Tag Archives: Landscape

Kimberley Day 7 – Vansittart Bay

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Monday 19 August 2024 – Vansittart. Now, there’s a name to conjure with! Surprisingly, perhaps, it’s one that I had come across before. In the God Old Days when I used to cycle a lot because it was fun, before the appalling Surrey road surfaces put a stop to all that, one of my regular routes led through Windsor. Skirting round the edge, because I wanted to avoid the hill that leads up to the Castle, I actually used Vansittart Road as a way to get back towards the river.

The name Vansittart crops up here and there in British politics, so I don’t know the provenance of the Windsor road’s naming. But the Kimberley one was named after Nicholas Vansittart, 1st Baron Bexley, one of the longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer in British history (May 1812-December 1822). The bay’s name was conferred, like so many in this region, by Philip Parker King, an early explorer of the Australian and Patagonian coasts.

While I settled down to relax for the day, and try to be well for a putative medical checkup in the evening, Jane went off to the nearby Jar Island. Here she is to tell you about it.

Jar Island was named after the many broken jars found there, once used for storing and transporting trepangs, or sea cucumbers. Fishermen from Makassar in the southern Celebes (the present-day Indonesian province of Sulawesi) visited the northern Australian coast throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, negotiating fishing rights and interacting with the Aborigines. The processed trepang is prized in Chinese cooking for its texture and flavour-enhancing qualities and is used in Chinese medicine; the Makassan trepangers, after collecting and processing trepang in Australia, returned to Makassar to sell the product to Chinese traders.

However our objective on Jar Island was something far older…

The usual Zodiac to shore was followed by a short walk through familiarly rocky terrain,

and the familiar instruction to leave backpacks and hats (this time there was an actual hat-tree),

but the familiarity ended there: the art in this gallery was very different to that we had seen before. Formerly known as “Bradshaws” (after Joseph Bradshaw, who was the first European to see and record such art, in 1891), and now known as Gwion Gwion, these styles of representation are far older than the Wandjina art of our previous excursions – at least 17,000 years old. There is considerable uncertainty about who created them, where they came from,  and what connection there is, if any, to the Aboriginal communities who created the Wandjina art. This has become a political as well as anthropological issue; if the Aboriginal people are not the descendants of the Gwion Gwion artists, this has the potential to undermine native land title claims in the Kimberley. Lengthy discussion of all of this can be found in Wikipedia and a gallery of typical Gwion Gwion art can be found here.

A thought provoking excursion on many levels…

While Jane was away on Jar Island, I was resignedly reading the papers in my cabin, when there was a knock on the door and the ship’s doctor came in. I wonder whether the frustration I’d expressed to Lucille the evening before had provoked the visit; maybe it was just a visit he’d already planned. Anyway, he quickly took my temperature, which was normal (I’d taken some paracetamol), asked about a few other symptoms about which I only had to bend the truth slightly, and declared me fit.

I was no longer a number (cabin 524) – I was a free man!

This meant that I could join the afternoon expedition, which was a visit to a site on the Anjo Peninsula with an unusual geology and even stranger story.

It was another wet landing, on to a beach with some unusual shells littered about.

A short walk up a sand dune dotted with Spinifex grass

led to a very striking landscape,

a salt flat with some rocky outcrops dotted over it – really remarkable sight. The rocks themselves had a great variety of colours, and I could have spent quite some time exploring them,

but this was not what we had come to see. That was just beyond the salt flat.

There, among the scrub and trees, is the wreck of a Douglas C53 Skytrooper, a troop transport version of what we Brits know as the Douglas Dakota.  This one was being used during the second world war as a ferry plane to, well, ferry evacuees. Having done so, on 26th February 1942 it was supposed to fly from Perth to Darwin, with an interim landing at Broome. The pilot set out on the wrong course – wrong by some 20°* – an error only realised when it was too late to get to anywhere with an airfield before the fuel ran out. In casting around for somewhere to land, the pilot realised that Jar Island was too rocky, but then saw the salt flat and did a wheels-up crash landing across it, ending up where it can be seen today.

All aboard – pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, radio engineer and a couple of military telegraphists – survived the crash. So did the radio, so they were able to describe where they landed, even though they didn’t actually know where they were.

Their rescue was remarkable, in that no-one knew they’d set off on the wrong course, so when they failed to turn up in Broome, all the searchers started looking in the wrong places, expecting, not unreasonably, to find crash sites en route to Broome. One person in a searching aircrew, though, recognised the description of the salt flat and so headed for the area, enabling the crew to be rescued. They had survived for a couple of days using pipes from the crashed aircraft to distill drinking water from seawater.

The crashed plane is a fine subject for photography,

and Jane had a private smile when gravely told that this engine, now detached from the wing,

was a Whitt and Pratney.

Nearby were a couple of interesting trees.  One was a paper bark tree,

which is a type of myrtle, apparently; and the other was a sizeable Boab Tree, though not anything like the monsters we saw in Madagascar.

It was surrounded by Pandanus (screw pines); someone had collected some of their pinecone-like fruits and left them in a small pile for people to admire.

Our group filed slowly back across the salt flat; I hung back as much as I could so that I might get a few aeroplane shots without punters in them, which meant that I was practically alone as I trudged strode back towards the re-embarkation point

where, to everyone’s delight, a surprise beach party had been sprung on us!

Champagne and cool jazz made for a fine end to an unusual and interesting excursion.

Tomorrow is a Big Day, in many ways. We’re coming towards the end of the cruise, so we get our passports back, and it’s the last day for any laundry to be done – these things are important, you know. There will also be the final Gala Dinner.

More importantly, it will see the final excursion of the cruise; scenically, we have been promised, outstandingly the best. Since I’m now allowed out, I can’t wait. But you’ll have to, I’m afraid.  Keep your eyes peeled for what I hope will be some really striking images!

 

* The pilot error may well not have been incompetence, but wartime tiredness compounded by bad luck. When plotting and then following a course, a correction has to be applied to compensate for the difference between magnetic north and true north, and this may have been forgotten. Also, the amount of iron ore in the ground can make compasses do strange things, so an error of this magnitude is not necessarily something to be dismissive about.

Camino Finisterre Day 9: Muxía to Quintáns – Normal service resumed

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Friday `10 May 2024 – So, the burning question was: would I feel I could cope with a 10km walk?

Actually, I did.

Our hotel room was very warm, so we didn’t have a particularly comfortable night. Despite that, however, the auguries were good that I was recovering from my digestive meltdown: I was hungry! Breakfast was at 8am, also the time we like to make our bags available for collection, and so we headed down for a leisurely, and in my case, quite sizeable breakfast.

The lack of a way to cool the room was the only significant detraction from my view that this has been the best hotel so far, particularly for being well-organised. The breakfast room was no exception, nicely laid out in a way that allowed for a decent buffet whilst still feeling spacious for those at the tables.

A couple of noteworthy points: firstly, there is a rather shocking picture on the far wall.

It depicts the Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Boat, the one at the headland that we saw yesterday, in the 2013 lightning-strike fire that destroyed it.  It’s been rebuilt remarkably well, as we saw yesterday.

Secondly, the background music took a trend that we’d previously noted to an extreme.  The trend is to play cover versions of well-known pop songs, usually in a totally inappropriate style, often sung in English by someone who clearly doesn’t understand the words. We’ve heard a bossa nova version of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, for example. But the hotel absolutely took the biscuit today by playing a smooth, salon-jazz version of Pink Floyd’s Time. It was so incongruous that it took me ages to work out why I vaguely recognised the words but couldn’t place the piece.

For walking, the forecast was great – sunny and about 19°C – so I decided to undertake the walk and we thought that we could have a lesisurely departure, since the distance was short, there was little point in arriving early and we wouldn’t have to worry about overheating.  So I used the time before our departure to sort out my walking poles, since the profile of the day’s walk was somewhat up-and-down.

It’s not too extreme – the ascents are only 100m or so – but the slope is 1 in 10, I was recovering and out of practice at hills; so sticks were the order of the day, for me at least.  I checked mine over to make sure that the little plastic pots, the “ferrules”, that cover the spikes at the bottom of the poles, were still in place.  I’d once carelessly lost one on some ascent or other, and Jane (who, of course, had organised some spares) was grudging in her willingness to hand out replacements.  So I took care today to ensure that I wouldn’t upset the Ferrule Godmother. [One?? Hah! Several!! – Ed]

And so we set off.  It was almost immediately clear that the extra layers we’d donned were going to be unnecessary; there was a cool breeze, but hot sunshine as we bade goodbye to Muxía

and started the first climb.

It led past the Capela de San Roque de Moraime

which didn’t look interesting enough to detain us, and on, through some interesting-looking pines

and past a Fonte which looked like it was also once a lavadoiro,

into a village, Moraime, where we’d notionally planned to have our first coffee stop.  Sadly, La Taberna was Spanish Open, so we didn’t get our coffee. But we did get a chance to look around the monastery there,

which is from the 12th Century and which is a very fine place to pop into. It has an impressive entrance portico

and a splendid interior.

A very significant item of interest there is the frieze which runs all the way along the north wall and which is in remarkably good nick.  Here is a stitch of three photos covering it; it’s not perfect but I hope it gives you an idea.

and here is the official explanation – it represents the seven deadly sins,

from left to right: pride, greed, anger, lust (my personal favourite, ever since Raquel Welch), gluttony, envy and sloth, with death awaiting them on the right.

Our next port of call was Os Muiños, which thinks enough of itself to have erected a Town Name

and which is appealing enough

but, most importantly, had a café which was Open Open, and which served us coffee, juice and beer, all of which were very welcome.

We carried on, along a path with some nice views

which led into woodland, through which we could have seen a beach if it weren’t for the trees in the way.

At about the point where we could see clear across the bay to Camariñas,

and I was busy taking photos of a nice flower arrangement,

we noticed a line of something in the water.

It seemed to stretch a long way,

almost across to where we could just make out the Muxía lighthouse, and we wondered if it was some kind of fish farming frame.  Nothing shows on the satellite picture of Google Earth, but on the other hand the town from which it stretches, Merexo, is home to Stolt Sea Farm, an industrial-scale purveyor of turbot.  Maybe the two are connected?

The countryside around there is very attractive, particularly on a sunny day

and, as we passed the scene above, we wondered if we could catch sight of the bonkersly-large horreo de San Martin that we’d seen on our day trip last Autumn. In the distance, we could see something that might be it.

There.

Yes, that thing.

It’s clearly a big horreo, but we couldn’t see it clearly enough to count the legs. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t the one we were looking for, but read on anyway.

The village of San Martiño is home to a substantial church, the Iglesia de San Martiño de Ozón.

As with many of the churches we’ve seen, it has a cemetery around it, and I went to have a look whilst Jane panted quietly in the shade for a bit.

It’s an impressive sight, with quite a contrast between the older memorial markers,

which are decoratively weathered, and the more modern ones

which are identical, but look less interesting because they haven’t weathered at all.

The rest of San Martiño has some very attractive little corners

and the utterly huge 16th-century horreo de San Martiño de Ozon. I posted a photo or two of it last Autumn, but it’s impressive enough to be worth showing again.

It is one of the largest in Galicia, running to 27m in length and having no fewer than 22 pairs of legs. Its large size is because it belonged to the clergy, which imposed a tithe of the crops of the farmers of the parish -10% of the total harvest – and thus they needed a large place to store it all. Apparently, it now “stores” volunteers working in the community. It’s a great photographic subject.

We were by this stage quite close to our destination, the village of Quintáns. The final surprise the walk had for us was this snack vending machine, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

I think it’s linked to a nearby albergue. Anyway, this brought us to our pension for the night,

the Plaza, which, despite our arriving at about 2pm, wasn’t going to offer food until 8pm.  Still, it has a bar, and where there’s a bar there’s gin and maybe some crisps or something. The view from our room is rather nice

and we’re hoping for a comfortable night before heading on tomorrow. The forecast is for cooler, cloudier weather, but no rain; hopefully an ideal day for covering the 13 or so kilometres to Dumbria, our next port of call.

 

Good Fortuna

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Wednesday 6 March 2024 – The journey out round and in again was unremarkable in terms of pitching and rolling en route. What was remarkable was the continued calmness and stillness in the waters of the bays we’ve visited.  We parked in Fortuna Bay within reach of two separate expeditions: Anchorage Bay, offering a hike to a land-terminating glacier; and Whistle Cove, whence a one-mile walk takes one to a colony of king penguins. “What? I thought. “More ‘king penguins? Can there be much added value in that?” Misguidedly thought, as it turns out.

The two landing sites had significantly different distances for the Zodiacs to cover – Anchorage Bay was close by, Whistle Cove a longer ride.  We were headed for the former, and there was a bit of a wait for the next bus to take us along; it looked like the steward helping us on to the Zodiac had to flag down a passing taxi.

We arrived to a desultory reception committee from the local wildlife.

There were a few fur seals on the beach, but the life there was mainly penguins, mostly king penguins, which are very handsome creatures.

They quite often stand in groups of three, something we noted a lot during the course of the day. From their behaviours (I have video, of course), we guess that the third in a group seems often to be a gooseberry, trying to muscle in on the action.

As well as these little groupings, some penguins seemed very curious as to what had just arrived.

The glacier appears to be relatively close.

This is a false perspective; when you breast the rise above, you are faced with a veritable Serengeti of mainly fur seals.

They are all young, some very young, and not particularly habituated to human contact – we were indeed fortunate to be able to land here today; not many people get that privilege, apparently.  The team had mapped out a route for us with red poles, taking the path of least disturbance to the wildlife, but still one would quite often get rushed by a pup; if very young, one could simply ignore it, but some of the larger ones required you to face it off by clapping and raising your arms to make you appear bigger and less rewarding as a target.  There was also the occasional penguin, and sometimes the seal pups would try to play with them, in which case they often got short shrift and sharp beaks.

Once across the Serengeti, onto an expanse of rocky terminal moraine, there was no wildlife, but some great landscapery.

As we found at Shingle Cove (goodness me, less than a week ago!), there were some very varied colours among the stones.

We returned to the beach and wandered along it for a while.  There was a lot of wildlife activity – young fur seals frolicking in the surf, and penguins coming and going; all excellent video content – but little of new interest to talk about in these pages.

Particularly in the overall context of the day; the afternoon was exceedingly – and for me, surprisingly – content-rich, even though it really only involved king penguins.

After lunch, then, we took the longer Zodiac ride to Whistle Cove. From the landing area, it’s about a mile, mainly over grass, to the king penguin colony, and you pass some nice landscape.

You can see the colony from a distance

and, at “only” 7,000 breeding pairs, it’s not as large as the one we saw at St. Andrews Bay.  But there, we weren’t allowed to land; here, we could get really very close, and could get some sense of how densely packed the colony is.

King penguins are, we’re told, so named because when they were discovered they were the largest penguins yet seen.  This gave a tiny problem when an even larger species was discovered; that species, though, spends its time in more central, less accessible parts of Antarctica, and so are very rarely seen by punters like us from Hondius. However, they’re larger than king penguins, which is why they’re called emperor penguins.  Emperors, apparently, trump royalty. Really?

Having been told we had over two and a half hours at Whistle Cove, I had been expecting to get rather bored; after all, seen one king penguin, seen ‘em all, yes?

No.

Being so close to the sight, smell and extraordinary sound of the colony was a completely different experience from viewing them from a Zodiac. It was rewarding to start watching for behaviour patterns and other characteristics, rather than just getting nice photos of penguins.  Those were, of course, easy,

(another group of three, see?) but there was a lot else going on. Jane, particularly, was good at spotting points of interest within the colony and alerting me to them so I could take a look and some photos.

We had to be very careful, for example, because some of the penguins were incubating eggs.

These two were particularly charming; they each have an egg in their special brood pouch and balanced on their feet as they sit on their heels – and they’re fast asleep as they incubate the precious egg.

Further round the colony, we could see some chicks, which have such different plumage that at first they were thought to be a different species.  Some are nearly as large as their parents

but the younger ones are smaller and engagingly dumpy.

Jane even spotted an egg; it was such a warm day that the parent will actually release the egg from its pouch to stop it overheating.  It takes patience to wait and spot, but eventually I managed to get a shot of one, too,

as well as catching the parent checking the egg and coaxing it back into the pouch.

Jane also alerted me to some chick feeding activity.  A chick will pester a parent for food,

and eventually will get it, from the store that the parent has managed to accumulate in a special pouch in its craw.

The chick may take more than a year to fledge so king penguins mostly breed biennially. As a result there are incubating eggs alongside newly-hatched and last year’s chicks side by side in a continuously occupied colony. However young need to be fat enough by April to survive the winter when food is very scarce; not all those emerging from the eggs we saw will have time to reach that point.

We also spotted an adult in the late stages of moulting.

Re-growing your entire set of feathers is a very energy-hungry process, so moulting penguins will stay as immobile as possible while the process completes – until moulting has finished, they are not waterproof and so cannot enter the sea to get food.

Nature being what it is, not everything is fine and wonderful.

This is a skua, feeding upon the corpse of a penguin, whilst others wander around, seemingly unaffected by the scene.

Just beside the penguin colony was a group of another local bird, the South Georgia pintail,

with its distinctive yellow bill.

And Jane caught a picture of a South Georgia pipit, which one could just hear singing above the racket of the penguins.

Finally, on the way back to the landing area after an absorbing couple of hours, we saw another leucistic fur seal, obviously very sleepy but equally in need of a good scratch.

So ended an excellent day’s expeditioning – tiring, but rewarding.  We’ve been astonishingly lucky with the weather, which has enabled great progress, granting us four days on South Georgia and still allowing an extra day “in the back pocket” for expeditions in the Falkland Islands, our next port of call.  The weather can be capricious and so that extra day might come in handy in case it’s difficult to get off the ship after we arrive.

Which is in two and a half days.  There will be no scenery now until Saturday, when I believe we’ll be putting into Stanley, all other things being equal.  So, there are two “sea days”, at least one of which will allow some rest and recuperation (and laundry!) after several days of relentless expeditioning.  There may be some wildlife visible from the ship – who knows? We can be sure there will be interesting lectures to educate us more about the area, its geography, oceanography and wildlife, so we still have a great deal to look forward to, even without leaving the ship.