Home

Well, we finally got home after a total of 20 hours door to door. Feeling pretty knackered, a mountain of mail and messages which will have to wait. Neighbours Chris and Dave have looked after the house for us, so big thanks to them.

It's been a great trip, lots of good memories to store away. Whether we do any more long-haul is an open question. Right now it seems unlikely, but who knows?

Anyway, that's it. Thanks for reading.

Singapore

If it's Tuesday we must be in Singapore (again). Very hot (34°) and incredibly humid.

We went back to the Botanic Gardens, with the camera this time. We used the MRT (mass rapid transport) system which is excellent, cheap and clean. It's more like using the Gatwick monorail than the tube, in that you don't have platforms as such, but enter via sliding glass panels often in a shopping mall. There are notices posted forbidding the carriage of durian fruit, a delicacy locally, but said to smell of rotting flesh. Yummy!

The Botanic Gardens are divided into areas such as the foliage garden, the fragrant garden, the healing garden, and so on. (The healing garden carries a warning not to handle the plants as some are toxic; ironic, unless you wanted to be healed of living.) The showcase, and the only bit you have to pay for, is the Orchid Garden. This is really good. I've added a couple of pics to give the flavour, but they don't do it justice.

One of the most famous names in Singapore's history is Sir Stamford Raffles, who founded the city state of Singapore in 1819 as a base of the East India Company. It became a British Colonial possession iseven years later. Many roads are named after him, and we are, as I type this, in the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel. It's a haven of cool after the heat and humidity outside.They do a Singapore Sling here at a very reasonable/outrageous $45 (£22.50 at Worthing prices.) The other thing is that there is a bowl of peanuts on every table and you are encouraged to chuck the shells on the floor. The picture shows Mrs A in this very place.

Singapore is very bustly, constantly modernising. There are five new MRT lines being built. Every other road features a demolition/construction site. Most of the new builds seem to be luxury malls, obviously catering for the transient visitor, of whom there are 11million a year.

If it ever comes up in a quiz, Singapore has the world's lowest birth rate. You need 2.1 babies per family just to maintain current numbers; Singaporeans can manage only 0.79. Anyway........

........tomorrow we have a 14 hour flight back home. Not especially looking forward to that, but it will be good to get home and see everyone again.

Invisible platypus

Here in NSW the clocks went back last night, so we're now GMT+9. Nice of them to tell us.

Went to Taronga Zoo today. This is across the harbour and the quickest way is by ferry. Sydney has the world's biggest natural harbour, a very complicated shape, full of inlets, bays, points, and whatnot. Ferries are the favoured way of getting around.

The zoo itself has some African stuff - elephants, giraffes, gorillas, etc - but prides itself on specialising in native Australian animals. It certainly specialises in invisible ones: we especially liked the invisible orang Utan,  and the invisible platypus was a sight to see.

The picture (above) is of one of the few visible creatures, the echidna, which (pay attention, quizzers) apart from the platypus is the only egg-laying mammal.

We were having a sandwich at lunchtime when the heavens opened. It didn't look as though it was going to get any better so, reluctantly tearing ourselves away from the remaining invisible creatures, we headed back to the ferry. We hopped off at Circular Quay, as it wasn't raining there, but as soon as the ferry pulled out, it was. We caught the next boat back to Darling Harbour, and back to our room for a game of scrabble.

Tomorrow, we're off at the crack of dawn to Singapore.

Taxi

We're in Sydney now. We drove the 200-odd miles through varied NSW countryside. The satnav would have sent us up the coast road, but Trevor gave us a better route, going inland via Braidwood and Goulburn, and on to the Hume Highway (this goes 807km from Melbourne to Sydney, but we were only on it for 100 miles or so). 

Braidwood, or 'historic' Braidwood, as it calls itself, has an air of the Wild West about it. It's quite high up, too, and chilly. The road between there and Goulburn, you could have been in England, with sheep and cows grazing. Some alpaca too, I think. Actually, not really like England at all, then.

We dropped off the hire car at the airport and got a taxi to our hotel, at Darling Harbour. My spirits were not raised when the driver, who had possibly just stepped off the boat from Bangladesh, asked me if I knew the way. I explained, as politely as I could, how the driver/passenger relationship normally works, and silence ensued. We got there eventually.

Tomorrow, all being well, we're going to Taronga Zoo, which involves a series of ferries. Hope I'm not asked to navigate.

Oven news

Word has been received from Hungary that a replacement oven has been dispatched. Pending its arrival, pizza-and-movie night worked the same as last week, the pizzas cooking in shifts in our apartment, and being eaten at Glenda's, over the road.

The film tonight was Fantastic Mr Fox (excellent) and the Rugby League was Sydney City Roosters versus Canterbury Bulldogs. That's Canterbury the suburb of Sydney, not the one with the archbishop, by the way.

In the morning we drive up to Sydney to drop off the car and spend a couple of nights there.

More soon.

Bushrangers

Went to Nelligen today. This is a small town ( pop 228) on the banks of the Clyde river. There's not much there, just a few dwellings and a small trade servicing the tour boats on the Clyde which make a brief stop there. It's very picturesque.

In the 1860s, in the height of the gold rush, gangs of bushrangers operated in the area, robbing shipments of gold, and generally upsetting the peace. They were most likely Australian-born descendants of the original convicts brought here in the 1780s.

The most famous was Ned Kelly, but the most bloody were the Clarke Brothers, Thomas and John, who were said to be responsible for 36 robberies and 5 murders. They were cornered in 1866 by militia aided by Aboriginal trackers,

and chained to this tree (above) to await the boat to Sydney (there were no roads back then) where they were executed in June 1867. Their notoriety led to the passing of legislation authorising citizens to kill criminals on sight.

Australian attitudes to bush ranging were not all hostile. Some saw it as romantic, with a touch of Robin Hood about it. The Victoria state cricket team's adopted nickname of Bushrangers highlights this ambivalence. Anyway, that's today's lesson over. 

Saw an unusual sight this morning: an SUV towing a boat. Not very unusual, you might think? Well, the boat was fixed to the front of the car and was being pushed. Not entirely legal, I suspect, even here.

Geology

Jeez it's a hot one, as they say around here.

Went for a swim this morning, revelling in the fact that the temperature, 29°, was likely to be as warm as anything we get in Worthing this year. Plus it's autumn here.

I got talking to an elderly lady who was collecting stones off the beach, and she showed me some pumice she'd just picked up. Pumice is cooled lava, but there are no volcanos around here. She said that it had probably come from an undersea eruption off the North Island of New Zealand a couple of years ago. 

The next beach along, Denhams Beach, has cliffs at the back whose rock formations bear witness to some serious seismic activity in the past. There are striations going in all directions, with all sorts of different minerals in evidence, sandstone, iron, quartz, basalt, to name but a few, as well as sedimentary deposits (sands and grits) forced into any vacant spaces. According to Wikipedia this seismic activity occurred over the last 500 million years.

I've added a couple of pics (one of which is now my desktop background) to give you an idea. The orange is sandstone, the black iron, the paler colours quartz, and so on.

Australia is a paradise for mineral prospectors; practically the whole country is begging to be exploited for its precious metals and gems. Australia's richest woman Gina Rinehart, a piece of work by all accounts, is the most successful of the plunderers. As a harmless Guardian-reading herbivore, I'm naturally appalled. On the other hand, my iPad wouldn't work without gold, silver, copper, and rare earth metals like niobium, beryllium and neodymium, and then you wouldn't be able to read this. So, I take a nuanced view.