It’s our silver wedding anniversary this week. “Take me overseas!” the wife demanded, so I said, ‘sure’, and we have headed to the Isle of Wight. Well, you have to cross the sea to get there: starting with Portsmouth Harbour, pictured.
I spent the whole day, from 1.30am in Toronto when we boarded the plane, until 6.45pm when arriving back in Hebden Bridge, on a series of rather overcrowded tin pipes. If we included Heathrow Airport itself as number 2, this train at King’s Cross was the fourth, and the most overcrowded pipe of all — the East Coast main line going into spasm once more thanks to some ‘operational incident’ or other. But at least I was in a seat. Home now, anyway, and no more flying aboard for a while. I need a rest.
Staying over in the Premier Inn after last night’s gig provides the opportunity to observe the morning traffic on the Mancunian Way from fifteen floors up. Heading west seems to be the route of choice, but the one car going east has the preferable journey at the moment, if you ask me.
Was sat in an office for all the first part of the day and a train for all the second part of it. But at least, when travelling home from Scotland, the Forth Bridges usually make an appearance, and they’re almost always worth photographing. The monochrome, as so often, conceals colour balance crimes caused mainly by the scene being viewed through the windows of the 13:59 from Aberdeen to Edinburgh (arrived 16:20).
With the only relatively easy road out of Jamestown temporarily closed due to being covered in stones after Wednesday’s storm, there is a need to find alternatives. You’d think that being used in a very challenging transportation environment would have imposed a kind of evolutionary process on the local vehicles, a sort of natural selection if you like. But if it has, this truck hasn’t benefited: that’s not dust it’s raising. And look at the bend that is about to come.
Jacob’s Ladder has 699 steps, and rises 602 feet up from Jamestown to the fort above. It was originally built to transport goods, using carts and a mule-powered pulley system. Nowadays it sees traffic from the locals who breeze up and down it as if it were nothing more than a stairway at home, and the occasional visitor, like me, who thinks — yeah, OK, I really should give it a shot. But bear in mind there is only one escape point, at step 285: after that, you are committed. My time up this morning — 13 minutes and 45 seconds, not bad for an ageing geezer. But I am never going down it. Nope, not ever.
So here I am back on St Helena, for my third visit — but not the last. Whereas, up until 2017, everyone arrived at Jamestown where the boats dock, nowadays, unless you are on a yacht, first sight of the island is always the airport, one of the more dramatic approaches in world aviation, I am sure. Behind is Great Stone Top, which I climbed in January last year.
Although I will fly back over the country again tomorrow, this was my last morning in Namibia. It gets added to the growing list of countries that I have visited that I hope to return to someday — but lack of opportunity and advancing years means I may well not (let’s include, at least, Fiji, Vietnam, Tanzania and New Zealand alongside it). Either way, it’s been a good two weeks. Here, I am being driven back to Hosea Katuko International Airport — which does not seem to lie particularly near Windhoek, and on arrival, stands strangely alone in countryside like this, typical of the country.
I do not know what you call black-and-white striped pedestrian crossings in your country, but hopefully this associative pun works very well for UK readers. Taken in the Etosha game reserve.
Finally, I’m off. This evening, this vehicle constituted flight ET729 from Manchester to Addis Ababa, via (for some reason) Geneva: the service that saved the day back in January last year when everything went tits up due to a few snowflakes, but that is in the past. I like the Ethiopian Airlines logo, which gives it a suitably avian feel. This will be my last photo taken in the UK until 20th May.
Being 42 