Framedlight

  It was yet another trip on Highway 84 up towards Ghost Ranch, but I now perfectly understand why Georgia O'Keeffe found the area so inspiring.  We had planned a walk and an excursion but stopped first to look at a tiny group of graves we had seen just next to the road. There was no marked graveyard and nothing to explain why they should be there. We thought they may be memorials to traffic victims but they looked far more like proper grave markers. Strangely there were some animal bones in the same vicinity which I photographed in homage to Georgia!

As we continued with the Slea Head Drive the weather deteriorated even further, so after lunch in a bar we decided to cut our losses and head towards home, or Dingle in this case. But, in keeping with the Tom Crean theme and feeling sorry for the poor buggers out in the hills on the 19 mile endurance walk, we returned via the cemetery in which Tom Crean and his wife are buried.  This lies just outside Annascaul in the hamlet of Ballynacourty. Howard said it would be a little bit different and he was surely right. The graveyard was overgrown and damp but what was striking about it was that most of the burials seemed to be above ground in little mausoleums. Maybe the ground was too stony and hard to dig, but it made it into a unique place. Some of the tombs were completely covered over with moss and seemed to be sliding back into the earth. In better preserved ones you could see the slabs that could be removed to place the coffins inside. As you can imagine I took a number of phot...

We travelled overnight from La Paz to Uyuni to start our 3 day tour of the salt flats and lakes. The bus was doing alright until about midnight when the metalled road gave out, to be replaced by rutted dirt. I was not feeling 100% and thought a trip to the toilet, situated at the back of the bus, would be useful. In the dark I did not realise that the aisle was full of luggage and one sleeping person. A tiny elderly Bolivian lady in full skirts and bowler hat still firmly fixed to the top of her head. Having negotiated myself there I found that the flush was not working - most off putting, and then had to get back to my seat, much to everyone else's disgust. We arrived in Uyuni around 7.00am having now got 2 hours to wait until the tour company opened. Uyuni was deserted except for the decamped bus load so we walked up towards the centre where we were taken hostage by a friendly cafe owner who escorted us to her premises. It was warm inside and crowded as nearly everyone from the...