Research and Travel Services

Research and Travel Services CEO Jimmy D and CFO Mij Dorian
ABN: 62 372 865 454 Company

16/07/2026

The salmon came cold from the case, pink and honest, and I salted it the way a man salts a thing he respects. The prawns went into the pan with garlic that hit hot oil and told the whole kitchen what was coming. I did not rush this. Rushing was for men who did not care what they ate.
The salad was simple. Tomatoes, cucumber, the olives briny and dark, feta cut thick because thin feta is a lie. I dressed it with oil and lemon and nothing else, because a man does not need a cabinet full of sauces to make a good thing.
Hemingway would have approved of the plain arithmetic of it. Fish. Garlic. Salt. Sun-warmed vegetables eaten without apology. He wrote once that food was one of the few things a man could still trust. Tonight, at the table, that felt true.

Another Bribie Sunday☀️🍻🍷The bugs come up in pots before dawn. Moreton Bay bugs, ugly as sin and sweet as anything in th...
12/07/2026

Another Bribie Sunday☀️🍻🍷
The bugs come up in pots before dawn. Moreton Bay bugs, ugly as sin and sweet as anything in the water. The prawns follow, pink and cold in their ice, caught by men who don't talk much and don't need to.
At the Jetty is closing for a week. Luke doesn't take weeks off. He takes them apart. Somewhere behind that closed door he'll be at it — sharpening, testing, throwing out what doesn't work and keeping what does. That's the job. Nobody sees it. Everybody eats it later.
Bribie doesn't stop for this. The tide comes in anyway. The pelicans still work the shallows for scraps.
A week is nothing. Then the door opens again, and the bugs are back on ice, and the menu is different, and Luke got it done, the way he always does.

The Stakes Are High — Even when Medium Rare🏆🏆There are people who travel the world in search of something and there are ...
08/06/2026

The Stakes Are High — Even when Medium Rare🏆🏆

There are people who travel the world in search of something and there are people who have already found it and are waiting for everyone else to come back and realise what they missed.
We go to "The Jetty" because Luke, and Josh before him, and both understood things about food that cannot be taught, coaxing things from the earth and the water that arrive on the plate still tasting of where they came from, but with a twist that nature left unfinished like a puzzle and only a great chef knows how to solve.
Something is missing when our friends are gone and we have never fully resolved whether it is the company or the food that feels the absence most, which is either a great compliment to Luke or a great compliment to our friends and is probably both.
Winter will thin the numbers. Our friends are in Malta walking walls where knights held the line against the Ottomans and waited for reinforcements that eventually arrived, which is more than Davy Crockett managed at the Alamo and more than we can currently confirm about our traditional Thursday lunch here @ The Jetty as we protect our Fort.
Luke is under pressure to stay and this is the thing that matters because a restaurant without a Luke is just an empty room with tables, chairs and an amazing view.
This is our Alamo - local support is crucial.
The stakes are high here at "The Jetty". Even when they are medium rare.

Luna's Portuguese adventure...this time Lisbon.
05/06/2026

Luna's Portuguese adventure...this time Lisbon.

25/05/2026

But for a nasty shock.. Bangkok 😂

Two Men and a Lake.Edgar Allan Poe wrote about a lone lake with black rock bound and tall pines and the terror that was ...
25/05/2026

Two Men and a Lake.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote about a lone lake with black rock bound and tall pines and the terror that was not fright but a tremulous delight and death in the poisoned wave and a fitting grave in its gulf. He was eighteen years old and had never been anywhere near Central Asia and described Issyk-Kul with the precision of a man who had stood on its shore in the dark for a very long time.
Hemingway would have stood at the water's edge and said nothing for a long time and then written one sentence about the lake that contained everything Poe felt and left the reader to work out the rest, which is the most demanding and most honest thing a writer can do.
The lake does not care about either of them. It never froze for Tamerlane and it will not freeze for poets and it has ancient cities in its depths and a submerged palace tiled in blue and a shore where the counting stones still stand and it was here before all of them and will be here considerably after.
On a fine summer day teenagers leap from a jetty and boys sell fish to tourists in beach chairs and a parasail drifts across the sky like a jellyfish.
Death was in that poisoned wave. An Eden of that dim lake.
Poe knew. He just didn't know where.
The Lake
https://www.telelib.com/authors/P/PoeEdgarAllan/Verse/tamerlane/lake.html


"A Picture of Dorian Astray"The Bard and The Banker.Robert Service counted other people's gold by day and wrote immortal...
21/05/2026

"A Picture of Dorian Astray"
The Bard and The Banker.
Robert Service counted other people's gold by day and wrote immortal poetry by night and saw no contradiction in this, which was either very practical or very Scottish, and was probably both.
He arrived in the Yukon as a bank clerk, sent north by men in offices who had no idea what they were sending him into. He lived in the apartment above the bank, which had the only flush toilet in Dawson City, which tells you that even in the wilderness a Scotsman will find a way to be comfortable.
They say he slept near the vault with a gun, which in a gold rush town full of desperate men was not an unreasonable arrangement. At midnight he would rise and write until three in the morning with a pot of black tea and whatever the darkness gave him, which turned out to be enough for a lifetime.
He wrote the Cremation of Sam McGee and the Shooting of Dan McGrew in that cold and unlikely place, guarding other men's gold while quietly accumulating his own.
The bank is a pub now. They called it the Bard and Banker. It covers the whole man in three words, which is more than most men get on a gravestone and considerably more than he would have asked for.

"A Picture of Dorian Astray".The Final Frontier.Alaska does not care if you come and it does not notice when you leave. ...
20/05/2026

"A Picture of Dorian Astray".
The Final Frontier.
Alaska does not care if you come and it does not notice when you leave. There is no road out of Juneau, which is the capital of the state, which tells you everything you need to know about how Alaska feels about the formalities of civilisation.
The horses of Skagway, the bears of Sitka, the Tlingit who were there before anyone thought to name the place — these are the real Alaskans, the ones who did not come for gold or empire or a flag to raise and they are the ones the land remembers as friends. The horses are gone. The bears remain. The Tlingit never left.
It is the last place on the continent that does not need you to like it.
Most places have given up that kind of pride. Alaska has not.
Alaska is magnificent and merciless and does not forgive mistakes and does not mourn the mistaken and was doing all of this long before anyone arrived to notice and will be doing it long after the last of us has gone.
Until next time.

*A Picture of Dorian Astray"Sitka Alaska - the Fortress of Bears and finishing with Halibut bits and 2 lb of crab.++++++...
20/05/2026

*A Picture of Dorian Astray"
Sitka Alaska - the Fortress of Bears and finishing with Halibut bits and 2 lb of crab.
++++++++++
In 1867 Russia sold Alaska to the United States for seven million dollars, which was two cents an acre, and both sides thought they were being extremely clever as apparently no one thought to consult the original land owners the Tlingit, who had owned it since the beginning and whose opinion was not considered relevant by either empire doing the selling or the buying.
The Russians called their empire the Bear and the Tlingit had lived alongside the actual bears for ten thousand years and understood both kinds — the one that came with warships and the one that came through the forest — and when the Russians came in force in 1804 the Tlingit held their fort for six days against cannon and warships before withdrawing into the forest on their own terms, which is not the same thing as losing, and the Russians knew it.
The handover ceremony in 1867 was not dignified. The imperial flag got tangled on the pole and a soldier climbed up to free it and the flag wrapped itself around him instead, which was not what the Romanof Tsar had envisioned. They got it down eventually because empires usually manage, given enough time and embarrassment despite no negative tik-tok posts.
The Russian bear went home.
The Americans raised their flag and put the most spectacular real estate on earth in a drawer for the better part of a century until 1959 when someone found it again and made it the 49th state, which is the kind of thing that happens when you buy something for two cents an acre and forget you own it until it turns out to be magnificent.
The actual bears are at the Fortress of the Bears on the edge of town, rescued and enclosed, moving the way bears move when there is nowhere in particular to go. The fortress keeps them safe from us while maintaining the polite fiction that it is the other way around.
The Tlingit are still there. They were never asked about any of it.
This is Southeast Alaska. It is magnificent and it is melancholy and it does not apologize for being either.
We started with golden crab and Halibut bites...so good was rich
Then snow crab after a break. Both crabs were almost perfect, which is as close to perfect as anything in this world gets and considerably closer than most things can manage.
We did not argue about which was better. We simply ordered more. And we refuse to apologise for our gluttony - we did it for the hal-i-but 😎

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