We went on a hike up Mount Nulakaokao (or something like that) today, 10 of us of various nationalities, led by our Fijian guide Ameo, who astonishingly, climbed up and over the volcanic rocks in bare feet. Impossible to cover the whole trek in one picture, but this one wins just for being rather different: it would have been easy to pick one of the views from and of the mountain itself, which were spectacular, but I like the flare effect on this one. This is Uli, from Dortmund, Germany.

The Yasawa islands stretch in a more-or-less straight line into the Pacific ocean from a point somewhere to the north-west of the main Fijian islands, and are probably former volcanoes. They are also to be my home (and the home of this Californian girl, and everyone else who was on the Yasawa Flyer catamaran out of Port Denarau marina early this morning) for the next few days. The word ‘Paradise’ is often overused, but in this case I think it’s entirely appropriate. This is a good time.

So here I am on Fiji, another country to add to the blog, and here’s the show put on by rather fit Polynesian men for the benefit of the tourists. Nadi is just near the main airport, strictly a transit point, the main event begins tomorrow. And as you can see, I do appear to be online in Paradise, so you should still get some fairly regular updates.

A few months ago, if you’d have asked me how I was going to spend my last evening in Brisbane, ‘watching wheelchair rugby’ would probably not have come towards the top of the list – but here we are, courtesy of my friend Manuela (playing, but not in shot). Some of these guys, like the one on the right with his back to us, were actually gold-medal winning Paralympians last year in London.

Anyway, I might now be off-grid for a while so if no more photos appear here, don’t panic – it’s just that I’m heading to a tropical island for a few days. Oh, the hardship. I’ll update you all towards the end of May. But then again, if wi-fi has made it to the remoter parts of Fiji, I will be here again before then.

It’s getting towards winter, and looked it, this morning – though it’s still warmer than at home, about 20 degrees C today. This will be the last photo of Brisbane itself on this blog, at least on this trip; I might be back next year, and I might still be blogging then, but on Wednesday I’m bidding it goodbye. It’s a decent city, it’s been good to me, so here’s to it.

At first when I walked past this little vignette I thought the little boy was holding a big doll — which considering I had The Who’s I’m a Boy on the iPod at the time (a song about forced transvestism) I thought was rather ironic. However, then I saw it was his little sister. Cute…

There have been quite a few photos of the Botanical Gardens during my time in Brisbane, but there won’t be many more — two more full days in Brisbane to come after today, then I’m off.

OK, look, I know that this picture will freak some of you out but like the picture of the cave spider I took last year, there is such beauty in this creature. Though I don’t necessarily want a couple of dozen of these things out on the verandah of my house – which my friend Fiona seems to have at the moment. And note that the smaller one visible above is not a baby – it’s the male of the species. These things spin huge communal webs, the size of which beggars belief. But, thank heavens, they are not poisonous.

I wanted to visit the tropical north of Queensland anyway, and Cooktown, and the experience of driving through the emptiness of the region, made it worth doing: but there was a reason to do it at this specific period of time, and here it is. I did not manage to penetrate the zone of totality due to not having a 4WD vehicle, so this picture is taken from Laura, a one-horse town west of Cooktown, where the tarmac ends — this was the closest I could get, but we are not at full coverage as you can see. However, in some ways, just as well I stopped where I did because I ended up watching it in the company of a group of Russians who happened to have a pair of solar viewing glasses that could then be used as a filter on the camera, as well as for our eyes. Without them it would not have been possible to capture it.

Anyway, despite all that, and the time and effort it took to see what was really just a few minutes of dimness, I’m glad I did. And there probably won’t be many other non-astronomer pictures of this event. I doubt many people in the world saw this. Its path certainly didn’t cross anywhere particularly populated, just the remote north of Australia and some islands in the South Pacific. Even round here there seemed general ignorance that it was happening: I think largely because they had a total eclipse last November, and this was ‘just’ an annular one, where the moon is at its furthest point from Earth so doesn’t cover the sun’s disk entirely. Nevertheless, let’s not be blasé about it: do you realise how rare eclipses might be, I mean, in the universe? The fact that the Sun and Moon are virtually the same apparent size when viewed from the Earth is really a remarkable coincidence. It’s possible we’re the only planet for thousands of light years in any direction that experiences them, so let’s treasure them.

Some historical notes…. Cooktown is, fairly obviously, named for Captain James Cook, and this river for his ship, the Endeavour, which laid up here in 1770 after it was holed on the Great Barrier Reef. Cook and crew spent six weeks here in June and July, repairing the vessel. During this time they also interacted with the local Aboriginals, and became the first Europeans to see the kangaroo — the story that they named this animal after the local word for ‘I don’t know’ is probably apocryphal, but funny anyway.

The world, in general, then forgot about the Cooktown area for 104 years, until gold was discovered nearby in 1874. A year later Cooktown had 65 premises licensed to serve alcohol, and the local Aboriginals, who had been treated rather decently by the crew of the Endeavour, had their lives and culture wrecked for all time.

Cooktown today feels slightly run-down, very frontier; humid as hell, signs warning of crocodile activity in the estuary, more people of Aboriginal descent than I’ve seen anywhere else in Australia, but, on the whole, more agreeable than Byron Bay, at least. There are no surfer dudes and blonde babes in bikinis, but it’s all the better for it. (Did I really say that?)

Australia is the world’s sixth-largest country, only just smaller than Brazil. But only about 23 million people live here. On the east coast it’s quite urbanised but that means there’s a terribly, terribly large expanse of the interior in which, pretty much, no one lives at all.

On this trip I have not really encountered that emptiness, until today, when I drove from Cairns airport some 330km north to Cooktown, along the Mulligan highway, which was only completed in 2006. For one 118-km stretch, between Mount Carbine and Lakeland, there are no turn-offs, and only one building (the Palmer River Roadhouse, the epitome of ‘the middle of nowhere’). But there are an awful lot of these termite mounds. Termites are definitely the dominant lifeform in this area.