With a three hour stop over
at Singapore’s Changi
airport, our Cathay Pacific Boeing jet finally landed at Melbourne’s Tula-marine airport, after an
eighteen hour journey from Mumbai. The one way ticket was our fourth international
relocation as a family. We were looking forward to spending a couple of years “down
under”. From everything we were told, particularly from our British friends, we
expected Aussies to be similar to British except perhaps a bit laid back.
The whole family move from London to Melbourne was so rushed - with a brief family holiday in India - that we had done virtually no research on
what to expect in Australia.
Our knowledge of Aussies was limited to Ricky Ponting who had scored double
centuries against India at Adelaide and Mebourne in
2003, Shane Warne who had just been banned from international cricket, after
being found guilty of doping that year and of course watching Mick Dundee, from the Crocodile Dundee series.
After being sniffed and
intimidated by a couple of massive Alsatian dogs – part of the routine Australian
quarantine immigration process – we finally approached the arrival lounge. A stocky
six-foot-three Aussie man in his mid fifties, with a double chin, small
inquisitive grey eyes and a French hat beard, was waiting patiently for us with
a placard. He was our chauffer who welcomed me with a warm “G’day Mate” as he touched
his hat and cocked his head to acknowledge my wife Himani. As he was effortlessly
loading our four heavy bags in the boot of his black limousine, I noticed his
hands. They were stout and broad, the fingers ending abruptly
with stubby but well manicured nails. Once we got comfortable, he looked in the rear mirror and started the
small talk with a rather blunt question. “Have you come here to die?” Despite
my jet lag, I was startled. I replied in a firm but calm voice, “No. I have
come here to work! We are on an international assignment.” He chuckled. What he
meant to ask was, “Have you come here today?” I had failed my first test of
the Aussie accent – they pronounce an “a” almost as an “i”. So my
client “ANZ Bank”, I found out much later, was in fact “INZ Bank”!
Once you get the hang of the
Aussie accent and train to elongate your vowels, it’s quite easy to follow.
What takes a bit more time to get under the skin, is all the slang and the
Aussie sense of humour. Several months into my stay, I was once conducting a
brainstorming session with my colleagues about project management best
practices. The session was going well and we had identified a few common issues.
So I said, “Right! Now that we have a good list of problem statements, let’s
carry out some root cause analysis.” That’s when I suddenly realised everyone was
grinning… It was that feeling when you intuitively know that
everyone else except you knows what the joke is, but it’s obviously lost on
you. In the next break, one of younger PMs came up to me and obliged with an
explanation. In Aussie English “root” means “sex”. I thanked her and bought my
dictionary of Aussie slang on the same day in the C.B.D. on my way home.
Another interesting language
experience in Melbourne
is learning to pronounce weird names of places mostly derived from the
aboriginal times. In and around Melbourne,
you can drive through the forests of Murrindindi
on the Maroondah highway to the suburbs of Murrumbeena and Mordialloc.
Balagorang are Kangaroo feeding grounds and Boogoodoogada is a rain bird.
In hindsight, I guess this is
good news for us Indians. Throughout my international career both in the West
and the far East, I have seen too many of my clients and colleagues murder
the pronunciation of Indian names. However, since Aussies are used to these
aboriginal tongue twisters, if you are say a Krishnappa Yellapragada from
Thiruvananthapuram, “No worries mate!”
As an Indian, I was
pleasantly surprised to find several similarities with Australia. Their
weather, culture, cuisine, attitudes, folk music and lifestyles are in many
ways remarkably similar. Take the rugged, rocky, dusty and bright sunny
landscape for instance. It very familiar to the Deccan
plateau of Western Maharashtra, where I grew up. That heat often starts some
of the worst bush fires around Melbourne.
One of the tips from my office colleagues, was never to underestimate the
Aussie sun especially as you are out and about on weekends. I now know why
Shane Warne had so much silver sun-tan lotion on, as he bowled Sachin Tendulkar.
If you look on the world
map, Australia
spans 12 degrees to 42 degrees to the South of the equator. India is 8
degrees to 38 degrees North, almost a mirror image. So it is not a surprise
that Australian weather has great diversity, just like India. Australia and India are both agricultural and
mining economies. We both rejoice beating England at cricket and we both
celebrate 26th January, as a national holiday.
Melbourne is known as the capital of cuisine of the
southern hemisphere. They say the Greek population of Melbourne
is next only to Athens.
There are large vibrant Vietnamese, Lebanese, Chinese, Turkish and Italian
communities living here since the second world war. Because a lot of Aussies go
to Indonesia
on vacation, Indonesian cuisine is popular too. The long line of cafés along
the Yarra (river), bring that confluence of world cuisine to life! And Aussies
eat their dinners late, like most Indians do.
But what I love most about Melbourne,
is that you can get to some of the most pristine sandy white beaches in just a half
an hour drive South towards the Mornington peninsula, or you can drive south West
towards Geelong for three quarter of an hour and find yourselves in the dense
fern tree rain forests or drive thirty minutes to the East during the winter, to
the ski slopes of the Dandenong mountains. I don’t know too many cities in the
world, where you can experience such variety and have this much fun, all in a
day’s outing.
There are some equally striking
contrasts though. With a land more than twice the size of India, Australia’s
population is less than two percent of India and roughly the same as
Mumbai. So you can drive around in the Kangaroo land for hours and in
the outback for days, without sighting a single car. The Aussie
definition of “personal space” is very different compared to where I grew up.
Aussies love the outdoors,
their famous long walkabouts and take a sabbatical to drive around the outback for
months in their RVs (recreational vehicles).
I
felt the work culture was largely similar to the West, except compared to the British
and even Americans, I found Aussies lot more relaxed and informal. It’s much easier
to strike a conversation with a co-passenger on the Met rail, than it is on the
London
underground.
Aussies are sport fanatics and apart
from cricket, they love their horse-racing, rugby, tennis and footy. Before
traveling to Melbourne,
I would strongly advice you to learn your AFL footy rules and be prepared to
support Collingwood. When you get here, just look around you and you’ll see a
Magpie. For the less initiated, AFL stands for Australian Football League and Magpie
is the Collingwood club symbol. Magpies in Australia
are as common a bird, as crows in India.
A few months after we had moved to Melbourne, we read about the Australian
gold rush that started in the 1850s and how Australia became famous for its
mines. They even have a living museum called “Sovereign Hill” where they have
recreated an entire town so you can go back in time to witness how life was in the
old gold mining towns of Bendigo
and Ballarat. I shouldn’t admit to this, but I now have a new week-end hobby. I
go on long drives on the outskirts of Melbourne
with a metal detector looking for those golden nuggets.Well… you never know!
*** by Sachin Kulkarni, Melbourne, Victoria. July 2003.
I had spent majority of the thirty two years of my life under the simmering golden sun of India. My only connection with ice had been the ice cubes from my refrigerator, which I would see dissolve rapidly in my glass of fresh lemonade before I eagerly sipped on that refreshingly cold drink as soon as I came home from school. I would then close my eyes and press the empty cold glass against them.
Actually, I did see some snow once or twice as a child, during the monsoon when we had hailstorms. I remember rushing into the backyard of my house in Pune, an open umbrella in my hand and keeping it upside down to collect the hailstones the size of a small grape, as we ate them before they would melt.
My daughter has a much deeper connection with the snow. She was four months old when we moved to Buffalo, upstate New York, a town on the border of USA and Canada famous for its “lake effect” snow. The first three winters of her life were all about the snow. She played in it when she was one, she slid on it in toboggans when she was two and made a snow man when she was three.
People of Buffalo measure their snow in feet, not in inches. Witnessing two feet of snow falling in a single night, was a new experience. For someone like me who grew up between 30 and 42 degrees Celsius, minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit was clearly off the charts. At that temperature, the definition of cold takes a whole new meaning!
It was 7 a.m. on 26th January 2005. It had snowed two feet last night. As I opened the door, it felt like an invisible ghost was waiting outside to slash my cheeks and chin with a thousand sharp knives. The glow reflecting off the white snow, made the surroundings incredibly bright. Within thirty seconds my nose and lips went numb. I had turned on the heater of our red Honda CRV with a remote control ten minutes earlier. Seasoned Buffalo citizens had warned me of nose bleeds. Blood starts to freeze within minutes at these temperatures. Most frost-bites happen when people don’t respect these temperatures and I certainly wasn’t taking any chances. As I settled in the car, I reached for the snow shovel. I waited patiently for the thick sheet of snow to get wet enough so it would slide off easily. I came out of the car three times, each time no more than a minute and wiped off the snow just enough to see clearly through my windshield and the rear mirror.
Our house was in Orchard Park, an area right in the Lake Ontario lake effect snow. That means the lake literally dumped snow within four square miles of where we lived. The whole town drove four wheel drive SUV cars. During winters, some would still put on iron chains on the tyres. That reduced the chances of cars sliding especially on black ice. That’s a good thing by the way, because it’s usually the difference between driving normally versus suddenly finding yourself running into the oncoming traffic as your car spins out of control. I wasn’t going to take any chances this morning. Or so I thought as I got into the car...
I didn’t watch the morning news. I should have turned the car radio on. It was a mistake.
Had I turned on the radio, I would have learnt that last night was one of the worst snow blizzards in years and a big news by Buffalo standards. The snow was so thick, that the oaks couldn’t bear the weight and four hundred of them, had branches falling on houses, electric poles and roads making driving extremely dangerous. The temperatures had plummeted so much, that water pipes had burst and sump pumps in basements had stopped working. Half the town was without electricity and heating. Many cell phone towers were not functioning. Several exits on the I90 motorway were closed.
The roads looked awfully quiet as I turned left, speeding up slowly and cautiously towards the motorway. This was my last chance to turn back. I should have turned back. I should have listened to the radio. This wasn’t another normal snowy winter morning. I was now cruising at 50 miles in the fast lane, well below the maximum speed limit of 65 and at a safe 50 feet distance behind a massive truck. She was going steady and was about to get off at exit 6. When she does, I would slowly manoeuvre to the middle lane, then onto the slow lane and comfortably get off at exit 7 to go to HSBC tower, the only skyscraper in Buffalo which was my office. I was already planning my day. I would be in the car park in five minutes and into my cabin on the twenty fifth floor in about eight minutes. It was my daily routine.
There was only one problem. What I didn’t know, was that both exits 6 and 7 were closed that morning due to big trees lying on the ramps. The truck driver couldn’t see the ‘exit closed’ sign as the sign itself was snowed under. When he did, he had to brake urgently. As the five tonnes of his vehicle was coming to a screeching halt, a thirty feet long and a foot thick sheet of ice came sliding out from top of that truck and landed on my car. All I saw was the silvery grey ice dropping on my car completely blinding my view. I desperately started my front wipers, but they didn’t have the strength to move a foot of ice. I had no idea when I would crash into the truck as I took my foot off the pedal and contemplated various options in a split second, including whether or not I should pull up the hand brake, knowing fully that in these extreme icy conditions that would mean I would spin out of control.
The next ten seconds were the longest of my life. I saw the faces of my parents, my wife, my daughter and my god (Ganapati) as I heard the screeching noise of the truck tyres in front of me, the loud thud of the sheet of ice landing on my car, my racing heart-beat and the noise of my side mirror as it clanged against the metal barrier on the side of the road shoulder, all in rapid succession.
I had managed to stop the car on the shoulder, having switched all three lanes without pulling up my hand brakes. The truck was nowhere to be seen, but it may well have been around since the visibility was now less than twenty feet. I slowly got out of the car and walked up in front of the car to see where I was. I had stopped about thirty feet from the point where the road shoulder had no barrier and there was a ditch on the side of the road, deep enough for my car to topple three times over. I shuddered and it wasn’t due to the cold weather.
I thanked god and my parents. I knew I would tell this story many times over and for that I was very grateful.
We picked Malta for this year’s winter
vacation with very little research. The idea was to get away from the dark, damp
and what is generally miserable London
weather in December so we could end the year on a slightly sunnier note.
However, given my extensive business travels to Asia
throughout the year, I didn’t fancy another long haul flight. We wanted to go
someplace relatively laid back, a nice family vacation destination, where they
spoke English, where we could get some vegetarian food and where we could rely
on the public transport rather than having to rent a car and bother with the maps
and directions. Malta
fit our requirements perfectly!
Malta is a group of three small islands in the Mediterranean Sea. It has a diverse set of neighbouring
countries. Sicily, Italy is only fifty miles to its North.
Tunisia and Libya are about
two hundred miles to the South West and South respectively. Spain and France
are to the North West and Turkey to the
East of the islands. The Maltese language, therefore, has Arabic origins but with
a lot of words loaned from Italian due to its proximity to Sicily and English due to its one hundred
and fifty years of British colonial heritage. Malta gained independence in 1964.
Malta is easy to get to. It’s a relatively short
flight from at least a hundred cities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Its climate is pleasant throughout the year.
It’s rarely hotter than thirty two degrees Celsius and the mercury seldom dips
below the teens. The country gets sunshine for an average of two hundred and
twenty days – in stark contrast to the island we live on. Malta is famous for its absolutely
stunning beaches and historical places of interest such as palaces, cathedrals,
museums and ancient temples including some that date back to 2,500 B.C. and
therefore are Unesco world heritage protected sites of great archaeological
significance. It’s schools, roads, shops and public transport infrastructure is
reasonably good. People drive on the left side of the road, as with most
countries that are part of the commonwealth. The real estate seems to be doing
really well. Even during the Christmas holidays, the off season, we saw Malta’s
impressive number of hotels, restaurants and beaches full of tourists. As a
consequence, Malta’s
economy is vibrant and thriving.
After a rather uneventful three hour flight, we
landed on Malta’s
international airport which apparently handles more than two million tourists a
year. Malta’s
local population is four hundred thousand. That’s a ratio of five tourists per
local.
As we got comfortable in our airport transfer
shuttle taking us to our hotel, one of the first things I noticed was how
incredibly colourful the landscape was. The lush green farms on the rolling
hills had dark green borders of cactus plants. The green background was
interspersed with golden yellow houses with white facades constructed from the
limestone found locally. At the horizon, this landscape was interrupted by the
azure blue seas below and light blue skies above. I was instantly transported
to the scene of Godfather I, where Al Pacino is hiding in Sicily and marries Apollonia.
Hotel Seabank
As we climbed down the next hill, the combined
smell from the salt-pans and the local fish market entered my nostrils and I
started remembering Godfather dialogues. Peter Clemenza says, “It’s a Sicilian
message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” I had a strong urge
to share my newfound deep connection with my wife Himani. But like many women,
she has never been too impressed with Godfather movies and couldn’t get herself
to watch all the three parts despite my repeated attempts over the years. I
decided its best to keep the Godfather analogy to myself, as wise married men
about to start their annual vacations ought to.
The main island of Malta
is only about thirty kilometres long and fifteen kilometres wide. So you can
pretty much travel across the entire country within an hour by car, bus or on a
tourist coach. After about three quarters of an hour, we reached our hotel
Seabank towards the North end of Malta.
I am used to hotels claiming to have the so
called “sea view” whereas in reality, the view is often a small and barely
visible distant patch of water between the land and the sea available to a few
lucky guests who happen to have their rooms overlooking the seaside. Seabank Malta however,
is literally thirty feet away from one of the best Maltese beaches – the
Mellieha bay.
It’s a rather large property with six restaurants – a Chinese, an
Italian, a Brazilian, an American, a Mediterranean
and a continental European. So we were spoilt for choice. Despite the variety of restaurants, however, our
vegetarian options were limited, except of course for dessert where there was a
good choice of cakes, pastries, ice creams, fruit and cheese. On Christmas day,
we were struggling to find a vegetarian dish on the traditional Christmas
buffet. The sous chef approached us, asked what the problem was and offered to
cook five vegetarian dishes just for us. Now that is customer service.
After dinner, the hotel guests had entertainment
arranged at “the dome”, a closed amphitheatre built on the property. Each
night, they had a different theme of song, dance and music. On our first night,
it was the music of the sixties. As the audience started to hum and sing to the
tunes spontaneously, we looked around and suddenly realised we were the
youngest couple in the audience! Not that we know our Western tunes, but the
songs were truly before our time. The second night of our stay, the theme was
Michael Jackson. The songs were acted and danced – ‘Thriller’, ‘Beat It’, ‘Dangerous’,
‘You are not alone’ – I must admit they did a pretty good job with elaborate
costumes. The third night was Abba. The fourth night was a magic show. The
Christmas Eve, was much more traditional with a Christmas band, a choir and
carols.
We spent the Christmas day exploring the hotel
since there was not much else to do with the shops and public transport closed.
The hotel had four swimming pools one of which was indoor and heated, a full
fledged spa, a gym, a bowling alley, pool tables, beach volleyball, dart, table
tennis and some shops all on the property. Fortunately, it was a balmy twenty
one degrees Celsius and sunny outside. So we hiked up the mountain behind our
hotel to the church of ‘our lady of hope’. From the churchyard, we had
spectacular views of Mellieha bay.
The north Malta tour
On Boxing day morning, as we waited at the
tourist agent’s office for our open rooftop sightseeing coach, Lucille the tourist
agent, decided to strike a conversation. Within twenty minutes she had told us
about her age, how much she weighed and all about her family, which included
two teenage sons who fought with each other all the time and her one year old
dog Jackie. Lucille told how upset she was since her younger son had chosen to
pierce his tongue this Christmas at the tender age of sixteen, whereas how she
had waited responsibly till the mature age of twenty five, before she got her
first tattoo.
Meanwhile, aforementioned Jackie, who was tied
to a leash and was standing next to Lucille, was now trying to make friends
with our daughter Aarohi. This was all getting rather too personal for us especially
from someone who was a complete stranger. After all, we had hailed from the island
of the stiff upper lipped Brits!
As Aarohi was stroking friendly Jackie, my wife
twitched at the thought of him licking Aarohi’s new Christmassy red frock while
I nervously speculated that Lucille was getting ready to show me her tattoo –
thus taking our twenty minute long friendship to the next level. Fortunately, our
coach arrived just in time and we were spared of further indiscretions. We had
heard that the Maltese people are very friendly. We had now experienced it first
hand.
We were now on our way to explore the north part
of the island. A major highlight of the north tour was a walk through the
narrow and winding lanes of one of the most ancient European cities, Mdina.
Mdina was the capital of Malta
since the ninth century before Valletta
was built in the sixteenth century. It’s a fortified city on top of a hill
offering excellent views of the whole island. On a clear day, one can see the
Sicilian coast and the volcanic mountains of Etna. Mdina is also called the silent
city because no cars are allowed inside – partly because the lanes are so
narrow and partly because it’s a Unesco world heritage site. There is a nice
thirty minute cinema in Mdina, showing five thousand years of Maltese history.
As we explored Mdina, we found several souvenir shops that are famous for their
decorative tiles and door knobs. Every door of every house in Mdina has a
unique doorknob with intricate designs.
Maltese people are family oriented, traditional
and very religious Roman Catholics. En route our trip we saw virtually every
single house tastefully decorated for Christmas. All houses obviously had
Christmas trees decorated with baubles, lights and tinsel. The doors were
adorned with Christmas wreaths made of holly and poinsettia (the red flower
like plant seasonal for Christmas). Several of the houses had elaborate
nativity plays neatly arranged in the windows. Balconies were lit up with rows
of blinking lights and had Santa Claus figurines climbing on a ladder from the
outside.
The islands have three hundred and sixty churches.
What’s fascinating is that most Maltese churches have two clocks – one showing
the correct time and the other showing the wrong time. Apparently when these
churches were built between the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, people were
superstitious. They thought that if you displayed two clocks with different
times, then that would confuse the devil!
The Gozo island tour
Besides the main island
of Malta, the country has two other
islands called Gozo and Comino both of which are much smaller and you can get
on them via a ferry from Malta
in less than twenty minutes. After a nice hot chocolate on the ferry, we got
off the other side at Gozo and into our tourist coach.
The Gozitans are laid back, very friendly and
highly religious. Gozitans still celebrate twelve days of Christmas and not
just the Christmas day. They say, they don’t even lock their doors. In Malta, each
boat has a small colour strip on its bow indicating which village or town the
boat is from. The person who started this tradition was a Gozitan. To mourn his
early death, all boats from Gozo have are tagged in black.
On the island, there is famous traditional
confectionary shop called “The Savina”. They export local handicraft and
confections made here. What I liked the most, was a fruit basket that looked
like real fruits but made of marzipan (a confection made from honey and
almonds).
From Savina, we went to the local arts and crafts village where there
the shops had a tantalizing display of decorative vases and other gift articles
in glass, wood and filigree. We bought Aarohi, a delicate butterfly ring made
in filigree and matching ear-rings. That made her day!
The highlight of the Gozo tour was a spot called
the “azure window”. It’s a place any student of geology must visit in their
lifetime. The entire landscape looks like the lunar surface with small craters
and ridges carved by the sea tides. The window itself is a rectangular natural
cave about fifty feet high and hundred feet wide. On the other side of the
window, there are lots of smaller V shaped caves and if the waters are calm,
local fishermen take you on a small boat through them.
We stopped for lunch at
the only restaurant on the hill. The menu was limited but food was delicious. We
had an excellent goat cheese and spinach ravioli and an authentic Gozitan penne
pasta in arrabiata sauce made out of fresh local tomatoes.
Fortunately, it
wasn’t very windy and the waters were calm. The boat ride through the caves was
lovely. On the island side of the caves, the sea is light green. As you pass
through the caves, it turns azure blue leading you one of the world’s ten best
diving and snorkelling venues. As we were admiring the clear transparent
waters, we saw several little purple jelly fish and corals. They made some
memorable snaps.
We ended the Gozo tour with a visit to a nice
little village called Xlendi famous for its seaside cafés and local seafood.
The south Malta tour
On our final day on the islands, we did the tour
of south Malta
that started with a boat cruise of the ten creeks and the grand harbour. Despite
the weather being windy and cloudy, we got spectacular views of the capital
city of Valletta, the three ancient cities of
Cospicua, Vittorioso and Senglea all of which were fortified to protect Malta
from the Turks and north African invaders.
Each of the creeks is full of yachts
and modern luxury boats – including one that belongs to the Indian tycoon Vijay
Mallya called ‘The Kingfisher’. Apparently, entire Europe uses Malta as a
giant parking lot for their boats because the Maltese government charges an
insignificant parking fee of one Euro per day. This is a smart move, since families
come to Malta
during the Easter and summer holidays to get their boats out and naturally spend
their time and money, thus propping up Maltese economy.
As the afternoon progressed, the clouds broke
and we got some Sun again. As our coach passed beside a limestone quarry, the Sun
shone on the yellow cliffs making them glisten like gold. I was transported
straight to the scene of Gregory Peck’s MacKenna’s Gold.
Following the boat ride, we went on a vintage bus
tour inside Malta’s capital
city of Valletta.
The bus had its engine rebuilt, but the exterior was preserved from 1930s. After
a rather rushed tour of the grandmaster’s palace of Valletta,
we stopped at a famous Italian restaurant for lunch. This is not a restaurant
you should dine at if you are in a hurry. They had a menu with at least forty
types of pastas and a similar number of pizzas and starters. The staff are
passionate about food and clearly took a lot of pride with which they cooked
and presented their dishes. We picked up the menu and salivated just reading
the descriptions. The Margherita said, “If God ate pizza, he would probably
eat our Margherita. Nothing special about it. And that is so special in itself.
Honest wholesome, sourdough base, San Mozano tomatoes, wonderful fresh organic
buffalo mozarrella and a leaf or two of basil. Finished off with a drizzle of
the most amazing OEVOO (organic extra virgin olive oil). It all started from
here.” The description for Focaccia said, “A focaccia like you have
never tasted before. Our red onion focaccia is delicate, light, tasty yet full
of flavours thanks to the pecorino, red onion (we chop our onions impossibly
thin), oregano and poppy seeds. The perfect accompaniment to the opening
drinks.”
Quite understandably, the restaurant takes at
least twenty minutes to prepare and serve a dish. It was a difficult choice
between treating ourselves to one of the best elaborate authentic Italian
lunches we’d ever have or get a quick takeaway from one of the cafés and still
manage to see the major highlight of the south tour “the blue grotto”.We chose the latter and reluctantly left the
restaurant. We picked up some Bruschetta (bread with tomato and basil salad dipped
in olive oil) and Pastizzi (a delicious typical Maltese snack that is diamond
shaped and filled with ricotta cheese and mushy peas) on the way, to eat on our
coach.
By the time we reached the southern tip of the
island, the Sun was almost touching the horizon. Winds had picked up and the
waters were choppy. We got down at our last stop “the blue grotto”.As the azure blue waves came up to the shore,
they were trapped in a gorge which was getting increasingly narrower. The
waters slapped the cliff on one edge of the gorge and splashed a good thirty
feet high. The cliff kicked it hard onto the other side. The waves slapped the
other cliff harder and splashed higher as they frothed. It was like watching
the nature’s duel between the land and the sea.
On the west side of the gorge, a man made
staircase descended about a hundred steps. The last ten steps were submerged in
the sea. We thought of climbing down half of it to get a closer view, but
somehow common sense prevailed and we decided to stand on top of the staircase by
the lookout point comfortably safe and about a hundred feet high. The Sun had
set making the waters dark blue and grey. The clouds had a silver lining and a rock island in the
distance was fast disappearing in the fog. As tourists do, we got busy with our
smart phones, tablets and other toys video shooting the spectacle. Just then,
most unexpectedly, a giant wave crashed and splashed in the gorge, this time at
least a hundred feet high and rose above our eye level, giving us a bath and making
our toys wet as it went down. Its roar was nothing less than a thunderstorm.
Nature was showing us who was in control.
Nobody spoke a word as we climbed in the coach taking
us back to hotel Seabank, leaving a dark silhouette of the blue grotto and the rock island behind us. It
was a humbling moment!
