Best Places

Grote Markt in the Belgian capital Brussels is surrounded by spectacularly beautiful architecture, especially after dusk. The ancient cobblestoned streets around the square are lined with fascinating cafes, although vegetarian fare is (available but) limited. During the annual flower festival a massive mural of flower petals fills almost the entire square.

30 mins ride from our apartment.

Looming over York, the Minster is the largest gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Interned beneath the floor are various dead priests, the ruins of a Norman church, and deeper still, the 1,000 year-old ruins of a roman fortress. You can see them all (except most of the dead priests) on the catacombs tour. There is also a smashing collection of jewels and silver plate (doubtless collected by the church with the donations of the starving peasants, thereby saving themselves from the fires of Hell). The stained glass windows above (similarly financed) are also awesome, as is the height of the structure overall. For Tolkein aficionados, it’s like being in the vast Dwarven halls of Moria, in the Lord of the Rings. The stone columns seem to rise to fathomless heights, and the stone lends an otherwordly stillness to the place. And, of course, the spirits of dead priests perhaps still walk the halls …

After running from the UN tour to the British embassy to collect my visa, I had about two hours to explore Geneva on foot before my plane departed. I moved fast … On my way into the old city, I found the Basilique Notre Dame. The light shining though the high windows cast amazing pink beams upon the ancient stone columns.

The stained glass windows were just unreal.

In 2003 I drove from Boston, in the north-eastern corner of the US, to LA, in the south-west, to attend and speak at the national animal rights conference there. It took five days and cost under USD 150. I slept in the car (no air-conditioning), eating canned and Chinese restaurant food. I did the same thing in reverse about a year previously in temperatures up to 43 C being tortured by right wing radio stations across the midwestern Bible Belt - it's not fun. Good thing I'm Australian and a spiritual master of patience and pain :)

I discovered many remote and beautiful valleys as I drove through the mountains and back country of south-western Colorado. Box Canyon was hidden deep inside one of them. The things I have to do to get these photos!

These falls awaited trekkers after an hour walking ever upwards by a beautiful river. The last section of the trail rises through the Mist Valley, so named because the spray from the falls makes it permanently misty, supporting a thriving mini-rainforest. A very steep path with ladders leads up the cliff to the right, and at the top lies Emerald Pool, a glorious green pool about 50 m across. It’s very cold, but you can swim if you’re brave enough. At the top of Emerald pool is another excellent waterfall, and beneath it the ‘slipway’ – a 40 ft section of smooth rocks across which the water sprays at high speed into Emerald Pool. Although dangerous, this is the ultimate place for water sliding for the super-brave. Climbing the mist valley falls to see Emerald Pool is a must.

Yosemite falls are the highest in the US, if I remember rightly. They fall in four stages. I had enormous fun jumping between the rocks at the base of the falls. Rock-hopping was the only way to reach the pool beneath.

At around 14,000 feet, Mt Evans in the Rocky Mountains has the highest sealed road of any mountain in the US. I climbed for ages through deep coniferous forests containing the occasional traffic-stopping moose, and then wound ever-higher above the tree line, along spectacular ridges and past stunning reflective alpine lakes.

When I was working at a San Francisco animal shelter in 2002, a friend took me on a tour of Lake Tahoe, four hours away. About a mile deep (and containing within its depths a rumored cousin of Scotland’s ‘Nessy’), Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in North America (the world?). Surrounded by snowy wilderness and ski fields, the incredible blueness of the water makes it one of the seven wonders of the world, at least according to me :)

After attending the national animal rights conference in Los Angeles in 2003, I went south to the Mexican border to check out San Diego. Strategically located two hours south of Los Angeles, this pretty city of sun, surf and yacht harbors seems the closest American equivalent to Perth, Western Australia - my long-lost home. Eventually I want to settle there for nine months of the year and head to Perth or the Australian Sunshine Coast during the northern winter :)

Way too soon, however, it was time to head North, waaaaaaaaay north, to Seattle, just south of Vancouver and the Canadian border, to start work for the Northwest Animal Rights Network. I drove the Pacific Coast Highway the entire length of the coast, sleeping, as usual, in the car. One day out from my destination, I found this deserted beach, strangely covered in fog. The Oregon coast is beautiful and rocky although the fog is very weird to an Australian – it must be a cold weather thing.

By the road leading to Glacier Point, shortly after I spent the night in the forest there.

The closest thing to Lothlorien I’ve seen in this world.

At one end of the valley, Glacier Point rises about a mile high and commands views over most of the valley and surrounding peaks. In a bygone era, they’d push a burning mass of logs over the edge every week, producing a spectacular ‘firefall’ that took about 11 sec to reach the ground, providing endless beautiful photographs. It was later stopped for environmental reasons.

Glacier Point is the ultimate place to see the sun set. Unfortunately I arrived in the twilight, but I did get to see the twinkling lights of all the campgrounds in the valley a mile below. Then I camped in the forest nearby to see the sun rise the next morning, keeping both ears open for hungry bears.

And what did I discover the next morning? Seven hang-gliders lined up ready to jump off the edge! Several of the guys looked fairly terrified and had to spend 10 mins psyching themselves up before the drop. They had to balance on a precarious slope between low trees and rocks, attached to their gliders, trying to avoid wind gusts that could kill them if they lifted them off prematurely. I got a sequence of about 10 photos of them gliding out over Yosemite Valley. They really had the ultimate ride.

I caught the mountain train from Montreux to Rochers de Naye, a little over 2,000 m high. It was a cog train, pulling itself up steep inclines via a toothed-cog in its base. It took an hour to climb to the top.

This was truly the biggest scree slope I’ve ever seen. The trail went to a neighboring peak a bit above 2,000 m.

God knows what I did (nothing) to deserve it, but for my birthday in 2004 (I turned 21), Jasmijn surprised me by taking me on an all-night bus ride across three countries to … Les Menuires ski resort in the French Alps. Especially for an Australian, it was unbelievable. Three days of mountain paradise. Note the wild snowboard trails in the upper right.

This extremely cool wind organ was about 100 m out into the North Sea on the end of a stone pier at Scheveningen.

One hour from Geneva along the lake shore, Montreux is the gateway to the Swiss Alps. I wandered along this stunningly beautiful promenade by the lake shore, photographing the tulips, while awaiting my mountain train.

The co-owner of the local vet clinic where I’ve been getting more clinical experience and helping out is a highly competitive yacht racer, and asked me to join the crew one evening. Well, I’d long since forgotten all the yachting knowledge I possessed when I ran aground twice in the Whitsunday Islands and once in The Galapagos about a million years ago, but it would have been impolite to decline, and so off I went. All I could think of was that line in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ when Captain Jack Sparrow lines the crew up and asks if they have the courage and fortitude to stay true in the face of danger and almost certain death … We didn’t hit anyone (barely), nor sink, and actually came about fourth in our class, and best of all for me, the sun was kind enough to set for us, yielding some beautiful twilight photos.

The view from my lucky, lucky mother’s window.

Driving North up the Pacific Coast Highway in Oregon, one day out of my destination of Seattle, just south of the Canadian border, I came across this beautiful near-deserted beach, where the sun was just about to set … These shots are near-identical to the beaches of my home city of Perth, Western Australia, except that our beaches generally don’t have rocks.

Tower Bridge. England 2004.