Ways of photographing icons

This morning, having slept very fitfully on my overnight flight, I sneakily half-opened the window blind at 8.00 Sydney time, while everyone on Bangkok time was still asleep, to see a brilliant blue sky over the rusty desert of Western Australia. The curvature of the earth was quite clear and for the first time ever I got a sense of its size and how very, very far I am from my upside-down home.

With a 6-hour gap till this evening's flight to Auckland, I needed to exercise and to get out into the sun of a different time zone so got a train to Sydney harbour. As I came out of the station the opera house and the bridge were in front of me as well as a thousand long lenses and I suddenly had no idea how to take photos. Instead I found tree- shade in the botanic garden and sat looking at the sea. But walking back to the station I found one lesson in ways of photographing icons.

I was really excited when we landed at Auckland about seeing my NZ family but there were long queues for every check, including biodiversity protection. A sniffer dog alerted its handlers to me and I was hauled over for having the smell of bananas in my bag - bananas that the Australian biodiversity protection system had made me dispose of 14 hours earlier. Smart dog.

But now I am in New Zealand!