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.