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.