Since we’ve been here the weather has been remarkably mild and calm. Hardly any rain (other than today of course, just as I’m writing this) – and for this time of the year in deepest darkest winter you’d have expected some miserable cold weather. It has been occasionally gloomy, chilly and overcast but, on the…

The Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in Kensington has to be one of the greatest museums in the world for Art & Design – it’s packed with an endless treasure trove of fabulous objects spanning thousands of years. And being London, it’s free! It has a permanent collection of over 2.3 million objects, from Medieval…

We had a brief encounter with the lurgy AKA COVID when we arrived in the UK from Australia – the day two government-required test came back positive for one of us, inconclusive for the other. Go figure! No symptoms whatsoever though, but of course we had to isolate for the requisite 5 days. By day…

We were briefly in North Wales earlier in the week, Hawarden specifically, Ants’ ancestral home. It’s been 2 long years since we’ve been back, so it was lovely, as always to see Anthea. Family reunited.  On a drive over to the Wirral, we went to Rock Ferry at Birkenhead with Liverpool looming across the murky…

‘Had I but lived a hundred years ago I might have gone, as I have gone this year, By Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know, And Time have placed his finger on me there.’ – Thomas Hardy From the steaming tropics of Far North Australia earlier in January to the stunning Jurassic Coast of Southern England…

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more spectacular sunrise than the one we regularly got at Wonga. The sun quickly rises from the Coral Sea at 5.53am, turning the mackerel sky into a riot of rainbow colour, with the reef shimmering and the Low Isles appearing as a mirage, shape-shifting on the horizon.  Our…

Thanks to our great new friends at Wonga, Shirl and Andy, we ventured out on their rather large and impressive cruiser for a day on the Reef, specifically heading for Bat and Tongue Reef and the intriguingly named Blue Martini – so called because of its circular rim and deep blue dive hole.  Because of…

The Daintree River Ferry, the only cable ferry operating within tropical Australia, feels like crossing over to the ‘Land That Time Forgot’ or, perhaps more relevantly, to the gateway into Jurassic Park – all it appears to lack is a huge rustic wooden gate and electrified fencing to hold the ‘wildlife’ in. The river is…

The CREB track, beyond Daintree Village, is a rough and ready off-road challenge for highly experienced 4WD drivers (only) and is considered one of Australia’s most notorious 4WD tracks, traversing the Daintree World Heritage Rainforest, the largest continuous area of tropical rainforest in Australia, at around 1,200 square kilometres.  The CREB (originally the service access…