flying over orange rock

Watson's Bay, Sydney

What a way to spend a birthday- on a bay in Sydney harbour. Five nights in Sydney and the city felt like my own again. To return to a place you haven't visited in more than 20 years is an amazing experience. The distance isn't as far as before when bridged by the Internet. It remains a place that makes me look and analyze my own environment, all is so different, the trees, animals and birds most of all. It is wonderful to have the view broken by the flight of an ungainly cockatoo or to wake to kokaburras.

Like birds facing the onset of winter we flew back to Amsterdam. The plane flew for five hours over the interior of the country and for most of that I was glued to the window. The earth here is so piercingly beautiful. Ripples of hillocks wrinkled the ground and the earth changed in shades of orange and red ochres. The plane flew over the coastline and in the ocean there were stretch marks, -fissures in the plates. I wanted to stay.