Roaming Tales

Avoca, Tasmania; February 2007

In Avoca on the east coast of Tasmania, you might run into fairy penguins - also known as little penguins. When I was there on a family holiday in 2007, we watched them huddling on a little rocky island about 15 metres off shore.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard; August 2006

Up in the Arctic, the traffic warning sign is for polar bears. ‘Gjelder hele Svalbard’ means ‘Valid for all Svalbard’. We did see polar bears too, though thankfully not near the main town of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen.

Despite the Coca Cola advert, polar bears and penguins do not live side by side. The polar bears would eat the penguins in a heart beat.

Both animals are cool creatures but I know which one I’d rather meet face to face.

This post is part of Photo Friday, a weekly photo blogging feature hosted by Debbie at Delicious Baby. Click here to see all the other submissions this week.

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Vintage clothes, art and stuffed squirrels on Brick Lane and Columbia Road.

Brick Lane, at the eastern edge of the square mile that is the City of London, is one of the most vibrant parts of London. It’s best known for the Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants that line the street and if you go at night you can barely move for the restaurant touts trying to entice you inside with various bribes of free drinks or samosas.

I prefer to get my curry elsewhere - at places such as New Tayyabs, a Pakistani restaurant behind the East London Mosque. And I prefer to visit Brick Lane during the day, especially on a Sunday when the Sunday UpMarket is on in the Old Truman Brewery and Columbia Road Flower Market is on up the road in Bethnal Green.

The Sunday UpMarket has great food - from Japanese to Ethiopian - in one half and secondhand and handmade clothes and other assorted flea market goodies in the other. It’s all under cover, which is perfect when it’s grey and drizzly outside as it so often is in London at this time of year.

As you wander further up the hill, you pass great cafés, famous bagel bakeries from the days when Brick Lane was a Jewish rather than Bangladeshi enclave, cool art galleries and around half a dozen great vintage clothing shops.

As you exit the northern end of Brick Lane and cross Bethnal Green Road, check out the contemporary furniture studio Unto This Last. Their best stuff is made to order as apparently they have had some problems with theft.

From there it’s just a hop, step and a jump to Columbia Road, which hosts a flower market every Sunday. I prefer to go late, around 2pm, when the crowds have died down and the flowers and pot plants are often on sale. This street is also full of funky independent shops. There’s the cupcake bakery Treacle (although cupcakes are not really my thing), a few gardening and homeware shops, and Nelly Duff gallery selling cool limited edition prints to name a few. If you’re still hungry after the Sunday UpMarket, the bagel bakery and cupcake shop, there’s a good Spanish restaurant called Laxeiro and the Royal Oak Pub.

There’s always something new to see in the East End. On my most recent visit, this past weekend, my eye was caught by the window display to a vintage clothing store halfway up Brick Lane, modestly called This Shop Rocks. The window display had two mannequins in dresses, one with a stuffed badger on a lead and one with a stuffed fox. There were also six stuffed squirrels wearing clothing dancing in a circle.

Have I missed something here? Is taxidermy back? Even though I’m sure they’re antique and not freshly stuffed, I actually found it a little disturbing, especially since they were rare, native red squirrels rather than the more common, foreign grey squirrels. They were cute but creepy.

It certainly got my attention but when it came down to it, none of us wanted to go in. Maybe the shop does rock but I might never know.

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Svalbard, Arctic; August 2006

In 2006, for my 30th birthday, I took myself on a holiday to the Arctic. I wanted to see polar bears in their natural habitat while I still could.

I did that and a lot more besides. I took an 11-day boat trip around the Svalbard archipelago in the High Arctic with Aurora Expeditions (booked through World Expeditions). As well as polar bears, I saw walruses, seals, whales, reindeer and a huge variety of birds. I challenged myself to try sea kayaking and this was a highlight of the trip - paddling past glaciers, seals resting on ice floes and enormous bird cliffs.

This photo was taken from the ship. I’m not sure what time of day it was and I can’t tell from looking at the photo either. At this time of year the High Arctic has 24 hours of daylight, with the sun simply moving from one part of the southern sky to another. It’s perpetual twilight – or perhaps dawn. The photo is on sale along with other examples of my art photography at Redbubble - Christmas is coming so feel free to buy a print or a calendar or cards!

I’ve written about my experiences several times since, including reportage about the Russian ship crew for Anyway, a description of Arctic kayaking for Rough Guides Make the Most of Your Time on Earth and a humorous blog-style account of the holiday for Australian Women’s Health. I also have a fact box on Spitsbergen (the biggest island in Svalbard) on the blog.

This is part of Photo Friday, a weekly feature hosted by Debbie at travel blog Delicious Baby. Please click through to see all the other photos submitted by other travel bloggers this week.

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Jerez de la Frontera, Spain; October 2008

Doors are a big deal in Spain. Perhaps it’s the Moorish influence as doors seem to be a central feature of architecture in Morocco and Tunisia as well. We saw beautiful doors everywhere we went in Spain, from Catalonia to Andalucia, from medieval fortresses (or alcazars) to suburban homes. Many of the doors were oversized and very grand and imposing, while others were highly decorated.

This brass door knocker is from an unknown building in Jerez de la Frontera in Andalucia - the home of sherry. The door is otherwise quite simple and I’m pretty sure the knocker is modern, indicating that Spanish door culture is alive and well. I really liked the way it looked - it gave the door personality, especially with the quirky little details such as the ring on the middle finger. [EDITED TO ADD: Read on to the comments to find out more - the best thing about my readers is they're smart and curious and they know things like the fact that this is a "Fatima door" and what that means].

We stopped in Jerez for lunch on our drive from Sevilla to Arcos de la Frontera, one of the White Towns in Andalucia. It was a public holiday so nearly everything was closed. We found Tio Mateo, a café in a leafy square by the library, and the food turned out to be really good - especially the pork in sherry sauce. Then we strolled through the town, admiring the city walls and the cathedral from the outside.

This post is part of Photo Friday hosted by Debbie at DeliciousBaby.

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Barcelona, Spain; October 2008

We spent five days in Barcelona, staying in an apartment about two blocks from La Sagrada Familia (The Sacred Family), the famous cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi. It’s worth seeing for two reasons. Firstly, the architecture is startlingly original - it really is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The building reminded me of a giant wax sculpture - all melted curves and tapering spires. The classic religious imagery such as the Passion of the Christ and the Nativity is represented but there are also unexpected touches, such as colourful piles of fruit on the tops of columns.

Secondly, the cathedral is not yet finished. At the height of the vogue for cathedral construction - in the Middle Ages and Renaissance era - it took hundreds of years to build a cathedral. Now we can whack up a skyscraper in a matter of months. But it seems cathedrals, especially cathedrals with this level of architectural detail, still take some time. Construction started in 1882 and the roof only went on recently. Things are speeding up now though and the current timetable estimates completion by 2026. Like my friend Jess, I’m definitely keen to go back and check it out!

It’s not often you get to see a cathedral under construction and I found it really interesting to go in the lift to the roof and look down upon all the cranes, and then descend via a stone spiral staircase.. The whole interior is still a workspace as well, with just a walkway for tourists around the edges. Underneath the building is a museum with drawings and plans and plaster work models of various parts of the cathedral - these days, this kind of work is usually done on computer using 3D printing technology, but they are still using the traditional methods.

The cathedral opens at 9am and if you can get there at opening time, you’ll be pleased you did. Most tourists are not that organised so it’s still relatively quiet at that hour but an hour or two later the entry queue is around the block and there’s another long line inside for the lift to the roof.

This post is part of Photo Friday, a weekly blogging event hosted by Debbie at travel blog DeliciousBaby. Check out the other submissions this week and also my photo post on chocolate bull fighting at my food blog The Gooseberry Fool.

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Madrid, Spain; October 2008

This, my friends, is a 17th century painting by Alonso Cano of Saint Bernard receiving the milk of the Virgin Mary. It’s on display at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

When people talk about being “catholic in their tastes”, somehow I don’t think this is quite what they have in mind.*

This post is part of Debbie at DeliciousBaby’s Photo Friday feature - please visit her site to check out all the other contributions. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like my quirky Jesus post from earlier in the week.

* Of course, “catholic” in that phrase refers to the other meaning of “catholic” and not Roman Catholicism.

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Spain is packed with religious artworks - some of them more quirky than others, such as these Jesus statues from Barcelona and Sevilla.

Spain is an intensely Catholic country and has been ever since the Moors were expelled in the Middle Ages and the fearsome Spanish Inquisition in the centuries that followed. So it’s not surprising that the country is brimming with beautiful cathedrals and religious paintings and statues from the medieval and Renaissance periods. Sometimes the endless paintings and statues of Madonna and child can seem a bit repetitive so I like to look for the ones that are a little different.

For example, it’s not too often you see statues of the Virgin Mary breast feeding the baby Jesus, such as this Medieval sculpture from the Frederic Mares Museum in Barcelona.

Those Medieval sculptors also liked to imagine Jesus as a playful child. From the same museum, here are examples of Jesus playing with his mother, and another of Jesus riding on the shoulders of Saint Christopher.

And at Sevilla Cathedral, we see Jesus with his stepfather Joseph and Jesus as a young boy. Not quite unorthodox but certainly less common themes than Mary and the infant and Jesus on the Cross.

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Kew, London; May 2008

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve wedged the heel of my high heels in between cobble stones or in a grate. Of course, the only time I’ve ever seen a warning sign was in Kew Gardens in London when I was perfectly sensibly dressed in jeans and trainers.

This post is part of Debbie at DeliciousBaby’s excellent Photo Friday feature.

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Cotswolds, England; May 2007

I grew up in Australia but had always had a sense of the English countryside from children’s books such as The Wind in the Willows. I was amazed when I went to the Cotswolds just how familiar everything was, from the quaint villages tucked amid gently rolling hills to the countryside with its black-faced sheep and bluebell woods. It really does look like you’ve always imagined it would.

But there were also a few unexpected pleasures… such as this cheeky gargoyle setting a bad example for children everywhere… and this Buddha in the Batsford Aboretum, the garden of a stately home connected with the infamous Mitford family. The statue was imported from Japan by Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford at the turn of the twentieth century.

This post is part of Photo Friday, hosted by Debbie at DeliciousBaby.

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Uganda; April 2006

I had the privilege to go to Uganda to write about a sustainable coffee project in April 2006. It was my first time in Africa, though not my last; I’ve since been to Tanzania, Senegal and Tunisia.

Uganda is a country that has suffered enormously in modern times, particularly in the 1970s under the ruthless Idi Amin. In some places, entire villages were wiped out. Certainly the natural landscape bears the scars of this era, with many of the forests felled and wildlife hunted out for food.

Yet everywhere we went, we were welcomed by happy, smiling people who seemed genuinely excited and pleased to see us. The reception of some of the children, crowding in and waving, made me feel like a queen!

Unlike in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania, where exposure to tourists has taught people to expect payment for having their photo taken, everyone was delighted to pose for photographs and when I showed them the image in my digital view finder it was, for some, the first image of themselves they’d ever seen. On my return to London, I printed copies and sent them back care of the coffee company to give back to the villages.

This post is part of Photo Friday, hosted by Debbie at DeliciousBaby. For all of this week’s submissions, see here.

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