Earthquake off Japan

As soon as we arrived home today we saw ABC television transmitting a live stream of news from Japan on the huge earthquake off the northern coast. The names of towns and provinces in Tohoku that they mentioned were all too familiar as they were part of our plans for the first half of our trip. The tsunami washing into Kamaishi port. Who would know of Kamaishi port normally? But I had been trying to include a railway line through there in our trip.

Now who knows which lines will be running, which hotels and museums open? And what does it matter anyway, except for those who depend on them for their livelihoods? For there are many, many people who must have lost their lives, possessions or been affected in some other way by this dreadful event and my heart goes out to them.

Just the other day, frightened a little by the devastation in Christchurch, I had been reading about recent earthquakes in Japan. We were in Takayama in July 2008 when a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Iwate province in northern Japan.

It's scary, but so is driving on Sydney's roads.

We've never explored the Tohoku area, or further north up to Hokkaido. Perhaps there is enough damage (and the risk of aftershocks) that we must again delay such a visit and return to the southern parts of the country. We'll just have to wait and see.

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My first overseas trip: Singapore and Malaysia

I've always loved to travel. My first memory is of sitting in a an aircraft, aged 18 months or so. Yet I never believed that I could travel overseas. To me, it seemed like something you did when you retired, or if you were rich. That all changed when I met B. She had not only travelled overseas, she was from overseas . B was born in Malaysia and arrived in Australia, with her family, in 1988. She still had relatives and friends in Malaysia and Singapore and she, along with the remainder of her family, planned to return for a visit during the Australian summer of 1995. At the time I was staying in B's mother's house while we were studying at university. After B's father passed away the year before I was the nominal "man" of the house and its high maintenance garden; her brother Michael was studying up in Queensland. B and I were quite inseparable and her mother kindly offered to pay for me to join them on their vacation. So it was that I obtained my very firs

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One night in Canberra

It's the April school holidays and we are too busy to have a break but need one because of that. And because it's the Easter weekend the options are limited, so we just drive down to Canberra for the night. No, this isn't our first trip for 2023. I wrote about Japan on another site . I refuse to wake up early so we depart after 8.30 AM. There is not much to say about the drive except that the clouds seem so low and Lake George is very full. We stop at a rest area and at the lookout up the hill to take it all in. Everyone is hungry so we first stop in Dickson and then can't think of anything to eat, so I drive us to Civic, where we can't decide and end up eating at the Singaporean Killiney Kopitiam branch. The Canberra Centre has nice shops. I dream of getting an iPad from the Apple Store, we buy a blanket and toothbrushes from Muji and wish that Lego wasn't so expensive. Nothing we can't get in Sydney, but then we rarely go out shopping in the city. It'

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