Di that it was a good trick to fly all the way from Melbourne, just to blow up a plane with us on it. Di gave me a dirty look and hustled me past the security checker who was looking at me oddly. I really must remember that sarcasm does not work here.

Apart from losing a couple of hours in the time zone changes, the flight from Los Angeles to Dallas was quite uneventful.

Waiting for the plane to Sao Paulo was quite a funny game. Basically, the big screens informing people of the departure time are located outside the lounge area where people sit, so they can change the time and nobody knows. The time altered from 4:30pm to 5:06pm to 5:15pm, we noted, only because we were wandering around, stretching our legs. We finally boarded and the plane was half empty, so I quickly grabbed a row of three seats on which it would be possible to lie down later. A minute or so later, the captain came on the intercom to say there was a minor problem and they were checking it out. In essence, the plane was leaking fuel out the wing and they thought that might not be a good thing. Well, duh. A couple of announcements later, and we had to get off the plane again, because it was cancelled.

Just because it was such a zany day which seemingly had no end, the SPOTD award was handed out again. Since some of the people on the plane were in transit and were coming from countries the US is not so friendly with, the customs people wanted to locate those people first, to hold them. As we were going to be wandering around the airport for a bit, they did not want to risk them just strolling out the door and into the masses, so they called for those passengers first. Everyone looked at everyone else, trying to work out who those passengers were, since nobody was allowed off the plane until they got off and were counted.

Repeated requests for those people without visas to come forward did not work. Neither did directly approaching the most likely individuals on the plane and asking them directly if they were in transit. A few minutes later, when names were located and read out over the intercom, four Chinese men who had said that it was not them that the plane was being held up for, turned out to be the people we were waiting for after all. SPOTD x 4, making a total of six so far.

We were given $US15.00 meal vouchers to spend at any restaurant (and I use the term lightly) in the airport, and were booked onto the 9:00pm flight to Sao Paulo, which was the next flight that American Airlines was operating that day. We decided that since we were in Texas, we’d better get something Texan to eat, and headed for Dickey’s Barbecue Pit for dinner. This place proudly proclaimed it’s fare to be “lip smackin’, finger lickin’, rib ticklin’, knee slappin’, foot stompin’, great tastin’” and well, who can argue with any place that claims all that?

I figured I’d get some grated carrot as a side dish to my ribs platter, and was about to ask for it when the person in front of us ordered some cheese, and they reached into the carrot. You see, what I did not realize was that I thought was carrot was actually cheese, and that cheese is not a natural colour here. I knew it was a bright yellow colour, but under the heat lamps, it had altered to orange, and so it was most disconcerting. In the end, I settled for the beans and fries (aka “chips” to those of us who speak correct English). The drink came in a 32oz cup, which for those of us who are not metrically challenged is about 900mls. That’s a lot of beverage for your buck!

Now, the next part is a little unpleasant, so if you’re of a tender nature, or my grandparents, you should probably stop reading now. Toilets in the USA have a significantly larger amount of water in them than Aussie toilets. Now, this is hardly a new fact to a lot of people, but it is still very odd the first time you sit down, on the grounds that you’re worried about the height of the water in the bowl, and the depth to which one is descending into the bowl. Suffice to say, there is still an inch or so clearance, so there is not much of a problem.

However, the toilets in the Dallas airport have automatic sensors on them that detect things like :

1. a person entering the cubicle, causing a flush,
2. a person leaving the cubicle, causing a flush, and
3. nothing at all, causing a random flush.

With so much water in the bowl, there is a very real problem created when a random flush occurs because, well, there are certain bits that are not at seat level, and when the water goes into a hyperactive swirl, and abruptly whips all away from below you, it first does a merry dance around the inside of the bowl. This aquatic waltz leads to the sudden immersion of male anatomy in cold water which, as you might imagine, is a delightfully startling experience that one would love to repeat, say, never. Alas, the toilet I chose at the airport was designed with a zealous sensor and it went off a total of four times before I decided retreat was the better part of personal hygiene and scampered out of the cubicle. Ironically, my departure from the cubicle caused no further flushing action to be prompted.

The day ended even less pleasantly with the discovery that the seats we’d been allocated on our new flight were not a window and aisle seat, as we originally had, but in fact, right in the middle of a row of five seats. To make things more delightful, the fellow next to us spoke no English, and went to sleep promptly, meaning we could not get in or out of our seats to walk and stretch our legs during the ten hour flight. Oh happy day.

Oh, and this flight was delayed as well, due to the fact that they could not get the boarding tunnel to move to the plane. Oh even more happy day.

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Only last week, someone deliberately set fire to a part of Royal Park during the middle of the day, which ended up burning about four hectares of grassland.

Last night, we heard a car horn begin to blast continuously. I thought it was the movie Di was watching, and so paid no attention for a minute or so. When I asked though, she told me it was not on the television. We left it for another minute, then I went to the door to see if I could find out where the idiot was.

Turns out there is a car in the park across the road from our place which is now a giant fireball, and the horn is going off continuously, presumably due to burning the right (or wrong) parts of the electronics. We called the fire brigade, and went out to have a look. They arrived a few minutes later, and put the car out very efficiently, and the police had a word to some people on the other side of the fire. We think they might have reported it as well, since the 000 operator told me that another call had come in while I was talking to them.

Saturday, we awoke to the evil bagpipe players over at Milparinka Adult Education centre having a bit of a practice session at 8:00am.

Later in the day, when working on the computer, I suddenly heard the tinkling of musical chimes and I figured the neighbours had put up a wind chime or something. Went on for a few minutes, so I went out to see where it was located. Turns out there is a guy standing in the street, playing an xylophone next to his car. Don’t tell me we don’t have weird neighbours. It’s not an unpleasant sound (that’s the bagpipers that were going full blast at 8am today), but it is a little odd.

There are times when it all makes perfect sense to get out of this street full of nutters, you know. Tuesday is Moving Day, so this is possibly the last MooQuack mail sent from this computer for a long while, and perhaps a good time to get out of the street as well.

In other news, the people organising accommodation at the International Grassland Congress might have just qualified for the SPOTD award. We’ve just all been sent vouchers by email to print out, so we can take them with us, and present them to the counter of the hotel where we stay. It seems logical to me that they would identify clearly where you were on the voucher, and it does do so.

In large text, it reads that we have a double room booked at the Nacional Inn, Piracicaba, and the address of the hotel, and our names, and all that other information. What is not clear is why we need to print them in colour. The instructions say that unless we print them in colour, they won’t be able to tell what city we are going to (there are three cities being used for accommodating all the conference people). Seems stupid not to have just put a big number on the side, representing the city, so people did not have to take the file to get it printed in colour.

Very tempting to just get the green pencil out and colour in the voucher on the way over there. After all, we’ll have enough time to do a spot of colouring in, and so long as the turbulence is at a minimum, the chance of going outside the lines should be low.

Finally, here’s a bonus - no Gwyneth Paltrow movie on the plane to Los Angeles. I was particularly worried we’d be forced to watch the (presumably awful) movie “Duets” that features Gwyneth singing that (definitely awful) song that is always on the radio at the moment. I know, I know, some people think she does a good job of singing, and that’s fine. You know who you are, and I know who you are, and you probably know I think you’re an idiot for thinking she is doing more than revealing to the world that she is multi-talentless.

If you don’t know I think you’re an idiot, then please consider this your notice. Should you ever choose to renounce your thoughts on liking that insipid piece of tone-deaf drivel, please fill out application form 156-Ofb and lodge it at your nearest MooQuack Embassy. Include two passport-sized photographs, and a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Be prepared to wait for 2-6 days for a response. Be prepared to be initially rejected for no clear reason, then have the rejection annulled. Be also prepared to pay an application fee ($25), a stamp duty of $53, and an heretofore unknown flanglemaster tax of $5.60 - all forms of payment happily accepted except cash, credit cards, barter, intimate favours and cheques.

Next stop - Brazil! Well, okay, so the next stop is Los Angeles, and then the stop after that is Dallas, but right after that - it’s Brazil! We’ll be coming to you live from Sao Pedro, two hours inland from Sao Paulo, and the Odyssey will have begun at last.

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If you recall back to a previous missive I mentioned that one of the challenges we were going to have when departing was what to do with my three axolotls (Itchy the Ichthyostega, Osteotagia, and Pak’ma’ra) when we departed the scene. I have had a couple of offers from friends to look after them in our absence, but it seemed like a lot of effort for them to go to, and so I was reluctant on that score. Not because I didn’t think those who offered could keep them alive in my absence, but because it seemed like a rather large imposition.

I thought about donating them to a school or kindergarden or something, where little kids might be appreciative of them, since that’s the sort of thing I would have liked in my classroom when I was at school, but then realised that there would be nobody there to look after them over the holidays when school was out. Also, in the event that a goldfish dies, they are easy to replace with another boring orange fish before the kids get back. An axolotl is more expensive and each one has it’s own patterns and personality so there would be no chance to do a quick swap.

Finally, I decided to put them into the Trading Post (for the benefit of those not in the know, it’s a newspaper where you pay to list stuff for sale) along with the whole aquarium set up and see what happened. Given a new 3-foot tank is $90, the pump is $40, the filter system is worth $20, underwater vacuum cleaner worth $10, and the three axolotls are worth $20 each, and even given the second-hand nature of the tank (still worth $50 alone), the whole arrangement was offered for $100 just to make sure it sold, despite being worth $180 all-up.

A couple from Geelong rang me at 8:00am yesterday, and asked me a couple of questions, then rang back to see whether I thought it would fit in their car or would they need a trailer? I estimated it would fit easily into their car, and they drove up the hour-long trip to see the tank. When they arrived, they decided against it, thinking that the stand was going to be quite tall, perhaps 2-3 feet tall off the ground. I offered them the tank without the stand, but they were not that interested. I think perhaps they wanted the tank as a major feature of the room, and the metal edges on the corners made them not interested. Could have painted it though, and it’d look fine.

Possibly the SPOTD’s too, since they did not ask about any measurements of what it was sitting on before driving an hour up and an hour back to Geelong. Then again, they were (1) from Geelong, and (2) driving a Mitsubishi Magna, so that explains a lot.

A woman rang me at midday about the axolotls as well, and asked if she could come over and look at them either in the afternoon or evening. I replied that the evening was not good for us, and that the afternoon would be fine as I would be home working. She agreed to come over in the afternoon, but never did.

At 6:45pm, I got a call from a guy who was the boyfriend of the girl who’d rung at midday, asking if they could come over and have a look. I resisted the urge to tell him to sod off, and asked instead how far away he was (since we were getting ready to depart to Geelong, but did not want it known the house would be empty either). Turns out they live in Kensington - and the distance between our houses was about 1.5kms. I said that would be fine, since I knew it would take no time at all for them to be here, and sat down and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited.

And waited.

One hour and forty seven minutes later, they arrived, with no explanation for the delay, and there was technically nothing I could say to them. No calling them stupid names. No abusing them. They were the customers (potentially, at least) after all, and I had to be nice to them. And if there is one thing that really irks me, it’s being nice and polite to inconsiderate and stupid people.

I almost baulked at selling them the axolotls, to be honest, based on their physical appearance. I was not sure I wanted my pets living with the sort of person that might feed them, but only when they bothered to. Based on the evidence, they’d not learned to tell the time yet, so it was rather worrying.

He got out of the Holden Torana wearing a pair of shorts and thongs only. Before he got to the door, he did us the honour of putting on a black T-shirt featuring some heavy metal band on the front. Tattoos ran from the ends of his toes to his forehead, and he was virtually completely covered with them, at least up his legs and arms. In his face, he had seven piercings at least, including a large ring through his nose (I tried to count them a few times, but there is only so long you can stare at someone and try to count the bits of metal in their face). To top this off, his hair was a lank combination of two foot long dreadlocks and general muck.

She was wearing a dress with one broken strap so that every time she breathed in or out, she had to grab at the top of it so it would not fall down to expose her chest. (Note : this was awful in that she had no chest to speak of anyway, so it was not like I’d want to look, but I had the most terrible fear that it would fall down while I was speaking to her, and her big scary boyfriend would turn and see me looking at precisely the moment her chest was exposed, then beat me up.)

A few tattoos adorned her body as well, though not the full coverage like her boyfriend’s. As I opened the door, their dog ran into the house, or at least tried to before my leg shot out, it copped a boot in the head and was projected back outside rather quickly. Before the animal lovers jump on me, it was not a kick. It was just that wherever it turned to escape my boot, I moved my leg to make sure there was no way of escape, and pushed it back out the door.

She told me she would put it on a leash, did so, and then proceeded to come inside - WITH THE DOG! I told her politely I would prefer it if the dog stayed outside, and she was fine with that, but rather than just tying it to the stairwell railings, she held it and did not come into the flat, choosing instead to look over the threshold from a few feet away.

Basically, these were the sort of people I would not associate with in any way, and here I was considering whether or not I was going to hand over my pets (in exchange for cash) for them to own. Very difficult decision. On the one hand, I knew the best I could muster for the setup if I sold it to an aquarium shop would be $40-$50, and on the other hand, I could sell it to tattooed pierced late bogans for twice that price. I decided the aquarium shop would probably resell everything, quite possibly to bogans anyway, so I cut out the middle man and made the deal.

At least they did not haggle about the price at all - not that I was willing to haggle with them really. Anyone else, yes, but not people that ring at midday, tell me they are coming in the afternoon, ring in the evening to come over and take 1.75 hours to travel 1.5kms when I’ve made it clear to them my evening has something planned in it.

Speaking to the girl on the phone at midday, she’d told me they had two already, so I knew that they had some idea of how to keep them alive at any rate, but I told them they should change the names since they were buying them for their own pets now. She said she’d be happy to keep the names I had for them, but when she tried to pronounce them, she decided to pass on Pak’ma’ra and Osteotagia, and instead just keep Itchy’s name, albeit not the full name of Itchy The Ichthyostega.

Not surprising, really. Didn’t exactly seem like those names would fit in with their axolotl names of “Axl” and “Spike”. And yes, the first one is named after Mr Rose.

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With a mere week remaining before departure, we’re up to our necks in panic. Among the things still not obtained are travel insurance and Brazilian visas. Could be interesting if I have to tell Dave I’ll be sinking drinks in the US while he presents my work to the IGC, but it won’t come to that, more’s the pity.

On the matter of travel insurance, the main problem is that although there are about 30 or so different policies we could apply for, there are only five or six major underwriters that actually are the insurers behind the brand names. Due to Di’s osteopetrosis and vision problems, if one of the underwriters chooses to reject the pre-existing medical conditions for cover, then we have to rule out about six different policies.

The main problem is that while there is no real treatment for the osteopetrosis if she breaks a bone, other than not walking too much on it (ie: not even crutches needed usually), we are concerned that if she were to step off a curb and be hit by a car, then the insurance company would claim she broke a bone because of the pre-existing condition, not because she was hit by a car at 50mph. The same goes for the vision - if she manages to gash her arm on a tree branch, would that be covered or not, since if she had 20/20 vision, she might have seen it? It’s a very grey area with the potential for us to pay lots of money for premiums and then get nothing out of it because they link it all back to pre-existing conditions.

Our SPOTD award went to the medical assessor who had, according to their own words, “spent all morning looking at the file but regretted to say that cover was being declined” right before she asked Diana what was the difference between osteoporosis and osteopetrosis. Bear in mind that this was not one of the general call centre people, but a person employed by the insurance companies to assess potential applicants for medical conditions. There is a bloody big difference between the two conditions, but the assessor had evidently not bothered to read up about either. Rather frustrating to be declined by an official for no good reason, but hey, after the fun and games of the US visa recently, we’re getting used to simple-minded folk in dangerously high positions of power.

The other irritating thing with the rejection of the pre-existing cover was that not only would they not cover broken bones, but they would also not cover non-related illnesses for Diana such as flu or gastroenteritis or injury in the event of a car accident. However, they were still prepared to charge the full premium, presumably as a “convenience” for us in some way.

Di was, as you might imagine, simply delighted with this offer and told them where to go and which bus to take…

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001
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