Author Archives: ontheroadwithdec

Heading west from Christchurch the country is a gently rising agricultural plain. Once heavy with sheep and farm crops it is now turning to dairy cows and grazing paddocks. The wind-rows of evergreens are disappearing and the quaint British landscape is opening up. The foothills soon appear and eventually high lakes and mountains take overContinue reading “New Zealand’s high country”

Sydney has lots of open space. It is a city on the water with over 230 miles of coast line. It also has many open spaces. The most obvious of these is the Botanical Gardens which cover a couple hundred acres and allow easy and green access to the Sydney opera House and nice viewsContinue reading “Sydney’s park lands”

People dream of koalas, kangaroos, Tasmanian devils and other uniquely Australian animals and are bummed when they find they are nocturnal and nearly impossible to get a look at. It is just to hot for animals to be out in the day time during the Australian summer – way to hot. For that reason thereContinue reading “Nocturnal Animals are a Pain”

Australia has done well by the land use heritage of its first residents, the Aborigines. The land was settled by people coming from coastal Sri Lanka as much as 60,000 years ago; certainly 40,000 years ago. These wanders/explorers/adventurers survived; maybe even flourished. They traveled during a period where the great glaciers of the last iceContinue reading “The Road to Uluru”

The landscape here is arid but spectacular. In the US we have Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, all rather dry but all stunning. This page will show happens when very old ocean sediments and eons of time and tectonic pressure work together. About 2.2 billion years ago this area was covered by a great andContinue reading “Standley Chasm, near Alice Springs”

Alice is always hot and dry unless it is raining and hot. I have seen the Todd River overflowing on three occasions; this is a river where the boat races feature boats which are carried by the participants as there is rarely any water. The Todd is usually a sinuous sandy serpent with no bite.Continue reading “Welcome to Alice (Springs that is)”

The small town of Kuranda is a bit of a tourist trap, but it is well up in the forest and has walking trails into the forest and that makes it worthwhile. Also it houses, in addition to a hundred trinket and post card shops, a gallery with the exquisite photos of Ric J SteiningerContinue reading “Up to the Kuranda Rain Forest”

The island continent of Australia is about the same size and shape as the continental 48 states of the USA. Cairns is where Boston is, Perth is San Diego, Melbourne is New Orleans, and Sydney is Washington DC. Just about the same. Now the weather is a different story; February in most of Australia isContinue reading “The Coast north of Cairns”