Sunrise/Sunset – can you tell the difference?

I can’t.

I mean, I do know the difference – the sun goes down when it sets, up when it rises.  It rises in the East and sets in the West.  But, when you take photos, unless you know the order in which they’re taken, it could be either.  Unless there are any experts out there who can tell the difference?

Sunrise or sunset - can you tell the difference?

We arrived in Australia on the West side.  We stayed just outside of Perth and were treated to a beautiful sunset (see previous blog).  So, when we arrived on the East side, in PortDouglas, just north of Cairns, I went on the internet (when it was up – it was down when we arrived, due to the previous day’s stormy weather).  Sun rose at 6.06 am, the weather was forecast to be clear (and 30°C, but I won’t go into that)  so I decided we’d get up at 5.45.

Eddie has an app on his phone, which tells you time wherever you are in the world.  So, it was set to Port Douglas time.  This might not seem an issue, but we’ve been caught out while travelling across Australia – they keep changing their minds about what time it is and we’ve been moving our watches back and forward like yo-yos.

I am not an early riser, but thought it would be worth it, to see my first ever sunrise.  So, having spent a night of dreams about turning up at the beach at 8.15am to find the sun high in the sky, I managed to do the closest I’ve ever done to leaping out of bed when the alarm on Eddie’s phone went off.  I even managed to get washed and dressed without going ‘bleurgghh’.  Then I put my watch on.

I put it on because I wanted to set my watch by the sunrise.  Because that’s something else I’ve never done before.  I reckoned I had about ten minutes before sun-up.

Wrong.

With a few blinks and a bit of head scratching, I worked out that Eddie’s blessed app was an hour out.  It had woken us up at 4.45am instead of 5.45am.  And I’d been blissfully fast asleep, dreaming of sunrises.

But it was still worth it.  When we left an hour later for our fifty metre walk to the beach, it was already light, with that lovely soft, cool (relatively) light of first thing in the morning.  There was a group of people exercising on Four Mile Beach, one or two early morning joggers, one other person facing the horizon with a camera – and that was all the company we had on this four mile stretch of beach.

Now, here's a question.  Are the above pics in the right order?  And another question - where's the wine?

The pedantic (I mean experts) among you might have spotted that the first picture should have come last.  If you look between the palm trees (sorry, couldn't help taking a pic of them, we don't get many back home) you'll see the sun is higher - because it's going up that is.

And as for the wine - this was the great barrier reef but there's no wine there! part of our trip.  The reef was amazing.  The wine came from a bottle shop.  Two bottles of very nice sav blanc, one from Australia and one from - er - New Zealand.