After our wonderful visit to the Desert Park at Alice Springs our coach driver took us on a short tour of Alice Springs (commonly abbreviated to “The Alice”). Alice Springs lies almost exactly in the centre of Australia, midway between Darwin and Adelaide. Surrounded by desert ranges and ancient landscapes, it began as a telegraph…
The world is a scary place at the moment and it’s likely to get scarier. So this week I’m going to share some of the happier times, leafing through the photograph albums of our travels. I blog all our trips so I’ll put a link to the relevant page for each entry. Just click on…
When I signed us up for this trip to Norfolk Island I suppose I had a fond notion that the advertised 200th anniversary was for the arrival of the Pitcairn descendants of the Mutiny on the Bounty. Silly me. Elementary research would have shown me that 2025 was the anniversary of the establishment of Norfolk’s…
Norfolk Island. It’s a speck in the South Pacific about 1,600 km east of Sydney. At about 8km long and 5km wide, the island is an erosional remnant of a once-larger volcanic structure sticking out of the sea. It enjoys a sub-tropical Goldilocks climate, beautiful scenery and a laid-back lifestyle. Perfect for a week of…
The first day of our actual tour was very busy. Our group of fifty was divided into the reds and the yellows and each group set off in a bus big enough for everyone to have a window seat. Our driver, Roger, a knowledgeable Kiwi who’d been around the Red Centre for many years, was…
Alice Springs is often seen as simply a jumping-off point for tourists heading for Uluru and Kata Tjuta but there’s actually rather more to it than that. It was the site of the Telegraph station that connected Australia to the rest of the world via Darwin. The Ghan railway line has run from Adelaide to…
Quite a few months ago, before we decided to sell our house and move to a smaller property, Peter and I booked a short holiday to Alice Springs and Uluru. It had been many years – in the last century – since we’d been there and that had been with FILM cameras. Positively archaic. The…
When we returned from our lovely excursion to Coburg cruise director Alex informed as that Scenic had conceded that the cruise was effectively aborted. At that stage he was out of options for doable day trips. We would (hurrah) be leaving the safe and comfortable confines of the Frankfurt industrial harbour and heading back the…
We were still stuck in Frankfurt and Alex was still coming up with places we could visit on a day trip by coach. Today, 27th December, it would be Coburg. It was over two hours in the coach each way, but we were assured there would be a toilet stop. The autobahns in Germany make…