Don’t imitate me;
it’s as boring
as the two halves of a melon.

Haiku by Matsuo Basho | Link

old and knotted tree
Spring leaves of deepest green
attached to everything

maybe not a Haiku by John Holman

The guy on the right is His Eminence Choeje Ayang Rinpoche — a reincarnate lama (a tulku) and a lineage-holder of both the Nyingma and Drikung Phowa. The guy on the left is Gen Tsewang, his brother who manages Rinpoche’s monasteries in India. They both started life in Eastern Tibet (Kham), leaving around 1959 and travelling overland to India. I often think how there lives must have changed.

The Range Rover is nearly 20 years old and has about 270,000km on the clock. It’s been a great car and like my good wife, mostly easy going but sometimes a tad temperamental. It was 37 degrees C here the other day so I drove up to Palm Beach, parked the car and sat on the grass and watched. It’s what I enjoy sometimes — sitting quietly and watching the world go by.

The Roman bath-house, in the City of Bath, receives more than a million visitors a year. So don’t go there if you want to be alone. They do have a cool audio service that wasn’t available last time I poked my nose in. Seems you can now listen to Bill Bryson — the author of some very funny travel books — share his thoughts and observations on Roman life, history and society. The swimming pool is called the Great Bath — I bet the water wasn’t that green when Marcus Aurelius was alive.

Palm Beach is about as far north as you can go and still be in Sydney. It’s on a peninsula that starts about eight kilometres south with the Pacific on one side and Pittwater — a body of water larger than Sydney Harbour — on the other. This snap was taken on the Pacific Ocean side. In the distance you can see the sand dunes rise and over the top and down the other side is Broken Bay.