The view from afar

Now that I'm back in the original Queen's land, I've fixed the camera (no doubt temporarily), so finally here's a glimpse of what the other Queensland looks like. Hot, green, sandy, and full of things that can hurt you is probably the best way to describe it.

Mission to Burma

Purely to renew our Thai visas for free rather than pay extortionate fees to extend them, we travelled from Ranong in Thailand across the Pagyan River to Kawthoung in Myanmar (and back again), all in the space of a few hours. This is what it looked like.

The largest preindustrialised city in the world

Mayans eat your heart out (and they probably would), because Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples are awesome. This place is seriously MASSIVE. And they let you climb all over them - health and safety guidelines don't get a look in. We spent a day and a half visiting (what our knowledgeable tuk-tuk driver informed us were) the best ones, but you could probably spend a week here and still not see them all (if you could stand the heat that is).

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=245278&id=606200496&l=adebde65b0

That's Cambodia, Captain

As you're all extremely clever and worldly people I don't need to go into detail with you the recent instances of Cambodia appearing in the news. The most noteworthy is that regarding Comrade Duch, the ex-Khmer Rouge member in charge of S-21 (the school-turned-torture-prison from 1975-79 at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh) who is currently on trial for crimes against humanity. It's only taken 30 years for the UN to put the trial in place, and he's probably the only KR member that will ever face trial, but I supose it's better than nothing. Tuol Sleng itself is particularly grim, with the cells left almost exactly as they were found (minus the bodies) when the Vietnamese liberated the city in January 1979, and a photograph of said scene now hanging on each cell wall. The sticker above was from the tuk-tuk we took out to the Killing Fields of Choeng Ek, where all those tortured at S-21 were taken to before being battered to death and buried where they fell. Pretty dark. A commemorative stupa stands at the centre, filled with the skulls of the victims. If you ever visit Phnom Penh, it's probably best not to do Tuol Sleng and Choeng Ek in the same day, unless you want to end up feeling particularly low.



The rest of Cambodia however was a lot more upbeat. Elephants and dolphins, palaces and hill-tribe villages, very bad roads and stuck-in-the-mud buses - it was probably the most varied country in the region, and for me one of the most enjoyable so far.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=243641&id=606200496&l=fe42ad6bdf

And the Temples of Angkor will require another entry here on another day.

Mall-asia

Here are our photos from Malaysia fondly known as Mall-asia as they have so many shopping malls or shopping centres there! They are a welcome relief from the heat as they are lovely and air-conditioned. If only we had some money to go shopping with...

Here are some more pics of Malaysia, of the island Pangkor with lots of monkeys and Kuala Lumpur or KL as it's called. Loved KL, the Petronas Twin Towers are awesome, really inspiring and they have an amazing shopping centre at the bottom with a Marks and Spencers!! And all the designer labels so it was pure window shopping there!!

And finally here are some more pics of the Grand Prix.

Hope you enjoy them and they have kept you busy for half and hour or so!
Love
Nic x (certified open water diver as of today!)

Found Nemo

Back in Australia when the camera problems began we visited the Whitsunday Islands off the coast of Queensland. They're pretty damn beautiful, and home to the purest sand on earth (Officially. 98% silica, something to do with the wind and waves smoothing the grains down over time). So I bought a little disposable one to take on the three day sailing trip and finally got around to getting it processed now. We also bought an underwater one for that trip and our day out on the Great Barrier Reef which Doug partially funded, so heres the pictures from that too. I can't tell which underwater ones are from snorkelling on the Reef and which are from the Whitsundays, but in any case I suppose it doesn't really matter, as they're all underwater, and I doubt the fish care.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=242119&id=606200496&l=d7af0d3551

What's going on, Mekong?

As promised (I do keep them) here's some pictures from a recent three day trip we went on from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The trip started well, but then thanks to the muppets at the totally lame tour company T.M Brothers and Co, went very downhill on the afternoon of day 2 (thinking about it makes me angry so I'll stop right there). Take nothing away from the people and places we visited though because they were lovely.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=235385&id=606200496&l=568984fe8a

Horn of Plenty

Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world; Daintree National Park and Cape Tribulation, home to the oldest rainforest on the planet; the Great Barrier Reef, the only living thing visible from space. These are all things that you need to see to truly appreciate, text alone on here wouldn't really do them justice. Which is kinda convenient, because all the photographs we've been taking of the above are somehow trapped on the camera, or the memory card, or the camera and the memory card. I won't bore you with the details of those problems now, I'll keep them purely for the Sony customer service department when I return. Meanwhile you'll just have to wait until we're home to see anything from Queensland to Vietnam, and everything from Singapore to Laos in between. Hopefully.

And so in this better late than never edition of IIITB I'll focus instead on talking about stuff that doesn't need pictures to illustrate it. Starting with vehicle horns, and the Southeast Asian obsession with using them. At home if you hear a car horn, you turn around, you assume there's a problem, you see where it came from, you ask yourself 'Did he just beep me?' Over here it's just background noise. You hear so many of them that your ears just go numb to the sound. It infers that I'm here, I'm bigger then you, you're in my way, and I'm coming through whether you like it or not. Bikes yield to cars, cars to buses and buses to trucks. Trucks yield to no-one, and pedestrians just have to make their way between it all when they can, hopefully with all their limbs still intact.

Everybody that's been there will tell you that Bangkok is intense, after two days in the city you'll be ready to leave. Well, Hanoi is like just that, only times about a hundred. The streets are narrow, the pavements are either completely covered by tables and stalls falling out the shop fronts, or simply non-existent, and the number of motorbikes is staggering. 84 million people live in Vietnam, and there's over 60 million bikes. Ho Chi Minh is a bigger city, with twice the population, but it's also blessed with wide French-style boulevards, so at least it's fairly easy to avoid them (unless they decide to come on the pavements too, which they do sometimes, especially when it's a red light and they can't be bothered to wait). In Hanoi it's a real challenge just to cross the smallest road.

When you arrive in Laos you can joke about it's currency, the kip. 'Worthless kip' works out at about twelve and a half thousand to the pound, and throughout the country they accept US dollars, Thai baht and kip for most purchases. Their banknotes also include a range of figures and numbers (for what reason I don't know), so even though you may have a 2000 kip note in your hand, it will also have the number 6000 printed on the opposite corner, along with various other symbols and numbers, just to confuse you. But Vietnam and Cambodia both outdo Laos for weird money.
The Vietnamese dong is about half the value of the kip, at around 25,000 to the pound. This means you can actually withdraw multi-millions from the cash machine, which makes you feel very rich. However, if you then go and misplace some of that dong, you can feel a bit poor again. Misplace a million to be precise. Debate continues about whether it was stolen (my theory), that i lost it (someone else's), or that it was sucked up by the fan and obliterated (the most likely). Either way, a million dong don't come for free, and I'm sure that when i get home and there's wall to wall empty bags it will reappear.
Cambodia meanwhile has almost abandoned it's own currency completely. The riel is pinned to the US currency, regardless of the exchange rate, so you always get 4000 to the dollar. But if you visit an ATM you'll get dollars dished out, not riel. If you buy something in a market, you'll get given change in riel. And if you're paying for a tuk-tuk, you'll probably get given a mix of both.

I now have a new memory card for the camera, so all I need is a DVD drive and I can upload some stuff from from the Mekong Delta and beyond. Watch this space.

The Green Centre

On the whole, Alice Springs and the huge expanse of nothingness surrounding it is very hot and very dry, with very little growing. The aboriginal groups from this area believe that a wet year comes once out of every ninety-two. Well about 14 to 10 days before we arrived in Alice, the northern end of South Australia and the southern half of the Northern Territory had received a lot of rain. And so, we arrived in one of those rare wet years. The 'valley of the winds' down the centre of Kata Tjuta is usually the only place with plant life growing, a sea of green in a desert of red. But when we visited, Uluru too and the rest of the outback, plants can be seen in all our photographs, where usually it would just be red dust.

Just after Christmas I started reading Mark Thomas' book 'Belching out the devil'. I was aware of Coca Cola's links with Colombian paramilitaries and their publicised problems in India, but the rest of the human rights violations that can be linked to them was all news to me (the use of child labour in El Salvador, police brutality on workers in Turkey, draining water from already drought-prone areas in India - the list goes on, I suggest you read the book if you want to know more). And so as a result I'm now boycotting Coca Cola. Or at least trying to - you wouldn't believe how difficult this is. Coke is everywhere. It's always available, and quite often the only option. Juice drinks and bottled water are often owned by the Coca Cola Company. Their advertising stretches from a huge billboard in Sydney's Kings Cross to small plaques celebrating their sponsorship of Polar Bear and Tiger enclosures at SeaWorld on the Gold Coast and Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast respectively. So my boycott has become less of such and more of an attempted avoidance. I'll try not to spend any more of my pennies (or in this case dollars and cents) on it, but I won't let myself die from dehydration. I'll always buy an alternative if one's available, but I'm never going to shy away from checking out big bears and cats.

Seeing a kangaroo and koala in the wild were pretty high up my list of things to do while in Australia. We got to see a koala after just five days when Trevor took us to Warrandyte State Park just outside Melbourne, but after five weeks I was still to see a wild 'roo (even after travelling over 2500 miles through the outback!). So when we arrived in the Hunter Valley just north of Sydney and Deb and Greg (who we met in New Zealand at Waitomo caves and had invited us to stay when we were in Oz) asked us what we wanted to do, I knew immediately what was top of the list. It didn't take long. At the first roundabout on the drive to their house they pointed out two kangaroos in a field about 100 yards from the road. We saw some on several other occasions over the next few days, but no more after that all the way up the east coast. So either all Australia's kangaroos are found in a tiny corner of New South Wales, or you just need to know where to look for them.

While seeing a kangaroo in the wild was something I'd wanted to do, going prawing was something I never thought I'd do. Basically because I had no idea what it entailed. Prawning in this case, for those of you that don't know, involves dragging a net 500 yards up a waist-high river and hoping that you've caught a load of prawns in it by the end. And that's what Greg and I did. I was shocked at what we caught. In two 'runs' up the Williams River we caught seven kilos of prawns! Now I'm not sure how much Tesco currently does them for but in any case that's a prettybig saving. And these were a lot bigger than those measly supermarket ones too. So Deb cooked them all up when we got back and for the next few days I ate more prawns than I realised I could. I'm still useless at peeling them though.

Sydney Siders

Ah so there are a couple of things I should have included about our trip to the Outback. We slept in 'swags' under the stars which are foam mattresses encased in a groundsheet type covered, the material is similar to that of a wax jacket I'd say, and you slip you're sleeping bag inside and voila, you go to sleep. Much easier than the hassle of pitching a tent and the great thing is when you wake up in the middle of the night you just look up at the stars, lovely.

When we were in the outback we saw loads of constellations and a few satellites and also MIR space station, you don't get to see that everyday! They also fed us up with 'Chile con Camel' like chile con carne but with camel mince - yummy!

Anyhows, we spent a very weird Christmas and New Year in Sydney - it's just not right in the heat - and stayed in a hostel on Coogee Beach, the hostel was a bit rough around the edges but we got to meet loads of people who were there over the festive period. On Xmas eve we went down to Darling Harbour for Carols round the Xmas tree.




Xmas day was celebrated by a free lunch and goon. The lunch was a buffet with Chicken legs, pasta salad etc, and for those of you who don't know what goon is it is what they call cask wine here which is basically dirt cheap wine which comes in 4 litre boxes, tastes pretty horrible and gives you a massive headache the next day. Oh but it gets you drunk...(Personally I prefer beer).




Boxing Day was extremely hot, probably hotter than Christmas day and we watched the start of the Sydney - Hobart yacht race from Watson's Bay, I have never seen so may boats sailing at the same time! It's amazing they don't crash into each other. There's also loads of helicopters flying round for a bird's eye view.




We had dressed in our best clothes that day so we could go to the races afterwards as it was free entry and neither of us had been to the horses before.We didn't win anything but it was good fun to go along and we caught up with Shane and Louise, an Irish couple who we met at our 1st stop in Rio all those months ago...

We did the Coogee to Bondi cliff walk which was nice as we got to see all the little beaches in between but got pretty sweaty doing it! Bondi beach, although probably the most famous beach in the world, is not the nicest if you ask me but worth the visit just so say you've been there!

To go and see all the tourist sights, the Harbour, Bridge and Opera House we met up with Adam who was also ( and still is) in Sydney.

Here is the obligatory photo of us with the Opera House:



Its a lot smaller in real life than on the telly...as with Ramsay Street...(actually speaking of Neighbours we watched it last night, I won't ruin what happens for you but its all rather dramatic at the mo cos they've just come back from their Summer break, but much pleasure was had in the fact that we could point at the screen and say 'Been there'. Ha ha)

We checked out Adam's apartment which is really nice, in China Town and looks over Darling Harbour, its amazing how many people you can fit in one apartment!

Later in the day we walked around 'The Rocks' area which is a it older than the rest of the city and has lots of shops and cafes there.

In keeping with our budget, the following day we went up the Pylon Tower of Sydney Harbour Bridge, a fraction of the cost of a climb but with just as good views. We went down to the kings Cross area which is where quite a few hostels are and has a good selection of bars, we had been given some free drinks vouchers upon arrival in Coogee so this was a great opportunity to use some of them!


New Year's Eve saw the whole hostel rise early to go and nab a good spot at to watch the fireworks from. We got down to Cremorne Point which is north of the harbour at 11am and spent the whole day waiting for the big event. It was good fun cos there was a group of us, but it was bloody hot, we were chasing the shade and had a bit of an argument with one woman who had become a bit too territorial!

This is the spot in the day time:




We weren't the only ones who thought Cremore Point was the best spot to view the fireworks, Vicky Alexander and Jane Mansfield (girls from Mill Hill) where there too! Random!! It was good to see them, people are just the same wherever you are!



The fireworks were amazing and there was a real feel of excitement when they went off.

Before we left Sydney we went to the north of the city again to Collaroy, not far from Manly, to visit Claire and Martin and their daughters Megan and Eloise (so cute). They moved over from the UK 3 months ago and have a lovely apartment. Alot of discussion was had about the difference between Australian life and British life!

We traveled back across Sydney to Coogee, stopping off for a wander around Manly before catching the ferry back to the centre of the city. In the harbour was the biggest ferry ever, it was HUGE!

You can find the Perfect Friend

Although we have been in Australia for a month and half and are well on our way, let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start....

We arrived in Melbourne and stayed with Lizzie and Trevor who very kindly put us up. Their dogs Cassie and Iggy are a bit crazy, but absolutely lovable and a lot of fun! It was so nice to stay in a home for a while rather than a hostel.



We were staying in a place called Reservoir just north Melbourne and regularly caught the train into the city which I found to be a good service. We visited Victoria Market which is absolutely huge, probably the biggest undercover market I've ever seen and got carried away buying fresh fruit and veg, the strawberries were lovely.

Our trip to the Old Gaol was pretty morbid as you spend the whole time reading the displays about the inmates whilst standing in the old cells which aren't exactly spacious. It was here where Ned Kelly was hanged. Although the place was dark and depressing it was interesting stuff. They take you on a tour around the Watch Tower next door where you actually get treated like prisoners and they lock you in cell - fun?!



The homeless world cup was taking place in the heart of Melbourne in Federation Square while we were there and we caught USA v Cambodia, USA won 6-5. Afghanistan won the tournament overall, Scotland came 4th.



On the Sunday we were in Melbourne we went down to St Kilda which is by the beach. The place is buzzing with people, there is a market selling crafty things, lots of cake shops and the streets are lined with people eating at cafes Al fresco. St Kilda is also home to Luna Park where we rode the 'Scenic Railway' which is an old wooden roller coaster built in 1912 and includes a driver in the middle of the carriage with a lever for a break! It was a rickety, bumpy ride and rather uncomfortable. It wasn't til we got off the ride that we saw the rotten wood and lose wooden pins holding it together that we realised how dodgy it was!



Having 'done' the Great Ocean Road we stopped off at Mount Gambier for a night before arriving in Adelaide where the rain came down in sheets and sheets! It was not how I expected Australia to be at all - where was the sunshine?! Despite the rain I quite liked Adelaide which has a great market, Central Market, which is a food market selling loads of fresh fruit and veg as well as other tasty treats.

From Adelaide we made our 21 hour bus journey to Alice Springs which was an experience in itself, but not one I'd recommend. If you have the money, fly there! It was from Alice Springs we would do our 1st organised tour - not bad considering how long we'd been away. When walking around Alice you notice and 'buzzing' sound which sounds like an electric hum, this is in fact all the big loud bugs and it then that you are really aware of the climate you are in. Later in our trip we would discover exactly how big these bugs are...

On my insistence, we paid a visit to the Royal Flying Doctors, out of a feeling of nostalgia for another TV show (other than Neighbours and Home and Away) which illustrated to us Brits a bit of the Aussie life. I think it used to be on a Saturday late afternoon? Anyway it was great to see the work the Flying Doctors do.

Our Outback tour lasted 3 days and commenced at 6am the first day, although this was by no means our earliest morning! We visited Kings Canyon, Kata Tijuta ( The Olgas) and of course Uluru. It was great fun despite the distances we drove and we were lucky to have a really good group of people on our tour. We discovered the joys of Goon (dirt cheap cask wine that comes in a cartoon) and taught the Dutch, Belgium and French how to play 21s.

We got to see Uluru at sunset and sunrise which meant getting up at 4:30am when it was still dark! (obviously)



Oh and of course the bugs, here I am happily holding a praying mantis....



....I may have had a few drinks before this was taken.

We came back to Melbourne via Adelaide and this time it was sunny - woo hoo! So we went down to the beach and met some lovely people in the 'Bay Discovery Centre'. I think they were all retired volunteers as they were all a bit older but all of them were really nice, told us loads of stuff and were interested in our visit to Australia.

We spent a couple of nights with Lizzie and Trevor again in Melbourne, it was very kind of them to have us back! So this time we made sure we didn't miss the out on the place where good neighbours become good friends.....



Yes, Ramsay Street! Or 'Pinoak Court' in real life. I think we both got a bit excited being there. Oh and yes, it is smaller in real life than it looks on the TV but then that may have something to do with the fact that there were loads of cars parked on the road while we were there...definitely not enough room for a game of cricket. Oh the things TV makes you believe! But worth the 4 hour round trip anyway!

Big Things

No worries. Those were honestly the first words I heard on stepping off the plane at Melbourne. And we actually did have shrimp on the barbie a few nights back. All the cliches are true! And if you arrived in New South Wales at any point during the heatwave of the last week and a half you would assume that it really is exceptionally sunny every day.

But truth be told it hasn't been sunny all the time we've been here. And I don't think I've said "no worries" once (at least not intentionally. And we have eaten from the kitchen more than the barbeque (though I must point out that there are public berbeques for anyone to use in every single town we've been through, and the councils even employ someone to go around and clean them).

In Melbourne we were fortunate enough to stay with Lizzie, Trevor and their two dogs Cassie and Iggy. Lizzie is my Mum's cousin's daughter. Back when I was at work I was talking with my team as to what relative this family tree connection would be, second cousin, cousin once removed etc etc, but I can't remember what the outcome was or what we decided so I'll leave that one up to you. Whatever Rich was suggesting was probably the wrong one though.

Melbourne has load to see and do, including an ace museum, huge sporting arenas such as the MCG, and the Rod Laver arena which is probably being used right about now for the Australian open, and Botanical Gardens. Every city in the world, Australia especially, has Botanical Gardens. Some are good...and some are not so good, but always being free, they're quite often on our list. Melbourne and Sydney's are great, Brisbane's we weren't so bothered about, Adelaide's we didn't get to see and I think Canberra has replaced every tree in their parks with a memorial.

In 1964, someone selling Bananas in Coffs Harbour, NSW, came up with the idea of constructing a Big Banana outside the plantation to encourage people to stop and buy some. It worked. It also worked in encouraging over 150 more big things to be built, and idiots like me to become a little bit obsessed with seeing and photographing as many of them as possible. It started with Larry the Big Lobster in Kingston SE on the way to Adelaide; it will hopefully end (on this trip) with Big Captain Cook in Cairns.