Tag Archives: Ursula Wall

Easter! In Australia it is Autumn. Easter might include chocolate bilbies (marsupial rabbit-bandicoots) instead of bunnies, but there are plenty of hot-cross buns and chocolate eggs. Because Easter is a long weekend, it is also time for the Byron Bay Bluesfest. First held in 1990 as The East Coast Blues Festival, this annual celebration of music has grown over the years: encompassing music from […]

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Winter in England can be grim: cold, wet, and dark early. Finding something to do outdoors with young people in inclement weather can be tricky. I was staying in Hereford late last winter and had friends coming to visit me. I wasn’t sure what they would be interested in, so I sent them a list of […]

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“The palace of great happiness or bliss.” That is how Pungtang Dechen Photrang Dzong translates from Bhutanese.  Also known as Punakha Dzong, it has been an auspicious fortress for many years. Punakha Dzong was the seat of the Government of Bhutan until they moved the capitol to Thimphu in 1955. It is still the administrative centre for the Punakha District, and houses a number of precious […]

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Iceland, that tiny Nordic island nation in the North Atlantic, sits just barely outside the Arctic Circle and has more glacier-covered land than all of continental Europe. With a terrain that has been ground flat by successive periods of glaciation and rendered relatively tree-less by human predation, the winter landscape looks cold and white and eerily bleak from […]

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Namibia is big. It doesn’t seem particularly big if you are looking at a map of continental Africa, but that is only because Africa is HUGE. Namibia is the 34th largest country in the world. And if your bottom is on a seat in a truck, and you are being driven almost 4000 kilometres in less than two […]

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