Tag Archives: travel

Why trains are better than planes

December 11, 2015 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

Hello, I’m back from my blog break. I missed blogging and want to share my recent trip to Japan with you. I can’t believe that it’s been 9 years since my last visit – and I believe I have enough material to last through the summer!

As an opener, I’m starting on trains. We got a Japan Rail pass for the entire holiday period, and once again it proved to be invaluable for long distance travel. The standard for Japanese rail services have not dropped since my last visit. The stations are clean and safe, with plenty of food and drink purchasing opportunities.

The services were on time to the second.

And the carriages were impeccible. This is the ‘green car’ (ie. first class carriage) of the shinkansen (bullet train), and it’s much more immaculate than a business class cabin on a flight.

I must admit that I’ve been pining for some high-speed rail since our trip to Europe over 2 years ago, and we got our fair share of shinkansen joy. I loved zooming about at 300km/h, and we even get to see Mount Fuji if she’s not too shy.

We used the services between Tokyo and Kyoto a heck of a lot this trip (I counted about 5 separate trips), and I can’t believe how easy it is to get from one place to another. For example, Tokyo to Kyoto (514km) takes about 2h 40mins on the second fastest service (the fastest takes 2h 10mins), with up to 12 services per hour! I guess the domestic services don’t make any money along this corridor.

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Winter Knitting – Part 2

August 13, 2015 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

I like sock projects because they’re very portable. I took this project with me to Running Waters, although I didn’t end up doing very much because I was busy doing other things. I ended up finishing it back at home.

I used up some of the sock yarn left over from other projects here. They’re wool with a bit of nylon for strength, and have been great to wear this (unusually cold) winter around the house and while taking the dog out for her afternoon walks.

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Into the Bush

July 2, 2015 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

The next day I started my camp experience. I was picked up by Deb and Charlie, who ran Larpinta Creative Camps, and after a quick run-around to collect the other participants (there were only 5 of us), we headed down the Stuart Highway. It was 130km of bitumen highway, then 50km of all-weather unsealed road, then 50km of 4WD track.

We stopped for lunch in desert oak country, and the sand here was bright, bright red.

Desert oaks are interesting trees as the juvenile (the punked up version on the left) looks nothing like the mature (the big tree on the right). It’s lean in its youth as it needs all its energy to shoot roots far downwards into the water table.

There was the letting down of tyres, since the going was going to get tougher.

I was impressed that the vehicle was named after one of my favourite mega-fauna, the diprotodon.

After lunch the road became a track.

Soon the escarpments appeared. We were almost at Running Waters.

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Waitomo

February 6, 2014 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

One place we visited that had nothing to do with volcanoes was Waitomo Caves. The caves were set in dense rainforest, and is famous for their glow worms. I have been to some of these caves before but since then they have opened up some new caves – we were able to visit three of them.

They weren’t the biggest caves I had ever seen, but they did have some lovely details.

One of them you descend into by a giant corkscrew ramp, and had suspended walkways to keep you above the wet floor. Now that’s engineering.

The Kiwis are good like that, very creative, out of the box thinkers, and you see evidence of it everywhere. Sorry to say, but often Aussies seem like square pegs in comparison.

Well, we’ve come to the end of our geological tour of NZ, and all the travel posts too. I’ll be posting about things much closer to home from now on, which isn’t all bad, because 4 months of travelling was very exhausting.

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Waikato Scenes

February 4, 2014 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

More mid-winter scenes from the Waikato region, as taken from the bus.

The foggy, early morning landscape was atmospheric in a claustrophobic way.

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Auckland – Part 1

January 16, 2014 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

A few weeks after we returned from Europe via Singapore, we packed our bags again. Hubby was leading a 10 day geology school group tour of the North Island of New Zealand, and I once again tagged along.

It was mid-winter, and Auckland was a bit chilly, although nothing like what it had been in Europe, and showery. We started off by visiting Mt Eden and its extinct volcano crater. Auckland is full of these extinct craters, although these volcanoes oozed rather than exploded.

In the distance we could see other ‘mounds’, which were other volcanoes. Nowadays they are surrounded by suburbia. Luckily they are well and truly extinct!

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Finished Objects 2013

January 13, 2014 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

It’s been a year since I last posted about my knitting, not because I haven’t done any, but because my travel posts have taken precedence. I actually haven’t stopped knitting, but I have mainly been sticking to only a few patterns. This one in particular was the pattern I took on my travels. It’s a good one to take since it’s done on circular needles from start to finish , and is very straight forward (little chance of lost needles, stitch markers or dropped stitches). Luckily, I had a lot of friends and families with toddlers, and so had plenty of little people to knit for – I’ve made 5 vests so far, of which these two are a selection.

We returned from Europe to a Sydney winter. While travelling, I’d taken a liking to wearing fingerless gloves, and I thought I would have a go at knitting one when I got home using this pattern.

It was so successful that I knitted a few more for my friends too.

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Singapore

January 9, 2014 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

We had a two night stopover in Singapore on the way home. The heat and humidity was a shock to the system after three months of cold, and also being in a very urban, very crowded environment. Singapore is ultra modern, with skyscrapers dominating the skyline.

The newer additions to the city was certainly interesting. This is supposed to be a large entertainment and hotel complex.

There were still traces of colonial Singapore still about, even if they were dwarfed by the new.

This old bridge in the city centre was built in the 19th Century by Scottish engineers, and had some interesting crossing conditions.

But with outside being so hot and humid, the only place to be in the middle of the day was indoors. Not being an avid shopper we tried to find other places to stay cool. We visited the odd museum. This one focused on Asian artifacts.

But what I enjoyed most was eating. I really missed while in Europe was the great South East Asian food that’s so available in Sydney. A good laksa can cure any ills.

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Going North

December 4, 2013 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

We boarded the train north from Helsinki Central Station. The trains were very comfy, especially since we travelled first class. It had plenty of leg room, free wifi and reading material (although they were all in Finnish), even a tea/coffee making station.

We had little idea of what the Finnish landscape looked like, except that there was a lot of forest and water. Well, we got plenty of both. This is photo I took a few weeks later when I was in Lapland, but it showed the landscape we passed through during those 6 hours – forest, more forest, on very flat land, broken up by the odd swamp/stream/river/lake.

To me, this seemed like the Arctic equivalent to the Australian outback, where you can pass through thousands of kilometres of red sand, rock, and low-lying scrub. This kind of landscape is vast too. It starts west of Finland in Sweden, and stretches across Russia all the way to Siberia and beyond. It would have been pretty hard-going navigating such a place for the early settlers, who were mainly hunters and woodsmen, since the woods were dense, and everything looked the same.

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Stockholm – Part 1

November 16, 2013 Sandra Graham Leave a comment

A couple of hours on the train (including a ride over the 8km long bridge between Denmark and Sweden), and we were in Stockholm. Stockholm was also a city built around the water, but it felt much more grand and expansive. It was however still quite flat, so bicycles were once again out in force.

Again, there were parts of the city centre that were quite Parisian in feel.

But we liked its old town, Gamla Stan, on an island, resplendid with cute cobblestoned streets and shops.

The weather, as you can see from the photos, wasn’t quite cooperating. Nonetheless, one can still sit comfortably outdoors in a cafe/bar, as blankets were provided.

From an Australian point of view, there’s something a bit wrong about sitting at a bar under a doona, but for Swedes, who experience many a long, dark night in the winter, one needs to take advantage of every opportunity to be out of doors.

Static and Silence

Tag Archives: travel

Why trains are better than planes

Winter Knitting – Part 2

Into the Bush

Waitomo

Waikato Scenes

Auckland – Part 1

Finished Objects 2013

Singapore

Going North

Stockholm – Part 1

Adventures on life's merry-go-round