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My name’s Prue and I wrote Camel Rider which is an adventure story set in the Middle East. It’s about two boys called Adam and Walid who trek through deserts and mountains to save a dog called Tara.

I love adventures and I’m just in the middle of packing for a trek of my own. This one is through the jungles of Papua New Guinea. One of the best things about being a writer is that I can go on adventures and call them research. This one should be an adventure because Papua New Guinea is a country where people still live in their remote mountain villages without running water or electricity like their parents and grandparents and great, great etc. parents did before them.

The reason I’m going is because my two brothers talked me into it. Our Dad was a soldier in the Second World War and he fought alongside the Americans in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. They had a really tough time because this is how a soldier who was there described it – “Imagine an area approximately 100 miles long – crumple and fold this into a series of ridges each rising higher and higher until 7,000 feet is reached and then dropping to 3,000 feet – cover this thickly with jungle, short trees and tall ones tangled with vines… About midday and through the night pour water over all this so everything becomes slippery and muddy.” Sounds great doesn’t it? Well if you like trekking through mud and being eaten by mosquitos and attacked by leeches it could be fun.

My Dad and lots of other soldiers traveled along a track through this area called the Kokoda Trail. Not only did they have to try and make their way up and down these slippery, muddy ridges and through fast flowing rivers but they were also being shot at by their enemy. I remember my Dad showing me and my sisters and brothers a scar on his back that he told us was when an enemy soldier dropped out of a tree and had his knife almost into Dad’s back when luckily for Dad, but unluckily for the enemy soldier, there was a friend behind Dad who saved him. Dad said he learnt a lot about himself and life during the time he was a soldier. He said one time when he was fighting he got so close to an enemy he looked into his eyes. He saw the man was really frightened. From that time on Dad said he knew that there’s no such thing as an enemy – just people who don’t know each other but who have got themselves into a situation which is about life or death and they’re just doing what they can to survive.

When I’m struggling up and down those folded ridges I’m going to try and remember that at least I’m not being shot at.

But I’d better get on with my packing. When I get back from this trip I’ll be back to work. One of the interesting things about being a writer is the variety of work you can do. My next job is reading nearly 15,000 poems from children all around Australia because I’m one of the judges of a national poetry competition. Someone asked me what I’ll be doing with all those poems after I’ve read them. I figure I might plant them in our garden. Maybe I’ll grow a Poetree.

Hope you enjoy Adam and Walid’s adventures. I wrote this story when I was living in the Middle East and although Adam and Walid aren’t real people, Tara is a real dog. She’s here alongside me now and is waving a paw. She likes being the heroine of the story and has visited lots of schools here in the Australia when we go and talk about Camel Rider and what it was like living in the Middle East.

Posted by author Prue Mason.

Just a few final thoughts on Berlin. I loved it. It’s filled with history, art, architecture, music, funkiness and of course, it’s home to the adorable KNUT! It’s easy to get around on the UBahn.

And then there are signs like this one, which cracked me up:



For those of you enjoy Pippi Longstocking:



My general feeling about Berlin can be summed up by this picture:

Due to many factors (travel, freelance deadlines, etc) I’ve gotten seriously behind on the blogging front. So despite the fact I’m back in the good ole US of A, I’m going to pretend I’m back in Deustchland for blog purposes.

So it’s our last day of touring in Germany, and we start off by walking from Potsdamer Platz down to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe . We’d visited it our first night in Berlin and it was a somewhat different experience during the day. Either way, it’s impossible to get the real impact of the memorial without actually visiting it. You don’t see how tall some of the pillars are actually, because the ground is uneven. I found that walking down in between the pillars was reminiscent of the feeling I got entering the underground gas chambers when I visited Auschwitz.



Right across from the memorial, and next door to the Brandenberg Gate, (talk about prime real estate), they’re building the new U.S. Embassy. I wonder how the government managed to get that particular plot to build on.

From there it was on to the Reichstag, a building steeped with history. The visit inspired my most recent, hate mail inspiring column at the Greenwich Time, which you can read over at saramerica. To me, the Reichstag is a great example of what I loved about Berlin – the juxtaposition between historical and modern.



Sir Norman Foster’s modern reconstruction of the dome destroyed in WWII sits atop the restored building, originally constructed in 1894.



The inscription on the façade, “to the German People” was carved in 1916, much to the displeasure of Kaiser Wilhelm II who didn’t like its democratic significance.



From the roof, you could see the continued reconstruction going on in East Berlin.



Then we strolled down the Unter Den Linden to Museum Island. We went to the Egyptian Museum and saw the famous bust of Nefertiti



The Webmeister and I had a nap on the grass in front of the Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral)



and rested our weary selves and tootsies



before hitting the Pergamon Museum, with it’s amazing collection of antiquities.

Afterwards, I invested (too much money, according to the Webmeister, who is trying to teach me how to haggle more effectively) in an official Soviet fuzzy hat with earflaps.

I figure since I’m so often called “an America-hating Communist” by people who don’t like my political column, I might as well have the appropriate headgear.



More to the point, it’ll keep my ears warm during the cold, New England winters. Never mind that when the Webmeister took this pic as I was sitting in the Ubahn station, it was about 90 degrees.

And thus endeth our touring of Berlin, a truly fantabulous city.

When the_webmeister suggested going to the Bauhaus Archiv museum, I was fine with the idea but not as eager to go as I was to, say, the the Jewish Museum, with its controversial new addition by Daniel Libeskind . More fool me.

I came out of that museum so inspired I felt like I was fizzing. I literally skipped down the street, much to the bemusement of the_webmeister.

You weren’t allowed to take photos in the museum, but here’s one of the outside, designed by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus School:



Here’s a few of my notes:

Johannes Itten: “a work of art must be sensed”. Plunged his students into chaos – free play in order to develop their artistic personality and artistic freedom.

Wassily Kandinsky: Believed in “free art for the free spirit.” Associated yellow with triangles, red with squares and blue with circles. Didn’t like green – color of “self-satisfied composure”.

Hmmmm. I just painted my bedroom “Peaceful Jade”. What does this say about me?

There was so much more. I bought myself two postcards to pin above my desk, so I can look up at them and remind myself of how inspired I felt when I was there.

After that we headed over to the Technology Museum , which is truly amazing place. Continuing on our Shoah theme, we went inside a cattle car that had been used to transport Jews to concentration camps:



Just being in there with three other people gave me the heebie jeebies. I couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like to be packed in like sardines with no food or water for days.

That’s just one of the exhibits in the two huge rail sheds. I was very excited to see a real Enigma machine:



(If you’ve seen “Breaking the Code”, about the code breaking efforts of Alan Turing and the team at Bletchley Park during WWII you’ll know why I was so excited by this).

We also got to make linotype:



Then it was over to the hands-on Spectrum part of the museum, where there were some seemingly great exhibits that would have been completely lost on me if not for the physics-literate Webmeister, because all the explanations were in German.

Here’s a pic of my physics hero, who clearly is still in touch with his inner kid:


and here’s me getting in touch with my inner Hermoine, trying to divine what’s going to happen in the last Harry Potter book:



Despite the fact that by this point my feet were ready to drop off, the Drill Sargeant – I mean, the Webmeister – was not going to cut me any slack, because we still had another museum to cover, namely the Jewish Museum. There was a very moving installation called “Shalechet”, or “Fallen Leaves” by the Menashe Kadishman:




Finally, it was back to the hotel, where I got a hug from one of Berlin’s many bear sculptures (who, while cute, is not nearly as cute as Knut):


Even better, I managed to beg a cup of ice from the bartender to ice my poor weary tootsies!

Due to Internet problems, column deadlines, and general exhaustion from an action packed sightseeing schedule, I’ve got very behind on my blogging. However, I shall now attempt to catch up, one day at a time.

On Tuesday the_webmeister and I headed to Orianenburg, a leafy suburb about the same distance from the center of Berlin as Greenwich is from Manhattan. At the end of a tree-lined street is Sachsenhausen concentration camp, one of the first concentration camps started by the Nazis in the 30’s.


It’s the utter normalcy of the street that completely freaked me out. Citizens of Orianenburg were tending their gardens on one side of the wall, while on the other underfed prisoners were being forced to run for 12 hours a day carrying heavy packs in order to test the soles of boots for the Germany army.



Sachensenhausen was originally used for political prisoners (namely anyone who disagreed with the Nazis, especially Communists) and “anti-social elements” (such as gypsies, homosexuals, transvestites, etc). Jews were also imprisoned there, although not after 1942 when Himmler decided to make Germany “Juden frei” and the Jews were shipped “to the East”.

Over 100,000 people died at Sachsenhausen. It was also a major training center for the SS; over 3,000 SS were billeted there for training. The average age of the soldiers in the Death’s Head unit of the Waffen SS was 20.7 years old. The head of the concentration camp inspectorate said that they purposely selected young men so that they could “indoctrinate them to readily sacrifice that little bit of themselves, so if necessary they could carry out their duty without scruples and with all necessary determination.”

Later in the war Russian POW’s were murdered at Sachsenhausen, which makes it seem doubly ironic that post-1945 the East German regime used the camp for political prisoners.

While we were there, I saw this guy wearing what I considered a particularly tasteless sweatshirt and a belt made of bullets.



Then I noticed the badge on his cap, with Hebrew lettering and “World Burns to Death.”




I googled it when I got back to the hotel, and it turns out World Burns to Death is a punk rock band whose “aesthetic preference is for derivative bland holocaust imagery: t-shirts, posters, and record covers stick to this formula. These images mirror the lyrical themes of the band, which detail crimes against humanity, religious hypocrisy and religion's effect on society, class oppression, nationalism, and man's general inhumanity to man.”

Guess that teaches me not to judge a guy by his sweatshirt. Still, I would have preferred if he’d left the “Gas Mask” sweatshirt at home.

Oh, and just in case you’re under any misapprehension that anti-Semitism in Europe isn’t still alive and well, the Jewish barracks at Sachsenhausen were firebombed back in the 90’s, a few days after a visit from the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. They rebuilt the barracks using the charred materials as a reminder:



Later that evening, we visited the site of a different form of totalitarianism. The night before we’d been to Potzdammer Platz to view a few remaining fragments of the Berlin Wall, which used to run right through the center.





In the 90’s, following the fall of the Wall, Potzdammer Platz was the biggest building site in Europe. We had an overpriced dinner at the Sony Center, with it’s cool, color changing roof , and then strolled down to the Brandenburg Gate.



Tuesday evening we followed up our Wall tour with a visit to Checkpoint Charlie



and the Haus Am Checkpoint Charlie , a museum started by Ranier Hildebrandt in 1962, right by the Berlin wall overlooking Checkpoint Charlie. The exhibition chronicles the attempts at escape to the West, both successful and tragically unsuccessful. There are cars with hiding compartments and hollowed out surfboards and example after example of the ingenuity people have when they want to be free.

It wasn’t just the exhibits that I found fascinating. My alter-ego, saramerica found this bathroom graffiti interesting as well.




Pretty sad that someone visiting a museum dedicated to freedom and tolerance would make a comment like, “We’ll stop the wall when you stop the illegal immigration.”

It was a thought provoking and emotional day, which we ended with a fantastic meal at a French restaurant right down the road from Checkpoint Charlie.