:-O
Korean photographer Ho-Yeol Ryu made this digital multiple exposure of planes taking off at Hannover, an airport in Germany.
It’s one of those project ideas that takes a lot of time but pays off in the end.
What is Malachite?
Malachite is a Copper carbonate - CuSO4 - often found together with Azurite - also a copper mineral but blue in colour
The Absence is over - back to real coffee and cake
Hello all two of my followers (me and the gold fish). I have been away from everything including my computer and my blog. I have been in Europe. I cruised from Budapest in Hungary to Amsterdam in The Netherlands via the Danube, Mein, Mein Canal and Rhine Rivers. What a trip. Worth doing for the food on board alone. More of that later.
On arrival back in Australia my casual employer asked me to relocate some campervans. We are at the height of our tourism season and the place is full of people from western Europe and elsewhere. Initially this was a driving job from Darwin to Cairns. 2800 kms and 3 day job - fine - got back from that in time to be asked to take a vehicle to Broome - 1900 kms in the other direction (to the west). From Broome another job to Perth - 2100 kms to the south - a quick flight to Adelaide and another vehicle from there to Darwin - 3,000 kms. All up 10,000 kms in 9 days. Had a bad case of white line fever on my return but an epic effort that I secretly enjoyed doing (once at least).
I last toured Europe in 1970/71 in a beat up Volkswagen 1500 beetle with a sun roof and a tent. This trip was on $5 a day as we were poor but eager. So some of what I experienced on this boat trip down the rivers (up in the case of the Danube) was a revisit. We also went on to Wurzburg in Bavaria at the end of the boat trip as our son is at university there. We used Wurzberg as a base to explore some of southern Germany and as I sat in the Hofbrauhaus in Munich in May 2010 quietly sipping a half litre of beer it was interesting to reflect that it was just short of 40 years since I sat in the very same place in somewhat different circumstances. Life’s richness never ceases to impress.
One lasting impression of the trip is that Europeans have little idea how to make good coffee and good cake. They are however beyond comparison when it comes to icecream, sausage and bread and I am also now a convert to sauerkraut. I will make more comment on this later and introduce you to the wonders of the soon to become famous, Missus Greenwood’s Chocolate Cake. Stand by.
The End of the Albany Adventure
And so the run home to Darwin from the Vic River was a mere 550 kms. Thus ended the adventure. We traversed the Continent twice - once from North to South down the middle via Alice Springs - and then from south to north essentially from Albany to Darwin via the North West of Western Australia and the Kimberlys. An epic journey of some 10,700 kms. what are the impressions? This is a vast land. It has 100’s of kms of seemingly uninteresting dry land stretching from horizon to horizon for hours and then it will suprise you if you bother to get out of your airconditioned vehicle and have a look around. Ask a question - what sort of vegitation can survive in 40 degree C heat and no water. The answer is lots - but they wont smack you in the eye with vivid colour and thousands of blooms swaying in the breeze. You will really have to look to find them but they are there along with many other wonders of this dry continent. Then one comes across water bodies like Lake Argyle which is the size of a couple of small European nations. It is a country of contrasts and I am very lucky to live in it.
