Welcome to Geoff’s Travel blogs. I will post links here when I do more travels. Here are the links so far:
2016
Europe & UK Spain, Portugal, Andorra, France, UK
South America Santiago, Pucon, Cusco, Machu Picchhu
Townsville and the Australian Institute of Marine Science – The tropical north and coral spawning
Sweden (via Bangkok, Thailand) … a white Christmas is on the books.
2017
A trip to Costa Rica via Brisbane (a conference) and the USA for the total solar eclipse: https://travel.geoffshaw.com/tag/eclipse2017/
2018
A trip to India with a focus on wildlife photography: https://travel.geoffshaw.com/tag/india2018/
A trip to China, Sweden and the UK. A week or so around Guilin in southern China with a camera club group, and visiting family and sightseeing in Sweden and the UK. https://travel.geoffshaw.com/tag/china2018/
A trip to Western Australia in wildflower season. Lots of wildflower photos among the scenery. https://travel.geoffshaw.com/tag/westernaustralia2018/
A trip to Tasmania in November/December https://travel.geoffshaw.com/tasmania-2018-11/
2019
A trip to Tasmania in February 2019 with a focus on yachting around the SE coast.Tasmania Yachting Feb 2019
A trip including Sweden, UK, Crete, Santorini, Athens and Srilanka in August-September 2019. Europe-Srilanka-2019
Another visit to Tassy https://travel.geoffshaw.com/2019-11-19-tasmania/
2020
2020 started with the Black Summer bushfires raging around Australia. Eventually 186,000 sq km was burnt (that is about one and a half times the area of England). In January we had a trip to East Gipplsand to share a holiday with out neighbours at their country retreat in Lake Tyers Beach. Here is a gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/xMqRCdw3cvRVKhn99
In early February I headed down to Tassy to join Steven. Sue and Geoff were in need of a helpful hand in clearing decades of acquisitions from the Old Church in preparation for their move to Old Beach. We also managed a short holiday: thanks to Sue and Geoff’s for kindly loaning us their campervan. Here is a gallery of images and notes: https://photos.app.goo.gl/exuvzDhkx3HfZTFy9
As the fires died out, the Covid pandemic took hold… What a year.
A trip to Sweden and the UK — our plans to also visit Italy and Ireland vanished with the rise of Coronavirus, which also severely truncated our stay https://travel.geoffshaw.com/tag/2020sweden-uk-ireland/
International travel has been impossible since then. In Victoria we had a “second wave” with extensive lockdowns including a period where we were not permitted to travel more than 5 km from home (I did a lot of cycling in circles round the suburbs since my usual routes along the bayside, along the Yarra River trails, along Dandenong Creek and meandering the many trails in Mullum Mullum Creek. I did make a short audiovisual video Nature in my neighbourhood for a Camera Club meeting. https://youtu.be/-7R_lkYN9yQ
December: Covid restrictions are, finally, eased after a couple of months with no locally acquired cases. We can now travel out of metropolitan Melbourne, so we took a trip, down to Lake Tyers Beach and surrounding areas of East Gippsland. The forests around there were extensively burnt in the fires in the 2019-2020 fire season, but many areas are starting to show signs of recover. Here is an annotated gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/86mDq83vSsAizWH26
2021
Travel has been limited over the last year or so due to the SarsCov2 pandemic (Covid19). With the relaxation of lockdowns we managed a trip to Tasmania in April/May with Steven and Judy, timed to capture the deciduous beech in autumn colours.
2023
The covid pandemic almost over… time to travel again. This time a trip to the US to visit Jill’s Aunt Ingrid and Ed in Omak, WA. On their advice we squeezed in the visit between the wildfire season and the early-snow season – not a very large window these global-climate-change years. We also squeezed in a jaunt in South America. The first leg took us to Santiago Chile for a brief overnight. Interesting place that I had visited in 2016, but Jill had never been there. Photos at https://photos.app.goo.gl/psBhYXdk8Pt6d8Wi6 . Then on to Ecuador with a flight up the Andes to Guayaquil, from where we took a long loop up the mountains ending up in Quito HERE. Next we took a road trip from Denver to Phoenix followed by another road trip in Washington state HERE.