Travel | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

Sep

Eat to ease East Africa’s famine

Sunday 16 October is World Food Day, and Oxfam is holding Shout the Horn to raise funds for its East Africa food crisis appeal.

Close to 12 million people in the Horn of Africa are currently facing desperate food shortages following the worst drought in 60 years. Oxfam aims to reach 3.5 million people with life-saving water, food and basic sanitation when people eat out at a participating restaurant.

If you work in a restaurant and cafe, could your place becoming a participating partner? The simple act of collecting donations on 16 October will make a difference to the lives of millions.

Full event details, including a list of participating venues and registration info can be found on Oxfam’s website. Please forward this to anyone who might be interested!

Find a participating restaurant near you – Oxfam will be updating the website daily until the event, so you can eat to ease East Africa’s famine.

My Chinese is a bit shabby, so I can’t give full attribution for this photo, but it pretty much says it all.

Sep

Notes from the back of a Daylesford wine bottle

Good Catholic Girl ‘Teresa’ Riesling 2010, Clare Valley:

‘St Teresa of Avila b. 1515 (patron of headache sufferers) is said to have been viewed levitating during deep prayer. My mother Teresa, prays, but to this point has not achieved levitation. The consumption of Clare Riesling over many decades has not caused her to levitate either. Could this dry crisp Riesling be the one?

Grapes grown by good catholic boys Faulkner and Pearson of Penworthham and Marsson of Watervale. Blessed with 600 dozen. Julie Ann Barry, Maker. www.goodcatholicgirl.com.au”

This excellent young Riesling was sitting perkily in the fridge of Monastiraki (Greek: ‘little monastery), the latest offering from Tina Banitski, the artist and mastermind
of The Convent, in Daylesford.

The forbidding former Catholic nunnery and school is now a cheeky art gallery, as well as Bad Habits cafe and the Altar bar (because the bar contains a chunk of the original altar in it, as well as the tabernacle).

Tina has also recently renovated a nearby house, stuffing it with work from her favourite artists, curios and wine to create Monastiraki, the perfect getaway for a bunch of friends or family.

People, it is officially Out There, from the paint-splattered mannequins hanging from the coat hooks to the scarlet or lime green bedroom walls, the fabulously wild artworks, cushion-tastic daybeds and buttock sculptures, essential, of course, for any self-respecting boudoir.

Sep

Spring in the city: good reasons to visit Melbourne

Newmarket Hotel.

Today, I was led astray, into the fabulous Melbourne Middle Eastern restaurant Maha. Little did I know that they are happy to serve up coffee to passers by, and to dish up the most divine donuts that ever wobbled on the face of the earth. They’re not even on the menu, they’re that good.

As we were mainlining the dough balls, crushed pistachios and white chocolate spill (a serve consists of five donuts – five – when inevitably two people are sharing?), I was reminded that Taste of Melbourne starts tomorrow. No time to crash diet before cruising the halls of the Royal Exhibition Building to taste dishes from some of the city’s top restaurants.

There are eight great reasons to visit Melbourne at the moment:
Fringe Festival September 21 — October 9
Melbourne Festival October 6-22
Art deco walking tours
Madonna & Child by Correggio
The Art of Brick LEGO exhibition, until October 9
New bars
Food meets design
and Taste of Melbourne September 15-18

Click here to read more.

Sep

Saturday night in Daylesford

On Saturday night, I
was in Kazuki, the newest restaurant in delicious Daylesford, about 90 minutes
north of Melbourne. Daylesford is, of course, hip to the eyeballs. Only a
population of 7000 people, yet it has art galleries, cafes, restaurants and
beautiful villas wriggling out of every pore.

Kazuki is a Japanese
restaurant on up and coming Howe St, and while I was snacking on tiny plates of
smoked eel ravioli and Japanese mushroom and celery soup, I looked across at
the next table, to see a couple enjoying a romantic evening: the wine, the
food, the view of the darkened street. The only odd note was that they were both about 20. Was I so
composed that at 20, I was taking dates out to swanky restaurants full of
ingredients I couldn’t pronounce? I can quite safely admit that no, I was far
too busy skulking around looking for low-budget entertainment in band pubs,
existing on a diet of unflavoured boiled rice, to even contemplate such
refinement.

“These kids of
Daylesford,” I thought, “they’re in a class of their own.”

Mind you, several
hours later into the evening, a band of the buggers ripped the two wing mirrors
off my daggy old, hardworking car. They’re not so bloody different, after all.

Sep

Poor Ned, it’s hard to get a head

Death mask of Ned Kelly.

Police killer or a true, blue Aussie? Bushranger Ned Kelly
is back in the news, 130 years after he was hung till dead in Old Melbourne
Gaol.

For the foreigners in the crowd, Our Ned had a penchant for
holding up banks, but was forced to go on the run after killing one or three police
officers during raids.

Ned, whose dad, Red Kelly, came from Moyglass in Co
Tipperary, was hanged in Melbourne in 1880, but his remains, along with those
of 134 other prisoners, were later moved to Pentridge Prison, in the Melbourne
suburb of Coburg. Prison officers had poured lime over the remains,
unintentionally preserving them so that 130 years later, the DNA from Ned’s
sister’s great-grandson could identify that the bones were, in fact, the
infamous bushranger’s.

Mick Jagger does Ned.

Ned’s skull was stolen in 1978, but when it was returned,
recent comparisons between the skull and his death mask, modelled on his face
while his dead body was cooling, have showed it’s not Kelly’s cranium, but is
possibly the skull of notorious British murderer Fred Deeming.

It’s a rough trot for a bloke, to have his bones carted
around in the public gaze nearly a century and a half later. And now, the Kelly
family and government bodies are beginning the wrangle over where those bones, it
will be a while till he’s finally laid to rest. But where? In a tacky tourist
trap or displayed tastefully in a museum, alongside his death mask? Either way,
his skull is still missing. To use Ned’s last words, “Such is life.”

Aug

A different direction: Lovin’ Lorne

My drive from Melbourne to Lorne, on the Victorian coastline, is not quite Hunter S. Thompson’s iconic road journey, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where he packs his attorney, two bags of grass, mescaline, acid and a salt shaker half full of cocaine: I’m packin’ my mum, some nice nectarines and a swimsuit in the hope that the water in Lorne’s Loutit Bay, aka Bass Strait, isn’t going to freeze my blood.

Click here to read more.

Aug

Where good looks count: Clear Mountain Lodge, Brisbane

Here’s a little tale about a lodge on Brisbane’s far northern fringe, near Samford. So I played down the arguments about the GPS, but it truly was a grim, bleak drive up to the lodge. Well worth it, really.

IT IS a cold and windy night, the night we head to Clear Mountain Lodge, a small hotel about 35 minutes’ drive north of the Brisbane city centre.

The lodge is, unsurprisingly, at the top of lonely Clear Mountain, in Brisbane’s little-known hinterland. In the dark of night, having been unceremoniously stranded in Queensland thanks to Chilean volcanic ash clouds, the lodge could be on the moon, for all I can see.

Thank goodness for the GPS, the neo-tech husband says. I’ll switch off my Walkman so I can hear you call me antediluvian but I just don’t trust them. So we argue all the way to Clear Mountain, before calling the hotel to check its location.

“Just drive to the top of the hill. You can’t miss it,” the receptionist says. “Don’t follow the GPS and go on Old School Road. It’ll send you down a four-wheel-drive track through a forest.” Tres Wolf Creek.

Click here to read more.

Aug

Palestine moves to north Melbourne

Snapped in Brunswick/Coburg, the Arab-tastic northern suburbs of Melbourne. It was a car shot, so sorry for the quality, it reads:

“On census day, let’s all say we are Palestinian!”

The census (where every person is counted in Australia) is being held tonight.

Aug

Cairo hormones high while NYC snoozes and loses

Cairo thrashes New York for late-night flirting. Who’d a thought?

In case you missed it this week, online dating site Badoo found that the Egyptian capital tops the world as most nocturnal city with the latest night logons for chatting and flirting on its website.

The Sex in the City capital, New York, was caught snoozing and therefore losing, coming in at a rather poor 32nd out of the 180 cities Badoo operates in. London came in 17th and Paris 18th. The naughtiest European city was Malaga, with six Spanish cities in the top 10 hotspots.

Cairo, a city I once heard described as not so much a city that never sleeps, but a city that sleeps in shifts, sees its flirt and chat activity peak at 00.45am.

Badoo’s 10 Most 24-hour cities
1. Cairo (Egypt)
2. Montevideo (Uruguay)
3. Beirut (Lebanon)
4. Malaga (Spain)
5. Zaragoza (Spain)
6. Madrid (Spain)
7. Barcelona (Spain)
8. Valencia (Spain)
9. Seville (Spain)
10. Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Aug

Upper West Side comes to Melbourne

It’s a sign of Australia’s enduring cultural cringe that Melbourne now apparently has an Upper West Side. Thank you, New York City, for helping us find new names for our city streets.

There’s always been that joke about ‘the Paris end of Collins St’, then there’s the Greek Quarter, Chinatown and the Spanish strip of tapas bars in Fitzroy. Let’s reclaim the streets: create our own Boganville, perhaps Gillard Grove, or Tonytown. Thank god for ACDC Lane, a shining light in the culturally confused wilderness.

Unfortunately, Melbourne’s Upper West Side is more mongrel than Manhattan. At the moment, our homegrown UWS is a scuzzy collection of building sites in the no-man’s-land around Spencer St, perilously close to the so-called gentlemen’s clubs (frequented by anything but gentlemen).

You can have your own slice of paradise for $342,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. Bargain of the century. I wonder how much it’d cost in NYC?

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