Perth, the end of an era and some interesting links

31/8/2015

I've had a really busy week in Perth and got a lot of stuff done.

At the beginning of the week, I was a couch surfer: from Lucille's apartment to Klaus' and Sumalee's house, then to Alex' and Bree's house, back to Klaus & Sue and finally settling in at Alex & Bree.

The van got cleaned, serviced, unloaded and put on Gumtree for sale. Fingers crossed I find a good buyer for it while I'm still in Perth.

I organized a wooden crate which is currently being heat treated to comply with ISPM 15 regulation to transport my stuff home.

It took me several days to sort through all my belongings, decide what to give away, throw away, pack for the sea-freight or keep in a pile to be worn/used for the next two weeks and then taken as check in luggage.

Today marks the last day of my over 8 year spanning career at Sandvik. It has been a very interesting time in which I've got to know many interesting people, had to overcome many challenges, seen quite a bit of the world, lived in three different countries and made many good friends along the way. While it was far from perfect, I think it was very valuable for my personal development. The half day in the office was enjoyable, catching up and saying my good bye's to a lot of nice colleagues. Alex left the company as well today and five other people were made redundant to re-size the office.

Leaving in style - Alex and me in front of the Sandvik office

Like in my farewell e-mail to my colleagues in the office, I'd like to quote the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius here, as he summed it up nicely, more than 1800 years ago:

"Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be." (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, 36)

Alex and I were taken out for lunch by some wonderful female colleagues from Doccontrol and Finance and afterwards enjoyed a coffee at Yahava Koffee Works in the Swan Valley.

... without words ...

Especially when your name is Rich ;-)

The Yahava Kwik Koffee drive thru in Swan Valley, cool!

One more thing I'd like to share here is the amazing documentary called “Being in the World”. It is an amazing philosophical documentary movie made by Tao Ruspoli (whom I heard in a Tangentially Speaking episode). Based on Martin Heidegger's philosophy, the movie features prominent philosophers from famous universities and masters showing and talking about their particular craft (a flamenco guitarist, a jazz band, a Japanese carpenter, a juggler,...). Amazing stuff. If anybody is interested, drop me an email and I'll point you in the right direction – there is a private video on Vimeo.

For a bit of background on the director: The second Tangentially Speaking episode with Tao Ruspoli  is really amazing too, the short outline on Chris Ryan's website reads as follows:

Tao is one of the most interesting people I know. His father hung with Fellini, Brigit Bardot, and Dali. Tao's family tree goes back 1200 years. He got guitar advice from Keith Richards, hangs with Oliver Stone, and he was married to film/TV star Olivia Wilde. He makes films about his passions—which range from philosophy to flamenco to the nature of love and marriage. Download.

Tao's latest project is a movie called Monogamish – a word coined by famous Dan Savage. Can't wait to watch it once it is released.

And lastly, I highly recommend watching a lecture from the 2014 Bulletproof Conference byDaniel Vitalis on 'Rewilding yourself' – what an energy he brings to the stage!

Jurien Bay to Perth

21/8/2015

Guest during my dinner yesterday

Rainy and stormy day almost all the way down to Perth, so I didn't stop at the Pinnacles. There is a little village called 'Seabird' which sign I've seen many times when driving up and down this road and this time I took the 10km detour to checked it out. They have a little cafe/restaurant/general store/bottleshop/all-in-one and I had a coffee there and spoke to the two women that were working there. Very quiet place and the rain outside and the fact that it is cold and winter didn't draw any people in while I was there.

A white inland sand dune

 

On the way into town I bought several bottles of wine and champagne for the next few days, I'll be couch surfing for a while and it is always nice to bring something along. I went to Austin Computers to get the SSDs in the laptop checked, but they had trouble opening the frame and gave me the address to an ASUS service center in Morley. I'll visit them on Monday as it is close to Alex's house. The solid state drive is getting worse, almost every second photo and every piece of music that I have on it is corrupted or severely damaged. Luckily I backed everything up on external harddrives, but I'll have to sort out, delete the unnecessary and crop all the photos where I'm not happy with the framing. Again! A work for the next few weeks, but I'd really like to get the computer working properly before I start that as it is much quicker from the SSD than from an external drive.

I watched the sunset a bit north of Freo – almost freezing due to the cold and wet weather down here. I was the only one wearing thongs – something I need to change soon, or risk frost bite on my toes ;-)

Anyway, in order to close the loop, I visited Lu in Mosman Park and had a wonderful champagne dinner to celebrate the safe return from an amazing journey. We indulged in a multi hour dinner and had many hours of fantastic conversation. We've both made many interesting experiences and realizations since the evening in February at the start of this trip and laughed a lot all evening long. Its shocking how quickly time goes by when in a good conversation and before I realized it, the clock has gone far past midnight and we called it a night. Lu is extremely dedicated to bring her PhD to a close, and hence got up at 7am already to go to the lab – on a Saturday morning. Science is a hard and brutal master.

I've concluded over the last week or so that this journey has indeed brought my life and thinking to a next level. I'm curious how the integration into my next adventure will work. I've got a meeting with our human resource manager on the 31^st August, so that will bring another chapter to a conclusion.

In the meanwhile I've got a lot to do and there are many people I want to catch up with in Perth.

Distance traveled: 260km

Travel times chart for Western Australia: Driving from Kununurra to Esperance for example takes at least 42.15 hours. I've been to both places ;-)

Now to a few statistics:

I've driven 19,326km in the van, since I left Perth in mid February. I've visited all states, except Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory – and as such pretty much circumnavigated a continent.

Most of the time while driving, in total several hundred hours, I had the pleasure to listen to interesting, smart, intelligent people discussing a very broad spectrum of topics. Special thanks to the great work of ChristopherRyan, Dave Asprey, Jordan Harbinger and Daniel Vitalis and all their guests and friends on their podcasts. I consider this a significant step in my education as a human being.

I've read 18 books on this trip

I wrote close to 50,000 words, published more than 1200 photos in the 76 blog posts and had more than 2350 page views in total. Kudos to all the readers.

I've taken 215 GB of photos (thanks to those huge RAW files!)

I've ticked off 5 items on my bucket list and have two more that are nearing completion

And above all: I've had an awesome time!

Kalbarri, Geraldton and Jurien Bay

19/8/2015

Yesterday night I enjoyed watching Tim Minchin and the Heritage Orchestra. Fantastic British born Australian comedian, actor and very skilled musician. Tim was raised in Perth and studied at UWA. This production in Albert Hall with a whole orchestra is amazing – I dig his jokes and his musical talent. Extremely good fun.

Finally time to get the Aeropress out in the morning and get a BP coffee into my system. Left early to see the pelican feeding at 8:45 at the river. Really cool birds – all of them rather young according to the volunteer that fed the 4 pelicans that were there today. They were fighting over the fish that was thrown their way by the attendees.

Posers!

Chasing one away - almost like chickens!

Jumping

Chasing again

Catching a fish

Trying to pull a fish out of each others bill

Catching a fish again

Afterwards I drove to Pot Alley – a huge rocky cliff – just outside of Kalbarri. There was a huge group of dolphins swimming close to the cliffs and probably hunting. I can't recall ever having seen so many of them in one place.

Several kilometers down the road, I visited Island Rock, Castle Cove Lookout and the Natural Bridge. There is a nice coastal walkway that connects these lookouts, particularly pretty in the wildflower season. There were at least 4 humpback whales out in the bay, too far out to take proper photos though. They were breaching, slapping their flippers and seemed to be having a nice day out in the cold blue Indian ocean.

Humpback - far out, even with the 300mm zoom

Near Port Gregory is the Hutt Lagoon – which is a pink lake. I stopped to take some photos but couldn't get close enough to the water to get the shots that I wanted, it was too muddy.

Beautiful colors - too good not to stop the van to take some photos!

Made it to Geraldton mid afternoon, just when the thick clouds started to open up and release some showers. Sat down in the van to read, download today's photos from the camera, place several phone calls and in the evening watch Randy Pausch's famous Last Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. I've seen this 80 minute long video already two or three times prior but enjoyed it and his message once again. I can highly recommend it as he sums up some important lessons in life.

Distance traveled: 194km

20/8/2015

Enjoyed a great cooked breakfast and talking to an elder Australian couple and afterwards to a young pair from the Netherlands.

Drove into Geraldton to get supplies and finally get a haircut to look like a normal person again before arriving in Perth. Had a coffee at the Dome right at the beach and was delighted by their fast WiFi connection – enough to download several new podcast episodes and update some apps while sipping an okay coffee.

Geraldton life savers tower

On the way south I stopped at the leaning tree – and it was windy there ;-)

Checked into the campsite at Jurien Bay and walked to the jetty and the beach to take some photos. There are many permanent campers on this ground, some of them have beautiful herb and flower gardens next to their homes.

Dinner was excellent – wild caught Australian crimson snapper, buttered broccoli and a mixed salad. This is probably the last campground I visit on this trip, so I went for gold. The camp kitchen didn't have a stove, so I had to bring my own to cook, but it was definitely worth the effort!

Distance traveled: 224km