Tag Archives: landscape

If you are going to be locked in your own region because of Covid-19 border controls, it helps to have a magnificent back yard! For most of the past almost-two years, those of us in Australia – like people in much of the rest of the world – have been under some level of travel […]

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It was raining. But that didn’t stop the residents of Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, from coming out into the streets and public spaces to celebrate their cultural heritage. I was very lucky with the Sunday I had by myself exploring the delightful city: a local troupe was performing traditional folk dances under the protective roof […]

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The archaeological remains and artefacts that survive to attest to the richness of the almost 30 centuries of civilisation we now call Ancient Egypt (3100-333 BC ) are mind-boggling. That people between 3000 and 5000 years ago conceived of – and built – the pyramids, tombs, mausoleums, and temples, that scatter along the Nile amazes […]

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Mark Twain described a “solemn, silent, sail-less sea” and called it “California’s Dead Sea”. Mono Lake is, indeed, other-worldy. The air is hot and still: July afternoon temperatures range from the high twenties (29°C; 84°F) into the mid-thirties (35°C; 95°F) – and rapidly drop into the single digits at nightfall. The waters are dense and […]

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It is one of those iconic images: one of the world’s largest monoliths rising out of a sea of gravelly sand, with colours all along the red spectrum, ever changing in the light. Uluru.  Sacred to the Indigenous Anangu people, this giant sandstone rock formation was said to have been created in the very beginning […]

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