Sunset over Phewa lake, Pokhara

We weren’t in Godavary for long. Just a day to change some money, purchase tickets and travel permits and then we were on our way to Pokhara. We would only be staying one night on the banks of Phewa lake – and we had a dawn start to look forward to.

So this was our brief glimpse of Pokhara, a seductively tranquil lakeside resort beloved of lotus eating hippy travellers since the sixties. Many years ago an old friend of mine who travelled to Nepal, full of ideas of what she would do and see there, visited Pokhara in her first week and never left for over a month. “How could I”? she said, “everything I needed was there – sunshine, a backgammon board, a glass of cold beer and the mountains reflected in the lake – there could be no better place “. I can see how easily you could think that. But we already had our flight booked to Jomosom, and so the lake for us was just a fleeting pleasure. A good thing – we might have been there still…

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End of the rainbow, end of the road

About a fortnight ago my best beloved and I went to Whitby, where we camped on a rise above the town with our lovely friend A. It was a wonderful few days, and the changeable weather ensured spectacular skies – I have so many sky images from our visit that they will keep me in Skywatch Friday posts for months to come.  Here, we had been walking from Robin Hood’s Bay to Whitby along the Cleveland Way National Trail, when the sky blackened. A rainbow glimmered faintly among the clouds as rain began to spit, while the sun shone on the crops that line the final mile or so into town. I’ll be posting more about this walk hopefully, there’s a lot more I’d love to show you.

I’ve had a lot of adventures this summer – many have not made it into this blog because they kept me a little too busy, but also, I’ve been deliberately keeping my time online to a minimum.  Now, with autumn just around the corner I need to hunker down and concentrate on making new stock, and while that means spending a lot more time indoors near the computer, I’m just not sure that once autumn starts I’ll have the time to blog consistently.  I’m not going to give up this blog, ominous though the title of the current post must seem (I chose it just because it fitted the picture, I didn’t intend the melancholy vibe I now see it lends).  But perhaps the form will change, less writing and more images, or maybe  just a monthly bulletin. I’ll always try to keep up with the wonderful bloggers I’ve met along the way, but please forgive me if my visits to your blogs are fewer.

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Red Kite Soaring

Last weekend as I sat quietly reading a book in the garden at R’s family home, I glanced up to see a large raptor circling lazily in the hot summer sky. Buzzards are common in that part of Hampshire, but this most certainly was not a buzzard. The forked tail gave this spectacular bird away. It was a red kite.

I sat entranced as it approached, lower and lower, quartering the field below the garden. It made a couple of lazy passes over my head, enabling me to capture these images on my not so great little point ‘n’ shoot, then sailed languidly away. A better flyer than a red kite you will never see; swifts and swallows and falcons are spectacular, but a red kite seems to defy gravity. With the tiniest adjustment of those long wings they can swoop or hang as if suspended on a string, turning and gliding, a burst of acceleration followed by an eerie stillness, all lazily performed (it seems) with the minimum of effort. Watching these birds you almost believe that if you stepped off a high enough cliff with your arms raised just so…

The birds beauty and prowess are not the only reasons for feeling surprised joy when one just casually appears above you. It was at one point nearly extinct in the UK, with only five breeding pairs surviving. And yet in Tudor London these birds were common scavengers,  with a contemporary report stating that “the kites are so tame, that they often take out of the hands of little children, the bread smeared with butter given to them by their mothers“*. Although officially protected in London for their valuable scavenging services by which much putrefying material was removed from the streets, red kites were persecuted throughout the British Isles until they reached their final perilous decline. By the 1920′s, the red kite was all but wiped out.

It’s spectacular comeback means that while red kites are by no means common, you are more and more likely to get lucky and see one with every passing year, and indeed they can be locally common. They are moving outwards at last from their strongholds in Wales and The Chilterns, and this bird is one of a pair which arrived in the neighbourhood only this summer. The first time I ever saw one close up I will never forget; it exploded out of a farmers field on top of Winter Hill near Cookham, a flurry of rusty red and charcoal and so very obviously the rare bird of my dreams that I actually shouted it’s name out loud. A grinning local out walking his dog told me I that if I liked red kites, I was in for a treat. He was right; that afternoon was spent on Winter hill with a picnic, a bottle of wine and the spectacle of red kites in plenty riding the wind below us. I will never forget that first sighting.

*Source of quote:- Birds Brittanica

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Stormy North Sea Sky

So where have I been this last fortnight? Away in Copenhagen visiting our friend Sonja at the Distortion Festival, and it’s taken me about the same amount of time to recover. R and I decided a while ago that if we were going to do any short haul European travel we wouldn’t fly. It’s not just for environmental reasons either – making the travel part of the fun is a huge reason too. Ferries and trains in Europe are a lovely way to travel. Hint: always carry a bit of root ginger, crystallised ginger, ginger ale or whatnot, as ginger calms travel sickness like nothing else can and makes a rough voyage as comfy as can be.  Anyway, our love of slow travel is what enabled me to get this picture of a stormy evening sky over the North Sea. You can’t see it in the picture but there was quite a swell already; by nightfall it was raining and there were huge waves too.

The ferry was vast and incredibly comfortable, so much nicer than being cramped in an aeroplane. However the bar was terrifyingly expensive;  we got some beer anyway and sat watching the “floorshow” – a hard bitten Glasgwegian wedding singer who plainly had cabin fever and couldn’t wait for his last show to end. His jokes probably hadn’t been funny when he began his tour and he wasn’t even pretending any more – at one point he walked off mid song and disappeared for about five minutes, presumably to take a big slug of Dutch Courage. Seriously, I could write a novel about this guy, but before I am tempted to do so I should describe the rest of the journey. The waves were pretty huge by the time we went back to our cabin, but thanks to my root ginger habit (see above) I was not feeling in the least seasick. However I was disconcerted when, once in bed, the ship was lurching and swaying so much that my head was hitting the headboard and I was sliding up and down the bed at irregular intervals. Luckily I was tired enough to sleep well once accustomed to the movement.

The train Journey across Denmark to Copenhagen was breathtaking – the countryside in gloriously sunny early summer (just a couple of weeks behind GB) was mesmerising and I longed to walk in the meadows and woods I saw speeding by. The huge bridge and tunnel that takes you across to the island of Zealand is an extra excitement. And the train its-self was comfortable, spacious, and fast. I love train travel – it accustoms you a little to the new place you are in. So much better than having to fly.

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Sky in the water

What’s wrong with these pictures? Unless you live on Pandora you don’t often get to see land floating through the sky! It’s been raining here in London almost non stop for the last couple of weeks, so on one of the few fine days last week I took my chance to go for a stroll in Finsbury Park. The huge expanses of grass that act as spontaneous football pitches in better weather were saturated in standing water and acted as natural reflecting pools. I took these photos of trees and sky reflected in the water and turned them upside down – as you can see from the image below.

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