On receiving the contract, I read it quickly and then read it again more slowly and then one more time, after which I decided that I needed help to make the correct decision. I bounced the idea off members of Goodreads , which is a book readers web site, and I was very pleasantly surprised to […]

Approaching Napier. NAPIER – So named after Sir Charles Napier 1782 to 1853. The Hawks Bay earthquake of 1931 flattened Napier, and killed 161 people and injured thousands. The local newspaper at the time wrote that the town had been wiped off the map. I took a photograph and this photograph, which was on a large […]

By 1946 over 500 Japanese had died in Australia. This number included those who died in the breakout of August 1944. The Japanese who died in attempting to escape were buried in a plot next to the Australian War Cemetery in Cowra.  The war ended and the RSL (Returned and Services League) of Australia would […]

Perth mint, which until 1970 was part or the Royal Mint of Britain. In 1970 ownership passed to western Australia. On our recent visit to Perth we took a tour of the old mint. The ‘Mint’ in the city of Perth is now mainly a museum with the ability to sell and market coins etc. […]

There’s not many boys who didn’t have an interest in trains at one time or another. My interest started when I saved pocket money towards a Triang train set, and the love of trains has never left me – although my original train set did. With grandchildren one can ‘remember’ to a certain extent when […]

It appears that I have a post out of sequence – after Muscat the post should have been Ras al Khaimah, and then Dubai – please accept my apologies. Too many readers have already read the ‘Dubai’ post to change the sequence. Ras al Khaimah from a painting in 1809. Ras al Khaimah has been […]

During our time in Thailand we decided to visit the ‘railway’ market, and on the way we stopped to see the salt fields. The salt is not mined but created through evaporation from seawater. The railway market has grown in popularity since out first visit about eight years ago. The market is across the road […]

I know that we are supposed to plan for the future, and that the only sure thing is death and taxes. During our Australian road trip last year I came across a grave . . . . The ‘problem’ with this grave is that fortunately it is empty – at the moment! It appears that […]

In 1788 Thomas Gilbert was the Captain of the Charlotte, which had sailed to Australia as part of the first fleet carrying convicts. After discharging his convict passengers Captain Gilbert sailed for China and passed through a group of islands that we now know as The Gilbert Islands. He made sketches of the islands and […]

Many of us have a book inside that we would like to write if we just knew how – I am not talking about putting pen to paper, but to construct a story that others would wish to read. For years I wanted to write and would throw away my attempts, because I was not […]

This was the second part of our ‘back to back’ cruising from Sydney in Diamond Princess. We spent a day in Yokohama before sailing to cruise the Japanese coast and a single foreign port in South Korea, Busan, which is across from Japan via the southern part of the Sea of Japan. We would stay […]

Majestic Princess Reg. London, 144,216 gt, 3,560 passengers maximum. (will it feel crowded?) There comes a time when winter is all too much as one grows older . . . and older. A few months ago I started to check where to go or what to do, for part of our Sydney winter. Being a wimp, I […]

Writing historical fiction is time consuming to say the least. Each scene that surrounds a character must be true for the reader, and the easiest way to make this scene true, is research and more research. You cannot afford to be wrong, unless of course you do it deliberately, because you are writing an ‘alternate […]

We anchored off Auckland and I could see the lights of the city as I stood my watch from 8.00 pm to midnight. We finally berthed at 6.30 am and worked cargo all day. Everyone on board knew that Maureen was flying out to see me, and they thought that she was from a very […]