i swam every day

i do love swimming and being in water but i so often enjoy it as i fear open water because of sharks (yes irrational i know) and am repulsed by public pools, so when mands and i stayed at a small resort in port douglas for our whatever-you-call-the-holiday-after-a-civil-partnership - i took great delight in swimming in the outdoor heated (unnecessary but lovely nonetheless!) pool at least once a day. and i didn't have to share it with anyone else at any time (well ok, mands a couple of times). it was absolute bliss to float on my back and quietly gaze at palm fronds and blue sky.

gratuitousness

i will continue my indulgence in paris for another post. this is one spectacular outlook from the very top of the eiffel tower. there is nothing over-rated about the tower at all - it is beautiful by day and night. it is little wonder that over 200 million people have visited this global icon since its construction just over a century ago. the only negative thing about it is that when you are up it, you are not looking at it. mands got a bit wiggy at the top because it is so high up, it took some convincing to get her up there. but she was glad she went up :)

i do love paris

i really really do. and i haven't even been there in the spring time. only in the autumn and the winter. but even then, and even on a grey cloudy day like the one in the photo, it truly is a beautiful city with so many wonderful sights and experiences. and so pleasant to walk around. it is little wonder that it is the most visited city in the world. the only thing going against it is that there are french people there. but aside from that, it is just simply delightful. i have been there twice and would go back again in a heartbeat. the third time i would stay in montemarte again as i did the first time, which is the 'arty district' up on the hill with steep cobblestoned streets near sacre de cour and the moulin rouge. mands and i saw don johnson (of miami vice fame) when we were in paris, he was staying in a hotel only 5 minutes walk from ours! i may have even taken this photo just before we saw him, as he was walking into a hotel bordering place de la concorde - a major square where this egyptian obelisk is situated, with the eiffel tower in the background. the oblelisk was a gift to france from egypt in the early 1800s - it is nearly 3,500 years old. don johnson is not as old as this, but he is even better preserved.

closer still with zah zoom

i don't know what these little plants (some kind of grass i would venture) are called but they numbered the thousands if not tens of thousands on the walk along the bay of fires. they were soft to touch almost like cotton wool - and certainly looked like swathes of cotton balls to walk through, with the wind blowing them about. it's hard to explain but i really liked them, it think because the way they moved about in the wind they looked like a sea of little furry white creatures happily bobbing about.  

year of the dragon

well it was actually year of the monkey, and this wasn't in china. but i was born in the year of the dragon, chinese zodiac calendar wise i mean, so i have always thought they were pretty cool. these very impressive dragon stair-rails (if you could call them that!) were located in one of the six royal tombs up the perfume river from hue, vietnam. 

the water out of the tap is very hard to drink

daniel johns playing with silverchair in canberra, followed by powderfinger: 'across the great divide' tour. powderchair won the headlining spot in the tour because queensland won the state of origin that year. the state of origin is the annual interstate rugby league grudge match (well, best fo 3). powderchair is from brisbane, queensland, and silverchair from newcastle, nsw. while i don't really watch league, i always barrack for the toads (queensland) in state of origin on principle. having said that silverchair is the better band and should have had headlining spot - not decided by a dumb sports competition!

trapped in a 20s timewarp

as in mands and i are both 20-something in this photo - and will be forever and ever. check those hair colours! we are not so brash now in our 'old age' :) i really like this photo, i think it's a nice one of both of us. we are on the tahune airwalk in southern tasmania - which is a walk literally up amongst the trees (and you know how i love trees!) with a series of walkways nearly 50m above the forest floor, stretching for half a kilometre. it is beautiful down (and up!) there.

emulating kate winslet

we spent a good half an hour or so out on the uyuni salt flats in bolivia, taking photos that played with perspective - the vast expanse of white with nothing really visible on the horizon allows you to do this. so we took photos like mands pushing a 'giant' bottle of vodka on top of me, us standing on a 'giant' pair of dice, and me holding a 'minature' mands in my hand. i'm not sure what i was doing with this particular photo but i do like it anyway for its simplicity. the salt ridge mands is standing on is only a 1cm high or so. in fact in look at it now, it almost looks like a 'giant' mands standing on the top of a wave breaking at the beach! or maybe she is remembering the giant jebus from rio :)

salt on everything - just as i like it

bolivia was my favourite country in south america - i knew next to nothing about it before we went there and loved everything about it by the time we left. when we were planning our trip to south america, we had two must-sees - mands wanted to see the big jebus in rio de janiero and i wanted to walk the inca trail into macchu pichu. these two locations are pretty much on opposite sides of the continent so we simply booked a tour that stretched overland between the two. and when i say we simply booked it, we really did simply book it without looking in any great detail at what else was included in the tour. we were just happy about going to south america. so it was a genuine joy and surprise to do the tour and discover what we were seeing and doing as it actually happened. for example on the first day out of rio de janiero we were in a van going south down the coast and got on a boat only to discover we were going to stay on a brazillian island for 3 days - it was woot! anyway that is not what this photo is about, it's a photo of salar d'uyuni - the salt flats in south west bolivia. salt salt salt as far as the eye could see - it is the largest salt flat in the entire world at over 10,000km squared. i even licked the ground. 

sport(wo)manship

a genuine handshake (not an arm wrestle as the pose may suggest) with smiles on both competitors' (amelie mauresmo 4 2 def by victoria azarenka 6 6) faces after a great grand slam match. not to mention some very nice muscle definition on their arms!!