pm215

It's taken me a long time to sort through my photos from last year's holiday, but here's another installment:

• Eastern Canada (Halifax to Toronto)
  
• On the train from Toronto to Jasper
  
• In the Canadian Rockies
  

I started the Canadian part of the trip in Halifax on the Atlantic coast, and passed through Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto. Mostly this was day-train hops, though Halifax to Quebec City is a nice single-night sleeper train. From Toronto I went on a day tour that took in Niagara Falls -- it is as full of tourists as you might expect but worth seeing anyway.

Toronto to Jasper is the main event of this rail holiday -- three nights on the same train. Most of the photos in that album are taken from train windows. The section on the approach into Jasper is amazingly beautiful. After a couple of weeks of hectic "see stuff, move on to next place" it was very relaxing to know I had nothing to do except sit on the train, eat the pretty good restaurant car food, and gaze out of the window. Highly recommended if you like scenic train journeys.

Album three is a day's worth of photos from Jasper National Park. I have more of these in the pile of photos I haven't yet sorted through...

I got distracted from sifting through holiday photos, but here finally are the last two albums from my Scotland holiday back in May:

• Various bits of Orkney
• East coast (Kingussie, Pitlochry, Edinburgh)

The Orkney set includes photos of the Grain Earth-House, an iron age underground cellar that would have originally had a roundhouse on top of it, and also the Wideford Hill cairn. Both of these are "minor" as Orkney archaeology goes (the Earth-House is actually kept locked up and you have to get the key from a local cafe), which meant I was the only person there.

My Scotland holiday last month was great, and I did particularly well with the weather. The trip was what you might call a self-guided tour: the travel agent prebooked all the hotels, train travel, and a few small-group day tours for places like Skye and Orkney. I got to see some of Scotland's more scenic railway routes, on a loop that went up from Glasgow to Fort William, across to Skye, then over to Inverness and up to Thurso, with a few days on Orkney before dropping back down to finish in Edinburgh. All the places I stayed were nice, I ate quite a lot of good food, and the logistics went exactly to plan: I would get off a train at a station and a pre-booked pre-paid taxi would be waiting to take me on to the hotel, every time. I'd happily recommend the travel agent if you want a good well organized tour-of-Scotland holiday where you don't care too much about how much it costs. They say they visit everywhere they send people to personally, and I got the impression that they tend to pick small hotels and day-trip operators and then use them consistently, which means that for instance the taxi firm cares about not letting you down because they're probably getting a job from the travel agent every other day in peak season. And they were happy to customise a 2 week trip into 3 weeks for me.

I've started on the drawn-out process of sifting through the photos I took; here's the first batch:

• Spean Bridge (near Fort William)
• Arisaig and the isle of Eigg
• Skye

I think the first part of this trip was in some ways the part I liked best: it started with some really nice places to stay, and the geography of the area is spectacular. Skye has some beautiful scenery but I was surprised by how full of tourists it was. It's still possible to find bits which are empty of other people, though.

It seems that Virgin Mobile have finally decided to kill off the tariff I'd been happily using for the last decade or more, thus forcing me to consider the confusopoly of mobile phone tariff choices :-(

I don't use my mobile much at all (occasional texts and calls; the logs say I last used it back in August), so the old Virgin PAYG-by-direct-debit was perfect: I just paid for what I used, with no monthly charge, and I never had to worry about having to top up the phone or credit that I'd paid for expiring. I'm not sure any of the operators offer a setup like this, and certainly Virgin's current offerings seem to weigh in at 6 quid a month minimum...

Three's PAYG deal looks about the closest (catches being that you have to use the phone at least every six months, and it's not clear whether it can be set to auto-topup). Moving my number to a new provider is faff I didn't really want to have to deal with, though.

Edit: aargh, can't just switch to Three, because they only work with 3G phones and mine doesn't do that (it's a Nokia 2600 classic).

Further holiday photo installments:

• Takayama
• Maruyama and Obuse
• Snow Monkey Park

I just got back from a great three week holiday, in Japan (again ;-)). I didn't take my laptop this time round, which was great from a "forget entirely about work" perspective but has left me with hundreds of photos on the camera to sort through and upload.

Here's a first slice:

• Himeji and Fushimi-Inari
• Mount Hiei
• Kinkakuji and Ryouanji
• Nara

A couple of particular favourites:

• Painstakingly spiral-raked gravel at a temple on Mount Hiei
• Sun slicing across autumn foliage, Mount Hiei again

More at the weekend, probably.

I've just had a builder in to partially board my loft and fit a loft ladder so I can get into it. This is something I've been meaning to do for ages, since it's irritating to have a part of my house which I can't access (even if only to check whether the roof is leaking). So now I have boarding on most of the usable part of the loft, and a nice wooden ladder that hinges up into the loft. (The last part of the job is getting the ceilings repainted in the room with the hatch and also in a room which had some lingering water damage visible from a long-since-repaired roof leak; that happens tomorrow.)

A few photos of loft and ladder here.

Sigh. This evening I discovered that the bottle of mould spray that had been sat in a carrier bag in a corner of the bathroom had apparently suffered some kind of overpressure event, cracked the lid of the bottle, leaked over that area of the floor and left behind a white crystalline residue of who-knows-what... (photo here) I wonder how much of the liquid needed to evaporate into the air in order to leave that much white stuff behind? (The product in question is this, so basically water, sodium hypochlorite (bleach) and sodium hydroxide (caustic soda).)

I don't go to Japan very often, but when I do I like to make the stay as long as I can get away with -- it's nice to feel able to have few do-nothing days in a holiday without it seeming somehow wasteful that you haven't gone out to Do Something. I just got back from three weeks out there (which burnt almost all my holiday for this year). February isn't the ideal time to visit, as it's still a bit cold and grey, but the timing was fixed because I tacked them onto the end of a work conference that was on that side of the world. As it turned out there were only a few rainy days, and even a fair amount of sun.

Some photos: Gunkanjima, also known as Battleship Island. This desolate lump of rock turned out to have a big seam of coal under it, so it was heavily built up with everything the miners needed to live -- until the mine became uneconomic in the seventies, at which point Mitsubishi shut it down, and everybody left within a couple of months. (Summary of the history for those interested.)

Kitakyuushuu Railway Museum (only a few photos, as it was a small place I stopped off at on my way somewhere else).

Marugame, Matsuyama and Kouchi, a trio of original (ie surviving from the Edo-period) Japanese castles on Shikoku. There are only 12 originals left, so it's easy to get completionist about the remaining ones. Matsuyama in particular is on an impressively huge scale, and I had good weather and the plum blossoms were just coming out...

Konpira-san, a hilltop temple complex which I visited on a day where it was pouring with rain in an atmospheric but not very easily photographed way...

Oigawa Railway, which was probably the best day of the holiday for me -- a scenic steam train ride up into a beautiful steep river valley, and then some light hiking at the top.

Not pictured: Nagasaki (the contrast between the reconstructions of the buildings where the Dutch lived in Dejima in the 18th century and the fine mansions built on the hill by westerners in the second half of the 19th century is a demonstration in architecture of the shift in power in the relationship between Japan and the Western countries who were trading with her). A weekend catching up with a good friend of mine who I hadn't seen for a few years. Yokohama. Akihabara. Large pile of books and manga to add to the to-read pile...

I also impulse-bought a reproduction map, which I'd like to hang up somewhere, but at 175x65cm it's pretty big. Any suggestions for good ways to display it that won't cost vastly more in framing than the 15 quid I paid for the map itself?