This week, I came back from two weeks in Hong Kong and China. My parents flew up from Melbourne to meet me for my first visit to the motherland.

We spent a week in the Sichuan province of China, visiting three of the six UNESCO world heritage sites in the province. One day, I will visit Beijing and Shanghai but on this trip, I saw China’s beautiful natural side.

Pearl Shoal Waterfall at Jiuzhaigou Valley.

A lake at Jiuzhaigou Valley. These lakes are amazing — they are crystal clear, even when the water is deep.

Tibetan flags at Juizhaigou Valley. About 1000 people live in the valley and most are Tibetan.

I paid 10 RMB (AUD1.70, £0.90) to dress up in traditional Tibetan dress.

Red panda at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. I used to think that red pandas were the plain cousin of black-and-white pandas. Now that I’ve seen them in person, I can assure you that they are very cute as well.

Pandas fighting — they don’t do kung fu, it’s more like basic whacking and thumping.

‘Get off me, you bully!’

We also saw baby pandas (one and three month old). The three month old panda was so cute, like a yawning flailing stuffed toy. The one month old panda was also cute, like a furry worm. We couldn’t take photos in the panda nursery.

At the sacred Buddhist mountain, Mount E’mei.

Incence at Mount E’mei.

China is full of bad English translations. I don’t know why. Even at our four and five star hotels and at UNESCO sites, it is clear that no one has employed the services of a fluent English speaker. I think this sign should say something like: ‘Value your life. Please do not climb over.’

Jinli Street in Chengdu has been an important market street for more than 2200 years. It was renovated a few years ago and is truly beautiful, everything stereotypically Chinese — except the prices, which have the stereotypical tourist premium. It is also uncharacteristically shiny and clean. Tourists flock here and are fleeced by pickpockets.

Puppets on Jinli Street.

At the end of Jinli Street, we watched Sichuan opera. This included the famous magic mask act, where the performers make lightning fast mask changes. The mask master was shaking my hand when he twitched and was suddenly wearing a different mask. I was astonished. I didn’t see it happen and he had been right in front of me.

I’ve been in Serbia for the past 10 days.

Looking out from Kalemedgan, the ancient fortress of Belgrade.

Cruising the Sava River, one of two rivers running through Belgrade. The other is the famous Danube River.

I ate ice cream five times. Serbian summers are hot.

Cathedral of St Sava, patron saint of the Serbian Orthodox church. This church has been in construction for a hundred years and it’s in the final decade for completion.

I flew back and got home at 6pm. Tomorrow morning, I am flying out to Hong Kong for work, then China for fun. I’ll be back in two weeks.

Everyone in the UK knows about the extreme perverseness of the difference between the cost of train tickets and plane tickets. I have flown to Paris for £20. A train ticket to Cardiff has costed me (well, my company) £200.

It makes it so hard for people to make the environmentally sane choice.

This cute video shows the problem well. I like it — Train v plane: fair fight?

Here are the last photos that I want to show you from my January trip to Lisbon. I really enjoyed this ‘Jewish flea market’. I don’t know what was Jewish about it but it was definitely flea-style, the trash and treasure kind of market.

I love the colours.

Here’s Joan. Mum will ‘tsk tsk’ about me wearing sneakers with a dress but it would have been impossible to walk in the pretty black shoes that I brought to wear for the work part of the week.

Mmm, sexy reading material. Wolfgang and Rosangela paid a Euro for the sauciest one of these graphic novels.

We took a 45 minute train trip out of Lisbon to a town called Sintra. Sintra is famous for its three castles, and we made it to none of them due to underplanning and over-relaxing.

This ‘house of cream tarts’ (queijadas) was in front of the train station.

We came across this door on our long climb up the mountain towards the Moorish Castle.

The first sign of the castle were these ruins.

We reached the Moorish Castle half an hour before it was to close. We decided to save ourselves the cost of the entry fees and continued on the path to the next castle, Pena National Palace.

It was only to be expected. Pena Palace had just closed when we arrived. By this time we were a little weary of the whole thing, so we paid for the crazy lurching bus ride down the mountain to the centre of town. It is a picturesque place, full of little craft stores and the smell of roasting chestnuts. And of course the third castle, Sintra National Palace in town, was closed too.

On our last day in Lisbon, we took a 20 minute tram ride to Belém, home to the justifiably famous Pastel de nata, the Portuguese egg tart. The tarts are so yummy! I wish I took a photo of us sprinkling cinnamon and icing sugar on them and scoffing them down.

But here is a photo of Belém’s second most famous attraction, the Belém Tower.

The Tower and other museums are free to visit on Sundays.

The chapel of Jerónimos Monastery, which is a World Heritage site. It’s very pretty but, you know, I’m a bit over cathedrals and chapels now. I think I’m done, now that I’ve seen Canterbury Cathedral, York Minster, Winchester Cathedral, Durham Cathedral, King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, the Dom in Cologne and other churches all over Germany, the Sacre Couer and Notre Dame in Paris…

Well, maybe I’ll make an exception. I might still put up the cash to visit Westminster Abbey one day.

As you might know, I love Gantt charts. A few months ago, Damjan and I put together a Gantt chart to plan out how I could use my annual leave.

My first scheduled vacation was Mauritius. That cost me five days annual leave.

The long Easter weekend meant that spending only one annual leave day allowed me and Damjan to take the train up to Edinburgh for five days.

It was glorious, such a picturesque city! We were especially fortunate in that it didn’t rain on any of those five days. This is highly unusual for Scotland.

This is Edinburgh Castle. Something funny happened while we were there. I got a text message from my friend, Frances (who is visiting London from San Francisco).

Want to join a few ny [New York] ppl at edinburgh castle tonight?

Confused, I replied:

Hi frances, did you mean the real edinburgh castle? I am here in scotland.’

From Frances:

Oh right, haha! No i meant the one in Camden [London]. Hope you’re having a fun holiday!

Here are some photos from inside Edinburgh Castle.

I thought it was funny, having a Royal Mail post box inside.

Here is an uncomfortably angled bench next to the guard house.

Loud annoying children playing with guns.

It’s good to see the Castle is up the latest environmentally friendly technologies.

Damjan and I stayed at Budget Backpackers in a private room. You know when you’re growing up when you become less and less able to tolerate hostels. I’ve stayed in hostels all around Tasmania, Germany, the UK, in Lisbon… I’m generally happy in a private room but in dorms, I feel quite anxious about waking people up and being woken up by late night party people and snorers.

Budget Backpackers was clean and friendly, though cramped. We joined one of their free Edinburgh walking tours. Our tour guide as an Aussie from Melbourne (Carlton). In our group, there were another two girls from Melbourne (Glen Iris and Gladstone Park). In the kitchen, we also met an Aussie from Geelong…

On the walking tour, we learned about body snatchers, people who would steal bodies (or murder to get fresh ones!) to sell to the anatomy school for £5.

It became necessary to protect graves from the robbers. In the first few weeks after a burial, family members would take turns to guard the body. This is the origin of the phrase ‘graveyard shift’!

The very posh George Heriot’s School, reputedly JK Rowling’s inspiration for Hogwarts. I thought the school kids could easily whip the tourists into a frenzy by coming out in black gowns, like we wear at Oxford and Cambridge.

It’s daffodil season!

We climbed to (the original) Arthur’s Seat. An easy one hour climb gave us a 360 degree view of Edinburgh.

St Anthony’s Chapel on the way up to Arthur’s Seat. Damjan and I sat down in the sunshine to draw the chapel for about an hour. Drawing is a hobby that we are experimenting in. I tend to draw fatter and more cartoony pictures, compared to Damjan’s more detailed and spindly drawings.

The Scottish seagulls are HUGE, so big they’re almost majestic. As Damjan said, ‘If they weren’t so common, I’d almost say they were elegant.’

All my photos are at the gallery.

In February, one of my best friends, Kate, got married. Kate and Avi had a multi-day traditional Hindu wedding in Mauritius, a little tropical island in the Indian Ocean. There are not many people for whom I would fly 12 hours. Kate is definitely one of them.

I stayed in Mauritius for a week. They were strange days, weather-wise. Just days before I was due to fly out, Britain suffered terrible snow storms and most flights were cancelled. I rushed home from work to buy travel insurance online. Even a flight delay of three days would render my trip to Mauritius pointless, as the wedding would be over.

The evening I was to leave, my departure time was pushed back two hours (Air Mauritius was kind enough to call and message me). Problems with refuelling and the closure of one of Heathrow’s two runways meant that we were stuck on the tarmac for another hour.

I was pretty anxious because as we were waiting, the snow starting swirling around the plane.

‘Oh no!’ I exclaimed to the girl sitting next to me. ‘Snow! It’s getting pretty white out there. I hope we get out in time.’

‘Hmph,’ the girl agreed and sadly curled up into a ball as she suffered through airplane allergies. (I get this too, when my eyes water and throat itches in the recirculated plane environment.)

Luckily, we finally took off. Later I was told that we flew out of a snow storm that shut down Britain’s transport systems for another two days.

It was not the end of eventful weather. The flight was the most turbulent I’ve ever experienced. We flew into a cyclone just north of Mauritius. For my first day on the island, the cyclone and choppy seas prevented us from going to the beach.

When tropical calm returned, I waded into the ocean. The water was beautifully warm. There was virtually no change in temperature going from the beach to the water.

I got a rather nasty sunburn. Carrying my backpack home (I managed with carry on luggage only!) sure did hurt my shoulders. It took me almost two months to recover fully from red skin.

It was only when I was flying home that I found out about the scorching bushfires in Victoria. The lady sitting across the airplane aisle had a newspaper with the headline, ‘Australian bushfire death toll its worst ever‘. I waved at her.

‘Excuse me, can I borrow your paper when you’re done with it?’ I pointed to the bushfire article. ‘That’s my home, Victoria.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The paper is a couple of day old already and I hear that there are more deaths now.’

I only got the full story about on the Tube back home from Heathrow. Imagine that, finding out about this tragedy from a rehashed press release in the free London Paper!

Anyway, the reason I am revisiting the events of February is that I’ve finally sorted out photos from Mauritius. A selection of the are here at my gallery. Here are some highlights.

I stayed with three of Kate’s friends in a massive holiday house. It was fairly swish and not expensive at all. I got the penthouse room. It had a walk in wardrobe, full size ensuite and, most importantly, air conditioning. At night time, the house also had cockroaches. They’re everywhere.

The Trou aux Cerfs crater high up near the shopping town of Curepipe. This crater is in the shape of a love heart!

 

Statues of Hindu gods at the Grand Bassin Hindu Temple, which is one of the most sacred Hindu places outside of India. Every year, half a million people make the pilgramage to the lake during the Maha Shivaratri festival in February or March.

I’m a sucker for waterfalls. This one is in Charamel, better known for its coloured sands.

 

The coloured sands of Charamel! So pretty, eh. I understand the colours are something to do with volcanoes. Not very specific, I know. I guess it’s to do with heating sands to different temperatures.

 

Giant tortoises! This one was very unusually active. It was eating leaves that tourists waved at it, it wandered around before settling down with its motionless friends in a puddle.

Finally, some beach photos.

 

 

 

Legs above belong to Kate’s family. Thank you for looking after me for the week!

Lisbon by night is as interesting as it is by day. While we were there for work, we went out to dinner every night. I don’t have any photos from then, but here are some from my weekend off.

This made me, Wolfgang and Rosangela laugh for a long time. Maybe it wasn’t an error, though. Maybe resistance does give rise to more resistance.

The streets are lined with orange trees. I’m told these are Seville oranges, which I sometimes see at the grocery store labelled with the warning ‘BITTER ORANGES. Best used for marmalades and cooking’.

Despite the warnings, we decided that we would try them out.

Many people seem to have had the same idea as us because we couldn’t find any low hanging fruit. Damjan and Rosangela, the tallest of the four of us, were tasked with fetching some oranges.

Although Wolfgang is grimacing, he actually seemed to quite enjoy suffering.

 

And here is a view of Lisbon from a lookout that our hostel manager recommended. In fact, he mapped out an extremely detailed itinerary for us for the two days that we were there.

If I have only a few days to spend in a city, I tend to spend those days walking around. I prefer not to visit a big attraction that takes up the whole day.

In Lisbon, I made an exception. We finished up work on Thursday. Damjan was flying in Friday night so I didn’t mind frittering away my Friday until he arrived. I figured I would save my city exploring so that we could go together.

This is how Wolfgang, Rosangela and I ended up at the Lisbon Oceanarium. I absolutely did not regret it — such a wonderful place! It’s the largest aquarium in Europe. It has five massive tanks. The one in the middle represents the open ocean. The other four surrounding the centre tank represent the Atlantic, the Indian, the Pacific and the Antarctic Oceans.

My favourite sight was the single sunfish. I have never heard of this fish before. It is huge! According to Wikipedia, the sunfish has been recorded at ‘up to 3.3 metres (11 ft) in length and 2 tonnes (2.2 short tons) in weight’. You’ll see in one of my photos below Wolfgang standing next to the sunfish.

At the entry, a massive ancient sea creature is made of crushed aluminium cans. There are lots of environmental messages throughout the Oceanarium.

The Oceanarium was full of loud kids.

This is the open ocean tank. I think I saw those funny (serious-looking) fish below the manta ray in ‘Finding Nemo’.

Open ocean

There are schools of fish in the tank. Apparently, when the scientists notice that the schools are getting smaller, they realise that the bigger fish are not getting enough food. The big fish are hand fed. Shrinking schools mean that something is wrong with the nutrient balance.

These are Atlantic Ocean birds.

This manta looks like it’s flying.

The sunfish! The next photos are a series showing the sunfish being fed.

Sunfish feeding

Sunfish feeding

Sunfish feeding. You can see the hand reaching down. How does the sunfish know that the food’s for him?

Squid for lunch.

These birds were in the Antarctic Ocean. They flew around the tourists quite happily and weren’t scared at all.

This is is ice in the Antarctic Ocean. It is an extremely odd smooth texture. It’s because the ice is growing from the inside. It’s growing around an extremely cold pipe of some sort.

This is an sea otter in the Pacific Ocean exhibit. It was very cute.

Some shells encrusted on rocks in the Pacific Ocean.

Wolfgang next to the sunfish.

 

This lady’s talking on her mobile and her baby is watching the fish screensaver.

This photo looks like something you might see in a Chinese restaurant.

Long overdue, here are some photos from my trip to Lisbon, Portugal.

We found a hostel in the very centre of the city. When we stepped out, we were already on a main boulevard, Rua Augusta.

Lisbon seems to be an environmentally conscious city. The police had electric vehicles. Here’s one for tourists.

 

Here’s another example. In Europe, buildings require an ‘energy performance certificate’, which is a rating of how energy efficient the building is. These were being advertised in many bus shelters.

And besides these signs, even the ATMs where you get cash out had a sign telling you how much energy it was using!

This is the view of some rooftops from a lookout in Alfama, which is Lisbon’s old Moorish part.

 

That’s Castelo de São Jorge (Castle of St George) on the hill top.

I spotted this sign and it took me a second to understand what it meant.

And here it is! A very basic urinal on the streets approaching Castelo de São Jorge.

Although this was only a small tourist shop, it still had a large stock of port. Portugal is, of course known for the port, a fortified dessert wine. I used to drink it rather regularly after eating three courses at Cambridge formal hall.

Many houses were drying their clothes high up on the second, third or fourth floor of a building. What happens when a bit of clothing falls from a laundry line four storeys up?

You’d think only scooters could get up these streets but there are also quite a few Smart cars and tiny Renaults motoring around here. I think you need to be brave, driving around Lisbon.

A window sill that caught my eye.

Lisbon is a well developed city but there are quite a few abandoned derelict buildings. The city is still rebuilding after the 1755 Great Lisbon Earthquake.

 

I spotted these mail boxes in a derelict building. Amazingly, one or two of them were still being used.

How bizarre and interesting!

The Age reports, ‘No turbulence at A380 superjumbo restaurant‘.

Imagine boarding a plane without security checks or even tickets and more importantly, there’s more than just fish or chicken for dinner.

Set in a dull commercial building in central Taipei, the A380 In-Flight Kitchen looks and functions like an airline in many ways, expect that it serves a regular restaurant menu of Western food, sometimes in plastic trays.

From the picture gallery the food doesn’t look all that much better than real aeroplane food. However, as I was growing up, any Western food was exciting. My favourite thing about being in hospital for a week whe I was 12 years old was the food. Mmm… Aeroplane Jelly.