International Peach Blossom Festival at Longquan near Chengdu.

Although it's called the Peach Blossom Festival, there are also pear blossoms and plum blossoms. The peach blossoms are the prettiest but the plums are the most prolific, as this picture shows.



This one is the same tree. This is my teacher, He Mengqian. She invited all the class but only I went, as most of the others spent Friday night celebrating the end of the week and couldn't get up so early.

Looking down across the orchards to the town in the distance. Lots of people like to pose for their photos, either in front of or actually in the trees (usually the young men climb the trees). The pink flowers are peaches and the white ones pears. We are looking forward especially to the peaches in the summer - they are said to be delicious!

Here you can see all the fluttering flags, Chinese lanterns, umbrellas and tables for eating, drinking tea and playing mahjong, scattered across the hillside.

A longer distance view from the same spot - the weather is very typical of Sichuan, where you see lots of mist but rarely see the sun. As well, we'v hardly seem any rain since we got here, although severla times it's rained overnight. (Miss He says this is typical of Chengdu - it always rains in the evenings, just like Camelot.)

Chengdu City, February 2007.

Here are some pictures of Chengdu. It's a big city, quite spread out, very busy. It's always misty everywhere in Sichuan province - you don't often have bright sunny days. There are lots of parks and teahouses, lots of shops both small and large, lots of buses and taxis and especially lots of people!

Here is our apartment - it's the second floor from the top on the left of the building. If you look closely you can see there is an old umbrella hanging on the balcony, and a orchid in a pot. It's the Chinese custom to stick anything they don't want outside the window on the balcony and hope that at the end of their tenancy either the landlord or some future tenant will take care of getting rid of it. Our balconies have various cardboard cartons, bundles of plastic sheeting, old plastic washbowls, a stool and a mop as well as the items mentioned.

This picture shows two of the three buildings that comprise our community. The building on the left is ours but our apartment is out of view to the top left. It must be during working hours - in the evenings there are lots more cars. But definitely there is nothing like enough space for every apartment to own a car! Bicycles are parked under the stairs at each entrance - even then, there are 14 apartments at each entrance, so if everyone had a bicycle there would be no space to walk up the stairs!

Here is our local park - it's called Jiu Li park, meaning nine li (a li is half a kilometre). Our street is nine li dike street, presumably because in old times there was a dike here and it's 9 li from the city centre (which it is). There is a confluence of two rivers here, so it's quite likely there would have been a dike; these days the rivers are in stone channels and are barely a trickle apart from the storm water which they double as a (rather smelly) drain for. The district has an even more poetic name, being called golden cow district. Anyway, here's the park.

Apart from our local park, we have so far visited three other parks. They all share common features such as walkways and at least one teahouse, and there is always some water - either a river or a lake. Most have pavilions you can sit in, and they are all well patronised - during working hours by retired people playing mahjong or cards, during non-working hours by people of all ages.

The teahouses vary from a small portable kiosk to a large airy pavilion. This one is a small portable kiosk. This kind is much more interesting because the owners actually chat to you. We had some tea at this tea house and during our time sitting there were approached by a number of people wishing to have their photo taken with us. This seems to be a hobby with high school and university students - our friend Kim told us he had his photo taken with every foreigner he saw when he was at university in Xi'an.

As you can see, as well as selling tea (you get a glass with any one of 15 or 20 types of tea plus a thermos of boiling water which will be refilled periodically), they sell all kinds of snacks. They also rent out mahjong sets and sell playing cards. Which reminds me - we saw an electric mahjong table at the police station when we registered in Chengdu - it automatically empties the tiles into a barrel, mixes them up and deals them out, even building them into a wall for you! Now there's a useful peice of technology... The comment from our guide (the guy at the university who deals with all these formalities) was that it's amazing how all the government offices are so modern, clean and have such good facilities in comparison with the majority of offices and companies. Of course the government is never short of money.

Below is an example of family transport! Actually, you don't see this kind of transport so often in big cities like Chengdu - or rather, you see the vehicles but they're normally used for transporting goods rather than people. In the countryside (provided it's reasonbly flat) you see lots of these, and often they're pedal powered rather than motorcycles. This one was in the same park that the teahouse above was in.

This picure is of Sichuan Universty, the biggest university in the city - it covers several city blocks from the main street that runs from north to south through the city, down to the river on the east side. This particular building is designed in accordance with what seems to be a unifying theme for the newer buildings on the campus. It's quite an impressive campus with nice looking buildings, and seems to have lots of facilities such as a football field, basketball, table tennis, badminton, etc. And, of course, a big lotus pond! Our university also has a very large lake, modern buildings and sports facilities, but doesn't seem quite as attractive as Sichuan University.

Well, that's it for today! Hope you enjoyed the show...

Boats on the Grand Canal

Drinking tea and playing cards - not our local park but a big one far in the north of the city of Chengdu - much bigger than ours.

Here are some photos of our recent trip to WA. I have almost 400 altogether but chose only 7 in the interests of space. Anyone who wants to see all 400-odd can come and visit me, or maybe I could send a CD.



One of many bays in Cape Le Grand National Park, just east of Esperance - there are lots of beautiful beaches there, probably too dangerous to swim because of the rocks and currents. Also, of course, the water is quite cold. If you head off out to sea, the next land you reach is Antarctica!



Although Cape Le Grand's beaches were so spectacular that they kept our eyes riveted to them for most of the day, we did have time to snap this emu.



This kookaburra hung around our campsite in Walpole looking for food. It was very unafraid.



As we were walking along the Bibbulmum track near Walpole, we suddenly encountered this enormous kangaroo. I reckon it stood at about 2m tall and was also very solidly built.



Sunsets are a dime a dozen these days, but I thought this one was worth sharing anyway... We walked from our campsite by the sea near Walpole into the town centre one evening (about a half-hour walk) and the sun was setting as we walked across the heathland.



Here is an example of the wild flowers - there were so many of them we were just amazed. I've seen wild flowers in Victoria, but the quantity is far lmore and the showiness also more spectacular. This was also taken somewhere along the Bibbulmum track near Walpole.



This, of course, is me. The road is near Dwellingup, which is a timber town not too far south of Perth. The surrounding forests have all been logged for more than 100 years, so there aren't many big trees. The town has been burnt down a couple of times and is currently a mixture of loggers and hippy types.



This is a view across part of the gold-mining area of Kalgoorlie. The main mine is an enormous open-cut pit (which for some reason I never got a picture of), but here you can see some of the workings in the background. Kal is basically in the middle of an arid zone, so there is not much vegetation and what there is is pretty stunted. Water for the mine and the town is piped from Perth via a historic pipeline - this photo was taken from the top of the water tank at the end of the pipeline.



This is a view from the same spot, looking across the town of Kalgoorlie.



This place is called Murphy's Haystacks. It's in wheat country on the Eyre Penninsula, west of Adelaide. As you can see, it's very dry - very marginal land, suitable only for wheat (and even then, not much is growing at the moment due to the continuing drought).

The rocks are very interesting geologically but I'm not expert enough to explain them, although I read the information boards. They continue and are joined together under the ground. The two people are my friends.