Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day . Teach a man to fish and you may go hungry!

Readers of Bill Bryson's book on Australia will know that there are about 250 ways to die horribly through various mishaps, poisons and aggressive wild life. Yesterday I managed to avoid several of these potential premature deaths.

We were down at Leigh and Corina's place on the coast - Brulee, a 2-hour drive through the mountains and forests. Leigh's version of R and R turned out to be pretty tiring. We were up at 5.30 am ready for a spot of dawn fishing from some nearby rocks.A red sky, quickly turning pale, with clouds and a rainbow in the distance. we lined up with about 6 others on the edge of the rocks and I followed Leigh's direction, casting into the ocean and hoping for something to happen. And for quite a while it didn't; while men (and this does seem to be a man thing) either side of us were hauling them in we got the impression fish were nibbling the bait off our hooks and laughing at us. Then, just as we were about to pack up, I had a bite, there was a short tussle as Leigh shouted orders to me for reeling it in, and a decent sized pacific salmon came to land. As we were leaving, I looked down from our rock into the water and saw a sting-ray several feet across swimming by, with a small mottled shark (Leigh: 'that kind very rarely give a serious bite'!) for companionship. Only as we were back in the car did Leigh reveal that not only is rock fishing Australia's no 1 sport, it is also it's most dangerous.  Apparently, 'You can always tell the best fishing spots by the memorial plaques for people who've been washed away'!

Back at the holiday home, the fish (and another we acquired) were duly photographed and put in the smoker to cook. Leigh had more planned. Body boarding in the surf turned out to be one of the many things I'm not terribly good at (and, at my age, why should I be?)  - there's clearly a knack to picking when to hurl yourself into the wave and to balancing your weight on the board. I felt I'd done enough for the day just be surviving, but Leigh took me for a lesson in surf-casting after lunch before we hit the road and arrived back in Quenbeyan in time for dinner with Bonni and Peter.

Still crazy after all these years

The most extraordinary set of friends was a legacy of three years in Tonga, now a full three decades ago. Those of us who formed a tight-knit group of church and aid workers have kept in touch ever since, found opportunities to meet and marvelled at the enrichment that time gave us. Sunday brought five of us together. I was preaching at Quenbeyan Uniting Church. An interesting service: two infant thanksgivings (anointing with oil + giving of candle], a rather chatty communion and numerous hymns about the Australian landscape. I shared the service with the local minister. I was the one not wearing shorts and open-necked shirt! As well as my hosts, Leigh and Corina, the congregation also included Peter and Bonni Maywald. Peter had been manager of the Friendly Islands Bookshop (making sure we could read the Booker prize nominations each year) as well as business manager of the Free Wesleyan church of Tonga (minister of finance for Greece would be a good contemporary comparison). He's about 6 years older than me - thirty years ago that made him seem seriously senior. Bonni, among many other things, helped produce the fruit salad when Diane and I were married. She has a half-completed PhD on women in early Tongan christianity. Peter's just retired afer leading the administration of Norfolk Island for several years (many of the residents are apparently descendents of the Bounty mutineers) while Bonni works in disaster management. Not having seen them since December 1981, there was plenty to catch up on. Sharing communion with them all was very special indeed. Over the lunch the five of us must have sounded like a regimental re-union and I felt sorry for the minister and his wife who had to sit there while we recalled long-forgotten events, names and Tongan expressions. As you can see from the photo, there's a common look about ex-missionaries of a certain age! There was plenty of joyful news in the conversation, but also sadness as I heard that our friend and former colleague, Sally Chipman, had died last August only a few weeks after her retirement from ministry in the United Methodist Church, USA.

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters)"

On top of the world down under

Vast as it is, Australia has no mountain ranges to rival the New Zealand Alps. and the highest point is under 2,300 metres. The upside is that it is a do-able excursion for ordinary hikers. Strangely, it's named after a Polish patriot who never visited australia. Mount Kosciuszko (note that for a future quiz night!) is about 2 1/2  hours drive from Canberra, in the Snowy Mountains National Park. This was our expedition for Friday. Corina was leaving nothing to chance. We had rations for about 3 days in our packs and she carried a first aid kit. We had jackets in case of the (unlikely as it turned out) surprise blizzard. The route to the mountain took us through forests, and valleys where immense gum trees had succumbed to the recent years of drought, their bleached skeletons reaching out from the dense green undergrowth. A chair lift gained us some height as we soared above green slopes that in winter become ski runs and from the top it was 6.5 km each way to the summit and back, achievable, but tiring. The landscape included granite tors intersperced with alpine meadows. A few flowers were still hanging on and muntain streams were full of tiny fish. The path was mostly over a steel walkway bolted to the rock and took us past the only glaciated formation in Australia (apparently that's important) and Australia's highest public toilet (genuinely important).  I was assured that the pose below was the traditional way to celebrate a successful ascent!

 We got back to the top of the chair lift a few minutes before it closed for the day
 and Leigh had the unenviable task of keeping awake as he drove home out of the mountain range.

'I'm going to have an adventure'

At the beginning of any journey it's good to meet a signpost - especially a living one. Sitting in Heathrow, Terminal 3, on Tuesday and waiting for my flight to board at the beginning of a six-week round-the-world trip, I noticed an elderly woman in a bright pink floral dress looking with growing bewilderment at a mobile phone. I know what you're thinking: 'when did you ever look at one without bewilderment?' But I had to offer help. I showed her how to store a number and to send a message, explaining that I generally found pressing buttons at random a good way to find out what these things did. I asked where she was going: Delhi to visit her son and 'have an adventure'. When I told her my plane was heading for Singapore and then to Australia, she really got going. She'd been born in Singapore, could still recall the bird song and the colours. It all stopped as the Japanese approached and she and her mother got aboard a final ship escaping from the harbour, leaving her father to perish on the Burma railway. They sailed back to a blitzed  England with the parents on board worried about U boats all the way. It was beginning to sound like the opening episode of Tenko. But by now my flight had been called and it was time for us to part to our seperate adventures.

The flight hurried me through time-zones, mostly at night. An abbreviated Ash Wednesday around a change of planes in Singapore, then on to Sydney. I was met by Leigh, a friend from over 30 years ago in Tonga, an economist who has always said (and now I believe him) that the rest of the world has got it wrong. He lives in Queanbeyan, near Canberra, but he wanted me to see Sydney first. We had breakfast with Leigh's daughter, Evelyn, petite (like her Philippino mother) and married to (I think this is the technical term) a hunk - a naval diver on the verge of joining the commandos and with the tightest handshake I come across for years. She gave us instructions for the day in the way daughters do (sub text: I know you're getting old so I'll say this very slowly) and we were off: the Manly ferry through the harbour to the Opera House (photos from every angle) and bridge (later walked across), new panama hat coming into its own. I was beginning to wilt, but Leigh was determined I should meet as many relatives as possible: brother Ken in his legal office in central Sydney and mother Joyce in her home in Caringbah. And then the three-hour drive towards Canberra trhough an amazingly green Australian landscape. Last time I was here all was drought-ridden, brown and dust; now, if not exactly an Irish green it was at least refreshed.

More soon.