Because we’d elected to arrive a day early for our tour, we had a day to ourselves. The Park Hyatt is centrally-located, within a stroll of the major tourist stops on the map so, having fortified ourselves with a wonderful breakfast, we ventured forth to explore Saigon city. I’ve already explained that walking in Saigon…
Our trip to Vietnam and Cambodia started in Vietnam’s largest, most Western-orientated city. Although it was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City in 1975, to the locals it’s still Saigon. Our flight was uneventful – Brisbane to Singapore to Saigon. But getting through Immigration was… interesting. To set the picture I should mention visas. Australians…
It’s that time of year again – the frenetic holiday season where everybody runs around like a cut snake to celebrate… something. It’s no coincidence (as I’m sure you all know) that all the major religions have a festival that pretty well coincides with the Northern Hemisphere’s Winter Solstice. Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Saturnalia, Sinter Klaas,…
It might be Saturday morning here in Australia but over in the USA it’s Black Friday, which is the American equivalent of our Boxing Day sales. The Americans don’t ‘do’ Boxing Day. It’s a very English thing which we have inherited. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. Even more so than Halloween, Thanksgiving is…
I’ve been going back over old collections of photos I’ve taken. I certainly use a few for Facebook and also, if they’re travel pics, to illustrate my travel blogs. But they represent just a handful of the photos I’ve actually taken. Some of the others are pretty good, too – in fact, better with time…
I’m glad the cat likes it. I don’t. Increasingly, free to air TV is wall-to-wall ‘reality’ TV shows. Married at First Sight, the Bachelor, the Block, Bride and Prejudice, The Biggest Loser yada yada yada. And (oh joy) it seems Big Brother is about to reincarnate. Cue eyeroll. I can’t fuckin’ wait. There really isn’t…
A rag-bag of topics have tickled my fancy this week. Let’s start with sharks, everybody’s favourite ocean-going boogy fish. Two young men were bitten while swimming up in the Whitsundays recently. That makes five attacks in that area in just over a year, one of them fatal. Inevitably, the calls have gone up. There must…
Halloween has just been and gone, and since I like to get into the spirit of the times (even if we don’t ‘do’ Halloween in Australia), my thoughts have turned to large companies and their ability to do good and evil. An article he read caused Pete to buy me a copy of a tome…
Rainfall can be such a hit-and-miss business in Australia. I can’t remember the last time when it was a non-issue; that is, not too little, not too much – just right. Remember Goldilocks? Even going back to my childhood in Perth, we watched and waited for the winter rains to fill the hollows in the…
Every year I write about the whale migration up (and down) Australia’s east coast, and visit the whales when they stop for a bit of R&R in the calm waters of Platypus Bay between Fraser Island and the mainland. Every year more and more whales participate in the long swim from Antarctica to the tropical…