The Western Australia Maritime Musuem - Shipwreck Gallery is located at Fremantle (a port city located 19 kilometres southwest of Perth).  This gallery is recognized as the foremost maritime archaeology museum in the southern hemisphere.

The most interested thing that I have found in Shipwreck Gallery is this Batavia Gallery.  It displays the reconstructed remains of the Batavia - (a ship of the VOC - Dutch East India Company) which was excavated by archaeologists in the 1970s.

The ship is also visible from the upper floor.  Although it is not a complete piece of ship, but it is still quite big.

Can you imagine how big this ship was?

The body of the ship was made of wood.

SiewPeng and Colin were standing next to Batavia.

The cannon is placed not far from the ship.  I guess that it must be found on the ship.

This big anchor is hanged beside the Batavia.

There are many other relics which were found on Batavia.

This set of skeleton is labelled with “One of the first Europeans in Australia. - A victim of the Batavia mutiny.”

We continued our visit on another section in the gallery.  It has a window with blue sky outside.  What was I waiting for?  I quickly pointed my camera to the window and clicked on the shutter button.

Colin, SiewPeng and the window at ShipWreck Gallery.

From the upper floor, I could see the information counter down there.  When we entered this gallery we were welcomed by the staffs and asked for donations as entrance fee.  We handed the money to her and she gave back the exactly amount of smaller notes and coins, and we put some $2 coins into a box as told by the staff.

I also found that there is a section with information leaflet for visitors with a donation box beside labelled with  ”20 cents for each piece” or something similar.

SiewPeng and Colin in Shipwreck Gallery.

We entered another section which is called SS Xantho Gallery.

[Xantho was originally built during this period of transition from side paddles to screws (screw propeller). I. K. Brunel’s historic screw-driven steamship Great Britain was built in 1843, five years before the side-paddle Xantho was launched. By the time Xantho ended up in the hands of the Glasgow scrap dealer, side-paddle steamers were pretty much obsolete.]  - taken from Western Australian Museum website.

SS Xantho was sank on 1872.

This is the engine of Xantho that the musuem had tried to restore.

SiewPeng and Colin and the Xantho engine.

The anchor in our background is the one near the entrance of this gallery behind the information counter.  It is huge and hanged from the upper floor to the ground floor.  Can you scroll up and find the photo of this anchor which I have taken from the upper floor?

As we know, usually in a museum or gallery, we may not be allowed to take photos.  I have asked one of the friendly staffs and she said it’s alright to take photos there.   Thanks to them and in return I write this post here, I hope to attract more visitors to this gallery.  If you are interested to see more about shipwreck, you should pay a visit to this Shipwreck Gallery at the corner of Cliff St and Marine Terrace, Fremantle, Western Australia.

These are the artworks found in Piney Lakes Reserve.  They appear randomly along the woodland path.  Some of them were placed or even hanged on trees.  Each of them is labelled with a metal plate, stated the artists, title and material used to make them.

This bird with red bill is taller than a human.

The eyeless pig look really muddy.  From the label I got the following information:- “Pig 2006″ by Susan Flavell, Piney Lakes was originally the site of a piggery. The material used was steel frame and cement render.

It is a big snake.  It is located quite a distance from the walking path.  When I first look at it from far away, I thought it is a big hose or something like dinosaur.

Do you know what types of birds they are representing?

“Cat Snake” on the tree.

The “cat snake” were sleeping of one of my favorite trees.  This tree has fair and smooth skin.

“Smoko Break”.

It looks like a huge red drill bit.

This is the most horrifying.  A human with unknown gender and a pair of wings was hung on the tree.  The body was covered pattern of circles and curves.

Is this a flower?

I did not take all the artworks photos nor take down the information about each artwork.  I just show you a few of them and you can go there as a visitor to have a look.  My purpose here to show you is just to introduce and tell you what have I seen in the reserve.  If any issue involve copyright has been raised, I am happy to take down these photos.

To the artists of these artworks: You have created great things that added the attraction to the reserve.  I hope my post here is not considered as stealing your artwork, but another way to introduce your piece of great work to the world and lead visitors to the reserve.  :D

Trees can be very tall.
They can touch the sky.
The trunks and roots are their legs.
The branches are their hands.
The leaves are their eyes and ears.

This tree produces the following seed.

The seeds look like a gasing (means spinning tops in Malay)

there are also other types of seeds.

The trees can be  great artists.  They always hide their artistic lines around them.  If you look around carefully, you will be able to discover them.

Although some of the trees have come to the end of their lives.  The shape of their trunk will still show their artistic beauty for decades, hundreds of years or even thousands of years.

There is a hole in this trunk.  I wish there was a rabbit like the one mentioned in a fairy tale staying inside and say hello to me.  But I wouldn’t know how I am going to react if this happened.

They might also turn themselves into a good place for mosses to grow onto.

Big and small branches on the trees look like roads and streets.

If you have studied Biology, you would know that there is a transport system in plants.  The water is transported from root to leaves by xylem, and the organic nutrients generated by photosynthesis (particularly sucrose is transported to all parts of the plant where needed by phloem.

The transport system in a tree must be very complicated and there are many junctions.  But I don’t think a traffic light nor a flyover bridge is needed for them to have a proper transport system.

Headless tree. :O

This tree needs skin care.

A tree couple.  They may be sharing the same roots.

This tree has soft branches.  Its hands look like girls’ soft hands and fingers, dancing gently in the sky.

Some of the trees have simple branches, some have complicated branches.

This tree was bleeding.  The latex in light brown is its blood.  The latex was dried in the air, but I don’t think the tree will stopped bleeding.  I did not touch it, it might be poisonous or cause skin problems.

If I am not mistaken, this is the maple tree.  Some of the leaves have dried and turned brown.  In autumn, it will turn into the colour of falls.  The whole tree will have ‘red hair’.

If you have discovered more interesting things about trees, don’t forget to tell me.  Hope you enjoyed this post.  :)

There are a lot of plants in Piney Lakes Reserve, but I do not know most of their names.  So let me quietly show you the pictures of them.  And I hope you can enjoy the beauty of the nature there.

We close our eyes when we listen to music, now I will shut my mouth (stop typing) when looking at the following pictures.  And you can imagine the quietness of the reserve but able to feel the activeness of the plants.  Then you would be able to listen to how the mother nature greet you.

This is the Banksia.  SShhh… …

When the little dried branches dropped onto the ground, the trees were actually creating some patterns on the ground.  It can be artistic.  I believe there must be secrets that the trees wanted to tell us.  But who can decode it?

Sometimes the wind helps the tree to produce their artwork.  After hours or days, the gardener come and erase their artwork and give them a new piece of empty drawing paper.

The tree language.

SiewPeng and the trees.

Coming up, I will show you the photos of trees in Piney Lakes Reserve.

Continued from our unforgettable experience of finding this Piney Lake, finally we found it.

The size of the lake is not as big as I expected.

The scenery around the lake was also not as beautiful as I expected (if compared to many places I have visited such as Kek Lok Tong).

Do you think this lake is beautiful?

But there are more birds than I expected.

Most of them look like ducks.

They seemed to be swimming happily in the “small” lake.  I can see that the main objectives in their lives is to look for food and look for a partner.  Feeding is not allowed in this park though.

They walked nearer to us if we carry something in our hand (they thought we would give them food, but we did not).  They ran away when I chased then.  They ran slowly in a cute way.  It was fun playing with them.

This group of birds have a same characteristic as human being - “find a cooler place to sit”.

I remember a Teochew song (one of the Chinese dialects), “DiGoLiangDiGoZhor“.  Translated directly it means “where is cooler where we sit“.  In the other part of the lyric, it mentioned that “where got money where we go“.  :O

Should I call it a pond or a lake?

How about if a human wants to swim here?  :P

This is a little bridge to get across a stream.

The stream is connected to this mini man-made waterfall.

The trees looked like having a meeting in this round shape area.

Conclusion, Piney Lakes Reserve might not be the most beautiful place to visit, but it has its own uniqueness which cannot be found in the other places in this world.  :)

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Anyway, every place that I have visited gave me a feeling.

We visited a place because someone introduced it to us otherwise we might not have even heard about that place.  No matter who introduced it, whether he, she or they 1.  guide us personally or 2.  wrote about the place and we read about it and visited the place on our own, there must be some interesting attractions about the place otherwise they would not even mention about it.  Sometimes the map is a good introduction method that tells me to visit a place.

In bookshops, it is common to find books such as 1001 great places that MUST be visited, 500 most uniques places in the world etc..  When I came across these books, most probably I would flip to the pages of the places that I have visited.  Then I will start to compare.  Yes, it is the time to compare my personal feeling and experience about the places with the author’s point of view.  Sometimes I agree, but sometimes not.  It does not means that it might not a good place to visit, but there are 3 factors that create the bias.

In Chinese, they are 1. TianShi (time),  2. DiLi (location), 3.  RenHe (people).  If there is a good combination of these 3 factors, everything would be perfect.  But most of the times, because of these factors, it is a bias to make a conclusion about a place.

Sometimes we can see that the introducer has had a good memory at the place that he / she introduces.  One might said that it is a romantic place if one has been there with his / her lover.  Next time, if I tell you about the unattractive park next to my house is a beautiful place to visit, you would understand what I mean.  May be I should not use the word “bias”, but it is just the personal feeling about a place.

If you ask me if I would like to come to this Piney Lakes Reserve again, I will say YES, because I have not seen how it looks like in other season - spring,  autumn and winter - (the factor of time), it might looks nicer in one of the seasons.  I also want to bring my brother here to see the grassland (with green grass and blue sky) that looks similar to a Windows XP wallpaper - (the factor of people).  Then I will compare my experience of the first visit and recall the previous memories.  I think next times I come here I will still remember a song - fireflies.

Thanks to SiewPeng’s sister who brought us here.  She came here before and I believe she like this place.  She must have been introduced by someone else to this place, and now I am introducing this Piney Lakes Reserve to you.

Next, I will show you a big collection of natural things that I found in this reserve.

ps: I also learned another thing - Do not judge a place by its name.

From the road directory, we found that the Piney Lakes Reserve is at the junction of Murdoch Drive and Leach Highway.  We parked the car at the car park near Leach Highway entrance of the Piney Lakes Reserve.  If you are familiar with this place, you will know what happened as we were looking for the lake.

Well, it was a hot Tuesday afternoon.  The first impression was good because there are solar power street lights.

We were walking in slightly deeper to the park and found another big piece of solar cell.  Thumb up because it is using clean energy which is environmentally friendly.

We saw the signboard showing the dog restrictions rules for Piney Lakes Reserve.

We were in the woodland and we reached a junction.  The following signboard stopped us to use this path.  If there were snakes, do you dare to walk into the park?

As you can see, the signboard is labeled with City of Melville.  It is a Local Government Area in the southern suburbs of Perth.  Piney Lakes Reserve is surrounded by the 3 suburbs under City of Melville (Winthrop, Murdoch and Bateman). …

… I have learned more about suburbs in Perth although sometimes it might be confusing.  Without doing some reading from wikipedia, I thought I had went out of Perth City when I saw “City of -something-” in Perth.  As I know, there are many “cities” in Perth, there is a local government / authority for each “city”, and each city has many suburbs.  Correct me if I am wrong.

We continued to walk into the wood land.

We found some protected plants along the way.

We found many things, but we did not find the lake.  A question started to come into my mind, “Why is there no lake in a place called “Piney Lakes Reserve?”.

I play a joke with SiewPeng’s sister by asking her this question bacause she brought us there and was our tour guide.  :P  She did not know how to answer my questions.  Hope she did not take my words seriously.  Hehe…

What we had found out is that the lake is actually located about 800 meters from where we parked our car.  There is another entrance for car park at Piney Lakes Reserve at Murdoch Drive which is just next to the lake and it would save us a lot of energy walking under the hot sun for almost 1 km if we parked there.

However, we had seen more things along the woodland path.  The longer we walked, the more we saw, and the more photos I have taken.

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…

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We had walked for about half an hour,  but the lake was still out of our visibility.

Another batch of protected plants with red tags.

Suddenly we reached a big piece of grassland.  Hey…  If you are using Windows XP default desktop wallpaper, try to compare to these photos.

When I was there, I felt that I have jumped into the Windows XP wallpaper.  It is not exactly the same but looks similar.

We took some photos and have some drinks (we were really thirsty).  First part of the journey exploring the reserve, I guessed we were the only group of people in the park.

Colin version of Windows XP wallpaper with SiewPeng and Colin (not forgetting our bag at the right corner as well).

Finally we found the lake, after walking across the grassland.

The following pictures were taken somewhere near the lake.  I will show you the lake in the coming post.

Not far away, there is a playground.

Stove for BBQ or cooking.

Do you know what this structure is built for?  They are the public toilets.

At the place I saw this board, the car park was just next to us but our car was not parked here.  We have no choice but walked for another 800 meters or 1 km back to our car.

Besides tiredness and hot, it was a great experience and we have had a happy time there.  While walking back to our car, I was far behind SiewPeng and her sister because I was busy taking photographs.  SiewPeng has lost her balance on the little hill at the grassland.  She fell down and her sister laughed at her.  I took their photos from far away and will keep these photos for ourselves.  :D

There is a round-shaped overbridge at Como Beach allowing pedestrians and cyclists to get across the Kwinana Freeway. It is connected to the Preston Street. The bridge is about one and a half stories tall and it is a good place to watch the sunset and view the scenery of the Como Beach.

I find the architecture of this bridge is full of artistic lines, I have written about it a year ago about this type of bridge found at Albany Highway (Cannington). This visit to Perth, I found at least another 4 or 5 round-shaped overbridges.

In the evening, when the sky is dark and the lights are switched on, it looks even more artistic.

Compared to the previous overbridge I found, this overbridge is bigger with a staircase in its middle. The staircase is for pedestrians because the circle is a long way to walk. SiewPeng and I have tried to walk on the circle, and it is really a bigger round.

Look at this picture, the freeway is just next to the beach. There is a big contrast just about 30 meters away (estimated). At one end I could see the busy road whereas the other end is the quiet beach with beautiful sunset in the evening.

I like to watch the cars and train passing by on the freeway but I did not stand too closed to the border and I make sure nothing was dropped especially my camera lens cap to the freeway with car rushing at 100 km/h.

This is the shape of the overbridge.

On the bridge, looking towards Preston Street.

Before we left, the sky has turned dark, we saw a young man with his small compact camera mounted on a tripod, taking the night scene. I remember I did that before too somewhere else in my hometown, my old camera was smaller than his camera, but my tripod was bigger than his tripod. Does this combination look strange? We walked pass him quietly, and he might not have noticed us.

Como Beach is facing west.  It is a good place to watch the sunset.

There is a sunset every day and we like to watch the sunset.  I am thinking of how many days we can watch sunset in our life.  If we have 100 years of life, we are actually having 36500 days of life (now you see life is short).

First, minus the number of days that we spent on traffic jam after going back from work instead of watching sunset.  Second, minus the number of days when it is raining or overcast (too cloudy) or other weather conditions that do not allow the beautiful sunset to appear.  Third, minus the number of days for many things in our life that attach us to our responsibilities. …  You will find that there is not much left.  It is still better than sunrise, because most people nowadays have to minus the number of days that they spend for sleeping on their beds.

Therefore, we cannot miss any sunset if there is an opportunity.  We want to take the best picture of it especially with the person we love the most.

It might not be easy to take a good picture of the sunset.  Look at the following 2 photos.  When the sky is in right colour and lighting, our faces might be too dark, whereas if we have taken our faces clearly, the sky would be too bright.  The solution to this problem is using fill-in flash.

Correct exposure on the background, but under-exposure for faces.

It is quite tricky when using the fill-in flash.  I use Aperture Priority Mode (A) most of the time, and if the built-in flash is switched on, the shutter speed is automatically fixed at 1/60 sec, The sky would be too dark because of the low light in the evening.  You might have an experience when you use flash in the evening or at night, you get a picture with clear faces but black background.  Therefore, I enabled the  slow sync mode (2nd curtain) for the flash so that the shutter speed could be made longer to 1/30 sec or lower.

Correct exposure on faces but over-exposure on the background.

The sky was getting darker but prettier with the light from street and building switched on.

There were two young men who came here, one of them was taking the photo.  They must be good friends.

The jetty said that it would be lonely when the night comes.

Evening is also a good time to pray.  As I know there is a religion do their 4th prayer in a day when the sun is at the horizon. It is a good time to calm down our mind after it has been turning for a day.  Talk to our god while the sky is changing its colour and we might get some inspiration.

I feel pity for those who do not treasure the great time in their life (excluding those who was unlucky and do not have the any great time at all).  I means those who unable to sense the beauty of nature, instead they prefer to do things hurting not only themselves such as smoking, or drinking alcohol, and might hurt the people they love as well but yet they do not know about it.

We greeted a photographer with her tripod and camera walking toward us.  She moved around to find a good place to place her tripod.  Before we left, we found her again underneath the jetty (there is a staircase to go down half way on the right side of the jetty).  May be the jetty is too narrow, we have blocked her way to shoot the sunset, or she might have found a great angle to shoot the jetty with the sunset.

Look back to the overbridge.  It was a long way to walk back.

The sky was completely dark, and I started to shoot the night scene.

The overbridge.

This is another piece of artwork sitting beside the river.  Far away, the lights from building are getting brighter, and the sky turned black slowly.

We left our footprints and went back to our accommodation with dozens of photos and uncountable feeling of warmth and peace.

We found many jellyfish while we were on the Como Jetty.

This jellyfish has a transparent head.

Most of the jellyfish are dotted.

This jellyfish is transparent.

Let’s see how it moved.

This is a fat jellyfish but has short tentacles.

They look cute especially when they are moving.  But they sting and may cause death.

While SiewPeng and I were looking at this set of photos and video clips, we made a joke that why not human swim in “Jellyfish style”.

This jellyfish has longer tentacles.  I guess jellyfish uses its tentacles to control its direction while swimming besides using it to sting human and other animals in the sea.

And look carefully, what can you find on the jellyfish’s head?

We found that some jellyfish has cross “+” on its umbrella-shaped head.  Are they related to Jesus?

I think this is the first time I see live jellyfish swimming in the water.  Let’s check out its facts:-

[Jellyfish are found in every ocean, from the surface to the deep sea. Some hydrozoan jellyfish, or hydromedusae, are also found in fresh water; freshwater species are less than an inch (25 mm) in diameter, are colorless and do not sting. …

Jellyfish blooms cause severe problems for mankind. The most obvious are human stings (sometimes deadly) and tourism declines on coasts. …

However, the most severe effects are those to fish; severe or complete declines in commercial fish stocks, destroying fish nets, poisoning or crushing captured fish, consuming fish eggs and young fish. …

Clogging also causes many problems including stoppage of nuclear power plants and desalination plants, as well clogging engines of ships and even overturning of boats by one of the largest species, the Nomura’s jellyfish.] - from wikipedia.

This is the poor jellyfish that has overturned.  It did not move itself but was moved by the tiny waves onto the border between the land and water.  Watch the clips bellow and you will understand.

We also found fish in the river.

The bigger fish swam alone.
The smaller fish swam in a group.

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…

The dead fish (most probably left by those who went for fishing) was burned and dried under the hot sun in the hot summer.

The sea gull might be targeting on the jellyfish.  But it flew away after I walked nearer to it.

Shells.  We did not picked up any of them because they were smelly with a dead jellyfish next to them.  It was also hard to find a shell in perfect and special shape.

Sea moss has grown itself on the rock.

I did not see the black swan (which is famous in Perth) here, I saw it somewhere else.  I’ll show you in the coming posts.

The most significant thing to identify that it is COMO beach is this long jetty.  From the google map, I estimated that it is more than 200 meters long.

We went there on a Tuesday morning.  It is very near to the place we stayed (less than 5 minutes drive).  We parked the car we have rented somewhere at Preston Street and we walked across an overbridge to get across the Kwinana Freeway.  I am not sure if there is any exit from the highway to this beach.

We were not the only visitors there, someone were fishing there.

Como is one of the suburbs in Perth under the City of South Perth.  Como Beach is the beach of river instead of beach of a sea (as we usually define).  I believe the water is half salted because the Swan River is connected to and not far away from the Indian Ocean on the west of Australia.

The water is not 100% clean but is it still clear enough to see its base.  We saw jellyfish here.

From the video you can see that the waves was extremely tiny.

This photo made me recall the Telaga Air in Kuching.  Both places are similar but with different scale.

SiewPeng and Colin at Como Beach.

Basically, there was nothing much to see here, and might not attract many tourists here (based on my first impression), but my compass told me that it is a place to watch the sunset.  We actually came here twice (the second time in the evening) to take the photos of the sunset.  And we found some photographers there.

Some people came here and walked to the end of the jetty and watched the river.  May be they were clearing their minds.

The beach is not wide at all, but I am not sure how long it is.  We were too busy taking the photos, and did not have enough time to explore.  The hot sun has stopped us too.  It was hot that day.

First, I thought this is the sign for the toilet …  :P

Yes, the toilet did appear behind.  But it is the artwork actually.  I saw some other similar artworks (with the black man and black woman sitting) at the other corner of the beach.

This is how “wide” the beach is.

This is the fist step of the bridge.

There is not much sand.

We sat in this hut to take a break.

Looking across the Swan River, we found boats.

We also found buildings from the center of the Perth City.

Along Kwinana Freeway, I found that there were at least 3 overbridges for pedestrians and cyclists to get across the freeway.

Next, I am going to show you the jellyfish that we found here and the photos of the sunset.

[At dawn on April 25 each year, Kings Park is more than a bushland reserve, The cenotaph at its heart becomes the focus for the annual Anzac Day dawn Service. Thousands of Western Australians gather to pay their respects to The men and women who died in their country’s service. The cenotaph was unveiled in 1929 and the centenary of the founding of the colony was Celebrated by planting an avenue of red-flowering gums along Fraser Avenue.] - from wa.gov.au.

The Cenotaph in the night.

The internal walls of the undercroft list the names of more than 7000 members of the services killed in action or who died of wounds or illness in WWI.

There is an area next to the Cenotaph that allow visitors to view the city of Perth and Perth Water.

This is called “Court of Contemplation” at State War Memorial precinct with the words written - “Let silent contemplation be your offering“.

Then we reached a curved wall with country names written on it.  One of the names stated is Borneo! :)  And SiewPeng’s sister told us another specialty of this curved wall.  If one sits at one end and leans against the wall to say something (with normal speaking volume), the person sitting at the other end of the curved wall can hear every single word clearly as if they are talking to each other face to face.

SiewPeng doubted her sister’s words because one would sure look insane if he or she sits at one corner and talking to a wall all by herself or himself.  However, she finally decided to give it a try.  The picture above shows SiewPeng delivering her words to her sister through the wall who was sitting at the other end of the curved wall.  And it really worked!

This is where the other end of the curved wall is.  It’s quite a long distance from the spot where the arrow is pointing in the picture above.  And that was where SiewPeng sat just now.

Here is another picture to show that the distance between the two spots is really far!  Look how tiny SiewPeng is at the beginning of the curved wall!  But it is true that the person sitting at this end where the arrow is pointing at, can hear every single word crystal clear as if they were sitting next to each other and talking!  Amazing!

We will remember them - the Australian army.

Light yellow flowers as the offering.

There is a flame - “Flame of Remembrance” in the middle of a pool - the “Pool of Reflection“.

2/16th Battalion Memorial - honours the men of this battalion who fought in Syria, New Guinea and Borneo in WWII.

There are other memorials, statues and structures in the park which I did not take the photos for each of them.  They are the statue of John Forrest, ANZAC Bluff Commemorative Plaque, 10th Light Horse Memorial, South African War Memorial, Queen Victoria Statue, Floral Clock, HMS Queen Elizabeth Shells, Leake Memorial Fountain, Kokoda Memorial Plaque, Jewish War Memorial and Dr Arnold Cook Memorial.

And I believe the most recent memorial would be the Bali Memorial that commemorates the loss and suffering of the Bali tragedy which occurred on 12 October 2002.

This is the last post about Kings Park. As usual, let me summarize the posts about Kings Park as follow:-

1. Visited Kings Park, Western Australia
2. Kings Park - Part 2 - the Nature
3. Kings Park - Part 3 - Perth City
4. Kings Park - Part 4 - Sunset
5. Kings Park - Part 5 - Night Scene
6. Kings Park - Part 6 - Gija Jumulu at Botanic Garden
7. Kings Park - Part 7 - State War Memorial (This post)

Hope you have enjoyed them.

This is famous the Boab Tree / Adansonia gregorii (Gija Jumulu) located at one of the car parks near the Botanic Garden in Kings Park.  It has been moved 3200km away from Warmun in WA’s Kimberley region to here. - Amazing!!!

The Gija Jumulu, SiewPeng and Colin.

This tree was estimated 750 years old, 36 tonnes weight, with 2.5 meters diameter trunk, and relocated due to works on the Great Northern Highway.  It took days (14 July 2008 to 19 July 2008) on its journey to arrive at Kings Park.

25 metre truck trailer and two traffic lanes were required to transport this giant boab tree with police escorts. :O

[Boabs are deciduous trees that are highly valued by Indigenous people for their edible fruits, medicinal uses and water-holding properties. …

…Now known as ‘Gija Jumulu’, the tree is a special gift to all Western Australians from the local Indigenous people, the Gija, who are the traditional land owners. They performed a farewell ceremony to the Jumulu (boab in Gija language) on Monday, 14 July 2008. …

…Along the way, almost entire towns came out to see Gija Julumu and people honked horns and waved the whole way down. The boab arrived at its new home in the heart of Kings Park on Saturday, 19 July. ] - from Botanic Garden and Parks Authority Website.

This is the signboard telling the story of Kings Park.  Kings Park was officially opened on 10 August 1895 whereas Botanic Garden was opened on 1965.

First I was confused about “Kings Park” and “Botanic Garden“.  How are they related?  And where are their boundaries?  From Wikipedia - “The botanic garden is an 18 hectare site within the park“.  It answers my question.

It is now known as Western Australian Botanic Garden and has a collection of 2000 species of Western Australian flora.

We haven’t finished exploring the entire botanic garden, because we wanted to look for the sunset.

Are these flowers Banksia?  They are in red and light orange.

We heard about this Boab tree before we came here, and we were not sure where it is in the huge Kings Park.  We explored and we found it.

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Last night, I had a chat with my brother, he told me about his experience with the tour guide when he visited China.  I told him that I like to travel without tour guide because I like to explore places myself.

Most of the time, after I have visited a place I will do some research on Google or Wikipedia, then I might try to find it on Google map to have an idea about its shape and topology.  If I visit that place again in the future, I would be able to explore it better.

Sometimes, the things that were discovered, are not on the web but will be stored in our memory and accumulated as experiences.

This is the night view of Perth City from Kings Park.  Does it look like the picture in a postcard?  I hope I can improve the quality of my photo and create my own DIY postcard.

I bought some postcards at a post office in Como at 60 cents (small), 80 cents (medium) and $1 (large) for my own collection and as souvenirs.  Later I found the small postcards sold at the city for 35 cents per piece only.  Maybe the qualities are different.

It was getting cooler after the sun had set.  It is not too cold and we enjoyed the temperature.

It is still summer at Perth now.  From this web page, today (25 Feb) the maximum temperature has reached 41 degree Celsius. Wow… it’s hot.

Can you find the green / yellow colour Swan Bell Tower?  It changes its colour from green to purple, blue and yellow every some interval of time.

It was about 8 pm in the evening.  We were not the only couple at Kings Park.  We saw a few people with camera and tripod taking photos at the lookout point too.  Some people were still sitting on the grass.

This is the Narrows Bridge on Kwinana Highway.

Zoom to the max, and cropped a bit, I can see the green road sign clearly.

On google map, I can see everything and know the direction well.  But when I was driving, I could get lost easily when I saw one of these exit signs.  Sometimes it was not easy to make a decision which exit to take within a limited time, when I saw it for the first time (especially the car behind chasing at a very close distance).  I hope I can get a GPS loaded with Perth map.

The road directory provided by the car rental company is useful, but I have to read it properly before starting the journey.  Sometimes, when the surroundings are different from what I expected, I need to stop and look at the map (But stopping on any freeway is not allowed).  But most of the time, SiewPeng’s sister was reading the map and was a good manual GPS.

These are the trees at Kings Park at night.  Finally we walked back to our car.  I saw many cars parked along the road on the slope.  I have come across a sign, something like this - it is against the law if the person in-charge of a vehicle is not at the park.  Hope I can find out more information about it.  Tell me if you know about it.

We went to Kings Park again on 15 February (Monday) evening at about 6:30 pm to watch the sunset.  We did not see the sunset process because the sky was cloudy.  We also did not figure out where is the best location to watch the sunset.

However, I have taken photos of the sky in warm colour slowly turned into darkness at dusk.  Parts of the sky was in purple, light red, yellow and orange.

Slowly, lights from buildings, roads, freeways and vehicles were switched on.

If I am not mistaken, this is a building at Mounts Bay Road.

The Wheel of Perth was also had its light switched on.

This is the Kwinana Freeway.  The lights of cars became the light trails in my photo.  1 second of shutter speed was used, hand held and still clear.  :)

Trees and orange-coloured sky.

On that evening, actually we reached the Botanic Garden first, we parked our car not far from the Gija Jumulu Tree.

Later, we found that the sunset was not visible there, we quickly went back into our car and parked somewhere nearer to the Aboriginal Art Gallery and State War Memorial, but the sunset was also not visible there.  We just saw the orange sky, and we continued moved ourselves following the direction of the sunset.

We had entered an area with woods were surrounding us, and had taken these series of photos (trees with orange-coloured sky).  It was getting darker and darker, but we went into the park deeper and deeper.  We still saw some people jogging facing us, so I was not worried and kept on searching the sun following the orange-coloured sky, and I hoped that I could reach a place high enough to see the sunset.  I remember SiewPeng and I had climbed up a little hill in the wood or the bushland.  Suddenly, we found ourselves had reached the Botanic Garden again because we were not far from the Gija Jumulu Tree.

The sky turned dark completely, and we walked towards the direction of our car.

We spent another 45 minutes taking the night scene of Perth City at our favourite lookout point (above the Aboriginal Art Gallery). Coming up next post, Kings Park - Part 5, I will show you the night scene of Perth City.

This picture was taken when we parked our car at one of the parking areas. Checking on my compass, I found that this is the direction where the sunset happened. But I am not sure if it is accessible beyond these trees.  And we had went to other directions to search for the sunset, but did not really find it.

Later, I checked the map of King Parks by Google map, and found that the park is facing South East.  It must be good for sunrise instead.  We did not go for it, because the sunrise was too early in the summer - about 5:30 am.  Yes, next time, we will come here - Kings Park again to watch the sunrise.  :P

While it is typical, let me make it unique.

While it is unique, let me turn it into a typical city view.

Far away, We can see the Wheel of Perth and Swan Bell Tower.  We have been there by walking along Barrack Street to the jetty on our trip to Perth last April, but we did not pay for the ticket and try both of these tourist attractions.

This time, when I have a chat with our friend Alan, he said that he and his family has never tried the wheel of Perth too although they are living in Perth.  He said that Kings Park is higher and can see the whole city.  Therefore, this trip to Perth, SiewPeng and I spent our time on Kings Park and visited 2 times on the 1st and 2nd day of Chinese New Year, instead of going up to the “wheel“.

For the Wheel of Perth and Swan Bell Tower, again…  we told ourselves for the second time … “Next Time“.

Wheel of Perth and Swan Bell tower look small in this photo compared to the building around it.  I doubt that what I can see if I were sitting on the wheel.  :P If the wheel was build on Kings Park, sure the visitors can see more things.

I like to study about the highway on the map and compare with the actual highway.

Some are called freeways actually.  The speed limit on freeways can be up to 100 km/h.  As you can see on the photo below, the railway for train is on the middle land of the freeway separating the traffic heading North and South.

In Perth, the highway seems like a normal road (60 or 70 km/h), but it can be very long (hundreds of kilometer).  I am familiar with Canning Highway (because we stayed at Como), Albany Highway (we went to Carousel Shopping Center), Leech Highway, Great Eastern Highway etc.

It takes 409 km from Perth to Albany using Albany Highway.  We didn’t tried that.  As an example, if you take a wrong turn South instead of North of Albany Highway, you will reach Albany if you keep going for 409 km.  Many time, it is confused whether a left of right turn should be taken because both side have the same street name.

There are several exits after the Kwinana Freeway to the city.  Since this was the first time I drive in Perth, I had made some mistakes by taking the wrong exits, because our destination has different names with the name of the exits.  Many times, we had reached Powis St exit and we know that we have missed the earlier exit and needed to turned back.  There was even a time, when we wanted to head south to Como, but we entered to the North freeway instead.

However, I learned from each mistake with the spending of extra petrol.

One of the Jetties.

Look at the blue ferry, its shape is a cube.

Boat.

Train on freeway competing with cars.  Do you think which one is faster?

There was one day, we decided to take a train to the City from Como.  When we arrived at the train station at the junction of Canning Highway and Manning Road, we could not find the parking for our car.  If we parked somewhere near the petrol station, we were also not sure how to get to the train station.  We didn’t want to walk on the freeway with cars beside us driving with at least 100 km/h.   Therefore we gave up the idea and drove to the City.  It was not easy to find a parking space, and I parked the car in a multi-layer carpark which called His Majesty’s Car Park cost us AUD$4.20 for an hour and ten minutes.

This is the place where I took most of the photos of Perth City from Kings Park.

The lower ground of this look out point is the Aboriginal Art Gallery.

Let me zoom in from the picture above.

There is a small jetty, and footpath along the coast.

Can you see the dotted line on the picture above?  From Kings park, it looks small.  If I am not mistaken, it is the very long jetty at Como beach.  We have been there twice, because we can watch sunset there and it is less than 5 minutes from where we were staying.  I will show you the sunset pictures and jelly fish at como beach in the coming posts.

You can notice that most of the photos above include the river.  It is called Swan River.

We found the emblem / logo for the Perth City and we understand that why it is called Swan River.  There must be many black swans near the river.  As we know water always attracts birds.

(taken from http://www.perth.wa.gov.au/)

As usual I have taken many photos when I visit a place, and the posts coming up will still be on the topic of Kings Park.  Stay tuned!

Kings park is a good place for me to take photos of the nature.  It is full of natural elements such as trees, leaves, flowers, birds etc.  The sky is blue most of the time and sometimes the cloud looks like soft cotton in the sky.

Since I have lived in a tropical climate most of the time, I like to compare the trees in Perth to the trees I see locally.  The trees in Perth seem to have less leaves.  Therefore, the branches and trunks are clearly shown with high contrast of the bright blue sky.

This trees is on a slope near the Aboriginal Art Gallery in Kings Park.  The leaves were almost dried and all of the big and small branches have darker colours which draw itself clearly into my photo.  Unlike the trees in Malaysia which are always green and seldom let their branches visible.

The white plants make the picture look snowy, but it is summer - hot.

In order to keep the sky blue, the trees were underexpose (made darker) and looked black in the photo.

Some of the trees have smooth skins, I thought it was painted with light yellow paint, but it was not.

The seeds of this tree look like bells.

These flowers are smelly.  Years ago, I had them in my garden, and now I found them in Kings Park.  This plant is called Mexican marigold.  The scientific name is Tagetes erecta.

These flowers looked like fire and beautiful but I don’t know the name.  They are accompanied by little purple flower.

This is also the marigold, but it appeared in a different colour.  Its colour is darker and mixed with dark red on the petals facing upwards.

Bees attracted by the red flowers.  The petals looked like needles with orange dots on top.

This plant looks soft and swing left and right by the wind.  The light brown on its top means it is growing healthily.

The shapes and colour of these leaves did not attract me but its name did.  ”Panjang” means long in Malay language.

We found bird feather on the ground.  It was in silvery green.

This is a black and white bird.

This is the entrance of the garden in Kings Park.

I like the white trees more than the green trees.  Why?  May be I have never seen trees with light green leaves in Malaysia.  It cools down the surrounding.

Someone was pointing on the tree with an odd shape trunk.  No, she was pointing to the one of the interesting things in Kings Park, - “the Talking Curve Shape Stone“.  I will tell you about it in coming posts.

Plants and the City.

The dried seeds / flowers dropped from the tree look like worms.  Do you know what is the name of this tree?

Our first visit to the Kings Park was on the 1st day of Chinese New year, it was also the Valentine’s day.

[This park is quite big (4.06-square-kilometre or 1,003-acre) located just next to the Perth city on Mount Eliza.  It has grassed parkland, botanical gardens and natural bushland.  There is also the State War Memorial inside the Park.  The name of this Park was Perth Park when it was opened on 10 August 1895, but rename to King’s Park in 1901.  Later, the apostrophe was dropped.] - info from Wiki.

From Kings Park, we can see the scenery of Perth City across the Swan River, some highways and buildings.

Now, I am going to show you only the things that can be found in the park, I will show you the rest in the coming posts.

We stood in front of the State War Memorial.  There is a wide footpath divides the big piece of grass into 2 sections.

At the other end of the foot path, there is a small pond with torch and fire in the middle.

Walking to the other area, there is a little slope with big trees along the way.  Many people like to sit and lie on the grass viewing the city and the river.  I guess many people choose this place because it is nearer to the parking area, or they can just park their car along the road under the tree.

Many couples were there on the Valentine’s Day.

Going down this slope, we found the Aboriginal Art Gallery there.  No photographs are allowed in the gallery, and I found some amazing abstract paintings there.

Above the Aboriginal Art Gallery, there is an area for visitors to see the sight of the city and the river.  The benches there are in curve shape.  Is the shape related to Aboriginal art?  Someone tell me please.

We found a Valentine’s balloon on the ground.

Next we reached a wishing well.

This well is a community project by the Rotary Club of Perth.

In the well, there is the logo of rotary international as the cover which looks like a piece of gear wheel.

And this well is surrounded by beautiful purple-coloured flowers.

It is enjoyable sitting on the grass, looking at the city and river.  I like to see the big piece of grass under the sunshine.

It is summer, and the maximum temperature recorded on that day was 37 degree Celsius.  The sky was cloudy, and we hardly felt any breeze there.

I wish I have a wide angle or fish eye lens on my camera, so that I can show you how wide the park is.

We sat on the grass and took some photos of ourselves.  SiewPeng’s sister laughed at us…

Next I will show you the city view from King’s Park, State War Memorial, Botanic Garden etc.

Our flight had delayed for more than 1 hour although we boarded the aircraft on time.  This was due to the system down of the airline check-in system.

Luckily we queued earlier, when there were 5 groups of passengers waiting for checking-in right in front of us, the computerized check-in process halted, and the queue did not move for more than 30 minutes.  No announcement was made and everybody just kept waiting.  Finally someone talking through the mic and speaker and announced that they would start to do the manual check-in process.  We waited for another 15 minutes before they started, after a staff arrived and handed some paper to each check-in counter.

We had our boarding passes written by hand.  After we have checked-in our baggages, we saw the long queue had almost reached the entrance.  They must have to wait for hours before their turns.  It was already 45 minutes to the STD (Scheduled Time of Departure).  We guessed they could not finish the check-in process on time.

It happened.  We sat on the aircraft for 1 hour plus before the flight departed, because the airline had not finished their check-in process.  While we were waiting, we finished playing one round of scrabble.

I started sleeping a short while after the plane took off because I was afraid that I might be too tired to drive the hired car the next morning.  I tried to sleep as much as possible and let the display in front of me show the flight status.  However I woke up quite frequently after 5am.  I started taking photos.

The display showed that following:
Ground Speed: 539mph
Altitude: 39000 feet
Outside Temperature: -70.6 Degree Fahrenheit
Time Since Departure: 4:05
Distance from Departure: 2299 miles
Distance to Destination:  299 miles.

I started losing my patient, and wished to arrive to the destination as soon as possible.  I kept on looking at the flight status and could not sleep.  It was not comfortable sleeping on an economic class chair.

I started to play with the LCD display in front of me, most of the entertainment channels were inaccessible unless an amount of money is paid.  I got bored in less than 1 minute and continued to close my eyes and woke up when the flight attendants passed by.

How nice if I could get connected to the Internet when I was flying in the sky.

The sky was getting brighter.  Before the sun appeared, the sky was naturally painted with gradient filled (exactly the same effect in computer graphic editing software such as photoshop) from dark blue to dark orange.  Below the horizon, it was totally dark.

Look at the photo below, from the place I sat, I could not avoid to capture the left wing of the plane into my photo.

Now, I lost focus to my impatient and anxiety, and I kept on looking at the sky which was in orange.  Slowly the sky changed its colour and brightness.  I still wished that the plane could land as soon as possible.

Finally, the sun has risen.  I noticed that some of the passengers started to close their windows, but some (including me) stretched their necks long to look outside the windows to view the sunrise.

I found the very thin line of new moon.  This is the shape of moon on Chinese New Year eve.

The sky was completely bright after a few minutes, I quickly took some photos before the landing announcement because using electronic equipment is prohibited at that time.

We were above the land in Western Australia, and I found desert, huge plantations, mountains and rivers.  Finally we arrived in Perth.

After a week long without updating this blog, finally we are back from Perth and getting ready to show you a series of photos taken in Perth.

This is the second time we stepped on the land of Perth, Australia.  SiewPeng and I had Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day in Perth this year.  This is also the second time I did not celebrate Chinese New Year in Kuching with my family in Kuching.

This time, most of the places that we have visited are beaches (Como beach, Fremantle) and parks (King’s Park, Botanic Garden, Piney Lake, Lake Monger).

We have rented a car.  SiewPeng and her sister have turned into a good GPS, while I have been taking some wrong turns into the opposite of our destination.  While we were in the car, we have listened to a song played by an FM station for many times every day.  The song is Owl City’s - “Fireflies“.

I think in the future, when I listen to this song, I will think about Perth.  Just like the Perth visit last year, when I smell the smell of the air in Perth, I can recall many things in Toowoomba. (At that time, the popular hot song was ”Get the Party Started” - by Pink… … I still remember. )

Coming up, I will show you the King’s Park.

HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR !!!  It is the big white cat statue, SiewPeng and Colin again.

This year, we decided to take a series of festive cat decoration at Padungan Road, Kuching at day time.  Last year, we have taken 4 types of festive decoration cat (Chinese new year, Gawai, Raya, and Christmas), which all of them were taken in the dark after the sun had set.

The cat has been put on with a red vest and red Chinese cap.  It is holding the firecracker in its left hand.  Look at the plum blossom (MeiHua in Chinese) in light-purple or pink, it represents the spring is coming.  Do you know that Chinese new year is also known as Spring Festival (ChunJie in Chinese)?  Locally we seldom use the word “Chun Jie” to refer to Chinese new year, but this word is being widely used in China and Taiwan.

This time, I asked my brother to help us to take our photo.  We have a short photo shooting session at about 8:30 am.  We were facing the strong sunlight which caused it difficult for us to keep our eyes fully opened.

Next time, we will choose another time.  Although the sunlight in the morning is beautiful, but it may not be the best time at certain angle.  Look at our shadows and you will know about it.

Because of the strong sunlight, we used our hand to block the sunlight and we looked like monkey.

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Yes, as I mentioned earlier, SiewPeng and I will not be celebrating the coming Chinese New Year in Kuching this year.  We are going to Perth again.  That is why we wish you Happy Chinese New Year earlier.  You may find that we would have no update for about 1 week unless I have time to blog and I can find Internet connection there.

This coming Chinese New Year I will not be listening to the noisy firecrackers sound at 12 a.m. on Chinese New Year and see the smoky and smelly air everywhere, I will not visit my friends and relatives as well.  I will be driving a car from one place to another in Western Australia.

2 more days to go, the Chinese New Year is coming… …

12 more hours to go, SiewPeng and I will be flying again… …

Someone has given me pieces of broken 3 X 3 Rubik’s cube keychain because I said that I wanted to take the pictures of the colourful pieces.  Now it is coming to the end of the Chinese calendar year, it is time to throw away unwanted things, before I throw them away, it is the time for me to shoot and blog about the poor colourful pieces.

Yes, it is a Chinese tradition to throw away unwanted things before a Chinese new year.  When I drove pass housing area recently, I can see that many Chinese houses have a lot more rubbish than usual outside their house waiting for the rubbish truck to come and collect them.  Most of the rubbish are boxes, some of them even throw away their old electrical appliances and sofa.  Sometimes it attracts some secondhand goods collector who thought themselves lucky because they found valuable / usable things, bring them home and make the goods belong to themselves.

[This photo was taken using my light box where a low-front-angle light plus a reflector were used.]

I believed that this keychain was bought from a discount store because of its poor quality.  If you want to enjoy playing Rubik’s cube, you should get a better quality Rubik’s cube.

I have bought a few cheap Rubik’s cube, they were either cannot be turned smoothly, or they break into pieces easily.  Until I bought my collection of high quality 3X3, 4X4 and 5X5 Rubik’s cube, I felt the actual differences.  From the manual, it even stated how to do the maintenance such as lubrication that need to be applied.

No wonder the world record Rubik’s cube solver can solve it in a few seconds.  :P  My fastest record is about 5 minutes to solve a 3X3 Rubik’s cube by looking at the formula.  I am still slow, and I can only remember the formula until the 2nd layer only.

This is the backbone of the Rubik’s cube.  I hope this won’t happen to my 3X3, 4X4, and 5X5 Rubik’s cube.  They are branded and not cheap.  Until now, I still haven’t solved my 4X4 and 5X5 Rubik’s cube.  I hope that I can make them return to their original state one day.

Therefore, I’ve decided to share this with you all and hope to get some feedback or comments from you.

Alright, check this out.  To ‘borrow’ or to ‘lend’?

Case 1
SiewPeng : I forgot to bring my sharpener today.  May I ___________ yours?
Colin : Yes, of course.

Case 2
SiewPeng: I forgot to bring my eraser today.  Could you ____________ me yours?
Colin : Sure, no problem.

Case 3
SiewPeng : Oh no!  I forgot to bring my pencil today!
Colin : Don’t worry.  I can ____________ you mine.

Have you got all the answers?

In Case 1, the correct answer is ‘borrow’.  The verb borrow is used when you want to take something that belongs to someone and sort of promised to return it to them at a later time.

In Case 2, the correct answer is ‘lend’.  The verb lend has to be used here because you are asking another person to give you something that belongs to them and will return it to them at a later time.

In Case 3, the correct answer is also ‘lend’.  This is because Colin has generously agreed to give SiewPeng one of his pencils and believed that she will return it to him at a later time.

There you go.

I hope that my humble sharing will be able to clear out some doubts.  I have written about ’send’ and ‘deliver’ too.  Please feel free to comment.  Have a good day!

Two days before the coming Chinese New Year, she will be back to Kuching, but SiewPeng and I will be travelling to another place (soon you will know about it).

Maybe I can meet my sister at least at the airport.  I need to confirm the date and time with her.  If it is on the same day, my brother only needs to go to the airport once (sending us and picking up my sister).

The bird was about to jump into the complicated world of electrical signal (digital / analog) of the telephone wires on a pole.  It was looking at the messy wiring and shook its head.  It sang a bird song and jumped a few steps left and right.

…

…

…  Finally the bird made a decision.

The bird jumped into the complicated world of electrical signals.  The telephone cables (most probably twisted pair cable)  may carry the voice signal, ADSL (internet connection) signal (which includes text, images, audio, video etc.), fax signal and other services provided.

Some of the signals are positive, some are negative, some bring good news, some bring bad news.

Will the birds know that it was actually standing above billion bits of information?

No, because birds did not get involved, nor it was interested about it as well.  It just wanted to stand high and see what is happening far away on the ground.  Look carefully, the bird was only approaching the messy cables, but did not stuck on the cables nor by the signal.  Only from my camera point of view it seems that it was stuck in the messy cable.

***  Sometimes, when something happen to us (either we know / don’t know about it), or we have no choice but to get closer into a situation, if we could manage to separate ourselves from the situation or move a step back, our points of view will be changed, and the effect on the situation might be changed as well.  The main point here is do not only stand on our points of view only, and we can see things wider.

If we are facing an obstacle, it is actually not an obstacle if we try hard to overcome it.  There will be one day in the future where the obstacle is not an obstacle anymore if we get into it from a different entry point.

Sometimes not to get involve is a good choice, but please take note that, we cannot put down our responsibility, we just do not let our emotion gets involved into the complication.

 The above is just something went into my mind when I saw the bird pictures.

Do you know that the orange skin leftovers can be useful.

First it became my model because of its odd shape.  Depend on how it was teared, it would have artistic shape.  The thin part of the skin is even semi-transparent, which is good for me to create the backlighting effect.

It can sit on the sofa.

It can lie on the sofa.

Do not under-estimate its artistic properties, it is rich in artistic texture.

I put it next to the windows, and can you see the little effect of backlighting?

It looked like a fat guy standing next to the windows looking outside.

With side-lighting, the texture of the inner part of an orange skin can be clearly seen.

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Well,  besides the above, I did not throw it away at the end of the photography session.  Instead, I used it to make enzyme.

Making enzyme is getting popular, and I also gave it a try.  I only use orange skin to make the enzyme to prevent bad smell.  The orange skin contain high citric acid which prevent it from getting smelly during the fermentation process.

My purpose is to make enzyme for washing and as fertilizer for my plants.  Therefore, I use the cheapest ingredients.  I am not sure if I can use the normal white sugar because most of the information I read does not say that white sugar can be used, they use brown sugar or honey instead.  But why don’t I just give it a try!!!  I will harvest it on 9th April this year.

My way of doing it is very simple, 3 parts of orange skin, 1 part of white sugar, and 10 parts of water.  Leave some space in the bottle, keep everything clean during the whole process, shake and open the bottle every day to release the gas in the bottle.

Wish me success in making my first enzyme.  :)

If you know what happen if I use white sugar to make enzyme, please tell me.

Last night, my father gave me some Pulasans (EN, BM), he said that they are the hybrid of rambutan and lychee.

I am not sure how true it is because the hybridization process is not mentioned in wikipedia, and it existed a long time ago. May be it is naturally hybridized hundreds or thousands of years ago which caused it appears in a shape in between rambutan and lychee.

Pulasan has dark red skin with soft torns (hair actually). It is more hairy than lychee, but less hairy than rambutan. The fruit and seed look more similar to rambutan than lychee.  The size is also bigger than lychee but about the same size compared to rambutan.   So my father called it lychee rambutan is more appropriate than rambutan lychee.  It also tastes sweeter than rambutan.

Nephelium mutabile is its scientific name. In Malay, buah means fruit, and pulasan means twisting. It is because this fruit is usually opened through the act of twisting the fruit with both hands in opposite directions (clockwise and counterclockwise), an action similar to wringing a wet cloth of water, thus the name pulasan.  It is called ngoh-khonsan in Thailand, and bulala in the Philippines.

The pulasan is native to Peninsular Malaysia.  We seldom see this fruit in the market or fruit stall here. And this is the first time I see pulasans.  SiewPeng said that she has heard about pulasan before but has never seen it before.  I did not know that it is called pulasan until I found it on Wikipedia when I was reading information about rambutan.

Nowadays, toilet paper are usually made from recycle paper.  When the recycled paper has staple bullet clipped on, but the manufacturer machine failed to filter it out, it will attach on the toilet paper.  It could be dangerous to be used in the toilet.

We used this brand of toilet paper for quite some time because it is more economical and the quality is acceptable.  But we were surprised when we found staple bullet “embedded” in the double-layer toilet paper.  This is not the first time, SiewPeng found it once, and this piece was found by me.  Currently, we have changed to the other brands.

Recycling is good for our environment, but attaching a small sharp metal object is not good for its consumers!!!

Many years ago, I have even found from the other types of toilet paper where there were some extremely small pieces of paper with alphabet or Chinese characters stick on it randomly.  It was not crowded on the toilet paper, but it can be found at least 10 or more in a roll of toilet paper.  As a result, it could tell me that the toilet paper were made from newspapers in different languages.

To the toilet paper manufacturer,  it’s time to check what is wrong with your machine, and check whether the manufacturing process is running under a good control to ensure that the procedure is correct.

Continued from part 1, I am going to show you more pictures of the parade.

There were 3 or more Gods from different Chinese temple joined the parade.  One of them was on a lorry, the other two were carried by some strong men.

There are Gods that like to run and there are also Gods that walk normally.  This time, we did not see the God that runs in high speed.  But we did see it many times in previous parades.  Is it because of the rain and the roads were wet?

A few men (usually 4) who carried the sedan chair of a God must had to synchronized they steps while running.  Sometimes, they would reverse a few steps back so that they have space to run.  The believer said that the God was actually running by itself and pushing the carriers to run too.

They played a drum while the Gods were on the street.  When they were walking, the sound of the drum was “Dong…. Dong Dong Dong” (one sound then stop and a few sounds).  When they were running, the drum player would play the fast beat “Dong Dong Dong Dong Dong Dong …………………………”

One of the Gods have a roofed sedan chair.

The other main attractions were the decorated vehicles.  They were from different organizations who participated in the parade, and some of them had performance on their stages on the trucks.

A lorry in red decorated with red lantern.

Girls dancing on a lorry.

She was looking at my camera.  :)

A decorated lorry by a local dancing group.

As you can see the decorated vehicles were coming non stop, they did move slowly and stopped sometimes.  While they were stopping, it was the best time to press the shutter release button on my camera.

After finished watching,  there were many cars on the roads and caused traffic jam.  We got into our car and stopped at the other location to watch the same parade from far away.  It was raining heavily, but luckily we were not hit by even a drop of rain.  We parked the car beside the road at Padang Merdeka (Kuching), and we saw a big building far away.  - the DUN.

We did not wait until the parade finished, but I took a left turn - (a big round) to go home.  It was still raining at that time.

As I told you before, there are quite a number of parades in Kuching every year.  There was even a parade last Christmas from churches in Kuching.

This time, it was the annually parade of a Taoism god called “Xuan Tian Shang Di” (in Chinese), which means Mysterious Heavenly Upper Emperor.  Every year, this parade takes place on the evening of the 4th day of the 12th month in Chinese Calendar no matter it is raining or not.

It was on last Monday (18 Jan 2010), SiewPeng and I went to watch this parade right after SiewPeng got off from her work at about 8pm.   It was raining but stopped and rained again.  Luckily we found a parking space in a short time, and it was not raining when we stepped out of our car until we got back into our car.

Lion dances and dragon performances are the most typical programs that can be seen in a Chinese temple parade (excluding Wesak day parade).  Sometimes they also perform dangerous actions such as jumping from one high pole to the other.  Further more, the lorries that were carrying them were always moving.

This is another lorry for lion dance performance.

The rain was unpredictable, it was not heavily pouring, but it kept on coming and stopping.  One of the dragons had its head covered by transparent plastic.  Some of the dragons have electrical circuit inside to light up the light on the dragon’s body, that was why they needed to protect it.

Lion dance always come with chimes and drum to guide the steps of the lion.

This is the lion dance drum player.  Look at their hands.

Another dragon, and as you can see, the ball is usually the guide for the dragon to follow.

There was a dragon resting on a truck.

We stood opposite a colourful building.  And there is a corner not far from us.  There were not many people there, mainly because it was raining which reduced the size of the crowd.

These pretty girls with braided hair, Chinese costume and candle lights looked similar to the one I saw last year but I am not sure if they were the same group?  I do not have a strong flash light on my camera.  It was always too dark when I took their photos.  I hope they can improve their lighting by installing a spot light or something on a vehicle in front of them like other teams.  It would be easier for me to take a better picture of them.  :P

There were many pairs of people, 2 in each group, carrying a long stick with a piece of cloth hung on the stick.  Good wishes such as peace, prosperity, “FengTiaoYuShun” (directly translated as “controlled wind and smooth rain” which means good weather), were written on the decorated cloths.

A school band also joined the parade.

Do you know what they are doing?

They are the believers of their God, who were following behind the 3 big incense sticks.  Their god statue was behind them.  Some of the leader were hitting the Chinese gong.

To be continued … … (I still have a few photos of decorated vehicles to show you.)

Last week, I just sent my 10-years-old mobile phone - Nokia 3310 for repair.  The above is the spoiled part that was returned to me.  Decades later, I believe that it can only be found in the museum.  I will celebrate its 10th birthday end of this year.

It has a dark area in the 84 x 48 monochrome display which made it difficult to read.  I decided to change it instead of getting a new phone.  It costs me RM 20.

After replace the screen board, it works fine again.

Read here, and you will know why I am still using this mobile phone.  It has now accompanied me for 10 years and I do believe that we will have more great adventures in the years to come.

It also followed me to Australia.

If I were to get a new mobile, it must be capable with the latest feature:- 3.5G, Wifi, GPS, so that I can have access to the Internet easily, and tell me the route to my destination (the talking GPS) without having to look at a map or a compass.

At the moment I decide to get a new phone in the future, I will get the best mobile phone on Earth.  I have a friend who bought iPhone 3G last year not long before the iphone 3GS was released.  If he waited for another 3 weeks, he could get a better phone.  I do not want this to happen to me.  There are new mobile phones coming soon, such as Nexus One (by google), blackberry etc..  So I keep waiting.

However back to my main consideration, every time I will ask myself a question, do I really need it and my answer is:- “sometimes“.  That’s why until now, I am still stick to this old turtle-shell (durable) phone.  Durability is one of my consideration too.  [It must be bullet proof, and tested ok after dropping it from the 10th floor] - just kidding.

My dear mobile phone - Nokia 3310, wish you long life!!!

If you have any ideas, please tell me which is the best mobile phone on Earth.  :D