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My friend Hap sent me this fine picture from Dijon.

Looks like… well… my kind of place.

I foolishly got hooked on Katie Melua‘s excellent album Piece by Piece just before going away on my round-the-world trip. Foolishly, I say, because when I got to Beijing I couldn’t stop thinking about the song about nine million bicycles (extract here).

Still, it’s better than the time a few years ago when Rose and I watched The Sound of Music just before visiting Austria. It’s embarrassing to realise you’ve been wandering around a shop humming to yourself about edelweiss or lonely goatherds…

There’s a whole range of transport options in Beijing other than just bicycles, though. In fact, I can’t remember ever seeing such a variety of vehicles anywhere else. Here are a couple I quite liked:

At one point we even overtook a tree going down the highway at speed…

I think there was a vehicle under there somewhere.

I really stopped in Beijing to visit some long-lost friends, rather than because I’d ever had a great yearning to see the place. But I found myself enjoying it greatly. There are some downsides – the air pollution, combined with the dust that comes in off the desert, is pretty appalling, and best illustrated by this photo of my friends’ muddy windscreen:

This was the view after a rain shower had passed over the stationary car. The car had been nice and clean beforehand.

Another downside, for those not used to them, are the Chinese lavatory facilities. In some spots, the Tourist Board has started indicating their suitability for visitors with a star-rating system.

Even four stars doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a seat!

But, these things aside, it’s a fascinating place.

I visited the Temple of Heaven and admired the trees in the surrounding park.

I visited Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City, where it’s apparently good luck to rub the brass studs on the enormous doors.

Young volunteers within the walls tell you how privileged they feel to be able to work there, and how they hope you’ll come back, and bring your friends, and see the Olympics. Their upcoming hosting of the games is hugely important to China. Personally, I have minimal interest in the Olympics, and some mild objection to the fact that my taxes are going to fund London’s decision to embrace the huge financial loss which hosting them always entails for the country concerned. But here the symbolic importance is huge and all around the city you see evidence of how things are being prepared, built, tidied up, covered up, so that the city will look presentable for the foreign visitors and the TV cameras.

I think the high point for me (in more ways than one) was the Great Wall. I had expected to be impressed by the scale, but I hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful. It was a bright, clear (and very hot) day, and we took a cable-car up to the wall, then walked along it as it snaked along the mountain ridges through the lush vegetation.

How dull it would have been if it had been straight and flat! That’s probably what the Romans would have done.

There was relief from the heat inside the towers.

And some opportunities to gather extra material for my collection of notices from around the world.

The food was superb, my friends James and Annabelle were great hosts, the prices were just unbelievable and the people were friendly.

Pity about the government.

And now I’m back in Cambridge, and it’s cold and rainy. Which, after the dust and mid-30s temperatures of Beijing, is actually rather nice.

Like many people, I imagine, the only mental image I had of Sydney was of the Opera House, and even that was flawed: it’s not white, you know, as I had always assumed. It’s actually a subtle beige colour. Here’s the obligatory photo – a night shot, just to avoid being too clichéd!

So I had no idea what to expect of the rest of the city, but I subconciously assumed that modern architecture would be the norm. And while it has a central business district much like many modern cities…

…I was really struck by the older buildings, from the grand to the humble, from early Victorian to late Art Deco.

I stayed at a delightful B&B dating from the 1870s:

And I was impressed with the public transport system, where a ‘day tripper’ ticket gave me access to an excellent rail network which whisked me to and from the centre, and a couple of long ferry trips, around the bay and up the river, all for about 6 quid. (A stark contrast to the tattered remains of a once-great railway system which greeted me when I got back to London. But that’s another story…)

I don’t want to post too many photos at a time, so I’ll spare you the leafy residential neighbourhoods, the amazing sandstone cliffs around Bondi Beach, the lighthouses and bridges…. All in all, I liked Sydney very much, and hope I get a chance to return before too long.

I liked this notice, seen on a platform of the (excellent) Sydney rail system this evening:

Actually, as one travels around the world, one often comes across interesting signs. I think one day I’ll publish a coffee-table book…

This padlocked box was on a street in a New Zealand town. Is the sign intended to fool very dim criminals, do you think?

And this one, inside the door of a loo cubicle, also set me wondering. I must confess, I’d never had the urge to do this before:

Once you’ve seen it, though, you start to wonder. What have I missed out on all these years? What is the attraction? Demonstrating your sure-footedness? Spying on your neighbour in the next cubicle? Pretending you’re in a French toilet instead of a Kiwi one?

Whatever the appeal, it’s obviously sufficiently tempting that they had to make and put up a special sign…

Spotted in an airport a couple of days ago.

I’ve been having a fabulous few days of vacation but have been moving from hostel to airport to boat to hotel sufficiently regularly that I haven’t had a long-term solid internet connection for quite a while. I have lots of photos and movies to upload but all my connectivity has been on a pay-by-the-minute basis recently, so you’re spared most of them for the moment!

This comes to you from the Inbox Cafe in Cairns, Queensland, which has a pretty good internet connection, great food and coffee, and very friendly staff. Recommended. Even here, though, it’s tricky to get a video upload to YouTube to complete. I’ve heard good things about Blip.TV, though, and might give them a try soon, because they offer FTP upload as an option, which is likely to be more reliable, I think.

In the meantime, here’s where I spent the night before last: on a dive boat on the Great Barrier Reef.

I rented a little underwater camera so will post something more sub-aquatic soon. But now I have to catch a plane to Sydney…

A couple of days ago I was in Napier. It’s an interesting town because it was almost completely destroyed by a big earthquake in 1931, and they rebuilt the centre from scratch, with the result that it has the most complete set of Art Deco buildings you can find in such a small area, anywhere in the world.

It’s almost too good – you might imagine you were one a movie set if it weren’t for the rather garish signs which New Zealand shops tend to have on them. These were perhaps the quietest ones:

Above the awning-level, though, there are restrictions on what people can do.

This isn’t a movie set, of course, it’s the real thing. And there are some nice touches lower down, too.

It’s only relatively recently that they’ve realised what a treasure this is and started to capitalise on its tourist value. Before that, the main emphasis was the beach (which is also very pleasant).

It makes me think of the David Suchet Poirot dramatisations, which draw heavily on Art Deco. There are fewer palm trees in most of those episodes, though.

The Art Deco Shop is in the old fire station:

and the owner had a great car parked outside: