And ... Home (Views Over Asia)

So now - at last - all the photos from our three-week, thirtieth-anniversary holiday of last October are up on my Flickr photostream.

The last day of the trip - an extended version of the 29th of the month - involved a 4am start (which is no great fun), a drive through the small-hours but nonetheless well-illuminated streets of Hong Kong, and the discovery that even Hong Kong airport doesn't really get moving that early. It took a little while for the catering to open up, but eventually we managed to find breakfast, and decided to try some local paper-wrapped rice-based thing.

Hmm. Possibly an experiment too far. Let's just assume that it's a taste which locals acquire from childhood, shall we?

So we boarded our Qantas 747, and spent the next few hours largely on a route that Marco Polo might, I guess, have regarded as familiar (assuming, modern theories notwithstanding, that he didn't just make stuff up), just a few miles higher up, in much greater comfort, and with some watching of movies and TV on the back of the seat in front. Were those the Tian Shan mountains down there, and if so, where was Shangri-La? And was that the Taklamakan desert? Not sure, but anyway, does flying over count as going in?

Ah well, those are not modern concerns. Modern concerns are things like Qantas grounding their entire fleet for a few days due to a large-scale row with their air crew union, which we only later discovered happened while we were in the air. Hmm. Dodged a last-minute problem there.

Which brings me ... back to where I was months ago.

Views of Singapore

My, we came back from that holiday with a lot of photos. It's going to take ages to put the good ones up onto Flickr (with appropriate editing). In fact, I've only just finished those from our day in Singapore. Well, that was a fairly full day.

I ended up with a lot of flowers. (Hotel exterior, Botanical Gardens, Fort Canning Park), and a lot of skyscrapers (Singapore). It's an interesting city, in a very tidy sort of way. Warm, too, being within a degree of the equator and all that. But the photos probably sum up our experience of the day.

And... We're Back

I've not been very good about posting here this year, for all sorts of reasons, largely involving distractions, but my silence of the last three weeks has had more solid justifications, which kind of run Singapore-Perth (mk.2)-Indian Pacific Railway-Visiting Family-Sydney-Ayer's Rock-Sydney-Hong Kong.

It was fun. We're home now. Right now, we've been awake for c. 21 hours, most of them on an airliner, so don't expect much coherence or many words immediately, but at least your e-mails or whatever now have a solid fighting chance of being answered. Or at least read.

Hopefully, there will be retrospective blogging eventually. Or at least, about 6 gigs of image posting to the Flickr photostream.

(First thoughts on Asian cities: Somebody said to me during the trip that Singapore is a beehive, Hong Kong is an ants' nest. Yeah. Alternatively: Singapore seems to be about making money, while Hong Kong seems to be about spending money.. Or, perhaps: If you show Singaporeans the city scenes from Blade Runner, I think they'd say "Yes, that is a horrible warning of how things might go if we don't regulate matters very carefully." If you show those scenes to someone from Hong Kong, the response would surely be "Hey, really good ideas with the flying advertising there!")

(Oh, and the Jenolan Caves are freaking well amazing. While Uluru has a simple job, which is to just sit there on a geological scale, and performs it brilliantly.)