Norfolk Island is a stunningly beautiful place but it doesn’t take long before you realise what an enormous impact humans have made on its ecology. It’s a lesson to us all, I suppose. These days, importation of any animal or vegetable material to Norfolk is strictly controlled. We watched the cute little beagle sniffing everyone’s…
The third wave of immigrants to Norfolk Island were the people from Pitcairn Island, and they form the basis of most of the permanent population. The mutiny on the Bounty is part of their family history. It’s how their ancestors came to Pitcairn Island, a remote 2 square miles in the South Pacific. I suppose…
Norfolk Island’s early European history is entwined with the British penal system and the colonisation of Australia, so part of any visit to the island has to include the convict ruins, and the graveyard. There’s not much to show for the island’s first settlement in 1788. Here’s a short piece about those first colonists. When…
We just spent a week on Norfolk Island, a tiny speck of an island (~35 square kilometres) in the South Pacific a little over 1,600km North East of Sydney. What a fascinating place. The island is one of Australia’s territories, but even so, it had a high level of autonomy until July 2016, when it…
Isn’t it interesting how things go wrong at the most inconvenient time? When I wrote the blogs for our latest trip to Europe I entitled it ‘A series of unfortunate events‘, because so many things went wrong. Well, it seems the trip demons hadn’t finished with me. Not all that long before we left on…
After all the travel dramas, life has fizzled out to its pretty boring routine. Except for the rain. 2017 will go down as a ‘feast or famine’ result in the rain gauge. Was it only this year that we bolted back home from Northern Queensland with tropical cyclone Debbie on our tail? After receiving only…
Our last day in Europe was one I’d been looking forward to for the whole trip. We were off to 18th century Jemniste Chateau, where we would see the house and the gardens, and have a traditional lunch. Then we would get to see a falconry display. Woohoo. Raptors. Flying. Unfortunately, after yesterday’s lovely weather,…
Prague is often compared with Budapest, which is understandable. I like Budapest, and I’m sure I would have liked Prague just as much. It has the same kind of feel, grand architecture and a cosmopolitan flavour that made me feel comfortable – or at least as comfortable as I could under the circumstances. As always…
It’s not very far from Berlin to Prague, so when we left Berlin on Sunday morning, we made a brief visit to Dresden, which was famously incendiary-bombed by the Allies in World War II. The city suffered under GDR rule, but has been rebuilt since the reunification. This was a walking tour, and I’ll confess…
We caught a train to take us from Warsaw to Berlin. We were in the first class carriages, but as Pete said, “If that’s first class I’d hate to be in economy”. I can’t say it was a train journey to remember, just a track through Eastern Europe on an overcast and drizzly day, stopping…