Pointing South

After seven mind-blowing weeks in Europe it was time to leave Rome (top left).

Flying to Auckland (bottom left) was punctuated by a stopover at Dubai Airport (right). The latter vast and brightly lit bubble of human enterprise is plonked near Dubai, a human luxury “pleasure dome” planted in the sandy part of the Arabian Desert.  Dubai sports the tallest building in the world and the second most 5-star hotels of any city (London “wins” that race). The luxury of Dubai is built on oil.

A rather large stranger sitting next to me spent much of the 10,000 kilometers of the flight to Auckland with her elbows digging into my ribs. We jostled repeatedly for pole position on the little arm rest between us, never looking directly into each other’s eyes.  My revenge was to spend much of the time processing a backlog of photographs on my laptop on the tiny fold-out seat tray. It's war in the economy section of long-haul flights.

I only discovered Blipfoto halfway through our holiday, so I have been playing catch-up to record a reasonably complete record of our trip since. Therefore all the photos in my journal so far are “back-blips” which I posted in order from the day I joined Blip rather than the exact day each was taken. Today’s Blip, and one final hurrah coming tomorrow, mark the end of the backlog and maybe the start of properly synced Blips, assuming I find the time to keep on blipping.