skyring

The sunset is a thin bright orange band in the west. With a fingernail shaving of a new moon just above it, fresh from an eclipse which missed Australia. I'll be chasing the sun this evening and for the rest of the trip as I fly continually into the west until I come all the way around again in thirty days. And home to a new moon and the Southern Cross rising over my horizon once more.

I wish I could take a photograph of the sunset over a dark land. But all I'd get would be reflections from the bright cabin, and I must hold the image in my mind. Chasing the sun into the west.

Western Australia will be a new place for me. The first of many this trip. It's our biggest State and our most sparsely populated. Most of the few inhabitants are concentrated in the fertile southwest corner and the rest is pretty much desert, apart from a mine and a cattle station here and there. I'm looking forward to it as I sit here racing through the sky at ten miles a minute and smiling up at a pretty cabin attendant hands me a glass of spiced tomato juice, its deep red colour reflecting the lignt of the fading sun.