Ho Hum.

I have made the decision that I really need to get back into this blogging malarkey. Its been a hectic 12 months, but hopefully some of that should be dying off and I should have some free evenings again.

That job I wasn't sure I wanted - I took it, and we are even looking at buying a house at the moment (though a major issue is the fact that I am the crappest negotiator ever to grace this earth).

I thought that in order to get hings going again I would have delve into my Flickr account for any photos which I have stashed away and could use. Then I had a minor heart attack when I found out all of my photos were missing! Thank god it was just my account expiring and I can recover them - otherwise I may have cried.

Here's one of the boys standing on the top of a via ferrata route we did in the Dolomites in May. A little too dark to see faces, but still I like it:



Hopefully I will be around a little more from now on!

Fair Verona

During our may trip to Lake Garda in Italy, we made a day getaway to the infamous city of Verona full of visions of glorious balconies. Verona itself is beautiful, full of some fantastic architecture - not to mention the best pizzeria I have ever been to.

The balcony itself was a bit confusing for me. I admit I am not an expert in Shakespearean literature, however I was under the impression that that the play was a fiction, and not in fact, a fact. 

Not the way these guys were selling it - the tour guides and the placards were there preaching to the amassed throng of tourists about the various comings and goings of the descendants of the Capulet family over the centuries?! You mean the Capulets - that made up family? I mused.

I was further confused over the logistics of the whole scenario, in that in order to climb into the courtyard, one would have to climb onto the roof of one of the smaller buildings. Not a problem in itself - but on surmounting said roof, surely it would be far more simple to just climb onto the balcony (around 4 ft higher than the roof) rather than down into the courtyard where young Romeo would have to make a 20ft ascent up a sheer wall to Juliets arms. It just didn't make sense to me.

On our trip we visited some stately gardens which we walked through with our friends. Lucy and I took a walk up one of the steep banks at the rear of the garden, and I spotted The Nurse and his girlfriend in such a situation as I thought would make a nice photograph. I probably took 10 photos of this type from various angles. I was quietly smug because I thought I had a good shot.

It was only afterwards, that I realised that I had invaded one of the most private moments a person could have. For this shot was taken at almost the precise moment that the Nurse offered a proposal to his girlfriend - and she had accepted!

So belated congratulations and as my engagement present have this photo of your engagement to keep.

I have also landed myself the duty of joint best man, so stag-do here I come!

For those who are bored and have 10 minutes to spare

A video I made of our Australia and New Zealand trip while waiting for Lucy to recover from a hangover. For some reason its very bad quality when uploaded.

Bagara

This one I will imaginatively entitle "Lucy with Sandcastle". Taken in a little town called Bagara near Bundaberg.

We didn't build the sandcastle, we just benefitted from somebody else's hard work.

The Whitsundays

Another day, another place. We went to the Whitsundays (I believe named after the prolific blogger Whit, who is fond of his Sundays) which were all beautiful silica sands and clear blue waters ... blah, blah.

No more of my desolate skylines today. While in the Whitsundays we spied this little fellah.

While he was no Komodo dragon, this little fellah did cause much amusement for some of my fellow tourists many of whom were sat huddled up on their seats.

Clairview

On one particularly mammoth stretch of the Bruce Highway we chose a random little group of houses to stop in and change over driving responsibilities. We were glad we did, for although there was nothing really in the small hamlet of Clairview, we rounded the corner to see some spectacular views of some mud flats at sunset. A perfect photography opportunity:

This one is my favourite:

I also like this one (mildly altered):

For some reason we couldn't help thinking of the film 'the Never Ending Story' (the cause of a lot of my childhood nightmares).

You will notice that many of my photographs has a dark and desolate theme to them! I am not sure whether this is because of my mood, or because it pretty much didn't stop raining for our entire time in Queensland!

Rainbow Beach

We have returned from our little travels and have seen quite a bit, but I will save the detail for future posts (I can hear the excitement from here).

This week will be the week of administration for me, before my return. However, I think I will find enough time each day to post up some of my exciting holiday snaps each day, you lucky, lucky people.

It will be great, just like that times you had over at your uncle John's where you spent hours looking at his slideshow of the family holiday in Skegness and listening to tales of bingo halls and donkey rides! 

Rainbow beach about 3.5 hours north of Brisbane was our first overnight stop in the 'Dwarf'. It rained mostly, but in between the rain (and before we had to get some helpful Tazmanians to haul us out of the sand with their 4x4) we managed to get a brief reprive and took a little run down the beach.

Rainbow beach is called so because of the interesting colours in the sand. I managed to get some good shots of clouds gathering and forming interesting reflections in the shallow waves.

It was pretty sweet waking up to this in the morning...

This is a picture

This is a picture of my friends.

More specifically, this is a picture of my friends on a sun kissed beach in Porto (Portugal).

More specifically still, this is a picture of my friends on a sun kissed beach in Porto (Portugal) last week each wearing t-shirts with pictures of my face on them (which were given by Lucy on my UK leaving do).

Today I am homesick.

ETL (Estimated Time Until Lucy) - 34 Days

Its Lucy's birthday today.

Actually its not really Lucy's birthday yet, its about three in the morning for her, and as far as I know could be on a Saturday night out on the town with her friends. But it is her birthday for me, for I am 000's of miles away on the other side of the planet - where everything is upside-down and the time is 9 hours wrong.

But Lucy has finally booked her plane ticket out to Sydney, and the countdown to her arrival can begin with little over a month to go. It seems like a blooming long time, but then we will have effectively been apart for 8 months which has been pretty hard. And lets face it, with that amount of time to spare, I should really be able to get around to cleaning the toilet before she arrives.

So today as I am feeling a little bored and with nothing exciting to think about - I am writing one of the usual posts that I do when I have nothing excited to write home about: A dig into some of my old favourite photographs....

This was taken in the seaside city of Split in Croatia in 2006 I think. It was taken with my camera phone (not being a camera snob). 

You can just imagine what she was thinking about, the thousands of years of history, the wars, the celebrations that had gone into those beautiful ancient walls in Split's inner city....

... actually it was staged. I asked her to look vacant and stare up at the walls...

In other news, I put my bike helmet on yesterday and a cockroach fell out of it and ran down my back. Time to hoover the carpet methinks.

Update: for some reason blogger says it is Saturday when it is Sunday. I got excited at the prospect of an extra day off when I read it.

Perama Island

More photographs from the RCWR Archive...

I took this photograph on Perama Island (off the coasts of Lombok and Sumbawa in Indonesia taken in November 2007). It makes me smile for a number of reasons. Firstly because my friend The City Worker was running around trying to get some good photos, and I got the best one of the lot, and secondly because It was the first stop off in a highly memorable 5 day boat trip to Komodo Island.

Perama was actually the name of the tour company who had commandeered the small island (really just a sand bank) for sitting around singing 80's cheesy rock songs, and taking part in their coral reef repair program.

The really depressing thing about visiting this part of Indonesia was the state of reefs. Whilst snorkeling we saw vast craters in the reef floor where it had fallen victim to certain (minority of) fishermen who still participated in 'reef bombing'. That is, blowing up the coral reef and collecting the dead fish as they float to the top. Not a sustainable livelihood.

Much of the rest of the reef hadn't been bombed, but was heavily bleached - apparently due to changes in climate over the last couple of years killing off the coral, which is extremely sensitive to climatic changes. Those reefs that the locals said had the best snorkeling, were probably 50% bleached. The locals were almost completely unaware of this thing we call climate change and the effect it may have on their means of making a living. It was quite a sad moment for me.

Biarro Alto

Another periodic look at one of my most memorable photos over the last few years (although I must confess - I didn't take this one)...

This photo was taken by the Sergeant Major on the steep slope up to the Biarro Alto (I took this to mean 'beer district' but apparently it actually means 'high district') in the Portugese capital of Lisbon. 

The cast were (I think) right to left: The Artist, myself, The Nurse, The City Worker, and the Lawyer.

There were some good times had at the top of this hill, including playing street football with a couple of Brazilian teenagers (who put us seriously to shame!), watching Portugal play in the World Cup in the bars during the day, drinking Sangria all night, and people milling around in the streets until sunrise.

One of my friends 'The Artist' probably has some more vivid memories than most of this street. This street was the precise street that he got mugged. 

The Artist doesn't have much luck when it comes tour our little holidays - in fact you might have heard me mention The Artists close encounter with a moped in Slovenia(a year earlier). The year we went to Lisbon was no different. 

He had decided to walk home early on the Sunday (our last night) and was heading down the hill when he was confronted by a couple of locals with knives. He did what any sensible person would do ... he ran for it. Unfortunately as it turned out, his assailants ran quicker. This surprised us  - as to us, the Artist was the fastest man alive. We used him as a kind of 'Forrest Gump' during our interform rugby years. I guess time had taken its toll.

He found himself bereft of his mobile phone and wallet (anyone who knows The Artist would realise that the value of those items was probably a princeley 53p). And for some reason became exceptionally annoyed when (after spending the entire evening in the police station), we rolled back into the hostel room after an outrageous nights partying (including persuading a number of dancers in a club to do the world cup Peter Crouch robot dance) and didn't believe that he had actually been mugged.

The next year, the Artist was pickpocketed in Valencia - but that is a different story...

A Self Portrait(s)

A Valentines Day special of "photographs that make me smile"

I am not as a rule a big believer in Valentines Day. But when your Valentine is on the other side of the planet you have to make a concerted effort, if only for piece of mind. I have just got off the phone (or webcam) to Lucy who received my flowers and present this morning which earned me a decent amount of brownie points. Enough brownie points for at least 'two late nights at the pub', one 'forgetting to call' incident and a whole raft of 'leaving the toilet seat up's.

The problem is that I am still in brownie point debt due to one 'relocating to the other side of the planet' incident which will take me some time to work off!

Usually Lucy and I skip the overpriced restaurants on valentines day and wait until the weekend for a day getaway. We go to Leeds train station and just board the train to wherever we fancy and spend the day perusing shops and drinking in bars before getting the last train home. Over the last few years we have been to Harrogate, York and Manchester on our little jaunts. Unfortunately we wont be able to do that this year.

The photos above are part of a random selection that I had printed for Lucy for today as a log of Lucy's running obsession with holding the camera out and taking photos of us both (although I think that I was holding the camera in at least two of those).

We have had some brilliant times together, some of the above photos were taken in Croatia, in Spain, and in Sydney. I echo the sentiment of  Lucy's card to me, that 'I can't wait to spend the rest of my life having an adventure together' (puke)

Thats what you get for writing a post whilst listening to Jack Johnson 

A Group Portrait

Due to the lack of any real news, I am launching a new regular feature looking at some of the most memorable photos I have taken over the last few years...

Picture the scene ... its Christmas Day and I am just getting out of bed early in the morning to sunshine over the harbour, the glorious Sydney sunshine pouring in through the windows. Lucy is mid-way through her month long visit and a usual is hard to wake up (despite my best attempts). At this point I am missing home somewhat, its the first real Christmas I have spent away from my family and friends and I have woken to an extremely quiet flat.

I switch on my Mac and load up skype to see what is going on and see that my friend The Sergeant Major is online as we had pre-arranged. I called him up and an image popped up on my screen ... a big group of my mates somewhere in Yorkshire, already pretty beered up and on their way out for our annual Christmas Eve celebrations. 

They had projected me onto the wall at the Sergeant Major's house and we proceeded to have the most bizzare long range conversation, including a quick game of round the world flip-flop tennis (I will have to explain the rules to this someday). I was shouting out loud by the end of it, until Lucy politely reminded me that we live in a block of flats with a bunch of OAPs and it was 7am on Christmas Day morning.

This photo is one taken of my computer screen of the larger part of the gang - from left to right: 

The Artist;

The Rock Star; 

The City Worker; 

The Nurse; and 

The Sergeant Major

This photo makes me remember that it doesn't matter where you are in the world, its the people that you keep around you that will make you happy (puke).

This is what you get for writing a post whilst listening to Radiohead!