Category: travel

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canada general travel

there’s more to squamish than just rabbits you know

The view out to Stawamus Chief from the Spit.

 

And now looking down to the Chief, Howe Sound and Squamish from another vantage point. Taken on the hiking trail to Elfin Lakes – which is part way to Mt Garibaldi, the ever present mountain which lurks above you as you sit in Squamish town. Unless it’s cloudy. So in other words you may see it once or twice a year.

 

So now after a week in Squamish (with the bunny feeding, the hiking, the climbing, the squirrels, the chipmunks, the Scattegories, the bath robe parties, the bicycling round town, the Walmart visits, the inaugural Tim Hortons visit, the sitting in traffic on the Sea to Sky because their blasting to widen the road had made large rocks fall of the existing bits of road reducing it to one lane, the wandering around Whistler, the discovery of a very gold and shiny puffy vest in the North Face store, and the complete absence of any bear or cougar sightings) a trip over to Banff on the mighty Greyhound beckons…

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general travel

in transit

Stop over in Taipei on the way to Canada. We arrived in the evening, and China Airlines provided us with swish (there were free combs! and it was on a golf course sponsored by Jack Nicklaus) hotel accommodation while we waited for our transfer flight to Vancouver the next afternoon. This pretty flower was found while wandering around town in the morning.

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general travel

an ode to airports

Yesterday I spent nine hours in airports and aeroplanes. For the sake of flying from Melbourne to Canberra in the morning, and back again in the evening. The first culprit was the ice. As we sat in the plane at 0730 we waited for the de-icing equipment (a man with a ladder, a bucket of warm water and a credit card) along with a lot of other planes. Then came the good news! Thanks to a security breach (some contractor passed their keys around the security barrier) the entire domestic terminal was being cleared. Including us lucky folk already on planes. We all had to file out to wait to go through security again, while staff wandered around poking things in shops in the secure area with sticks.

After passing through security again at 0930 and finally boarding, we naturally once more experienced the joy of queuing as our plane waited to be allowed to take off. This required some waiting, and some manoeuvring of other planes which had arrived but had not been allowed to disembark.

[insert fun part of the day where I ride around Canberra on my bike visiting people]

And then I checked in and found out my flight back to Melbourne was pushed from 2030 to 2200, no wait, make that 2235, and I’d just missed being bumped to the earlier Melbourne flight. *mutter*

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general travel

brisbane – kangaroo point

And then we returned to Brisbane – cold, miserable and windy, like the rest of the east coast of Australia, thanks to the dirty great big low sitting just off the coast.

View from Kangaroo Point across Brisbane River to the CBD.

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general travel

glasshouse mountains

Pineapple farms! The Glasshouse Mountains were surrounded by the bloody things.

Pineapple farms with Mt Tibrogargan in the background

 

Mum on the summit of Mt Ngungun

 

Scribblygum. No really. The zigzags are from tunnels made by larvae of the Scribbly Gum Moth – they lay eggs between layers of old and new bark, the larvae burrow into the new bark, and as the old bark falls away, the trails are revealed. The tunnel diameters increase as the larvae grow, and the ends of the tracks show where the larvae stopped to pupate.

 

View of the Glasshouse Mountains from Wild Horse Lookout (L-R: Mt Beerburrum, Tunbubudla, Tibrogargan, Mt Beerwah, Coonowrin and Ngungan). Click for a bigger view.