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James Shrimpton

Renown travel writer Retires

AAP Travel Editor James Shrimpton retires from the post this weekend - although he plans to continue as an occasional travel writer for AAP. Here he shares some memorable moments from his total of 46 years' reporting news, sports and travel with Australia's national news service.
By James Shrimpton (with pix AAP903-906)
SYDNEY, AAP - Working for Australian Associated Press has taken me to Hell - and to Heaven.
Hell is a community on the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, notable for a barren, rocky landscape and for T-shirts and postcards reading "I've been to Hell and back".
That was on a Caribbean cruise, one of nearly 70 voyages of varying days, destinations and distances.
For Heaven I went to the eastern edge of the northern Fiji island of Vanua Levu, a luxurious resort named Lomalagi, which means "heaven" in the Fijian language.
Lying in a hammock beneath a sheltering beachside palm tree, a Fiji Bitter in hand, was pretty heavenly at that!
My career at AAP has included spells in London, New York, Suva and in bureaus around Australia.
Two postings to London brought meetings with the Queen and Prince Charles (at Buckingham Palace receptions), also an interesting exchange with Margaret Thatcher.
It happened when membership of the Foreign Correspondents Association in London brought an invitation to the prime minister's annual cocktail party for the international media at Ten Downing Street.
Mrs Thatcher chatted amiably with groups of her guests until I asked her: "Prime Minister, when you were in Melbourne recently for the Commonwealth conference all you probably saw of Australia was through car and hotel windows - wouldn't you have liked a week relaxing on a beach or the Great Barrier Reef or somewhere?"
The Iron Lady put on her schoolmarmiest voice and chastised me so: "One thing you must learn in British politics is that one should never be seen to be enjoying oneself in a foreign country."
An assignment to Fiji as South Pacific correspondent in 1986 was nicely timed: the region's first coup d'etat occurred exactly one year later and Colonel Rabuka provided AAP with a world scoop by ignoring our line to Sydney while cutting off all other overseas communications.
Please pardon all this name-dropping.....
Occasional brushes with showbiz stars included the long and short of it: diminutive Danny DeVito and John Wayne.
DeVito (and Robin Williams) hilariously chatted to the media at a Disneyland function in California; I covered Duke Wayne's press conference in Sydney - smuggling in my wife Val so I could introduce her to her longtime screen hero.
Barry Humphreys phoned our London office one day offering news of a new role as Long John Silver in a stage version of Treasure Island and invited me and my eldest daughter Taryn to a performance - presumably as his guest.
First lesson in journalism: never presume. The tickets were waiting for us at the box office all right, but cost me around STG25 (now $A64).
Also in London, Mick Jagger literally and unforgettably bumped into my wife on stairs at a showbiz party in Chelsea and said "Sorry".
Sport has taken me to six Olympic Games and five Commonwealth Games, although one of the latter - Auckland 1990 - was not for AAP but as the Australian team's media officer; what fun it was saying "no comment" to other journalists!
When Israeli team members were taken hostage by terrorists at the Munich 1972 Olympics, media were banned from entering the Village but where there's a will.....
I was covering basketball training at the time, and strolled with the Aussie team back through the Village gates in a borrowed track suit, rather inexpertly bouncing a basketball.
At a medieval dinner in Beijing in 1993 I interviewed the chairman of the city's 2000 Olympic Organising Committee, both of us wearing ancient scarlet silk robes and decorative hats and feeling rather ridiculous.
He told me virtually how Beijing was going to buy the Games by lashing out millions of dollars on venues and infrastructure... not quite enough though, apparently.
Australian sports writers galore invaded Germany for last year's World Cup football; in 1965 I was one of just two journos sent to Cambodia for our first World Cup effort when we crashed out 1-6 and 1-3 to North Korea.
But it's travel-writing that has meant going all over the world in the last 15 years: from the Arctic (Kirkenes, on a Norwegian cruise) to the Antarctic (three flights over the icy continent and one cruise making nine landings by zodiac).
"The best job in the world," some colleagues have said of my record of visiting 102 countries; I won't argue.
Tourism bodies or resorts around the world want publicity to attract tourists; they fly in travel writers, putting them up in (mostly) five-star hotels; the journalists write about it, the public reads their stories and (hopefully) books holidays.
It's a bit of a gamble for organisers; we tell it the way it is, which doesn't HAVE to be favourable just because it's been paid for - so says the code of ethics of the Australian Society of Travel Writers.
In most cases, everything is fine. Some fond memories:
. A safari in Botswana during which, wanting a picture of me riding an elephant, I passed my camera to the mahout who passed it to the elephant who passed it with his trunk to a man walking alongside who took the picture, passed the camera back to the elephant who gave it to the mahout who gave it to me.
. Cycling through the vineyards of Burgundy (not more than 35km a day), picnicking on baguettes and rough red wine then taking a siesta under a giant oak on the village green.
. Lying in the shallows on the French Polynesian island of Moorea and having a (female!) sting-ray sidle up to me and blow me a close-range kiss (more like a raspberry!) from a range of 15cm.
. Reporting JFK's election campaign from New York in 1960.
. On an Alaskan cruise, flying by helicopter from Skagway onto a 3,000m-high glacier; the pilot then left our group there, surrounded by majestic snow-topped peaks - and picked us up an hour later.
. Another chopper flight, from Las Vegas, to a plateau halfway down the Grand Canyon where we enjoyed a BBQ and beer.
. Having an aversion to camels (wide, bad-tempered, evil-smelling), taking a horse instead around the Pyramids outside Cairo and being the only one in our party who could walk properly next day.
. The spectacular falls of Victoria, Niagara and (the best) Iguacu on the Argentina-Brazil border.
. Lots of golf - at St Andrew's, on the world's longest course in the Chinese mountains near the Tibet border, at Whistler in the Canadian Rockies, at an oasis on California's Death Valley, in Hawaii, in Fiji playing with 1987 coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka - and all over Australia.
. Hitting front pages all over the world by breaking the news of that 1987 Fiji coup.
. Two Yangtze cruises - the first a year before the Three Gorges dam flooding, and the second the year after it, the landscape dramatically changed; other voyages across the Atlantic and Pacific, to the Antarctic, in Asia and to Alaska, the Caribbean, Mexico and in Europe.
. In the Antarctic, bathing in a hot-springs pool with the temperature five below zero.
. At the Munich Olympics, standing in a group of well-paid, senior sports writers waiting an hour outside a room where a dehydrated Raelene Boyle was having trouble providing a urine test.
. Climbing Uluru, also the 165 steps of the ninth-century Borobudur temple in Java.
. In Kakadu, a dawn river cruise to a chorus of awakening birds.
. An ocean walk "dive" on the Great Barrier Reef, out from Port Douglas.
. Taking five days instead of one-and-a-half to drive the Pacific Highway from Sydney to the Gold Coast, stopping at all those interesting places you normally speed through.
It's been fun.
AAP js/drp