As anyone who reads Geoff’s blog will know, our amazing little person, Ronan Thomas Lampert, arrived safely and relatively quickly last Wednesday at 6:17am.

Life has been a tiring but simply amazing maelstrom of experiences since then as Shell and I enjoy our first few days as a family of three. There doesn’t seem to be much free time to write eloquent blog posts as a new parent, but I’ve finally managed to find a few spare minutes to upload some pictures of Ronan for you to at least share in some of our indescribable and all consuming joy.

A few months on, and our adventure in Bhutan seems like almost a lifetime ago. I was lucky enough to find time to revisit the memories on Thursday in giving a short slideshow presentation to people at work about our trip. Was a bit rushed in the end, as I had to get off to the airport to catch a plane to Brisbane, but was great fun none-the-less.

Inspired by looking through photos in preparing my slideshow, I’ve finally posted a few more photos from our trip to Bhutan up on the web. Head over to my Flickr page (or more specifically, my Bhutan Photo Set) to see them. There are lots more photos to process and publish – especially film photos from our non-digital SLR. I’ll place those up on Flickr as time permits.

All this thinking about Bhutan has also inspired me to finally start reading the book on Dzongkha, the official Bhutanese language, that I bought a few months back. Fascinating reading so far!

Start Altitude: 10m (Bangkok)
Peak Altitude: 2800m (Taktsang)
Sleeping Altitude: 2200m (Paro)

Ater a week in Thailand, our flight from Bangkok Airport was scheduled to leave at 5:50am, meaning an obscenely early start from our hotel in downtown Bangkok. At the airport, we arrived well ahead of Druk Air staff, who eventually showed up sometime after 4am. Whilst waiting, we met a lovely couple from Brisbane who were also heading off to Paro to do the same trek as us. Although we assume that we would be trekking together, they ended up walking in the smaller World Expeditions group.

Unexpectedly, our flight actually had a brief stop-over in Kolkata in eastern India; well, not really a stop-over, since those of us on the plane didn’t even disembark, but passengers alighted and boarded around us.

Once on the final leg to Paro, the scenery was apparently pretty spectacular, with views of Everest, Kanchen Junga and other Himalayan peaks. Unfortunately, we were seated on the wrong side of the plane to see most of this :-/. Despite that, however, the scenery was still pretty impressive, as was the spectacular landing into Paro. Apparently, the Airbus 319 we were flying in is pretty much the largest plane that can actually land at Paro; certainly anything with a wider wingspan would surely be clipping trees and valley spurs as the plane banked from side-to-side on approach, based on how close the mountains, trees and houses appeared to be to the wing tips on our descent.

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We bought ourselves a kitten today! He’s one of four kittens from a stray litter that was found at Macquarie University a bit over a week ago. The picture shows him with his three siblings. We think our kitten is the one on the right, but to be honest, it’s very hard to tell them apart, so he could also be the one on the left! Either way, he’s one of the long haired kittens.

We’ve called him Dorje, which is a Dzongkha word meaning thunderbolt, and is also a common Bhutanese name. At only 3 or 4 weeks old, Dorje is still incredibly tiny, so we’ll have to wait another 4 weeks or so before we’ll be able to bring him home. We did, however, get to play with Dorje and his siblings for about an hour at the vet clinic this afternoon, and the vet nurse told us we could drop by whenever we wanted over the next few weeks to spend time with him.

You might have noticed that things have been a bit quiet around here for the past month. There is actually a very good reason for this – Michelle and I have been overseas in Thailand and Bhutan since the beginning of April, with the main focus of our trip being a 14 day trek through the Himalaya in western and northern Bhutan.

The trek was almost certainly the most physically and mentally demanding activity I have ever undertaken, but was equally fascinating and stunning at the same time. Our trekking was hampered by unseasonably bad weather, including rain, sleet and (a lot of) snow, along with temperatures ranging from -10 to 35 degrees during the course of the trek.

The remote areas of Bhutan in which we spent the bulk of our time really are like walking back a few hundred years to medieval times. The villages have no roads, in fact, no vehicle access at all (not by air or by land) – everything is brought in on yaks, ponies or carried by people who, like us, must make the multiple-day trek along steep, narrow, rocky paths from the nearest road-accessible towns. There is (of course) no mains power or water.

Over the next few days (and probably weeks), I hope to publish a selection of photos and stories from our epic journey in the mountains. Feel free to leave any comments or questions as they arise – Bhutan is a truly fascinating country that I’m still very interested in learning much more about.

Our final week’s lead-up to the Hawkesbury Classic was far from ideal. After peaking the weekend before the classic with our 60+km paddle, we planned a week of rest, no stress and little exercise to ensure we were in peak condition for the actual Classic. As it turned out, the week was a crazy, hectic one for both of us. I ended up spending 2 days in Canberra for work, which involved getting up at 5am on Wednesday morning for an early flight. As a result, I was feeling rather sleep deprived and could feel the onset of sickness – runny nose, sore throat and blocked sinuses. On Wednesday evening, I was feeling a bit worse. After carbo-loading on a big serving of risotto and hot chips I had a long hot bath and early night in my hotel. On Thursday morning, I couldn’t even bring myself to walk the 15 minutes from my hotel to the office – opting instead to fall into a taxi for a $6 taxi ride. By Thursday evening, when I returned home to Sydney, I was feeling pretty crap. Our land-crew for the Classic (both our fathers) were flying up from Melbourne late on Thursday night, and our original plan had me going to pick them up around 10pm. As it was, I arrived home from the airport around 7pm, ate some carbo-loaded pasta for dinner, did some quick tidying to make room for our dads to sleep and crashed into bed, leaving Shell to stay up and greet them as they arrived via taxi from the airport.

Under any other circumstances, I would have stayed in bed most of Friday feeling sick and sorry for myself. As it was, I had yet another unavoidable early morning start, since we had an interview candidate who we had specially flown out from St Petersburg in Russia as a candidate for our software engineering position. Friday was the 1 day he had to spend with me in Sydney, given that I would be on leave (recovering from the Classic) on Monday, and he would spend Tuesday and Wednesday meeting the rest of our team in Canberra, before completing his epic journey back to Russia. As a result, I was up and in the office early, preparing and fine-tuning problems for our Russian candidate to work on. I spent most of the day in a rather intense discussion and problem solving sessions with our inevitably jet-lagged candidate, and by the end of our day, I was probably as exhausted as he felt. Thankfully, after pumping myself full of herbal and cold-and-flu tablets, I was feeling a little (but not a whole lot) better by Friday night. Another carbo-loaded meal of pasta shared with our dads was followed by shopping for last minute food and drink essentials (gatorade, bananas, high-protein snack foods etc), ready for our big endurance test. The rest of the evening was spent gathering all our gear and supplies for the Classic, deciding on expected checkpoint times for our race plan and preparing last minute equipment.

The day of the Classic dawned rather overcast and cool. Long range forecasts from the weather bureau had originally predicted thunderstorms and showers, but this had been revised to the chance of afternoon showers but an otherwise fine and clear day and night. I woke feeling a bit brighter than Friday, but still far from on top of the world. After some cold and flu tablets and a big breakfast of weetbix, tinned fruit and pancakes, we loaded up the car with PFDs, paddles, food, camelbacks, clothes, maps, compasses, torches and other essential paddling supplies and headed off up the M2 to the starting point at Windsor. Suffice to say with all that gear and 4 people in Starla, we were rather squished in for the hour-ish journey to Windsor.
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So on the final weekend before the Hawkesbury Classic Shell and I decided that it was time to up the ante a little. Although not blogged here, in the past few weeks, we have paddled on the Hawkesbury from Sackville to Wisemans Ferry (~35km), from Wisemans Ferry to Spencer (~32km), and completed a paddle in somewhat choppy seas from our usual launching spot on the Lane Cove River across to Birkenhead Point at Drummoyne (on Sydney Harbour). Each of these paddles happened on different days though, and we were yet to paddle more than about 35km in a single day.

With the actual Hawkesbury Classic being 111km, we decided that we needed to stretch that distance a little. Having previously paddled from Windsor to Sackville, this weekend’s organised familiarisation paddle was in the reverse direction – from Sackville to Windsor – and timed to start an hour or so before sunset such that most of the paddle would be completed in darkness. Shell and I decided to start out just before lunchtime and paddle on our own from Windsor to Sackville before completing the return leg with the rest of the crowd completing the organised paddle.

The number of boats taking part in each paddle has certainly increased as we’ve got closer to the Hawkesbury Classic date. Despite the crowd, our boat continues to be "distinctive" (that’s what a number of people have told us) in that it is one of the wider and slower in the fleet. (We like to emphasise that it’s stable, comfortable and carries lots of gear!). In fact there have rarely been any other plastic boats on the organised paddles. On a couple of the paddles, there have been two guys in a canoe, but even they have swapped over to a speedy fibreglass kayak for the past couple of practice paddles and for the actual event. Still, even if it takes a bit more effort, we’re determined to attempt the Classic in our own kayak .

So the big question that should be on your lips is: did we actually make the distance? Yes – all 62.4km of it!! We arrived back at Windsor sometime around 8:30pm – didn’t actually check the time, but it had been dark for a few hours when we finished. The paddle was very challenging, and the last few kilometres of the return trip to Windsor seemed to take forever! Let’s just say we can certainly feel the trip in our muscles this morning! Somehow, no matter how many calluses develop on our hands, long paddling sessions always seem to uncover fresh areas to become blisters and hot spots. Thankfully we’ve also invested in some kayaking gloves which are a great help once our hands become too sore, and also help to keep our hands warm in nightime paddling.

It was actually a beautifully still night, so the water was pretty glassy for most of the return trip – in contrast to the head-winds that we experienced for most of the way from Windsor to Sackville. Every boat was also carrying a cyalume light (mostly pinned to the PFD of the back paddler) so for many stretches of the river, although we were paddling in darkness, we could try to follow a somewhat eerie collection of glowing greeny-yellow lights off in the distance ahead of us. A shame that we had neither a camera nor the energy to take a picture of it, as it looked quite cool with these lights dotted over the river ahead of us.

Anyway, we’re very satsified to have proved to ourselves that we can paddle 60+km in a single day – that should at least see us through to Wisemans Ferry for the actual Classic. Our challenge now will be to actually continue beyond Wisemans. We’ll probably arrive there sometime around midnight, and we’ll be tired and sore. The tide will have turned against us, and be stronger than further back upstream. So will we actually finish the Classic? I honestly don’t know, but life’s nice when you’ve got challenges Wish us luck for next weekend!

If you remember back a couple of months, I was involved in filming for Scope a new kids science show on Channel 10. Well, Scope premiered on Channel 10 at 4pm this afternoon, and apparently the finished product turned out quite well . I must confess that I haven’t even seen it yet, but Michelle managed to co-opt a television in some academic’s office at work so she and her colleagues could sit around and witness my 2 minutes or so of fame. Even more exciting was that Michelle herself also made a cameo appearance in one of the stories. So we’re a family of stars for the day 8-).

I think we’ll have to go out and celebrate when we find a spare moment! Hopefully sometime I’ll get hold of a VHS copy, digitise it, and host a copy here on SGI.nu, so you can see us in all our TV star glory.

The weird thing is that I actually met someone from CSIRO corporate for the first time in a meeting last week, and as soon as I introduced myself, he started telling me about how fantastic my segment on the Scope show was. It transpires that in his capacity as a member of the CSIRO Corporate Rewards commitee, he had seen a copy of the show as part of a promotion case for the show’s host, Dr Rob, who is a CSIRO Education employee. Small world I guess .

Update: It turns out there’s at least one of my segments available to view online on the scope website. Find out how your mp3 player works in the eyes of a 12 year old!

Shell and I completed another Hawkesbury River Classic training paddle on Saturday, and in doing so we set a new personal record for the furthest distance we’ve paddled so far in a single, unbroken session. As you can guess from the post title, the paddle was from Windsor to Sackville, which is actually the first leg of the Hawkesbury Classic. Windsor is a good 30-40 minutes drive from home, so it was an early start to get up, ready, packed and out to Windsor by 7:30am.

After dropping Shell, our kayak and all our gear off in Windsor, I had a quick car shuffle (which included a ride on the Sackville car ferry) to have the car waiting for us at Sackville when we finished. By the time we’d all sorted out the car shuffling, got kitted up in PFDs, registered, attached race numbers, had a quick briefing etc. it was about 9:30am when we got on the water. Again, we were certainly amongst the more recreational paddlers on the day – in fact there was really only one other boat there that wasn’t a racing kayak (that kayak had a home made keel attached to the bottom to keep it tracking well).

Without going into the details of nearly four hours of continuous paddling (I think we finished in about 3 hours 50 minutes in the end with two approx. 5 minute breaks), it was a really enjoyable paddle, although the final few kms were tough. We set off from the starting line at breakneck speed, with a stroke rate that was way above what we are able to sustain for anything more than a few minutes. (Shell later confided that she’d kinda got caught up in the moment and was seeing if she could match the stroke rate of the more hardcore marathon paddlers around us). After our flying start, we eased into a more regular rhythm. The first 25 or so kms went by pretty happily – we made good time, and had the opportunity to chat with a few other paddlers along the way and take in the varying scenery we were paddling through. The final few kilometres were quite a bit harder, at least for me, but eventually we caught sight of the Sackville ferry and knew we were going to make it. Of course, shortly before we finally reached Sackville, we were passed by some of the more enthusiastic paddlers heading back to Windsor – apparently 32km on a Saturday morning isn’t enough for some people!

One thing that made the paddle a lot easier was our new CamelBak drinking bladders. With these fitted behind our seats and the drinking tube tucked into our PFD, it was a lot easier to have frequent drinks without having to stop paddling to unstrap and unscrew a bottle each time. We still have to work out the correct positioning of the tube (sometimes we still needed to miss a paddle stroke to position the tube correctly for drinking), but it’s a vast improvement over using our Sigg bottles. Surprisingly, they were quite cheap too (well, cheap compared with most of the other CamelBak systems), because they don’t come with a harness etc. We reckoned we’d be better off without having to carry the weight on our backs, and after Saturday’s paddle, I think that was an excellent decision!

Of course, we’re back at it again this Saturday – this time from Sackville to Wiseman’s Ferry, which is I think a shade over 40km. I think we’ll need to buy some kayaking gloves before then – even with calluses on my hands, they are still starting to blister by the end of each paddle. Not to mention the dry and rubbed skin in the webbing between the thumb and forefinger.

I’ve spent the past two days at the inaugural CSIRO Scientific Development Forum (CSIRO access only, sorry people!), a gathering of early-career scientists and post-doctoral fellows from across CSIRO’s many diverse research areas. The focus was on providing insight and tools to help us develop as the future leaders of science in CSIRO and the local and international community.

Much of the two days was spent in discussions about our various diverse research areas. This was fascinating, given the breadth of our interests – spanning everything from molecular science, genetics, food technology, animal cloning, virology, astrophysics, precision optics and superconductor physics, petroleum research, ICT research, statistics, nutrition and a bunch of other areas. Despite such breadth, there were many interesting insights shared about how to take control of our own careers and personal development.

In addition, we heard from several high-profile speakers, including Federation Fellow Professor Calum Drummond, who talked about his career. One thing I certainly took away from his talk, apart from his “can-do” attitude, was his emphasis on the importance of balancing focus on work with family life. Dr David Mitchell spoke about entrepreneurship and his experience in several start-up companies. We also workshopped and brainstormed some interesting ideas around identifying business ideas that might satisfy existing market gaps and market needs across a range of industries.

All-in-all, it was a valuable 2 days, not least for the networking opportunities to meet and kindle relationships with a very diverse range of highly intelligent and highly motivated people.