The first experience of Xian is an airport very similar in design to Pudong International, if not quite the same scale. We’re collected by our local guide Cynthia, and led to our people mover for the hour-long drive into Xian. On a vast plain, bisected by a number of lowflowing rivers, Xian presents as an unremarkable and quite unattractive metropolis…
Category: Travel
Shanghai
The first-time visitor to Shanghai can be overwhelmed by the sheer scale and energy of China’s largest city, also one of the world’s ten largest. With a population touching 14 million occupying an area roughly twice the size of greater Melbourne, the inner urban core is a network of highrise apartments, shopping malls and parks inter-connected by a labyrinth of…
Storming the Celebrity Solstice
Each June and December I join a circle of friends to celebrate the turning of the seasons for a ritual feasting and overindulgence in wine; I’m referring, of course, to the winter and summer solstice. Summer Solstice this December though, was just a tad different. This year was a get-together with 2850 of our closest chums, including around 1700 travel…
Cuzco Museum of Pre-Columbian Art – Day 9
It’s a Cuzco Saturday morning; crisp, bright and sunny. The hotel breakfast made exceptionally palatable with the online news that Collingwood had given Geelong FC a thorough shellacking at the MCG on Friday night, Melbourne time. We’re an odd couple; I’m a ‘Pie’man and Mitch a ‘Cat’woman, so at least twice a year there’s a minor domestic shitfight at our…
Cuzco
We’re in Cuzco (Cusco) and it’s the eighth day of our ramble along Peru’s famous Gringo Trail. To recap, our journey commenced in Lima before flying, via Cuzco, to Puerto Maldonado and 2 nights in Reserva Amazonica in the headwaters of the Amazon River. We then flew back to Cuzco and, leaving our heavy baggage in storage, were immediately swept…
Mammoth problems in the high Sierra
Two trips to the Sierra Nevadas fifteen years apart prove that the core message expressed in Split Enz’s refrain “history never repeats” is a load of crap. The Sierra last millenium One January, in the fag-end years of the last century, then-partner Michelle, and long-time mate Ding and I left the fleshpots of Las Vegas and set a course for San Francisco.…