FACT: I stopped 150 meters short of reaching home.
car in river 1
RUMOR: Nobody was hurt.
car in river 2
ACTION: NZ Police sent a rescue diver straight away.
car in river 3
CHARITY AUCTION: Due to the tidal nature of this river (Heathcote Estuary, Canterbury, New Zealand), free test-drives are being offered only at low tide. You may book one by registering on our website.
car in river 4
A plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife has crashed in western Russia and that at least 87 people have been killed.
The Polish Foreign Ministry confirmed that the president and his wife were aboard the plane that crashed near the city of Smolensk, after touching tree tops before landing.
(Photo above – courtesy BBC News)
The Tu-154 plane crash-landed and burst into flames near the Smolensk airport, about 400km west of Moscow.
The aircraft had a capacity of up to 90 people, although Russian news agencies reported 132 passengers on board.
The Polish officials, all presumed dead, were in Russia to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, when the Soviets killed thousands of Poles.
I had a very dense trip back, not much time to write and hardly any time to take photos. I shall mention only one thing. I flu Emirates from Dubai to Sydney – 14 hours upstairs in the business class section of a new Airbus 380-800. It is a good experience.
After such a long flight, you get to your destination fresh and relaxed. Unless you spent too much time in their well-appointed round bar. It is through one of the bar windows that I took these photos of the Terminator – the line between day and night, which I reached just above the Equator over the Indian Ocean.
It is not such a fine line between day and night as one would expect.
This ends my three weeks trip. However, I have plenty of stories and photos that I may share in this mockoblog at a later date. Thanks for following me and sorry to disappoint if my travel accounts have been few and far in between. There are times to write and times to read. My trip to Europe and surely back was about living above all.
I’m having a bath listening to a radio programme on international law in times of war, on my cell. Bloody serious but equally boring. As soon as the conversation passed the time of chivalry, knights and Crusades, I got my Nokia E71 (which is now in a plastic zip bag) to chech my emails. I have four addresses that I can manage from this phone and in the second inbox I found an em@il from the bloke who’s supposed to pick me up at the Bucharest Baneasa Airport in about 42 hours. He says: ‘It may be summer where you’re coming from but it’s damn cold winter in Romania and in the whole of Europe, bring warm clothes! The forecast for when you land is 11 bellow and snowing.’ Yeah, right! I replied: ‘Jandals, sunnies and maybe my tennis cap OK?’ I can’t ad a bloody straw to my bag. It’s locked, secured, tagged, sealed, ready to be thrown in the belly of the B777 & A380 beasts from Christchurch all the way up to Vienna. I’m not touching it. As the radio talk show gets to Israel’s right (?) to launch a preemptive strike on Iran, I open a wee software I installed on the Nokia, World Traveller, and check the weather through the cities I’ll be in at the respective times:
Christchurch: 15 (that’s our summer!), dry
Sydney: 29, dry
Dubai: 26, overcast
Vienna: 0, dry
Bucharest: -3, snow.
It’s getting better and better. [I see some guys are tweeting about this travel log and I haven’t even departed.] Prince William has just landed in New Zealand. Hillary Clinton, who was due here this weekend, has postponed her visit. But what do these have to do with my trip. I’d better get back to my last minute preparations. I’m leaving for the airport in two and a half hour. First I’ll turn this waterproof radio off because the show now reached the topic of terrorists and planes. Good timing, indeed!