After Port Stephens we spent the next 3 nights staying in Katoomba which is in the heart of the Blue Mountains national park. The blue mountains are called the blue mountains because the eucalyptus oil given off by the trees gives the air a bluish tinge you can see below:

The place is absolutely beautiful and a photographers dream. I took a lot of photos and am really glad I'd dragged my tripod along. To be sitting in a cafe in Katoomba and within 5 minutes be in the heart of the scene above was amazing. You'd look around and see yellow-crested cockatoos (which I'd only ever seen in zoos) flying around alongside parrots of various colours and sizes. Australians are so lucky to live in such a rich countryside - and I was only seeing a tiny spec of it.

Katoomba itself was a nice little town full off cafes and book shops, not at all spoilt by tourism. I noticed rather a lot of people with dreadlocks, pink furry boots and a curious obsession with wearing black, which seemed a little out of place but who am I to judge?!

One of the main things to see are the Three Sisters (pictured above) that are towers of rock that are apparently older than the grand canyon in the states. All I know is they make a pretty impressive leading line into the jungle below! Talking of which, you can take a near-vertical train ride or a more leisurely cable car down to the forest floor and walk through the trees from the safety of a walkway:

Of course, you'd do well to read the warnings first - I hate leeches!

Australia is just an amazing place. Since the island was separated from the rest of the world's landmasses millions of years ago all plant and animal life has evolved differently to the rest of the world. Unique animals like kangaroos and platypuses developed there along with most of the deadly snakes and spiders of the world. Even the trees are different, shedding bark instead of leaves:

The blue mountains, from what I could see, is absolutely beautiful. Rather than prattle on about it, here's a photo just around sunset that illustrates my point rather nicely:

Oh alright, here's one more about half an hour after sunset:

It was lucky we dragged ourselves down to the viewpoint that evening as the clouds came in and it was foggy for the last day and a half of our stay in Katoomba. Apparently it had been raining before we arrived and the weather just  decided to improve for the duration of our stay. As with the rest of the holiday everything just flowed perfectly!

On the advice of Ian, who runs Wanderers Retreat, we took the scenic route down to our next destination (which was Katoomba in the Blue Mountains). It was a great idea as it meant we'd get to see some more of the area without just blasting down a motorway in our fake 4×4.

The roads were quiet, almost empty and we passed through loads of small towns and even saw a couple of familiar ones: 

And even the odd monster!

It's amazing the things you see driving off the main roads. Normally I'd have been driving like a lunatic along the twisty roads but I was taking it easy, looking at the scenery in no particular hurry. Just the way it's meant to be on holiday. And of course, I had my lovely wife alongside me doing a fantastic job of navigating - not even a single mistake!

We hired a car and drove from Sydney up to a place called Wanderer's Retreat in Port Stephens (about a 3 hour drive away). If you check the site you'll see that you can stay in a luxury tree house in koala country with beaches a short walk away and more plant and animal life around you than you can shake a stick at. We were there 5 nights and it was absolutely beautiful. It must be the most beautiful place we've ever stayed and I'd go back in a flash! Just along the road was Nelson Bay and this shot from a hill above shows the sort of place we were staying:

One thing we noticed is that no two houses look the same (we made the same observation in New Zealand when we were there). It makes such a change from all the clone-houses you get in the UK where imagination is a missing ingredient.

It was around this point that I was completely eaten alive by mosquitoes. I was too busy looking out for snakes, scorpions and spiders to think about them but 25 bites in one day, each of them coming out in a large, super-itchy blotch an inch across certainly got my attention! So the next day, after getting some antihistamine and very strong cream, we took a ferry across to Tea Gardens (strange name for a village I thought) and had a look around - far less action-packed I know but I was suffering! We weren't alone:

And in fact a few dolphins decided to put in an appearance in the harbour:

When we got back to the tree house we had a run on the beach (I love being by the sea!) and then I got into a nice bath full of cold water to calm the mosquito bites down. And it worked!

Every day we'd been walking around looking up into the trees for a glimpse of one of these elusive koalas with no success. But luckily on our final day we managed to see three of them - and they're so cute!

Apparently they're not very active during the day but I didn't mind, that made them easier to photograph. Its child was climbing around the other side of the tree and was even cuter, although was clearly camera shy. The thing about Australia is that there's an incredible depth of plant and animal life that we Europeans can only dream of. And to have these furry little beasts living in trees where you live must be so cool.

It rained really heavily one night and into the next morning. As we drove back to the house after a shopping trip I heard this noise and thought the car was breaking down. I stopped and opened the window to be hit by a wall of deafening noise! Turned out it was Cicadas that are incredibly ugly and even more incredibly noisy insects - but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss hearing them now!

I also miss scenes like the one above. Port Stephens is a beautiful area and we only scratched the surface. 

How to cover an amazing 2 weeks spent in New South Wales, Australia and do it justice? I thought I’d write a few articles briefly talking about each bit of my holiday with a few photos to illustrate what I’m talking about. For the final article I’ll show a slick slide-show with all the photos I took over the trip.

We arrived first thing in the morning in Sydney and would have to wait until lunchtime to get into the hotel. This gave us a chance to get a coffee from Starbucks and think about where we wanted to go. Lonely Planet guide in one hand and strong coffee in the other, we looked at the options - and it seemed the obvious choice was to go up the Sydney Tower, the highest point in town measuring in at 250m high.

I don’t know if I was expecting Sydney to be bigger, but I was surprised to find that I could see all the interesting landmarks from the harbour bridge north to the opera house east. The view north is right. It was quite spectacular being able to see the whole city beneath my feet.

After that we had a bite to eat and went down to the Sydney Aquarium which was awesome. There were so many interesting fish, lobsters, eels, sharks, seals and even a crocodile (scary things those) and the underwater tunnels were cool - you could see sharks swimming around eating fish.

After a day or two of wandering around, exploring Sydney, light shopping and sleeping off the jet-lag, we decided to go on one of the open-topped city tours. You could hop on and off at various points and really get to see the whole place. It’s interesting to see the mix of old and new buildings right next to each other:

No trip to Sydney would be complete without a visit to the Sydney Opera House. It didn’t look that impressive from our viewpoint but up close you get to see what an amazing piece of architecture it is!

My good lady was a bit sceptical about how big it was so I took the following shot to remind her that it’s pretty big really. I don’t know what sort of enormous building she was imagining!

And looking back along at the city you’ll agree it’s a super-modern place:

All in all I really liked Sydney. It’s a big city for sure, but it’s not a dirty or unfriendly place so far as I could tell. It’s truly a 24 hour city (our time in a hotel in the centre proved that) and yet you’ve got beaches a short distance away (and the famous Bondi Beach of course). And the sunshine helped too. Lovely!

We spent the last 4 days in Sydney which is a 24 hour city to say the least! Our hotel was smack in the middle of the centre and we can vouch that the place never sleeps - which is more than can be said for us. I think over the last few days we've been asleep more than we've been awake. I reckon it's a combination of jet lag and recovering from work - it really takes it out of you.

Rather than go on about the highlights of Sydney I'll wait until I get home and can upload the pictures - the trouble with my fancy camera is that I need to process all the photos before I can upload them and your average internet cafe doesn't have both photoshop and Capture One Pro installed! One obvious highlight was meeting up with Rosie who's on her world tour just now - she's clearly had a hell of an adventure so far and more to come!

We picked up our hire car yesterday which happens to be one of these huge fake 4×4's that are so popular amongst parents with kids. I'm not sure why we ended up with one as it's about twice the size of anything we need but it does have cruise control and air-con so I'm not complaining! We've come up the coast near Nelson Bay and are staying for the next few nights in a koala-infested forest in a tree house! It's very tranquil although we've not spotted one of these cuddly beasts so far (it is raining so they're probably hiding somewhere). There's a beautiful, quiet beach too that's a mile long and, in true Australian style, is called 'One Mile Beach'.

I've noticed that everything over here is named with a complete lack of imagination. For instance, someone spotted a snake, noticed that it was brown in colour, and named it the 'Brown Snake'. Male kangaroos are renowned for their stink, so they're called 'Stinkers'. It goes on!

Anyway, we're off to continue our quest to find the best cappuccino in Australia - they keep getting better and better and it turns out that Starbucks are at the bottom of the scale here. Later!

Way back in January we thought it would be a nice idea to spend most of December in Australia. It would be cold, wet and miserable in Yorkshire and hot, sunny and relaxing in Australia. Well, it turns out to have been a wise move! It's rained non-stop for days, it's been cold, and apparently it's the exact opposite in Sydney!

Oh yeah, I also forgot to mention we're flying Virgin Upper Class too - which is an even bigger bonus. Not only do we wait for the flight in "The Clubhouse" which is like some futuristic, luxurious apartment, but we get to fly in seats that become fully flat-folding beds. It's a tough life! We're in the lounge just now waiting for our massages (really) and were just sitting next to a rather well known Scottish actor with a fondness for motor bikes. Sadly he was on his way out else I'd have started chatting to him (a lucky escape for him I think).

Anyway, we're off to play pool before our massages so I'll leave you to it. Expect the odd post as we get near an internet connection and I've brought my camera and tripod so I'll have no excuses to come back without a hard-drive full of fantastic photos. Enjoy the rain!

My passport finally expired and I was forced to get a new one. After much time spent meaning to fill out the form and apply for one I got around to it last weekend and incredibly my new one turned up this weekend. The first thing I noticed was that it now sports a much more up to date photo of me in it - you can see right what ten years does to you!

However, that wasn’t the most interesting thing I found about my passport. It turns out that I have one of these new-fangled biometric passports I’ve been hearing all about on the news. Apparently my photograph and the details on the photo page (my name, date of birth and so on) are written onto the chip so that you can wave the passport across a scanner and that information will just magically appear on a screen. The chip looks like this:

As an anti-fraud device it’s probably pretty good. The data is stored in an encrypted format (according to the leaflet) and can’t be written to again, so no changing the details. This means if someone steals your passport, while they may be able to put another photo on it, they won’t be able to change the details on the chip. Sounds cool.

But then I read the leaflet some more and came across the following section:

“From autumn 2006, we will interview all adults (people over 16) applying for a passport for the first time. In line with new European Union standards, we are also considering including fingerprints in biometric passports in the future.”

Now the first part is interesting as it’s likely to be an administrative nightmare and increase the time and cost of getting a passport. However, the second part unsettled me a little. If you want to live in some futuristic world where there’s no crime and everybody wears spandex, then you probably need the authorities to have everybody’s details: fingerprints, DNA samples and so on. This means that if a fingerprint is found at a crime scene, they can immediately tell who it comes from (since everybody’s prints are stored when they apply for a passport), then arrest them and freeze them in some high-tech prison facility. If you’ve got nothing to hide then you shouldn’t have a problem with it so the argument goes.

But for that the authorities would really need to have people’s best interests at heart, and as anybody who studies history knows, that is very seldom the case. All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But hey, I’ve got nothing to hide so maybe I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Until it’s too late!

I spent the last Bank Holiday weekend of the year (this weekend) camping above Robin Hood's Bay over on the east coast of Yorkshire. It's a really lovely little village (see below) in stark contrast to garish, tacky, commercialised resorts like Scarborough (which is my idea of a holiday in hell).

We'd just bought a new 3-man tent as my good lady thought the previous one was a bit small, oh and that since it leaked when it rained it wasn't really up to the job. Just as well we did since we were pounded by strong winds and rain both nights - and we managed to stay dry! Although with the noise we didn't get a huge amount of sleep.

We'd invited some friends and their 4 children along which was certainly entertaining. A friend of mine once said that children suck all the energy out of you and into them and now I know exactly what he meant - we were completely knackered by the time we got home on Monday and were in need of some rest and relaxation! I feel so much sympathy for my parents when they took us away anywhere - I have no idea how they managed to cope with our constant demands for attention without beating us to within an inch of our lives! (The black ruler aside dad ).

Oh, and just to show that Scarborough isn't all amusement arcades and Ferris wheels, here's a view walking between the north and south side of the town:

Of course, we were greeted by amusement arcades and Ferris wheels at the far side but the pretty coastline was nice while it lasted - as was the weather! 

Well, here I sit in a café in Portree on the Isle Of Skye. It's been raining pretty much non-stop since my wedding on Friday but how do I feel? I'm the happiest man alive.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the whole wedding idea, it turned out to be the most amazing day of my life and about a million times better than I ever could have dreamed of. Some friends even told us that they never thought they'd go to a wedding to rival their own (your own is always the best apparently and mine is no exception!) but with ours it did.

A colleague warned me that the wedding vows are "more than just words" and he was absolutely right - as I was repeating the vows to my wife (woo hoo!) the gravity of the situation hit me along with the emotion of it all and I broke down. She looked absolutely beautiful and as I was looking her in the eyes I meant every word and they came from the bottom of my heart. The rest of the day was a blur that flew by in a flash - and when we get home and look at the photos I'm sure it'll all come flooding back. To spend the day as the centre of attention with all my friends and family there to witness us tying the knot was truly wonderful and I only wish it could have lasted longer.

It may sound corny but already I feel like a different person. I left Yorkshire a boyfriend but I'm returning as a husband. Anyway, I'll write more when I get home and put up some photos, but in the meantime my wife is putting on her jacket - it's raining outside and we've got scenery to go and look at! Later.

Well, I’m away up north to get married followed by a week of travelling around Scotland. We decided that since we do a lot of long-haul travelling (we’re off to Australia in December for example) it would be a great opportunity to drag my good lady around some of the more interesting and mountainous parts of Scotland that I spent my younger days hiking. It’ll be a trip down memory lane and a chance to thrash my car around twisty roads.

Since I’ve left everything until the last minute I haven’t packed yet - I’ll do it when I get home after work. Then I’ll head north. Fortunately this has finally given me the opportunity to do something useful with Google Spreadsheets. Powerful though spreadsheets are, I never have a need for them, but when you’re writing a list of everything you need to pack, they’re ideal:

What was even cooler was when my good lady logged onto it from home and could check it over, make changes that I immediately saw, and we could send messages to each other. Very slick indeed.

Anyway, I’ll be radio silent for the next week or so as I’ll be far away from the internet. I just hope this weather holds!