This is the final instalment of this series of photos from my trip last year. It’s been interesting to look back over all the pictures, finding ones which I passed over at the time, and editing them to the point at which I am happy to show them to the world. There are more that merit a revisit, to be sure, but for the purposes of this site, I’m finished. It’s time to move on and actually write about something more recent.

The photo depicts the aforementioned durian being consumed with unfathomable relish by the youngest sister of a friend, whose family was kind enough to accommodate me during my short stay in Kuala Lumpur. I say this because durians struck me as possibly the most disgusting fruit in the world, in terms of smell, taste and texture. The experience of consuming even the tiniest bit of one conjured images of eating pus, wrapped in a plastic bag (not, of course, that I have ever attempted that). In a country where good food is held in such high esteem, and is so readily available, this monumental departure from good judgement by so much of the populace is precisely that - unfathomable.

Technically, Wikipedia informs me that this should actually be entitled “Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay”, also known as “The Durian” (more on that subject soon). The photo is of Singapore’s centre for performing arts - twin buildings looking remarkably like the eyes of a particularly large and metallic fly.

A picture from Singapore! None of the 106 I took there have seen the light of day before now, for the simple reason that they are, oh the whole, a bit rubbish. I bought a new lens - 50mm f/1.8 - in the electronics heaven that is Sim Lim Square, and spent most of my three days in the city experimenting with it. This is probably the only one of those photos which I’d deem fit to show the world without a huge amount of editing. The reason the fruit seller in question looks rather annoyed is because by this time I’d been taking photos of him and his stall for a couple of minutes, and hadn’t actually purchased anything (and, if I recall correctly, I didn’t in the end).

This was taken in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market - a wonderfully raucous place, full of fresh produce and the cries of those selling it. This borek stall - one of numerous competing lunch vendors - was surrounded by a constant swarm of patrons, and the women in this photo served them continuously with impressive speed and efficiency. The boreks themselves, I can attest, were excellent.

Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world. At 1840 km² it was impossible to thoroughly explore during the two days we spent there, and as the tourist industry there has a totally captive audience, the charges for a tour bus trip around the island were rather steep. This, coupled with the desire to be out of a coach for a while, led me and a small group of my fellow travellers to take a walk from our lodgings at Kingfisher Bay to the famed Lake Mckenzie, whose waters and beaches are so pure that they can be used to exfoliate the skin. The walk was approximately a 10km round trip, and it turned out to be the most exhausting day of the three months. The combination of sand underfoot, a few steep inclines, and the oppressive heat made for difficult conditions, and once we got there I really wasn’t in the mood for taking photographs. The only shots I did take that day were during the final stretch of the walk, while I raced the sunset down the seemingly endless beach, attempting to make it back to Kingfisher Bay before darkness. As you can see from the photo here, the result was something of a tie.

This was taken on the first night of three aboard a sailing boat among the Whitsunday Islands. With brilliant white sand (over 90% pure silica), blue-green seas, fringing coral reefs and gorgeous sunsets, it’s easy to see how this chain of 74 islands just off Australia’s east coast is considered to be something of a holidaying paradise. If you like that kind of thing, of course.

I took a whole set of these to show the remarkable change in colour of the rock as the sun went down. This shot was not among that original set, and has indeed been highly bastardized during the editing process, but I like the final effect all the same.

The scenery on the drive from Dunedin to Tekapo is stunning. Taken in the context of New Zealand as a whole, this is perhaps not saying quite as much - it seems that everywhere in that country is at least stunning - but this road runs passed some of South Island’s glacial lakes, including Pukaki, the much smaller but no less vivid Ruataniwha, and finally Tekapo itself, which for some forgotten reason I have very little photographic evidence of. The image above is another Photomatix-assisted edit, but the original still shows the distinctive turquoise colour caused by glacial erosion.

I don’t usually lie edit this extravagantly, but the results this time turned out rather pleasingly. As you can see from the original, it was neither dusk, nor dawn, but rather Photomatix which produced these colours.

I wrote at the time that a day trip to Milford Sound was a frustrating experience, both photographically and in general - it was one of, if not the highlight of the three months in terms of scenery, and to be there for such a short period was a great shame. When I go back (that’s when, not if), I will spend more time in Fiordland. Maybe with the assistance of an overnight cruise on the Sound I could take a photo which looked a bit like this for real.

Mount Ruapehu one of three volcanoes in the Tongariro National Park. The other two, Tongariro and Ngauruhoe (Mount Doom) are scaled as part of New Zealand’s most famous one day walk - the Tongariro Crossing - which I desperately wanted to undertake. Sadly, my only day in the region coincided with extremely changeable weather, making the Crossing too dangerous to attempt, and with only a couple of days before the route was completely closed for the winter, it wasn’t worth waiting around. To give some idea of what I mean by extremely changeable, the photo above was taken in about a 15 minute window of favourable conditions as the coach crossed the park. Only a few miles north was a torrential rainstorm, and a few more to the south was a dense bank of fog. I’ve never seen so many microclimates in such a small area.