Tag Archives: flora

In Cusco, a woman having breakfast at our hotel was complaining about her muscle aches and pains. She had just returned from the Inca Trail, and when I said we were starting it the next day, she looked me up and down and said: “Well, I hope you are fit!” in portentous tones. What had […]

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There is a special magic about alpine flowers in their natural habitats! They are ruggedly unique, suited to their particular alpine environments, and yet delicate in their beauty. Whether it is in the Swiss Alps (see: Rainy Alpine Hillsides) or the Snowy Mountains of Australia (eg: Alpine Flowers and Summer Snow), there is something uplifting […]

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California’s Eastern Sierra region is a remote and vast wilderness, lightly populated and replete with extensive rugged and magnificent terrain. Sitting in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, the mountains here rise steeply from the prairies and deserts to the east. The largest industry in the Eastern Sierra is tourism: based in tiny localities and […]

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California’s Eastern Sierras are a jaw-droppingly beautiful outdoor playground. How lucky was I to have a photography-friend with not one, but two bases in this rugged and gorgeous area! Like me, she is a fan of mountain walks and flowers, and we had timed my trip to line up with the best of the mountain […]

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Fraser Island is a unique and wonderful place; it is a poem in sand, punctuated by the occasional sculptured rock. I’m not much of a geology student, but the landscape of Fraser Island is a living, pulsing thing that transcends time. As written in the UNESCO-World Heritage listing, the “immense sand dunes are part of […]

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