Not refuge but sanctuary

Brain twister: She searches for sanctuary on the seashore.

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post sees our family living it up at a Pacific party in the Holiday Inn, London (£15 a ticket, bargain for dinner, quiz and Pacific chat). Nell was allowed to give a garland to the Fijian high commissioner and won a raffle prize, so results all round.  But the take home message for our family was all about how to offer a safe home for those whose homes will be destroyed by climate change. Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).  

Left to right: Chris and Agnes.

Words matter - everyone knows that. But at a fantastic Pacific Islands party at the end of September 2012 - run by Agnes Benson from Kiribati (via the Herts/Bucks co-ordinating committee) and Chris Luxton, who used to live in Papua New Guinea and is the leading light, well chairwoman, of Pacific Islands Society UK and Ireland (PISUKI) -  I found out just how much words matter.

The talk at our table turned to climate change and the impacts this will have on Pacific islanders who are in line to lose their homes. Those in Tuvalu and Kiribati are at the front line of sea level rise, but of course that's the drama. Earlier problems are changes to the water table - which makes drinking water harder to find and salinates the soil. If you can't grow food, or get water (other than from rainwater), you're starting to be on an island that's not fit for human habitation.

So what will happen to those nations?

The Pacific has some experience of resettlement. In 1946 the Banabans were forced off their island (in Kiribati) and resettled in Rabi island, Fiji (many also live near the airport at Nadi) so the phosphate could be strip-mined by the British (who only years later paid compensation for this piece of mineral terrorism).

Kiribati has enshrined in its constitution minority rights for Banabans. How long can that last if  more Kirbati people are obliged to upsticks? It is after all a very flat place, one where there is nowhere to go if the unthinkable happens. Ditto Tuvalu.

Can you imagine a generous country like New Zealand allowing a state within a state? Could part of Auckland be turned into Tuvalu, say? Will Tuvalu be allowed a UN vote (it only became a member in 2000)? Or an Olympic team (they first competed in 2008 at Beijing, and here is a video of their proud weightlifter at London 2012)? Will Tuvalu still be allowed a government? And what will those exiled Tuvalu people be known as, "climate refugees" perhaps?

Absolutely wrong word say several people at the event. The countries that have caused these problems, predominantly those that developed their industries the earliest, have to learn to offer "sanctuary". It is simply an accident of geography that the disastrous impacts of climate change on nations happens to them, rather than us.

Over to you
I'm going to be thinking about this for a while, sanctuary not refugee, but wondered what readers of this blog thought?

Oceania at Greenwich

Festival vibe: rug, snacks, anticipation.

Greenwich is a spider trap for tourists and day-trippers. But so well-deserved, and with the DLR taking you into Cutty Sark, where this famously fleet tea clipper (ship) has been quite beautifully repaired after the burning incident, Greenwich is a treat. Even more so on 21-22 July 2012 - the first weekend when the sun shone all day for what seems like months.

Best of all the BT River of Music has one of its six free stages, all along the River Thames here - which look set to entertain half a million people. The Americas and Europe stages were fully booked instantly; the Africa, Asia and Oceania were a bit slower to "sell" out. Nowadays even free concerts seem to involve buying a ticket - for a £3 booking fee.

Narasirato from Solomon Islands in London.

Tangio tumas
Show stealers for Lola and Nell's first festival were -of course - the bamboo pipe band from Solomon Islands. The group are from 'Are 'Are lagoon, a wonderful place in Malaita (it's where I learnt to speak Pijin, paddle a canoe, etc). It's also where Gary Barlow thought erroneously he was going to be eaten, but enough of that. The band, Narasirato, have two albums and a history of touring big music festivals (including New Zealand and Japan. The pan pipes are made from bamboo, it's all very traditional but the extra oomph comes from the Solomon Islanders' staggering energy on stage - they just keep on dancing; and the drums (also made from bamboo pipes but whacked with rubber similar to a flip-flop) seem to give it a rocky sound. If you missed this, you can see them at Womad 2012.

Get this party started
We heard George Telek from Papua New Guinea, then bands from Milne Bay, also PNG, the Marshall Islands, Guam, East Timor and the Aborigine musician Frank Yamma sedately from a picnic rug (the same place for New Zealand's Hollie Smith). It was like being in an issue of the world music magazine, Songlines. But when Narasirato picked up their pan pipes half the audience rushed to the front or got up and danced. It was marvellous, and later we had a quick chat with the band while they munched on chicken and chips.


Pete actually stayed on our picnic rug so watched -with some incredulity - his family at the front of the stage dancing along when focus-on-the-crazy-members-of-the-audience were flashed on to the big screens. In 2011 during our long stint in Solomon Islands I insisted we went to several hotel "tourist" dances in the hopes that we'd see the famous pan pipe entertainers. We never did - it was mostly Kiribati sashaying of the hips or Belonna stomping (although the latter was fab). As the proverb says, "good things come to those who wait". There's never any reason to rush off around the world, nearly always the world comes to you... so it was with BT's River of Music festival at the Oceania stage.

Pete and Nell try a Greenwich sofa.

Go see Greenwich
On the way home, we were distracted by more of the things Greenwich has to offer - a street market of delicious food (flat white coffee, vegetarian burgers brazenly named after their ingredients (carrot, greens), Scotch eggs served with a runny egg and a sprinkle of celery salt, at bearable prices, located just by the Old Royal Naval College. We then ate these on a vast atro-turf covered sofa surely designed to give you an Alice-in-Wonderland feel.


Over to you
Have you discovered free events thanks to the Olympics? Or has the Olympics tempted to you to find out about another country's cultural heritage? And have you seen a Gamesmaker yet in their bright purple jackets?

Is it ok to be nervous in boats?

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This time a quick look at reasons to be seasick This post is by Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about books and blogs)   

As a child I would scream if you put me into a boat. Obviously I blame my parents for this - they'd taken me to Strangford Loch, in Northern Ireland and wanted me to play by the shore. In a bid to stop me wading into the water they put the fear of God (and a lifelong terror of water) into me by talking about the whirlpool that killed. You see,

Boats gets swallowed by whirlpools...

Even though I'm grown up and know all about life drills and the Plimsoll Line, I'm still a bit nervous of water. That's why I've made sure my daughters can swim, kayak and row. I know the difference between a life jacket and a life protector - and use them.

But the terrible stories of shipwrecks over the past few months - an oil tanker off New Zealand, the cruiser off Italy and now a ferry in Papua New Guinea (see story here) - freak me out.

Titanic fears
Last summer,on the way back to the UK after a three-month break in the Solomons and Australia, we saw a vast cruise liner squeezing under the huge Sydney Harbour Bridge. It must have been one of the ships that take 4,000 passengers. I probably never would consider going on a ship that big, but once you've seen a tower block floating past (see pic above & below) it is hard to imagine how you would cope in a crisis situation. Or indeed what it would be like with lights out in an overturned boat, a rough sea and all staircases turned into cliffs.

Boats seem to attract accidents, bad weather and poor seamanship. They also dump crap in the sea, not just sewage, but waste oil and loose cargo.

Consider this post a thumbs down to motor boats, however big.

Over to you?
Is boat travel still the way to go in the 21st century? What would you do to improve ship safety and sustainability?

Mr Pip's rebellion

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell love to travel - sometimes this can be done by staying put and just reading... This post takes you to the South Pacific with the help of two writers - Charles Dickens and Lloyd Jones. It is by Nicola Baird (although the video isn't)

What a classic choice. Hugh Lawrie looks set to be Mr Pip in the film version of Lloyd Jones' amazing book of the same name - a modern retelling of Dickens' Great Expectations set in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea with a couple of moments in the Solomons and New Zealand. Filming is near Arawa (in Kieta village) from May - July.

I loved the book - in fact have just re-read it - and tried to tell the author this at a meet and greet author session organised by Borders before it closed down. But poor Lloyd Jones was unwell from the long New Zealand flight and failed to show. But here's a warning: it's not for sensitive souls - the Bougainville blockade of the 1990s and the cruelty meted out be the government's forces (redskins in the book) and the rebels was appalling. At least a generation of children lost their chance of education, many people died unnecessarily, not just from conflict but malaria.

Here's a short video of a young girl canoeing in a lookalike PNG village to the one Lloyd Jones imagined. I borrowed this from a blog called My Amazing Paradise.  Here's the video.

Volcano v planes

Iceland has become the most over-heated topic of conversation at Baird-May Towers. First it was aboutWest Ham (icelanders bought the club); then we focused on the banking crisis (which led to West Ham changing hands) and now it's that pesky volcano. This post is by Nicola.

No planes over London is spookily pleasurable. Without the planes it's been possible to sleep (ALL night), and leave the windows open. To hear bird song and see such blue skies you'd think it was a Photoshop trick. London is still noisy, but not half as bad as it usually is. And with all those busy Brits stuck somewhere else the city's tubes, trains and roads are far less crowded making cycling easier, taking buses more effective and walking more enjoyable.

It seems this is the world's first carbon neutral volcano. The figures go like this - the European aviation industry is emitting 344,109 tons a day and volcano Eyjafjallajoekoll 150,000 tons - so while the planes are forced to rest our volcano has cut Europe's carbon footprint by nearly 200,000 tons a day. See here for more info from the number crunchers.

Ironically the best view I've ever had of a volcano was when I was in a light aircraft island hopping in the South Pacific and the pilot flew close to the snout of a newly emerged volcano so we could have a better look. If I'd known then what I know now about dust particles I'd have been terrified.

Instead I was smitten looking down from the tiny plane into the smouldering red heart of a new volcano spitting out boulders with gusto as it emerged from the Pacific Ocean floor. Two years later I was in Rabaul, the Papua New Guinean town destroyed by it's neighbouring volcano looking for a friend who'd lost their home to hot grey laval ash forcing his family to move into a shipping container.

I know volcanos are an expensive pain, but for us stay-at-homes the no fly zone has been an unexpected treat. And an early lesson in what happens when your sky supplies get shut down...