Living:

Sunsets, but not in Victoria, Australia

Friday, 27 August 2021

The Australian state of Victoria has suffered an awful lot of lockdowns since the coronavirus pandemic kicked off. I’ve managed to miss the most recent batch, I escaped the state just before Lockdown 5 kicked off and Lockdown 6 is ongoing.

One of the things you should not be doing in locked-down Victoria is watching the sunset, go home, shut the doors and watch TV seems to be the idea. Ticking off sunset viewers at Melbourne’s Rye beach the state’s premier Daniel Andrews frumped that watching the sunset is ‘not in the spirit’ of Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdown. So here are a dozen sunsets to go on with.

▲ Starting with a classic Melbourne sunset, from Donovan’s Restaurant on St Kilda Beach. Of course all Melbourne restaurants are closed in the current lockdown.▲ Sadly Australia has been regularly compared with North Korea for the severity of its regulations during the pandemic. So here’s a Pyongyang sunset from 2002, including the pyramid-shaped (and still yet to open) Ryugyong Hotel and the Juche Idea statue.

◄ Also in 2002 sunset over the Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady) River between Mandalay and Bagan in Myanmar (Burma).

▲ Camels always look good at sunset, so here’s a Tuareg camel train in the desert just outside Timbuktu in Mali in 1997.

▲ Australia can do sunset camels as well, these are at Cable Beach at Broome in Western Australia, looking out over the Indian Ocean in 2015.

◄ Quadbikes at sunset on the Makgadikgadi Pans in the Kalahari in Botswana in 1997.

▲ We won’t see this one again, sunset on the Twin Towers in New York City in 1996.▲ Brazilian sunset watchers looking out over the Atlantic Ocean from Forte do Boldro on the island of Fernando de Noronha in 2010.▲ It’s hard to beat a Sumbawan sunset juxtaposed with the smoking Sangeang volcano as we left Gili Banta heading towards Komodo in Indonesia in 2018.▲ Or sunset across the Grand Canal in Venice to the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in 2016.▲ A classic sunset with a cargo ship from Manchioneel Bay, Cooper Island in the Caribbean British Virgin Islands in 2014.