moonvoice: (tv - cabin pressure - shut your face)
We went to Hamelin Bay while we were down south.

I was...not well. Not even well enough to walk our normal way through the dunes. So we had to go down to the boat ramp instead and explore the beach there.

It was so windy the sand stung our faces. I still liked it though.





There's more where that came from )
moonvoice: (calm - antarctica sun)
The second last UK post.

It feels great to be settling into my more normal routine though, slowly doing odd jobs around the house, some of which have needed doing for years. I'm resting a lot though, which has been really necessary.

The Perth winter has been so generous this year, and we still have a ways to go, which makes me happy. We may even hit the yearly average for rainfall.


Hanuman langur



Read more... )
moonvoice: (wczuciki - wolverine alert)
So, about two days before we were due to fly out of England, I got to meet with someone who I have known - through my artwork - for nearly 10 years. I've known her for so long that I was actually meant to meet with her six years ago, the first time we travelled to the UK, but I was just too exhausted and frazzled at the idea of meeting so many new people.

This time I marked it as a priority.

I apologise that there are not more photos of the penguins themselves. The truth of the matter is that most of the time was actually spent interacting with them, and not taking photos, because to get close and personal means risking all your belongings (they are, after all, wild animals). And that secondly I spent so much time just chatting happily with Zoe and I lost track of time and we spoke like we'd been old friends who had met over curious Humboldt penguins many, many times before.

And now about the Humboldt's themselves. (Any information I get wrong is due to my own dodgy memory and not Z). There's about 95 at Penguin Beach (the oldest building at ZSL London Zoo and Heritage listed), and all have names. Most are named after media figures, including drag queens like Courtney Act. London Zoo have also made some forays into being openly Pride supporting, including having the banner 'Some Penguins are gay, get over it' among other things. Zoe is a big part of this.

The penguins had their own say whether they wanted to meet us or not. There is a back entrance where they can come and see what's going on, or ignore us. They can self-determine whether they get any attention or not, and decide what sort of attention they like. They are all highly individualistic and it is hard not to compare them to cats after a while, in terms of their different natures, how they interact, and when I said this in some amazement to Zoe (framed as 'I can't believe I'm saying this but they sort of remind me of cats'), she said that it makes sense, given they're social animals with no strong sense of hierarchy, and that she thinks they can be very catlike as well.

We were visited by about 15 of the group, who were all *very* excited to see us (I was stepping over penguins that were clamouring around my feet to check us out). We were allowed to pet the ones that wanted to be petted (males preferred the chin and females preferred the belly, from memory, but it could be the other way around).

There were two 'naughty' ones - Gypsy and Charlie, who honestly I LOVED, but you couldn't put your hands near them, because they bit. Not maliciously, they just...I mean, they can literally only explore things with their beaks, unlike dogs or cats who also have paws, flippers and their tiny feet do not make good exploratory devices. And their beaks are strong, because penguins. Because they were the most curious, they also bit the most. All the penguins can potentially bite, but they are very clear with their boundaries. If they don't want attention, they walk away. If they want more attention, they come closer. I asked whether petting damaged the feathers, and Zoe explained that - unlike parrots - the penguins can self-direct the physical attention they receive, and as a result of that, their feathers are in good condition (though they were going through varying stages of moult while we were there).

Charlie screamed at me for not petting him, while he leaned against my jeans (I have photos of this), Tif was delighted when they started attacking her coat, and Glen had the time of his life. I have decided there is a particularly great feeling to having a penguin leaning heavily against your jeans, gazing up at you, while you chat with a senior zookeeper about life, the universe, how sadly little zookeepers make, how many reptiles Zoe owns, and how amazing the world can be at times.

For anyone curious, you can see more about Humboldts and Zoe here at her Instagram account, the latest video includes some of the 2019 youngsters, who have yet to be named. (I know she wants to name one Groot, lol). She has a lot of lovely videos of her with the Humboldts, and earlier than that you can see her work with reptiles too.

Now onto the photos.


Meet Charlie. One of the 'naughty' Humboldts. Who watched me like this for a huge chunky of time, while leaning into me and pressing his flippers into my jeans.

You will notice his beak is a little skewed. A parent stepped on his egg before birth, and crushed it, and they rushed him to the Zoo veterinarian to save him, which they very much did. But as a result of the crushing, his beak is wry-billed, and he bites much harder than the rest of the penguins. One of the reasons he's so curious and 'naughty' in the first place is because he was entirely hand raised.



Read more... )
moonvoice: (calm - grey highlands)
Today Glen and I went bushwalking, on a lovely Makuru (Noongar winter) day, and perhaps one day I will put photos up from that excursion.

But for now we persist with the last of the UK photos. There isn't that much more to go now, I promise and I apologise. I knew for myself that if I never got these photos up, they'd go into the huge folder archive I had and I'd forget about this entire experience.


Coati



Read more... )
moonvoice: (calm - grey highlands)
I don't have all the names of these birds, though I did end up getting most of them (I generally take photos of name cards when I can see them, it's just that there weren't always visible name cards or available and/or there were too many name cards to get photos of).

I need to clean all the boxes from around the piano, including a whole bunch of Ziwipeak venison that Maybe may not be eating anymore? We'll see!


White Pelican.



Read more... )
moonvoice: (t - i like your weirdness)
The Zoological Society of London, or ZSL, was one of our final locations. And pretty much for one major reason, I happen to know the head zoologist of Penguin Beach (after having done commissions for her over the years - some of my most distinctive reptile pieces were thanks to her wonderful passion for herps), and she invited me to come and meet the Humboldt Penguins in person. (They will get their own post don't worry :) ).

I ended up bringing Glen and Tif with me (after checking it was okay), and Z was kind enough to get us into the zoo for free. It was an interesting experience, I kept mentally comparing it to Perth Zoo, which is around the same size. I think ZSL has done a great job in moving a lot of its larger animals to ZSL Whipsnade, which is a more safari-style location with far more space and privacy for the large animals. ZSL therefore placed far more emphasis on its aquarium, penguin beach, its history (the original sculpture that inspired Winnie the Pooh is here), insects and arthropods, and birds. There were a few large animal exhibits around, but really not many, comparatively speaking.


Giant Gourami



Read more... )
moonvoice: (t - i really fucking like cats ok)
At the end, we stayed around Barnet (though specifically in Cockfosters) which was our last week before we were to drop the car off at Heathrow (at which point we experienced a terrifying attempted carjacking where a car literally exploded into flames next to us while an incredibly drunk man forced his way into the car and attempted to get us to drive to a mysterious location for a mysterious amount of time) and catch a cab to Gatwick.

I have good friends in Barnet, and though I was skeptical we'd get to spend much time seeing Tif and Kuba, in the end we saw them nearly every day, treated to incredible Polish hospitality, watching Miś and watching Glen and Kuba play VR. Tif did the cover for Blackwood, and has also done several banners for my Fae Tales universe, and we actually met through her reading my series and reaching out. She does amazing book cover work for HarperCollins in London (yes, that HarperCollins), and otherwise freelances.

On a whim I've also decided to put all of our other food photos in this post. Mostly because I got hardly any photos of Cockfosters or Barnet.





More under the cut, including some quality Tom of Finland - also, some photos of meat behind the cut. )
moonvoice: (wczuciki - hound)
The last one for Carlisle!

This was also the last day we had with Silvia, and we dropped her off - after seventeen days - back to Manchester Airport as we drove down to Coventry. We were reaching the end of our trip, though we still had a bit to go.

At this point, I was starting to pull out of social commitments in London (I'd organised to see like four different groups of people), and I was also just never very hungry, and frequently wanted to sleep. The weather was getting gloomier, but me being me, I liked that. :)


Boar



More under the cut! )
moonvoice: (t - i'm already disturbed enter)
This was a small museum but it was absolutely packed with artefacts.

So there will be two posts filled with pagan altars and other bits and pieces.

It's funny you know, I felt zero connection to the ruins and structures of the building while walking around them, but I felt something different while in the museum and I can't help but feel that's because this is where all the altars are.





More under the cut! )
moonvoice: (t - fuck art lets manage hedge funds)
Within like two weeks of visiting this place, an article was released that talked about how families and people trying to get selfies etc. were literally ruining huge sections of Hadrian's Wall (followed by a picture of a partially collapsed wall). This caused one of the people on my friend's list over at Facebook (who is demonstrably older) to complain about the 'instagram generation' and how everything is always their fault and they don't respect a thing and they're ruining every site ever.

What they sort of fail to mention is that Hadrian's Wall is super long, a lot of sections are unsupervised, and that it's often *large families* who try and stand on the wall for a photo, and it's sometimes the parents and grandparents (and categorically NOT the instagram generation) who are creating these scenarios.

Anyway, honestly, there's a fine line between 'attracting tourists to get the funding to maintain the site' and 'attracting too many tourists that the site gets degraded.' There's no perfect way to maintain that line, and many of these places are underfunded, semi-owned or completely owned by rich folk, or not even protected at all. The sweet spot is impossible to perfectly keep, because you never know if it's going to be that class of schoolchildren that rambled everywhere all over the site, or if it was that couple, or that one family that will be the breaking point.

But short of fencing it off completely, like Stonehenge (which I don't think is the answer, honestly), these sites will degrade. They're historical artefacts. They can't not. That's what time does. Like, sure, it sucks that people are walking all over them, and maybe there needs to be more signage telling people how to respect the sites (there's zero signage of this nature, anywhere that we could see), and maybe you need to fence some of them off, I don't know.

But it isn't only the Instagram generation that's a problem. It never has been. Since there have been cameras, there have been people willing to be rude with those cameras. (And plenty who are rude without).





Read more... )
moonvoice: (calm - blue shoreline)
Hadrian's Wall was very much on Glen's bucket list of places to visit, and as he really had a very stripped down list, I had to make sure it would happen. As it was, it sort of happened in the middle of a lot of driving (from Aberdeen down to Carlisle), and we were aware on the day that it might not be possible.

But it turned out to be a really good break, honestly, and it was only forty minutes away from the Premier Inn we ended up staying at.

I know we could have gone to like, 'just a section of wall' but I thought it would be good to find an actual site and museum for Glen, so he could get a better sense of the experience. So I landed on Cilurnum, built in 123 AD.

I was very tired at this point (tbh everything from Inverness onwards, was a continuing theme of precipitously heightening exhaustion), and I honestly spent most of the time either slowly meandering (I never got to Hadrian's Wall, it was too far a walk), or sitting down, contemplating how much more I could do if I had a wheelchair (something I have come to contemplate a lot more since). I would have skipped the museum entirely if Glen hadn't come out to show me the photos of the interior, and I realised I would regret not having a look.

But for now, the exterior. It's all a bit out of order, and I haven't written down the names of what every location was, but basically was a Roman fort, and the best preversed Roman cavalry fort along Hadrian's Wall. It started off for cavalry and later became given to infantry.

Hilariously, the whole thing was buried because the rich twat that used to own the land wanted a smooth and uninterrupted view down to the river. His son then became an archaeologist, and in a giant fuck you to his father, unburied the entire thing when he inherited the estate.


A tiny Glen waving in the distance.



Read more... )
moonvoice: (calm - reaching trees)
You're getting all of Aberdeen in one post. I don't have many photos and sadly, didn't really love Aberdeen. Look, I'm sure it's a great place, a lot of people live there and they can't all be bad. But the time we were there seemed determined to show us every malicious, mean-spirited, rude person there was. From having people spit right at my feet as they walked past me, to getting heavily shouldered while walking, to being honked at for having to turn into the place we were staying at and not going fast enough, the only face Aberdonians showed us was one of intolerance, impatience and gloom.

Aberdeen itself was quite beautiful.

And there were - to be fair - two exceptions to our encounter/s with Aberdonians. The first was a busker who sang beautifully, rough around the edges but with a trickster's gleam to his eye. The second was a couple who were socialising a black labrador puppy, and let us pet her for a time.

That's it.

But yes, hoping to having an entirely different experience one day. After all, a place determined to convert most of their churches into bars and nightclubs is a place I'd like to get to know better.


Many Aberdeens are made of this beautiful grey granite that has a high mica concentration that sparkles beautifully in the sunlight. However, when it's overcast, it...looks somewhat more melancholy, and one of my friends said 'are all these buildings made of cinder blocks?' and I can't unsee it.

But I am quite taken with the grey granite.



I did not leave my heart in Aberdeen )
moonvoice: (calm - flower forest)
Blessed Winter Solstice (and Summer Solstice, for those in the Northern Hemisphere).

Today, Mum and I went to Dome Cafe, as is fairly normal for us on a Friday morning. I also finished the season finale of Sarazanmai and cried over it and then watched it again and then cried again and then watched it with Glen and cried a third time. It was really good. Also I cry really easily at things.

I'm slowly reading The Book of Dust by Phillip Pullman and I finished a book on Orkney Folktales last night and am now reading Letters From Hamnavoe by George Mackay Brown.


Loch Morlich, Glenmore.



Read more... )
moonvoice: (ghibli - hmc - kiss of life)
While I had plans to do a few different things in Aviemore, including visiting the Reindeer park and the zoo there (which has wolverines and polar bears), ultimately I was too sick to do much more than constantly lie in bed, barring one excursion to Loch Morlich in Glenmore, which was incredibly worth it.

The Airbnb we stayed in here was lovely. In addition, I asked the host if we could check in considerably earlier (I almost didn't ask, because I didn't want to impose) and since it's normal to be charged a fee for this, I framed it as 'I know this is last minute, but we would be happy to pay an additional fee to check in early.' She straight away messaged back telling us the place was ready, and that there would be no fee, and then to let us know if we needed anything else at all.

The place we stayed was the first place that was heated via biofuel, and its environmental footprint was extremely conscientious in all ways. Not only that, but it was a beautiful place to basically be bedridden in, and it felt so homely and lovely, with really nice decorative touches. It was across the road from a small Tesco, and we chatted the the guy working behind the counter and struck up conversation, and eventually ended up talking about Avengers: Endgame which was opening that night. He said he was - after playing football - driving up to Inverness (50 minutes away) to watch its opening session.

We made the decision to drive up to Inverness the next day and watch it. I had mixed feelings about this, we knew we were going to see the movie with Silvia but I'd planned for it to be in Aberdeen 2 days later. In the end though, all I could manage was sitting and watching a movie, so exhausted that it hurt to draw breath, my legs aching simply because I was conscious.

Yeah okay, no wonder I'm still recovering from this holiday.


At 300 metres above sea level, it is the highest beach in Britain.



Loch Morlich was incredible. )
moonvoice: (wczuciki - moon-flower)
The last batch of Orkney photos before we move onto Aviemore.

Tonight we played Dungeons and Dragons with our team (ridiculously named Brongeons and Brogons), and a hilarious night was had. I brought homemade banana bread (with chocolate chips) and Anita brought apple crumble.

This weekend I think will hopefully be pretty quiet. It's been good to post these pictures up slowly, and process them all. By the end of it, it'll be close to 40 posts, but you'll have only seen the very tip of the iceberg, given I took some 5,000 photos. (Too many, obviously, lol).





Some of my favourites under the cut. )
moonvoice: (ghibli - pm - night walker)
The Italian Chapel was already on my to do list, but when I met Lane in Chichester and got to have a conversation with her about her own visit to Orkney, she strongly recommended the Italian Chapel and that made me bump it up the list, and I'm really glad I did.

So a bit of history. The Italian Chapel is a Roman Catholic Chapel that was built by Italian POWs during World War II. It is made of two Nissen huts, and features extensive use of trompe l'oeil. The POWs were sent to a previously uninhabited island, and alone, far from home, with no real idea of what would happen to them, they began to wish for a place to worship, and asked for the resources to make this possible.

Everything you see, just about, is painted. The tiles are painted. Many of the wooden details are painted. Very well rendered by Domenico Chiocchetti, a prisoner from Moena (and details later finished in the 60s and again later on). The facade was made of concrete to conceal the shape of the hut. The bell was made of cardboard. The light holders were made of corned beef tins. And so on and so forth, ingenuity in a time of war.

While Chiocchetti's fellow prisoners were released, he remained to finish the Chapel. And in 1958, a group of Orcadians set up a Chapel Preservation Committee and Chiocchetti returned to help restore it. Other released POWs have since returned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of coming to the island. To this day, it is considered under joint ownership of Moena, Italy, and Orkney.



The interior. Once again, thanks to patience and despite the incredibly good weather, we had the entire place to ourselves.



More images beneath the cut. )
moonvoice: (wczuciki - wolverine snow)
We stayed in Kirkwall while we were in Orkney, which I really liked. There was the neat little fandom touch (I wrote a Bull/Cullen Dragon Age: Inquisition fic, and researched Cullen's base of Kirkwall a lot, and one can't help but feel it was partly based on the town itself), which was partly why I wanted to stay there.

We ended up in a lovely detached flat behind a family home, and the hosts were really generous and kind. They gave us access to their washing line (which was sorely needed), and while we were on restricted hot water (it only operated at certain times), it worked out fine.

One of the nights we stayed, I had a craving for Chinese and was getting sick of fish & chips or sandwiches or any of the other instant, simple things we ate (I ate an awful lot of fruit, especially raspberries, because they were so cheap compared to here). There was the main stretch, which had a single Chinese place. I was on Google Maps just moving it around and looking at what there was, when I happened to notice a Chinese place in the opposite direction of the town, where nothing else was except houses.

On a whim, I looked them up to see the reviews, of which there were plenty, and they were all very positive. It turned out the local Chipenese (Chippie x Chinese) was something of a staple for the locals, who highly recommended that ferry loupers (tourists) not be put off by the fact that it's a demountable at the back of a home, and it's tiny. So Glen went and lo and behold they had a full Scottish chippie menu (replete with white, red and black pudding), and a full Chinese menu.

And they deserved all the positive reviews, it was amazing.

Tbh everything in Orkney was often better than I thought it would be, which given I went in with really high expectations, was like...pretty unexpected actually.


A very quiet main street in Kirkwall, on Easter Monday, as we searched for lunch.



Read more... )
moonvoice: (calm - nacreous noctilucence)
I'll be frank, Glen cares a lot more about these kinds of places than I do. Glen sort of loves built history, and I love natural history, and we make that work. Skara Brae I objectively recognise as being very significant, but at the end of the day, I was more happy to have gone there for the sake of going there, than out of any sense of feeling or connection to the place itself. I felt far more for even the ocean beyond Skara Brae (which you will see towards the end of my photos).

I'm sure I was influenced in part by fatigue. Being exhausted and sore, and not realising that Skara Brae was such a walk from the heritage centre, as soon as I realised how far away it was I already had a sinking feeling. I just took it very slowly. Not for the first time, I was confronted with my own actual ability vs. how I imagine myself in my mind. But taking it slow was actually the right thing to do, and I'm glad I did it. And we were blessed with incredible weather.

Also the whole place stunk of manure and sheep shit, you can't really escape the fact that there is farming literally everywhere around you, and in view of the site itself. Tbh, I kind of loved that.


Skara Brae, a Neolithic UNESCO site that is older than the Stonehenge and Great Pyramids.



More beneath the cut. )
moonvoice: (t - not sure what I do for a living)
I have never been on a car ferry before, and Glen and I were both pretty nervous (I think it's one thing to do it with your own car, and quite another to do it with a hire car). Tbh, boarding was super easy on the ship Hamnavoe which was a very nice ship, and honestly the whole process was extremely smooth and easy from start to finish.

Because I get pretty bad motion sickness, I ended up staying on the outer deck once we took off and hadn't really dressed for this. (I was warmly dressed, but that wasn't really enough to deal with the Firth between Orkney and Scotland, and my hands went numb as I took photos). Even so, it was worth it. The trip is fairly short (only about 45 minutes from Thurso to Stromness), we had a mild swell on the way there (and even milder on the way back) and it was relatively quiet on the ship as we were travelling in on Easter Sunday.

Orkney was honestly like something out of a Studio Ghibli movie, and I've never had that experience before. I'm sure I will attempt to explain some of it in the next few posts and I'm sure I'll fail to convey it, but anyway, here is the trip in.



This mild fallstreak hole phenomenon appearing in the altocumulus made me extremely happy.



I think I'm in love with the sea )
moonvoice: (calm - wallaby heart)
We had no plans to go to either Wick or John O'Groats, but one of the biggest issues with check ins throughout the UK, and especially with Airbnb, is that check outs were often early, and check ins were usually VERY LATE (around 3-4pm). This often meant that even with a solid 4 hours of driving, we'd still have 2 hours to kill until check in.

As a result, driving from Inverness to Thurso was going to leave us with far too much time to kill, so we decided to make a day of it and do a trip to Wick and John O'Groats (this has the honour of being the most northerly point on the isle that is Britain). The roads were generally not very well maintained, narrow, and there were some alarming hairpin turns that dropped off nicely into an ocean that had no horizon line because of the haar. (Which was in abundance in many places we visited in the Highlands). Glen's least favourite driving was along here, and we had to take some of it back again, lol.

Wick was honestly rough, and had very obviously come upon hard times. But the people were very charming and generous (you could take some notes, Aberdeen, honestly). John O'Groats was small and wonderful. Blustery, wild, with many nesting seabirds, including guillemots and kittiwakes.


Duncansby Stacks at Duncansby Head



Wick and John O'Groats under the cut. )

Profile

moonvoice: (Default)
moonvoice

September 2022

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728 2930 

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 11th, 2025 03:00 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios