I’ve seen more snow this year I think than ever before. Not just on the ground (though there has been a lot of that), but snow actually falling, great white wafts of the stuff thickening and brightening the air. Unluckily, this has not resulted in my having become snowed-in at any stage – which I’ve always thought sounds like quite a lot of fun. Instead, for the most part, it seems as though I’ve been in a car during most of these incredible snow falls, either driving or as a passenger, and that experience has led me to conclude a few things…

The noise is audible from inside the train carriage as we glide across the Ponte della Libertà and into Santa Lucia station. Whistles, horns, drums, occasional shouts, festive choruses, and bursts of laughter. With too much luggage in tow, I disembark the train. From the top of the station steps the scene below is arresting – a full-swing masquerade party is in motion on the streets. Women in curled white wigs and enormous bustles, men in every manner of decorative mask, and children decorously dressed as little barons and baronesses (or less decorously, and more frequently, as little superheroes!).

It is the central weekend of the Carnevale di Venezia, an unseasonably warm and bright day in February, and, I now realize, the entirely wrong day on which arrive needing to traverse Venice carrying three weeks worth of luggage. My plan had simply been to stride down the stairs, onto a waiting vaporetto, disembark at the Rialto, and be all settled into my temporary new home in the space of thirty minutes. With the normally efficient railway piazza transformed into an uncrossable terrain of revelry however, there is simply no option but for me and my baggage to join in the festive crush of human traffic, and get pushed where the flow is to take us…

Last time I wrote about travelling to our Coomboona farm, I likened the experience to Alice’s falling down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. I was speaking metaphorically of course, there was never actually any white rabbit, until this trip, when, in a strange instance of life intimating art, there suddenly was…

The Venetian light, ethereal and translucent as it shimmers off the shallow waters of the lagoon, has been the focus of much praise in literature and art. In ‘Death in Venice,’ Thomas Mann describes a ‘vaulted sky of delicate azure and utter purity,’ light like ‘dazzling crystals dancing;’ while Turner’s famous Venetian watercolours depict the city always through a veil of golden mist, sparkling evaporate blurring the skyline of distantly visible spires and campaniles. This trip however, after the fete days of Christmas have passed, and the fireworks and festivities of New Year’s have given way to the inevitable hangover, we encounter La Bella Venezia in an altogether different mood...

We arrived in Zermatt on Christmas Eve just as twilight was giving way to night. High cloud and darkening skies obscured the towering Matterhorn from view, but, ‘tomorrow,’ we said, looking out the window, ‘we’ll be able see it then, just like on the Tolberone, rising there to the right, or is it maybe just to the left?’ ‘Well, we’ll see, tomorrow.’ And then the first flakes of snow started to fall…

My Mum lives in a place called Coomboona – though very little evidence exists to confirm that this is even a ‘place’. You can't get there following road signs, for Coomboona has no signage to indicate its existence; there is no township; no post office (though legend has it that there was one, once); and Google Maps is in the unfriendly habit of ignoring us altogether in favour of adding the prefix ‘North’ to the name of the nearest town (a substantial distance away) and lumping us in with them. For all of this though, Coomboona is what the place has always been called, and despite its apparent obscurity, it’s not all that difficult to get to from Melbourne … or not until the very last minute at least. Heading north for about 2hrs or 200 kilometres on the huge corridor of the Hume Highway, Coomboona is just one exit away. Well, one exit, and one barely marked little right hand turn.

The road onto which this hidden turn takes you is very long, and runs straight as a die. A distant line of bush shimmers at its end, glimmering green forest gums marking the edge of the Goulburn river. The straight set of the road is deceptive though, for as you drive along, a circuitous cast of characters and scenes to rival Alice’s experience in Wonderland appear out the window to either side...

The movement of the tides may dictate daily life on Zanzibar, but the island’s historical life owes more to another natural phenomenon – the winds. The first colonisers to blow in on the breeze were Arabs and Persians in the 9th century. Their dhows brought previously unknown spices, citrus, and tropical fruit, but by the 15th and 16th century, with Portuguese colonisation sweeping East Africa, dhows were replaced by galleons, and recently acquired South American staple foods such as maize and manioc were added to the mix. Next to arrive were the Omanis whom, courtesy of established trade routes with India, introduced new East Asian spices, and established Zanzibar as in important port in the global spice trade. Along with the spices came the recipes to utilise them, and, by the end of the 17th century, samosas, curry, masala, and biryani were being made in kitchens all over the island, adapted to suit the local ingredients, and influenced by the Arabian and Portuguese inflected cuisines that had come before...

Life on Zanzibar’s shores moves in rhythm with the tides. At high tide, when the sea rises to just cover the fringing reef, local sailing dhows or ngalawa, set off to fish the deeper waters beyond the reef. After they’ve set sail and the tide begins to drop, the beach extends outwards, doubling, then tripling in size to form a series of shallow pools in which a variety of marine creatures find themselves temporarily trapped. At lowest spring tide, these shallow pools formed by rock, reef, and sand, extend all the way out to the barrier of fringing reef itself. When this happens, and it is possible to walk out for hundreds of metres where there was water only hours before, coastal villagers come down to the beach to comb the rich pickings offered by the pools. Armed with nets, buckets, sacks, and hands, octopus are grabbed from beneath rocks, crabs are quickly gathered up into bags, and clams expertly prised from their rocky holds. Then, as high water begins to sneak back over the reef, progressively deepening the pools and forcing the foragers ashore, the task of trading on the morning’s pickings begins just a little further up the beach….