Category: flickr

Norway on Flickr

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I find myself pining for the fjords, and so I’ve been working hard to select some appropriate photos for Flickr from the nearly 1000 I took while we were away in Norway.

I’ve found that people get bored quickly when you show them all nearly 1000 (it almost finished my Dad off completely), so I’ve come up with a cunning two point plan.
Firstly, divide the photos into days: we were there for three, so there are now three albums on Flickr to reflect this:

Day One: Arriving in Bergen, going up Mount Floyen on the Floibanen Funicular.
Day Two: Wandering around Bergen before that concert.
Day Three: Sognefjord via Myrdal and Flåm.

And then, secondly, produce a highlights package, in case people only want to look at your (approximately) 50 favourite pics. The pic above didn’t make the cut, I’m afraid. Yes, there are 50 better images than that. 😮

They don’t really do it justice, but they’re still worth a look (in my humble opinion).

Just wow

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Despite having unlimited internet here in the UK, I don’t have unlimited time. That time will probably be better spent doing things other than uploading photos onto Flickr (and than blogging, actually), but that doesn’t mean that you will be forsaken – I have chucked a few pics up there already, and I will continue to write blog posts. Sorry about that.

Norway was amazing, incredible.
I’m lucky enough to live in one of the most dramatically beautiful countries on the planet. This last weekend, I was lucky enough to visit another. Living in Cape Town often gives one a false level of expectation when it comes to seeing other places. There’s not really much that can match it, but the west of Norway did just that. And, dare I say it, possibly more.

Bigger and better on black

If our rail journey from Bergen to Myrdal was breathtaking, then the trip from there to Flåm would have to be described as asphyxiating, and the near six hour fastcraft journey through the fjords back to Bergen would have left us long dead through suffocation.
Sight after utterly incredible sight left us (to continue the pulmonary theme) literally gasping.

There are, as you might expect, several hundred images to wade through, to select the best and discard the rest. And as I said, I’m not doing that just yet. But if there was one image that summed up our visit to Norway better than any other I took, it would be this one. The falu red cottages, built almost into the rocks, the glassy, icy waters of the fjords and – for us at least – the blue sky.

I desperately want to go back, but equally, I desperately don’t: there’s simply no way that a return visit could ever be so perfect.

Could it?

Pool

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It was just a few days before that a-ha concert that never was that I was up on Tyneside, stamping all over my old stamping ground and throwing snowballs off the Tyne Bridge.

While I was there, I took the metro out to Whitley Bay and walked down to Tynemouth, where I found this sorry looking swimming pool on the beach, filled with rocks, sand and some snow:

Some history:

At the Southern end of Tynemouth Longsands beach, on the North East coast, lies the decaying remains of Tynemouth Outdoor Swimming Pool. A concrete, rectangular, salt water tidal pool, built in the 1920s. Popular with locals and holiday makers alike for over 50 years. It began to lose favour in the late 70s with the introduction of cheap package holidays abroad, just as other British coastal holiday destinations lost out.

The pool fell into disrepair, and in the mid 90s the Local Authority demolished the ancillary buildings and bulldozed the rubble into the pool, at a cost of £200,000, before filling with concrete and imported boulders to form an artificial ‘rock pool’. The anticipated marine life they introduced never flourished and the pool remains an eyesore to this day.

Not great.

But there is some good news: some form of early regeneration has begun!

Digging has begun at an abandoned outdoor swimming pool which campaigners hope could be restored to its former glory.
Campaign group the Friends of Tynemouth Outdoor Pool is carrying out a survey to find out what the pool tank was filled with when it was decommissioned.

Hopefully, one day, it will look like this:

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That’s some distance off at the moment, but surely anything to make the Tynemouth pool look in any way different from its current state will be an improvement.

Mantis

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We had a large visitor to our backyard this lunchtime:

This one was ever so edgy, so was quite difficult to photograph. His skittishness is probably how he’s managed to get so big.

Despite using a really decent camera, to be honest, I don’t think that this compares with some of my other photos of mantises (mantii?) such as this one on a football, this one on a wall and – infamously – this one devouring a gecko:

Ah, happy days (though obviously not for the gecko).

New Brighton Light

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After Liverpool’s dramatic win last night, something scouse seemed appropriate. This is almost scouse.
The New Brighton Lighthouse in Merseyside doesn’t work anymore – it hasn’t worked for over 40 years – but that doesn’t stop it being photographed an awful lot. That’s probably because of its proximity to semi-human habitation, being right at the mouth of the River Mersey.

nblh

Alternatively, you can grab a quick shot from the other side if you’re passing.

Either way, when you’re a bit short of time and you need a quota photo of a lighthouse, New Brighton features at the top of the quantity and, fairly often, the top of the quality scale as well.

Note the Liverpool Giraffe Sanctuary in the background.