Qausuittuq

At the end of the year I usually check on the progress of my New Year's resolutions, and then make new ones. I did make eight resolutions for 2014, but they were all personal, not aviation, and I'm not telling you exactly what they were, so this will be dull, or at least cryptic:

1. Achieved: A+
2. Social - 71% achieved (51% before the middle of April and 10% after the beginning of November): B-
3. Academic - never set measurable goals, even though that was part of the resolution, achieved maybe 20% anyway: F
4. Fun - 58% (25% before the end of March and 25% during December): C-
5. Ha ha ha ... I don't think that one lasted to the end of New Year's Day: Withdrawn
6. Physical - Achieved by the beginning of March. Now EXACTLY back where I started. I still think that's still a pass, because I did achieve it: C
7. Speed - Negative progress: F
8. Martial arts - Did really well until April 6th, then lost momentum, and had to work through both the events I was supposed to be training for - 40%: F

The general theme is that I kept them well until work got busy and then life became entirely sleep, eat, plan, fly, laundry. I think I just have to not make resolutions that involve doing anything not on that list on a recurring basis through the year. For next year I am going to set month-by-month goals that allow for no progress to be made during peak months, and encourage me to pick things up again as my time increases at the end of the season, without feeling defeated.

Qausuittuq means "place where the sun does not rise" but it's on this post because the place that bears that traditional name is usually called Resolute.

Dinosaur Confusion

On the way back to Alberta we're crossing the northern Rockies again. I mention something to my crewmate that I forgot to point out the first time: Dawson Creek is a co-located waterdrome and land aerodrome. "You'll see it as we go by," I promise him. "It looks like the fin on a diplodocus."

"What?" he says.

I try to explain. "The land runway is just an ordinary straight strip of pavement, and the water runway is a parallel ditch, but in order to enable pilots to taxi off the water runway there are also a series of channels in the lagoon for parking."

"And that's a diplodocus?" He thinks it's some strange aviation term.

I say, "Oh no, a diplodocus is a dinosaur. They probably don't exist anymore. I mean, I know dinosaurs don't exist anymore in general, but I expect they've changed the name. It has a big fin, like a sail."

He Googles diplodocus on his phone. Yeah, you can totally get sufficient cell coverage in the mountains of northern BC to google random dinosaurs on your cellphone. And no, it's not illegal to use a cellphone in our airplane. It's illegal to use an electronic device when the pilot-in-command has ordered otherwise. And I haven't. He tells me that the diplodocus doesn't have a fin. He's right. It's just legs and neck and tail.

I admit, "I must have got my dinosaurs mixed up." I had a green plastic one when I was a kid. Later I google "dinosaur back fin sail" and google immediately shows me my dinosaur. It's a dimetrodon.

And you have to admit the lagoons at Dawson Creek look just like its fin.

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By the way, it's Google's fault I don't post so much anymore. I have a quick bookmark that takes me straight to the page that allows me to compose a blog entry, and when I have something to say, I click that button and write at least a draft, before I forget what I was going on about. But over the past few years Google has bought Blogger and other things that I have passwords to, associated variously with my work identity, my personal identity or the identities associated with hobbies, including blogging. So now chances are that when I punch that button, I am already participating in the Google universe in another identity, so instead of bringing up a blank post for me to edit, it tries to get me to join Google Plus under whatever identity I'm currently using. I think pressuring me to join Google Plus is Google's default action when it can't serve me the page I've asked for. The really irritating part is that the page is does serve me doesn't even have the option to log out. So I just roll my eyes and close the tab, and the thought goes away.

And on the subject of logging in, I have disabled anonymous commenting, because the volume of comment spam is now so great that I rarely have an opportunity to read your real comments. Blogger does a pretty good job of filtering out and not posting the spam, but it comes to me for moderation and I have to delete it daily by the screenful. I imagine Google has forced you to be just as ubiquitously logged in, so I hope this won't be a problem for you.

Devastation

We're going to Slave Lake again, the community that had the fire. I checked NOTAMs carefully to make sure that services were available, but there is no sign from an aviation planning point of view that there is anything wrong there. Our work is far north of the community, up above the bush and lakes of far northern Alberta, and when we're done I plan the descent to bring me into the aerodrome environment at the right speed and altitude. I'm looking for the runway, right where it's always been, perpendicular to the lake, surrounded by the town, and then I get my first glimpse of the devastation. I have landed in Slave Lake enough times that I have subconscious landmarks that help me find the way to the runway, but it's like landing at an unknown aerodrome. The swathes of nothing are startling. I find the runway nevertheless and put the airplane on it.

I ask the fueller how things have been going in the town, with reconstruction and he says that almost nothing has been rebuilt yet, in fact they hardly have a handle on how to complete the demolition. So far the burned out areas have been fenced off and the remains of vehicles are been towed away, but nothing else has been done. He and everyone else I meet in town are pretty upbeat about their situation, though. They're northerners, I guess. Life goes on and they aren't dwelling on misfortune. We call all the taxi numbers but can't get one. There's a benefit concert going on, with big name bands at a venue just out of town and everyone is taking cabs so they can drink and party. We get a ride with an FBO employee, who tells us a "secret" that I can tell you now, because it's all over. She's just been finalizing arrangements for the arrival of aircraft carrying Prince William and his new bride Kate and their retinue. This was a surprise addition to the itinerary of the royal visit, but you can't keep secrets like that in a small town. Everyone I talk to has heard that they are coming, but some think it's just a rumour to buoy their spirits, and that a prince in line to the throne of Canada wouldn't visit such a small place.

The FBO employee gave us a tour through the destroyed parts of town. Entire blocks were completely razed, just empty yards with grey crumbled foundations and a few twisted pieces of metal. There was very little that was blackened or scorched. It was just gone. Completely incinerated. The fire was so hot that the foundations now crumble to the touch. Here and there is a house that the fire jumped over, or that the firefighters managed to keep from becoming engulfed. Sometimes such relatively untouched houses are sitting between two barren holes, intact except with the siding warped in curvy waves. There's one yard where the concrete steps that once led to the front door are still standing, covered in a waterfall of molten glass. It's a ghoulish little tour.

Our driver also filled us in on some of the worst parts of the fire, not what you would expect. Everyone was evacuated from the town with no notice, and they were not permitted to return for ten days, until power, treated water and emergency services could be provided again. Imagine a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant at four in the afternoon. Now imagine a KFC that was abandoned in full operation at four in the afternoon, then left there with no refrigeration, no air conditioning and no cleaning for ten days in the heat of summer. Now add in ten other restaurants, an entire supermarket, and everyone's homes. The stench, I am told, was epic.

I go out for a jog before supper, following the trails by the river, and then crossing a road onto a park playground and across the park. At the far side of the park is a fence, but not your ordinary chain link fence to keep soccer balls from rolling into the street. It's a barricade between the park and one of the burned out areas. I turn left and run along the fence, just looking for the exit, but except for where I came in, the park is almost surrounded by burned out areas. I look at the metal that is visible in the yards. There are some cars, they look ancient, aged a hundred years in a day. The post-nuclear LA scene from Terminator 2 that shows a highway full of burned out cars does not adequately represent the effect of heat. The glass and rubber is just gone, and what's left looks more like the ash casts at Vesuvius than metal chassis. In one yard two cars are stacked one on top of another and I try to envision how that came to be. There are the remains of metal garden sheds in some yards, and after seeing several examples I realize that another common theme is trampoline skeletons. The springs are gone, I guess scattered and buried in the other rubble or incinerated with the synthetic fabric of the bed of the trampoline and the tubes that once made the round or rectangular shapes are twisted too. In one yard is a living tree, it looks like a little fruit tree, and I feel badly that no one can get in through the fence to water it. It survived a fire but may die of summer.

One of the "island" homes, an intact house amid all the devastation has three coloured printed signs inside the front window, proclaiming DONE DONE DONE on blue, pink and yellow paper. I theorize at first that the resident did not want to live there anymore, but further down the street I see what is presumably the reverse side of the same coloured paper, noting NEEDS WATER, NEEDS POWER, NEEDS GAS. Locals probably were instructed to pick up these sheets and post them in their windows to alert the utilities people that the residents had returned and were requesting restoration of services. Another sign in the front yard of what must have been a duplex gives a name and phone number, saying, "I owned the other half. Please contact me so we can decide how to proceed." Even one lot of this rubble would be hard to clear. It's not surprising that so little progress has been made.

We go for dinner at Boston Pizza, me trying not to think too hard about what the kitchen must have looked like after the fire. I notice a help wanted sign, and have seen those all over town, so I ask the server. Of fifty-seven people employed at BP before the fire, only twenty-one returned to the town after the evacuation order was lifted. Restaurant servers are typically young people, free to move where the jobs are, and they took other jobs in other towns, or just saw no reason to return. BP was one of the first restaurants to reopen. It's a chain, so the franchise was probably quickly able to source and ship full replacements for everything unusable, and it was screaming busy because most returning residents couldn't use their own kitchens.

It's actually more surprising to see how mentally healthy everyone seems than it is to gawk at the destruction. I realized during my run that this is an ancient human experience. Humans built homes and humans used fire since before history was recorded, and humans have almost always returned to rebuild. I'm glad the stench was just restaurant and grocery store meat. No one was injured badly enough for it to be reported. There are a few lost dog signs on poles, "ran away during the evacuation" doesn't bode well for a little white dog, but you never know.

Calgary Sights & Heights

In an account that has drifted loose from the day in which it actually occurred, I will now describe a half day free of duty in Calgary. I e-mailed everyone who responded to my Lunch invitation and whose e-mail comes up when I search on "Calgary" or "YYC," to see if anyone is up for a short notice visit. If I didn't e-mail you, and you wish I had, send me an e-mail with the name and airport identifiers that I might be putting in if I were in your neck of the woods, and you never know. I might have a free day there sometime. I search everything with the label Lunch in my gmail account, looking for the name of the town or airport, so put more than one in if you like, and avoid mentioning places you're not in the same e-mail.

No one is available for the afternoon, so I go solo to investigate the things on the hill behind the hotel. They're ski lifts and ski jumps, leftovers from the 1988 Winter Olympic Games. There's not enough snow left to ski--it's summer, after all--but there was enough to climb up a big pile of snow underneath the chairlifts and pretend I'm summitting Everest. Forgot my flag, though. I do climb up the whole hill. It's a little disorienting to find when I get to the top that the hill is really just an escarpment, and that there's a boring subdivision at the top, almost level with the top of the ski hill.

Along the ridge at the top of the ski hill there is a path that goes to the bases of a number of towers. They are the tops of ski jumps. You know when you see ski jumpingon TV and the person goes off the jump and sails through the air, bent forward over their skis into a human aerofoil? That sort of ski jump. The biggest two have elevators going to the top, but the others have stairs, and there's no gate nor "keep out" sign and it's all part of a public park. I walk on up. And up. And up. Maybe they just figured sightseeers wouldn't go up all those stairs. At the top there's a platform with that same potscrubber plastic stuff you get at the loading and unloading area of ski-lifts. There's a bar to hang onto as you position yourself at the top of the ski jump. And there's the steep, steep, precipitous drop. It's kind of freaky and at the same time flattering that the Calgary parksboard thinks highly enough of me to trust me to behave safely up here. I'm a little surprised that no one has killed themselves trying to mountain bike down the ski jump, for example. The amount more daring and less common sense than me that it would take to think that was worth trying is well within human variation. Or a mickey of Crown Royal.

I go down the wooden stairs along the side of the ski jump and then back to the hotel. During dinner, Carlos replies to my call for locals. Remember Carlos? He guest-blogged about a high tech cement mixer he drove. I look it up and that was 2007. I guess a few very loyal readers may do. He lives in Calgary now and has time before his next shift to squire me around the city. He comes by in a low-slung car, definitely not a dump truck and we head downtown. He's rocking the aviator sunglasses and the Latin flair as he points out the Bow River trails and other sights during the drive.

We start off at the Calgary Tower. Every city has to have its phallic symbol. There's an elevator, so I don't have to walk up the stairs. At the top is a similarly dizzying view, with better safety features. There's a glass floor and we entertain ourselves "balancing" on the girders within it, and jumping into the "spaces." It's a fun game of mind over mind, to use the logical part of the brain to overrule the more instinctive part, the one that says, "there's no FLOOR there!" Then we walk all the way around the tower, looking at the landscape. We can see the Rocky Mountains, the suburbs, the airport, along with arrivals and departures, and some of the downtown. Part of the view from the tower is blocked by a tall building that wasn't there when the tower was built. Ironically, it't the same building the controller wouldn't give me permission to overfly at 7,100' a few weeks ago. Now I get a better look at it, closer to the ground. Carlos also explains his crazy scheme to learn to fly and build time as a commercial bush pilot in South America. I realize at this moment that we were so busy discussing his plans that I never got around to telling him that I might be working there this winter. Now he's going to kill me.

Back at ground level it's too late (i.e. within twelve hours of my report time) to have a drink at Carlos' favourite bar, so he vows to find me some dessert. He consults with his dispatcher from work while driving around the city. It's amusingly similar to me trying to get airport information from the FSS while in descent. It's late enough that the best bet turns out to be Dairy Queen, so Carlos pulls up to some young ladies on the sidewalk, cranks the charm up a several notches and gets directions to the nearest. Ice cream doesn't have to be fancy to be good, and this was quick and delicious to get me home in time for my required duty rest.

I remember asking Carlos if he wanted me to hold anything back in my description of the evening, and he said to go ahead and tell it like it was, so I must have been planning to mock him for something, but I've forgotten what it was. Probably his driving. I don't think I screamed at all though, so it's all good.

It's funny sometimes, that a guy doing his best to impress you might not come off as the most impressive, but it makes a girl feel good that he's going to the effort, so in the end she's happy. Carlos was tired and busy, but he postponed some important tasks to make sure I felt welcome and had a great time in Calgary. Yeah, tip for everyone: spend more effort making the person you're with feel important than making them believe that you are important. That takes me right back to some advice I received may years ago from another Albertan: "stop trying to show people how smart you are, and concentrate on letting them see how nice you are." It's a rare friend who will offer constructive criticism that requires them to point out your personality flaws. I don't know where he is now, but if you're out there, K'Harv, you know who you are.

Carlos came to Canada from Colombia and over the past few years I have had the privilege of witnessing his gradual mastery of the English language and his pride in his new country through our e-mail correspondence. He teased me with a put-on accent when I remarked on having expected one. He sounds almost like he was born here now. He's even writing eloquent letters to the CBC, and just had an excerpt from one on climate change read on-air on a province-wide show. You can listen to it via podcast (at minute 20:34), or read the unedited version at his new blog. He notes that the units for the diesel consumption mentioned in the letter read on air should be km/liter, not liters per kilometers.

I'm proud to have friends who stand up and speak out for what they believe in.

Pitt Meadows

I'm at an airplane washing station at Pitt Meadows airport near Vancouver. It's nicely designed with a hose on a reel, a water hook-up, a drain, and some really clever metal stanchions around things you shouldn't run into, like the hose area. These stanchions are everywhere: in front of electrical meters, fire hydrants, anything that would normally have poles or pylons to protect it from vehicles and snowploughs, but they are propeller blades. I don't think they are actually propeller blades, unless someone decommissioned a lot of identical, large-propellered airplanes here, but they look just right, complete with manufacturer's stickers. I can't remember if they were Hartzell or McCauley. They just looked right.

The airplane ends up not totally clean, but better. I rewrap the hose on the reel, winding each coil next to its neighbour from to one end to the other in each layer, and then I get lazy near the end and let it wrap more loosely. As I'm putting away the soap, I see a man come up and unroll and reroll my last messy bit. Sorry, man. I can appreciate his need to have every coil perfectly set on the reel. It really does look nice that way and I regret not having done it that way for you myself.

This is not a really big airport, no scheduled flights and just a little terminal with scenic flights, but for some reason it has a giant avionics shop. They sell Lightspeed headsets, the kind I was trying to get when I got the Bose, and they have the new Zulu 2. I try it, but you can wear one and then the other all you want on the ground without really being able to say which is better. You have to go for a flight, preferably a long flight, before you know whether a headset is doing the job well. The logistics of taking one for a test flight are awkward, though, seeing as the next time I take off, I'll probably not land until I'm back in Alberta. I'm pleased with the Bose, so I'll keep it and not start a crazy game of buying extra headsets.

While I'm here, I get a tour of Maxcraft Avionics. It's quite impressive. Good avionics service is hard to get. I've ferried a lot of airplanes with every kind of broken avionics sometimes to more then one airport to try to get them working. I've also done a lot of flights with gaping holes in the panel where avionics had been removed for repair, sent off somewhere. Big doesn't necessarily mean good, but they have the diagnostic equipment, the certification from every manufacturer I can think of and must have a good reputation. The paint jobs on the aircraft in their hangar suggest that they are trusted by the RCMP and Helijet for major refits, and by a private owner with an intercom problem. Aviation electronics can be really hard to get fixed properly; I'm not sure if it's a black art or a science. If these guys are as good as the facility is impressive, then a lot of people will be coming to Pitt Meadows.

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One more South Sudan link. The people, men and women, have been at war for twenty-one years and pretty much the only experienced, established institution they have is the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. Considering that the median age in Sudan is 18 years and life expectancy 58, over half of South Sudanese have been at war for their entire life, and most soldiers have probably never held another job. The process of demobilizing the army is further confounded by the fact that there are almost no civilian jobs, even if people had the concept of returning to them. I found this article on the reintegration process. It has lots of pictures so you can see what South Sudanese people look and dress like, too.

South Sudan Embarks on Nationhood

I only heard about the new country of South Sudan on July 9th, the day it declared independence and haven't had time to write about them until now. The United Nations should be recognizing them as an official world country in the next couple of days. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight million people

In some places, including on the government website the name of the country is written Southern Sudan, but the official seal styles it as the Republic of South Sudan. I think the Southern Sudan references are from material describing the area before independence. They have a flag, a national animal (the secretary bird), a coat of arms, a national anthem (link plays music), a capital city (Juba) and a president. They're still using the currency and postage stamps of their northern neighbour, so I think getting mail through to South Sudan is going to be a bit like communicating with a friend when you only have the mailing address of her ex. And they've fought for twenty years over the divorce.

They say that a what a country really needs to be official is a sports team, a beer and an airline. It looks like South Sudan is getting right on that. They already have a football team, and it's even played a match already. They lost 3-1 to Kenya but it's not an offical result as they are still waiting on FIFA membership. I thought that a beer would be a no-brainer but they have a good excuse for not having one quite yet. The construction of their new brewery is a big deal because under the former Muslim regime, alcoholic beverages were outlawed. And they even have the beginnings of an airline , complete with a webpage that doesn't actually link to a booking database, just a form. The date of the maiden flight has not yet been announced, but Juba does have an airport with a paved runway (13-31), which was apparently closed on Independence Day but airlines didn't receive a NOTAM, possibly because of that communications via Khartoum thing. The Republic of South Sudan will have to join ICAO, at which point I suspect it will go straight on the list of countries in which one should avoid boarding an airplane at all costs. They're a very poor state with terribly low education and healthcare.

I met a pilot/AME recently who says he started the war in the Sudan. He was there years ago, when the Sudan had nothing of value to the rest of the world, and nothing to fight over internally but camels and goats. He was there surveying for oil. He also made a positive contribution to the national infrastructure because they discovered that he could fix things. He would call for taxi clearance at the airport and then have the clearance rescinded because the airport firetruck wasn't working. They possibly were looking for a bribe the first time, but he solved the problem by restoring the firetruck to working order, and after that there was always something that needed fixing.

I hope South Sudan gets what needs fixing fixed faster than it gets itself into new conflicts and problems. I don't suppose there's anyone reading this blog from there. Few in that country can read let alone have access to communication technology, but if you are, know that I wish your new country well. South Sudan has apparently applied for the internet country code .ss but a regime that collapsed sixty years ago has such a lock on those letters in some people's minds that it may be denied.

P.S. Beda Otwari, the Director of Administration and Human Resources for Southern Sudan Airlines is a Canadian.

The PPC Ride

The examiner holds up to ask someone to let a student know she is going to be late for the lesson following my flight test, so I have a chance to go ahead and verify that no one has run into the airplane while it sat there, and that nothing is leaking out of it. Hour eleven of my duty day is beginning as I climb into the pilot seat. I welcome the examiner on board and quickly brief her on the location of emergency equipment. I set my prefolded charts where I can reach them and get myself buckled into my seat. The airplane starts nicely and I record the time then start working through checklists, explaining what I am doing. I made a list of which frequencies to put on which nav aids to get going, and I pre-identify what I can. I have an ADF not an RMI so I do what I always do with these and set north to the top, explaining that is to prevent me from mistaking it for an RMI and thinking it shows the correct heading. I also note to her that the GPS database is expired, hence the prominent NOT FOR IFR USE label across the bottom of the screen. I tell her she's welcome to use it for situational awareness if she wishes. I love it when the examiner has something interesting to look at so I don't freak out from the scrutiny while doing basic preflight checks.

I copy the ATIS and then call for clearance. Someone should tell them to speak slowly. I had to ask for two parts of the clearance to be repeated before I could write it down and read it back correctly. The clearance, from my notes, appears to be B △ eva 1/B M70 Rr^r 'u 4616 7600 on caus followed by A 2Z91 X25 125.42. This apparently all meant something to me at the time, because I taxied out. The examiner tolerated my careful pauses at each intersection while I consulted the taxi diagram for the airport she knew her way around perfectly. After I was clear of the parking area and established en route to the runway I made some small turns and rattled off "turning left, wings, er stick left, decreasing, decreasing, steady, steady," for the various instruments that should and should not respond to directional change on the ground. I told her that as this was the airplane's fourth flight today I would not be doing a run-up, if she was comfortable with that, and she was. The examiner had much better handwriting than me, because I remember seeing something akin to "confident and comfortable in the cockpit" written on her clipboard. I can read pretty much any way up. I didn't realize that was a thing everyone couldn't do until I saw it posited as a trick. I have a moment of "got her fooled" but that's washed away by a realization that I've lived in this cockpit for the last few days, and I do know how to fly, even if I don't have the recent specific experience common to students who have trained here.

I switch to tower frequency when I'm ready to go and they clear me for takeoff. Roll, straight, rotate, going up, going up, gear up, fly straight, climb speed, trimmed, after takeoff checks. I switch to terminal and they radar identify me and clear me direct the NDB. Level off, call level (even though I don't have to, and I'm not hinting for anything). Now concentrate on tracking to the NDB. I get two sets of marks for this, one for en route procedures and one for ADF tracking. And I'm doing it nice and straight. I'm as proud of this as a kid who can tie her own shoes. A basic skill done well. Now I have to keep doing it while doing something else: copy a hold clearance.

It looks like + U D> M70 HN IB 160 <FC 0045. That makes way more sense than the previous clearance, so I must be improving. If inbound is 160 then outbound is 340. With no explicit instruction on the direction of the turns, they must be to the right. I look at the ADF, by which I'm tracking to the NDB, and see that it falls just to the left of the top of the instrument, which according your basic flying school rules indicates a parallel entry, an initial left turn to 340, followed by a left turn to intercept the inbound track and then subsequent right turns on crossing the station. And I'm still tracking like a pro. I tell the examiner my intentions and she asks how it can left turn. Because on a parallel entry you start by going the wrong way ... and I'm an idiot. I'm looking at an instrument that is set to north and not to my course. Three forty is almost directly behind me. They have given me the easiest hold in the world, and I should have anticipated it, because it's the logical hold to give me, and because a sensible pilot would have been thinking about holding at the NDB the easiest way instead of being all proud she could tie her shoes. I know I would have caught that when I looked at the actual heading indicator to make the turn, but jeeeeez, HOLDS, why do I always find a new and exciting way to screw up my holds?!

I enter the insanely simple direct hold. I start the timer in the right place, I turn at the correct second, I have to bank a little more intercept, I time inbound, I declare the required outbound timing and outbound heading and both the intercept and time to station are to the degree and to the second. Not that it matters, as she has only the choice between "major error" and "fail" for my inability to state the correct entry without prompting. They don't have to tell you you've failed or stop the test on the first one. I should put a post it on the ADF: 'this is not an RMI.'

Crossing the NDB, the examiner asks for a block of airspace and now I'm visual to do the manouevring part of the test. A steep turn, which only passes because they don't fail you if you promptly correct excursions from tolerances, and a stall recovery, executed correctly, including the flaps first, then gear order peculiar to this airplane. What else is in the airwork? Maybe that's it. Slow flight included in the stall demonstration, I guess. Back to IFR. They clear me for the VFR-only full procedure approach at the NDB. It's direct the NDB, hockey stick, outbound, timer, don't forget to reset the DG, monitor the morse code for the NDB, turn 45 degrees, see the terrain on the GPS, yikes, no wonder this is not for IFR use. Fly out the time, hold altitude, turn inbound, established within 5 degrees of the inbound track I can start descent to the first stepdown. Reset the DG again. It drifts fast during turns at low power. Man, how is it even legal to do IFR NDB approaches with out a slaved gyro? It's never set to within two degrees. The examiner has set the correct radial on the GPS but I focus on the DG and ADF to track as well as I can, step down, step down, MDA. Should be visual, no contact. The examiner shows me the aerodrome off to the side and makes a note for herself that the track she gave me was not ideal. Unlike the VOR radials I discussed earlier, tracks to an NDB depend on magnetic fields, so they shift when the magnetic poles do, thus a long-outdated IFR approach based on an NDB no longer leads to the runway.

I fly the missed. There must have been a simulated engine failure in all that, as she gave me back my engine after the missed, and then cancels IFR then gets me a clearance for a simulated straight in ILS back to the airport we came from. I tuned the localizer before I left, and set the inbound track, because there weren't any VORs en route, so now all I have to do is slow to approach speed, double check the identifier and follow the vectors to intercept it. I'm cleared to do so. "Loc alive!" Set the DG again and intercept. I overcorrect for a moment, then settle down. Staring at the instrument, I see that it's one of the kind with dots on them. Most of them have dots, but now I'm laughing inside myself at the dots. MORE DOTS! This is what I do all day. I put that needle right in the middle of the dots and pin it there. "Glideslope alive!" It's one of the glideslope indicators that hinges at the side like a drawbridge. I put the gear down as it swings just before level and then put the nose down and descend on the glideslope. I need to pull the power back a bit more, otherwise the turbocharged engines give me more power as I descend and I'll get above the glideslope. Despite the fact that I'm descending on the glideslope, I am given a "not below" clearance, and I reach that altitude while still on the glideslope. I hold altitude and watch the needle drop away below me, until the restriction is lifted then I ask the examiner what she wants me to do. She tells me to recapture the glideslope. I tell her I would normally conduct a missed, not dive for a glideslope, but I do manage to get it back just before reaching the circling altitude. I circle out, mentally choosing points that represent my circling limits, but just as I put down my gear to start turning in, the tower asks me to extend my downwind, they'll call my base. I should have taken the gear up again, but instead I let my speed decay and make the examiner nervous before I'm finally cleared to turn in and do my touch and go. I grin to myself, glad I did one this morning. As I turn crosswind, the examiner says she wants the next landing to be flapless. Ha ha. I admit straight out that I haven't landed this airplane flapless before, that there's no checklist, but that I'll have a shallower approach angle, higher approach speed, more runway... While I'm babbling the examiner grabs the left throttle and pulls it to idle. "This should help you get down." I simulate feathering the propeller and securing that engine and it so happens that as her simulation has taken out my hydraulics, this would be a flapless landing anyway. I simulate activating the gear electrically, and wouldn't have chosen to pump down the flaps with a runway of this length. She tells me I can have the power if I need it, but I entirely forget in the flare that the "zero thrust" simulation that the examiner has set is actually not zero thrust and the residual power, afternoon warmth and lack of flaps prolongs my touchdown so far it's funny. I stop and turn off at the end.

After landing checks done, I ask the examiner for suggestions on where to park and she gets the taxi clearance for me and gives directions. There's a whole back lot full of interchangeably anonymous hangars. It's like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. If I park the airplane back here I'll never find it again. The examiner knows that there is no airplane in this hangar and that the owner won't be here for a while, so it's okay to park in front of it. She's now late for her next lesson, so the debriefing will be in the morning, at 7 a.m.

"Can you please at least tell me if I can tell my company I passed?"

"You passed."

If she had made me wait, you had better believe I would have made you wait. Most of them do. I really wonder how bad some pilots must be, that they are worse than me and actually fail these things. Is my expectation of the world just too high? Like the fact that my customer today said he thought I was the most punctual pilot he had ever worked with. I mean what? How can you be more punctual than on time? And how can your job be to file a flight plan saying you will take off at 1430, and not be sitting at the hold short line waiting for a take-off clearance at 1429? Most of the job that isn't memorizing and practicing emergency procedures is calculating how long things take, and writing that down in four places.

The examiner takes her paperwork and leaves while ponder these things, fill out the journey log and gather my belongings.

There's a young man sitting in a C172 parked on the apron without the engine running. I say hi and ask him if he's practicing emergency procedures. He says no, he's just waiting for his instructor. I apologize, explaining I'm the reason she's late, and hoping I haven't got her in a bad mood for him. He's relaxed about it. He's working on his initial private pilot licence, trying to get landings right. The instructor in me makes me ask what the hardest part is. Not that he doesn't have a very competent instructor, but sometimes even the same words from someone new trigger something. He says just getting everything done, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't.

The operator has gone to meet with a client, and left me with the name of a hotel where we have reservations, and instructions to get a cab there. I go and find a phone at the flying club and call one. They say I'm first in line for a cab in the area and when I ask how long that might take the dispatcher repeats You're first in line for a cab in your area! I should have hung up and called another company. I'd rather be treated with respect than have an uncracked windshield. But I say whatever and wait. There's another pilot at the club and I express some of my "phew, flight test over" relief to him and he recognizes which airplane I must have been in, from the examiner's voice getting my clearance. He was in the airplane that interrupted my ILS approach, and apologizes for that. I tell him that really it helped me out, because the closer to the airfield I get, the harder it is to keep the needles centres, so breaking me off early made me look better. I go out to wait for the cab. I wait a while. Rude and slow.

The driver is a lot nicer than the dispatcher. He turns out to be an IT guy taking a break from his career. I have supper and should be ready to collapse, but I'm still kind of wired. Maybe that was especially potent coffee. I call the front desk. "Do you guys have a swimming pool or something?" She doesn't even say 'yes,' just gives me directions. The pool has a bunch of kids in it, and I join them on the waterslide, making sure it's all clear below before I launch myself down it. It's a good one! They compliment me on my happy shrieking. One of the 'kids' turns out to be the mom. I tell her I'm decompressing from a flight test, which leads to the usual conversation about what airline I don't fly for. I tell her about taking pictures at Slave Lake and get a blank look.

"Oh, what province are you from?"

"Alberta. But we've been away."

They've been away for six months. The parents have jobs that allow them to work via the internet for a good portion of the year, and the kids are homeschooled, so they've just been travelling. "Oh where?" I ask.

"Everywhere. The whole world."

Wow. I ask about some countries I'm interested in. Cambodia? She doesn't know where it is. I tell her. No, they haven't been to Asia. Or Africa. Or South America. Or Central America including Mexico. She hasn't heard of Estonia. Hasn't been east of Germany. They have been only been to countries dominantly populated by white people who speak germanic or romance languages. I wouldn't challenge your right to call a vacation covering the UK, Australia and Western Europe a world tour, but if you're home schooling your kids, they have to know that that is not "everywhere - the whole world." She has a reason, though, but a kind of weird one, for not wanting to go to 'those places.' Her partner, not currently in the pool area, is from the Caribbean, and dark skinned, so her kids look like 'their kids.' She's afraid that they will be mistaken for locals in one of those places and taken for slaves, because that happens there. I don't know where to start. I'm not going to touch the paranoia that goes with a mother's love, or her subscription to "all brown people look alike," so I tell her that in Cambodia, children in slavery are usually sold by their own parents to feed the others in the family, or by luring runaways, not by snatching the children of the wealthy. I'm pretty sure that's the way slavery works most places these days, because capturing people that the authorities would come looking for is bad for business. I try to express that just because a country doesn't have the same standards or the same traditions as Canada, that it isn't a place you can travel safely. I've never travelled with children, but if they'll eat what's available, sleep where you tell them to and have the basic sit stay and recall training of a pet dog, I think they could enjoy travel, to the whole world.

And at the end of the day-- and it really is the end of the day--it makes me wonder how fundamentally broken my world view is. I need to see more of it, and look harder at the places I already am. I spend a few minutes in the really hot hot tub, then go to bed.

Pine and Beaver

I'm out for a walk in the rain, pausing at the corner of Pine and Beaver. Where am I?

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is what people call all the temples together, everything that remains of this ancient city, and the name also applies specifically to the largest temple. It's the iconic image of Cambodia, featured on the flag, the beer, the t-shirts, pretty much anything that needs to say Cambodia. We first saw it while passing by to get to other temples, and stopped by it to see inside, the first afternoon. It's hard to appreciate how big it is, because it's so big you just think each part is further away than it is.

It's accessed via a broad stone walkway over a waterway, I guess you might call it a moat. There were people in boats on the moat. I don't know if they were collecting trash, doing maintenance, hunting for frogs, or just having fun in boats. There was so much going on that I didn't think about it until now, trying to describe the experience. Once upon a time there would have been stone railings all along this walkway, but they have almost all fallen away. The walkway itself must have been a thousand years old, but it was more solid than most of the roads at home. The first set of towers, the ones you see in the photo above, are just part of an outer ring. You go up the stairs, pass though it, and follow another long stone walkway to the main building. There are more remnants of the snake-style handrail along each side and some "small" (bigger than my house) buildings in the fields either side of the walkway. They, and other buildings like this within courtyards are called "libraries," just a name some archeologist gave them, and that they were never repositories of documents.

At the end of the long walkway is Angkor Wat itself, but it's again a series of rings, kind of like cloisters at a monastery. There are roofs overhead in some places, but I note that they are very crude. Perhaps the rough stone was originally covered by carved wooden ceilings like in European cathedrals, or by silk draperies. The stone ledge around the top would easily support a ceiling. Interestingly, much of what they know today about Angkorian era woodwork comes from the apsara doors. The stonework there mimics woodworking joins so closely that it shows how they made doors. A lot of the stonework is not entirely finished. You see walls that have been partly decorated and even a few that have obviously amateur copies of the apsaras and designs, something between ancient graffiti and apprentices trying their hand at master work.

This many-armed Buddha statue was probably not representative of the original deity worshipped here, as the Angkorian kings were mostly Hindu. There seems to be a fair amount of give and take between Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance isn't it the Hindu gods, not Buddha, who are usually depicted with many arms? I thought this odd at first, and then I realized it's closer to the norm than to the exception. It's true for other combinations of religions that have existed in the same area for a long time. Christianity is so irrevocably intertwined with paganism that ancient fertility symbols like trees and rabbits are still central to Christian holidays. Judaism and Christianity have half a holy book in common. Religions branch off others and absorb pieces of others they come into contact with, like other aspects of culture.

The orange drapery on the statue is similar to a monk's robes; it's a distinctive colour that makes monks extremely photogenenic, especially against the stone, grass and sky. We see lots of monks at Angkor Wat, I think more because it's a fascinating place to visit as to worship at any particular statue. They are definitely tourists just the way we are, posing for photographs, looking at the old buildings and exchanging tips on what sights to see.

A monk is not allowed to touch a woman, not even an accidental brush between clothing. We found out that the monks weren't allowed to go to the water festival because the crowds were so dense it would be impossible not to come into contact with females. If they do accidentally touch a woman there is a purification ritual they have to go through, so I'm mindful of this and give the monks room. I am also not allowed to initiate a conversation with a monk, and presumably this includes gestural conversations, like miming, "May I take your picture?" Nevertheless, I want to take pictures of the monks so I keep watching where they are going in the hopes of setting up a good photo. I saw a group of three walking down a cloister, but the light was poor. When I got to the end of the corridor, I realized that they had gone out onto the promontory at the end of the gallery, where the sun hit them. The background was a little plain, but I might be able to get a shot from an angle, partly framed by the temple. As I'm trying to unobtrusively maneuver for this shot, the oldest of the three greets me with his palms together and the words sak sabai. It's a "how do you do" type greeting, and the response is also sak sabai. In retrospect the response is probably something different when you're talking to a monk, because the language has masses of parallel vocabulary used just for monks (and another set for royalty). How dependent on social registers is a language when I tried to work with it for two weeks and couldn't even manage to learn the pronouns? But it's incredibly obvious that I'm a foreigner, so he can't expect proper vocabulary. Actually he looks slightly surprised that I answered at all. Maybe some tourists shriek and run away. I follow up with my best Khmer for "I am from Canada," and then it's my turn to be surprised.

He responds with, "So am I. I'm from Ottawa," in perfect English.

He has a Khmer accent, and looks Khmer. When I'm done looking confused, I put it together that he emigrated to Canada and now has come back here to study as a monk. He confirms that, and we chat for a bit. I ask if I can take their picture and he says sure, don't you want to be IN the picture? He hands off my camera to the youngest monk and I come out in the sunlight to sit with them. Sorry, you only get half that picture, and the toe of my shoe as I sit crosslegged with them.

At the centre of all the rings of galleries are steep, steep, crumbling stairs up to the iconic rounded towers. One of the staircases is augmented with scaffolding supporting wooden stairs and a handrail, still steep but usable. Reaching the head of the line, visitors are assessed for the propriety of their clothing before being issued a pass to go to the top.

There's not a whole lot different at the top of the towers. It's most interesting as an opportunity to see the towers as closely as possible, and for the view of the whole complex, as you walk around and look out the different sides. You just see jungle beyond the walls now, but I suppose once wooden and palm frond houses would have surrounded it. There's no real central area or anything, just fancy decorations and vistas. It's not really intended for people to marvel at, but for the gods to be comfortable and happy. The idea is to build a fabulous residence for the gods so they will spend time near you and be avaialble to hear your prayers and well-disposed towards answering them.

Looking back toward the west you can see the outer ring, the walkway and the libraries, plus the courtyard below. The rubble was arranged in rows and catalogued with numbers. The handwriting style and the age of the markings makes me suspect that it was a French project.

This was as close as one could get to the towers at the top of the structure. I think it's interesting that the rounded shape is actually composed of straight lines and square corners. It gives a very interesting effect. I wonder who first came up with the idea and how.

This was the central exit archway from the complex to the east. When you walk right to the edge of the ledge it's just a drop off, no stairs, no ramp, no crumbled ruins, just a three metre drop to the ground. I found out later that it's the exit where you walk out to mount your elephant. Of course. I wonder where the valet elephant parking was, back in the day.

We didn't see any elephants at that temple, but there was a dog, in good condition, and a lot of monkeys sitting around nursing their babies and grooming one another.

At the end of the day we go to dinner at a huge tourist buffet restaurant and I get a chance to find out what some of the things I have been eating are called. They don't have any ngeuv though. There's also Chinese food and "spagbol". (Oh that's what I want to eat when I'm travelling, a Cambodian imitation of an Italian dish as interpreted by the British). The food is pretty good. Cambodian desserts aren't as sweet as we're used to, just slightly sweetened, but palatable. I take a sample of everything, including something that looks like green jello (hello Salt Lake City!) but turns out to be similar to Turkish delight, and my favourite of the whole selection.

The highlight of the evening is the traditional dancing. There are apsara dancers, contorting their hands and feet the way the temple carvings do, and folk dancing in other costumes, all telling traditional stories. I realize looking at the Khmer writing on the wall behind the dancers that the squiggles are becoming a little bit recognizable now. The words that means "Amazon" (shown in my apsara post yesterday) start the same way as the word for "Amok," one of my favourite dishes, that I see on bilingual menus, and the word "America" which I copied onto postcards going to the US, just for fun. I'm pretty sure the post office can handle French and English.

Apsaras

This is not an account of any particular day, just a collection of images and notes on a particular type of temple carving, the apsara.

The apsara was probably the most ubiquitous image in all the temple carvings. She is a dancing woman, but not just a woman, she is half-goddess, half-woman. The guidebook calls them celestial dancers who entertain the gods and are the sensual rewards of kings and heroes who die bravely. In Hindu mythology they always performed with the celestial musicians, but in Khmer mythology they were elevated alone to special importance in temple decoration. The hand gestures represent various forms of the lotus, which in turn symbolize phases of life, seasons, etcetera. The raised hand on the one above (from the main temple at Angkor Wat) shows the blossom, and both hands on the one below (also from Angkor Wat) show the leaf. Traditional Khmer dance includes human dancers emulating these temple carvings, and they really can do the unnatural-seeming things with their hands and feet, and legs. They practice and work to enhance their flexibility from a young age

I could spend a week just going through temples here only looking at apsara carvings, learning the forms from different eras. I'm not sure now looking at the different ones, what is the choice of the individual artist, a change in fashion with the centuries, or just a different aspect of the dance being shown. I probably have a hundred photos of different apsaras (I keep wanting to make the plural "apsarae," for no good reason at all), and I haven't kept excellent records of which were on which temples or where they were on that structure, but I can work most of them out from memory or the order of photographs.

The ladies above were on the east face of Angkor Wat and the ones below were the dinner entertainment at a fancy tourist restaurant. My camera ran out of battery for the day before the dances and then at the end I managed to wring a few more photos out of it. That's why I don't have a very good shot of the dancers.

I perceive the carved apsaras as being bare-breasted, with necklaces and waist ornaments and skirts, and ancient accounts of the temple dancers describe the colour of the women's breasts, so presumably they were. I'm curious about the point when the dancers became more fully clad. They've done a good job of costumes that match the depicted dancers closely enough that I'm not absolutely certain that the originals aren't also wearing close-fitting garments. They have belly buttons but I don't have any photos where I can say for certain that they have nipples. That's not saying they never did, as they are almost all worn, from weather and handling, we'll call it worship. This lady, still an active object of worship, was in Preah Kahn.

The next one is from Angkor Wat. She, thousands of her comrades also decorating that structure, and the parade of monks moving through the temples made me think: boys enter the monastary at eight or ten and stay for a few years until they leave to get married. I seriously doubt that over the last thousand years the fundamental nature of young teenaged boys has changed any more than the appearance of beautiful young women has. And here a major, if not the major decorating element of their places of worship is a mostly naked goddess. It amuses me to think of these lovely and serene ladies fuelling the fantasies of centuries of young monks who are forbidden to touch a woman, and even supposed to avoid speaking to one.

The next apsara is from Bayon near the top level. When I spotted her, there was a large tourist sitting down for a rest in the shade provided by the same walls that seem to have sheltered her from damage over the centuries. I was scoping out how to take a clear picture of her when a tour guide came around the corner, telling his charges that she was the best preserved of any apsara in Bayon, at which point the tourist realized that he was blocking a view and got up and moved.

A lot of the images were badly damaged, many deliberately, probably in attempts to steal them. Some were repaired and in some cases blocks where their faces would have been had been replaced by plain stones, repairing the structural but not aesthetic damage done by the thieves or vandals. I concentrated on finding the best images.

I had to climb around a little ways on the structures to capture some of the images. There were hardly any restriction anywhere on touching or climbing. I never touched the stone carvings, even though they had the oil of thousands of previous touches on them, just because I'm used to not touching precious things on display. And really shouldn't I buy them dinner first?

The structure below is obviously a door, and the first time I came across one I stared and thought, "Door? how can there be a thousand year old door?" Then I realized that it was stone, just a carved representation of a door and that didn't make a lot of sense either. There was noting behind it, no way it could open, so what was it for? It's an apsara door. The apsara is a celestial being so she doesn't need a real wooden door. Khmer temples, you see, unlike religious structures in Canada, are not intended as a gathering place for worshippers. There are no concerns for access, assembly, sightlines, acoustics, public galleries or pulpits. The temples are palaces for the gods and goddesses, temporary abodes, and the aim is to build a place for them so sumptuous that they will want to come and stay a while, thus making them nearby and more likely to hear or heed your prayers. The apsara can pass through this door into whatever other part of the temple, or perhaps the universe she pleases.

It's such an exciting idea that I can't believe Tomb Raider didn't have Lara Croft press the right combination of buttons to have the ancient apsara door open on hidden springs and hinges, instead of just inelegantly hauling down the door with ropes and manual labour.

Remote Temples

On the list of embarrassingly minor tourist gripes, the air conditioning is too cold and we can't figure out how to turn it down, and the light in the wardrobe won't turn off without turning off the master switch, which we need on in order to recharge our camera batteries overnight. We solve the former by figuring harder and the latter by unscrewing the light bulbs. We're also amused by the laundry list that allows us to specify the number of kimonos we have submitted for laundering, but "bra" is not listed. Do Cambodian women not wear bras? We hadn't noticed, which suggests that yes they do. I'll have to scrutinize my photos some more.

The hotel breakfast spread is phenomenal. It includes the staple foods for a hearty breakfast in North America, Western Europe, and many places in Asia. We can hear the delight in some Korean guests' voices as they discover kim-chee on the buffet. I bypass the omelet station, toast and jam and a spread of sliced meats, cheese and bread to try "fish porridge" (soup thickened with rice), chive cakes and bok choi fried with bacon. I also have a croissant and some dragonfruit. The last has a pink rind, with white fruit and lack dots, like something filled with poppy seeds. It was fresh-tasting, not too sweet, about like a green melon but not as juicy.

The tuk tuk drivers were all waiting and we distributed ourselves among them to head off to the temples of Angkor Wat. Our driver, a fellow I met last night while looking for supper, speaks quite good English and earned the capital to buy his tuk tuk working in a "soldier hospital." He's married and has one daughter, aged six, and she goes to school.

I should stop here and explain that Angkor Wat is literally Temple City, and was the capital of the old Khmer Empire, abandoned in the mid-fifteenth century when the rulers decamped to Phnom Penh. What remains is only the stone buildings, mostly temples, of what was once a huge city of wooden, stone and grass buildings. It is called the Eighth Wonder of the World and the main temple building is the largest religious structure anywhere. We ride out of town towards the temples, through the front gate of the national park containing the temples and buy a three day pass for $40, a fortune by Cambodian standards, but well worth it to see and help them preserve this huge complex. I later confirm that Cambodian nationals don't have to pay that fee. I want every Cambodian possible to be able to see this incredible evidence of their heritage. This isn't like the Aztec and Mayan ruins, relics of a long-gone civilization with no real connection to the people who live there now. This is pretty much the same civilization as exists now, people who are still dancing the same dances, performing the same rituals, and building with the same decorating styles. It must inspire both pride and shame to know that your ancestors did this, and that the civilization has crumbled to this extent. Imagine tourists coming to see the greatest city in your country after it had fallen into ruins and you were living elsewhere.

Today we are starting with Banteay Srei, "the women's temple," but the name is relatively modern. The temple doesn't have anything particular to do with women, but it's over a thousand years old and features carvings of stunning delicacy. It seems impossible that they have survived for so long. Apparently many of the temple façades were guilded and/or painted, so perhaps many layers of paint had to wear off before the elements had access to the stone. I walk through the temple and also around the outside of the moat. There are lotus flowers growing in the moat. The park staff have labelled some of the trees in Latin, Khmer and English, a nice touch for the visitor, acknowledging that the encroaching jungle and not just the temples are worthy of note.

Leaving the temple I enter a merchants' area where I attract a rabble of kids reminiscent of the inchworms in Commander Keen, pause in one place for a while and you're surrounded by them, all clamouring to sell scarves, books, bracelets, and wooden carvings. A full colour guidebook to the temples catches my idea as a good idea. The merchant shows me that the cover price is $27.95 and that he will give it to me for a mere $20. I should have got something like this and studied up before I came, to appreciate it more. I leaf through the book and see that it is nice, but walk on. I don't really have time to read it now. The throng follows me through the whole market. They're polite, and my nature isn't to ignore someone who shows me a pretty thing or says hello. The price of the book gradually decreases as I walk to the end, and finally I buy it for five dollars. It's a 240 page trade paperback with high quality paper and colour photographs on every page. It's published in Thailand. I don't know how the publishing industry works anymore. Did they steal these books to make money at $5? I'm referring to it now to keep my recollections of the temples straight.

Back in our tuk tuk, we stop at a palm sugar ... um place. It's the palm tree equivalent of a maple sugar shack i.e. a cabane à sucre, where you boil the sap from a maple tree to condense it into sugar. At a cabane à sucre you pour the condensed maple syrup on the snow to freeze it and make it into candy, but here they boil the juice from the fruit down into crystals which they sell in palm-frond tubes, three for a dollar. They offer free samples, which are delicious, and I buy some for souvenirs. If you don't have maple sugar where you're from, the nearest thing to it is probably very crystalline vanilla fudge. Very sweet, a bit crunchy, and melt-in-your-mouth. We met this guy later, gathering the juice. He posed very obligingly for the photo and is the only Cambodian I ever heard complain about the heat. That's what you get for climbing trees midday!

From there we went to Ta Som, a fairly isolated overgrown temple with huge piles of rubble everywhere. Even the rubble was beautiful. Each temple is built out of stone blocks, but not huge ones. I could probably just barely lift one. The carvings are not additional items placed in niches (thank goodness, otherwise they probably all would have been looted by now) but a part of each brick. I think they were carved in parts on the stones before the stones were placed here. I did pick up one of the smaller ones just to emphasize the vulnerability. Of course I put it right back, but there must be many of them stolen every year. The Indochine minister of culture even stole some entire carved apsaras (dancing goddesses, more on them later) in 1926. They caught him, but I'll bet that literally tonnes of these temple stones have left the country, some in the hands of people who truly thought they were conserving them.

I'm going to abandon my day-by-day recitation and just let this take as long as it takes to tell, otherwise I won't be able to keep up and I'll be forced to skimp on my story.

AviWAITion

This post got lost. I've been trying to slip it in where it wouldn't look out of place, so it's been floating around with my scheduled posts. I'm just going to jam it in here, out-of-place and out-of-season. You can say it's jet-lagged. Tomorrow the Cambodia saga will start.

I'm in Moose Jaw, where the nice engineer and his apprentices are replacing the left engine turbo wastegate, and there's a part that has to come by FedEx, so I have a day of waiting. Fortunately I'm good at that. I just pretend that every place I'm in is somewhere I have come on purpose for a holiday. I've been to Moose Jaw before, so I've already seen the historical re-enactment in the underground tunnels and admired the almost movie-set ready historical main street, and the murals. But I wouldn't mind going back to the park, and maybe I'll go swimming in the mineral springs again.

One time I was here, my work partner was a casino gambler and an expert wheeler dealer who wrangled rooms in the Mineral Spa Resort & Casino at the same price as the hotel chain we normally stay in. Seeing as it's a holiday weekend, and I'm a negotiation pussycat, that didn't happen this time, but I can still pay the admission fee and go 'take in the waters.' I'm actually more in a swimming mood than a soaking mood, and the public pool feeds off the same mineral springs, so I head there. It's next to the park, anyway.

As I walk across the Boston Pizza parking lot (there's either a Boston Pizza or a Tim Horton's in every hotel parking lot in Western Canada), I spot something shiny on the pavement. When I'm airside, my FOD detection circuits compel me to pick any metal objects off the ramp in order to prevent them from being ingested by aircraft engines or taking chunks out of people's propellers. I pick up this one too. It's a brass shell casing ... ah no, it's an unused small calibre bullet. It probably rolled out of someone's truck or came out of their pocket as they got out of the truck. But now what do I do with it. I feel a responsibility not to chuck it back on the ground where kids might play with it. I don't want to put it in the garbage where it might be incinerated. And my normal approach of letting weird pieces of metal rattle around the bottom of my pocket or suitcase until they end up in the jar next to my washing machine isn't going to cut it with airport security. Plus hey, unexploded ordnance.

I wander down Main Street (isn't this sweet: it's actually called Main Street, not 50th Avenue) past an object in the grass by the railroad tracks that was there yesterday and that I'm 95% sure is a dead cat, but I'm not going to go closer and confirm. See I'm smart enough not to take on responsibility for ALL the awkward to dispose of objects on the streets of Moose Jaw. While I'm walking I make up a sentence that describes the town. The moose sat on real caribou hides and stood on fake hyena rugs. I'll leave it to you to figure out why, apart from the moose reference, it is useful and appropriate.

I have lunch in a little Thai restaurant and read a tourist brochure, which mentions a local business with the address "420 High Street." No prizes for guessing what kind of business it is. That's a few blocks away, and perhaps they sell hemp paper postcards along with their other wares. I walk down that way, but although their sign says they open at eleven, they're still closed at two. Typical stoners. I instead buy a postcard at, of all places, a windshield repair shop. They are a general everything glass shop, including figurines and other glass art, so they have arty cards.

On the way east towards the park there's a police car parked with its lights flashing, but no car pulled over near it. The officer is sitting inside doing paperwork. I come up to the window and he looks up suspiciously to ask what I want. For a moment I wonder how stupid this is going to sound, but I don't have to say any more than "I found a bullet ..." before he becomes friendly and says he'll take care of it for me. Done with less hassle than I was anticipating.

The park is not huge, but it's well laid out with hills and different levels and a river with happy ducks floating on it. It's good for people watching, and it's culturally acceptable to strike up conversations with strangers in front of ducks. You can also talk to strangers in used bookstores (but not new ones) and in health food stores, and in the line-up at a regular grocery store. You can talk to strangers on the street, too, but you have to be careful to pick someone of approximately matching age and apparent economic status. Real life is not like a social MMORPG where you can talk to anyone who crosses your path without alarming them.

The public pool is next to the park, and it's a hundred year old building with the word NATATORIUM graven in its stone façade. It's also closed with some scaffolding up and workers in hardhats. I can see that the outdoor pool is still empty. Just as well. Meanwhile I have received a text that they may have the airplane ready for me this afternoon, so I probably shouldn't be in a swimming pool. I wander up to the museum, which is in the park, but as I go down the stairs into the exhibit hall I lose cellphone signal, so that's off limits, too. Cellphones give you a limited sort of freedom when you're on call.

Walking up a back street towards the hotel, I pass an old funeral home. It's a current funeral home, too, but I see its history in the fact that the doors to the garage for the hearses are clearly carriage house doors. I'm sure hearses pulled by black horses came through them for years before they invested in a motor hearse. Also, and perhaps it's just the power of suggestion, but the adjacent "funeral parking only" lot doesn't have aisles and stalls like a conventional parking lot, but instead just aisles, running lengthwise down the lot, so the cars must park in nose to tail columns, as if they were waiting for a ferry or stopped in a California freeway traffic jam. I picture that being exactly the way you would park a large number of horses-drawn buggies. The lot is paved and there are no hitching posts, but I can imagine the parking routine staying unchanged for a hundred years.

The Europeans must be laughing at me, sitting in cafés that have been in the same place for three hundred years, but in western Canada things are so new that hundred year old stuff is of historical note.

I see a gopher poking out of a hole and try to take a picture, but it runs back down the hole, at which point a different gopher pokes out of a further off hole. I dart back and forth with my camera in a giant game of live whack-a-mole until one of the gophers takes pity and lets me snap a shot.

After all that, the airplane isn't ready before the shop quitting time, so I go back to the hotel and read my e-mail and other things on the Internet. There's an update from John, the person who got me into the KC-130 sim. He describes an interesting problem at a simulator facility in Texas: On two airfields you landed below the runway, on the third you landed about 30 feet up then ran into an invisible wall. Both problems were "mostly fixed."

Canada & Intergalactic Spaceport: Two Places We Didn't Land

Now comes the leap across Canada. I've probably flown point to point in the US before while passing through Canadian airspace but not landing, but this is the first time I will have done it between points that I couldn't drive between without clearing customs.

The airplane is ready to go, as we fuelled last night. I'm on the radio and she's flying today. I call for our clearance and they ask us how soon we will be ready. The engines are almost warm enough for takeoff, just a few checks to do. She holds up three fingers. "Three minutes." There's inbound IFR traffic but apparently that's the right number for them. We're give a clearance that expires three minutes hence, and told to taxi and call when ready. I don't know how long the delay would be if we don't make this time, probably not more than ten minutes. Run up complete, taxiing for the hold short line I call ready. Tower has VFR traffic inbound and tells them they have an IFR waiting to go with a tight departure slot. The pilot understands and agrees without being explicitly asked to slow it up--maybe literally reducing speed, extending a downwind or flying a wider base, I'm not sure where the he was--for us. We're cleared for takeoff before his arrival, to roll with seconds to spare in our clearance valid time. I irritate her by specifying the required heading twice, when she already knows where she's turning to. She points out that we're not under two-crew procedures, so she's not obligated to read back or crosscheck the bearing. I apologize, "It was just that you didn't have the heading bug set." We're not using the autopilot for the departure, so it's not essential, but using a heading bug has long been a habit of mine, across many non-autopilot- equipped aircraft. Two crew SOP approval is on our list of things to do, along with certification of our training program on the GNS 430.

We climb to enroute altitude and join the appropriate airway and in a couple of handoffs we're talking to Canadian ATC It's such a welcoming thing, even though I'm not headed home I can now leave the C out of our callsign and they will say "decimal" and other subtle things that I don't so much notice the absence of, as welcome the return to.

Canadian ATC has a reroute for us, if we're willing to accept transit through uncontrolled airspace. I'm ready to copy. It's pretty simple compared to what it could be, just direct a particular waypoint after passing another one, and they spell each five letter combo slowly so I can copy them down and then find them on the chart.

We amuse ourselves for a while with the GPS, finding the worldwide locations of the five letter identifiers corresponding to parts of our names, friends names, etcetera. I think one of mine was in Hawaii.

As we get further south the weather is improving and we get glimpses of the land and water below. We're over the water between Vancouver Island and mainland BC, so seeing ocean, and shoreline and bits of mountains below. Another frequency change and then they have another reroute for us. We filed via the YVR VOR, but we want to be in descent by then for Bellingham and might be in conflict with Vancouver International traffic, so the reroute takes us out to the west over Nanaimo and Victoria. The weather below continues to improve. We could almost cancel IFR and descend VFR to complete the trip more efficiently, except you never know what the weather will be like the rest of the way. I'm about to ask for a more direct routing so we don't have to go all the way to YYJ, when they give us vectors almost direct. ATC does a fantastic job of keeping traffic separated without impairing efficiency. It would be a much more complex process with a much lower capacity for throughput of traffic without them.

The final VOR in our routing is HUH. Huh? It's close to Bellingham airport, but not actually on the field, so it used to be called BLI. But some years ago, I think it may have been partly triggered by the American Airlines flight that flew direct the wrong NDB in South America, they started renamng all the nav aids that shared names with airports but were not physically at the fields. So the one by Bellingham is now called the Whatcom VOR. I think it's on Whatcom Road or in Whatcom county. We wondered at the rename whether the identifier HUH is a joke, because in Canada "What?" and "Comme?" each mean the same thing as "Huh?"

It may be coincidence, but there are definitely jokes in naming nav aids. The Reno VOR was renamed "Mustang" and now there's a "Ranch departure" out of Reno. (The Mustang Ranch is an infamous brothel there).

Our vector has us approaching the mainland USA, the Whatcom VOR and the Bellingham airport on vectors, above a cloud deck that started just before the shore. Approach is trying to pass us onto tower, who are reporting clear skies and have a visual approach posted on the ATIS. I can sense some frustration on the controller's part that I am insisting I am still above cloud. Sometimes I just want to take pity on the controllers and admit that I know where the airport is, but we're above a solid layer, and if I'm not visual I won't say I am. We come over the edge of the cloud deck just in time to spot the airport and descend to land. As the NOTAM's told us, there are lots of taxiway closures here with construction, but it's well in hand. We taxi in and are marshalled to a stop right away. We get directions to the washroom and quick fuelling. There's no pilot's lounge, but they let me use an office computer and phone. If we can get out of here VFR we can get across the country to our next destination. It has to be VFR because the sum of the flights will exceed her eight hour limit for single pilot IFR, and I neither count as a second pilot nor am allowed to log any IFR until I renew my rating. So now we'll be VFR and flying on my licence, but she will still do the flying. This is fine and legal. I can let my cat fly, or the autopilot, as long as I take responsibility for the flight. I go with company flight following rather than a flight plan.

Weather looks good from here, so we depart VFR to the south and turn west when we have the clearance to and the altitude to go over the mountains. A controller calls us "November Charlie blah blah blah blah" for a while and I accept that because although there's no "N" at the beginning of or callsign it's obviously us, and that's just the way some controllers talk. Eventually she asks us, "Are you November Charlie or just Charlie." I tell her there's no November, without pointing out that it's the designation for American aircraft and Charlie is for Canadian, so it would be hard to be both. Possibly the first controller that checked us in for flight following explicitly entered an N on our electronic flight strip. As soon as we cross the first range of rocks eastbound, the ground gets drier, then it continues to get drier and higher as we go east.

Tailwinds are awesome, better than forecast. I never put too much hope in tailwinds and count headwinds as worse than forecast. But we're smoking. A bit of math reveals that we don't need our planned fuel stop after all. I turn on my phone and enter a text message with our new ETA, then wait until we are going over a town and hit send. It finds a cellphone tower and sends it before we pass it by. We squeeze over some higher terrain, doing a few zigzags here and there to avoid having to climb into oxygen territory. We'll need oxygen tomorrow morning and don't want to use it up now.

I call flight services to update the weather and they tell us sternly that VFR is not recommended in Wyoming or Colorado due to an aggressive line of thunderstorms. We listen to the SIGMET and thank the briefer, then look at each other and smile. We respect thunderstorms, but we're not avoiding two entire states for the presence of one line, even widespread air mass thunderstorms. They are a highly visible weather phenomenon. We discuss it and determine that if we have any doubts about the proximity of a thunderhead, or we encounter an area where storms pose an impassable barrier, we'll just land at one of the hundreds of conveniently located airports. There are so many here. It's not like we're in Northern Ontario and will be SOL if we can't make it from Thunder Bay to either Dryden or Kenora. There's an airport behind every bush out here. People have airports just for fun.

As an example, I notice that we will be passing not far from the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport. That's a real airport, not in the greatest condition, but we could land there safely. I bring it up on the GPS, plus find the official description of the little airport, to amuse my fellow pilot. Shortly afterwards I realize that she has altered our course to fly direct the spaceport, "We can't be this close and not fly by!"

We see some distant and retreating CBs but nothing interferes with our flight, which passes through airspace of both Wyoming and Colorado. We reach our destination without incidents and descend to land, rolling out at a long, high altitude strip across from a golf course, and somewhere that we suspect we can buy excellent Mexican food.

We check into the hotel and then I make a couple of phone calls to find out where oxygen service is available. There's nothing at the airport where we are parked, but one airport down the highway I find an FBO that says "yes" to providing oxygen and "six am to seven pm" for their hours. Fantastic. We'll probably be in tomorrow. I get driving directions.

And I'm off to bed, because there's more work to do in the morning.