Year: 2016

Since I last wrote I have come half way across the pond and find myself in Greece, half my homeland. I was curious and excited to be here as on my last visit, the effects of the GFC were very stark. The sun is shining, the Greeks, in their inimitable style blame all their ills…

Conquering Mount Maroon was one of the purposes of the day and only partly achieved but sharing this with some wonderful women made it a special day indeed. Today I am singling out one woman in particular who impressed me for the wrong reasons and I am not afraid to acknowledge that. I met my…

Where I come from we eat these for breakfast.The fruits that is. I caught sight of this prickly pear on our way to Mount Maroon. We stopped here to get a good look at the mountain we were going to conquer and to enjoy the view. A Cypriot prickly pear in flower  Mount Maroon. I…

A man with a sun hat and a checkered shirt sat next to me on the bus. He was an older man with sun burnt skin, a white moustache and a pale complexion. He had on his lap a bag and within a minute of sitting down he pulled out a big picture of an…

Its been a fair few Sid- Free- months in our little neighbourhood. Our quiet street is quite sleepy most days but not today. At about 11 am this interesting duo came rolling down the road and stopped outside a house a few doors up. The duo are Julia Baker and her Scottish partner Johnny, who…

Walking along the pavement on a Sunday morning I came across this which for reasons unknown moved me greatly. To start with I wasn’t sure what I had seen, so I bent down to get a better look and there firmly embedded in the pavement was a “fossil” flower. Yes, I know, I have been…

This is my last posting about Western Australia. I have blogged about Perth before but since our last visit the city’s foreshore has had a radical makeover and it is worth noting this and sharing some of its changed views here. I have to say that we were not at all impressed by the architecture…

Lots of Dutch influence on this side of Australia as a number of vessels came across these shores in the 17th Century. Willem de Vlamingh named the island Rotte nest ( Rat’s nest ) having seen what he thought were very large rats at the time but which were actually marsupials called a quokkas. This…

So what do you get when you have red and desolate and wonderfully salty blue, with the occasional downpour –  Plants that are adapted for the driest conditions and the harshest of climates. They are nothing short of stunning. Perhaps needing to be so to attract the insects and the bees. The first three pictures…

The red and desolate is encircled by the blue and beautiful. So we decided we needed another view.  We flew over the peninsula taking in the small town of Denham, then the unforgettably named Useless Loop, over the salt mines,  before turning into Zuytdorp Point cliffs and then flying over the westernmost tip of Australia…