“We’ll follow these guys – they’re three local hoodlums”, This from my local guide on Omatepe Island, Nicaragua. I was sitting behind him on his trail bike, and we were burning down the road after walking up Volcan Maderas, the smaller of the two volcanoes… Read more
A gem in the heart of Christchurch is Riccarton Bush (sometimes called Deans Bush). It’s a patch of original kahikatea forest, just a few hundred meters from the Riccarton shopping center (See Molloy,1995, for pretty much all you need to know about the forest). As anyone… Read more
Many of the real advances in science seem to come from a sudden ‘insight’ ( think Archimedes and “Eureka!”) – and there is often no simple connection between collecting data and that ‘aha!’ moment. The tedious data collection happens, but at some moment, the brain, perhaps… Read more
Early on a cool Sunday morning I sipped my latte outside Relishes Cafe, Wanaka, and thought the immediate view could be better. In a somewhat typical urban New Zealand fashion, the lake is cut off from the cafe not just by a road, but a… Read more
Are Australian lives and property being burnt as a result of something that happened tends of thousands of years ago? In 1994 an influential book, ‘The Future Eaters’, was published by the Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery. One of the goals of the book was to… Read more
Estonia was my first-ever experience of driving, by myself, on the right hand side of the road. I tried to keep it simple. All I needed to do was pull-out from the car hire place (small town, Viljandi linn), negotiate a round-about at the edge of town, then I… Read more
In Australia there are trees that look like inside-out chimneys. Strong but sensitive – a fungal attack can leave them as a pile of mush within days, and, often as not, they won’t survive being transplanted from the wild. But, you can burn them to… Read more
The first time I came to Brisbane in the hot part of the year – I couldn’t believe how anyone could survive there. The nights were oppressively, putridly hot, and full of bitey-insects. Then I ended up living there and suffered for years. I would… Read more