Ev's birthday boogy - woohooooooooo

We go to the Olympics and Ev has his second birthday bash

On Friday night we got tickets to go to one of the Olympic events being held in Hong Kong (and here, dutifully, is the Olympic flame that burns at each venue - all six odd stories high of it) which meant going to see showjumping - not my first choice of sporting event of course, but the only really accessible option - the other HK events are sailing. That being said, it was a lovely thing to go to. For a start, the crowd was frankly huge. My guess is that the majority of people, yours truly included, had never been to a showjumping thing before - so there were a lot of officials with signs telling people how to behave - which basically meant keeping quiet (with a big crowd that's quite an achievement) while the riders took their turns - a very mind your manners (Manors) and cucumber sandwich sort of thing. However, beneath the veneer it remains a really tense affair, with people dressed up in all sorts of national colours, jumping up and cheering and waving flags when their riders had completed their rounds. It gave the whole event a football match with a mute-button feel - though the mute failed each time when a pole went down (or someone fell off, as did a Kiwi rider, who was as unceremoniously dumped onto one of the fences as our rugby team has just been at Newlands) because plenty thousand people would let out an involuntary and simultaneous "ai-yaaah" - expressed with a falling tone, which is the cantonese equivalent to oh no, but with a lot more dramatic effect. I'm not terribly wowed by horses, but these were excquisite - just desperately beautiful animals, and the riders very elegant and composed on the outside. The tension of it all was very much on display when one of the two Hong Kong riders completed a perfect round at top speed to get himself into first place. The crowd went wild, as did Patrick Lam, the rider. When he cleared the last jump and crossed the line in 86 odd seconds, he leapt up in the saddle, punched the air wildly as he galoped around, and then took off his riding helmet and flung it into the crowd. It was much more of a motor-cycle grand prix head-space than a polite cough into the picnick blanket in the shade of the Range Rover. I thought it greatly contributed to the atmosphere. Here he is on the left above, galoping around without his helmet on while the crowd roars its approval. You'll have to click on the small horse pic on the right above to see the detail, but I took it to give you an idea of how beautiful and beautifully groomed the horses were. I also liked the dragon hedge which formed part of the arena - cool touch that. On the way out I took this cool picture over the Sha Tin river at the back of the stadium which I thought was very Hong Kong - a Jumbo floating seafood restaurant with lit pagodas, a wall of Sha Tin housing estates in the background, and the Olympic slogan in the front. All in all it was a heap of fun - must be a hell of a (brief) rush to see a big track and field final.

EVAN'S SECOND BIRTHDAY PARTY - EVAN'S SECOND BIRTHDAY PARTY - EVAN'S SECOND BIRTHDAY PARTY

Ev's birthday is only on Monday - but I'll be out of town next weekend so we had the party today. It was super-hot and the usual humid, so lots of sweating from running around, and pink faces to go with it. Ev had a ball, discovered he was in a dancing mood, but insisted on the same song being played again and again while he cavorted around beaming away. Ange made him a cool cake, a racetrack two, in keeping with his committment to things automotive, which Aiden very nearly trashed just before the party by slipping and falling, and getting his elbow stuck in the corner in the process. I think I might have been a bit abrupt with him at that point, but it was very repairable as it turned out. I've shot a little .mpeg clip which I'll post here when I've worked it out, in case you fancy some boogying lessons from your littlest brother. He's now 97cm tall, and a very solid and cheerful two year old. I'm looking forward to his birthday proper on Monday, and it's been really great to have Ange's folks here, taken a lot of the bite out of the distance. I hope you're having a cool weekend - hope to chat to you tommorrow.

Island outing on Sunday

We had a lovely day on Sunday, were lucky enough to get a boat ride out to Loi Lams for a seafood lunch and then on to Mils beach with Tracy and Simon, their kids, and Ange's parents

Wendy and Ian. It was a beaut of a day - h

ot and clear, and the water was ultra refreshing. The boys dammed up a little stream that ran down the

island to the beach, it was freezing compared to the ocean. Ange discovered this by trying to sit down in it, much to her mirth. The boys swam in their life-jackets, I floated around like a dugong. It was great - home by 7 and a knock-out kip. Hope you had a great weekend too.

Ocean Park error of jugement

Two weeks no post - not great; apologies. In truth not a lot reportable or photographable happening. The exception to this is that Aiden has learned to ride a bike without trainer wheels. No photos of this though - me too busy playing the neurotic parent running alongside, to get it together. Learning to ride a bike, as you will know, is also about learning to fall off one. Aiden has not disappointed. At the tender age of four he has chalked up one Lexus SUV already - THANKFULLY it was completely unmarked in any way.

I've been preparing for an interview I have in Geneva on the 25th of August. I'll tell you more about it if I get it - hold thumbs though, I think it's worth having. Ange's folks are here to visit, which is great. Having people here closes the distance, and Aiden and Ev are having a ball. The pic on the right here features Ange's dad Ian and Ev. If you look closely you might be able to see that that Ev has recently landed on the side of his nose whilst running - across nice rough concrete of course. Now he is Ev "Scabnose" McG. I've also been able to watch a bit of the cricket, which has been a nice treat. Not sure that I think the English have been too sporting - I thought the whole issue with the site-screen was not quite cricket.

I go back to work next week, which will be interesting. I was supposed to work yesterday morning, but we had a typhoon near-miss and the city was closed. I saw the signal was up at 6.15am, and just rolled over and kept going. Great timing, and a pleasure because there was not much damage. Tracy and Simon's canoe and sailing dinghy broke free of their mooring, and went walkabout in the storm. We had to go looking for them, thought it was worthwhile because the worst of the wind had been onshore. We eventually found both, one just in the bay and one around the corner towards DS beach. Very wierd really, because you're looking for something on the rocks at water level, and they had both been carried way way up by the storm surge. It was almost as if they were behind and above where we were looking. Both are miraculously in one piece.

The boys had a bit of cabin-fever by today, and Aiden asked to go to Ocean Park, a theme park on the coast near Aberdeen harbour. In a blistering error of judgement I agreed to this, not very smart. Chinese schools here and on the mainland are on holiday. It was like going to a huge scrum. The water-rides that Aiden specifically wanted to go on were closed for maintenance too - adding insult to injury. In the end we collectively got to ride on the cable-car, and Aiden had a b-grade (in my experience) ride on a very mini abyss thing called the Frogger - pictured above. I think I have more empathy with the feelings of the two guys on either side of him; that was about it. The views were fabulous, but even the cable-way was conjested - as illustrated on the right. Rush hour recreating. Better analysis next time I promise you. The Olympics begin tomorrow - not sure if that is a big thing there, but it's huge here, given where it is. I have a ticket to go to a horse cross-country event on Monday morning - but it's not really the men's 100m, is it now? And, I have to work...

Macau Weekend

We went to Macau for the weekend - the Vegas of Aisia, Casinoville and architectural hallucinogen - its telecom tower competing with ultra-mod gambling cities, an artificial Venice, volcanoes, art deco originals and a 50 story gold shiny building that looks like the top half of a pineapple with its spikey leaves. Rampant chaos, explosive growth, the hint of an omnipresent underworld, all running at top speed in 35 degrees of South East Asian ultrahumidity. We navigated the first two of the three islands and went to the far side of the third, Coloane, where you can hide from the rest in relative seclusion and your kids can run on a beach and splash in a pool. But before I get into it I wanted to say that I was delighted to get this photo of you taken by Big George. I chopped out the rest of the pic, and built a groovy matching background - matching that is the quicksilver stripes on the Quicksilver top. Its so nice to get a pic of you, puts me in touch, and reminds me how you're rocketing - you look beautiful, fabulous, so I thought I'd post it here, where it pretty much belongs.



We did not much more than nothing, spent two days in the pool and on the beach to Fernando's, the best Portugese food in Asia, spicy, tasty, simple and volumous. Coloane has a black sand beach, (from the artificial volcano perhaps?), which I've only seen before in Indonesia, and the sea is an amazingly muddy brown - VERY different from the white-blue/green of SA. The hotel was lush, and the pool

Dai Long Wan camping extravaganza

On Saturday morning we went camping with a group of people. The trip had originally been planned for the Friday, but no one was organised by that stage, and the weather was so good the sandbank braai in the previous post seemed like the most sensible. The destination for the outing was Dai Long Wan, in Hong Kong terms a remote island beach with no cell reception. Greg and Pam have a yacht (here is Aiden on deck leaving the harbour), and the idea for the trip was to load all the camping gear and a number of people and kids onto it while others went in beachable zapcats so that the equipment and people could be taken ashore from the yacht. As you can see from the three piece photo above, Dai Long Wan is very beautiful; a mountained amphitheatre with a beautiful long, wide beach facing onto a bay with a couple of small islands in it. It took about an hour for the yacht to get there, half that to get unloaded and ashore, and we set up a camp site on the beach facing the bay. This is what it looked like by the time the sun was setting behind the mountains. Aiden and Evan had spent the afternoon running and playing in the water. The beach was almost a table-top shape in cross section; we put the tents on the escarpment of it and there was a slope down to the tidal part of the beach. Evan, surprisingly, found this feature very entertaining and put a good chunk of time into walking up it and running down, getting the giggles when reaching that stage where you are in danger of your upper body overtaking your legs.
What had been a lovely day, however, turned into a less lovely night. With all four of us in it, temperature inside the tent rapidly reached what felt like 400 degrees - bearing in mind that summer nights here range from about 25 to 30 degrees, with humidity in the 90s. At eleven pm I couldn't be bothered with the pretense any longer, so I got up, promptly got drenched in a ten minute downpour, and then spent a sandy and wet hour lying under one of the shade things that we had brought, pretending that two hundred thousand frenzied and starved mosquitoes weren't feeding on my face. I gave up this farce when the third mosquito had actually flown into my nose - not a very comfortable feeling. Then between short and intense downpours I tried unsuccessfully to take time exposure photos on the beach, until I eventually accepted that sitting and chatting to other people who were having a decidedly sub-optimal camping experience was the only real choice. Simon's brother in law, Allan, is finance head for the UN's refugee programme in Geneva, so that made for a unique conversation, from my perspective. When the dawn came it was beautiful, and people shook off a non-existant rest with brekkie and a swim and all looked like changing for the better - but not for long. Over the horizon out at sea a grey black wall of cloud had sprung out of the sea. I noticed as it grew, literally visibly, that two big fishing trawlers had taken shelter behind the island in the middle of the bay, a piece of shelter that our camp-site was decidedly lacking in my opinion. On the other side of the beach, perhaps a km from where we were camped was a dai-pai-dong, a very small beach restaurant type thing - but probably more accurately described as a fancy shebeen in South African language. I said to Ange that she should get cracking and take the kids to the dai-pai-dong because it looked like we were going to get pounded, and fortunately she did because 15 minutes later we were hanging on to the stuff that we had not managed to pack up, while a storm of unimaginable ferocity raged. An hour into this the sea had turned decidedly nasty. Simon and Greg took a load of stuff out to the yacht through the surf on one of the inflatables and found a decidely unhappy crew member who proclaimed that it's engine would not start leaving him at the mercy of the waves, and suddenly it looked like we were going to be spending another, very uncomfortable night on the beach - there being no other way to go home. Fortunately however two people who had been on the beach the day before, Rob and Emma, had to come back to Dai Long Wan to fetch an inflatable of theirs that they had left there the day before, and did so on a 28+ foot RIB. This is a big inflatable with a proper hull, and 2 big, high performance four stroke motors on the back. It's the type of boat that is used by the HK Marine Police's pursuit team, and by NSRIs around the world. You can load it (as it it takes 22 people, unbelievably), and travel in pretty much any sea - this pic comes from an Australian baot magazine, and they were raving about it too. Rob is mechanically gifted, he gets it completely, so not only did this offer a possible (super-efficient) way home, but also sorted out the yacht motor, because in half an hour he had fixed it. So then it was just the challenge of getting everyone and all the stuff off the beach in a much rougher sea than we had come to shore in. So from what was panning out as a bit of an ordeal with little children, 40 minutes later we were back in Sheung Sze Wan, having been blasted back in this ocean gobbler of a machine.

Sandbank village braai

It was just a perfect day in every respect (...drink sangria in the park, and later, when it gets dark, a movie too - Lou Reed); blue with white sky vistas, unusual for Hong Kong - booming heat, and a very lazy very warm sea. The bottom of the bay is close to flat, so although they look a long way out in this pic, both Oscar and Aiden can stand where they are and have the water come up to just above their belly buttons. But because it was spring, it turned and came in again with surprising speed and the last bits were going onto the portable braai just as the water was knocking on the door. 15 minutes later we were all carrying bits and pieces and wading back to the jetty. The problem with a sea so calm is that it lacks the energy of waves. This in turn means that you have to provide that energy if the guys want a bit of boogy board action, which they invariably do. Fortunately some of the older kids think towing is quite a blast, so there are others keen to play this role. Oscar Arro made a very significant contribution in this regard; without it the whole thing would have been a touch exhausting.

The photos below are all pretty much the same theme, nice day, fun in the sea.

I took this picture with the last of the days light in the background and Courtney holding the flash.

Below this are the colour versions of the two black and whites in the previous post. I think the one of Aiden popping out of the water is a really nice photo. I like the compositional triangles in the other one too, and the sense of cautious trepidation that it suggests. I think this second one is nicer in black and white than colour. Hope you like them, and are having a fantastic hot time of it in KZN yourself. I was thinking about the Ushaka slides and being there with you, and wondered if you'd been zooming them yourself, of late.

...and another perfect day on the 4th of July