Travelling Man and Muse
2010 World Trip

Despite having a difficult first night thanks to not the ideal suite, we spent our first day in Cairns on a whole day trip to the Kuranda rainforest and it was fantastic, a real highlight and quite unexpectedly so. It was a very full day that started at 8:30 when we were collected from our hotel. It was a fifteen minute trip to the start of our 7 mile cable car ride. Yes, you heard correctly a cable car, the Muse's absolutely least favourite method of transport. In fact getting her even near a cable car has been impossible up till now. However, this was one of the highlights of the day, as the cable car barely skims the treetops of the rainforest and provides an amazing view of this unique habitat. That's the second half of the cable car ride. But you have to get to that point and for the first couple of miles it climbs to the top of a mountain over forests and ravines and gets quite high. I'm not great with heights but for 'she who must be obeyed' they represent ...

This whole trip has been booked venue by venue and activity by activity online. We have used many different booking sites and agents. It is time to throw a little criticism in the direction of pretty well all of them. Wherever we have booked with hotels and tour operators directly we've got what we wanted, expected and paid for. Wherever we have gone through one of the endless variety of intermediary sites offering great deals, there have been issues. The most common one was with hotel bookings. Invariably we found two queen size beds where we had specified one king size. The hotels always sorted us out and we're talking minor irritation only, but it just became tiresome when it happened for the third time at the Cairns Shangri-La. However they were very helpful at the hotel. 'This always happens', was there response. They upgraded us to one of their management suites with a king-size bed and access to the 'luxury' floor. This has it's own lounge and dining ...

So we've reached the end of out stay at Longitude 131. The excursions and the guides have been wonderful, the breakfasts good and the lunches including today's smoked duck salad really very nice indeed. As I have commented already the resort is let down by poor attention to detail and lack of staff and organisation in their evening kitchen. They made our departure easy, however, doing our online check-in for us and organising the return trip to the airport (probably glad to see the back of a couple of whinging poms). One of the guides took us. We left the lodge less than an hour before our plane was due to depart and within 20 minutes we were airside waiting to board. Well ahead of the scheduled departure time, with all passengers clearly checked in, Qantas boarded the plane and we left. We reckon that from our last mouthful of lunch at 131 to take-off was less than an hour. Qantas are very efficient and it appears that not only is their director of catering a fan of this blog...

Throughout the resort there are 6in by 2in burrow entrances everywhere we look.  There are literally hundreds of them.   Our guides assure us that these belong to the very large and rather shy local lizards. The lizards are in fact members of the monitor family and average about 4ft in length.   I have been waiting to come across one.  We are a couple of hours from departure, when finally, some movement in the undergrowth and here he is.  The big camera is of course packed, so this will be our only lizard portrait. Nevertheless he is a very fine specimen and every inch of four feet long.   What a shame they only eat larger insects like the locust-sized grass hoppers that abound.  If only he would eat the flies, I'd catch him and wear him as a scarf. By the time  I took this picture, I must have had a hundred of the little sods buzzing around. That's the last time I step outside without my fly net and hat in place!

Every hotel with pretensions prides itself on the assortment of cosmetic preparations, shampoos, body washes and moisturising creams that it provides for it's guests. Very often these are in very exotic looking bottles and in very small quantities. All can be purchased on departure, however, at eye-watering prices. Southern Ocean Lodge succeeded in this department on every count, particularly on it's prices, which were not just high, but laughable. Longitude 131 was more sensible in this department. They might be just a little bit confused in the way the perfumes of their various products are coordinated, or should I say completely random. I have just emerged from a wonderful invigorating shower after a day's walking and sightseeing. I have used a body wash infused with grapefruit, coconut and tangerine oils and used a shampoo enhanced with lavender and mint extract. I smell like a cross between the fruit salad I had for breakfast and a room full of old dears who've a...

It is nine o'clock in the morning and we are sitting down to breakfast at 131. Before anybody thinks that we have had a leisurely start on this our last morning in the Australian outback, we have been up since 5:00am. I had no idea that this time of day existed! They don't like you to miss dawn coming up over the rock here. You can miss sleep, but not the sun coming up. Well it did come up, but decided to stay hidden in cloud. What we have had is a wonderful 4km walk around the eastern flank of the rock. Adrian, our guide, has been explaining the significance of the various features in the rock face - and amazingly, water holes - on the route. At one point, not only is the waterhole full, but water continues to trickle out of a small fissure in the sandstone.  A culture and people have survived and, until Europeans turned up, thrived in this land for over 20,000 years, which is something you quickly come to respect, as the heat and the flies take their toll. With all our techn...

Today so far, we have been dragged from our beds before dawn for a sunrise walk through a gorge in the Olgas, a rather extraordinary group of hills 45 minutes from the hotel.  It's still dark as we have breakfast and set off,  but it's a fabulous walk and at that time of day there are no other tourists.  We are the only group mad enough to be out.   After a short rest back at base camp, we're whisked off into Yulara, the local town or rather the local small group of hotels clustered around two or three shops and restaurants, whose only reason to exist is to provide somewhere for Uluru visitors to sleep and eat.  Now having walked from one end to the other - a process that has kept us out of trouble for 15 minutes we are both delighted not to be staying in any of them. Suddenly, 131 might be looking up! Lunch is a vast improvement on dinner - a really excellent King Prawn salad with a lime and chilli dressing, followed by a trio of sorbets, though service could be a lot bett...

OK dear reader, here it comes. This is the big one. We are now checked in and beginning to enjoy all the amenities and delights that the Voyages Longitude 131 Ayers Rock resort has to offer. This is the stop around which our whole six-week adventure was planned. This was billed as the best place we were going to stay on the whole trip. Our already sky-high expectations were raised even further by a delightful American couple whom we met at Kangaroo Island's Southern Ocean Lodge. They had come from 131 and in their view, fabulous though SOL was, 131 was by the slimmest of margins the better place to stay. Well, it is our view that they were wrong, not just a bit wrong, but completely and utterly and hopelessly wrong - in fact, bordering on bonkers! Longitude 131 is not a bad place. It's just that it doesn't even come close to Southern Ocean Lodge in any department - food, comfort, space, guest facilities, style, furnishing, even cleanliness. The room is not in the same leag...

I shall now return to the subject of Qantas and their unique approach to in-flight catering. The flight from Alice to Ayers Rock is no more than 30 minutes. Qantas, however, is going to serve and clear a meal of some description to its 150 passengers, come what may.  So at break-neck speed the cabin staff distribute a semi-opaque oval shaped clam shell style plastic box. I am sure that for those who have seen this before, effecting entry presents no problem. To the uninitiated it is a little more of a challenge, but eventually we're in!  It contains quite a lot of celophane, clearly the airline's material of choice. One celophane package contains a piece of vintage cheddar; another contains two crackers that we suspect are designed to be consumed with the cheese. The final and largest celophane package contains a large cookie. Finally there is a 250ml bottle of water.  My award for most carefully thought-out package goes to the cookie wrapper.  The package designers have done t...

I may have commented before about the way Australian airports operate.  Fair dinkum, mate would certainly apply to their smooth and occasionally slightly eccentric operation. Today is not the day for sightseeing and it is not the day for walking anywhere either. The rain is sheeting down, though it's  still 'bloody hot mate'. Alice Springs airport is not the largest in Australia and one or two things are missing, covered walkways all the way to the door of the plane being one of them. So at the gate Qantas issue each passenger with a large red and white umbrella and an odd little line of red and white domes snakes out across the tarmac to climb up the steps to the aircraft door, where the cabin staff retrieve the umbrella and drop it down to be recycled for the next passenger snake. But it all works efficiently in common with everything else at the airport.  The check-in queue disappears in seconds because they open more desks. Clearing security is quick, because there are ...

Good-bye Alice Springs - and not a moment too soon. Actually I'm probably being a little unfair. If it hadn't been for this place, Charles Todd might never have been able to establish the route for the Telegraph lines that linked Adelaide on the southern coast with Darwin in the north.....come to think of it, two other places where no sane person would want to live! To be fair to Alice, the ranchers and miners needed to have somewhere to come and get drunk and buy supplies. Today tourists come to buy things they don't need - except fly nets, which they do need - and the 'local indiginous population' come and get drunk.   As you drive through the bush you come across huge signs that say NO ALCOHOL and NO PORNOGRAPHY and in the small print give details of the federal laws which give effect to these bans. This is the government response to the inability of the Aboriginees to cope with booze and sexual excess. It probably seems a bit heavy handed to us, but apparently i...

Our first job on arrival was to phone the driver and bush guide we'd arranged to meet to confirm our Palm Valley tour. The result is our first problem all trip. Unexpected rains have washed out the roads to and inside Palm Valley. Tour cancelled! After a bit of replanning we booked a whole day tour of the West Macdonnell mountain ranges with Emu Run Tours. It turned out that we were only six in total on the tour, which meant we practically had a personal guide and driver, exactly as we had wanted in the first place. It also turned out to be another brilliant day. We were collected from our hotel at 7:45am and off we went into the bush, which starts within a couple of miles of the town centre. There is much more water out here than you expect. A couple of metres below the red dusty surface there is plenty of the stuff and this particular outback area is much greener than we anticipated. Alice normally gets about 3ins of rain a year. This year it has already had 6ins. Even some of ...

We are on a two hour flight from Adelaide to Alice Springs. We are being served light refreshments, which on this plane means a choice between a cookie and a cake (extremely small muffin would be a more accurate description). The cookie has been encased in an impenetrable celophane wrapper and the cake is within a small paper casing.  In order to encourage us to recycle our now shredded sheet of celophane and our empty but sugary paper pastry case, they are not simply collected by the cabin staff and placed into a single recepticle. Instead every passenger on the plane is given a large paper recycling bag in which to place our one very small piece of rubbish, thereby ensuring that what gets recycled is 10 times more than it needs to be, due to the size of the recycling bag. Good thinking there Bruce!  England needs you!  Had you ever considered a career in Health and Safety?  Alice Springs, we have arrived. It's hot. I mean it's seriously hot. Standing in a queue at the Gates o...

Sadly this will be the last Captain's Log entry from Kangaroo Island. We've had a very early start indeed. Our flight leaves Kingscote airport - a word I use in its loosest sense - at 8:00 am. The drive from the lodge to the airport is about 55 minutes, but not first thing in the morning. At 6:00am when we leave it is still dark, which means that the island's nocturnal creatures are very active. Drive at more than 40 MPH and you WILL write off your car when it meets a high speed kangaroo.  Southern Ocean Lodge has excelled itself again, however, and a member of staff and wildlife guide is there to meet us in reception.  We are the only guests leaving this morning so we have our private dawn safari along the dust road and out towards Kingscote. Within a mile, we have seen our first and only LIVE possum. We have seen possums before this, but only after they have been enhanced with rubber and other random car parts and rearranged as road kill!  This one is very much alive and ...

It is Sunday afternoon. The weather is perfect. Sunshine, a blue sky with a few high white clouds, a picture-perfect view across the ocean and the sound of the sea breaking on the rocks below have created the ideal environment. We have finished a remarkably good lunch and have come out on the cliff-top walk again, as it was so beautiful yesterday. The Muse has brought a book, recommended by an extraordinary American couple with whom we had dinner last night, another absolutely remarkable meal, by the way, and she is completely absorbed. This gives me a chance to tell you more about this remarkable place. In New Zealand, we drove through the Remarkables, a stunning mountain range that I described earlier. One of the highlights of this morning's adventure here was a trip through Flinders Chase, a huge national park, that is home to amongst other things The Remarkable Rocks - and they really are. Here is your geology lesson for the day......granite is formed when molten lava cools ver...

At least one of my readers will find this quite funny But here for the world is the view from our dunny In the distance the rocks and the sky and the sea As we sit here in comfort enjoying a wee!

At around 6:00pm, a small group of residents was driven the short distance to a former sheep ranch close to the resort. The ranch is now owned and managed by the parks authority who are letting it develop naturally into a 3,000 acre nature reserve. Here quietly grazing on the open grassland are hundreds of kangaroos. You are able just to walk quietly amongst them. Although wild, they will let you walk to with 15ft or so before gently bouncing off to carry on grazing a little further away.  While we admired the local wildlife, the rangers and guides who had come with us plied us with the local bubbly and some rather delicious canapes. I rather think we had more nourishment from our few snacks than the roos were getting from the grass. It hasn't rained here since October and rain isn't due until around April.......England pleas take note. The weather here is warm and dry and sunny.  On the short drive back to the lodge, our car stopped. There sitting quietly in the branches of a ...

This picture taken from the very private terrace outside our lounge area highlights some of the differences between Australia and New Zealand. So much of New Zealand was covered in lush green forest, even the mountainsides. Here in Australia it is more rugged. The landscape is harder, harsher, hotter and a great deal flatter. The flight from Melbourne to Adelaide was only short and the plane didn't get to much above 14,000ft. The land below was brown and barren, almost featureless from above. There is, however, a sense of space. This is a vast country. Even here on Kangaroo Island, you feel that this is an empty place where you could go for miles without seeing another soul - and you certainly can. We walked along the cliff top this afternoon to a sheltered headland some 3kms away. Within a few yards of leaving the lodge, the building itself was no longer visible and the only sounds were a few sea birds and the crashing of the waves on the rocks and soft white sand beaches 500f...

No picture is quite going to do this place justice. We were met at Kangaroo Island's tiny airport by one of the lodge's staff and driven to the south-west corner of the island. After 45 minutes we turned off the road onto a dust track that took us down to the coast. After 6kms we turned again through security gates and 2.5kms later we stopped outside a truly remarkable oasis hanging off the cliffs and looking across an unspoilt bay onto the southern ocean. Cue the wow-ometer!! We entered a vast room overlooking the coastline. We were handed a glass of chilled bubbly and introduced to the staff who would be looking after us. This is an all-inclusive resort; the bar and the wine cellar are ours to raid at all times of the day or night; even the minibar and all its delights are included. We relaxed for a while just taking in our surroundings before wandering into the dining area for a superb four course dinner. Describing our suite is not easy. There are just 21 rooms here, each o...

I knew it was all going too well. Something has to go pear-shaped. Twenty-four expectant passengers are all seated and we are ready for take-off to Kangaroo Island. The stewardess is giving us the safety briefing and the PA system appears to have an intermittent fault as the occasional word drops out.  Oh dear! This is one of those faults that means we can't fly. So we are disembarked and returned to the departure lounge. An engineer is on his way. We may be here for a few minutes or we may be here for a while. We are not excited by having htr end of our day ruined. Our dinner at Southern Ocean Lodge is calling to us! REX, Regional Express has let us down. An hour passes and finally we're away. By 8:00pm we've reached the lodge.   

Internal air travel in Australia is blissfully easy.  A 20 minute cab ride from our hotel to the domestic terminal at Melbourne's Tullamarine airport to check in 45 minutes before departure is drama-free. So is clearing security; we do not have to remove shoes or belts or coins or false teeth or any other prosthetics. We do not have to surrender or consume all liquids. Relaxed common sense seems to be the order of the day. By comparison, domestic flying in the UK is torture! We just have time for a quick browse round the shops and time to extend our hat collection by one each and it's off to the departure gate where our fellow passengers are concentrated round a TV screen. This really is a sport-mad nation. We had cable channels in our apartment devoted to rugby, soccer, Aussie rules football, basketball and of course cricket. Here at the airport as in almost every bar in the city, it's the winter olympics that seeems to be gripping the populace. Will the Aussies or won...

The final place we visited in Melbourne was the restored Customs House, now the Immigration Museum. This gave a fascinating account of the many nationality groups that have helped to populate this country over the last 200 years and the way in which successive colonial administrations have both encouraged and restricted immigration.  The first question to which we wanted an answer was how many  criminals did Britain actually send here. The answer is that between 1788 and 1868 160,000 individuals were deported to penal colonies.  In the magnificent central hall is a faithful and accurate recreation of a 1950s ocean liner cabin. We know it's accurate because there we met and talked to an 80-year old Geordie who had come to Australia in 1953 as one of the £10 poms. The cabin was exactly as he remembered it.   The whole exhibition was well laid out and informative and has provided what will be useful background as we visit the different population centres of the country and learn more ...

We've had a great couple of days in Australia's second largest city. What's been really fun is having our own small flat. Clarion Suites Gateway, which is where we've stayed basically provides fully serviced one-bed apartments complete with fully fitted kitchen, living room and most importantly for us, our own washer/dryer. Being away for so long we need access to something a lot less overpriced than the average hotel laundry.   It's also been fun not to go out for every meal and to prepare our own food. Breakfasts in particular have been a real treat. Decent fresh fruit and freshly cooked bacon instead of the usual mass catered hotel buffets has made this a most enjoyable experience. Even if only for a very short period we feel almost like residents. It has to be said, however, that even if we were residents here, as Europeans, I think we'd be in a minority. There is a huge oriental population in Melbourne - immigrants from China and almost every other nation i...

We are sitting at a wonderful outdoor Italian restaurant in Lygon St in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton. The sky is a deep and glorious blue and the sun is shining; temperature high 70s with no humidity.  The Bruschetta was delicious and a seafood risotto and fresh rockling fish dish are on the way. Choosing this particular restaurant was anything but easy. Lygon St is Melbourne's own Little Italy, a long boulevard of countless Italian restaurants, food shops, boutiques and cafes.  This is such hard work and we're hardly having any fun at all.  After yesterday exploring the bustling downtown area, it's nice to come out to a quieter part of the city. Out here is the Melbourne Exhibition Centre, a stunning building that was built in 1880 for the World Expo and is apparently the largest wooden structure in the world. It is one of the few remaining old buildings in Melbourne that date from around this time. Most of the city's architecture is very modern. The contrast betwee...

For all the lessons it might need to learn about in-flight catering, JetStar at least runs on time. We touched down in Melbourne 15 minutes early and within an hour of touch down we were looking out of the window from our sixth floor apartment. Our river view suite came at a price. Overlooking the river also meant overlooking the railway and tram lines.  Sleep was not going to be possible.  After a little gentle negotiation with the management, we were relocated to a rather quieter apartment on the 14th floor. Much better - at least we'll sleep.  After the gentle rural idyll that has been New Zealand, a big brash noisy Australian city is a real shock to the senses; a million different sounds. bright lights, people everywhere and traffic, something we haven't seen for a couple of weeks. Melbourne is a busy, bustling, cosmopolitan city, young and very modern. A great city circle tram operates around the perimeter of the area we will want to explore. It's free and a very usefu...

Travel recommendation. Don't fly JetStar - or if you have no choice, take your own entertainment, food and drink on board. This airline, which operates some Qantas routes charges for its in-flight movies as well as for all its in-flight catering. That includes tea and coffee. In other words instead of giving you inedible plastic food, they actually take money off you for the privelege! I'd have been interested to attend the meeting between the marketing managers and the customer service managers at which this decision was made.  Their on-board prices are pretty eye-watering too. A bar of Cadbury's chocolate - or should that be Kraft chocolate now - was 50% more expensive in the air than the same bar bought in the departure lounge!! Mind you, perhaps I shouldn't be complaining. There seems to be no shortage of takers for either the portable movie players at AUD$20 a time or for the food, so maybe those passengers so desperate to pay this or AUD$10 for a glass of red wine...

The wow-ometer that was to have remained switched off for a few days sprang into life unexpectedly as we took off from Queenstown.  The flight climbed slowly over the spectacular Southern Alps. The landscape of this country's interior is as remarkable as its coastline - snow-capped peaks, lush green valleys and winding empty roads.  The view from the plane on a sunny day is stunning.  New Zealand has a gentle sense of humour that permeates most aspects of life including their in-flight catering.  Air New Zealand managed to serve a snack despite the shortness of our flight;  our choice - one of two cookies, Grandma's Oat or Hokey-Pokey. We sampled both. Grandma certainly knows her oats; perhaps she should have been consulted when the cookie creators were assembling Hokey-Pokey.  Once on the ground at Christchurch, 'normal' airport life was all too quickly resumed - check-in queues, security queues, some time-wasting immigration/customs form-filling, all the usual complet...

We've had just over a week exploring and experiencing this fabulous country, three days in the amazing geothermal volcanic country on North Island and six days driving around South Island.  Only a quarter of the country's population live on the larger South Island, which makes it fabulously easy to get around, especially by car. The roads are good and there simply is no traffic. Two cars and a bus constitute a traffic jam.  Once the Transalpine train left us in Greymouth, we drove over 1,000kms exploring the island's west coast and the dramatic wonderful scenery that is Fjordland.   The highlights would be too numerous to list, so we'll pick out the few lowlights!  Mostly they would be food related.    Despite our best efforts to pick restaurants that gave the impression that someone within knew how to cook, the food overall was only adequate. You would think that somewhere amongst the 70 million sheep that occupy rather more of the land than their minders, there would ...

The Te Anau Lodge is our best stop so far. It gets tops marks in every department.  Until the 1980s this building was a convent next door to a school, but the most amazing thing is that it was sited almost 70kms away!  Around 10 years ago its owners decided they liked the lakeside in Te Anau and quite literally moved house! The present owners, Margaret and George have only been running the lodge for four months, so we actually booked our stay before they took over. They have certainly found their spiritual home. This is a wonderfully restful B&B.  Much of the furniture dates from the building's original construction in 1936; wood abounds and the whole house has a wonderful charm and warmth.  Our bed for the night was enormous and supremely comfortable with a few more modern conveniences than the Sisters of Mercy nuns would have enjoyed in the house's convent days.  Breakfast was served in a glorious room, formerly the convent's chapel. The stained glass windows and even...

Valentine's Day brings an early start, as we are driving the 170km from our hotel to Manapouri to join a cruise that will take us across the lake by boat, then by coach across a mountain pass to a cruise on one of fjords - Doubtful Sound.  The day has started in bright sunshine and the drive to Manapouri is absolutely beautiful. As we cross the lake on the first boat trip, sunshine glinting off the water, the mist closes in and we are treated to what we are assured is Doubtful Sound's usual weather. Rain!! Once on Doubtful Sound itself we travel its whole length out into the Tasman Sea to visit a seal colony living on one of the rocky outposts along this shoreline and then back through this channel carved out by glacial erosion over countless millenia.    The mist is very atmospheric, giving the towering rock faces on either side an eerie mysterious brooding quality.  Countless waterfalls seem almost to flow from the sky into the dark waters, over 400m deep at the deepest point...

On this our fifth night in a New Zealand hotel room, I have to report something extraordinary. A modern innovation that appears to have passed this country by. New Zealanders travelling abroad will have encountered this incredibly useful modern bathroom aid. Yet the fact that it seems not to exist here suggests either that no native of this country has ever returned to these shores from his travels to discourse on this remarkable device or that New Zealanders don't bath or wash when overseas. To what do I refer, I hear you cry. Well, before you run a bath, what do you do? You place a plug in the plug-hole. You then run the bath etc etc. Where do you find the plug?  Well on the end of the chain of course.....well not in this country. Bath or wash basin, the first game you play here is hunt-the-plug. It is never on the end of a chain, because here they haven't discovered the bath chain. The plug is sometimes on the side of the bath, sometimes by the basin, sometimes in a drawer o...

The drive to Franz Josef took just over two hours driving through more wonderful scenery, past lakes, rivers and forest-covered mountainsides. During the 170km journey I doubt more than 50 vehicles passed us going the other way once we had cleared the two or three towns between Greymouth and Franz Josef. The town of Franz Josef exists only to service some of the needs of the tourists who come here to see the glaciers. This it does inadequately and without the glaciers there would be no need for it to exist.  Our home for the night is a very comfortable up-market B&B called Westwood Lodge. It has everything we could want except a bath!  This is a shame as the bathroom is over 100sq ft and could easily have accommodated one.  The glacier was.....well, a glacier!  A huge frozen river carving its way down a mountain a little too slowly for any movement to be observable.  So countless trippers walk up to it or climb on it and go......ooh! a glacier, but to be fair, the whole area is dra...

KIA-ORA is everywhere in New Zealand so we expected to find over-sweet indifferent orange squash on every street corner. Instead we have found a warm welcome wherever we have stayed. It actually means 'welcome' in the Mauri language.  You are most welcome to their rain!  In England, we get  plenty of rain. On New Zealand's west coast it's heroic stuff. Apparently it rains here 270 days a year and up to 300 inches falls every year.  Last night saw a large percentage of that arrive. The rain was soft at first, but by midnight it sounded like an express train thundering through a station at full throttle. I am grateful that the building in which we are sleeping is made predominently of wood. At least it will float when the floods rip it from its foundations!  By morning the deluge had abated and apart from a slightly grey mist in the air, there is little sign of the night's rain. It will be interesting to see what effect the downpour has had on the myriad rivers and st...

The drive from Franz Josef to Queenstown is over 400kms. Some of it is on straight roads, some of it is long and winding roads, some of it is on very twisty roads indeed. It is not possible to describe the scenery that was probably out there somewhere for the first 150kms, because the mountain mist was still obscuring everything. We think the scenery was......well, very scenic.  We can't describe the scenery for the next 250kms either. This is not because we didn't see it....we did. It has nothing to do with the weather either, because it was now perfect - high white cloud in a blue sky with sun throwing dramatic shadows across the rocky crags, sparkling on the azure waters of the lakes and rivers and warming the air. We can't describe the scenery because we ran out of adequate superlatives. We can try a few...awe-inspiring, magnificent, breath-taking, stunning, beautiful, fabulous....the views can neither be described nor photographed.  You have to be there.     One 40km s...