So they say, anyway. True or not, I'm in still one piece after jumping out of a plane today. Once I got over the initial experience of freefall - breathing is very hard until you get the hang of it - the ride down was fantastic. Pacific Ocean on one side, wooded hills the other, in between the teenie houses and streets of Wollongong. Over far too ( Read more... )

Satisfied that we were competent enough not to dent his insurance premium, Dave took us off in the van, two towns eastward to Wentworth falls, where, after a picnic lunch of ham and peanut butter (hey, once you face one fear, the rest are easy, right), we set off down the bush track towards the canyon. The walk was rather dull, a sandy path with ( Read more... )

So skip now to last week. Spring is here with a vengeance, and Sydney is a pleasant place to be, but I'm running out of things to gawp at, and I'm giving serious consideration to moving south. My original plan to remain in the area til New Year was always a flexible one, and lately I have been inundated with suggestions of other places to visit. ( Read more... )

Okay, lets start at the beginning. It should be obvious that I didn't go to Katoomba for the nightlife. So why did I go?

Lets go back a month or so. I had been in Oz for about 3 weeks, and the weather had taken a turn for the worse. To be fair it was still a few days until winter officially ended, and it wasn't terrible by British standards, but it ( Read more... )

Melodramatic, huh? What a great name for a place though. Katooooom-ba. Sounds exotic, and slightly wild, evoking perhaps some dingy smugglers' den in the heart of the Congo. Good name for a Bond villain too. But does a place always live up to its name?

In this case, resoundingly no.

Katoomba is dull. And not just compared to Sydney - that'd hardly be ( Read more... )

Go by tube
I have never liked flying. I expect I'd enjoy a trip in a light aircraft, and I've enjoyed being dragged behind a boat strapped to a parachute. But airliners take what should be the most incredible thing a gravity-bound human being could experience, and make it dull. You sit in a chair bolted inside a metal tube for hours, and if you're ( Read more... )