Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt: Green.
Source: Green | The Daily Post
Green.
Green machine.
Green | The Daily Post
Reply
Tag Archives: malaysia
Weekly Photo Challenge: Sea | The Daily Post
I was brought up in Oamaru, on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island so I guess that the sea has always been a part of my life in one way or another…this is what Oamaru Harbour looked like around the end of the 80s. In the 60s and early 70s, it had been a busy little coastal port with (small) ships regularly coming in for loads of wool and other produce – my uncle was a truckie at the time and I remember how cool it was that he could park alongside the ship and dump his load of grain directly into its hold…
This is the feature known as Matanaka at the northern end of Waikouaiiti (keep up with the place name pronunciation, you foreigners!!) Beach – we had a bach about a mile inland on the main access road to this end of the beach and used to come here every summer in the 70s and would as often ride horses along it as play in the surf…
Cutting forward to the late 80s – I think that this is the beach at Kuantan on Malaysia’s east coast – we stopped over here for a night during the Great Thailand-Singapore Bike Ride…we arrived in Kuantan mid-afternoon and had a ball body surfing – right up to the point that we got back to out hotel and Dan Flan pointed out the big rip…uh-oh…
I spent some time in Vietnam in the late 90s – this is the famous China Beach. At the time it was still many miles of unspoiled white beach and I have been afraid to go back in case it has been spoiled by commercialisation or industry. I used to sit here all day and read my one English book (on its 6th or 7th go round by this stage) and watch the MiGs and Hips fly in and out from the airbase by Da Nang…every couple of hours, I count count on a couple of local kids dragging a bucket of ice and Coke along the sand to keep me refreshed…
Swimming with dolphins off Akaroa…sometimes it’s a bit or miss as to whether the dolphins will come out to play but that did this day – this is a must-do if you are in Akaroa…
Crossing from Stewart Island back to the South Island – don’t know why I even bothered to invest in breakfast…
Muri Beach in the Cook Islands, during our honeymoon…quite happy to spend the day just paddling around the lagoon…
Taken from the Manhattan Beach Pier in LA on one of my stopover days on a business trip to the US…I catch the tram-bus to Manhattan beach for a donut breakfast and then spend the rest of the day shopping at the malls around El Segundo, my mission being to only have enough US cash left for a chili dinner at LAX before my flight home…I love these piers that let you stand behind but above the surf line and watch the waves roll by…
Weekly Photo Challenge: Sea | The Daily Post.
Share this:
Weekly Photo Challenge: Nostalgic | The Daily Post
Family times
School daze
Oh, for the life of a youngster again…
Weekly Photo Challenge: Nostalgic | The Daily Post.
Share this:
Weekly Photo Challenge: In the Background | The Daily Post
Weekly Photo Challenge: In the Background | The Daily Post.
I spent a number of hours (yes, really, but more as a part of concurrent activity as I waited for other things to occur e.g. keyboard buffer to clear so I could eke out a few more letters before it clogged up again; waiting for DVD Shrink to process a file so I could upload the next one etc) trawling through Picasa looking so an image that did the background thing for me.
It was a struggle because I don’t seem to have many pix where the background is even that clear let alone, has some potential meaning, message or other attraction. Finally, I managed to go firm on four examples, known from this point on as the ‘also rans’, that can be seen at the bottom of this post.
What happened was this. I export images from Picasa to a holding folder – this also adds a watermark and reduces the longest edge to 600 pixels, and also makes the image a nice web-friendly size – and from here, I drag and drop the images into my WordPress media library. As I opened up the holding folder just now, I was struck by the composition of this image of the Tupperware Terminator (my name for it, not theirs so don’t try ordering a Terminator from Tupperware – who knows what you might get!) where to me the background with our driveway and inferred different pathways left and right at top and bottom, just adds so much more (still working on more what) to the image…so here we go for ‘Background’…
The also rans
1 RNZIR Thailand to Singapore Bike Ride august or September 1988 – the only thing that I rode, as tour photographer, was inside the van. I only just noticed today, almost a quarter of a century later, that I snapped myself in the foreground of the background of the foreground in this shot of the mighty Hi-Ace fording a flooded road during the monsoon…
Redcastle nestled in the background of St Kevin’s College, Oamaru where I went to school. It’s all changed now from this fairly idyllic shot (mid-90s)…anyway, if you have any problems with me, blame these guys… (just kidding!)
USS New Jersey in the background of this shot taken from the USS Olympia on the other side of the river. My original shot was of the gun in the foreground but after noticing the New Jersey in the background, I recomposed it and shot it again for this specific effect…
Vancouver, around this time last year…the floatplane in the background is the icon of that trip. I arrived late one Saturday, to find that my hotel was overbooked and that they had rebooked me for just that night in another hotel – all the way back by the airport, a 30 min odd drive at midnight – in recompense, they put me in a flasher room with a balcony on the penthouse floor, As it turned out, this was the room original reserved by our hosts for my boss whop they rebooked before he arrived into a standard room a few floors down on the other side of the hotel. When he arrived a couple of days later, I said I’d swap rooms with him but these float-plane used to glide right by his window a dozen or so times a day and he said he much preferred that to yet another view over an urban landscape…top bloke!! So I got to keep my balcony and he got to keep his fly-bys – everyone happy…
Share this:
Weekly Photo Challenge: Home
Weekly Photo Challenge: Everyday Life
My take on everyday life…just random shots I dragged out of Picasa… 
…heading back into Washington after Josh and I did a day visit to Quantico…
…monsoon season in Kota Bahru…the great Thailand-Singapore Bike Ride…
…tight little English streets in Salisbury during the inaugural ABCA CLAW…
…and a summer’s day in Turangi…
Share this:
Weekly Photo Challenge: Near and Far
WordPress’ take on ‘near and far’ is meant to be about mechanical perspective but perspective is relative…
In 1985, I was also a (very) junior member of the local Territorial Force (TF) company, Alpha Company of the 4th (Otago Southland) Battalion. The larger proportion of our soldiers were all freezing workers from one of the major freezing working around Invercargill and they all had difficulty getting to the TF annual training Camp in January (to align with scarfie school holidays) as that was the peak of the works season. On one of his vists to the deepest South, it was put to Chief of General Staff MAJGEN John Mace that shifting the annual camp to the works offpeak season would be a great enabler for local recruiting. He took up the challenge and stated that if A Coy could put a full company on the ground In October, he’d be good for a company deployment to Singapore…
So A Coy put a company ++ on the ground in Tekapo, meeting its side of the deal….lots and lots of adventures that fortnight, I can tell you…
I was also in the last year of my lineman apprenticeship with Telecom and in this phase of my training, I was spending some time with the rigging section that maintain the radio towers scattered around the Southland Plains. Fifty feet is quite near, until you are fifty feet up a tower on a breezy day…then it snowed which was the end of tower-climbing for the day…
This was the day before we staged through Dunedin and flew out to Singapore – 4000 hours (or so it seemed) on a Herc across the red dust of Australia for a one night stopover in Darwin to the sweltering humidity of South East Asia to our home for the next six weeks…Dieppe Barracks, Singapore…
Not that we spent much time there…shake out on the ground and almost immediately off across the Causeway to hit the jungle for Ex PEMBURA RUSA…helicopters…rain…snakes…rain…hornets…rain…more rain…and almost as much fun as there was rain…
Share this:
Weekly Photo Challenge: Fleeting Moment
I’m more of a deliberate photographer – that fleeting moment where I just happen to have my camera out and ready when an opportunity presents itself rarely, if ever, happens to me…fleeting moments in the street is even more of a challenge because we’re not big on streets where we live…the odd road and lots of tracks of varying descriptions and capabilities but not many streets…so my search today focussed more on fleeting moments than streets…
I got back as far as 1988 before I found this one which happily conbined both…two children playing in flood water in downtown Kota Bahru around September 1988 as we staged for the Great Thailand-Singapore Amphibious Cycle Ride – the amphibious bit being unplanned but necessary: next time we probably wouldn’t plan such an event to sync with the first week of the monsoon…
This is a picture that I scanned using my newly acquired negative scanner in 2010 – in going through these phtos I have noticed that there was a hair in the scanner the whole time I was scanning these negatives so I will have to go back and redo the lot. It’s not hard, just tedious and, once I replace the netbook that melted down on my way home from Vancouver, it’s a job that can be whittled away at in front of TV….
Share this:
Weekly Photo Challenge: Water
I’m sure there’s a road here somewhere…
The Great Thailand-Singapore Bike Ride…it’s 1988…some of the lads from Charlie Company, the First Battalion, the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment take up the challenge to ride from the Malaysia-Thailand border back to their base at Dieppe Barracks, Singapore…why? Because they could…Day 1 of the ride was also Day 1 of the eastern monsoon and from there life became interesting…
Kota Bahru, like most of the region, flooded out but most took it in their stride…
…and after many adventures, the final destination was reached…
The final leg…coming onto the Causeway…
This week’s WordPress Photo Challenge...and an interesting exercise in hearts and minds as we worked our way down the east coast staying on beaches and in small kampongs each night…much as I would have liked to have been riding, someone had to take the photos…plus I didn’t have a bike anyway…and I was just back from six weeks in the States…and it looked like hard work…these really were the good ‘old’ days…
The World According to Me... 