Millerine and I have only about 5 days to get in some sites after the frisbee tournament, so we left the day after to the mountain area of Alishan. We caught the train to Chiayi and found that there we were too late for the trains to Alishan and had just missed out on the buses. We went to hire a car, but from what I could understand of the contract we were not insured at all so I didn't want to risk it. At 15:30 something fairly strange happened. The streets became full of military police, the roads were shut down, and some kind of curfew came into action for about half an hour. We weren't even allowed to walk on the streets. At 16:00 an alarm went off and suddenly everything went into action again. I'm still not sure what it was for.

We managed to find a bus to the mountain town of Rueili, about half way to Alishan. The bus trip was fairly epic. It took about three hours of winding up a steep mountain road, which didn't treat my hangover all that well. The view was great until it got dark, and then you could see lights all over the mountains.

The people at our Hotel were very friendly and fed us a good simple dinner and breakfast, but the bed was rock hard and there was a lot of noise. It was on the side of the mountain and the views reminded me a bit of Podolševa in Slovenia, except with more tea, bananas and bamboo. The town is between 1000m and 1200m altitude.

In the morning the hotel guy drove us to the trailhead for the Rueili-Fenchihu historic trail. It's a 7km walk, but the first 3km is quite a steep upwards climb. It was through a shady bamboo forest and the views were great, but I was sweating a lot and a bit worried that 1.2L of water was nowhere near enough. The trail leveled off and got easier by about halfway though.

Fenchihu itself was a nice but very touristy little mountain village (all local tourists I think - we were the only white people there). For NT$100 we got a good feed of soup and some rice and vegies (served by none other than Confucious himself), then jumped on the train to go back to Chiayi. This is a tourist attraction in itself. It's a tiny little narrow guage railway that ambles down the mountain through tunnels and over bridges. The mountain views are good but we were going through a fair bit of cloud so the visibility wasn't great.

From Chiayi we are taking the High Speed Rail to Taipei where we'll stay the night.

The World Games was a very busy time. We had scorers down on the ground and up in the control room for the big electronic score board, but Stu Sinclair and I shared the work for scoring for our system.

A day or two before the tournament started I visited the main stadium to check out the facilities. It's a new 40,000 seat stadium, so a great place to have the tournament. We would be running everything from the control room, which is like a commentators box with a good view of the fields. We needed an internet connection to run our system, and there was no internet connection in the control room so it was lucky the wifi that was available in the stadium was also available (although a weak connection) in the control room.

Although the two days before the tournament were pretty busy for me, I managed to see a couple of sports. Canoe Polo was fairly exciting and we saw Australia beat Spain, but the softball was a pretty low scoring affair. All other sports we tried to get tickets to were sold out.

The frisbee started off with a bang. Australia went down to the US by two points, but showed they were pretty strong. The play was exciting and I think it proved the sport could be a crowd pleaser. The Chinese Taipei games particularly drew a large crowd in the thousands. They used line assistants who could help with only line calls and up/down calls if asked. Most importantly they signalled what any calls were to the scorers and the crowd so you could tell what was going on when a call was made.

The most exciting game of the tournament was on the second day, Australia vs Japan. Japan had showed they were strong and were a favourite to join US in the final, but Australia has the Dowle/Neild freakshow, and all our other guys were awesome. Katie Bradstock managed to shut down their pocket rocket girl, and it was pretty even. It was incredibly tense, with Australia winning by a point. I was in the crowd for that game, and it was absolutely electric. The first Japan/US game on the last day which Japan won by two points was also fantastic.

In the control room I was incredibly busy. The first morning in particular when I was still fixing bugs and fixing the schedule in the database while scoring the game was a tough one. But by the afternoon we had the site working well, with our media girls able to put up reports for each game, and a lot of people had started to watch the live scoreboard. Even though we had some trouble with it at the beginning there was a lot of positive feedback by the second day.

The website is probably still up at http://wg09.net. It started of as not much but grew over the three days. I'm happy I used Joomla, as it made it fairly easy to update content and menus as we went along. For things like team bios and the like it was obvious we needed to have that happening before the tournament though.

A few things I've taken out of the tournament:
- To be a great team you need to have no weak points.
- It's most important for girls to be quick and good defenders, then being able to make good decisions with the disc, cut well and take hard catches. Having them be awesome throwers is of course important, but less so than those other things.
- The only thing stopping ultimate from being a great spectator sport has nothing to do with refs. It's all about the quality of play. At Worlds and things like Australian Nationals there are still a lot of low level games which aren't great to watch, but at World Games all teams are great, so it really works as a crowd pleaser.

I'm on a holiday at the moment in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where the World Games are being held. We're here to watch the frisbee, which I love. I love frisbee so much that I forget to not play when I shouldn't. The night before leaving I had to get my last frisbee fix for two weeks, and played with a bit of a cold. By the end of the night I was coughing uncontrollably and well on my way to being properly ill.

After the three sector, two day trip to Taiwan I was in full fever mode, and they busted me with the heat detectors at the airport. They are paranoid about the flu here, and surgical masks are quite common. I now have quite a collection of them.

I visited the hospital which was fairly easy as the doctor spoke English. There aren't that many English speakers here, but it seems that anyone who does speak is willing to be helpful and interpret when it's needed.

A couple of days ago I had a small accident whilst riding my bike. I was riding behind a hatchback up to a right hand turn when they stopped suddenly. It's amazing the number of conscious thoughts that can go through one's head in a small amount of time, when there is an impending disaster. The things I can remember thinking are:
1. Shit they're stopping and I'm going way to fast! I'm rooted.
2. Brake.
3. Why is my right hand not on the brake. There it is. Go right hand brake! (I'd probably just been indicating with my right hand or something).
4. Damn. Too much left hand (front) brake. Here we go.
5. That back windscreen was rather bouncy.

This probably happened in about half a second. I wasn't frightened or worried about injury or anything like that - just working on stopping, which is handy as that's what I needed to do. Hooray for reactions.

It was pretty lucky the way things worked out. My cleats came out, so when the bike flipped I somehow landed on my feet. There was still a lot of forward momentum, but instead of faceplanting into bitumen I had a reasonably soft landing against the back of the hatchback.

The total damage from the incident was a crack in my front light. I rode away without so much as a bruise, but my legs were a little wobbly after all the excitement.

No I didn't walk down any red carpet, but I saw some others doing it last night at the opening to the Sydney Film Festival. It's yet another thing about people that I just don't understand. Someone walks down the red carpet and stops in the middle for a few photos. Onlookers stare at them and admire them (or something) and get all excited. Then they walk to the other end of the red carpet and get interviewed.

The interviewing bit I understand. Sometimes these people have interesting things to say about their art. I just don't get the red carpet and all the people watching. What about these people is worth going out of your way to look at from a distance? If they were aesthetically appealing enough to travel for then it would all be good, but they're not. They're just famous people.

The red carpet didn't bother me, as I could just walk past it to the bar. The half hour or so of speeches did a little. The traditional owners of the land were "recognised" too often to be interesting and the NSW minister for the arts proved herself to be either a bad public speaker or a dope. Three of the five speakers had something useful to say though.

Having said all that, it was a worthwhile event to go to. The film (Looking for Eric by Ken Loach) was entertaining. It's good to be watching a lightly humourous film in a crowd packed with beautiful people, all keen to laugh at any hint of a joke to demonstrate they understood it.

I'm struggling to not sound like a horrible cynic. In actuality I had a good time and really enjoyed the film. There are a bunch of other SFF films to look forward to over the next couple of weeks, and the opener has given me some confidence about them.