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There are 74 Whitsunday Islands between coast of Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef most are uninhabited. After a while I stopped counting.
Unlike our trip north the trip south from Cairns was well within Australian Territorial Waters - no Casino. No worries!
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Racing down the coast - through the Whitsundays
In June 2013 we visited Russia. Before that we had a couple of weeks in the UK while our frequent travel companions Craig and Sonia, together with Sonia's two Russian speaking cousins and their partners and two other couples, travelled from Beijing by the trans-Siberian railway. We all met up in Moscow and a day later joined our cruise ship. The tour provided another three guided days in Moscow before setting off for a cruise along the Volga-Baltic Waterway to St Petersburg; through some 19 locks and across some very impressive lakes.
This is a little exercise in creative writing. The brief was to reimagine the Three Pigs from a different perspective. The original is a parable about the virtues of forward thinking, providence and hard work, so that only the most abstemious pig survives the metaphorical wolf. I thought it was a bit tough on the middle pig who is just trying to find a balance between work and play. So here is my version:
To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream:
ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:
… But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
When I first began to write about this subject, the idea that Hamlet’s fear was still current in today’s day and age seemed to me as bizarre as the fear of falling off the earth if you sail too far to the west. And yet several people have identified the prospect of an 'undiscovered country from whose realm no traveller returns' as an important consideration when contemplating death. This is, apparently, neither the rational existential desire to avoid annihilation; nor the animal imperative to keep living under any circumstances; but a fear of what lies beyond.