Tag Archives: Landscapes

Watson for today, then?

3 Replies

Friday 20 September 2024 – Acting on a suggestion from the friends we met last night, we decided that Watsons Bay would be a good destination for an excursion, particularly since the weather outlook was so good – sunshine and temperatures in the mid-20s.

So we headed for the ferry and queued up

to get on to F9 on the B side of Wharf 2. I’ve been pretty impressed with the way the public transport available around Sydney is organised. There’s no need to buy tickets; one can simply “tap on” and “tap off” using a credit card or, in my case, my phone. The trains are double-decker, the ferries seem to be very competently operated and the services have suited us very well on our short stay here. The ferry ride out of Circular Quay offers, unsurprisingly, some great views of the Sydney skyline

North Sydney

and, of course, its iconic structures.

Jane noticed that there were people climbing the bridge,

something that she and I did when we were here last, in 2001. Nice to see it’s still going; and they’ve added the aboriginal flag at the top of the bridge since our last visit, unless I’m mistaken.
Many ships leaving Circular Quay will pass a Martello Tower built on a small island:

Fort Denison, a former military site which is the most complete Martello Tower in the world and has been a museum, tourist attraction, restaurant, and popular location for wedding receptions and corporate events. It’s now closed for conservation work, apparently.
Watsons Bay is an attractive place

with a great view back of the Sydney skyline.

One of Sydney’s great attractions is a restaurant, Doyles, known for its seafood generally and its fish’n’chips specifically. The Watsons Bay location

is the original one, dating from 1885. Another attraction is the heritage trail which starts at Camp Cove (a place, not an over-theatrical chap) and leads up to South Head, the southern jaw of the mouth of Sydney Harbour. It’s a walk. So we went for it. Obviously. It takes you past some of the nice houses there,

and behind a cannon, which is pointing, for some reason, back at Sydney.

The furthest point of the trail, about a kilometre from the start, is Hornby Lighthouse

with the old lighthouse keeper’s cottages beside it.

One can also see how narrow the gap is that leads into Sydney Harbour. North Head – the upper jaw – is really quite close.

The lighthouse is a good, photogenic location. It’s therefore catnip for today’s generations of phone camera wielders (mainly, today, from the far east),

who seem to find it intolerable should a photo not include themselves. In many cases, quite an inordinate amount of time is spent organising poses (e.g. staring (nautically? pretentiously?) into the distance or pointing at the top of the lighthouse as if surprised to see that it has one). This specific posing seems to be a cultural thing among oriental tourists, and I wonder what will become of all of these images. Instagram, I suppose; the idea is that other people should see the photos. I doubt that, once posted online, the images will ever be seen again by their originators.

Grumpy? Me? Bloody right.

We had wanted to continue our walk down the other side of South Head rather than just completing the heritage trail loop. Trouble is, there’s a fucking great military establishment in the way, HMAS Watson,

and they clearly take a dim view of people wandering past their buildings. So, back towards Camp Cove it was,

which at least gave us the chance to take a coffee stop. From there, we cut across to the other side of the head. There’s clearly a military link here, since (as well as the naval base there) the road passed an armoury, an “Officers Quarters” building

and what we think were once gun emplacements.

There was some wildlife action along the way: Jane spotted a kookaburra

which really was sitting in an old gum tree; a couple of remarkable ants nests;

an engaging pair of blue wrens (male and female)

and a bunch of sulphur-crested cockatoos,

who were pretending to be sea birds perching on the cliffs and

inspecting tourists for food value.

We also spotted this dove

which, coincidentally, is a Spotted Dove.

The wrens and the cockatoos were at Gap Bluff, which has a small National Park area and also provides a couple of great cliff views.

There’s a historical memorial there, too;

the anchor belonged to a ship, the Dunbar which was wrecked on nearby rocks

in August 1857. Only one of the 122 aboard survived and the anchor was recovered some 50 years later and placed as a memorial to the others. The wreck was the catalyst for the creation of the Hornby Lighthouse and its survivor, one John James, went on to become the lighthouse keeper there.

Further along from Gap Bluff is the Watsons Bay Signal Station,

first established in1790; a permanent guard would watch out for arriving ships, raising a flag both to give them a sign of the new location of the settlement, and to notify the colony of the imminent arrival of the long awaited ships. Amazingly, the station has remained in permanent use from that date and has thus maintained its role for over two centuries, and from the same building for most of that time.

Near it is a lighthouse, the South Head Upper Light, also called the Macquarie Lighthouse.

Its site is the longest serving lighthouse site in Australia, with some kind of navigational aid in place since 1791 (sadly not sufficiently effective to save the Dunbar, though). The lighthouse shown above was completed in 1883 and is still fully operational. Next to it is the lighthouse keeper’s cottage

and in front of it, complementing the formal informational plaque on the lawns, is a much more informal tribute.

One could have carried on walking the cliff path, but we turned back to the bay to catch the ferry

back to Circular Quay, whence we walked towards the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden. On Circular Quay there are some plaques in the ground celebrating well-known Australians; we recognised a couple

and I suppose this one

must be the one originally dedicated to Rolf Harris.

The Botanic Garden is a large, pleasant park

with some remarkable trees

The tallest palm tree I’ve ever seen

and a few quirky sculptures.

My main objective was to get Mrs. Macquarie point and something called Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. This Macquarie name keeps cropping up. Major General Lachlan Macquarie (born on the island of Ulva off the coast of the Isle of Mull in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. Macquarie served as the fifth Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social, economic, and architectural development of the colony. He is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century, hence the ubiquity of the Macquarie name.

He was married, as we can infer from the naming of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair,

an exposed sandstone rock cut (by convicts in 1810) into the shape of a bench. Folklore has it that Elizabeth Macquarie used to sit on the rock and watch for ships from Great Britain sailing into the harbour. She was known to visit the area and sit enjoying the panoramic views of the harbour. Above the chair is a stone inscription referring to Mrs Macquarie’s Road. That road was built, on the instruction of Governor Macquarie, between 1813 and 1818, and ran from the original Government House to Mrs Macquarie’s Point.

By this stage we were getting a trifle foot- and back-sore, so decided to return to the hotel. We diverted for a quick look into The Calyx,

to see if it would sell us some beer. Sadly, the café is just a café, and coffee wasn’t going to cut it for us, so I took a couple of valedictory photos

and we headed back to the hotel, past the Conservatorium of Music, which has the least music-related architecture I think I’ve ever seen.

Thus ended a very pleasant day’s outing; ample justification for a glass of something cold and a bite to eat. Before we retired for the night, for amusement, I set a timelapse going to cover the comings and goings of the ferries at Circular Quay, which we can see from our hotel room. I hope you find it as engaging as I do.

Tomorrow we leave the city proper to spend a few days with friends who live to the north of Sydney. I have no idea what this means in terms of photos and verbiage on these pages; you’ll just have to keep an eye out to see for yourself, won’t you?

Ayers and Graces

6 Replies

Sunday August 25 2024 – Before we could get to today’s keenly-awaited excursion, we had to deal with the non-trivial matters of getting up, showered and dressed within the confines of our small cabin. Although it required some fairly precise choreography between the two of us in order not to be bumping into each other all the time, it was (for me, at least) much less awkward than I had been fearing.  The bathroom area in our little cabin is small, but very well-organised, and doing the morning’s ablutions was remarkably trouble-free. I was also quite surprised to have slept reasonably well; my last experience on a sleeper was from London to Edinburgh and it was ghastly – noisy, uneven and uncomfortable. The Ghan was rather noisy at times – there was what felt like shunting done during the night, leading to lots of creaking and groaning, some of it on my part; and it was accompanied by a certain amount of lurching (the carriage, not me), but throughout all that we both managed to grab a reasonable amount of sleep.

We got a good breakfast, swiftly and competently served by the crew, who really work hard and do a good job; our section manager was a lass called Esther, who, as well as helping dish out the meals, was excellent at ensuring that we knew where we had to be and when, and that we had the right bits of identification card on our “Look At Me, I’m A Tourist!” lanyards.

I have had a great and abiding love of aerial photography, having had the excitement of my first views from an aeroplane at the age of nine. (Hence, on this trip I’ve been lugging around with me a drone which I haven’t really had a chance to use yet.) This love of aerial photography means that today’s excursion is one which I’ve been looking forward to with considerable excitement. First, we had to get to Alice Springs (or Mparntwe, as it’s known to its indigenous owners), through countryside of a type which was really rather familiar by now – scrubby and burnt in places.

At about 11.30am we pulled in,

and, as is standard in large-scale tourist activities everywhere, were sorted into buses to take passengers onward to their various activities for the day. Our bus was driven by the usual bluff Australian chap, in this case called Gerry, who was good enough to take us up to a viewpoint so we could take in A Town Called Alice (see what I did there?).

The viewpoint has a complicated aboriginal name

but we know it as Anzac Hill, which leads to the War Memorial.

On the way up, signs remind visitors of the many contributions to the war efforts of the 20th and 21st centuries made by solders from Australia and New Zealand, from WWI through to Iraq.

The lookout offers a great set of views over Alice Springs.

The gap above is where the road south leads out of town. This is the Stuart Highway, the longest road in Australia, which has been with us since Darwin and will still be with us after some 2,700km as we reach Port Augusta, just 300km short of Adelaide, the ultimate destination of this train ride.

Apparently, property prices in Alice are very high despite its rather remote location. This is because it can’t expand any further without infringing on indigenous land or cattle stations.

On the way down from the lookout, the backs of the commemorative signs are also decorated with reminders of the various conflicts.

Gerry also drove us around Alice to get a view of the place. It’s unremarkable  – just this town, you know? – and it’s kind of difficult to capture the feel of a place from a moving coach, but it does have (at least) a couple of striking murals.

Slightly frustratingly (because I wanted to get on with the day’s main activity), we had to have lunch first; this was served to the Ghan’s passengers at a place called Madigans.

It’s worth mentioning that the stewards from the train were part of the service, so their responsibilities carry on even off the train; they really do earn their corn.

And then – at last! – we were off on our excursion proper.  Here is a clue as to what we were about to do.

It’s a Cessna 208 Super Caravan, an aeroplane with which we first became familiar in Madagascar as we flew north to Anjajavy. Two of these aircraft awaited the group of 12 undertaking today’s flights, and there was a ripple of amusement as one lady, who was maybe one egg short of a clutch, couldn’t get to grips with the idea of a caravan being anything other than something you go camping in.

It was interesting to see the GABA (Great Australian Bugger All) from above,

though the landscape was actually very varied and interesting.

It included Pine Gap, the local US spy base near Alice,

and a not-inconsiderable bush fire

whose smoke affected the view across some salt flats.

After about an hour in the air, though, we caught the first sight of the reason we’d undertaken this 90-minute flight.

Yes, there it is, top right.

Uluru, or Ayers Rock in the old language. The pilot made sure that each side of the plane had a good view of this remarkable lump of masonry, which has a variety of aspects, depending on the angle of view.

It is, of course, an iconic part of the Australian landscape, and a considerable tourist magnet, as shown by the size of the local airstrip

and the number and variety of accommodation opportunities in the vicinity, such as this – another one which looks suspiciously like camping.

What we hadn’t known about beforehand was another remarkable rock formation quite close by Uluru, which we also flew by for a look –

The Olgas, or Kata Tjuṯa in the local indigenous language. There are 36 domes in this extraordinary formation.

The day’s aerial excitement wasn’t over, either. We landed at Ayers Rock airport to refuel and took off once again

to fly back to Alice, but we took a slightly different route back, over another fantastic formation called King’s Canyon – another local landmark which we hadn’t known about before today.

Apparently, one can go walking around the canyon, which sounds like a very interesting way of passing a morning.

By this time, the sun was going down, and the angle of the light really highlighted the considerable amount of geology that goes on in the area.

Among all of this huge landscape, one could spot the occasional outpost of civilisation

and looking at it in its greater context, one could only wonder

Why? Why there? What’s going on?

The ride back was actually more interesting than the ride out, but eventually it was time to land back at Alice

and be taken to our evening meal, which was at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, the original site of the first European settlement in central Australia, one of twelve stations along the Overland Telegraph Line.

It was billed as “dinner under the stars”

which was fine in theory, but somewhat overshadowed by the clouds which cropped up and made seeing the stars a bit tricky.  A chap called Tom tried to show us some of the local astral geography, but it required a certain feat of imagination to get much out of his undoubtedly enthusiastic efforts. There was also the possibility of a camel ride

and a band entertained us just loudly enough to make conversation difficult,

so we took the opportunity of the first bus back to the train in order take a rest after a memorable day. I know that seeing Uluru is something that practically every tourist visiting Australia will do, but our view of it today was a great pleasure; and to see the other formations in the area was, if anything, even more exciting.

We have one more day on the train, or, more accurately, largely off the train; tomorrow we spend much of the day visiting a place called Coober Pedy where life is largely underground for a variety of reasons. This is an intriguing prospect and one I hope you’ll return to these pages to find out more about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A scramble in Isalo National Park

5 Replies

Saturday 15 June 2024 – Le Jardin du Roy is very nicely put together. The rooms are spacious and comfortable; my main gripe is that there’s not enough light to see what you’re doing.  I suppose that this is a consequence of running from solar power and/or a generator, but it makes finding things (e.g. a black laptop on a dark surface in an underlit room) very frustrating. The internet availability was pretty poor, too, but the food was good and the service very agreeable.

Its buildings were in very lovely stonework,

and whoever designed or crafted it put several “hidden” things among the stones. At a basic level, you could find things like this star among the stones.

but there were more complicated creations as well.

Two lemurs and a palm tree

A nativity scene in our room

The day dawned, as I imagine is a regular pattern at this time of year (beginning of the Malagasy winter), cool and misty.

Our mission for the day was to explore Isalo National Park, so we headed to town (Ranohira) and Kenny (a) introduced us to our guide, José and (b) got tickets for the National Park , which, at 815 square kilometres, is pretty substantial. It was created in 1962, and is mainly dry, deciduous forest, based on sandstone landscapes, which means there has been plenty of erosion from wind and rain, creating rocky outcrops, plateaux and canyons up to 200m deep.

Our main objective for the day was to walk along one of these canyons.

After a short drive, we started our hike, for it definitely wasn’t a walk in the park, as you’ll see as you read further.

The scenery was quite spectacular with the sandstone cliffs we’d seen elsewhere.

 

We were headed alongside a river, as one could tell from the aquatic bamboo plants we could see.

The path started off easy enough

and, as happens so often, we started off with José explaining all sorts of non-wildlife stuff, such as: the difference between young Pandanus palms (single stem, thicker leaves, in the foreground) and older Pandanus (branched, leaves thinner, in middle and background);

and the iron pipe leading water to the town, some 6km away.

We did see some of the local fauna:

A butterfly – sorry, don’t know which sort
A red dragonfly, nothing to do with Hannibal Lecter
Sleepy Scops Owl
Sleepy Scops Owl

Darwin’s Bark Spider and its web

Madagascan White-Eye

I was dead chuffed to have nailed the image above, as the birds that we occasionally saw around us were exceedingly skillful at detecting the instant before a camera shutter is pressed and buggering off.

We soon reached a picnic area

where some lads were starting the preparation of a cooked lunch (what is it with men and outdoor cooking?) for those who had booked it (we’d chickened out, or rather cheesed out, and ordered a packed lunch to protect our, but particularly my, digestive systems). Here, we saw a Red-fronted Brown Lemur

who was very cute, but actually had a very sad back story.  She had got separated from her family group during a bush fire, and had failed to find them again; so she was lost and solitary. She hung around the picnic area trying to steal food – of course everyone was told not to feed her – and she must have been very lonely.

José also found us a White-browed Owl

but the real excitement was seeing a Ground Boa crossing the trail just in front of us.

We stayed very still, hardly daring to breathe, so that it carried on its way into the forest. It was about a metre and a half long.

The walk continued alongside the river into the canyon, which was the main objective of the day’s hike.

and we were treated to a succession of great views as we scrambled over the rocks (it was a real scramble in places,

and we were both grateful for the sticks we’d brought with us from Ranomafana).

Some of the trail had been prepared to make it easier for the punters

and José told us about what happens during the rainy season, when the water level rises several metres.  Some evidence of this could be seen in the trees that had been deposited among the boulders in the canyon.

We eventually reached a couple of pools: the Blue Pool

and the Black Pool (which had no illuminations)

where the trail basically ended.  So we took a rest while Jose and Kenny shot the breeze

and then headed back the way we came. There were a couple of encounters with the local fauna:

Dragonfly

Water beetles

And the colours of the stone were fascinating.

When we got back to the picnic area, we were lucky enough to see a group of Verreaux’s Sifakas.

They were very athletic, as ever, leaping from bough to bough, rather better than the Monty Python sheep, who, of course, tended not so much to fly as to plummet.

After our packed lunch, eaten amid the haunting scent of delicious food being cooked for the other picnickers,

we headed back to the car.  On the way, we passed a rock on which was perched what I heard Jose describe as a “snot bug”.  Eventually, we understood it was a Snout Bug, for fairly obvious reasons

though I suppose that if it caught a cold, then maybe Jose’s original description might have been the better one. We also saw (among the other, more orangey coloured ones) a butterfly with a beautiful blue hue.

That was it for the hike; the canyon was a lovely, if slightly tense, experience, and I was glad to have caught some video of the sifakas.

On the way back to the hotel, we passed a couple of very colourful local scenes.

We had an evening entertainment laid on – a short walk to watch the sunset. On the way, we were lucky enough to see a Hoopoe,

though I had the wrong lens on the camera for a truly good shot. It was still nice to see it. The hotel had laid on a resting place for us (which we laid on)

and a cocktail service

(with nibbles).  The scenery was striking in the setting sun

and the sunset itself was not bad,

(middle photo from a mobile phone; outer two from my Big Camera; shows that mobile phone cameras these days are pretty damn’good).

Actually, we got more striking colours looking behind us

but it was a nice way to finish off the day. The nibbles had been enough food for us, so we simply retired to our room and took no dinner. Since we were (we were told) the only residents at the hotel for that night, it must have meant an entire kitchen staff on duty for no purpose; but we’re at the start of the tourist season, so I guess the hotel must expect quiet times.

We leave the hotel tomorrow, rather early, as we continue our south-westerly journey to Toliara, on the coast.  We have a Thing To Do en route, which we hope will be interesting.  I’ll of course report, so please stick with these pages to find out what we got up to.