It's the cycle of life

Sydney's Taronga Zoo is famous not just for its animals but its spectacular views of the harbour. Its offshoot in Dubbo, the Western Plains Zoo, lacks the views. It attempts to make up for it with a spacious environment for its many large and endangered species on display.

It is my turn to drive today and Google Maps sends me off on an odd route, up Obley Road instead of the Mitchell Highway. Despite the poor state of the road at times I prefer it due to the lack of traffic, especially trucks.

After we arrived at the zoo there is a lot of debate over whether we hire bikes or walk. We didn't realise that we could have driven around the zoo, otherwise we wouldn't have hired the orange bikes.

Maybe we would have enjoyed the visit more. There were some interesting animals, a hippopotamus playing in mud, white, black and single horn rhinoceroses, elephants and giraffes. We could barely see the famous lions.

But cycling around in the heat was tiring and the surrounding environment was basically Australian scrub and not particularly attractive or exotic. I enjoyed it a lot less than a number of other zoos we have visited.

We were utterly hot and exhausted by the time we pulled up at the Dubbo Palms Motel, whose exterior has all the appeal of a warehouse lot. The rooms are okay, but I can hear the main road out the front.

Decades ago I stayed in Dubbo and visited the zoo with my family and I'm afraid that they were not the best of memories. I'm hoping that Dubbo's other attractions will impress more tomorrow.

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Ho Chi Minh to Hoi An

The easy way to get to Hoi An from Ho Chi Minh City is to fly to Danang then go via car for the final leg. Then there's my way. We had to wake at 5.30 am to get ready for a 6.15 departure from the hotel. A hotel car took us the few kilometres to the domestic terminal at the airport, where we checked into our Vietnam Airlines flight to the central Vietnam city of Hue. The airport was nothing flash, but it seemed functional. Alex had sandwiches (refused banh mi) for breakfast, then we went to the gate. Our blue Airbus A321 was parked at a remote stand, which necessitated a packed shuttle bus ride. It was nice to be aboard a full service airline again, even if the service was just a cup of water. We took off over the hazy skies of Ho Chi Minh City and for most of the smooth flight were cruising over a carpet of cloud. We descended over mountains poking their heads through the cloud, across lakes and paddy fields and over the beach. It was lovely scenery.

The Carlingford Line

We close the year and the decade with a local adventure to mark the closure of a railway line. On the January 5, 2020, the Carlingford Line from Clyde will close to be partially replaced by the Parramatta Light Rail. This is Sydney's quietest line, a single track branch for most of its length from the industrial centre of Clyde to the northwestern suburb of Carlingford. According to Wikipedia, power supply and signalling issues mean that only a single four car train can utilise the line at a time. Newer Sydney trains run in fixed eight car configurations. This will be the first and last time I traverse the Carlingford Line in its current configuration. The weather of the day is certainly appropriate for an ending, the brown smoke haze lending an apocalyptic air to proceedings. I drive to Padstow and catch the T8 line to Central, followed by the T1 towards Parramatta and Penrith. The historic homes of the Inner West give way to industrial complexes, rail storage yards and t

A lazy day at the beach

It's 2am and somebody is still setting fireworks off on the beach in front of the hotel. I can't see the explosions as I have the window shuttered, but I can still hear them. I've wanted to have a lazy day and today was the closest I got. I woke up in the night from a very sad dream. Dreams follow crazy paths, but this one resolved itself as so. An entity had been causing disruption of computer systems around the world. It turned out that this entity had emerged from the computer networks and had been struggling to gain access to more computing power so that it could live. The entity had taken on the persona of a woman. The protagonist who had "defeated" the entity discovered that it was alive, spoke to it. Ultimately fell in love with her. But his prior actions would lead to its death. As a gift to her he downloaded his memories so that she could experience life even as she died. I know it sounds like a pulpy sf or technopunk plot, but dreams are about feelings,

travelling allrite

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