August 2019

Another month has gone by (and I am a year older) and it is time to give a summary of August. The main news is that our house sale moves forward with the whole deal currently getting State approval. After this is given, which usually takes a month, we agree on a final settlement date. This can take upwards of three months, but our lawyer will press for a shorter time. There is a number of decisions we cannot make yet as we don’t know if we will get a furnished or unfurnished apartment. Currently we prefer the latter so we will not have to get rid of a lot of furniture. We have started looking at what is available and have already found a contender, but price negotiations will have to follow. Currently I am pruning possessions to a more manageable level. The garbage collectors will be glad when this is done.

Helen will continue to teach and at the moment is having to do the odd class in the afternoon because of a waiting list. Nikki has been busy with her house surgeon duties and Dani as energetic as ever with her promotions was jumping puddles in Ireland (and you can see the earth is round).

This is generally a quiet time for nature photography but I have been out a few times. Unfortunately, the news on this front is not good. My ‘bird studio’ at Penanti is now completely flattened and some crops have already been planted there. 

I am left with some great memories of Penanti and the feathered friends....including the most beautiful Kingfisher....ever.

My back-up place also got a beating in a recent storm. It lost a section of a walkway last year and this was repaired but more trees came down this month and damaged an even greater section of the walkway.

I did have an interesting session with a pair of Flameback Woodpeckers at Air Hitam Dalam. Like us they were looking for a house and Mrs Woody felt a depression on the top a palm tree stump was good enough. Mr Woody was not convinced and refused to go and look. She chased him around the tree trunk several times before they went their separate ways. 

It is still a magic place to visit as the sun rises and the roosting Asian Openbill Storks set off for the padi fields.

Sometimes encounters cannot be photographed but the moment is just as uplifting. One morning it was pre-dawn and I could make out silhouettes only and this bird had a crest of some sort and a distinctive call. It turned out to be a Black Baza.....I had photographed the same species about 6 years previously not far from the current location. It is a small to medium-sized raptor.

Its call can be heard here.  The second, third and forth are best.

In the last month I have sold four images, three via the German Bird agency and one to National Geographic.....the giraffe and the aeroplane.

My main appointment with nature has been taking Coco for a walk each morning at her favourite beach. I try to get there each morning as the sun comes up, as I like sunrises and fishing boats. I know most of the fishermen who go to sea at this time. Coco has her favourites as well, Guitar-man, Crab man, and Indian man. Trees along the beachfront were also damaged in the storm. Coco was fascinated by the offerings left out for the Hungry Ghosts.

On the Hari Raya holiday I photographed a line-up of orphan boys who were having a day-at-the-beach treat. Viewing them and talking to their teacher was a humbling experience.

After a lull in sightings we have started seeing otters again. Two were spotted by Helen adjacent to the walkway and I managed to record a sequence of local wild dogs versus an otter family, Dad and his two offspring. While you have seen this spectacle, I place it in the months review for the sake of posterity. The moral of the story....if you want to fight....do it when you have the advantage....and not in the sea with the worlds most agile swimmer who has sharp teeth and large claws.

When Helen and I remember we like going to see the annual orchid show at the Botanic Gardens. There is an amazing array of colours and shapes.

The pub quiz has gone well in the last month with 4 wins and a second.

While keeping the mind agile I have started practicing my bowling again, with assistance and have found a reasonable carpet green on the mainland that I hope to practice on. I have already had two sessions there.

In Brisbane, both Hayley and Phoebe have done well with their netball. They are now a two-dog family.

We will have a few months of chaos when we shift locations. I am planning my photographic targets for  next year. One place of interest is Sulawesi.....and who could resist such targets.

July 2019

As it turned out July 2019 was a memorable month.

We had sisters Alison and Lynette stay for 3 nights while on their way to celebrate Alison’s 70^th birthday in Vietnam,

Helen had a program arranged and two highlights were a dinner at Suffolk House for our ‘official’ septuagenarian celebration and the other was going across to the mainland for the Silent Auction where the fisherman arrive on each side of the river a negotiate the price of their catch. We also visited the tsunami monument that consists of boats that were damaged in the tsunami.

 

It is in a non-photographic phase and my only shots are on the beach walk with Coco. I love sunrises and their various moods. The walk is never the same with rock paintings, stray puppies, stalking cats and even otters eating fish (damn that was the only morning I did not have my camera).

This unknown person, below, seems to sleep under the palm tree and on top of an upturned dragon-boat most nights...the high tide would be only a few feet away

The big news, for which we have waited 18 months to occur, happened on the last day of the month. The house was sold.

The whole business was not pleasant. Our original plan was to stay in Penang for around 5 years until University fees ceased the drain on our economy. In hindsight we should have put the house on the market according to plan. We were a year and a half too late. The market had peaked and was sliding downhill, albeit slowly, and unforeseen building works threatened the nice ambience of the neighbourhood. We had the following problems;

1. There were around 25 similar houses on the market.

2. We were looking at a small population of buyers....local well-off Chinese.

3. We became aware that buyers were little interested in improvements and looked only at size and price.

4. The dreaded Fengshui became an issue in determining sales.....we were pointed in the wrong way apparently. Chinese friends tell me that Fengshui masters are overpaid and can come to any conclusions.

5. The agents are generally lazy and communicated very poorly with us.

6. Major works in the area have prompted other homeowners to sell

We had dropped our asking price twice in 15months. Research in early July indicated that NOT ONE HOME on the estate had sold this year. We decided to stand out from the pack and dropped the asking price even further. That strategy seemed to work.

Some nostalgia

We had one offer, but the bank did not play ball in granting a loan. In retrospect I doubt the seriousness of that offer. We had several half-hearted low offers.

We had 12 agents working for us...although 3-4 never brought any potential buyers. We had 63 punters visit in 18 months with the majority, by a long way, being in 2019. This July seemed to see a cut-off in viewers......except for the critical one. This punter too was interesting....we had a low offer without an inspection (it turns out his friend has a house not far away so he was obviously familiar with the layout). With some negotiation with the agent we got the price up by150,000 MYR. It was lower than our asking price, but we were prepared to settle at this point, which would also ensure that we could stay in Penang. I won’t go into these details, but we were 7 days away from being forced to quit Penang. The main reason we are here is that the money we have goes further than it would in Australia or NZ.  It is not a close race....stats say NZ is twice as expensive so our tank would drain twice as fast. Any place has compromises and we are OK with what is available here.

Settlement will take around 5 months so we have plenty of time to prepare. We will look for an apartment roughly in the general area. On the plus side we have made over 1 million ringgit and of course had free rent that would amount to another half-million ringgit saved.

In the pub quiz we have had a good period with 5 firsts in the last 6 weeks.

From Brisbane below is the latest picture of Hayley and the multi-talented Phoebe who swaps achieving at different sports to playing music in a city-centre performance.