Here is my luggage awaiting what amounted to the second leg of my 9,000-mile journey home: the train journey from Circular Quay station to Sydney airport. Circular Quay must have one of the best views of any railway station in the world — accepting stiff competition from Durham in the north-east of England (look it up…) – so you’d think they might clean the windows now and again.
I know I did the ‘crossing a bridge’ thing a few days ago, but no offense to Brisbane, this is one of the world’s truly great bridges so needed to be shown on here (and I like the various lattices on the shot). And it is a very impressive piece of engineering. Eighty years old now but I am sure it will still be looking as good into the next century (though by then, who knows, it might be called the Hancock Westpac News International Bridge or something like that).
Sometimes you see a shot coming just in time to get it lined up, focused and taken. Played for and got. I’m very happy with this one.
Start of the first leg of my journey back to Brisbane, where I now reside. (Well, second leg, if you count the walk up Katoomba’s main street to reach the station.) I like the various curves of the platform, and do wonder what the guy in the background is actually up to.
Karamea is not an easy place to reach and as I have to be back in Australia by Monday morning I shelled out a few hundred NZ dollars for a flight out, with Golden Bay Air. This turned out to involve not just one, but two chances to have my own personal pilot, as both legs (Karamea – Takaka, then Takaka – Wellington) involved me being the only passenger on a tiny little Cessna. On the first plane I rather meekly sat in the back but here I am on the second flight, sitting up front next to Dallas the pilot as she flies us both over the islands of the Marlborough Sound. It was really cool to be able to talk to her during the flight and hear her conversations with air traffic controllers. I could become quite a convert to this light plane flying actually. Thoroughly worth the money, a really excellent experience.
Could have offered up photos taken from the plane, but there will, I’m sure, be plenty of New Zealand landscapes coming up over the next few days, and I also got a good shot of Auckland but that’s also a theme used a few days ago. So here’s a photo taken of the plane. Here is everyone plugged into their little worlds as we fly over the Tasman Sea.
Things you don’t necessarily want to hear from the pilot as you’re coming into land: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re turning the seatbelt sign on, there seems to be some thunderstorm activity around the airport”. Cue one of the bumpier landings I’ve ever experienced. But we made it.
The east exit. It does get busier than this during the week. Taken as I returned from the airport having transited (on a very bumpy flight) back from Adelaide. The lonely ‘wet floor’ marker – placed there for no reason I could discern – gives it a sense of pathos I think…
I seem at the moment to be spending most of my life on the move. Just as well that I don’t mind taking photos of railway stations, then, even if it does sometimes make me look like a trainspotter. I got quite a few photos today that were nearly very good, and even though there’s nothing spectacular about this one, I quite like it; this gentleman just looks very chilled out. All in all it does encapsulate what was another very beautiful day with great light, one on which it was far more pleasant to be hanging around outside than one has a right to expect in mid-December.
I haven’t always spent this much time travelling, you know. It really started to take off (ha ha) around the middle of 2010, the first time I came to Bergen (and Scandinavia) in fact; since then I have averaged a trip a month, and in 2012 more than that. That’s just the way my job works now, I have little commutes (to Manchester) and big commutes (usually to Bergen or Moscow) and beyond the time they take they all feel rather much the same now. It ain’t glamorous. It’s just work.
