That's me in front of Free Massage. Behind the waterfall is the groom holding hands with his new BFF. Photos by David Lansing.

We paddled for hours. Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t really paddle at all. David put Christopher and Marguarite in the back and Cindy and Katie in the front which left me in the middle. For balance. So I just sat there and took photos. While everyone else did all the work.

After awhile, Cindy said her shoulder was hurting. And her knee (from where she’d jammed it when David had thrown us when we went down the first rapid). She kept rubbing it and asking Katie if she thought it looked swollen. By now I’d already taken ten thousand photos so I didn’t really need to be in the middle anymore. I told Cindy I’d switch with her.

After awhile we came to this waterfall David called Free Massage. Cindy asked him why it was called Free Massage. David said, Because if you stand under it, you get a free massage.

All the boats pulled up along the bank next to the waterfall. People started creeping their way along the slippery wet rocks behind the fall. “Oh my gawd,” said Cindy. “This is just an accident waiting to happen.”

It did seem crazy. The guides stood on the wet rocks helping people inch their way along but once you got under the water, which hit your head and shoulders like wet bags of cement, you were kind of helpless. You couldn’t really see where you were going and one misstep would drop you onto the rocks below.

“So,” said David, “who’s going to get a free massage?”

Our rafting guides take a shower beneath the Free Massage waterfall.

Cindy and Marguarite said they were going to sunbathe. Christopher and I got out of the boat and stood in the shallow water but neither one of us had any intention of dying on a river in Fiji. Katie, the renegade from Idaho, said she’d go. With the guides helping her, she climbed the wet rocks and cautiously moved along the slippery ledge until she was behind the waterfall. It looked like she was getting hit by a constant barrage of water balloons. It was crazy but I admired her for doing it.

The craziest thing though was this young couple from Australia who were here on their honeymoon. They decided to climb up and have their picture taken. Which isn’t the weird part. The weird part is that they did it with another guy from their boat and when they got close to the waterfall, the bride, who was kind of heavyset, slowed down while her husband and the other guy from the boat went forward. They kind of left her standing there, not quite in the waterfall but not at a safe distance either. And then the two boys stood under the cascade of water, holding hands, while the bride stood nervously to the side looking like she was absolutely terrified.

Marguarite was watching all this. “If that was my husband, I’d push him off that damn waterfall,” she said. I’m sure she meant it.

After that, all the guides climbed up the rocks and made funny faces and flashed signs and then we all got back in the boats and proceeded back down the river. We passed the boat with the newlyweds. “The bride doesn’t look too happy,” murmured Marguarite. “No free massage for him tonight.”

Katie, Christopher, our guide, David, Marguarite and Cindy...or is it Jennie? Photo by David Lansing.

We’re standing at the edge of the chocolaty Navua River with about twenty other people, half-listening as one of the Fijian guides drones on and on about the do’s and don’ts of river rafting. If you fall out, don’t try to swim, you’ll drown. Do exactly what the guide says. Don’t take your helmet off.

“My helmet smells funky,” says Marguarite, holding it a foot or so from her face and wrinkling her nose. “Here,” she says, holding it up to me, “smell it.”

No, thank you. Really.

I love Marguarite. Last year we went to Vanuatu together. We paddled canoes to a Blue Hole and Marguarite was right behind me when some idiot woman tipped our canoe and my camera sunk to the bottom of the river. Marguarite was the one who told everyone else on the canoe trip to not say a word to me after this happened. Which I appreciated.

Marguarite goes over to our guide, David, and tells him her helmet smells funny. “Like something died in it,” she says. David shrugs and gives her a new helmet. Marguarite comes back over to our group. “Well?” I say. “This one smells too,” says Marguarite, “but not as bad.”

I tell Marguarite not to worry about it. We’ll just take them off once we get going. “They’re kind of useless anyway.” And they are. Just cheap plastic that would shatter into a thousand pieces if our noggins ever hit a rock or submerged tree.

Meanwhile, the lead guide is still giving instructions. “Come on,” mumbles Marguarite. “Let’s just get in the boats and get going. It’s hot out here.”

And it is. Hot and steamy. Made more so by the ridiculous kiddie helmets and suffocating PFDs we have to wear.

There are five of us in our group. The lead guide wants one of us to join another boat. Marguarite won’t hear of it. “Uh-uh,” she sternly tells him. “We’re staying together.”

The lead guide smiles, shrugs, walks away. We climb into the inflatable—Christopher, the manager of the resort where we’re staying; Cindy, who is from San Francisco and whose real name is Jennie (but for some reason I keep calling her Cindy); Katie, a perky, sweet journalist from Idaho who is constantly uttering observations that either demonstrate her naiveté or deadpan sense of irony, I haven’t quite figured out which; and Marguarite and myself.

The other boats pulls away from shore. There is a modest rapid right at the beginning of the trip and first one and then another of the inflatables gets turned around, their paddlers tossed and thrown around the inflatable. Everyone gets drenched. Obviously the guides have done this on purpose. Marguarite gives our guide a steely look as he pushed us away from the shore: “Do not do that to us,” she scolds him. David smiles, lifts his oars, and the boat spins backwards. Cindy, who is sitting in the front, is thrown violently backwards. Katie half falls out of the boat. The rest of us all get soaked. The journey has begun.

Whitewater rafting the Navua River, Fiji from David Lansing on Vimeo.

I don’t think I’ve ever spent less time at a resort than I did The Pearl South Pacific. I checked in very late Sunday night and by 6:30 the next morning I was in the lobby, packed and ready to go. I was also badly in need of coffee.

“Daryl, could you get David a coffee?” said Julie Hodson. Julie and her husband Daryl are the managers of the Royal Davui, the resort in Fiji where I’ll be staying. They’d come over on a boat from Davui the day before expecting to have dinner with me at The Pearl but when I still hadn’t shown up by midnight, they’d gone to bed. Sensibly, I think. Still, Julie had arranged to have a platter of food brought to my room (some wonderful cheeses and fruit and the like) Sunday night so I’d have something to eat when I arrived, and god was I thankful for that, having not had anything to eat since breakfast some 20 hours earlier.

Anyway, Daryl got me a coffee and we sat around The Pearl’s lobby watching the sun come up and then around 7 we walked over to the resort’s pier and waited for the boat coming over from Davui. Daryl and Julie were heading back over to the island while I’d be joining up with a small group coming over to go white water rafting down the Upper Navua River.
I know what you’re thinking: white water river rafting in Fiji?

That’s what I was thinking as well. But my buddy Marguarite, who’d arranged this trip, told me it would be fun.

“You don’t have to do it,” she’d said, “but you’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

Well, I didn’t want to be sorry. Even if I was so tired at the moment that all I could think about was how envious that Julie and Daryl were just now getting on the little boat taking them back to Davui where, if I was with them, I could check-in to my villa and take a long nap.

I waved good-by as Julie and Daryl pulled away from the pier and headed out onto the open ocean. Then I climbed on the bus with the others and headed off into the rainforest towards the Navua River.

After arriving three hours late from Melbourne, Feroz and I drove from Nadi through the night to Pacific Harbour on the southern end of the island.

I woke up Sunday morning knowing that getting from Tasmania to Fiji was going to be difficult. Here’s the set-up. I had to leave Hobart very early Sunday morning, drive to the airport, return my rental car, fly to Melbourne, wait for my bags, go through customs and immigration, change airline terminals, and get on a flight to Nadi, Fiji where, supposedly, someone would be waiting to drive me half way around Viti Levu, the main island, to Pacific Harbour.

There were just too many opportunities for things to go wrong. And they did.

Getting to the Hobart airport was no problem, but then things got interesting when the flight coming in from Fiji was late. By a couple of hours. That meant I’d have less than an hour to go through customs in Melbourne, transfer terminals, and check-in for my flight to Nadi. I won’t go into all the bloody details but the way it worked out, I arrived in Fiji about three hours later than expected. Amazingly, my driver was still waiting for me, albeit slumped over and snoozing in one of the plastic bucket seats next to the luggage carousel. His name was Feroz and, he told me, he’d been at the airport for eight hours waiting for me. Poor guy.

So we loaded up and headed off into the Fijian countryside, in total darkness, up little country roads, passing by all the locals walking along the side of the narrow road and the dogs sleeping on the warm tarmac. It would be just nothing and nothing and nothing, and then a little village that we’d pass through in about two minutes, and then more nothing and nothing and nothing.

As we were entering one of the little nameless villages, Feroz asked me if I was thirsty and would like to stop for a beer. I told him I was fine. A few minutes later, he asked me if I needed a bathroom break. I told him that wouldn’t be a bad idea. So he pulled the taxi over onto the side of the road. In the darkness of the night, we headed off into the jungle, he in one direction, I in another. We did our business in the bushes and got back in the taxi.

After about an hour or so I told Feroz that I’d changed my mind; a beer sounded good. So we pulled into one of the little Indian-owned markets the size of a rural post office which has iron grates on the front and where you tell someone what it is you want and they go find it in the back and bring it out for you and hand it through the grate. These markets are ubiquitous in Fiji.

It was about ten o’clock. The Indian family that owned the market was sitting behind the grated counter watching snowy images on an old TV. A single bare light bulb lit the store. A girl of about fifteen or sixteen, wearing a sari, got up from the TV and came to the grated window. I asked her for a beer.

“Gold or bitter?”

“Umm…bitters.”

“Just one?”

“Yes, please.”

When she walked away I thought maybe I should have asked for two. Afterall, we still had hours of driving ahead of us. She came back with a paper bag and handed it to me through the grate.

Now, I was thinking that I was going to get a regular-sized bottle of beer or maybe even a can. But when I opened the bag, I saw that I’d bought one of those liter-sized beers that aficionados of Colt .45 and Olde English “800” seem to prefer.

“Big beer,” I said to Feroz as I got back into his taxi.

He laughed. “Very big, sir.”

We drove on, Feroz talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone and me drinking my big beer out of a paper bag. The thing is, it tasted pretty damn good. And I rather enjoyed the decadence of sitting in the front seat of a Fijian taxi driving like a bat out of hell through the pitch-black countryside drinking a big ol’ beer. There was a certain gonzo aspect to it. (As Hunter S. Thompson said, “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”)

Sometime after midnight, we arrived at The Pearl in Pacific Harbour, my lodgings for the night. Feroz looked even more tired than I did. I was worried that he still had a three-hour return trip to Nadi ahead of him. But he told me that wasn’t the case. He lived nearby. “I’m going home now,” he said. I shook his hand and thanked him for the admirable driving job. And for stopping to let me buy a beer.

“It was not a problem,” he said. “I hope you enjoyed it.”

And I did.

A massive school of bottlenose dolphins approaching our Zodiac. Photo by David Lansing.

Sunday morning I fly back to Sydney and then on to Fiji so I thought today I’d do something a little bit wilder than visiting cheeseries and saffron farms. So at my friend Malcolm’s recommendation, I booked a four-hour wilderness eco-cruise between Port Arthur and Eaglehawk Neck. The tour information I got said to “dress very warmly.” I asked Malcolm what that meant.

“Well, I’d wear thermal underwear if you’ve got it,” he said. I told him I hadn’t packed my thermal underwear. I wasn’t expecting to go skiing. My choice, he said, but it would be bloody cold out on the water. “You’re going to be on the edge of the Southern Ocean. It can be tempestuous.”

So here’s how I dressed at 6:30 this morning: I put the bottoms of my track suit underneath my jeans and on top I wore a long-sleeved turtle neck shirt, a thick polo shirt, topped by a fleece jacket and a water-proof parka. Surely, I thought, that would keep me warm.

When I showed up at Tasman Island Cruises in Port Arthur a little after nine, they issued me a full-body water-proof Gortex suit. I asked them if I was to take off my other jackets and coats or put the Goretex suit on over them. “Put it over your clothes,” they said.

I guess they weren’t kidding about it being cold.

Still, it all seemed a bit much to me. The morning was gorgeous and there wasn’t a breath of wind when we pulled out of Port Arthur, siddling past the old convict’s prison and the Isle of the Dead. There were a dozen or so school kids aboard our vessel which was basically an over-sized Zodiac with maybe two-dozen blue plastic seats, all with seat belts (I should have known from the fact that we were instructed to always wear our seatbelts that this wasn’t going to be a gentle float down the river).

We looked at some seabird rookeries and saw lots of lazy seals sunning on the rocks and then circumnavigated the towering sea cliffs of Tasman Island and Cape Pillar. It was as we were admiring the old lighthouse atop Tasman Island that I first noticed the very black sky to our south. Our captain and tour guide (both named Damian: “Most folks call us Damo and Damo”) had noticed it to.

“We just need to get past the point and we’ll be okay,” said one of the Damos. The sea got choppy and the other Damo lurched around the Zodiac handing out wool caps to put on underneath our Goretex hoods. At first I declined but then it started to rain a bit and I grabbed a cap. Five minutes later, all hell broke loose. It was the most amazing meteorological event I’d ever experienced. We went from a cool but mild morning to a very scary storm, complete with hail coming in sideways at us thanks to gusts of sixty miles per hour, in just a matter of minutes. Everyone, including me, sealed themselves up in the Goretex as tightly as they could. I left only the tiniest of slits above my nose for my eyes.

Mind you, I was wearing more clothes than I’ve ever worn skiing—including helicopter skiing in Canada—and I was still shivering with cold. Nobody spoke. The water had really gotten turbulent. Everyone just held on as best they could while one of the Damos gunned the Zodiac up the coast trying to outrun the storm. Eventually we came around the point he’d been aiming for and just like that, the wind and rain ceased. I pulled down my hood, grateful to be out of the storm, and looked out on the horizon. Coming directly towards us was what looked like a river of white water. Something—thousands of somethings—were breaking the water up ahead and coming our way.

“Dolphins,” said one of the Damos. “Thousands of them.”

And that’s what it was. The largest school of giant bottlenose dolphins I’d ever seen or heard about. Damo estimated there had to be at least three- or four-thousand of the animals. They surrounded our Zodiac and swam beside us and in front of us and underneath us. One of the largest cruised right next to us and began intentionally spanking his flipper against the water as he swam, soaking us. He did it over and over again. “Bastard knows what he’s doing,” said Damo.

This went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. And then, just like the storm that had appeared out of nowhere from the Southern Ocean, the dolphins were gone and the sea was still again.

Nicky Noonan looking at about $7,500 worth of her Tas-Saff saffron.

Had another great dinner at Henry’s in the Henry Jones Art Hotel. A lovely, fragrant seafood soup made with lots of local fish and mussels and flavored with saffron. After dinner, Andre Kropp, the executive chef, came out and we talked about the meal over a glass of wine. I told him that, for me, what really made the dish, besides the fresh assortment of seafood, was the saffron. It seemed particularly delicate and flavorful. I asked him if it was from Spain.

Nope, he said. It’s local.

I thought he was joking. Or that he meant it was “local” in the sense that he had picked it up from a local restaurant supplier. But he told me there was a crazy couple who had a saffron business up in the Huon Valley. I called up my buddy Sally Legosz of Herbaceous Tours and asked her if she knew anything about them. Of course, she knew them. Said she was planning on taking a cake out to the owner, Nicky Noonan, the next afternoon since it was her birthday and asked me if I wanted to join her.

Hell yes.

When we arrived at Glaziers Bay, which is where the Noonan’s Tas-Saff farm is located, Nicky, who looks a bit like Penny Marshall’s younger sister, was somewhat frantically running about the place. She’d just gotten a call saying some Australian food inspector was coming by for an impromptu visit. The Tassies are crazy about quarantine laws and the like and since a big part of what happens at the Tas-Saff farm is the sorting and packaging of crocus bulbs, which are then parceled out to some 50 bulb growers throughout Tasmania, these inspectors, she explained, are very concerned about how clean your facilities are and making sure there’s no contaminated soil on the bulbs.

Anyway, Nicky took us inside the tiny little room where the spice is measured on carefully calibrated scales that are so sensitive that they can be affected by people just walking across the room, where she made tea while Sally cut into the cake she’d brought with her. I asked Nicky what made her decide to get into the saffron business.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think we were crazy.”

Like almost everyone in Tasmania, she and her husband, Terry, were living a much different life elsewhere in Australia when they decided, as Nicky says, “To get as far away from Sydney and that life as we could. So we headed south to Tasmania with this vague notion of leading some sort of subsistence farming on a little handkerchief of land we’d bought.”

Then one day Terry, an accomplished cook, decided to make some paella and went shopping for saffron. “All he could find was a tiny little bottle of Spanish saffron for $15,” says Nicky. “We both wondered why on earth it was so expensive.” Terry wondered if they couldn’t just grow their own saffron. “We didn’t know at the time that saffron came from the dried stigmata of the crocus flower and that each flower only produces three tiny little stigmata. Or that it takes the stigmas from almost a quarter of a million flowers to extract one kilo of saffron.”

Twenty years ago, the Noonans imported 5,000 corms from Europe. It took three years before they got their first flowers. Which they harvested by hand. A decade later, they were harvesting nearly 120,000 flowers from their little plot and getting about a pound of saffron for the effort. “Crazy, right?” says Nicky. Which is why they developed a growers network throughout Tasmania to grow the flowers for them. Still, all the saffron ends up here at the Noonan farm where two seasonal workers carefully weight and package it before shipping it off to food geeks who clamor for it—like Chef Andre Kroop.

Bill Lark at his whisky distillery in Mount Pleasanton. Photo by David Lansing.

Late yesterday afternoon I stopped in at Lark Distillery which is just a two minute walk from my hotel. It’s not really a distillery; it’s just the storefront in Hobart where Bill sells his whisky (along with Moo Brew which, funnily enough is a brewery owned by David Walsh, the math savant and owner of the Museum of New and Old Art). It was just about five in the afternoon and the place was packed. A local bluegrass group was playing. Bill was sitting at a table near the back door, drinking whisky and beer with his wife, Lyn, and one of the young guys who works at the real distillery out in Mount Pleasanton. They were listening to the music and sampling various Scottish single-malts (Bill has recently been hired to act as a consultant for a new whisky distillery in Fife in Scotland, so he said he was “doing my homework”).

Bill has a real love of bluegrass music. He told me the story of how last year he’d been asked to give a presentation at a whisky symposium in Louisville, Kentucky, and one of the main reasons he agreed to go was so he could listen to some authentic bluegrass music.

He says: “Well, I asked the guy at my hotel where I could go to hear some bluegrass and he said, ‘Darned if I know.’ I never did hear any bluegrass in Louisville because there wasn’t any.”

So now he hires a Tasmanian bluegrass band and has them come in to the distillery and it gives him an excuse to sit around with his friends and listen to the kind of music he likes and drink a little whisky and beer.

I had a dram or two with Bill and afterwards he invited me to join him this morning out in Mount Pleasanton to tour the working distillery. We met back up at the Davey Street store around ten and Bill drove us out to the distillery which is about 15 minutes from downtown Hobart. I’ve been to any number of distilleries in Scotland, including some the biggest brands in the industry, and they’re all pretty modest affairs. But Bill’s place takes the cake. From the outside, you’d think it was just a large storage barn. From the inside, you’d think the same.

There was a big industrial-looking pot where the “mashings” for that day’s whisky were being slowly turned, and a couple of miles of piping along the walls where the mash was cooled and transferred to a copper still, and a few other gizmos but that was about it. What you learn from touring a whisky distillery is that it’s a pretty simple process. You get some malted barley (Bill gets his from Cascade Brewery in Tasmania), add water and yeast, brew it just like a beer, ferment it, and then distill it. That’s about it. Oh, and then you age it in oak barrels and put it in a bottle.

It seems so easy that I’m thinking of making my own whisky when I get home. I just need to come up with a good name for it. Any ideas?

The girls at Grandvewe Cheeses getting drained. Photo by David Lansing.

The local cheeses Sally and I enjoyed at the Red Velvet Lounge in Cygnet were really luscious, particularly the Blue which was softer and creamier than a traditional Roquefort. As we were leaving, I mentioned to Sally how much I’d enjoyed it and she said, “Would you like to stop by the cheesery? They’re friends of mine.”

Sally’s friend is Diane Rae who, along with her husband, Alan Irish, and their kids, own and run Tasmania’s only sheep milk cheesery, GrandvEWE (get it?). Sally told me as we drove along from Cygnet to Birchs Bay, where the cheesery is located, that Diane used to be a financial planner in Queensland before moving to Tasmania ten years ago.

“I think she got fed-up with the whole corporate world,” Sally said. She told me that it was her husband who rescued “the girls.” I asked her who “the girls” were and she laughed and said, “Oh, that’s what they call their sheep. They’ve got names for all of them.”

Anyway, when we arrived at the cheesery, there was a bit of a stir. It seemed it was milking time at the cheesery. We followed a half dozen other people into the barn where dozens of ewes were lined up single file waiting to get on a shoulder-high platform to have their udders relieved. The girls were actually pushing and making loud noises trying to hurry the process. “It’s probably a great relief for the girls to get milked,” said Sally. “Must be uncomfortable for them.”

According to the young woman with multiple ring piercings in each ear who was draining the girls, they get one to two liters of sheep’s milk from each ewe from September through March, and it takes about six liters of milk for a kilo of hard cheese (they are known for their fine Pecorino) and about two or three liters for softer cheeses like the Blue Sapphire we’d enjoyed at the Red Velvet Lounge.

Diane wasn’t around but I did chat with her daughter, Nicole, who is the farm manager and wine maker. She said the cheese making business was a bit of an accident. Originally the family intended to start a winery at Birchs Bay (she started her career as a wine wholesalers in Queensland) and they were looking for a way to organically control the grasses between the rows. “We figured sheep would be best and then my dad heard about a flock that was being sold and shipped to the mainland. He rang the owners and said he’d buy them. ‘They’re Tasmanian sheep and they should stay in Tasmania.’ So that’s how we ended up with the girls. And then we had to start milking them and doing something with the milk. That’s how we ended up owning a sheep cheesery. It was just circumstances. Now I spend more time running the cheesery than making wine. Such is life.”

The Red Velvet Lounge in Cygnet, Tasmania. Photo by David Lansing.

I was telling you the other day about the Huon Valley which used to be the center of thousands of surrounding acres of fruit trees and berry farms, all growing the stone fruit and raspberries and such that went in to IXL Jam (from an early story on the jam factory, which is now my hotel in Hobart: “The raspberries were brought up in kegs, and inside the yard is a pile of these vessels, which were nearly all afloat during the raspberry season. The currants, gooseberries, and stone fruit were all brought up in cases that went as far as the eye could see…”).

Anyway, Sally and I were driving around the Huon Valley and just passing by all the little roadside stands selling strawberries and blueberries and cherries was making us both hungry so she suggested we drive into Cygnet, long the center of the Huon Valey, for lunch. She took me to the Red Velvet Lounge, a funky, eclectic brick restaurant that is the heart of little Cygnet. It’s the sort of place that’s almost too popular for its own good (even though it was well past one, the place was jammed and two young women were going crazy trying to keep up with all the orders).

The lunch menu was fascinating. They had smoked eel croquettes and quail saltimbocca and cold English pork pie (which, our waitress told us, they were out of), but in spying on the other tables, it seemed the most popular item was their cheese board: several different types of local cheeses (Heritage Double Brie, Grandvewe Blue, King Island Surprise Bay Cheddar), plus grilled fruit bread from their bakery, crackers, and apple slices. So that’s what we ordered.

The other cool thing about the Red Velvet Lounge were the shelves lining the brick walls that were filled with the restaurant’s own preserves, all made from goodies grown in and around the Huon Valley: preserved apricots, peaches, cherries and well as some exotic jam combos like plum and vanilla or apricot and saffron. They also make (and sell) their own mustards, sandwich pickles, olives, and something called Gentle-woman’s relish. I’ve heard of gentleman’s relish in England which is either a) a spicy anchovy relish or b) slang for jizz (take your pick), but have never heard of Gentle-woman’s relish. Which is why I had to buy a jar.

Wim Delvoye's "Cloaca," better known as the "poo machine." Photo courtest of MONA.

I was going to get a tour of MONA from Delia Nicholls, a delightful research curator, but when she came to greet me she told me that she only had an hour or so and then had to go to a funeral for an old friend, another art patron. So instead of walking around, we sat down at the museum’s wine bar for a light lunch and some conversation. I like Delia. She’s very up front. For instance, when I originally talked with her, I asked if I might be able to meet the museum’s owner, David Walsh.

“Not possible,” she said. “David doesn’t particularly like people.”

Since I don’t particularly like people either I was sympathetic.

Over lunch Delia told me that working for David could be “challenging.” She said David personally hired her for her job as curator but then would never say hello when they passed each other. After several months of this she stopped him and asked him if she’d done something to offend him. “He had no idea who I was. He told me he didn’t pay any attention to people’s faces. He doesn’t relate to people that way. He’s a mathematical savant and everything to him is numbers…and he sees numbers as colors.”

She also said David built the museum to follow his passion. “It’s not a museum where you’ll be talked down to or expected to feel a certain way about the art. You’ll just either like it or you won’t. And it doesn’t make any difference to David one way or the other. He’s not trying to convert you.”

She then hurried off to her funeral and I hurried off to see what she and others call the “poo machine,” an installation by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye properly titled “Cloaca,” that simulates the human digestive system. Regular food is shoveled into a long, transparent mouth, travels through a number of agitated glass bowls, and ends up as turds which are pushed through a cylinder and onto a plate promptly at two every afternoon.

Delia told me that the poo machine was at the very bottom of the museum, three floors below ground level, so I hurried down the stairs, through several dark galleries, having no idea where I was going, until I realized I was lost. “Excuse me,” I asked one of the attendants, “can you tell me how to get to the poo machine?”

Never thought I’d be asking that question.

Two minutes later, I found it. Several people were standing around the end of this odd contraption, waiting for the turds to fall. We all waited and waited. About fifteen minutes after two, a tall, blond attendant came into the gallery to have a look at the machine. “I’ve never seen this before,” he said. “It always poos at two o’clock. This is very unusual.”

The attendant got on his two-way radio and reported to someone upstairs that no turds had come from the poo machine. A crackly voice on the other end told him to stand by.

A few minutes later, two middle-aged women in museum uniforms turned up. Everyone, including me, stared at the poo machine. “It didn’t poo at all?” asked one of the women.

“I don’t think so,” said the tall blond attendant. “Did anyone see any poo?” he asked those of us standing around. We all shook our heads.

“Very unusual,” said the woman.

“I’ve never seen this,” said the tall attendant. “It always poos.”

But evidently not today. Seems the poo machine was just a little backed up. I patted the stricken tall blond attendant on the back. “It’s alright,” I told him. “It happens to the best of us.”

And with that I went off to see what else was of interest in the museum.