Flights and Landings

Quite a lot has happened in the last year. I am now in Dublin, writing up, and looking at ways to develop this project further. Exciting times ahead!

By following the archive links in this blog you can still read through my travels

April 2006: Ireland
May 2006: Ireland, Kenya
June 2006: Kenya, Uganda
July 2006: Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique
August 2006: Mozambique, South Africa
September 2006: India
October 2006: India
November 2006: Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia
December 2006: Cambodia, Vietnam
January 2007: Australia, New Zealand
February 2007: New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa
March 2007: United States
April 2007: United States, Ireland
May 2007: Ireland.

I will be keeping this blog alive with periodic updates, and you can still contact me at

exceptional.lives (at) gmail.com

Call me a five year old..

Metro commutes are usually not that entertaining, but while in DC I had a little giggle every time I passed through the following station; Foggy Bottom.

Call me a five year old- I don’t care. I still think it is funny!

Mission Murals

San Francisco is a mural mecca. I went wandering and came across many a colourful encounter. Here are just a few.

Cafe Culture gone Cyber

In a city which seems to have more cafes than clients, what happened to café culture?

Here in San Francisco, cafes are more akin to libraries. Talking is almost a faux pas- this is laptop land, so wired it is wireless. If someone speaks, others look up with that same furrowed brow which condemn wandering whispers in the dens of college reading rooms.
Here it feels as if the entire café going society is about the sit a national exam; their backs bent over their keyboards, their looks worried. This is pin drop, hear it territory.

Want to meet me at a café to chat? Too risky. I’ll meet you at the library instead. In the meantime I’ll just order another coffee and check my email!

Closing the Circle

Its funny, the further away from ‘home’ I travel, the closer I eventually get. I’m not trying to be philosophical here, it’s just the geography of round the world trips. Now that I have reached San Francisco, I’m three quarters (ish) of the way back to Ireland.

I have put ‘home’ in inverted commas for a reason, because the more people who have opened their doors to me, and the more places I feel are ‘home’.

This time round I am in the home of Susan Megy, one funky lady, who I ‘met’ virtually through the Omidyar Network and who has been cheering me on while I loop around the globe. Another funky such person is Jean Russell, who has been helping me all along with contacts and suggestions for people to meet. When she heard I was going to be in San Francisco she flew down from the Chicago region to catch up in person. It’s been fantastic to put faces to these names and I feel so privileged to be able to connect such good good people. Thanks Susan and Jean.

Irish doors will open in return… just let me get back ‘home’ first!

Stranded in Samoa

Its amazing what damage a bird can do, the feathered kind. One flew into the engine of the plane I was meant to be on leaving Samoa, and grounded the aircraft ‘indefinitely’. One very dead, silly bird.

Turns out that 'indefinitely' was really just as long as another plane from New Zealand could arrive, some 17 hours later. It is a reminder that I really am far from a large chunk of land. In the meantime I get put up in a fancy pancy hotel, watching the pacific waves crash, savouring the sun.

Thanks bird!!

The Tongan Ocean of Light

When you live on a small island, far from even other small islands, life takes on unusual dimensions, and challenges.

One of those challenges is getting a quality education. There are schools of course- a primary school in each village, and a secondary or high school in the large towns, but the standard is low, class sizes large and resources limited. This makes for some frustrated brains.

However, ten years ago, the founders of the Ocean of Light Primary School, decided to take on the challenge and in doing so are raising the educational bar in Tonga.

Back when I was last in Tonga, on a gap volunteer year after school, I worked for a some time at the then infant Ocean of Light Primary School. It has just 27 pupils and was very much still trying to find its feet. Ten years later, with new school buildings and a pupil intake of about 340, it’s feet are clearly found. There is now a kindergarten and a secondary school, and plans for more buildings. Last year the school opted for the Cambridge International School certificate, and now students can take A levels and compete for university places in whatever part of the globe they wish. The exams are tough, the standard high- and given the relative shortage of local teachers who are available to teach at A level standard, it’s hard to get staff.

But still the school continues, believing the just because you may live in an isolated place, it doesn’t mean opportunities have to be isolated too.

Interstingly too, and I dare say unique to Tonga, the school takes moral education and pastoral care as a very high priority. Although inspired by the principles of the Bahai’i Faith, the school uses ‘The Virtues Guide’ which a methodology for teaching social and moral behaviour across the religious and cultural spectrum. The principle of the secondary school, Nick Flegg, told me that about one third of the current pupils are Baha’i while the remainder are from the many other denominations which make up the Tongan population- Methodist, Baptist, Seven day Adventist, Mormon, all seeing advantage in the methodology.

Ten years on, it was fantastic to see the growth of the school. The challenges are still there (funding, staff, resources), but the school is committed to tackling them, and keeping the bar high. I hear too that other schools that other schools on the islands are sitting up and taking note… which is a good sign for educational opportunity but at bad sign for frustrated brains. I’m on the side of the good sign.

Some of the faces and frolics

Take II to Tonga

Did someone just press pause?

I’ve jumped back in time, ten years in fact, when I lived on these islands. I’m now on Vava’u, my haunt back then, to visit the family who I lived with, and give myself a dose of the pacific, which time and memory has somewhat warped.

But it is all coming back to me now. The sights and sounds are familiar; crickets at dusk, a gecko’s chirp, cockerels crowing at ungodly hours, church bells ringing out for attention, palm trees everywhere, green green land, and ocean- lots of it.

It is so familiar that it’s almost as if time has stood still.

The pigs still torment the dogs, the dogs still torment each other.
The Vava’u high school uniform; deep wine, white shirts and the girls wearing bright yellow ribbons. They wave gestures of welcome. Malo’e’leli’, I shout, ‘Yo’, the reply.
Women in mourning, dressed in black, with traditional woven straw mats tied around their waists.
The shop fronts colourful, inside selling not much at all or overpriced imported goods.
A box of cornflakes is a treat. An ice-cream, pure indulgence!

Coming back I expected many changes, but what I see is not as dramatic as I thought would await. I see too many cars, too many plastic bags and more yachts in the harbour. There are some more shops, more restaurants… but not that many more. The market has moved closer to the wharf. There are a few internet café’s. The post office is looking more bedraggled. It still takes about 2 months for a letter to arrive from Europe, and that’s by airmail!
There is an ATM machine, which makes life a lot easier. The roads have been resurfaced; what once was like negotiating a deep ravine is now a smooth cruise (EU funding made it here).
The graveyards are even more colourful, with knitted quilts adorning gravesides.
The mosquitoes still bite.

The coral around my regular swimming spot has grown. I’ve seen new fish which I never saw before; in all a myriad of colour and stripes and shapes bringing new meaning to magnificent. The water is a warm bath, the snorkelling a meditation on diversity.

Yes, this is the Pacific.

The people are still big; big boned, big wasited. A heavily starch based diet- taro, tapioca, breadfruit, sweet potato, yam combined with coconut milk make this place a slimmer’s nightmare. Tasty but ‘waisty’. But then there is mango, passion fruit, soursop (a white fleshy sweet fruit), watermelons and pineapples so juicy, they dribble sweetness with every bite. These islands know how to provide.

I wander the streets and memories come back. Wonderful!

Morgan’s Magical Madness.

So what do you do when a good investment turns into a NZ$47 million bonus. For Gareth Morgan, you give it all away.

I first came across Gareth not through his philanthropic streak, but his adventurous one. Gareth, his wife Joanna, and a team of others have taken long distance motorbike trips around the world. An Indian journey across the Himalayas; another they entitled ‘Kimchi Kiwi’s’ across Korea; and an epic, retracing the journey of Marco Polo from Venice to Beijing across the Silk Road. Photos and astute commentary are captured on their blog, www.worldbybike.com

Their travels are reminders of the cultural and geographical diversity of the globe, while also the ‘have’ and ‘have nots’ which punctuate it with disparity. So when Gareth’s investment came through, he decided to set up the Morgan Charitable Trust, and seek ways of redistributing his gains.

The money came as a result of the sale of Trade Me (New Zealand’s equivalent of Ebay), which Gareth’s son Sam had set up. At the time when Sam’s business was getting going, Gareth saw the investment potential and placed his bets. The horse came in a winner.

Seeing investment potential is something Gareth himself has made a business of. Trained as an economist, Gareth set up Gareth Morgan Investments, which now has a portfolio of ‘about NZ$1 billion’. He is also a director of Infometrics, an economic forecasting company based in Wellington. Between all that, his bike trips, and being a father to four, grandfather to one, he still has had time to write several books on financial investment including the recent New Zealand bestseller, Pension Panic, which he wrote while on his US bike trip (He packs a PDA, a fold-up keyboard and a satellite phone onto all this trips which make up his mobile office). Between all of that Gareth is a regular contributor to New Zealand’s Dominion Post and Christchurch Press, where his economic rambling are expounded with wit and charisma. He is also a regular voice on radio with dispatches while on his bike trips (including one from Iran when he and fellow travellers were under house arrest!)

Gareth speaks with a slight lisp, a remnant from an early cleft palette, which he says made him a prime bullying target. School was troublesome, grades were weak. It wasn’t until university where his academic focus was found. But by the time he had his PhD in economics from Massey University in Wellington, with a wife and two kids, he wanted a break. His wife Joanna is ‘bus mad’, and so they packed up home into a converted bus and went on the road for three years with a growing family; picking up odd jobs along the way. He was while living in the bus Gareth set up his first business (bus at night, suit by day), convincing investors to back a horse racing guide called Bettor Informed. It eventually failed, but the lessons were there to go on to set up Informetrics, and onwards from there.

Gareth is indeed a busy man. More bike trips are planned for the coming years. More books to be written, and meanwhile, the Morgan Trust will be redistributing the winnings.

(Gareth Morgan was named by North South Magazine as New Zealander of the Year in 2007. You can follow his blog, photos and commentaries on http://www.worldbybike.com
An account of his travels across the Silk Road is published as ‘The Silk Riders’)