Which is apparently Aussie Slang for Goodbye (although I never heard anyone say it...)

The new 3-D Cathy Pacific Flight Simulator™ shows me finally leaving Australian air space...



...somewhere near Darwin (or thereabouts...) and seemingly about 17 hours after taking off - Australia being so big and all that.

And now I have to get over any jet lag and go back to work...

Although you can see the two most famous landmarks of Sydney really clearly from many different angles around the harbour, it's increasingly difficult to see either of them the further you move south into the CBD (Cental Business District, as City Centres are known over here...)

The Bridge gradually disappears between high-rise (and in some cases, quite low-rise) buildings...



...and the Sydney Tower, which boasts Sydney's Best Views, only manages to squeeze the Opera House in between a couple of skyscrapers...



But Mrs Macquarie had the right idea...

Mrs Macquarie was the wife of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. He has all sorts of things named after him, Lake Macquarie, Port Macquarie... even Mrs Macquarie. But she did well in Sydney with a point, a road and a chair.

The point is well visited because it has the standard postcard view of the disappearing icons...



Once you have this photo (or one like it with better, bluer skies), then your work is done and you can go home.



So it's a good job it's the last day really...

(There is a "me in front of..." shot - in fact, there are several... and a story...)

With only a couple of days left to go, all the faffing around and zooming and panning I've had to do thus far to get good photos of indigenous wildlife seemed a bit redundant today.

By leaving Sydney at 7.20am (which was a wrench...), you can arrive at Featherdale Wildlife Park before it opens, before the crowds spook the animals. They have the lot: Tasmanian Devils, all sorts of wombats, birds of many coloured plumage, snakes, crocdiles (see the Flickr photo album for the lot...)

But what you want are your totally bona fide Australian icons up close and personal...

Koala (not bear) whose fur you expect to be wiry, but is, in fact, really cuddly-toy-soft...



Kangaroo/wallaby - not sure I can still tell the difference...



Emu... (minus Rod Hull and a bit too close up...)



And dingoes...



...which look cute as puppies but which carry your children off as adults...

Also on display was this rather oversized joey, which seemed a bit reluctant to leave its mother...



A bit like those five year olds you still see ferried around in pushchairs. Probably eating sweets.

When you only have a day to get your head around a city, it's best to let someone else take the strain of making sure you don't miss the best bits. OK, it would have been simple to attack a street map with a highlighter pen and dash round ticking things off, but this would have involved effort, and the advantage of the "Do Hong Kong in a Day" tour was that it came with built-in air-conditioned bus and a ten-to-the-dozen talky tour guide, Doris. (Actually, she may not have been called that, but for the purposes of writing about anything she did or said, it will do...)

First stop, up the Peak on the scary, almost vertical tram...



...which I was going to call "funicular", but it isn't, on the basis of there only being one. (You learn something every day...)



This is the other iconic view of Hong Kong...



...high up looking down, rather than low down looking up.

Both ways, you get confirmation of the way everything is packed in behind the water's edge and then clinging increasingly precariously up the mountain side.

Looking the other way, you get to see a bit of natural hillside that was too steep to build on and a snatch of the South China Sea...



(That shore line is also packed with high rise buildings - the tiny section you can see here is really the only bit which isn't...)

Anyway, not long here - over the hill to Aberdeen, which is another harbour surrounded by high rise government housing. You either live in one of those or you live on your boat...



...and then you go to work either fishing, or in the jewellery factory - part of the tour only so ludicrous Americans Canadians (see Twitter) can buy over-priced jade...



...or you try to flog fake handbags and Rolexes at Stanley market...



And that was just the morning...

Actually, I suppose we did. You can't really blame the Chinese.

Up on The Peak, some guy was hawking old black and white photos alongside a modern day colour one so you could play Hong Kong Spot the Difference. Quite developed in the fifties, but no real high-rise buildings... Now every square inch is packed with skyscrapers - office blocks...



...and apartment blocks (what the tour guide called "kissing apartments" - so close to each other, you could kiss the person in the neighbouring block...)



Before any buildings, you could imagine what the harbour looked like, sailing in, between the islands, it would have been steep, rocky hillsides, covered in forest. A real paradise. But now it's so dense...

On the plus side, you can walk between adjacent buildings and through their (thankfully air-conditioned) lobbies via covered, elevated walkways. You can get round most of the central business district like this - no-one seems to walk at street level.

After walking, the main way of getting around seems to be ferries across the harbour. The Star Ferries between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island cost HK$2 - the equivalent of about 14p. And as well as a public transport route, the harbour is a big tourist attraction. An evening cruise on a Chinese-Style Junk (pushing it, that description, really - it was a motorised, split-level boat with bar) means you can see what the city looks like as it lights up...



(*Note to self... consider travel plans more carefully when opting to go somewhere where it's hotter at 9pm than it ever gets during the summer in the UK...)

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Lots more photos on

I am in the process of not-quite-packing.

This is a procedure which involves gathering together things which might be necessary for my holiday without actually packing them into anything. The suitcase is still in the loft.

It's a very useful phase of the proceedings as I am also getting a number of other jobs done as a by-product. For instance, sorting out my "home file" (a product I swore I would never possess) while trying to find my passport in it. This involved a trip into town to purchase A4 filing wallets (or "slippy dippies" © Chris Kilby 1990s). These were cheap, which is good, because I could have just lifted some "used" ones from work... This led to several hours sorting out contents of aforementioned boxfile and categorising and shredding and wondering why, in the light of the advice I give my Dad, I still have the receipt for a printer I bought in 2001 and threw away in 2002.

Anyway, here is the collection of electronicage I have to take abroad...



USB cable, another USB cable with slightly different end (in white), camera batteries (why it can't take ordinary batteries, that you buy in a shop, I don't know...), charger for camera batteries, earphones for iPod, memory card for camera, USB stick to back up photos to avoid what happened to Tina's Australia photos, socket adapters to turn safe, earthed three-pin plugs into wonkily angled, two-pin, flimsy death-trap plugs, phone charger...

That's the luggage allowance gone then.

I am very excited that it's going to be winter in Australia. I like it being cold. (Actually it won't be cold, but it won't be boiling. It'll be comfortable.)

I've been so busy looking forward to the winter evenings, dark early etc that I totally failed to appreciate how hot it's going to be Hong Kong...



I realise there are ways of coping, but I really don't want to have to wear linen and sandals...

...people do person does read this blog, which is all very encouraging and spurs one on into making a bit of an effort.

With this in mind, I have invested time and coffee in producing the very nascent map below.

It shows the basic route and main destinations and its creation, in that it was bloody hard to do, gives the lie to Google's corporate "do no evil" philosophy (see number 6) and drives a cart and horses through most of its design principles (especially number 3).



(You can zoom in pan about and look at an aerial photo of Heathrow, if you wish...)

I intend to add those groovy little place markers in various colours and styles to bring some actual tourism to what is currently only flights, and they may (or may not) appear on this map (see number 5).

With only three days officially left at work now (but probably about seven or eight left unofficially) and with some other people (who had sensible Easters actually at Easter) having finished work for the summer completely, I thought it was about time to start looking forward to the holidays.

The last time I did this properly was in 2005 when I went off to New Zealand and it's been really good to look back at the blog and the photos from them to remember what we did and saw, what with memory failing through age, early onset Alzheimers etc.

Being as I'm going nearly as far again this time, I have decided to produce a self-contained "interactive postcard" of...



(I really spend too much time on the computer...)

There are several good reasons for this:

1. It's cheaper than phoning people;
2. You don't have to master any foreign language to buy stamps for real postcards (in this case, Australian...);
3. It's a good back-up for all the photos in case the memory card goes tits-up;
4. It saves making a real scrapbook like I used to do when I was little (my OCD meaning that I would only ever buy John Hinde postcards...);
5. It will give Ann Crocker something to read (I still have a dog in my boot that's hers... fluffy, not real, so don't phone the RSPCA...);
6. It will divert attention away from the fact that I have failed Project366 (but kept going longer than some...).