nancy hazell

gramma, my mum's mum, at rebecca and ali's wedding. she is 87 and going really well. the female genes in the familial line are very strong - my mum has 5 sisters and 1 brother. and of the 15 cousins, only 4 are boys. girl power!!

what the hell

another giant khymer face. just because i want to.

ground control to angkor thom

two of the many massive stone faces carved by the ancient khymer people and installed throughout angkor thom. what amazing khymer and cambodian history passing which they have gazed out upon across the centuries.... if only they could actually speak.

not london bridge, not falling down

walking across tower bridge at sunset. tower bridge is often mistaken as being london bridge. probably because london bridge is really quite boring to look at, while tower bridge is quite striking and makes for a much better photo(s). finally i should mention that tower bridge is featured in the spice girls movie when they jump their bus over the bridge. so clearly it has exceeded london bridge in the fame stakes.

where life moves slowly in a good way

one of the most stunning sunsets i have ever seen was watching the sun set behind the mekong river, sitting on the top of a hill in luang prabang, in northern laos. life is laos moves at a slow and leisurely pace compared to other south east asian countries, you truly cannot help but feel relaxed there and just happy to be. what a wonderful place it would be to live.

accidental zen

i am not a believer in god(s) but sometimes i have a sense of greater powers or forces at work in the world. maybe it is just the magical concept of fate or meaningful coincidence. when i returned home from a trip to vietnam and was looking through the many many photos i took there for the first time on a screen bigger than the tiny one on the back of my digital camera, this was one which instantly became one of my favourites of the trip, it encapsulated so perfectly what the whole vietnam experience had come to mean to me. because the truth of this photo is that it was not carefully taken at all - but rather very carelessly out of the window of a taxi racing through the busy streets of saigon as i tried to capture the image of the clouds - only to truly accidentally and unknowingly, yet with perfect partnership, catch the word 'zen' in the same frame.

how's the serenity?

the almost perfect serene stillness of an autumn-tinged lake burley griffin taken from in front of the high court of australia across to the national carillon, with the tops of the defence buildings at russell visible over to the left. i like the low moon already visible hanging in the sky too. not such a bad photo given i took it with my mobile.

old school advertising

appealing streetscape in prague. ordinarily i loathe the painted brick look but this is stylish. which is saying something given it's a billboard for foul pepsi. i wonder if mands would love the painted brick in our living room so much if i did it like this. somehow i think not :)

the turning of the leaves

one of the things i love about canberra is the distinct four seasons we experience. i think it would be perfectly dull to live in a place that was warm all the time. autumn in canberra is crisp, bracing and visually stunning thanks to the proliferation of european desiduous trees.

where we came from

day 2 of the inca trail. about 8 hours of walking the path of the ancient incas en route to machu picchu. the crossing over 2 mountain passes (while nearing the second, this photo shows mands pointing back towards the first one, aptly named dead woman's pass), and down into 2 deep valleys. moving through about 7 vastly different temperate ecosystems from tropical tangled thick jungle to open near barren plains on the flat tops of mountains. blazing sun, misty rain, white snow (the last sighted in the distance on mountain tops only, thanks be). and as i have said before, i would do it all over again.