TRAVEL REGRETS, I HAVE A FEW...

Small Town, USA. Easy to miss.

I know you shouldn't have regrets. But there is that saying about only regretting the things you haven't done. You know the one.

Travel lends itself to those. Opportunities that present themselves fleetingly on the road. Sometimes repeatedly. I understand there's no possible way to embrace every temptation that crosses your path. And I'd say I've grabbed onto more than I've missed over the years. But, peering into the rear-view mirror, I wish I'd done a few things differently.

So, it's time to air them. To fess up and offload the weight I've been carrying around in my day-pack of travel regrets, stuff-ups and missed opportunities, and up-end some of them onto the pavement of Get Over It Street.

AN OMANI IMMERSION

Omani Francincense at the Amouage factory, Muscat.

Fessing up: Before we go any further, you need to know that I travelled to Oman as a guest of  Sultanate of Oman Tourism.

I'm sitting here with a small nub of frankincense melting on a coal that's crackling and sparking alarmingly in the kitchen. It's pretty magical stuff and drags me back without any resistance to the Middle East but most specifically, Oman.

Travel smells can be very powerful and have that ability to instantly haul you from here and now, to another time and place altogether. Like the alleyways of Old Muscat's Mutrah Souk. My travel companions are long gone...finding treasures deep in the heart of the market, knick-knacks and other gorgeous things. I'm just watching, listening, breathing it in and on the look out for a lemon & mint juice. There's got to be one here somewhere...somewhere through the frankincense.

I could write thousands of words about this place, no doubt, but I suspect you'd prefer to peruse a few pictures and maybe hear some sounds. If you've got a spare 12 minutes or so, you can hear me chatting about Oman with Joanne Shoebridge on ABC North Coast below.


If not, just push on, scroll down, and absorb the sounds hidden amongst the images of this fascinating place.

It's even better with frankincense.

If you've got some lying about.

MUSIC FESTIVAL SMACK-DOWN: Bluesfest versus Jazz Fest

In the past 12 months I've had the very great fortune of attending two mega music events. And that's odd for me. You could count all the gigs I've ever been to on my fingers and toes, even if you include the school lunchtime concerts by Aussie acts in the 80s like Kids in the Kitchen, The Machinations, the Dynamic Hepnotics and The Cockroaches (who morphed into a little thing called The Wiggles in the 90s).

They must have been the oddest gigs for those bands. An all-boys school in the middle of the day, lunch bags rustling as a few hundred teens tucked into whatever Mum or Dad had packed that morning.

But I digress…

HUNTING OMANI HONEY

Even if you don't speak a word of the local language, you can tell when your tour guides are lost. There's something in the way questions are asked and replied, a tilt of the head, perhaps even a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders and a hopeful gaze off into the distance. You can just tell.

We were only a short drive out of Muscat but it felt like we were riding around on the Curiosity Rover such was the barrenness of our surroundings. This was dry. Really dry, dusty and very rocky. And in spite of it all being pretty much one colour (a sort of chocolatey grey) it was oddly beautiful. 

PASSPORT HAIKU No. 1

I've recently had to retire a trusty travel companion of 10 years...my passport.

I love passports and dread to think of a time when the thump of stamp on paper is a thing of the past. That irregular beat of arrival and departure. The audible start of something, or the coming to an end. Welcome, stranger...welcome home.

I find the randomness of where the stamps land a bit delicious...watching the immigration officer thumbing through pages, looking for a space that's good for a thumping. What will it land next to? Which places will it connect? Which times? What's that seeping through from the page behind?

BLOODY CANBERRA

We've just returned from a long weekend in Canberra kindly hosted by Australian Capital Tourism as part of its intriguing Human Brochure project. And, to be honest, we were blown away. Exploring some of the capital's gems, places with deep national significance, and some that were just plain fun, was an all-round positive, double thumbs-up experience.

It all seemed sort of counter-intuitive. I mean, how were we having such a good time in a place renowned for being irreparably dull with few redeeming features?

THINGS PEOPLE ALMOST NEVER SAY

I can't wait to go to Canberra.

You probably didn't expect that.

It's a bit of a lazy joke in Australia that Canberra is boring. The nation's capital. Home to dullards like Parliament House, the National Gallery, The National Museum, Floriade, Questacon and the Institute of Sport...

All a bit of a yawn, isn't it?

Well, no.

I haven't visited in the 20 years or so since that time. But I know the story of the place with its sacred geometry, the hierarchical placement of our great institutions, the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright on Walter Burley Griffin's grand, almost esoteric vision and his wife Marion's renderings of it give this place a rich framework on which modern Canberra is draped. You don't have to dig too far to find golden veins of storytelling worth mining.

SOLAR ECLIPSE, NORTH QUEENSLAND - 2012: One Man’s View.

A guest post by F. John Alcock - My Dad

As you might imagine almost everyone was thrilled with the anticipation of an eclipse, although one young lad was quoted in the local paper as saying that he wouldn’t be getting out of bed for it.

Oh well, the last one here was in 710 AD, and there’s another in 2237 so, you know, they happen a lot in North Queensland, don’t they.

There was a sense of calm excitement along our beach, a friendly crowd of a few thousand waiting at dawn for something good to happen, and not a prince in sight.  It was a slow start, cloudy on the horizon. Nothing to see. An old bloke wandered by with a black cockatoo on his shoulder, a huge bird as long as a man’s arm and able to crack macadamias with its prodigious beak. They were as much photographed as was a very ordinary looking dog with an air of importance about him wearing sun glasses several sizes too big, out with his humans.

And then the sun broke through the clouds.

VIETNAM: 15 PHOTOS AND A RADIO SHOW

Everyone I know who has been to Vietnam has loved it.

I mean really, really loved it.

I had spent a heap of time in Asia without ever having set foot in Vietnam until recently. And within moments of stepping out into the technicolour mayhem of a Ho Chi Minh City evening, all I could think was "What's taken me so long?"

A few hours earlier an unforgettable aircraft approach swept around sparkling city towers before falling gently towards canyons of neon whose currents of jiggling scooter headlights flowed determinedly up and down stream.

LONESOME GEORGE - The End of his Line

A couple of weeks ago now the world lost Lonesome George, the last remaining Pinta Island tortoise - a sub-species of giant tortoise endemic to that particular island in the Galápagos.

Image: George on 12th August, 1997 - Darwin Station, Galápagos Islands 

Until a scientist stumbled across George on Pinta in 1972 it was believed that his particular line was extinct. So, on his discovery he was moved to Darwin Station (where I had the great pleasure of meeting him) in Puerto Ayora in the Galápagos Islands to see out his days under science's watchful eye.

Unfortunately attempts to have him mate with a pair of Espanola tortoises (his nearest genetic match) failed and so the end of the line for George was the end of his line.