Ryan Ho Kilpatrick

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“Dear, I know nothing of \ Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love \ Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur \ Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.” . These are the colours of Malta: a horizontal tricolour of muted yellow limestone sandwiched between the deep blue of the Mediterranean and the azure sky. It’s a banner that follows your every step along these ancient shores, where buildings new and old are all made from the soft, porous rock and left unpainted to breath out the salty summer air and wintry rains. This entire island could be one elaborate sculpture chiseled over the centuries from a single limestone block, then lodged in the middle of the sea like the centrepiece of some impossibly grand fountain.

Daylight fires its final salvo into the limestone rock pools at the foot of Fort St Elmo’s seaward ramparts. In 1565 these embankments saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Great Siege of Malta, as Ottoman forces fought to take the strategic Sciberras Peninsula that divides Marsamxett and the Grand Harbour, commanding the entrance to both of the island’s main waterways. Not a single Knight of St John survived to see it fall into the enemy’s hands. Today it stands at the head of the capital Valletta, the haunt of dog-walkers, divers, stray cats blinking sleepily into the twilight, and fishermen standing still as the statues of saints you see on every street corner. Like so many places in Malta, it feels like two parallel worlds, past and present, draw breath in unison. As above, so below.

Under sail and on the trail — the Hong Kong I always miss most. See you in a year, HK frens (unless you come visit me in Malta!)

Lit in 1901, Cape Byron Light stands at the easternmost tip of the Australian mainland. The country’s most powerful lighthouse, by night its light sweeps 27 nautical miles across Byron Bay, burning with the intensity of 2.2 million candles. If it could keep shining boundlessly over the inky ocean waters, though, it would illuminate some 13,000 kilometres of unbroken fetch before meeting the rising sun on the opposite shores of the Pacific, a few hardy candelas making landfall upon the Chilean coast. Also pictured: the Catholic Cathedral of St Stephen in Brisbane, a sloping street of traditional Queenslander homes in suburban Bulimba, the River of Light show on the Brisbane River, and dawn on the Great Barrier Reef.

The sun sinks into the seas off the Great Barrier Reef on one of my last days in Australia. In my short time here I’ve dived for the first time with grey nurse, reef and wobbegong sharks, giant Queensland grouper, bumphead parrotfish and marble, bull and eagle rays. I did my first wreck penetration dive and liveaboard and shared the water with breaching humpback whales and great pods of dolphins. Back on dry land I took my first furtive steps into a continent I’d barely thought of before but now can’t get off my mind. Can’t wait to see you again, Great Southern Land.

Half in the sky above Okanagan Lake, a very BC chapel—the Saint Elizabeth Seton House of Prayer. For the first time since I arrived here, the heavens finally opened and the still air started breathing again, wind and rain driving away the smoke from nearby forest fires that had brought air quality and visibility levels redolent of Beijing. At last, a glimpse of the Okanagan as God (or at least the Catholic Diocese) intended!

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