Tiny island in the bay

King Island was a small island off Wellington Point that was a popular Moreton Bay tourist destination in the early 1900s. For a couple of years during that era, the Phillips family lived on the island because one of their children was advised to bathe daily in the salt water to ease her polio symptoms.

UBC’s Institute of Asian Research

UBC is not a practical university like Simon Fraser University. Most buildings on the Burnaby’s SFU campus are clustered together undercover so with Vancouver’s never ending winter rain, students don’t need an umbrella on their way to their next class. UBC however, is like a city within itself where buildings are scattered over a wider area — not practical, but far more attractive.

An Arashiyama hike

Arashiyama’s back street walkways made a great hike if you could ignore peeking into temples and being distracted by restaurants and tourist shops.

Fresh water turtle hike

Within Turtle Swamp Wetlands, there was a wide trail amongst Australia’s best vegetation. If I’d visited in the spring, the ground would have been covered in wildflowers. But when I arrived on Russell Island, it was winter, or at least that’s what the locals thought a twenty-three degree day was.

Vancouver’s best rose garden

It had been a long time since I’d ventured to Vancouver’s UBC endowment lands, but because there was a break in the rain, and a sunny day promised mid-week, I headed to the place of my first employment when I arrived in Canada two decades ago.

Cemetery amongst the trees

When I meandered on the back laneways of Kyoto’s Arashiyama, I came across a tiny burial ground.

Turtle Swamp Wetlands

While trees were being bulldozed to build more houses, Russell Island’s Turtle Swamp Wetland was preserved. This was a place to soak up the beautiful squiggly bark gum trees, grass trees and paper barks.