Alex and James RTW Trip

Mexico

2010-01-12T10:48:00.000-08:00

Well here we are, 7 months and 10 days since we left, staring down the barrel of our last day of travelling, waiting to face the grim reality of the weather back in England. Ha its not all doom and gloom, both of us are really looking forwards to coming home and seeing our family and friends, its just the reality of getting jobs and dealing with the cold that might not be all that much fun! We've been holed up in a hotel in Mexico City for the last day or so, waiting for our flight, which is still a good thirteen hours away. So plenty of time to finish up the final (or maybe second to last, who knows) blog entry - Mexico.

The relatively simple hop down to Cancun from LA turned into yet another airline based nightmare... we'd got to LAX nice and early and found the Mexicana check in desk, only to be told we didn't actually have tickets for the flight. Joy.

After ten minutes talking to the most unhelpful customer services person in the world, it turns out BA never bothered to actually book us onto the flights we'd rearranged all those months ago in Aus/New Zealand. It took almost an hour on the phone to BA to sort it all out, and thank god the seats they'd booked were still there, its just that our ticket wasn't linked to them yet... or some other airline babble we didn't really care about. Needless to say we were both fuming but relieved that we'd made it onto the flight - after all that stress and hassle back in the Autumn is was so annoying to find out they'd messed it up, and then for the people on the phone to imply it was our mistake... gah, airlines really do their up most to ruin trips.

We just about made it to the gate in time, but from there in the journey was painless, and we arrived in Cancun four hours later.

Okay so we did pinch this one from the internet, its not an amazing photo from the plane :p We really didn't know anything about Cancun before we arrived, and we'd skipped the usual ritual of buying the guide book - the theory being we were there to spend a couple of weeks by the beach before heading home. In hindsight we should have done a little more research - it turns out there are two distinct areas in Cancun; downtown, and the hotel zone. The photo is of the fancy hotels in the hotel zone, which sadly were a long way out of our price range. Instead we headed towards the hostels in downtown.

We had managed to book a real duffer online - not only were we paying three times over the odds (thanks to HostelBookers, we've been ripped off by them plenty of times now, so if you can make your own reservations!) but our nice sounding double ensuite room turned out to be a nasty 12 bunk dorm. With a slatted window right onto the busy kitchen. Our day was going from bad to worse...

We managed to scrape out a pretty miserable nights sleep (once everyone else had gone to bed!) and left early in the morning to find somewhere better to stay. This took about 25 seconds, as there were a couple of nice hotels just around the corner charging less than we'd paid for the scummy hostel! After a bit of negotiating to get us out of paying the full pill at the hostel (hostels are really funny about this around holiday times it turns out) we jumped ship and took up residence at Hotel Tulum.

We explored the local area that evening, and it was clear the Mexican's went to town on the seasonal decorations. Apart from that we didn't do much in the run up to New Years Eve, except relax and explore the area. There were plenty of cheap local buses running between downtown and the hotel area, so we explored the whole place and didn't do all that much else... so fast forward to the big night...

It started in quite a civilised fashion, but descended fairly rapidly once we'd sampled a few of the local beverages =)

We'd made our way over to the hotel area on the handy bus and had a wander around, but the majority of places were charging 60 US dollars plus for entry and an open bar - which was a bit rich for our tastes. We found a nice place with no entry and regular drinks and settled in for the night. As midnight approached we celebrated by trying out even more of the local tipples =)

So by midnight we were thoroghly in the new years mood, and the bar handed out hats and balloons (and more tequila slammers...) and everyone had a dance to the crazy music.

All in all a good night out, and despite the looks on our faces we weren't in that much trouble the next day =) We took it easy anyway, and booked up a big trip for the next day. The Yucatán Peninsula is home to many ancient Mayan ruins, with the most famous being one of the new wonders of the ancient world - Chichen Itza.

As Cancun tourist traps go, the Chichen Itza tours are right up there. We signed up to the cheap and cheerful one anyway, and tried prepared ourselves for the usual faff of the conveyor belt tours.

We were up bright and early for the 7am pickup, but then sure enough we had to wait around at a staging area until about 9am whilst they found enough buses to fit everyone on to. Not a good start... it was like it was there first day organising the trip. Once we finally got underway, the first stop was a cenote to have a wander around and for brave souls to have a swim in.

There are so many of these sink holes dotted around you can't really find any tour that doesn't take you to one, so this wasn't the last we'd see of them. It was a nice enough place to have a look at, but the water was so full of sun cream it looked a bit like crude oil in places. Nice.

After that, we were dragged to the usual 'local market', specifically set up to relieve US tourists of their money by selling 'authentic' locally made products. Having been forced to endure this scheme on at least three continents of far it wearing a bit then. Next up was a pretty good lunch buffet, which cheered us up. One of the more genuine local dishes was a delicious lemon soup, which was much more tasty that it probably sounds!

So we'd been on the tour for about 8 hours, and finally it was time to actually visit the main event...

To the tours credit, they did lay on a pretty good walking tour, telling us all about the traditions and history of the place.

This is the view from their footy pitch, which was pretty well proportioned but the home to an entirely different ball game... archaeologists reckon it went on for a few days, and the captain of the winning team was decapitated - apparently a good result in those days.

After the tour we had at least 23 minutes to stroll our by ourselves before the place closed and we were herded out by security. What a wonderfully planned day out... by the time we'd stopped at all 400 hotels on the way home, we'd spent 13 hours on the trip - having only spent two hours at the place we'd actually want to see. Ho hum, it was a pretty amazing site but it'd have been nicer to spend another hour or so there to see everything.

After that slowed the pace down even further - we had a few weeks to kill and not all that much to do on a budget. Our next trip out was to the Isla de Mujeres, a popular island just off the the coast. The main form of transport here was golf buggy, and we couldn't resist hiring one to tear about the place for a few hours:

It turned out that the island took the brunt of the winds coming in of the Caribean Sea, and it was absolultey freezing as we pottered around in the open.

Forunately it was much warmer around the other side so we were able to get some good beach time in before we headed back to the mainland.

Our regular days of pottering around to the beach and having dinner at the locals food market continued for a while longer, before we booked another day trip, this time a bit more adventurous - zip lines.

We went to a place claiming to be Mexico's number one attraction, and it turned out to be a good one. That picture isn't us as yet again they did the 'no cameras' trick and then scammed you for the photos their camera guys took along the way. I guess we should have been used to it by now, but the way they pretend you shouldn't take your camera for other reasons is a bit much.

The zip lines were amazing fun, and there were plenty of them. After the zip lining there was the inevitable trip to another cenote, but we'd booked the special option to get there on all-terrain segways, oh yeah =)

I'd always wanted to try one of these things, and going along the tracks through the jungles was pretty amazing. It wasn't all plain sailing, as one of the ladies in our group couldn't get the hang of it and had some nasty falls (driving them into trees isn't the best way to get around...) but we had a blast - if you get the chance to have a go we thoroughly recommend it =)

That was about it for the trips out, we idled away the final few days and enjoyed some pretty tasty feasts - its going to be hard to go back to home cooking again after this!

And that was that - we had one last trip to the beach to say goodbye. We've spent quite a bit of the last 7 months strolling down some of the most amazing beaches in the world, so it was a sad farewell.

And here we are, up to date once more. From Cancun we flew to Mexico City; we've been a bit reclusive and not seen anything of the city - it felt a bit like tempting fate to risk one of the more dodgy cities we've visited on our last day, so we've been watching TV and counting down the hours until the flight.

I think we may do one more post once we've got home to round things off, and look back at some of our favourite bits so we'll remember things in the future. Already when we look back and read our first few posts it feels like a lifetime ago... so it'll be great to have this record of our amazing journey for the rest of our lives.

If you told us eighteen months ago we were going to have circumnavigated the world, we'd definitely had laughed... but when the situation changes you've got to take good advantage of the opportunities life puts in front of you... but that'll do on the reminiscing until we are back home safely in one piece, there is still plenty of time for BA to screw up again and send us (and our bags) somewhere totally random ;)

See you all soon!

Vegas Baby

2010-01-12T10:43:00.000-08:00

We left things last time as we were heading from San Francisco to Vegas, via another night in LA. We were back on the old faithful greyhound buses that we'd spent half our Aussie live's on. Fortunately for us these were only six to seven hour journeys.

The landscapes we travelled through were pretty amazing; quite different to those of New Zealand where everything seems right up close, but the vast expanses of the plains and the mountains in the distance made for some great window gazing.

Despite being impoverished travellers, scraping by on 30 quid a day each for most of the last 5 months, I'd pulled out the big guns and treated us to four nights in a super fancy hotel for Christmas. Thanks to everyone who made suggestions on where we should stay, we ended up going for the Bellagio - one of the fanciest places on the strip.

As soon as we arrived we felt totally out of place wandering through the amazing shops with our backpacks on, everyone there looks so filthy rich, and by the time we made it through to the reception we thought it was only a matter of time before they busted us and pointed us down the street to some grubby hostel. Thankfully, in Vegas anyone's money is good money, even in the swankiest of places =)

The lobby was a crazy combination of flowery glass arty ceilings and fancy Christmas decos, and about a million people all fighting for the check-in queues! It took a fair while but eventually we checked-in and headed for room sixteen-thousand and something... they are mind blowingly big hotels, that's for sure.

We'd arrived in the last evening, so we headed straight out to get our first hit of the Vegas atmosphere and stroll down the strip as everything was lighting up.

No sooner as we'd left the hotel the famous water fountains sprang up and we joined the throng watching the show, with the Paris hotel in the background.

This is the view back towards the Bellagio from the lake, sadly a bit blurry but it gives an idea of the size of the water area at the front of the hotel. Our room was right around the other side, I guess you have to pay the big bucks to get the fancy rooms overlooking the fountains!

It didn't take any time at all before we were swept up in the maelstrom of neon, adverts and noise as we headed up the strip taking in the sights. We got as far as Caesar's Palace before we caved in and headed to get a beer and do some gambling =)

We'd not done all that much research on the way the bars work in Vegas, but it became clear quite quickly that if we played on the video poker/blackjack machines they'd give us all the free booze we wanted. Each different place had slightly different rules on how much we had to put in, and what the minimum stake was, but before long we became pretty good at roughly breaking even whilst enjoying the complimentary booze. Happy days :)

The next day (slightly later in the morning than originally planned..) we set off for a longer trip to check out the sights and the wacky stuff going on inside the various casinos.

We liked the European themed ones quite a bit, maybe something to do with feeling a bit homesick - I liked Paris the most whilst Alex went for the Venetian, complete with its fake-sky indoor St Mark's Square:

Despite it being Christmas Eve, there weren't quite as much Christmasy spirit things going on around the place as we'd expected. Although we did find a good bit in the Bellagio once we'd got back and done some more exploring in our own back yard.

That evening we hit the casinos again - after an hour or so of polishing our blackjack theory online to maximise our drinking scheme returns - and played on the various machines and got merrily drunk again. I really wanted to play some 'proper' blackjack at a table, so we headed away from the Bellagio's 20 dollar tables to a cheaper place up the strip. I merrily lost forty dollars in the space of about six minutes (despite having been practising the theory stuff all day!) thanks to a wicked run of luck from the house. This quickly put an end to my dreams of "making it big in Vegas" and we headed back home relatively early so we'd be in good spirits on Christmas Day.

The big day arrived and we spent the first few hours on Skype calling our families back home. As we were talking to my lot there was a knock on the door which we thought was the room cleaners - so we sent them packing - but the shouts of "let them in" that flew back out of the screen meant we quickly opened the door... the little schemers back home had ordered a nice bottle of bubbly to be delivered to our room, so that set the tone for the day and we had a great day of eating and drinking.

We couldn't resist hitting the room service to get some tasty breakfast to go with the champers :

By the time we'd finished the feast we realised we'd only got another few hours until our lunch booking, so we quickly rescheduled that until later in the day to avoid any the inevitable culinary overload.

We went for a nice stroll to work off breakfast - and its amazing that there was absolutely zero difference between Christmas Day and any other in Vegas. The casinos were still busy, there were still throngs of people everywhere you could see outside, and the traffic was still crazy! Definitely a case of no rest for the wicked.

We'd booked at a table at one of the nice restaurants in the Bellagio for a late lunch, and when we arrived they mistook us for someone else who'd kicked up a big fuss to get a lake-side table outside. We didn't exactly do much to try and clear up their confusion, and before we knew it we'd been whisked through to a great table right on the beautiful lake with the fountains.

Hopefully this didn't leave another couple having an angry confrontation with the maitre d', but you've got to take your chances, especially in Vegas ;)

Sadly we couldn't get any traditional Christmasy food, it was a bit too fancy for that, but we both ended up choosing a really tasty chickeny-orangey thing which made us very happy indeed.

After all that food and drink we were definitely feeling the Christmas spirit, and took a stroll back in the other direction down the strip to walk it off, followed by more (mild!) casino action in the evening. We'd already booked our next days activity so wanted to be in a clear headed state to head off to the Grand Canyon by helicopter on Boxing Day.

It was both of our first times in a helicopter, and I'm not sure if there is a better place on earth to try it than the Grand Canyon.

The tour we'd booked involved a 45 minute flight to and from the canyon, with a flight down into the canyon and then stopping at a crazy cowboy ranch nearby. This last bit sounded a bit ropey on paper, but actually it kind of made the trip.

Our host at the ranch played and sang made up songs whilst we had a tasty bit of lunch, and then there was an opportunity for a horse ride (which we declined, it was extra and it was also freezing cold outside!) and we could stroll around the ranch. They put on a daft western shoot out demo as well, it was all quite cliched but good fun. Then we hopped back into the helicopters for the flight back.

The journey back was more direct than the way out, and the views were just as great. Before landing we took a route across the strip and had a chance to see all of the hotels from above which was amazing.

And that was about it for our frantic four days in Vegas. We didn't get to any shows, mostly because we'd spent so much money on the helicopter ride, but that gives us something to look forwards too next time we visit. Hopefully next time we'll not be backpackers, and have a bit more money to spend - it is possible to have a good time and not spend much, but we both get the feeling it'd be a whole load more fun if you could go crazy for a few days and do and see everything on offer!

It was pretty sad leaving our amazing Bellagio room too, this was definitely the pinacle of luxury so far on the trip, but we had to face the reality that we were heading for some pretty low budget hostels in Mexico for our next stop!

USA

2009-12-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

Once again we are gazing back through time to update the blog - we are getting pretty close to the end of the trip now, and have resolved to make sure we don't end up writing the last two months of blogs from London =)

Right now we are in Cancun, Mexico, enjoying pretty nice weather as we wind down before the trip back to freezing cold England. But in terms of our blogging progress, we are just about to leave Auckland, over a month ago...

The flight was almost a repeat of the fiasco that ended up with the longest day ever without sleep in Melbourne, so this time we took the pharmaceutical route and took sleeping tablets after we'd finished our first round of in-flight movies. This turned out to work quite well, we both got enough sleep to get by, and before we knew it we'd arrived at LAX. It was still some crazy hour in the morning in US time, and with the sleeping pill lag to contend with as well we weren't exactly on top form as we staggered off the plane.

Everything was going well until we'd spent the best part of an hour waiting at the baggage reclaim; slowly but surely the torrent of luggage slowed to a trickle, and the other passengers had pretty much all gone... but no sign of either our bags. Things went from bad to worse when we asked the Quantas people in the terminal - the idiot that had checked us in in Auckland hadn't given us our baggage tags so we had nothing that they could check in their system to find out what had happened. (Note to anyone going on a plane with checked in baggage - never leave the check in desk without bag tags!)

Arrrggg... we spent another hour queueing and filling in lost baggage claim forms and were dispatched off to our hostel with the promise Quantas would phone each day with a status update. Neither of us were holding our breath.

We had booked to stay in a hostel right on Venice Beach, and it turned out to be a good little place ("Venice Beach Cotel - its like a hotel, but cheaper!", gah!) situated right on Venice Beach prominade.

Fortunately we only had to wait for a couple of hours before they found a room we could take - thank god their customer service was better than Melbourne or we'd have been waiting until the afternoon again. Its a really nice area to stroll around, even in the early hours of the morning! We crashed out and slept for the rest of the day, not really knowing what was going on.

The next day we woke up and took stock of our situation; neither of us had anything else to wear, no toiletries at all, and only one airline toothbrush between us. After harassing Quantas baggage service by phone - who as expected seemed quite oblivious to our missing bags despite it only being 24 hours on - it became clear we'd need to buy some stuff to get by.

(In hindsight we should have should have done so much more before we left the airport - once we'd got some internet we did loads of research on what kind of compensation they will give you if you kick up a fuss. Its well worth googling for this information if you are embarking on a lot of flights this year - knowing your rights in advance makes things a hell of a lot easier than trying to chase it all down after the event!)

Alex took charge (not just because we needed to shop, she'd been to LA before) and we took a stroll down to Santa Monica. The famous pier was a little bleak and closed down as it was the middle of winter, but the walk was great. From there we headed in land to hit the shops along the 3rd Street Promenade. A hundred or so dollars later we had enough bits to get by with.

The next few days passed by in a bit of a haze as we couldn't really plan anything until we had news about the bags. On the third day we managed to get through to the guy that had helped us at the airport, and thank christ he actually knew what he was doing - we gave him a much more detailed description of the bags and within an hour they'd been able to track them down in some random section of Auckland airport.

Our best guess as to what happened was that the guy who checked us in was a) annoyed with us or b) just plain stupid, and had 'forgotten' to put the baggage routing tags on the bags (and therefore had no bag tag receipts to give us.) So the bags just got left around the check-in area before hitting the on-hand (airport talk for lost property?) bags pile in the airport. Anyway, all interesting stuff to know in hindsight, but the best thing was the bags would be flown overnight and would be back with us the next day.

We did more walking for the rest of that day, and explored the canals that give Venice Beach its name:

There were some amazing little houses around there, it looked like a great place to live. People were starting to put up their Xmas lights and decorations, so we had a great day out.

That next day we planned out the rest of our time in the US, ready to book everything the second the bags arrived - obviously still paranoid that Quantas would some how mess that up too. We'd not really explored LA at all yet, so it was about time jumped on the bus and headed over to Hollywood.

We'd picked a pretty special day for it - within about an hour of leaving the heavens opened and it rained solidly for the rest of the day. Hollywood in the rain, without an umbrella, is not a great place to be. We couldn't even see the sign in the hills it was so grim, so we headed inside and went to see the Christmas Carol 3D film instead.

It was a great film and everything - the amazing 3D scenes of Dickensian London made us feel pretty home-sick - but the real highlight happened before the film started. Just as the adverts finished and the film was about to start, the whole screen shot upwards to reveal a load of perma-grinning singers and dancers, complete with Mickey and Minnie mouse. We'd managed to completely miss the fact we'd booked ourselves into some crazy kids Christmas show - even after being given strange jangly wrist bands on the way into the cinema.

Oh well, a few extremely twee Christmas songs later - and after being covered in fake fairly liquid 'snow' - the film finally started!

So LA was a bit of a write-off really, mostly down to the missing bags, and partly due to how impossible it is to get anywhere without spending four hours a day on buses. The different areas are so spread out its a bit disappointing how hard it is to see everything.

Amazingly the bags did show up on time the next day, so we booked up some greyhound tickets and a hostel, and the headed north to San Fransico the day after.

The guide book told us the city was way smaller than LA, and could be walked around in a day. So we set off from our wonderful hostel in downtown to the Golden Gate Park, thinking we could walk back around the coast in a day...

This is before we realised it was about a 15 mile roundtrip - it turned out our map had a section that wasn't to scale (I mean who does that... mean trick to play on tourists) and after about five hours of walking we were still nowhere near getting back! It was a beautiful city to stroll around though, so we loved it despite being knackered after we got a tram home.

We spent the next few days exploring the cheap things to see, like Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39. Alex was keen to try the Clam Chowder :

Not really my cup of tea, but Alex loved it... she is definitely winning the game of how many local dishes you can try going around the world. (I'd just snuck off to the BK around the corner before we took that photo :p)

The weather was a bit grim, but we managed to make it up and down the zigzags of Lombard Street without sliding down. That evening we took in a quintessentially San Fran show called Beach Blanket Babylon - Alex had found this online and it looked like a good laugh. Its a really long running satirical musical revue, which is constantly reinvented to poke fun at whatever is in the news at the time. This was hilarious, despite the fact we didn't get some of the more quirky American jokes - and well worth a visit if you are in San Fran.

On the way back home that night it was my turn to sample some classic American fare - I was a bit peckish on the walk home so we grabbed a Philly Cheese Steak from a diner and holy cow is that the best food ever invented?! I'm sure my heart stopped for a few moments as my internal organs fought the waves of lard sweeping through me, but it was worth it for the cheesy-meaty-bready tastiness of it all. Happy days =)

We'd had a string of relatively cheap days in the US so far, so it was about time we slapped down the greebacks and did some tours - first up was Alcatraz. We'd followed some good advice and booked ahead of time to do the night tour - allegedly the best tour in the San Fran area. We'd fluked a perfect day for it to; it was very clear and sunny, so by late afternoon the city was bathed in an amazing orange glow as we set sail across the bay.

This is the view from the island away from the city:

This was one of our favourite tours of the trip, its just so well organised and the audio tour around the prison itself was great. Because we'd done the night trip there weren't that many people around, and we manage to use our London commuter elbowing skills to get the front of the queue to get into the prison, so it was eerily empty as we explored around it.

When we made it back outside the sun had just about set behind the Golden Gate Bridge, and the views were breathtaking :

It was a great trip out, full marks. We walked home from the pier through Union Square (our hostel was just around the corner) and couldn't resist getting caught up in the Christmas spirit with just a week to go until the big day :

The next day we went to see the long awaited Avatar film - in IMAX 3D no less - in the morning. Its undeniably a brilliant film, we both really enjoyed it. As it was the first day of release we had to go during the morning to get a seat, so it was really disorienting coming outside into the sunshine and walking around afterwards!

We'd shelled out the big bucks for our next trip - a full day tour out into the Yosemite National Park :

We'd got lucky on the weather yet again and enjoyed an amazing day out in the crisp mountain air. The tour was a bit of a rush but they managed to pack in loads of the main sites through the park. We've already forgotten the names of everything but this one might be a big rock called El Capitan seen across the valley.

The waterfalls were all running a bit low on water, you can just about make out one of them in the background past the crazy tree :

We got to do a few hours of exploring after lunch, so we did a bit of scrambling to get up close to one of the bigger falls near the visitors centre :

And another one for good luck...

Another amazing trip - it was quite a long bus journey to get out there, but well worth it. The clear day and all the snow made it unmissable.

As we were getting closer to Christmas - and our 'holiday' in the Bellagio - we started winding down again after the big tours. The next day we thought it'd be nice to talk a stroll over the Golden Gate Bridge, but sadly the amazingly unpredictable weather thought better of it.

With not much else to do in the gloom, we hit the town that night and headed up to the bar in the Marriott Hotel for a cheeky beer or two. The mist had cleared a little and the views from the 39th floor bar were great.

(For some reason I couldn't stop thinking we were in scene from Star Wars, is it like the Death Star in Return of the Jedi?)

We hit a few more bars and had a grand old time, but on the way back we broke the cardinal rule of 'never go shopping after drinking', and ended up going a little bit silly in the corner shop...

Ah well, it was Christmas after all =)

We'd come to the end of a great week in San Fransico, so it was time to head back the way we'd come and head to Las Vegas via a one night stop back in LA. Christmas in Vegas deserves its own post, so we'll leave it here - until next time...

The rest of New Zealand

2009-12-08T23:31:00.000-08:00

Our last update was from the Franz Joseph glacier on the south island. We'd decided to split our 20 ish days in NZ evenly between the islands, so we only had a couple more days left in the south before we had to give back the car and head to the north. The final destination on the plan was Nelson, a largish city on the north coast. It was another fairly epic drive to get up there, but things quickly picked up when we found out the hostel we'd booked gave everyone free chocolate cake and ice cream each night! Awesome :)

To be honest it doesn't matter at all if the hostel is a complete dump when they give you free cake, but this place was brilliant - it was run by a couple that had spent ages travelling themselves so really knew how to keep the backpackers happy. We really wanted to do some wine tasting (ie drinking) at some point in New Zealand, and Nelson was the perfect place for it; we signed up for a tour and headed out the following day.

The tour was great, we visited four different vineyards and tried so much wine it got to the point where we actually had to use the spittoon by the afternoon :p The lady that ran it was a really eccentric ex-school teacher, and the whole thing felt like a crazy school trip but with lots of wine involved. All good fun - we definitely learned a bit more about wine, but it did take us quite a few days of beer drinking before either of us could face ordering a wine again ha!

So that was it for the south island, as the next day we were up bright and early to drive to Picton to get the ferry. In classic style we'd not bothered checking times or booking, so it was a total fluke that there was a ferry just about to leave the minute we arrived. A little bit of running around the ferry terminal later and we were on the boat, heading north to NZ's capital city, Wellington.

Our fantastic luck with the unpredictable New Zealand weather finally ran out, and as we pulled into the docks in Wellington the outlook was pretty grey and miserable. It stayed rainy for three days running, so we really didn't see much of Wellington. Possibly the most exciting thing that happened is that we stumbled on the enlightening of the city Christmas tree, complete with Sally Army band and carol singing, to get us into the Xmas mood a bit!

With the rain showing no signs of abating, we rented another car and headed north back out into national park territory.

The first stop on the north island tour was Tongariro National Park, a real life volcano and home of one of the best one-day hikes (they call them 'tramps') in the country. After a lot of persuading from Alex I'd agreed to embark on this 21km long by 1km high mission of a walk as it did sound pretty amazing... even if I did think I had a very high chance of collapsing in a heap at some point along the track.

The hostels in the area were set up for sending people out onto the track via buses that ran from the town to the start in the morning, and then they'd pick you up at the other end 6 gruelling hours later. So we dragged ourselves out of bed to get onto the bus at 7:30 am, completely weighed down with snacks and water as if we were heading out to the north face of Everest. The weather report was a little ropey, but we'd seen the clouds clear up nicely the day before so we were quite optimistic... famous last words...

It was pretty easy going to start with, just a gentle slope up some really nice terrain, and the sun was making the right noises about breaking through the clouds.

The easy going start quickly turned into the start of the uphill slog. It was around this time we overheard some people saying that the volcano area had been used - yep, you guessed it - in Lord of the Rings for some of the Mount Doom bits. So there were quite a few people joking about climbing up Mount Doom, and one group in particular were taking it so seriously ('Listen guys, its now or never to turn back, as once we climb this bit there's no coming back...') we started to feel a bit nervous. We could see on our handout from the hostel that the profile of the walk was pretty much straight up from there, with a really long downhill at the end, so we got our heads down and started up the side of the mountain.

Its time for a quick side note - at this point we'd be remiss if we didn't mention a slightly wacky NZ form of sustainance - Scroggin. We were baffled by this phrase at the start of the NZ journey, we'd seen a couple things mentioning it but had no clue what it meant. But it turned out to be their word for trail mix, or whatever we call that in England. Like a high-carb snack for when you are walking. Anyway, having found out there was a special word for it - and having found huge scroggin dispensers in the nearby supermarket - we were completely loaded with the stuff. By the time we'd hit the hilly bits we were so wired on peanuts, dried fruit and chocolate covered raisins we were zooming passed everyone else. Maybe not such a good idea right at the start of the walk, but hey, it was tasty...!

Anyway, back to the mission in hand - it was all going so well until we were about halfway up - then either we broke through the clouds, or the clouds came down to break us...

.. and it all went a little bit sideways from there :

You could barely see 15 metres, and sadly this walk is all about the views of things that are more than 15 metres away. Aparently there was an active volcano crater, several brightly coloured volcanic lakes, and all sorts of Lord of the Rings-style scenes of barren landscapes out there somewhere.

Right at the top we crossed the freezing level and started to a few scattered snowy/icey bits, and that also transformed the cloudy mist from an annoyance into a face-freezing blizzard. We were not best pleased at this stage =)

And not to be outdone...

From the top there were a few pretty steep bits to slide down, followed by three hours of gradual downhill slog. We were pretty happy to break back through the freezing level, then through the cloud level, and by the end it was pretty warm and dry again. But after 21 cold and wet kilometres both of us were pretty fed up with it - and I was totally knackered - so we were very glad to ge the bus home for a nice hot shower. Looking back on this we are really glad we did it, but its such a shame about the weather as it could have been an amazing trip. (Advice to anyone heading this way - leave a spare day in your plans so that if needs be you can wait to do the crossing... the bus service we had were really cool as if by the time they'd driven you all the way to the start and the weather was still rubbish, they'd take you back and give you tickets for the next day instead.)

The next morning was pretty horrific, both of us (ok well me especially) were crying out in pain with every step. The rest of the people in our hostel were also in varying states of brokenness which made us feel a bit better. But with limited time to cram everything in, it was straight back on the road (thank god for automatic cars!) heading for Waitomo - home of the famous black water rafting.

The drive was fairly straight forwards, and the hostels were all bluring into one by this point... but thats not really why you make the trip over to Waitomo. The whole area is littered with caves, and the main underground river runs for miles. They've made various attractions - caving, walking, more glow worm spotting for the more mild-mannered travellers - but the main event for most people is the black water (underground) rafting. This is a tamer version of white water rafting, but you do it underground in narrow tunnels sat on car inner tubes... sounds great eh? :)

We booked in a combined day of crazy activities - first you abseil down 20 metres or so into the cave, then you go walking up the underground river and do some caving. Then you stop in a huge underground cavern and do some glowworm spotting, followed by the rafting. Once you've gone far enough down river, you grab the tubes and hike back upstream before climbing the wall of the cave you abseiled down to get out again. A pretty average day by New Zealand standards then.

There were some nice easy walks around the place to do to try and stretch our achy legs, and caves were everywhere :

Our crazy mission started at 10am the next day, and started pretty mundanely with a bus ride followed by changing into the gear. We ended up with all sorts of crazy stuff - a full wetsuit as the water is freezing and we'd be getting pretty wet, a crazy pair of cloth trousers (to stop the eels from biting?!), a climbing harness with caving rack for the abseil and climb, a hard hat with a torch so we could see in the cave, and finally a pair of lovely white wellies. There were 6 people in the group, plus the guide, and we all looked like total loons walking around in all the gear.

So first up was the abseil, and thanks to our rock climbing antics in Thailand this was pretty straight forwards. (Unforunately we don't have any photos of us in action as it was the classic rip off of having to pay for a CD of mostly blurred photos the guide had taken afterwards. But that wont stop us from ripping off photos from google though eh...) This is a picture of the cave entrance from the bottom, the abseil happens on the far left, and the climb back up by the ropes on the right.

We hadn't quite realised how cold it was going to be down there, and the water level was pretty high thanks to the recent rain. Our wellies were pretty much continually full as you had to walk in the river for quite a lot of the way. After everyone made it down we grabbed our inner tubes and headed up stream. There were some little bits of caving to do - both Alex and I aren't partically fond of small enclosed spaces, especially after the Cu Chi Tunnels trip in Vietnam - so we chickened out of the harder bits. The trek up stream to see the glowworm cave was well worth it; after lying down on a sandy bank we all turned out our lights. Straight away you could see glow worms all over the roof, but after five minutes of acclimatisation you could see millions of the buggers - absolutely amazing.

But all of that was a bit of a sideshow, as finally we'd trekked far enough up stream to hit the inner tubes. With our lights off we cruised down stream, and then sped up through some really fast bits too. This was really increadible fun - and just a tiny bit scary at the same time - we were so far underground, with all that rock around and the fast flowing river, it was all pretty exciting stuff.

The trek back upstream was a killer however - lugging the tubes back through the faster bits was a real mission. We were all quite relieved to make it back to the starting cave, but then we had to face the 20 metre climb to get out! The wall was very simple compared to the stuff we'd done in Ko Phi Phi, but its still pretty hard work climbing on wet rock in wellington boots. Everyone made it up, and for the second time that week we were knackered and desparately in need of a hot shower.

The relentless pace of drive-sightsee-drive was starting to take its toll by this stage, but we only had one more destination on the north island before we reached Auckland - possibly the worlds smelliest city, Rotorua.

Built around an area of huge geothermal activity, the entire place stinks of eggy sulphur joy, all day and all night. You can't escape the smell, it follows you everywhere and tries to overwhelm you when you least expect it. You wake up in the middle of the night thinking something has gone seriously wrong with your digestive system, but then you remember where you were and go back to sleep against.

Ok enough about the smell... against all odds Rotorua is a major tourist destination, with lots of thermal spa style pampering options, and some quite famous geysers and mud pools to take a look at. After our knackering few days, first stop was clearly going to be the spa :

Now I'll be honest and admit that sitting in a boiling hot pool of stinking water isn't one of my top ten ways to unwind, but Alex really enjoyed it. The views across the (stinking, sulphurous) lake were pretty good though.

The next day we were up early to visit the impressively titled "Wai-O-Tapu Geothermal Wonderland". It was a bit of strange one as the place was open all day, but everyone going there rushes in at 10:30 on the dot, as this is when they 'induce' their main attraction, the Lady Knox geyser.

Its all very impressive but with quite a bit of smoke and mirrors - the chap pops by and drops 300 grams of soap powder into the top of it to make it go. Otherwise it erupts on its own every couple of days, but by the sound of things they've been rudely awaking it every day now for the last eighty years or so.

After a few minute of watching it go, the assembled masses pile back to the main park to walk around the remarkable assortment of craters, cauldrons and other crazy geothermal sites.

Having been a little baffled by Rotorua's appeal so far, we were really taken aback by amazing sights in Wai-O-Tapu. Its completely unique in terms of things we've seen so far on the trip, the colours (yeah, smells too) and bizarre formations caused by the geothermal activity have to been seen to be believed. They have built a really nice walking path through the different parts, and the whole experience was really great.

It took a few hours to walk around the full site, which left us with a few hours to kill in the afternoon, so we headed up in another gondala (the twin to the one in Queenstown it turns out) to take in the views over the town and the lake.

Being identical in every way to the one in Queenstown, there was also a luge track, so we couldn't resist hurtling down the side of the hill a few times... great fun and great views at the same time, all great fun.

That was it for Rotorua, and pretty much it for New Zealand. The next day we did the final leg of the drive, dropping the car off in Auckland and settling in for a quiet 24-hour flying visit. We took in most of the city but didn't really get up to much, I think we'd been put off doing anything by everyone saying it was a bit rubbish! To be honest we were totally shattered by this point and enjoyed a bit of a rest for a day.

So another country down, and only two more to go - we headed off to Auckland airport the next day a little reluctant to leave New Zealand, but also quite content that we'd packed in so many amazing days as we travelled across the islands. It was a great balance of scenery, chilled out people, great drives and lots of adventure - we can't recommend it enough.

So next stop America... our flight took us from Auckland to Los Angeles direct, and managed to land before it took off, thanks to the wonderful magic of crossing the international date line. It was the start of a strange few days that's for sure, but that story will have to wait for our next update =)

New Zealand - south island

2009-11-26T21:00:00.000-08:00

So eight countries down, three more to go, and next up is New Zealand. We had a pretty painless flight from Sydney into Christchurch - and managed to get into town and checked in to the hostel without any of the drama we had in Melbourne. So we definitely got off on the right foot in New Zealand, and so far its just getting better and better. Most of the gripes we had in Oz are much less prevalent in NZ, and the scenery is simply world class.

Our plan was to follow in several of our friend's footsteps and rent a campervan; however after a bit of research into costs and a chat with the reception staff in our hostel we were persuaded to rent a car instead. It turns out you have to pay to stay in campsites anyway as its illegal to 'freedom camp' so if you're happy to be a bit less hardcore and like your home comforts such as a full length bed, your best option is probably a car and sleeping in a hostel.

After a couple of days in Christchurch milling around and enjoying our last bit of time in a city for a while, we took off in the budget mobile (a snazzy '98 Nissan Pulsar automatic) to Oamaru, the next town of interest down the south coast. We were put onto a scenic route by the chap who rented us our car and we were soon driving through the most stunning landscapes we'd seen on the trip so far - needless to say what should have been a short drive ended up taking a fair while longer with all the picture stops:

We'd decided to be a bit cocky and leave booking our accommodation until we arrived like the good old days in Asia, however this quickly backfired as it turned out Oamaru's only annual event was occuring that weekend - some big Victorian fete, typical! After a bit of searching we luckily managed to find a lovely little hostel a little way out of town but right by the coast and with a really homley feel with a proper fire place and everything.

After settling in, our first mission was to go a see the penguins that inhabit the coast surrounding the town. Our guidebook gave us the info to buy tickets to watch them from a grand stand set up near the town, but the owner of our hostel put us onto a free viewing point a little further out in the sticks. Naturally, being stingy backpackers we took his advice and set off for the free spot, glad we'd managed to save a few bucks. We made the journey about 15 minutes further up the coast to a lighthouse where a penguin fanatic couple had set up a viewing platform and a penguin hospital. Straight away we saw seals and sealions bathing in the sun and it was pretty amazing to see all these creatures in their natural habitat completely unaware of our presence a few hundred meters away. As we were there for the penguins we decided to test our patience waiting for them to arrive...a good hour or so later one lone yellow eyed penguin decided to waddle to shore.

It wasn't exactly the hordes we'd been told to expect but hey, at least one had shown up so we could justify heading back for some dinner and a beer!

The next day we thought we may as well go and see the event happening in town, as it seemed to be a pretty big deal with all the accomadation in town completely booked. Turns out the Kiwis get really into it with locals and tourists alike in crazy Victorian fancy dress strolling around watching events like penny farthing racing etc in the historic section of the town, it was all a bit surreal:

After a stroll around and a cake and tea at one of the 'Victorian' tea shops we set off to our next destination - the Moeraki boulders, a natural phenomenon of rows of spherical rocks that had mysteriously appeared on the sand.

Although quite strange, the boulders didnt provide much entertainment so we were soon back on our roadtrip heading further south to Dunedin.

After another three hour drive through the blissful NZ countryside we arrived in the second biggest town in the South Island, Dunedin. It turned out that they had a Cadbury chocolate factory in town, so naturally this was the first thing we signed up for that afternoon. NZ is the first country we've come to that has proper chocolate, ie not fake Cadburys that they have in Australia with so many chemicals to stop it melting in the heat that it no longer tastes like chocolate, so we took full advantage and gorged ourselves silly on all the free samples :)

After that, we felt we ought to do something a little more cultural so we went and had a look at some of the old buildings like the train station thats supposed to be the second most photographed thing in the Southern Hemisphere (or so we were told at Cadbury world but we've never seen it before....who cares they were giving us chocolate.) It did seem like a bit of a bold claim though - a train station second only to the Sydney opera house.

By this point we were beginning to realise that most places in NZ are quite small and you really dont need longer than one or two days to see all the attractions, it really is all about the scenery so once again we headed off, this time west to Queenstown.

Yet again, the drive didnt dissapoint and before we knew it we were in Queenstown - NZ is definitely the first place where we've complained that the journeys have been too short! After checking into our hostel we headed straight for the cable car to get a good view of this amazing town:

We couldn't resist a go on the luge they had to take you part way down the mountain which was good fun. Not quite as good as the one we went on at the Great Wall as you still had to walk 99% of the way back down (a track that turned out to be a right old leg killer) but a start at least.

There were so many adventurous activities organised around Queenstown - its famous for its bungee jumps (its where they "invented" it), but you can pretty much do anything crazy there. The budget wasn't quite ready for us to go mad, so we sorted through everything and decided that jetboating would be the trip of choice. We headed off the next day, choosing a tour that took us along their famous Skipper Canyon - a really crazy dirt track used in the gold rush that is so risky to drive the rental companies wont insure the tourists to drive it =) On the way they stopped off for some more magnificent view points :

The tour we signed up for took us out to the Skipper's Canyon section of the Shotover river. We didn't really know what to expect from the boats, but it didn't take much hanging around on the river bank before we got a taste of what we'd let ourselves in for :

The jet boats were amazing fun - they work a bit like jetskis by sucking up water underneath the boat then shooting it out of the back, making them crazy fast and really manoeuvrable. Their trademark trick is a 360 degree Hamilton spin (named after the first jet boat, nothing to do with Grand Prix), something the driver pulled out quite a few times to give us a bit of a soaking and a good laugh.

It was another place with a Lord of the Rings claim to fame (we were beginning to spot a pattern emerging...) - the chap claimed they filmed the section where Arwen raises the river to block the dark riders there, and then proceeded to blast around there at high speed a couple of times. It could well have been the place, it looked similar to the picture, but to be honest most of the turns in the river looked the same so who knows!

That was it for our whistle stop trip to Queenstown, we loved it and its definitely somewhere we'd like to go back to with a bit more cash in the pockets. Because of the way the roads were laid out in the south, it turned out we'd need to come back through Queenstown on the way north, so we'd see the place again in a couple of days time anyway. Next stop was the Fiordland national park, which is the largest in the country.

We thought the scenary on the way up to Queenstown was amazing, but the trip to Milford Sound blew everything else away... it is by far the most dramatic drive either of us have ever done.

So many amazing photos to choose from, it was a small wonder we stayed on the road there was so much to look at.

It was quite a long drive all the way from Queenstown, and Milford Sound is a tiny little place at the end of the park, so we booked a little cabin (/shed) at a campsite in Te Anau so we didn't have to drive all the way back to QT that day. After dropping off our stuff there we headed into the park and hit a few easy trails recommended in the guide book. Now I'm not really much of a walker - definitely not compared to Alex "If theres a mountain here I'm gonna climb it" Bentley - but the views from these tracks were so beautiful it was definitely worth it... see I'm actually happy after going on a walk!

The view just around the corner from there was a contender for best picture of the trip so far :

And that was just some lake we stopped at on the way to the main event. After another hours worth of driving we made it to the end of the road at Milford Sound. The guide book had prepared us for the slight disappointment of there not really being anything there - the journey was more amazing than the destination, but yet again the scenery was well worth the effort.

Even though we'd been driving all day, we still had lovely sunshine the whole way back to Te Anau as it doesn't get dark until around 9pm here - its just perfect when the sun is out!

Thats about enough of the pictures of the scenery for a moment, because when we arrived back in Queenstown the rains came down and it wasn't quite so pretty. We consoled ourselves with an amazing gourmet pizza in one of the restaurants in town (probably better than Fire and Stone is was that tasty.)

The next day we were due to head north up to glacier land so had an early night in preparation for a 7 hour mission of a drive.

Its been at least one paragraph without a picture of a view, so not to worry here is another one. The sun was out for the drive and the great views were back.

You could stop every 5 minutes pretty much, and just pull over and take in the views if you wanted. It would take you a flipping long time to get anywhere though, so we had to get our heads down and stop taking photos for the rest of the journey...

The driving was starting to get a little much as we hit the winding roads up towards the Fox glacier. This was the first stop for a walk before heading onwards into Franz Joseph where we were staying that night. There was a bigger glacier in Franz Joseph so we wont post any of Fox; it was very cloudy so both glaciers look pretty much the same. There wasn't much to do in the town of Franz Joseph, but the hostel pointed us towards a nighttime walk where we could go glow-worm spotting. Any excuse to get the head torch out I reckon is worth it, so off we went into the darkness.

It was a bit of a let down to be honest, we saw quite a few glowing specks but you'd be hard pressed to call them worms. The walk in the dark was fun, we kept bumping into other people walking down the track in total darkness.

The next day we headed out to the main attraction of the town, the glacier. In hindsight we should have paid the big bucks to go on the guided tour, as they only let the pro guides take you onto the glacier itself. We opted for the zero cost walking around option, but we got pretty close to the front of the ice flow :

They have very scary signs telling you not to walk up and touch it, so thats about as close as we dared to go! When we are millionaires this is another place to come back to - they fancy trips involve flying on a helicopter, landing on the glacier and climbing into the ice caves... sounds amazing!

Thats about if for this update - its been a few days in the making and by now we've made it to Wellington on the north island. We've got another 10 days of adventures here, before he head of to the USA, so fingers crossed we'll have some blogging time later this week. Bye for now...

Cairns to Sydney, the end of Oz

2009-11-26T19:46:00.000-08:00

So we reached the end of our canned updates last time around - in case it wasn't obvious from the random cuts, we wrote the last 4 blogs in one big sitting and posted them in little chunks. The hope was that it would buy us enough time to get back on the blogging horse and start doing weekly updates again... but no luck, we've fallen behind again =)

We are now about 9 days into the New Zealand part of our trip, so we need to catch up on Cairns and Sydney first.

Cairns turned out to be a bit of a weird one - our hostel was like a haven of tranquillity compared to the rest of the town. There were tons of bars in town centre, and this seemed to create a slightly booze fuelled atmosphere about the place (apparently the Ozzies mostly make the trip up there for 'Hen and Bucks' parties.) But we weren't really there for the night-life (thankfully!) so quickly signed up for a day trip out to the Great Barrier Reef.

We'd been warned to expect a great conveyor belt of ships delivering people out to the reef, and in this respect we weren't disappointed. There were a huge range of ships to choose from, but thankfully the very helpful chap at the hostel reception put us onto a bargain where we would get our first dive free, and then have the option for an extra 2 dives at a pretty good rate. This seemed ideal, so we signed up the next day.

As it takes a good hour or so to get out to the reef, the trip started pretty early so we found ourselves filling out the usual "if you die, its not our fault, and its definitely not PADI's fault" forms around breakfast time. The boat we were on was huge, about as big as the car ferries we'd been on in Thailand, and it was totally packed out with newbie divers going out for the first time to do Discover Scuba Diving trips. We started the day stuck with the riff-raff until we realised we'd been booked in as beginners too, so after a brief panic we found ourselves in the lounge for qualified divers.

Being stuck at the top of the boat didn't do much for Alex's sea sickness - it was a really nasty journey in the end as people were throwing up all around us. And it was a total scramble to get all the gear on, with the guides really hurrying everyone along despite their sickness. This kind of set the tone for the dive to be honest, it all felt a bit rushed. The guy massively overweighted us (really annoying having done all that bouyancy stuff in the advanced course) and wouldn't really listen when I said I didn't want that much - the production line approach meant everyone had to do what they were told pretty much. The dive itself was ok - nowhere near as pretty as our previous destinations and a bit annoying as the masks were a bit rubbish and we both spent half our time mask clearing. But we were both glad that we have now seen the Great Barrier Reef - but we did feel a little for the beginners, they were being marched into the water in groups, swimming around with linked arms and generally causing a menace to us swimming underneath them =) Not a great intro to scuba compared to other destinations in the world thats for sure.

After that we politely declined the additional dives, and hit the snorkelling for free instead.

By far the highlight of the day was getting to swim with a giant maori wrasse that lived at the second dive site. This was a massive really inquisitive fish that usually visits the snorkellers and divers each day, and fortunately he appeared half way through our snorkel. Now being cash-strapped travellers we couldn't afford to rent/buy the underwater cameras, so I've had to pinch a pick from the internet again :p

(We can't work out if thats a chap or a lady, but either way its not one of us with a crazy new hair cut!)

The fish was really fun to dive down to, as the people on the boat had explained that if you rub its nose it gets a bit of a head rush and lols around happily in the water. So we couldn't help but swim down and give it a good old rub, hours of fun =)

That was about it for Cairns, we chilled out for the remaining time (we went to see The Time Traveller's Wife and got ourselves into a right miserable state for a night! Loved it though, did reasonable justice to the book) and before we knew it it was time to jump back on the plane to Sydney.

The flight was a really strange experience after spending so long on the greyhound, it seemed quite bizarre to be back in the place we'd left all those long journeys ago. We'd booked into a well rated hostel (The Jolly Swagman) in the Kings Cross area of Sydney. For those that don't know, "The Cross" is Sydney's red light district, so we were a little apprehensive... but the hostel web site reviews were all really good so we thought it couldn't be that bad! It turned out to be a good choice - no worse than staying in Leicester Square or Soho in London), and after a good nights sleep we hit the tourist trail hard.

We ended up walking for miles, as Sydney is an amazing city to wander around. Its small enough that you can check out most of the sights in a day. Our route took us down the hill from Kings Cross to the Botanical Gardens, around Farm Cove to the back of the Opera House. The photo above is the view of the harbour bridge from the Opera House... and from there we went up through the Rocks to the bridge to get the reverse picture of the Opera House from the bridge...

It was quite the knackering day out, I think we walked for about 5 hours before collapsing in the park. The route back to Kings Cross became really familiar - its pretty much up hill all the way after going downhill out of the city. But it did mean we got to pass Sydney's luxury car area every day, and couldn't resist...

One of the things we'd been looking forwards to the most was seeing some of our friends who live in Sydney. The company we both worked for in London has had an office in Sydney for years, so there have been quite a lot of people making the hop to the other office for a bit. So we found ourselves hitting the ferry over to Manly on Saturday night to meet up with Shelley, one of Alex's friends from CMC, and her boyfriend Jimmy. Now it had been a while since our last 'proper' trip out with someone we knew (in Thailand with Bekka) so we had a really brilliant night out swapping stories and enjoying a really really tasty pizza. A few fancy bars later and sadly it was time to get the ferry back to the city after a really great night out.

The next day we were a little worse for wear (me especially, as per usual) so opted for a relaxing day out at the beach. Little did we know that Bondi Beach is probably not the best place to go for a quiet relax at this time of year...

Talk about manic! We wandered around the town for a bit, but it was too crazy for us in our fragile state so after Alex had her fix of the Sunday market we headed back into the town to try and find something quieter!

The next day we'd lined up another night out with a still current CMC-er (dying breed that they are!) and top footballer, Paul Brown. We arranged to meet in uber touristy Darling Harbour which gave us a chance to check out Sydney's Aquarium.

It was pretty good all in all, it definitely got better at the end with the massive tanks with sharks and all sorts swimming around. I think we have become zoo/aviary/aquarium snobs by now, each different exhibit gets compared to the sum of the amazing places we'd seen so far in the trip. The bar has to be pretty high to impress these days :p

We had another great night out with Paul, he lived pretty locally and took us to a gem of a sushi place were we ate at least a couple of the fish we'd seen earlier in the day, mmmmm tasty =)

Our last day in Sydney was pretty relaxed (not too much of a hangover thankfully, we definitely felt bad for Paul who was in work the next morning nice and early!) We had a lovely picnic in the park before heading back into town to complete our hatrick of meetups with another of Alex's ex-CMC buddies Phil who has only recently made the hop over to Sydney. We went out for drinks in 'the rocks' another of the fairly touristy parts but with some pretty nice chilled out bars.

And that was that for Australia. Definitely an action packed month, sadly marred with lots of organisational blunders and an epic budget fail. But despite this, we had a great time there and look forwards to coming back in the future - just with a bit more cash in our pockets =)

That'll do for now, next stop - New Zealand...

Oz part 3

2009-11-10T03:02:00.000-08:00

So where are we up to? Today is a bus day, travelling north from Byron Bay to Hervey Bay, with a quick stop off in Brisbane to get lunch and change buses. Oh and to try and redo all our remaining flights over the phone with British Airways in order to save our ticket from being totally cancelled...

We'd come up with a set of dates, and hoped they could get the specific flights sorted out for us over the phone. It had all been such a mad panic both of us were stressed out and worried everything was about to go hugely pear shaped.

We made it to Brisbane on time and found an internet place to skype call to BA. After explaining that I was phoning back to check on the results of the mysterious manual process, the chap proceeds to apologise profusely that its all sorted out but they wont be able to offer a refund.

I sat there dumbstruck for a second or so... assuming that he didn't understand what was going on. After double and triple confirming everything, it appeared that the re-routing fee had mysteriously vanished, our tickets wouldn't be cancelled and we didn't need to go through all the remaining flights and change anything. Result!

It was a good thing we didn't have to go through anything else as we barely made it back to the station before the bus left. Neither of us could really believe it had all worked out so well at the last minute... (To be honest we should really call BA again at some point just to double check, but neither of us want to risk breaking the illusion that its all sorted out ha!)

So somehow that massive black cloud was lifted, giving us much more time to re-plan the end of the trip based on the new budget. The rest of the journey flew by, and we arrived in Hervey Bay and were picked up by our hostel (called "The Friendly Hostel", not sure what to make of it but it was well rated on hostel bookers!) Sure enough the people that run the hostel were very friendly indeed and we settled in for the night. We were due to leave for Fraser Island in the morning, and they let us leave all our bags and stuff in the room - without making us pay extra or anything! Its a miracle, full marks to the Friendly Hostel. Suddenly everything seemed like it was back on track and we could start really enjoying ourselves again.

Fraser Island is a bit of an odd one - its a massive long island off the east coast, but the trick is its made entirely from sand. The trees and bushes have grown on a thin layer of soil, and they lock the sand down so it doesn't blow away. It all makes for some amazing terrain and a really bumpy journey around as there are no real roads.

Because of this we booked a guided 4 wheel drive bus tour over the island with one nights accommodation. There was a choice to do a self-drive tour, but after some stories we'd heard from other travellers on the Ocean Road tour we'd decided against it - and it turns out that was a brilliant choice.

The ferry ride over from Hervey Bay took a while, I think we'd become too used to the speed boats they used in Malaysia. When we arrived we were met by our intrepid bus driver/tour guide - Dave. (He looked the spitting image of the CTU boss in 24 that dies of radiation poisoning, and sounded a lot like Adrian from CMC. The combination confused me for a long time.) Our bus was a fearsome piece of work too - everything on the island has to be full on 4x4 to make it through the soft sand. We set off up the road and it was bumpy going from the get go - and within minutes the bus had to stop because a self-drive rental jeep was stuck in the sand. This set the standard for the rest of the two days - Dave explained that as they hadn't had any rain for the last three weeks the sand had got so dry even the locals were having a hard time getting around without getting bogged in sand. For the tourists with no 4x4 or sand driving experience this meant they got bogged, then didn't know what to do so then got themselves totally and utterly stuck.

Dave was pretty helpful to these poor souls, giving them a crash course in driving on the island ("Low gear, high power - drive it like you stole it. har har har." Yes, he did laugh like a pirate) but we'd heard stories about the other drivers giving the tourists a right earful and telling them to get off the island! Charming... but we were on the bus so had nothing to worry about...and we weren't at all smug.

Dave was quite happy to keep us occupied during the forty minute drive to the first stop, and it become very clear he was of the no-nonsense school of Aussie humour. His anecdotes would have offended most of the annoyingly politically correct types you get back home, but to be honest you couldn't fault him as his heart seemed to be in the right place (despite his views on killer dingos and religion.) He was one those people that seem to know a lot about just about everything, so some of his stories were fascinating, some were hilarious and some were blatantly made up, but it kept everyone entertained for the entire two day trip.

The first stop was the first of several freshwater lakes, and we took a stroll around the edge of it. The scenery is amazing, with trees just sprouting up from sand:

The walk out from the lake took us through the rain forest, which was really thick in places, with little creeks running through it. (Some aspect of the metals in the sand reacting with the dead tree bits has caused hardened deposits to form, according to Dave, which keeps the water from sinking in to the sand.) This was a really nice walk, with great walkways build over the creek to prevent damage to the fragile natural balance.

The next stop was a much bigger freshwater lake that we could swim in. This is a real treat in Oz, because you can't really swim in the sea because of the risk of jellyfish and sharks. So this was great, we both dived into the crystal clear water and had a great time. Alex had been practicing her croc impression since the Singapore zoo:

We headed back to the main resort complex to check into the hostel they have built a little bit away from the nice hotel section - they definitely make sure the unwashed backpacking types are kept away from the conventional holiday makers. The accommodation was pretty basic, we shared with another couple who didn't talk much English so we didn't get to know them much. The evenings food was provided down at the Dingo Bar, which we thought was going to be rubbish but turned out to be great - decent buffet (mmm chicken wings) and a bar. We got talking to a couple of English girls we'd be chatting to during the day, and ended up sharing stories over beers and cocktails until late (well, late-ish, we had another 7am start!)

The second day was quite different from the first, as the bus headed straight out onto the east facing beach. Through some trick of the wind this beach runs the entire length of the island, and is wet enough throughout the day that the bus can drive flat out down the beach. Its so flat that they have a small plane that takes off and lands alongside the buses, as they tear up and down at 60 mph.

The first stop was a lovely fresh water stream that we walked down to the sea. It was high tide at the time so the fight between the sea and the river had built high sand banks on each side.

The second stop was a wreck that washed up and is steadily falling to pieces, it felt like we should have been diving to see it - it looks strange as it had washed so far up the beach, but I guess that the sand must have built up around it since it ran aground year ago.

After lunch we climbed up onto the top of a headland which overhangs nicely so that you can see the sea life wandering by. With the sun above you, the white sands and you looking vertically downwards you can see pretty much everything swimming by. We managed to spot a sting ray, three sharks and a turtle. Sadly the pictures dont really do it justice, as they are just shadows under the water, so all we have is the view from the edge...

That was it for the sightseeing, and Dave headed back to the ferry port for a goodbye to the people we'd met on the tour.

We headed back to the Friendly Hostel again for another night, before hitting the Greyhound the next day for our biggest mission yet - a 17 hour epic overnighter to Townsville - to get the ferry to our next destination, Magnetic Island. After our previous rants about overnight travel we were suitably worried about loosing vital days due to sleep deprivation, but we were reasonably confident we'd get two seats each on the coach so we could sleep reasonably. Our luck was in, and the coach was pretty empty when it picked us up. We played doggo (this might be a Shaw family expression, meaning "to lie down and pretend to sleep") sprawled across two seats each time the coach stopped to pick people up, so by 10pm we had ourselves two seats each and managed a pretty good sleep.

We arrived in Townsville at lunchtime and arrived in Magnetic Island shortly after - the weather had turned nasty and the ferry crossing was a stomach churning 20 minutes. Another fairly packed out local bus took us across the island to Bungalow Bay - which turned out to be a hostel rather than an actual bay. The chap that had arranged the trip for us swore blind we'd have the option of upgrading to a private room when we arrived, but the place was jam packed and we ended up in an 8 bed dorm. This was a bit of a disaster as we'd got a bit fed up with dorms and were really looking forwards to spending a couple of nights with some peace and quite and personal space. They were a strange bunch, all brits - a slightly older very quiet couple, a strange softly spoken scouser, two typical backpacker girls and a strange chap who only seemed to come into the room to have a shower in the mornings. We had vague chats with them but didn't really hit it off, so we spent most of our time doing our own thing.

We decided to explore the island by bike, its so small it looked like you could get most of the way round in a couple of hours so we set off on our mission. We hadn't quite taken into account the huge hills though which turned our little bike ride into a bit of a tour de france. Inevitably we soon decided to cut it short and have a picnic by the next bay we came too. This was our first bit of exercise in a while before this so were pretty tired that evening and decided to treat ourselves to fish and chips on the beach before settling in with a jug of beer we got free at our hostel (they know how to snare in the backpackers.)

We have to mention the crazy wildlife we came across whilst staying in Bungalow Bay - each day we'd have a close encounter with a different kind of creature. Whilst eating dinner one night we watched a lazy fight between a small stork shaped bird and a possum, and the next night a Kookaburra perched right by where we were sitting. Every evening hundreds of large bats would swoop between the trees. But the most colourful encounter was with these parrots, which had flocked in for a feed at the campsite.

We said our goodbyes and headed back to the mainland the next day, for the final stage of the epic bus route - Townsville to Cairns. This looked like a walk in the park, only 6 hours, and it flew by. As we've spent so long on the bus in Oz, we thought we'd capture some of its Greyhound glory:

Only a few days left in Oz now which we'll be spending in Carins for the Great Barrier Reef, but more on that another time, hopefully one day we'll be up to date again!

Oz part 2

2009-11-10T03:00:00.000-08:00

After our epic two days of bus travel, we staggered off the bus in Byron Bay at 7pm on Saturday 31st, Halloween night... and also a long weekend in Oz because of the Melbourne Cup. This was bad news for us - all of the hostels were full, and the streets were full of drunken/crazy revellers. We managed to get the last two beds in a four person dorm in the biggest and potentially most expensive hostel in the town - Nomads. Beggars couldn't be choosers, but it hurt to be paying 80 oz dollars a night (46 quid each) for dorm accommodation that would have cost 4 quid a night in other parts of the world. Not a great start after our spending spree in Melbourne... and our first exposure to dorm living. After the exhausting journey and stress about budgets, it was feeling like a lot of hard work. We agreed to have a big planning session the following morning so we could try and get things back on course.

This was our first experience of dorm living and - based on the unholy menagerie we'd seen outside - were a little apprehensive about who/what we'd be sharing with. Thankfully our only room mate turned out to be a really lovely Australia girl called Erin (there was another girl there on the first night, but she seemed even more unhappy to be in a dorm and stormed out tearfully the following morning. Hope it wasn't my snoring :/) It was definitely a relief for us both to be sharing with someone nice, phew!

The next day was spent online doing the budget and scheming... but not before we took a walk along the beach to check out the surfing action.

We'd not planned anything for New Zealand and the US, and we were starting to realise we'd need to work it all out to see if we had enough cash to last us. The budget spreadsheet quickly spiralled out to epic proportions and it turned out we were well over a grand over budget already. Even if we trimmed out everything like drinking and eating out (this is supposed to be a holiday! :p) we'd still never make it. It was becoming clear we'd need to shorten the trip or we'd be running out of cash a month too soon.

So I phoned the airlines to check that we can change our flight dates - this being on the key things you get on your around the world ticket. And also as we'd travelled under our own steam between Melbourne and Sydney, we thought it would be polite to let them know we wouldn't be making it. But shockingly the lady at Quantas tells me that this will incur the dreaded "re-routing fee". (This is some bureaucratic nonsense that means we have to pay 300 US dollars for them to re-issue the ticket... which I'm sure in this day and age requires them to click a couple of mouse buttons!)

Needless to say I argued quite irately that a cancellation is clearly not a route change, we were still going exactly the same way around the world, and they'd be able to sell those seats to someone else and get paid again for them (we don't get refunds as we don't pay for the individual tickets.) But she was having none of this, and then dropped the bombshell that if we didn't a) complete the re-routing, or b) get all the way back to Melbourne at get on the flight, the rest of our tickets would be automatically cancelled. Leaving us stranded in Australia. Arrrrg!

We hadn't even thought to check this, if it wasn't for the budget rethink we'd never had called the airline and never found out about it until we tried to get our flight to New Zealand. Close call.

Anyway we had two days to complete the re-route, and come up with the new dates for the flights. This was hard enough to come up with back in London with the travel agent in front of us, let alone in the middle of Australia on the floor of a dorm with flakey wifi. We didn't want to waste the entire day, so we headed out to relax on the beach for the afternoon whilst we both contemplated what we thought we should do for the rest of the trip. The beach is really amazing, it goes on for miles and the scenery was just what we needed to relax a bit.

That night we went out to a bar on the beach and had some drinks with Erin, which was a great help to forget about the planning stress! The next day Alex went out to look around the market, which had loads of hippy clothes, cheap books and food - a lot like the stalls at a music festival back home. Byron Bay tries to cultivate that hippy, alternative therapy, artsy feeling but at the same time has given in to money a long time ago - we splashed out on breakfast to cheer ourselves up, and ended up spending a tenner on a fry up and 6 pounds on muesli with yoghurt! This was the last straw, from this point on it was supermarket food cooked in the hostel kitchens.

I was determined that we sort out every thing we could in advance, so we went on a mad frenzy of bookings. We sorted out an over night trip to Fraser Island, and a two night stop at Magnetic Island to complete our set of destinations up the east coast. Next came the bus connections for the remaining three journeys, followed by hostels at each destination... finally the plan was starting to come together, but bloody hell was it hard work. And we hadn't even sorted out the reroute, as the lady we spoke to at British Airways said they needed 24 hours to "complete a manual calculation in their back-office" in order to work out the exact charges... it was starting to get silly at this point. Manual calculation?!

It was our last night in Byron, and Erin had suggested we have a barbie in the courtyard of the hostel. I might have been moaning about how expensive it was for a dorm room, but the place was definitely well equipped. We hit the supermarket (bizarrely the local is a branch of Woolworths, who seem to be fairing a lot better than their counterpart back home) and came out with a bargain basement feast of burgers and sausages. We headed back an I did the honours on the gas BBQ:

This was my first effort on a gas barbie, and it wasn't quite the same as a proper charcoal job, but it was a great way to spend our last night and was a bargain to boot, happy days.

The following morning we were back on the dreaded Greyhound at the crack of dawn - heading north to Hervey Bay, and from there to our two day trip around Fraser Island... somehow having to find some time along the way to call British Airways and sort out the re-route, before the deadline the following morning.

Did we make it? Will we be stuck in Australia indefinitely (hardly the worst result in the world :p)? Sadly we've run out of internet time right now so we'll have to tell the rest of the tale next time...

Oz part 1

2009-11-10T02:56:00.000-08:00

Following on from leaving Singapore we boarded our overnight plane to Melbourne hoping for a good few hours kip on the 7 hour flight. The gods of air travel were not smiling on us however, and the resulting seven hour flight was sleepless for both of us. We got some ok movies in though, but the screaming babies at the back of the plane managed to keep us awake despite the ear plugs. We were starting to realise we were in a bit of state, as we wondered off the plane into Melbourne airport the time zone shift had propelled us into the morning - our bodies were saying 3am, but the clock was saying 6am. We sleep-walked through the airport and into a taxi, and made it too the hostel we'd booked only to be told by the really grumpy receptionist guy that the room wouldn't be ready until 2pm. Arggggggg. We were used to the hostels making a bit of an effort to find a spare room, or get the cleaning gang in early, but this guy wasn't budging, and was being really rude with it too. Welcome to Australia...

The guy begrudging let us store our bags, so we set off to discover Melbourne at 6am, after being awake for approaching 20 hours. It turns out Melbourne is freezing cold at this time of year, so our thin shirts and shorts didn't really stand up against the 9 degree chill. We ducked in to the only place that was open at 6am on a Sunday morning and got some fried foodstuffs for breakfast from Hungry Jacks (is this the Oz version of Burger King?)

After barely making it back to the hostel alive, Mr Cheery let us in to get changed and told us we could sit in the hostel lounge upstairs. We took this as a great opportunity to get some sleep, but within about 30 minutes another overly officious chap came in and turned on the lights and told us he could let us sleep there, only sit. We were quickly realising the Oz wasn't going to be quite as chilled out as we'd become accustomed too.

Having been turfed out of the lounge, we headed back out to kill some more time. Fortunately Melbourne is a lovely place to stroll around, especially on a sunny crisp morning (now we had our warmest clothes on - hoodies/fleeces, jeans and trainers, heaven!) We found a lovely row of street cafes and had some breakfast, possibly the best fry up in the world so far. We then took a stroll down the river and watched the crazy Australian's rowing, running, cycling and their way through early Sunday morning. We were shocked to see so many people out and about - I swear most people in London would still be nursing a hangover at that kind of time on a Sunday...not that I'd know :)

So we were up to 10am by this point, 24 hours on our feet and feeling pretty spectacularly tired. I'd done some pretty hairy all nighters at work in the past, but they didn't really prepare me for this kind of tiredness. It got to the point where we decided to go and pay to watch a film in the cinema just so we could sleep for a couple of hours... the only thing on was "An Education" - we were hoping for something a bit lighter to sleep through, but it turned out to be a pretty watchable film and neither of us managed to get any sleep. But it killed another couple of hours and by 1pm we wobbled back to the hostel to see if they'd managed to clean up the room yet. Kicking out time in Oz hostels is 10am, so you'd think they might be able to prioritise cleaning a room in the 4 hours they have between 10 and 2pm... but no. They made us wait until five past two before they finally let us into our room. We were a bit annoyed to find out our twin/double room was actually a bunk bed, but to be honest who cares when you've been awake for 27 hours and travelled thousands of miles.

We slept for a good few (beautiful) hours - ironically making ourselves completely jetlagged despite only making a timezone shift of three hours. So for the record - overnight travelling is a spectacularly bad false economy: first of all you have a half wasted day because you can't do much carrying bags on the day you leave. Then you may or may not get a jot of sleep on the bus/train/plane. Then when you arrive in the morning you are more than likely going to have to wait for check in at your next hotel. By the time you make it to bed, you are so knackered you write off the rest of that day. When you wake up at 6pm you've got no idea what time it is or even what country you are in, wander around like a zombie then go back to bed. It then takes another twenty hour hours to get your head out of zombie mode. So by all accounts you've wasted half of the first day, the whole of the second day, and pretty much all of the 3rd day... just to save one nights accommodation costs. Bonkers. So if you are like us and really need your sleep, make damned sure you are going to be able to get some sleep on the transport, or our advice is forget about the overnight trips, it doesn't save you anything.

Ok rant number two is officially over. Back to Melbourne.

After a couple of days we started to feel human again and started to really enjoy Melbourne. Its a great little city, its small enough that you can get around most places in the central area on foot, and there are trams and buses to get further afield. We soon realised our diets were taking a bit of a dive, as instead of the cheapest food being the healthy stuff (rice or noodle dishes in Asia), the junk food was now by far the cheapest thing on offer. We had so many Subway rolls for lunch that Alex has all the choices memorised, ready to go at a moments notice. Dinner was at Hungry Jack's again, but we were still feeling a bit sorry for ourselves so didn't care!

The next day we hit one of the skyscrapers in the Central Business District for the viewing platform which was great. The weather was picking up nicely and the view was amazing.

We'd done most of the sights in the city, so we signed up for one of the more popular day trips - a days sightseeing up the Great Ocean Road. This is a long strip of coastal road running west along the coast, with a load of sights to see on the way. The price of the day trips was a real eye-opener for us - at this point we'd kind of been on auto-pilot, spending whatever we needed. But at 92 oz dollars a pop each - 53 quid with the lousy pound/strong oz dollar - we were spending more than our entire days budget just on the tour. Add on the accommodation and food and we were starting to realise we were spending money like there was no tomorrow. We decided to think about the budget another day and hit the tour - it was a nasty early 7am start, and we hadn't woken up before noon for two days running thanks to our jet lag/laziness.

The tour was amazing - or more specifically the scenery was amazing. The tour was just driving us down the coast and back, with really rubbish rolls for lunch (gah 106 quid!) The highlight was the national park containing the Nine Apostles, which apparently are Australia's second most iconic image after the Sydney Opera House (what about Ayers Rock/Uluru we thought, but apparently not. We kind of felt bad for never hearing about them before - bah.) Enough waffling, here are the pics :

The whole place was amazing, but this is probably the pick of the scenery photos:

The final stop was a place called London Bridge, that turned out to be a Durdle Door-esque rock which used to be two arches next to each other. The bigger of the two arches famously collapsed, trapping two tourists on the end of the rock. Their rescue was televised across Australia, but it turned out they were having an affair and had lied to their respective partners about where they were going that day. Or so the story goes...

It makes for nice photos no matter what they tell you =)

The next day we had a planning summit; we hadn't really figured out at all what we were going to do in Oz. Our first plan was to meet Alex's friend Hayley in Melbourne, but as (bad) luck would have it she was back in England when we arrived. The only other plan was to meet up with some of our other friends in Sydney, but we had this pencilled in for the end of the month as we fly out from Sydney to New Zealand.

So we hit the guide books and came up with a list of places we like to go. Our best guide book was a sheet of A4 that Bekka had scribbled down for us in Thailand. She'd gone through all the best backpackers things to do and to be honest was ten times better than the rough guide in figuring out what to do. The bad news for us was that our useless travel agent at Trailfinders (he of the overnight-travel-is-good fame) had led us into booking a flight into Melbourne, and then another flight to Sydney, and then our flight out of Oz from Sydney. This meant we'd have to stay around Melbourne for a fortnight, then spend a week travelling out of Sydney and back. (For our geographically impared readers, Melbourne and Sydney are pretty close to each other in the south east of Australia, whereas most of the places we had on our list were on the east coast.)

It quickly became apparent that we'd need to change our plans to get up the east coast, and looked into flying from Melbourne to Cairns (in the north east) and then travelling back down the east coast to Syndey (in hindsight this is what the Trailfinders chap should have told us, but I guess we were lazy and should have planned it more ourselves.) The flights were silly money though - because we needed them short notice I guess - so that was ruled out. Then we turned to trains, which were crazy money too, leaving buses as our last hope. Unsurprisingly these were crazily expensive too, but not quite as bad as the other two.

A trip to a travel agents later and we were the proud owners of two east coast coach tickets that would take us all the way from Melbourne to Cairns, with as many stop as we wanted - all for the bargain price of 550 quid. (2797 km and about 35 hours driving time.)

We also sorted out the flight from Cairns to Sydney, which set us back 330 quid. So in the blink of an eye we'd spent the best part of a grand sorting our the mess we'd got ourselves into. Not a great start, but having come all this way we figured we'd not forgive ourselves if we didn't at least see some of the country. We were in a bit of a daze after all this (I'm not sure we spent 900 in total in the whole of India, let alone on a single day) but went back to the hostel to pack for the bus trip to Sydney the next day.

In order to cram everything in we decided to only stop over night in Sydney and head up the coast straight away the next day. This meant a 13 hour bus ride from Melbourne to Sydney, followed by a 14 hour journey from Sydney to Byron Bay the following day. Mission. In hindsight I think we tried to cram too much in to too shorter time, but we were keen to see as much of the country as possible despite the crazy coach times. To be continued...

Singapore

2009-11-10T02:49:00.000-08:00

So we've just finished up in Tioman, and its time to leave the island paradise and head to our next big city, Singapore. For once our route planning paid off, and the journey from Mersing to Singapore was a pretty short one. The main hassle was negotiating the border control; they've build a huge series of buildings on each side of the causeway that links Singapore island to the Malaysian mainland. I think we had to change buses 6 times before we finally arrived in down town Singapore. The Rough Guide pointed us to a road near the centre with a lot of hostels on it, but sadly we soon found out the government had closed most of them down. Only one was left, and were sitting pretty on their monopoly, charging big bucks for really rubbish rooms. We were too tired to get a bus to another part of town, and as we only had a couple of nights there it couldn't be that bad.

The room was still a stinking pit of despair when we woke up, and sure enough we had little bites on our arms and legs where we'd been visited in the night. Oh the joys of backpacking! We cheered ourselves up with a trip to the Singapore Zoo, which was absolutely world class - probably the best zoo either of us have even been to. Their main attraction are the cage-less enclosures, with the creatures separated from the public using moats or at the worse perspex dividers. They also did some really good shows, like this one showing off how elephants worked in lumber camps before machinery took over.

The zoo was positioned on a peninsular, so the animals didn't have anywhere to escape if they managed to get free, which meant the whole thing was really scenic and really well designed. Each different area was lavished with details, and we couldn't help take a load of silly pictures with everything we could find around the enclosures.

(Fortunately the real monsters were behind 6 inches of croc-proof glass.)

So full marks to the zoo, definitely one of the highlights of the trip so far. That night we hit the other side of Singapore - the shopping. In a fight between Singapore and Malaysia to see who could build the fanciest shopping centres, we think the Singaporeans would just about edge it, as their version of Oxford Street is quite something.

I'm not quite sure why any city needs 18 branches of Louis Vuitton on one road, but the shopping-crazy people of Singapore seem to think this is a vital necessity. It was all a bit rich for us, but it was great to walk through some of the buildings, the designs are amazing even if you do feel a bit overwhelmed by the consumerism of it all.

After all that excitement the next day we chilled out and went to the cinema and lounged around the shops. That night we hit the ultimate Singapore tourist trap - drinking a Singapore Sling at the place were they were invented.

The Raffles Hotel was suitably grand, but their bar was basically a 15 quid-a-go cocktail producing conveyor belt. Inventing a cocktail has given them a license to print money (the cocktails weren't even mixed in front of you!) but it was quite good fun as so many people were there doing exactly the same thing.

The Raffles Hotel was suitably grand, but their bar was basically a 15 quid-a-go cocktail producing conveyor belt, but it had to be done!

From there we went on a stroll around the city's waterfront, which is definitely up there with Hong Kong in terms of amazing night time strolls.

We tried to get another drink around the harbour, but couldn't find anywhere that would sell us a bottle of beer for less than 8 quid! (You can get the same beer for 50p back in Malaysia.) Not wanting to completely destroy our budget we resolved to save drinking for Australia. This was the first time we'd had to pay more than a pound for a drink so it was quite an unwelcome shock to find ourselves somewhere more expensive than London.

Another unique part of Singapore is their "inventive" laws, you can get fined for just about anything so we spent the first few days trying to avoid any of the following offences:

Failing to flush a public toilet

Consuming chewing gum

Crossing the road within 50 metres of a crossing

There are probably even wackier ones we didn't come across, but the road crossing one was a right pain because sometimes the traffic lights would take a good 5 minutes to change. Having honed our traffic dodging skills on wild roads of Vietnam, it felt quite ridiculous to wait 5 minutes for a green man on empty roads.

Singapore was only a flying visit so we didn't really get to see all that it had to offer, but to be honest it wasn't very well set up for backpacking with the lack of budget hotels and expensive drinks, attractions etc so we were both in good spirits when the taxi turned up to take us to the airport. We'd taken the "go overnight, it'll save you a nights accommodation costs" advice again for the flight, but we were beginning to smell a rat on this strategy already. The hostels all kick you out at 10am or noon at best, so you end up not doing all that much because you are stuck with your daypacks loaded for a flight (with the main backpacks sitting in the hostel, praying not to be interfered with.)

Having seen the wondrous shopping centres of central Singapore, we were ready for their airport to be a shrine to commercialism the likes of which we'd never seen before. Somewhat unbelievably the airport was a real let down - I'm not sure if we were at a bad terminal or something - the best we could muster was a 7 Eleven (to be honest this is by far our favourite shop in Asia) and we struggled to find somewhere to sit, so in the end we had to wait it out just outside the boarding gate. We boarded around 8pm, and by this point we'd been faffing around for twelve hours and were pretty tired, so we were looking forwards to watching some movies and getting some shut eye.

The rest of the story will have to wait for our next post, next stop, Australia...

End of Malaysia (at long last)

2009-11-10T02:45:00.000-08:00

I think we said something in the last post about the next one not being so long coming... turns out we were a little wrong in that prediction... but better late than never =)

So we left off just as we were leaving Kuala Lumpur - we'd done a real mean zigzag across the country and faced a really long journey diagonally back across the entire width of Malaysia to hit the east coast. The plan was to try and do some diving in the Perhentian Islands, and relax a bit after a reasonable stint of city living. The bus journey was pretty long but uneventful, Alex started the day as usual with a Nasi Lemak (coconut rice with anchovies in spicy tomato sauce, not my cup of tea in the mornings but Alex is great with the local food) and her current favourite tea in the world - Teh Tarik. Apparently this just about beats the Indian sweet tea - its even sweeter, thicker and frothier than anything else she'd tried so far. My slightly narrower tastes struggle in the mornings, especially at the small places in the bus stations, I can't face curry in the mornings so end up with cold fried chicken or something similar... not ideal but at least we aren't going to starve any time soon.

The bus dropped us off quite late in Khota Besut, which was still a little trip away from the ferry, so we stayed over and made the trip the following morning. The boat out to the islands was great fun in itself; instead of ferries they use small speedboats to make the crossing. We arrived on the smaller of the two islands and found out that it was the final week of the season and that most places were closing up that week. But despite our lack of planning it worked out quite well, because you could name whatever price you wanted in the hotels because they were pretty much deserted, apart from a smattering of other backpackers. We ended up in a lovely little cabin for a few nights for a bargain price.

The resort was really small, no more than five or six shacks and a jetty, all along the beautiful beach.

The season was coming to an end because our old friend the monsoon was heading south from China (apparently the local fishermen shut up shop a few days after they start seeing rubbish with Chinese lettering washing up.) This didn't affect us much during the day, but the evenings brought in pretty epic rainstorms. We thought we had the measure of it after the first night, so the next evening we ventured through the jungle to the slightly larger resort across the island on Long Beach (the lets-come-up-with-clever-names-for-the-beaches committee had skipped the Perhentian islands as well as Thailand it would seem.)

We had a lovely dinner on the other side of the island, and maybe enjoyed one beer too many because before we knew it the rain clouds had sprung up and proceeded to tip it down relentlessly for the rest of the night. We figured it would let up, so dodged into another bar but it still wouldn't let up. It slowly dawned on us that we faced the trip back through the jungle in the pitch black night in the middle of a tropical storm, with no umbrellas and only my iPhone for illumination. Yet another quality misadventure we'd managed to get ourselves into... this time there were no leeches thank god, but there were enough scary noises coming from the undergrowth that we practically flew back down the track.

As luck would have it the iPhone Flashlight app performed admirably under pressure, but the same couldn't be said for my flip-flops, which chose an ideal time to come to pieces. Oh how I laughed at the time... (fortunately no-one was stupid enough to be around to hear my tirade.)

After a good 30 minutes slog we made it - soaked, muddy and stumbling out from the jungle onto our home beach. We resolved not to go exploring in the evenings so much after that.

The following day we stuck to our side of the island and rented some snorkeling gear and hit the beach. The snorkling was absolutely amazing in Malaysia, quite often you'd see just as much stuff in the shallows as you would diving, so it was a great way to spend an afternoon. We had a small isolated cove inside the hotel grounds, so we went out and started kicking around to see what we could see. Before too long I noticed Alex gesticulating wildly and pointing out into the distance... with my eyesight not being what it used to be it took a while to peer through the gloom, but sure enough the shape that emerged looked a lot like a shark. We both stared a bit longer before we noticed another shape, and sure enough that turned into another shark. Fortunately for our growing sense of panic they were holding their ground about 20 metres away, and as we got a better look we could see they were only small ones and had black tips - our small amount of shark knowledge was enough to know they were black tipped reef sharks, and no threat to us. Still quite an exciting event, it was the first shark I'd ever seen in the wild.

There wasn't really enough going on to keep us on the smaller island any longer, so we grabbed a taxi boat over to the larger island, hoping for some more action. We were also hoping to find a dive shop that one of the (now ex-) CMC guys owned, and maybe do our advanced diving course there. After checking out a couple of the resorts along the coast we decided their wasn't much to do there and headed directly for the bay on the other side where the locals had pointed us towards the dive shop. Unfortunately when we got there the dive shop and accommodation were fully booked up, and with the bad weather moving on we decided not to stick around. We did a single night in another deserted decent hotel, before heading back to the mainland.

So after the abortive diving trip we had about 10 days left in Malaysia before we had to head south across the border to Singapore to catch our flight to Oz. On the boat back from the islands we got chatting to a local couple who turned out to be heading in the same direction as us, and offered us a lift. This was the first time any sort of hitching-style transport had offered itself up, so we didn't really know what to make of it. The couple seemed nice enough and it was going to save us a lot of hassle with taxis and buses down to the next town, so we accepted their offer. We were a bit worried we were going to be squashed into a tiny car with our bags, but when the guy turned up in this beast we were pleasantly surprised.

It turned out to be a good call, we had a good journey peppered with conversation in broken English down the coast. We made it to the regional bus station at Terengganu and made it just in time to jump on the bus down the coast. We must have mentioned it before, but the buses in Malaysia are brilliant - massive seats, good aircon, and still really cheap. So we settled in for another 5 hourish bus trip south towards a place called Cherating - or as the guide book would have it "the chilled out backpacker hangout of Cherating".

How a town could be so horribly over hyped in one sentence we'll never know. Cherating turned out to be a total dead end dump of a town. The usual excuses could be applied - we were right at the end of the holiday season blah blah - but if this place was ever a chilled out backpacker hangout there were was no sign of it when we arrived. We faced an accommodation choice between an assortment of run down shacks, all with damp, so we opted for the one with fewest holes in the walls and least creatures roaming free in the bathroom. Almost all of the restaurant had fundamental reasons why they couldn't feed us - ranging from "the chef can only make spaghetti" to "our kitchen closed down last March". Thankfully we managed to find a bar to grab a much needed Tiger, and ended up hitting the locals place for some food, so it wasn't all bad.

The next day we hit the one travel office (normally you can't move for travel agents in these places) and sorted out a taxi down to the next bus terminal town. We were so happy to leave the stinking hovel (the jury is still out on whether this was actually worse than the place we stayed on our first night in Malaysia...) we took a photo to celebrate.

It turned out to be a bit of a groundhog day; the car took us a fair way down the coast, we arrived at the bus station in Kuantan intending to hop on another bus to take us all the way down south towards Mersing, the port where we could catch a ferry over to the Tioman Islands - our next best hope of getting some diving in. With our luck already pretty much at rock bottom we found all the buses heading south were full, so we had no option but to stay over in this industrial bus town until the next morning. Against all odds Alex managed to find a lovely little hotel for us to stay in, wonderfully clean and with wifi and everything - this was heaven after the previous night so we had a chilled out day relaxing and watching TV. We went out for dinner and had a massive sushi feast at a nearby shopping centre, which succeeded in cheering us all the way back up again.

We'd booked the bus for 9am the next day, so we arrived at Mersing around lunchtime, and by 3pm we'd made the boat hop over to Tioman - heading for a placed called Salang Bay. This turned out to be much more what we were looking for in terms of island retreats - there was enough stuff going on to keep you occupied for more than a couple of nights. We hit the Tiger beers that night in a beach restaurant happy we'd found somewhere we could call home for the next few days. As luck would have it the restaurant did a mean fish BBQ and amazingly tasty grilled chicken, so we feasted as the sun set and retired to our lovely little bungalow really quite happy indeed.

Here is a photo from outside when we woke up the next day - it was a great spot, a few minutes walk from the town and beach, but set back in a small grassy clearing.

We set off from there to canvas the local dive shops and see what we could get up to during our stay. Before we'd gone 100 metres from our bungalow we were confronted by an enormous lizard strolling along the path in front of us. It took one look at us and headed back to the stagnant pool/river that ran behind the town. We quickly realised there were two or three of the massive beasts in the water.

(After doing some research at Singapore Zoo, it turns out these are Malayan water monitor lizards. They became known as "The Beasts", and no walk through the town would be complete without at least one sighting... fortunately none after dark however. Strangely, at night the entire place was taken over by kittens, go figure.)

There were four dive shops in the small town (it takes about about 5 minutes to walk from one end of the small strip of buildings along the coast) and unfortunately the best looking place was fully booked, so we had to go with a place called Fisherman Divers. We decided to try and get our Padi Advanced qualifications sorted so we would have a greater choice of fun dives in future - the regular qualification limits you to a maximum depth of 18m. Some dive sites, quite often wrecks or good spots far out from the cost, go down to 30m so the advanced course means we can join trips to these sites as well.

The instructor was a local chap with a tough to follow accent, but he seemed to know his stuff so we stumped up the 300 quid and signed on to the two day course. The Padi course is either good or annoying (depending on your point of view) because you have to complete "Knowledge Reviews" as homework before the course starts. The advanced course is broken down into five separate dives, 2 compulsory and 3 optional ones - you basically pick the 3 options that will advance you into a variety of diving specialities (to use the hopelessly patronising Padi schpiel) whilst the 2 compulsory cover the important bits.

We were due to do Peak Performance Buoyancy first (option 1, but they made us choose this one :p), then Navigation (compulsory 1), followed by a Night Dive (option 2) in the evening. The second day would be the Deep Dive (compulsory 2) and end with a nice relaxing Wreck Dive (option 3). That meant quite a bit of homework, so we had to lay off the beers that night and hit the books.

Thankfully the questions are all trivial things a 10 year old could do, but the annoying thing is you have to use the exact Padi-Approved TM phrases from the book. Heaven forbid you should use the wrong term, or else the instructor will have explain the gospel according to Padi for another 20 minutes before you actually get to dive. Very annoying...

The dives were really straight forwards; all the entries were done from the jetty on the first day so we just had put all the gear on and lug ourselves 5 minutes past all the chuckling tourists in the town. The first dive was intended to improve all aspects of our buoyancy control and positioning in the water, so it was all about getting the perfect weighting and weight distribution, breathing patterns and that kind of stuff.

All good stuff to start with, apart from the bit where the instructor grabs Alex's wrist underwater and drags her off randomly. It turns out that we wanted her to see the local Titan Trigger fish because she'd been making jokes about them earlier on. Every dive resort in Asia seems to have a local trigger fish or two, and they are infamous creatures for chasing divers during certain seasons. And they aren't small things either (about as big as a decent sized dog) and if they bite you they can take a far chunk of flesh with them.

So it was with some mild panic the rest of us set off after the instructor with Alex in tow. Fortunately the fish was too busy nest building to come after us, although as the instructor (who has a long pointy mental stick - officially a tank-banger for getting attention underwater, but it doubles as a pretty effective fish poking device) swam away it did make towards Alex and me as we backed off carefully. Hours of fun =)

The other dives that day were good - I made a totally embarrassing mess of the navigation dive after being really cocky about using the compass on land. The hardest thing you have to do is swim in a square, about 20 seconds along then turn either left or right, repeated until you arrive back within one metre of the instructor who is waiting where you started from. I took me 6 attempts to get this even vaguely right, seriously I blame the compass sticking but even once I'd borrowed Alex's it turns out I couldn't measure the distance well enough (you are supposed to count your fin kicks - in the test you swim along a 30 metre long rope and count your kicks; I counted 52 on the way and 31 on the way back... not good, hopelessly inconsistent.) Fortunately I fluked the last trip around and the instructor let me have it - which was good because everyone's air was starting to get a bit low by this point.

The night dive was a real adventure, its a completely different world underwater when you can only see things directly in the beam of the torches. If you let your imagination go crazy there are all sorts of nasty creatures lurking just 10cm away from the edges of the beam, but its kind of the whole point of diving to keep your head clear and not panic so its quite good fun just to let your mind wander for a second or so The only exercise you have to do in the darkness is a simple navigation test, you swim out for 20 seconds by yourself, turn around and head back. The rest of the group hide their torches whilst you do it so you really do have to make sure you get the reciprocal heading right or its easy to miss the group. Fortunately everyone made it back ok, and it was pretty exciting going out into the pitch darkness by yourself for a bit.

Having spent so long running through the extra safety precautions you have to take on a night dive it was almost inevitable that the instructors high powered light would fail during the dive. But no worries, he carries the required backup light... which failed as well. So he had to fall back onto one of our backup torches - as with everything on these courses you get given such useless equipment when you are learning compared to what you'd actually use for real - and these torches were so small it was funny. So we picked our way back to the jetty with just these tiny little torches which was quite funny.

This was the first time we'd ever done three dives in one day - two is much more common - so by the time we cleaned up our kit and hung it for the next day we were shattered. But oh joy! we still had some homework to do for the deep and wreck dives the next day. Having read through the deep dive (which really is the main thing you are doing the course for really...) we were both quite excited and keen to see how we'd get on so deep underwater.

There isn't really any trick to diving deep, but you have to take all the safety issues doubly seriously because if anything goes wrong that far down you can be looking at a pretty serious case of decompression sickness. All the problems stem from small bubbles of nitrogen forming inside your blood when you get so deep, due to the pressure of the water above you. These bubbles can cause all sorts of scary things (like the bends) if you don't let them escape by really ascending really slowly. One of the other things the extra nitrogen causes is called "Nitrogen Narcosis", which can cause all sorts of wacky symptoms under water. The book describes these along the lines of "general feelings of unreasonable safety underwater", like you are suddenly free from all of the general stresses of scuba diving (like making sure you breathe through the regulator, basic stuff like that.)

So the purpose of the deep dive is to go over the safety stuff again, and to give you a controlled taste of being "narc-ed up". The instructor got us to do a simple mental test on the surface, and then again at 30 metres. The idea is that you appreciate that your decision making and thought processes are significantly hampered down there, so you take a lot longer to do even simple things. By this point we were equal measures excited and nervous about the dive, but we all packed up our stuff and headed out to the dive boat to find out.

I say dive boat, but it was more like a rowing boat by the time we'd squeezed the 4 people on our course and another 10 people onto the tiny thing. Getting our gear on was a game of poking other people in the ribs and banging tanks, but this is downside to doing the course on the cheap. Once everyone had untangled themselves it was time for buddy checks ("Bangkok Woman Really Are Fellas" - buoyancy, weights, releases, air, final checks :p) and then into the water.

The dive was quite pleasant through the usual myriad of fish, rocks and corals, and before we knew it the instructor was signalling to come in close and it turned out we'd already hit the magical 30 metre depth. When we talked about it afterwards, both Alex and I hadn't really noticed anything weird going, and sure enough we did the test in roughly the same time we did it on the surface. This was good, because it meant we weren't going to go bonkers at depths, but we both kind of wanted to feel the effects so we knew what to expect. I guess it must be quite a subtle thing, and we'll learn to recognise the signs as we become more experienced divers. Anyway, not going crazy was enough to earn us the congratulatory handshake from the instructor to indicated we passed that bit of the course.

The afternoon dive was a real walk in the park after all this - the wreck diving speciality dive was a bit of a joke compared to the other more technical dives. We basically had to swim around a lovely shipwreck for 20 minutes noting down points of interest and potential hazards. You drum into you the hazards of actually going inside the wreck, so you just stick around the outside and peer in. The dive went down to 24 metres, so this was already a good return on doing the advanced course as we would have only been able to swim over it before. This was a great end to the course, and everyone came back happy that we'd completely everything and had a great time to boot.

We were genuinely shattered after two days of activity - despite being pretty easy going at the time, Scuba diving has an uncanny way of tiring you out completely after you've finished. After some more tasty beer and BBQ fish/chicken, we hit the sack quite pleased we'd achieved something productive for the first time in a while.

Time was starting to get short before we had to leave for Singapore, so we managed one more day on the beach before we booked our ferry back to the mainland and the connecting bus to Singapore. That night I managed to sneak out and watch a Man United game with the locals - they are massively into English Premier League football out there, and Man U and Liverpool (boooo, hiss) have a huge following. I watched it at our favourite fish/chicken restaurant, as I'd noticed their TV was decked out with United flags and banners - sure enough it was a great choice as the owner was a big United fan. I can't remember exactly which game it was (Blackburn maybe?) but each time we scored they played Glory Glory Man United really loudly on their music system - quality =)

That'll do for now, next stop Singapore...

Malaysia

2009-10-15T05:47:00.001-07:00

It was kind of inevitable that we'd get behind on the blogs before too long. Lack of internet and mainly laziness means we are a good couple of weeks late on our news. Time for a bit of catch up...

We've been in Malaysia now for two weeks, and it's been a total change compared to Thailand. Mainly a change in how often we've moved around; our average in Thailand was about seven nights per stop - so far we've stayed in seven different towns around Malaysia, averaging 2 nights per stop. I guess we felt we'd not seen enough of Thailand, but to be honest it's more like we've not found anywhere we've wanted to stay for that long.

Our first stop after the eight hour journey from Krabi (the mainland port near Koh Phi Phi) was a place called Georgetown, in the north east. The guidebook promised a strong British influence and quite a bit to see, so we figured it would be a good start after the beach-out that was Thailand. It turns out that the budget accommodation in Georgetown is mostly aimed at people doing visa-runs from Thailand. Both Malaysia and Thailand offer short term (one or two month) visas when you enter the country, so people who want to stay longer have to pop over the border for a night and then get a new passport stamp on the way back the next day. These people do not seem to care much about clean sheets or having creatures in their rooms, and consequently the accommodation is definitely what you'd called basic...

Oh what a glorious night we spent at "Blue Diamond"... the rough guide even gave it a good write up but oh how wrong that turned out to be. We found ticks on the sheets, the light switches were actually outside the room, the window just had bars (no glass) etc the list goes on... and to top it off they had a band playing non-stop James Blunt covers right outside until 2am. Just what you need after a long journey. We can look back and laugh now, but neither of us were laughing much when we checked out angrily the following day!

Things changed for the better the next day, when we realised we could get a really nice room in a mid-range hotel for what we'd been paying for guesthouses in Thailand. Clean sheets and windows with glass in them and everything. We thanked our lucky stars we wouldn't have to spend another night in the hovel, and went exploring the town.

It was a nice place to take a stroll around, with a lovely mix of old British, Chinese, and Indian style. One road has a mosque, a Hindu temple and a big old church pretty much one after another. This mix set the stall out for what we'd see in the rest of Malaysia, there is huge Chinese and Indian influence in the places and definitely the cuisine.

Mmmm, tasy. That night we ate in the food market, but neither of us tried the fish heads. It was a great place as you could grab bits of loads of different types of food to create whatever kind of meal you fancied, for hardly any money as well. We left there happy and rather well fed.

We'd kind of run out of things to do already so the next day we signed up for a local tour, which was useless. In the evening we decided to cheer ourselves up and treat ourselves to some tasty steak and red wine at a nice looking restaurant we'd seen the day before. From the outside we had no idea what a wacky place it would turn out to be inside...

It felt like the inside of an ants nest inside, with giant pod-like seats, and then it all went a bit Alice in Wonderland with loads of doors stuck to the ceiling. Very odd, but pretty cool none the less. The steak wasn't anything to write home about, but it was lovely to have a "proper" meal with some wine and desert and everything. So two nights running we left feeling nicely full up.

From Georgetown we set off into the Cameron highlands in the centre of the country. We stopped in a town called Tanah Rata, and had a very enjoyable few days exploring the mountains (to be honest, they were more hills that mountains) and enjoying the low temperatures - for the first time in the trip I actually needed to dig my jeans and warm jumper out. Alex was obviously freezing cold and within minutes had bought a cosy hoodie to wear.

We spent our first full day there doing a bit of walking, and it was quite adventurous but nothing on the scale of India or the craziness of Vietnam. The only real danger was getting lost, but we made it back in one piece easily enough.

There weren't all that many places to eat or drink in the evening, and it was exclusively Indian and Chinese food on offer again. Alex quickly found one unique dish, the tasty-sounding-but-not-so-good-in-reality "Steamboat".

It's not a million miles away from those hot rock efforts you get in the Alps - basically a plate of raw stuff with a boiling hot pan of soup inside of the heated slabs of rock. The potential for hideous food poisoning was equally good however, with raw beef, chicken, prawns, jellyfish and mussels all piled up on top of each other waiting to go. The waiter cheerfully popped by and suggested we simply needed to pop them in for a couple of minutes and bobs your uncle. To be honest I'd have preferred a good twenty minutes to be on the safe side, but hunger took over and we did as we were told. Fortunately we escaped without any unwelcome visitors, but neither of us would try a Steamboat again, that's for certain.

We signed up for the main tour of the area the next day, which started with another jungle trek to find their famous enormous smelly flowers :

They grow out of the roots of the bamboo trees (I think) and can grow to be over a metre across. They only last for five days before they turn rotten and shrivel up, so the guides have to keep searching for new ones every few days. This one was halfway through its brief life and had lost a bit of its smellyness, but it was pretty impressive none the less.

The next stop was a nearby village where the indigenous hill people have set up a tourist trap. There was some shpiel about them not living in the jungles any more since the government built the main road through the hills, and now the kids can go to the local school etc. It was ok though as we got to have a go with their hunting blow pipes (which they may or may not have actually used depending on how much you believe)

It turns out Alex is some sort of ninja blow-pipe specialist. There were another English couple on the trip, and compared to the all powerful Bentley-san we couldn't hit a barn door with a banjo. The target was a leaf attached to a white polystyrene board, and we had to shoot from about ten metres away (the pros can hit it from 25 metres apparently.) Alex's first shot hit the leaf, and her second hit it dead centre. The locals were suitably impressed, but the rest of us could barely hit the board let alone the leaf. Good fun though - they tried to sell us miniature blow pipes to take home but didn't seem to understand it'd be tough to get the pointy needle darts back through customs...

The last stop on the tour was a Butterfly Farm, which seems to be a catch-all term for anywhere with bugs in cages so far in Malaysia.

Alex kept up her ninja skills by wearing poisonous insects as shoulder ornaments.

I wouldn't want to bump into that on a dark night that's for sure =)

That was it for the highlands, and the next day we grabbed another Super VIP bus - three huge seats per isle rather than four, and really fierce air con - to the capital city, Kuala Lumpur.

This was quite the change from the chilly highland hill town, and the heat hit us like a wave as soon as we clambered down from the bus. It took us a while to get our bearings, but we soon headed towards the China town area to find the budget accommodation. We used the standard 'James sits with the bags, Alex goes to find somewhere' approach but for once Alex came back with sad face and said all the cheap places were a bit nasty. There was a super nice place just over the road so we thought we'd splash out for once.

The place was called the 5 Elements and it was sooooo nice compared to the places we'd been staying. Super luxury, and we got a pretty good deal too - can't imagine staying somewhere like that for 30 quid a night back home that's for sure. It was so nice we barely wanted to leave the room, but we managed to drag ourselves out for some sightseeing.

The top thing to do on our new favourite website - TripAdvisor.com - was the KL Bird Park. This is a huge walk in aviary where you get to commune with the birds face to face. We were a little sceptical that this could be the number one thing to do, but it turned out to be really quite good. They had all sorts of birds there, from Ostriges and Emus (obviously these had to be kept in enclosures) to little baby chicks and ducklings you could pick up. Oh and don't forget the cheesy Ace Ventura-style photo area...

That night we went on a big old walk around the city, trying to find the famous Petronus twin-towers that dominate the city's skyline. We struck a zig-zag path across the city and got to the base of the towers after about an hours trek.

(For some reason we were inspired into godzilla poses, it must have the size of the towers, or the wine we'd had along the way, who knows which.)

We decided to try and visit the next morning, so we arrived back there early in the morning and queued up to get tickets to go up to the viewing bridge halfway up. We left it a bit late to get there so we ended up with tickets to go up at noon. That meant we had a few hours to kill, and as the first 4 floors of the towers housed a fancy shopping centre the decision was easy to make. Despite the presence of a Top Shop, Accessorise and M&S, Alex demonstrated remarkable self restraint and only ended up buying a book. The budget breathed a sigh of relief as noon arrived and we headed up the tower.

The view (which you can't see very well in the photo, sorry) was pretty good, but nothing too spectacular compared to the places we'd been in Shanghai. The bridge was only halfway up, and the towers in Shanghai are slightly taller as well. But still pretty impressive, and worth the trip.

That was pretty much it for the major sites, so we decided to hit the road again. It had been at least a week since we'd seen a beach, so we headed north again towards the Perhentian Islands. But we'll save that for the next update, which hopefully wont be took long in coming...

At the halfway point

2009-10-07T01:48:00.000-07:00

Time is flying by, and we've reached the half way point - four months in, and 5 countries later, we've made it to Malaysia. This is the last stop on the South East Asia leg before wit hit Australia on the 24th of October.

First things first though, we've still got some pictures from the end of our in stay in Thailand to show. We ended up staying in Koh Phi Phi for 11 nights, which I'm pretty sure is our longest stay yet. This was partly because it was really nice but mainly because Alex came down with a nasty cold half way through. We decided not to do any diving in the end, the budget was already too far gone to shell out the big bucks so we did the other two activities available instead; rock-climbing and boat trips.

I'd never tried rock climbing before, and was a little uncertain that I'd be able to drag my not inconsiderable bulk up a cliff face. Alex had done a couple of hours at an indoor climbing place in London, and convinced me it was easy, so we signed up. One small hitch in the plan - Bekka had put us onto a really good bar the night before and we'd stayed there maybe a little bit too long to claim our balance was 100% the following day.

The cliff we were climbing on was right at the end of the beach, and looked like quite a nice one to start my climbing career on. We'd got lucky on the day and it was just Alex and I with the instructor lady, so we didn't have to hang around for a big group each time. It did mean I was called into action straight away to help the lady get up the cliff to set the top rope which we'd be attached to. She gave us a quick bit of instruction but soon enough it was our turn - I went first and got about half way up the climb until my legs gave up and I came back down.

Alex proceeded to shoot up the cliff and made it all the way to the top of the rope :

The second climb was a bit more successful, and we both made it to the top. From there it went downhill as our arms and legs proceeded to pack up completely, and by the fourth climb we both came off about 3 metres from the ground - pretty rubbish all in all =)

It was well worth the pain as the views from 20 metres up the cliff were great, and it was great to try climbing for the first time. The experience of clinging on for dear life to tiny cracks in the rock, way up in the air, as your muscles slowly but surely give way is an interesting one that's for sure, but I guess that's what the ropes are for!

It took a few days before our wrists and legs recovered, and also this is where Alex's cold reared up its nasty head. We had a few days of totally doing nothing, mostly relaxing and sleeping - and I got completely hooked on CSI:Miami and NCIS as the only TV channel that we had in English was Fox Crime. Could have been worse I guess - it was kind of like watching DVD box sets back home when you get ill. Thankfully Alex recovered before my addiction got totally out of hand, so we booked up our next day out - a boat trip to visit Koh Phi Phi Lay. This is the smaller of the two Phi Phi islands, and its main claim to fame is that the film version of The Beach was filmed there.

First stop on the trip was a beach on the main island just down from where we'd done the rock climbing. It was called Monkey Beach, and it was pretty obvious why :

The tour guides warned everyone to be a little careful with the monkeys as they aren't always friendly - we'd come across this first hand during the climbing day as an enterprising primate nicked off with our bananas whilst we were distracted. The ones on this beach were even worse, they'd go for any people that wandered too far from the surf. I'm sure their intentions were just food based, but they caused a few screams of panic when some of the bigger ones started on the tourists!

The boat set sail across the short (but really quite choppy) stretch to the smaller island, and it took us past a small colony of locals that live inside a cave and make a living collecting the birds nests from the cliffs.

These nests sell for a small fortune to make birds nest soup all through Asia, and it looked like a pretty risky game shinning up bamboo poles. Each to their own I guess. Next stop was a small bay for some kayaking and snorkelling, which was great. Then to the big event, the trip to the 'beach' itself. The boat would usually sail right into the bay and drop people off there, but the sea was so choppy they couldn't make it through the rocks safely. Instead they dropped us off at the 'hole'...

This turned out to be a whole world of fun; the aim is to dive from the boat and make your way to the ropes. Then you hold on for dear life and make your way over the rocks to a tunnel underneath that bit with the stairs, all the while trying not to get washed away by the reasonably sized waves. Then you time it right to dodge through the cave onto the other side before the next wave. This was definitely not for the faint of heart, but it was a real adventure so we loved it. On the other side of the hole it was really calm and quiet, and after a few minutes walk we made it out on the beach.

The island is pretty much unspoiled as you can't build or live permanently on the island (apart from the nest people in the cave, they get special treatment) and the beach was amazing. The only downside was that it had got quite late in the day, and the weather that was causing the big waves also brought windy spells that whipped up the fine sand on the beach. After 10 minutes of gazing around in awe, most people switched to shivering in the tree line trying to avoid the sandstorms!

The trip out back through the hole cave was even more fun, and we made it back to the boat for some well earned dinner and the sunset views of the island on the way back to town.

That was the last act for Thailand, the next day we hit the boat back to the mainland, followed by the eight hour mini-bus ride down to Georgetown in north west Malaysia. This was a fairly painless journey, apart from the knackered suspension and bumpy roads, we were bouncing up and down relentlessly the whole way through Thailand. The Malaysian's road building prowess was a welcome relief and the end of the journey flew by. We'll save the Malaysia news for the next post, so that just leaves our final thoughts on country number four...

Thailand definitely won the prize for the most amazing island backdrops, but we didn't ever try hard enough to see the real side of the country. So its really our own fault we didn't get a good feeling for the non-touristy side of things... saying that it was pretty amazing to be able to chill out for the entire month on the beach =)

More from Thailand

2009-09-21T05:38:00.000-07:00

Its Mojito Madness night at our local bar so we thought we'd settle in with a big old jug and do another blog update. Its a hard life, this travelling...

Last time around we were sat in a bar in Koh Tao with Alex's friend Bekka, and I was nursing a foot infection. Since then we haven't done all that much moving around; we really liked Koh Tao and stayed there for ten days in total, then briefly visited hell on Earth - sorry, Koh Samui - before making the longish trip west to the Andaman Coast, ending up in Koh Phi Phi.

The main reason for staying in Koh Tao was getting some diving in - we tried to talk Bekka into doing a Discover Scuba dive but after a days snorkelling she seemed content to stay on the surface. So whilst it was still the three of us we crammed in quite a bit of fun and games, starting with a day out on quad bikes.

This was really good fun, you could explore pretty much the entire island - its only 20 km square, and there is really only one main road - in a day. The road quickly gives way to dirt tracks as soon as you leave the main town, which provided ample opportunities for off-road adventuring. Our mission was to visit all of the small bays around the island, and we made it to most of them. This was our favourite :

As we had two quads we rotated drivers throughout the day. Bekka won the Evel Knievel award for stunt driving hands down - her approach to getting up the steep bumpy bits consisted of screaming and then going double hard on the throttle. Extremely effective, but it also had Alex screaming for dear life as she clung on the back.

After having a brief panic due to running out of petrol, we managed to get back to the main road and hit the local crazy golf. It turned out to be a pretty decent 18, with some suitably crazy bits :

Despite an impressive hole-in-one from Bekka, James came away with the victory (after obviously taking it far too seriously, and shouting "spirit of the hole" at anyone who dared to take shortcuts.)

The next day was our last day with Bekka, and she'd requested one last day on the beach to maximise her tanning time. That night we hit the town and started off with a 3 litre beer tower at Choppers before heading to Lotus bar, the main club on the island.

We said our goodbyes the next day and faced the reality of it being just us two again.

Next up was diving, we booked in with the cheapest diving school we could find and crossed our fingers (the budget has taken a bit of a hit in Thailand :-S) Luckily the only complaint was the lack of a decent lunch on board - the dives were still amazing and no one got left behind - bonus!

I think that day we visited Japanese Gardens (loads of different coral types) and White (or maybe Green) Rock. The second dive site had a smallish wreck we swam through, and a pretty fierce current, so it was quite challenging but good fun. Its an amazingly knackering past-time, and because you normally start so early in the morning it pretty much writes off the rest of the day. Afternoon naps become epic 5 hour sleeps, and you get this weird floating sensation when you close your eyes... all good fun though =)

We'd developed a bit of an evening routine by this point - cocktails at sunset on the west facing beach. The bars all have lounging around cushions on their decks, making it the ultimate in relaxation.

Obviously after a few cocktails it would be wrong not to try some tree climbing, and fortunately there were a few palm trees dotted along the beach that didn't pose too much of a challenge :)

We wanted to do another dive - to a site called Chumphon Pinnacle - which everyone said was the best site around Koh Tao. But the weather conspired against us for a few days, so we stuck around and filled in the time with more beach lounging and another day of exploring on the quads.

Giles - this one is for you. Inspired by your comment about the half-finished road and cliffs from our drive around Samui that time, Alex and I had to go even further off-road to try and find something to beat it. This "road" lead up to the reservoir at the highest point on the island... I wouldn't have fancied it in a car to be honest, the quads just about fit on the bit of track that wasn't totally churned up.

We also visited the cove we both liked from the last trip, and Alex grabbed a snorkel and mask and went exploring. (I'm not sure you can see her that clearly in this photo, but she made it out to a rocky outcrop in the bay.)

The next day we got lucky with the weather and the cheap and cheerful dive shop were going out to Chumphon, so we signed up and headed out. It was well worth the wait, as this was definitely my best dive yet. The site is centered around a huge underwater pinnacle, which is far enough out in the ocean that it attracts all sorts of creatures to stop and have a break there. Sadly we didn't get to see anything amazingly exciting (Alex was hoping for a sight of the rare whale sharks that sometimes stop off), but we swam with school of large angelfish, and thousands of other assorted swimming things.

After one last day of lounging around, we decided to move on. It was a toss up between heading West then towards the other coast, or taking a few days to visit Koh Samui properly. We were a bit worried about the weather on the other coast - it is their rainy season now - and hadn't heard anything from Bekka to say it was sunny, so we booked a boat over to Samui. Within about 10 minutes we got the message from Bekka saying it was amazingly sunny, and Koh Phi Phi was one of the best places she'd been yet... typical timing!

We'd booked the ticket at short notice so we were resolved to going to Samui for a few days. We still had about 12 days left in Thailand as well, so it made sense to try and make the most of each area.

I'd been to Samui before with the CMC gang, but we pretty much spent our time there in the confines of a lovely 5-star beach resort. I can vaguely remember we went out one night (when Si's brother Dave came over to meet us?) in the town, but my hazy memories didn't prepare us for the reality of Samui's big towns four years on.

We landed in the main city, Chaweng, and quickly found a cheap room along the main road. The town is pretty much one massive long road that stretches down the coast, with plenty of fancy hotels on the beach and lots of bars, shops and food places along the main road.. and even a couple of branches of Boots too. It was all nice enough, but the beach was hawker central, to the point where you'd get harassed every five minutes without fail.

In the evening the place became a cross between a poor man's Ibiza and the most salacious parts of London's Soho. Almost all of the neon-lit bars featured gangs of Thai women being chatted up by much much older western men. Not really the sort of night we were aiming for, that's for certain.

We wrote that off as a bad choice of town, so the next day we headed down the coast to the quieter town of Lamai. We found a really nice place to stay, and then rented a moped again and went exploring. We hadn't done any uber-touristy stuff for a while, so we headed for some waterfalls and stopped off to do a quick elephant ride on the way =)

This was probably the highlight of Samui - it was just the two of us, the elephant and a chap to make sure it didn't run amok. After we'd got about 10 minutes away from the main buildings the chap jumped down and wandered off behind us leaving the elephant free to wander. Fortunately it seemed pretty well trained, and we got to sit on its neck, and see it picking up a huge palm tree trunk whilst we were clinging on for dear life. All good fun. We also visited the local branch of Tesco, which was quite the culture shock after spending so long in tiny beach shops.

That night we hit the town again hoping for better things... but no such luck. Lamai was just as nasty... the faint hearted might want to look away now (also note to family - might not want to send this bit to the grandparents :p) This is an oh-so-creative collage of some of the bar names we found on our walk around town :

It really was this bad. There were two areas in the town which just contained bar after bar - a bit like stalls at a fair - chock full of girls with older blokes lining the seats around the edges. I know you hear the stories about sex-tourism on the news back home every now and again, but it was a different ball game coming face to face with it ourselves. Maybe we being a bit prudish, but it was quite an easy decision to head off to the west coast the next day.

The journey was another bus-boat-coach-boat epic, taking about 11 hours... but as soon as we climbed off the ferry and walked down the jetty on Koh Phi Phi it was totally worth it. This place is 100% desert island paradise.

We've been here a few days now, and are really enjoying it. Its definitely overcrowded - and this is the low season as well - but its not too overwhelming as pretty much everyone here are backpackers. The main town is built on a strip of land between two big hills, and has a beach running down both sides. The bars, shops and hotels are all packed in along this strip, so everything is really close by.

The only downside is things here are really pricey! We paid 1600 baht for two dives in Koh Tao, but here they want 2500 baht. There seems to be some price fixing cartel action going on, which hardly seems like cricket. Our daily budget is only 3000 baht, so for both of us to dive it means we can't eat for a couple of days :( We still can't decide on that one... we might do some rock climbing as well, or do an overnight camping trip on the island they filmed "The Beach" on - but they are also really expensive sadly.

We've only got 8ish more days in Thailand before our 30 day visa runs out, so we are starting to think of where to head to in Malaysia. We both really hope its more like Vietnam than Thailand - the over-development of the islands and crazy prices here mean its not in the same league as Vietnam. Still, the beaches are amazing, and the views are breathtaking, so it can't be all bad... =)

End of Vietnam, start of Thailand

2009-09-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

Its update time - and this time we're writing from a totally packed bar in Ko Tao. So yep we've managed to make it from Vietnam to the fourth country on our trip - Thailand. Before we get into that too much, we've got the end of the Vietnam story to tell...

We were coming to the end of our time in Nha Trang last time, and we spent a few more days there doing more touristy stuff after the diving related fun. One of the more bizarre attractions we visited was called Vin Pearl; its a cross between Jurassic Park and Alton Towers, a theme park set on an island over the harbour from Nha Trang. Motorbike taxis have been a fairly common form of transport for us in Vietnam, so I took the chance to grab a photo on the way to the port. (They call them "Honda Om", which apparently roughly translates to "motorbike embrace", which pretty much sums it up.)

If you went all-in on that last update and read the diving blog we linked, you'll have seen the pylons for the cable car that links the two together. Its a completely weird experience, going on a cable car over water. The boat must have been too much effort or something... anyway they managed to make the whole trip over very disconcerting by playing really strange music into a poorly connected speaker inside the gondola. (For the gamers out there, think the entrance area in Bioshock - twenties music with bursts of static, all that was missing were flickering lights.) Anyway it doesn't look very sinister when you get closer, and fortunately everyone was alive when we got of the cable car - no sign of escaped dinosaurs or anything.

The concept seemed quite good - there were a few pretty good rides to go on, a waterpark, and a pretty big aquarium as well.

This was really good, they had a whole load of different fish and it gave us a chance to take pics of the sea creatures we'd seen whilst diving - they'd populated quite a few of the tanks with the local wildlife.

The waterpark was really good fun too - neither of us had been to one for so long we were like kids running around for a good hour or so to try everything out. They had a really cool slide where you sat in a two person dingy thing and got pushed down the side of a huge watery halfpipe. It was obviously tuned for the locals as with my slightly heavier bulk we almost shot off the other side. I dont think Alex has ever yelled so much, but thankfully we landed back inside the ride and it was quite a laugh after that bit =)

This one was quite a tame one in comparison, but near to the changing rooms so we could get the camera out.

We'd been in Nha Trang for quite a while by this point, so we'd tried most of the bars and it was a toss up between the Sailing Club and the place from the last blog (Louisianne Brewhouse) - I got hooked on their pilsner and Alex on their dark lager.

And that was that for Nha Trang. We were sad to leave again, it didn't have the character of Hoi An but it was a bit more lively and the diving really made it brilliant. We left south for Ho Chi Min City (formally known as Saigon) on a night bus - this was a really weird concept... picture a typical coach but double bunks running down both windows and one down the middle. Again we fell foul of the local's scale, neither of us could really lie down flat in the beds but somehow we managed to make it through the 10 hour overnight trip.

People had tried to prepare us for the shock to our system when we reached the city, it was a lot like Hanoi but a lot bigger and lot crazier.

We arrived at 6am and grabbed a taxi from the bus stop to the backpackers area, but unfortunately for us we'd fallen straight into the sleepy-tourists-straight-of-the-night-bus-wont-notice-the-meter-shooting-up scam. After a barely ten minute journey we were facing a 5 quid plus charge when we knew full well it shouldn't have cost anywhere near that. After a fun bit of early morning shouting we managed to extricate ourselves without too much of a dent in the pockets... after that we needed a sit down and went to get breakfast.

But within minutes of finding a cafe we were approached by a slightly bewildered Australian girl who had a pretty horrific tale of drunkenness and alleged taxi-based drugging and kidnap from the night before. She was so disoriented she couldn't find her way back to her hotel, so we did our best to help her out - hard considering we'd been in the city for all of about 15 minutes by this point.

Talk about a warm welcome to a new place... Saigon was going to be a challenge. Fortunately we'd only have to face it for a couple of days, as our flight to Bangkok was looming.

The differences between Hanoi and HCMC/Saigon were pretty clear straight away - Saigon seems a lot more cut-and-thrust capitalist than the capital, and still seems a lot more affected by the war. We headed for the "top attraction", the War Remnants Museum.

It started with a load of captured US weapons and whatnot, but quickly moved onto the horrific stories surrounding the American's use of illegal chemical and biological weapons. There was an entire room showing almost one hundred photos of the victims of agent orange/dioxin poisoning through the generations taken by Japanese humanitarians working to raise the ongoing issues facing the people. This was a totally shocking eye opener for us, neither of us having been around at the time and only having picked up bits and pieces from history. Some bits of text were obviously presented from a propaganda/bias point of view - the communist terminology is pretty thick at points - but you just can't argue against the pictures.

(I don't know if we've mentioned it before - travelling is making us a bit more political - I guess it can't fail to raise your awareness of issues you haven't necessarily had to face back home. This stuff really opens your eyes to the nonsense that goes on in world politics, how the US can really sit on a high-horse about anything to do with bio/chem weapons after this is just beyond crazy.)

The next day was a bit more of the same - almost like war tourism - we visited the Cu Chi tunnels just outside of the city. These are a section of the actual tunnels used by the Viet Cong during the way which have been tidied up for the tourists. There were a whole load of things to do there - it all started with a hilarious propaganda video that must have seemed like a cracking idea when they made it in what must have been the late 70s. (Seriously, its like the terracotta army place, update your videos at least once a decade!)

What made us chuckle the most - and I really don't remotely think we should actually have been laughing but no one could stop themselves - was the part of the video that was praising the so called "heroes" of the resistance. The commendations they gave out to these people were amazingly bloodthirsty - one you girl had managed to clock up "Tank Killer", "Plane Killer" and the "Killer of Americans" medals. Crazy.

The first stop after that were the trap door entrances, and everyone got a chance to try and squeeze into the opening. I didn't take any chances with my bulk... so Alex had to go for it instead =)

We had a fairly detailed introduction to all the types of vicious traps that were used - our guide chuckled merrily as he speculated one of the spinning death pit traps was "probably big enough to kill an entire platoon" - it was equal measures shocking/bizarre/eye opening.

The supposed highlight was a section of tunnel that had been expanded a little so we could actually fit.

The full length was about 200m, but we managed about 110m before blind panic set in and we had to get out. It was just about tall enough to walk at an extremely uncomfortable stoop, but it was so hot and stuffy. Then he tells us the original tunnels were only 80cm square, which we would never had fit inside.

After that took the opportunity to fire an AK47 at their firing range. They had all sorts of stuff you could shoot if you shelled out (ha) for the expensive bullets - all the way up to the massive machine guns from Rambo. The AK was the cheapest and most authentic (we could have tried an M16 but we were definitely siding with the locals at this point) so we bought 10 bullets and hopelessly missed the target with every single one of them :p The bang is incredible, way louder than anything you can imagine from a film. The best bit of this was seeing the crazy old chap who chaperoned us (who had clearly fired a fair few rounds himself in his day) grinning like crazy as Alex gave it a go - its clearly more a boy thing.

The flight to Bangkok left in the evening the following day, so we packed for the plane and headed for the airport. We'd kind of made a slight balls up on the planning and managed to overstay our visas by a day, but having checked the government website it seemed there was a one day grace period to leave the country. But try telling this to the people at the airport... from the look on the face of the check in lady it was like we'd just shot someone. There was no way we could get our boarding passes, so I had to go and talk to the immigration people. But the immigration place was after security, where I couldn't go without a boarding pass (real clever airport design eh). I finally convinced them to let me through and managed to find the chaps with the guns - after about 10 minutes of confused english and apologetic noises from me they scribbled something on our exit cards and said it would be ok to leave. It probably said something quite rude in Vietnamese, but hey it got us through the airport without having to shell out for a visa extension. Closest call yet.

So that was it for Vietnam - an amazing month bookended by hectic cities but best remembered for the amazingly relaxed time we had along the cost on the way down. Like we said before it maybe a result of the timing, but Vietnam is definitely the highlight of countries we've been to so far. Anyway, next stop Thailand...

(Arg I'm writing too much again, will try and cut to the chase a bit more!)

The first plan in Thailand was to meet up with Alex's friend Bekka in Ko Pha Ngan - one of the classic backpacker island destinations on the west coast. It was a bit of a mission to get there - the flight into Bangkok followed by a train, a bus, two boats and a couple of jeeps! But we made it, and our first hit of Thai beer rewarded us when we arrived :

We launched straight into tourist mode and rented a jeep to go sightseeing. The first place we found with a spare jeep was a reggae bar around the corner, so we ended up cruising around in style in the rasta-mobile.

Our intention was to visit some of many waterfalls on the island (its only small, takes about 30 minutes tops to get from one end to the other) but unfortunately we'd got the timing wrong and it hadn't rained for almost a year - so we saw a lot of lovely forest and some rocks, but pretty much zero water. So instead we stopped off at anywhere that looked interesting, and along the way we passed an elephant trekking place which had some say looking monkeys tied up. Its impossible not to go and have a look even though its not exactly a nice thing to do (quite a lot of these things we'd never get away with in Europe, shooting guns, petting tied up monkeys, definitely guilty pleasures), but anyway this monkey took one look at Alex and attacked.

Only kidding, it was just trying to rob her and went straight for her purse. I guess the monkey has to keep the elephants in bananas some how...

The real reason we'd made it all the way to Ko Pha Ngan was for the legendary Full Moon beach party that happens... well, every full moon. It has got something of a chequered reputation, its not unheard of for people to come a serious cropper due to bad drugs and over indulgence, but its something of a must-do if you are backpacking in Thailand. To be honest I wasn't looking forwards to watching a load of drugged up students dancing around to trance music all night... but it just shows you shouldn't listen to everything people say - we all had a brilliant night and would definitely do it again. On with the pictures =)

We'd also met up with some friends of Bekka's - Lisa and Nisa - who also knew some friends from their native germany who were heading to the party too. So we ended up with a really nice gang of people to go out with.

The setup was pretty simple - you buy booze in the form of crazy buckets: 80% vodka, 10% coke and 10% syrupy thick Thai redbull. There were stalls selling this stuff lining the beach, along with lots of hippy style stalls selling body paint and other bits and bobs.

There was also quite a lot of flaming stuff to look at - these guys were amazing :

There was also a burning skipping rope for those loons who were too far gone to know any better... fortunately there were medical centres (and sleeping-it-off areas) all the way along the beach.

It was really good fun sitting around on the beach chatting, and wandering up and down the beach checking out the sites. We found a particular booze stall that unfortunately didn't give us the discount we hoped for...

We'd booked a taxi to make our escape at 4am (the red bull in all the drinks made this a very easy stretch) so things obviously got a little sketchy towards the end of the night (you'll notice the paint on Bekka looks like it was applied by a monkey, whilst the paint on Alex is all nicely done - guess which one of them is the art student ?)

We've had a special request from Alex's Mum to show you where we were staying - the standard sort of accommodation in these parts is the beach side bungalow :

After a few more days on Pha Ngan we caught the ferry northwards to Ko Tao - this is where I learned to dive a few years back on my previous trip to Thailand. Unfortunately I managed to pick up a pretty mild foot infection so I've had to take it easy for a few days, but Alex and Bekka have been out exploring. Their first nights entertainment was textbook Thai entertainment... a Lady Boy show.

For Giles, Brownie, Si and Si - Siam Scuba is still here and looks to be going strong, but the place we stayed has been knocked down long ago. I remember it being right at the edge of town when we stayed there, but the place is soooo much bigger now, so many more bungalows and dive shops. For a long time I didn't think it was the same place we stayed, but sure enough I'm writing this from Choppers bar which I'm pretty sure we had a pint or two in during our last visit. Good memories =)

Thats about it for now, hopefully my foot will sort itself out (our hotel is opposite a medical centre, we're fine Mum :p) and we can get some more diving in. After that, who knows...

Heading south in Vietnam

2009-08-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

So its been almost three weeks since our last update, and we've turned into complete beach bums. The old days of frantic sightseeing are but a distant memory, these days the hardest thing to decide is to when to leave the beach to head to the pub each afternoon.

We have made it all the way down to Nha Trang in that time, but most of it was spent totally relaxing in our new favourite place, Hoi An. Here's a map to put it into a bit of perspective :

View Vietnam in a larger map

Hanoi is the first dot in the north, then Hoi An (its only about 20 miles south of Danang) in the middle with Nha Trang lower down. We did the trip from Danang down to Hoi An in a taxi, which was a pleasant change from the usual bus/train/plane epic to visit a new spot, definitely more civilised! We took the usual pick from the Rough Guide for accommodation, but the first choice was closed for renovations so we made do with a place just up the road. It all looked much the same but sadly the hotel didn't have wifi - which we'd got completely used to having all the time. This turned out to be a bit of a pain, having to lug everything out to a bar a few doors down for facebook and skypage, but the beer was cheap and the music was good so it wasn't too much of a hardship.

So I've already let the cat out of the bag about our new found love for Hoi An... maybe it was just the timing; we were still screaming out for some quality beach time, but we ended up staying for 10 days we liked it so much. In a nutshell its a fairly small town whose centre is a protected world heritage site, so the buildings are all really old and have a really diverse blend of local and foreign influences. Some bits look really medditerainian, others really oriental. It makes for a really lovely place to stroll around and take in the sights, and there are so many restaurant/bars you could probably eat at a different place every night for a month.

The town is about 4km from the coast, so in classic tourist style you rent pedal bikes and cycle down through the paddy fields to hit the beach. The whole area is cut through by the river, which made pretty much every direction you looked pretty amazing. We couldn't help a few surreptitious photos of the locals going about their business with us gurning in the foreground :

We spent the first night exploring the place, and taking quite a few pictures!

The second day we hit the beach, and the lovely bike ride became part of our daily routine after that. When we got back to the hotel we passed a chap handing out flyers for an all-you-can-eat/drink BBQ, which for me is like a moth to a flame. It was a bit of trek to find the place, but the ribs were the tastiest either of us had ever tasted.

(Unfortunately we were a bit too tipsy to find out the secret recipe :p)

The bar was across the bridge from the main town, so we took a stroll around and took some pictures of the market, which was still pretty busy at night.

The next few days we really got into the relaxing routine of getting some breakfast, renting some bikes and cycling to the beach, lying around and then heading back as the sun started to drop. The cycle home was a good excuse for a cheeky beer at one of the restaurants on the riverside :

With our new found cycling freedom we went exploring around the islands in the river, fortunately we didn't need to cram ourselves onto the tiny ferry that connected the islands, it would have been quite a fight against the legions of ubiquitous mopeds.

In the evenings the town came alive, and we joined the throngs of tourists pottering around and taking in the sites and having leisurely dinners along the riverside.

So all in all it was pretty idyllic, and we fell for it pretty hard after the carnage in Hanoi. But sods law never fails to catch up with you in the end, and sure enough I picked up a nasty man flu the next day. This meant I was out of action for two days, which gave Alex some quality shopping time; Hoi An is famous for its tailoring, every other building is a clothes shop, so there was plenty to check out. She managed to land one tailored dress, one top, another dress and a bracelet for less than a tenner, so she was in her element =)

When I finally made it from my death bed, we got back into the beach life again.

One funny thing around the town were the hoards of local school children who would be bussed in to harass the tourists - erm I mean practice their language skills. They hunted in packs, but fortunately for me they'd always go for the lanky blonde girl first :p

The next day we decided to explore a little further afield and rented a scooter again. (If you remember our last ill-fated attempt in Goa, we made it about 2 miles before a massive storm trapped us in a bus shelter for hours..) My riding skills had improved little since we left the UK, but we managed to negotiate the local roads easily enough. The only real downside was the only helmet big enough to fit my massive head was pink... seriously, why not just make the big ones all black!?

After so many days of lommering on the beach we thought we should probably get back on the sightseeing horse. The main day trip out of Hoi An was to a place called My Son, a series of ruined temples build by the ancient Champa people who lived in the area in ye olde days.

This was nice enough, but the blazing hot sun meant we made it around in a fairly rapid fashion. The clever trick these chaps had was building these massive buildings without using mortar, so it was pretty amazing they had survived since 14 AD and made it though the war in one piece.

After another few days at the beach we embarked on another mission, this time to the Bach Ma national park. It was pretty eventful, and we've already posted some stuff on facebook already. Alex was really keen on the trip based on the guide book, but I had my doubts as the first line was something like "Totally off the beaten track, hardcore botanists and ornithologists will love it blah blah...". We had to arrange the trip ourselves as it wasn't one of the common ones from Hoi An, but we had no trouble arranging for a car and driver to take us up there.

We arrived at the base station bit (thats a bit of a grand term, it was just a few buildings at the bottom of the hill) at around 11am, and had to arrange for another van to take us to the top of the mountain. Yep we kind of cheated this time; instead of climbing up we thought it'd be a lot more fun just to climb down ha! The van dropped us off near the top, and checked our route to arrange a rendezvous time to pick us up from the end of one of the trails 3 hours later.

The guide book had already warned us that this was one of the wetest places in the whole of Vietnam, so we were well prepared with brollies and macs. At this point we were still expecting the walks to be fairly straightforwards, and the sun was still shining, so we set off on the short walk to the summit. We ascended up into the clouds, so the view was a bit lousy, so we started down the trail. It didn't take too long before we realised we'd bitten off a little more that we'd anticipated - I was on my arse after about 10 minutes of battling the steep downhill sections. The jungle was pretty dense, and the terrain was covered in spindly little white spiders that could have easily made a career in horror movies. Alex hadn't seen fit to dig out her walking boots, so she had to battle the critters in her trusty open Birkenstocks.

We'd made it a little way down before the rains started, but when the first drips started it wasn't too long until it was a full on down pour. Macs and brollies out, and more falling around on our part. It didn't take long to adjust to the wet - I think we'd both realised by now that we were in a little bit of a pickle and started taking things a little more seriously (for the first time ever I was really glad I'd watched all those Ray Mears programmes on TV ha!)

We fought our way downwards and after over an hour of downpour the rain let up. Our progress sped up a little and we found the series of waterfalls and small lakes we'd been aiming to reach before we headed back to meet up with the van to take us down. With all the water these were pretty spectacular, and well worth the mission to get these :

The sun came out and made for some amazing scenes in the jungle clearings :

It was about this time we both started noticing painful little sensations from our ankles, and a quick check of our feet brought on the second major battle of the day - the leeches :s

Neither of us had faced a real-life blood sucker before (gags about lawyers and estate agents aside) and it was pretty disgusting at first, but after we flicked the twentieth one off we sort of got used to it. This is where I must have missed a Ray Mears episode, as it turns out the best thing to do with leeches is to leave them be. After they've had their fill they should just drop off (into my socks?!) of their own accord. We were just grabbing them and pulling them off; this is medium bad as it can mean you rip their teeth out which then get stuck in the wound, making a right old mess of things. (Even worse, if you attack them with a flame or salt, they can puke back into the wound, pretty much guaranteeing an infection!) Hindsight+google also told us that they use an anti-coagulant to keep the juices flowing nicely, which means that the cuts can bleed for hours and hours after you get shot of them. More on that later...

The track got a little bit silly at this stage, as the route kept crossing and recrossing the river. After all that water the river was so engorged that the handy stepping stones they'd build to help people across were under at least a foot of fast flowing water. Instead of risking the fall, I started wading across with the gear held in the air, and the whole thing became a proper adventure. Alex's sandals came into their own as my waterproof Merrells meant I had a very soggy afternoon after this.

We had to pick up the pace at this point as we'd gone so slowly during the rain and rivers we were in danger of missing our pickup. It turned into a forced march through small streams, lush green fields and more jungle - and it couldn't help but bring on images of Vietnam war movies as the landscape is so distinctive.

Somehow we hit the rendezvous exactly on time, and the reward for our pains was an amazing view across the plains and rivers to the east of the mountain.

As in all the best horror movies, we weren't quite out of it yet. The van took us down to the base camp, where our driver had been waiting for us all day. He got lost a couple of times heading back to Hoi An, but we made it back in time for dinner. As I was getting ready, Alex lets out a shriek and an "Oh my god, whats that on your leg?!" - yep I'd not noticed a leech had attached itself to the back of my thigh and had been chugging away merrily for some time. The leech however hadn't had predicted that I'd be sitting down the whole way home, and by the time we managed to get it off it was well and truly squashed to bits. It wasn't a sight for the squeamish though, and I really really hope that the taxi had dark coloured seats :/

We settled down in the pub later on to watch the Man Utd game on TV, but just after half time I felt a sticky patch on the back of my leg - turns out a plaster can't hold back a leech bite and my leg was soaked in blood again... I had a few pretty funny looks as I shuffled as quickly as I could back to the hostel. Hours of fun =)

(End of leech stories, honest.)

We idled away the remaining time in Hoi An as lazily as we could. We'd settled on our favourite bars and restaurants, and the locals were starting to ask how long we were planning on staying. Wandering around the streets at nice was still great; we'd buy and ice cream and take a stroll over the river each night.

We had a great meal near the Japanese Bridge on our last night; this is one of the oldest bits and is one of the major landmarks in the old town :

And that was about it - we both felt it was time to move on after a really relaxing time. So we booked tickets on the Reunification Express heading south towards Ho Chi Min City/Saigon, and we jumped off at Nha Trang.

This is much more of a classic beach resort, with a long beach front strip and tons of hotels, bars and dive shops lining the roads. We'd decided to go a bit crazy to start with and landed in a 30 USD a night hotel room with a beach view for a few nights. It was nice to live it up for a brief period, but we realised quickly that the different between a 10 dollar and 30 dollar room isn't all that much here.

When we woke up on the first day proper, we saw a strange sight from the window - a flying dinghy.

This took me straight back to the days when CMC bought out the guys who founded Information Intheneck - one of the directors bought a yacht and was seriously thinking about buying a flying dingy, we couldn't believe it at the time and we spent a good week or so laughing. Anyway, if any of the old school are reading, it put a smile on my face again =)

After we moved to a hostel just around the corner, we settled into the beach life once again. Not having to cycle 4km to the beach meant we could come and go easily, and the choice of bars and restaurants was pretty good too - including a couple right on the beach with seats that guaranteed laughs after a few cocktails too many =)

We beached it up for a few days, and then decided it was time to check out the dive shops. I'd done my basic training a few years ago in Thailand, so Alex wanted to find somewhere reputable to do her PADI Open Water qualification so we could dive together. We settled on Rainbow Diving (out of about 16 dive shops around!) as they seemed nice and had a pretty good reputation. This meant Alex had to spend two days in a classroom and then swimming pool before we could hit the dive boat and do some real diving. I booked two days of diving on the days Alex would be on the boat so we could go out together, including a refresher lesson as I couldn't really remember much of the details.

We totally forgot to take a camera onto the boat, so I'm going to be a bit cheeky here and dodge some typing - these guys did the exact same thing and they've written it up really well if you wanted to read more about the diving here !

Someone else's blog who went diving

The good news is Alex passed with flying colours, and is now a fully carded member of the scuba diving world. We will probably look to do the advanced course at some point later on the trip, as its a good way to keep progressing and be qualified to deeper dives.

We hit the bars hard that night - the dive boat left at 7am so we'd had to go easy for a few days. The local bars all have free pool tables, and I keep getting hustled by the local lads - the other night I had to buy a fake book after loosing horribly to a kid that had clearly misspent his youth...

So thats about it, an epic catch up after so long without blogging. I'm resolved to doing more frequent and smaller updates now, but we'll see if that works out! We took a couple of photos on the way to the bar we are writing this from :

This last picture is basically trying to get one up on a certain Daniel Jones, who is forever winding up the office crowd with tweets that he is working in his garden back home... I know this is not technically working, but the beach-front-restaurant-with-pool has got to come close on the internet smugness scale?

Until next time...

Asides - International fails

2009-08-07T06:46:00.000-07:00

This is a quick post before we do a real one... inspired by the genius of http://failblog.org/ and based on some of the sillier things we've come across on our travels so far.

The first one is from a completely serious article from one of China's English language papers we found in Xi'an - the funny bit is in the middle on the right.

Astronomy Fail

The next one is a fairly typical bit of dodgy Babel-fish work in China, but seriously right outside the teracotta army you'd think they could get a proper translation done...

Human cattle fail

This one maybe a teeny tiny bit racist, but it made us chuckle enough to run the risk...

Building naming fail

And this one was from the same place, its not quite the perfect name... and not really a patch on the Jim'll-Mix-It cement trucks from London, but...

Slightly bad taste company name fail

And we end with a sign on the beach in Palolem in Goa, India. Wrong for quite a number of reasons...

Public order priorities fail/Should you really have to print that on a sign? fail

Thats about it for now, surely there will be more at some point.

Vietnam

2009-08-07T06:38:00.000-07:00

Hello from Vietnam, the 3rd country on our itinerary. We left things last time in the middle of the travelling week from hell, getting through 4 cities in 5 days.

The only real highlight was the stop over night in Hong Kong, we revisited the best sushi place ever and then took a stroll around Kowloon Harbor at night. This obviously resulted in the usual cheesy night time photos, but it was amazingly nice to look at after dark.

From there the trip to Hanoi in northern Vietnam was painless, and as soon as we stepped out of the taxi in the city we had to quickly adjust back to the sort of chaos we'd got used to in India. Our hostel was in the Old Quarter, a warren of small roads and moped-based carnage. You can't move for the little buggers, and we had to learn an entirely new way of crossing the road - sort of edging forwards and praying that the bikes flowed around you like a stream.

The next biggest thing that hit us was the heat! I know I've probably moaned about this before (maybe every single post) but the heat here tops the lot. From the look of things on paper it was supposed to peak at 29 degrees in August, but since we arrived the needle has been steady around 36 degrees. Not really a patch on the 40+ from India, but the humidity is the real killer. Again it looks to be much higher than normal; over 90% each day we were in Hanoi. Needless to say there will be some picture of extremely sweaty people to follow - you have been warned.

The centre of the Old Quarter is a big old lake with a temple in it, which was nice but we were still adjusting back from the scale of things in China... it only took 30 minutes to walk around rather than 4 hours. And there were no pedalos! Robbed.

(Alex's t-shirt was from Hong Kong, they all say "Cheer you up" on them and have pretty scary smiley faces with crossed out eyes, and seem to be all the range in China and HK.)

Our first trip out was to Ha Long Bay, a beautiful area of islands on the north east coast. It was a 2 day trip, with an overnight stay on the boat at sea.

This was definitely one of the highlights of the trip so far, the place is absolutely amazing. Time to bore you into submission with lots of photos =)

There are thousands of little islands all jutting up straight out of the ocean, which made for awesome pictures pretty much anywhere you pointed the camera. (Movie/TV buffs out there might remember it from the stealth boat bits from Tomorrow Never Dies, and more recently the guys from Top Gear had to sail it on mopeds...)

There were quite a few stops on the first day, the first was at some amazing caves inside one of the rocks. They weren't particularly deep, but the large cave at the back was huge - the guide claimed the locals used to store ammo during the war.

Having already given fair warning, you should be prepared for this... even though we were in a cave, we came out a little worse for wear, and stayed this manky for about 48 hours afterwards =)

Fortunately we did stop off at another little island for a swim later, which gave us temporary respite from the heat.

This was after a short but amazing canoe trip - they basically put is in a canoe, waved in the general direction of some caves and let us loose. Some might say this is a really bad idea in an area where every single island is pretty much the same as the next one, but off we paddled.

We managed to find the caves after some frantic arm work - and it was well worth it as you could paddle underneath the rock face into the centre of one of the islands. As it was impossible to get in there via boat it was really secluded and felt like quite the adventure.

Getting back to the boat was more of an adventure though, sadly we turned left at the identical island when we should have gone straight on... and by the time we managed to find our boat (oh yeah the boats are all the same too, with helpful names that are all pretty much the same. And there are tens of the things parked up all over the place) we could barely raise our arms.

All good fun though =)

As dusk settled the boat sailed to a calm area so we could jump off into deep water and do some more swimming. I was still going crazy with the photos as it all looked soooo nice...

We both managed to jump in, Alex first with me on camera duties.

Unfortunately just as I got back up to the surface, Alex was already bolting to the ship's ladder as she'd managed to plummet into a small gang of jellyfish who weren't that impressed with her graceful entrance. Thankfully the stings weren't too bad and she was able to carry on enjoying the trip after a quick rest.

We had some well deserved beers, and obviously this meant climbing on the bits of the ship that we weren't really supposed to...

Dinner on the ship was fairly unspectacular, we had to make very strained conversation with a Parisian family for the duration, much more entente cordiale than we'd expected considering the main entertainment on the boat seemed to be karaoke. We made a quick break for the deck and enjoyed some more beers as the sun set behind the islands...

And we couldn't resist the cheesy sunset shots...

That was all in one day, so we slept pretty well that night. The bad news was they woke us up at 6:30 am for breakfast - by turning of the air-con. That was the start of a monumentally sweaty day...

The boat ride back to the harbor was pretty much the reverse of what we'd done the previous day, so we kept out of the sun and tried to stay chilled. The trip included some lunch in the harbor on the way home - we were praying for a nice cool restaurant and some tasty seafood... but instead they had something else in mind.

The second bit of heat related bad news that day was the air con in the restaurant wasn't working - a power cut they said - although everything else seemed fine. This had probably happened before, so they'd had the ingenious idea to attach a fine mist sprinkler system to the roof, and spray the whole lot around with large ceiling and wall fans.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out what will happen if you do this when the ambient temperature is over 35 and the outside humidity is already 90% plus... thats right, we ended up eating lunch in a sauna.

It was one of the text-book coach tour restaurant we've come to hate; with about 40 tables all churning out the same ropey food to the tourists. When combined with the sauna it was all a bit much and kind of took the shine of the second day of the trip to say the least (it definitely put a shine on us though... haha)

We stayed in Hanoi for a couple more nights, and by far the most fun night was my birthday. We'd hoped to make it to a beach for the occasion, but Ha Long trip meant we had to stay in town a little longer. This worked out really well as Alex had tracked down a really nice fancy French restaurant and we had a lovely meal out - I had my first steak for months and remembered what it was like to eat out somewhere fancy for once =) We rounded off the night with some seriously strong cocktails at a nearby bar, but sadly we forgot to take the camera out, so no pictures of me looking worse for wear.

This is getting epic again so its time to cut to the chase... we were still really crying out for something more relaxing than the city, so we took Phill's advice and headed south. The first place down the coast with a decent beach seemed to be Danang, so we jumped on an internal flight the following day. We headed out to the beach today, and it was really nice... (although a wedding reception in one of the beach front bars did its level best to destroy the mood with some god-awful karaoke!)

We lounged for a few hours under the umbrellas (yep, I got burned, again) and then wandered over to another touristy area called the Marble mountains. These are pretty much what they say on the tin, with hundreds of shops carving pretty amazing statues and the like. The better bit was the mountain itself; it was a lovely place to explore the various pagodas, caves and mountaintop views.

It was a pretty tough and sweaty climb in some places, but the views were amazing from the top as most of the surrounding land is at sea level.

Theres not much else to see in Danang, so tomorrow we are heading a short way down the coast to Hoi An. This promises to be even more picturesque and relaxing, so fingers crossed for some more restful days ahead.

In transit

2009-07-29T04:53:00.000-07:00

We've left it a while again since our last update, mainly because we've not really been doing all that much since then! The sightseeing apathy has struck hard, but we've managed to keep ourselves occupied with some more good stuff...

Last time around we were thinking of going swimming in the Olympic pool, but what a goose chase that turned out to be. If anyone is thinking of coming to China, dont buy the Rough Guide, it was written in about 1850 and has led us down more blind alleys than we care to remember... its suggestion of heading down there for a swim seemed so straight forwards on paper but the reality turned out to be far from simple.

We'd picked a stinker of a day for it; the humidity was so high that we were soaked long before we even found the building the pool was in. The visibility was shocking, so we could only just see the birds nest stadium looming out of the gloom which was a shame. We negotiated an army of Chinese tourists, ticket touts and all sorts of unhelpful officials before arriving around the back of the "Water Cube" building. Finally someone helpful turned up, but then this is seriously what we'd had to do to go swimming :

Pay 5 quid to enter the building
Take a swimming test (another 2 quid) - swimming 50 metres without drowning
Present a passport photo (another few pounds as strangely we'd not planned for this in advance...) in order to get our swimming license
Pay another 5 quid for a lovely swimming hat

As we are now officially pikey travellers, the thought of paying half our daily budget to go for a swim was a bit mad, so we turned tail and sweated our way back home. Seriously, its this stuff you buy the guide book to avoid!

Next on our list of things to see in Beijing was the 798 Art District. This is a large area of converted factories that the government have quite successfully given over to modern art in its many and quite bizarre forms. Its a bit like having the Tate Modern spread out around Shoreditch, and it works really well.

I have to admit modern art is more Alex's cup of tea than mine, but after a little bit of moaning I did really enjoy it. Its all a bit hit or miss, but the hits were really quite memorable. (Although I have to pull up the Rough Guide here again; out of all the amazing sites this country has to offer, they reckon this little art district is second only to Mount Everest in terms of things to see. Bonkers.)

That night we headed back to our hostel (the second of the three we ended up staying in around Beijing) - we'd been trying to find somewhere nice nearby to eat but that night we really hit the jackpot.

I'm not sure how well that picture will scale, but its a page from the menu. We were quite used to guessing picture menus, or getting our heads around baffling Chinglish translations, but this one took things to a whole new level of "I'm not really that hungry anymore..." In case you can't see it, here are some of the highlights on offer :

Sliced Tender Beef (from spine)
Ox Penis
Thinly Sliced Fatty Beef
Cow's Spinal Cord
Pig Brains
Fresh Duck Intestines
Fresh Goose Intestines
Sliced Pig's Kidney
Fresh Cow's Third Stomach
Cow's Stomach
Pig's Trachea
Chicken Gizzards
Duck Blood Tofu

I think in the couple of days were tried to find somewhere nice to eat, I had 4 sweet and sour porks (although you could barely call it pork) in the space of 2 days. And one of them was for breakfast. I felt bad not trying a bit more of the local food, after all we'd done really well in India - but it was just too much of a minefield. All in all Chinese food has been shocking, a real let down. After doing a bit of research online Alex found quite a few websites dedicated to tracking down places that actually served reasonably priced edible food... it was quite a short list.

With an epic fail on the eating front under our belts, we turned to an activity that rarely leaves us stumped... drinking. Beijing Timeout was a really good read, and tipped us of to the oh-so-touristy Houhai area. Set around three big man made lakes, this area was lined with cheesy lounge bars, complete with shouty touts and hordes of local tourists.

Most of the bars had some sort of live music, but there were so many bars that quite a few were completely empty, leaving plenty of sorry looking Chinese two pieces singing ballads to themselves. We found a crazy reggae place with a Spanish gypsy/flamenco band and settled into the mojitos until the budget forced us back home again!

The walk back was about 40 minutes but we'd harded a little more to it by then, we were probably walking 5 miles a day at this point. It was nice though, we came across lots of nice areas, like this one called Ghost Street quite close to our hostel :

The road is lined with (mostly nasty) restaurants, but they've all got lanterns outside which make the place look very picturesque at night.

After a break from the serious sightseeing, we were back on it the next day, and headed to the Summer Palace in the north-western outskirts of the city. This place was another amazing day out, in a similar vein to the forbidden city but spread out all around a huge lake. The walk around took pretty much all day, but the sights were worth it, ornate bridges, temples etc and massive lily ponds all around :

Obviously with such a big lake involved we couldn't resist a bit of pedalo action. Alex has been lamenting the lack of gym opportunities on the trip so I spent a fair proportion of the time with my feet up to let her rectify this... how considerate of me =)

We just about made it around in one piece, although on the way back we did have a run in with one of these chaps :

There were about 6 of them crossing the lake and didn't really pay too much attention to the tiny pedalos around them...

Our attentions then turned back to food, and with in the spirit of "if you can't beat them, join them" we headed down to the night markets in the centre of the city. This place is famous for bringing together all of the regional snack dishes and serving them out to the tourists during the night, but I dont think we were quite ready for quite how wacky it was going to be...

We'd convinced ourselves to try something, and Alex set upon the fried scorpions as "it just had to be done." It was either that or chickens feet or bug larvae, so we grabbed a stick for £1.50 and psyched ourselves up. At this point several other tourists walked by and asked if we were mad, but we went for it anyway.

As they say on the internet, pics or it didn't happen...

They were surprisingly palatable, but didn't really taste of much. Definitely worth a try if you get the chance!

The next trip out was back to Houhai in the day, we liked the look of the lakes and so we hired a tandem bike to explore them in more detail.

It didn't take us too long to get the hang of it, but we did have a lot of locals running scared going through the narrow lanes of the hutongs surrounding the lakes. We stayed around in the evening and decided it was time to blow the budget and have a feast day... it was time to duck it up, Beijing style :

Its pretty similar to the crispy shredded duck pancakes you get back home, except the focus is on the crispy skin and the fat rather than the shredded meat. We splashed on some wine as well, and had a really nice night.

So thats about it for Beijing, and ultimately for China. Due to the sightseeing apathy we never made it to a couple of the other places we thought about visiting in China, spending maybe 10 nights in Beijing in total. We managed to make a mess of the second hostel booking and got kicked out the night before we were due to leave, but fortunately found another place just around the corner easily enough! We hit the main station in Beijing, heading for another soft sleeper bound for Shanghai.

So now we are back in Shanghai, at the same hostel we stayed in before. We have another night here tomorrow, before we have to get up at 4 am (cry) to head to the airport to catch a flight back to Hong Kong. There we have to spend another night before finally getting the plane down to Hanoi... roll on Vietnam.

Xi'an and Beijing

2009-07-21T05:43:00.000-07:00

Its been a little while since our last post so this one has got a fair bit of catching up to do. Fortunately our latest hostel has a good wireless connection in a nice bar/cafe bit so we are relaxing nicely after another big day and getting an update in.

Our last update was just before we went on the terracotta army; we'd arranged the day trip out through the hostel where we were staying in the centre of Xi'an. These trips have been a pretty good way of meeting other travelers, and our tour guide turned out to be a crazy Chinese girl called Za Za. It was just like a school trip - we had to introduce ourselves and say where we were from, and then she went round a hit us all with stereotypes of each country which was a fairly strange start to the day.

In hindsight the whole day was a bit backwards - the first stop was at a "factory" where they sold overpriced knockoffs to the tourists. One thing they did was take a load of photos of you and build a life size terracotta army model of you; they had a few in their back room waiting to be shipped and it was really weird seeing western features on the ancient Chinese soldiers bodies. It was definitely odd seeing the fakes before we saw the real thing, and also they had so many pictures there it was almost like we didn't want to look too much in fear of spoiling it later on.

From there it was a short journey back in the bus to the tourist complex outside the main site. By this stage the heat and humidity switch had been dialed right up to 11, and we had to face a 1km trek from the bus to the entrance. Needless to say everyone was a sweaty mess by the time we hit the waves of security gates needed to get into the main area. In classic backwards fashion our guide preceded to take us around everything in reverse order of impressiveness... I'm sure she thought this was a good idea at the time but after seeing some fairly unimpressive bits that hadn't been dug out yet (and a truly awful 360 degree film that looks like it was shot in the 70s) we finally made it to the main building number 1.

It was packed out with thousands of sweaty people, but we managed to jostle to the front (handy being a clear foot taller than everyone else...) and get some pictures of the main chunk of soldiers. Some people report feeling underwhelmed by the whole thing, and from our experience you can kind of see what they mean... but we loved witnessing the results of the amazingly wacky concept of burying 8,000+ pottery soldiers underground to try and take them to heaven with you. I was surprised they'd stopped really trying to dig out any more of the site - I took a fair bit of imagination to appreciate the real epic-ness of it when two-thirds of the site was just rock underneath huge aircraft hangers. Maybe they should send the worlds trainee archeologists over year as part of their training, even with China's mind blowing human resources they think it would still take hundreds of years to extract everything there.

Our tour didn't go to the other tombs nearby - as well as burying the soldiers the emperor Qin Shi Huang also built an gigantic underground city nearby, and legend has it that it had rivers of liquid mercury flowing through it. This is the reason they give for not excavating further - the mercury levels in the ground make it dangerous to work there. I reckon if Time Team got in on the action, they'd have it up in no time, but I can't see that happening soon.

The next day we stayed in central Xi'an, and took the guide books advice about exploring the city walls on two wheels.

This was a load of fun, it was about 14km around the circumference and they gave you just about enough time to pedal around it like a lunatic before the extra time fees started clocking up. The bad news was that we'd started taking liberties with the sun cream, and both got burnt to a crisp. There are some lovely photos of my gloriously red neck, and secret agent style white sunglasses marks but we wont be posting those... Alex managed to escape serious embarrassment sadly bah!

That night we went to see a show that had been pitched to us in the hostel and recommended online. It was called the Tang Dynasty Show or something similar, and it was one of the wackiest/most hilarous things we'd ever seen. There were about 10 scenes of traditional dance and music, linked together by a crazy shouting Emperor character. The standout was a crazy trumpet chap - he was playing this really small trumpet that sounded a lot like a kazoo, and he just went crazy. Halfway through it took the trumpet out of his mouth and just kept going (for those that saw the last series of Britian's Got Talent, think of that crazy Sax guy) making the strangest noises you have ever heard. Well you have to try everything once...

Later that night we revisited some of the sights we'd seen during the day and got some nice night time pictures of the centre of Xi'an:

(I was hiding from the camera for a good few days...)

That was about it for Xi'an, so we booked our train tickets (overnight soft sleeper again) to Beijing. During the change over days we checkout in the morning, leave our bags at the hostel and try and do relaxing things that wont make us too hot or sweaty - this time we thought we'd try and get a nice back massage. The rough guide tipped us off about a massage centre staffed by blind masseuses, which sounded like a good thing to try... but ooooh how wrong can you go. These guys were professional torturers, and they met our cries of pain with laughter and even more gusto. Coming from the nice "massage with oil" school of relaxing massage back in the UK, this crazy pressure point Shiatsu wasn't really what we'd bargained for:

We hit the train with a lot more pain than we started the day with, but hopefully there were other therapeutic benefits too =)

Ok onto Beijing - the train was brilliant as usual, although being woken up at 7am and stumbling off the train straight into Beijing was pretty disorienting. We found our hostel after dealing with the standard shouty taxi driver, and went straight back to sleep! That afternoon we walked to Tiananmen Square (fairly bleak concrete jungle, reminded me of Coventry) and then on to an area with a good choice of bars for a drink. We quickly learned the first lesson of Beijing: dont try and walk anywhere. This place is huge... the map scale was 4km per few centimeters, so something that looked just around the corner was in fact miles away.

The next day was boiling hot again, but we soldiered on and visited the Forbidden City, home of Chinese emperors over the years. This picture was taken just outside:

This was another amazing place, again delivering on the distinctly Chinese ability to come up with sites on a scale that we'd never seen before. There were so many buildings and corridors and courtyards we quickly got lost, but it was really good fun exploring without a map. Both of us realised we were getting a little bit jaded from the amount of sightseeing we'd done (we really really need a beach soon!) so we didn't spend much time on the exhibitions.

Another running theme on China is hit and miss meals - many of the restaurants don't have English menus, pictures or staff that speak any English at all. So quite often a picture menu is a good as it gets, and we've found its surprisingly tough to pick tasty good based on a picture! I tend to do worse out of this than Alex; she tends to stick to tasty veggie options whilst I'm valiantly determined to go for meat dishes. This particular night was the crowning glory of bad choices :

In the picture it looked like a tasty chicken with chili dish, but when it emerged it turned out to be a beast... whole chillies, mixed with chopped chillies, whole cloves of garlic and bits of chicken bones and gristle. Bonus. I'm sorry to say I had to have a cheeky KFC for desert, it was that bad.

Right I'm going on quite a bit today so time to speed up a bit. We saw a really really good acrobatics show that night, well worth seeing if you are in Beijing.

Next big thing - the Great Wall. We signed up for another hostel trip so we joined 20 or so other travelers and jumped into the (nicely air conned) bus to the section of the wall at Mutianyu.

We did about 3 hours walking along the stretch of wall, which was amazing. This is one thing that really did live up to expectations and more... the scenery was breathtaking (or was that walking up and down steep hills in the sunshine? =), sorry couldn't resist..) and yet again the scale of it all really gets your imagination going - apparently 1/5 of the entire population of China helped build the thing. It was the same wacky Emperor that was responsible for the terracotta army who had a hand in this, by this point he was so mad from the mercury he probably though it was a reasonable thing to try and build...

They had a really fun bobsleigh effort on the way down which I really couldn't resist, it was good fun even if we were shouted at AGAIN... our speed was considered TOOO FAAAAAST and we definitely weren't supposed to be taking any photos. Heaven forbid!

And the award for longest post ever goes to... time to call it a night. Tomorrow we are mostly going to be chilling out, and maybe checking out the Olympic swimming pool if our legs haven't seized up completely!

Xi'an

2009-07-15T05:51:00.000-07:00

We made it through the epic 15 hour journey from Shanghai to Xi'an, but to be honest we spent almost all of it fast asleep on the comfy soft sleeper beds. Its a very civilised way to travel, even if your cabin mates are two very snorey Chinese chaps (for once even my snoring was put to shame, these guys taught me a thing or two.) Other than that the train wasn't too different from India, the same mad panic about platforms and whether we were getting off at the right stop etc. The people were much quieter and less raucous, in fact our mates called it a night around 10pm, and were snoring for China by 10:30.

Xi'an (which we now know is pronounced She'an, after a scary run in with the lady at the Shanghai train ticket office...) has definitely picked up our spirits after the disappointment of the building site we came from. The first site that greats you from the station is the north side of the huge wall that encloses the city - apparently you can hire a bike and cycle around the wall, ace. The city inside the walls seems a little more personal than the huge roads in Shanghai, and its much easier to just stroll around taking in the sights.

We are staying in a hostel called Hang Tan, about 500m away from the Bell Tower in the centre of the town. Its another proper hostel, with peoples signatures and doodles all over the walls, and a really nice cafe-bar full of clutter and interesting people. We've signed up for the uber tourist trip to see the Terracotta army tomorrow, and to see the Tang Dynasty show on Friday night. We are both pretty excited about tomorrow, these big old epic touristy days maybe a little predictable but so far they haven't disappointed.

Now for some photos, here are some we've just uploaded from Shanghai. The first is a classic geek tourist shot; me with the worlds only commercial maglev train.

This is the central shopping street that runs for a good mile or so through the centre, there were about 7 Maccy D's, KFCs and Pizza Huts alone...

This is Alex enjoying a ten quid (slightly over budget!!) mojito at the worlds highest bar, so much for sticking to the cheap beers =)

And finally, a couple from many pictures from the boat ride, the views were absolutely brilliant.

And thats about it, will upload some Xi'an pictures, hopefully with some of the little pottery chaps, tomorrow...

China

2009-07-13T05:59:00.000-07:00

We are coming to the end of our time in Shanghai, and tomorrow we leave for Xi'an . This is just a quick post to say we are still going strong but we can't update the blog or facebook due to the Chinese censorship/firewall. Its a bit annoying beining disconnected, but the facebook block was due to the recent riots so its unlikely to be lifted any time soon.

Shanghai has been a bit of a disappointment, because the entire city is undergoing a massive makeover ready for an expo next year. The slogan is "better city, better life" but right now the whole place is one big bulding site. We made it out onto a boat trip today which managed to get us on the other side of the building sites, and we could actually see the city which was nice. The pictures of the buildings they are putting up look great, so if anyone was thinking of coming here, wait until May 1st 2010 =)

Despite that, we've had a few good trips out - last night we had cocktails in the worlds highest bar (I think they mean bar at the top of a man made structure) which was amazing - there was a thunder storm at the same time so the view over the city was really atmospheric. It was pretty pricey though, and we did have to put on our smartest clothes to make them believe we wernt the scummy travellers that we are. Great fun though, highly recommended.

Thast about it for now, I'm working on a way to get updates out more easily so hopefully we'll be able write more soon. Xi'an is teracotta army territory, which we are quite looking forwards to, so fingers crossed we can post some pics then.

Hong Kong

2009-07-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

So we made it to our second destination - Hong Kong. (Before we get started I keep typing it as Honk Konk so sorry if I miss any of the typos)

The flight from Delhi was a strange one - it was a Cathay Pacific flight and pretty much all the attendants were wearing crazy surgical face masks. This was our first run in with what now seems common - people here are really really paranoid about getting ill. It turns out that swine flu has piqued the historical issues of contagions in this area, so no one is taking any chances.

Another thing of note was that the flight attendants had to work harder than any we've ever seen before - we need to be a bit careful about generalising here - but many of the Indian people on the plane were a real bloody handful. No seatbelts, bags in the isle, standing up all the time, it was crazy. One chap insisted on getting a water just as the plane was about to take off, and it took a long time to explain that the lady couldn't serve him straight away. It was our first real encounter with people who speak two radically different languages trying to get by in English as their common ground, making us feel a bit bad as we'd learnt so little Hindi and only one word of Mandarin so far.

The flight was good, it was over night so we saved ourselves one nights hotel money. The only downer was not getting too much sleep, as we landed in HK around 7:30 am. First impressions were amazing, great airport, really good express train into town etc. Our hotel was straight out of the rough guide again (Star Guest House) and was well located in Tsimshatsui, Kowloon. This is a 15 minute walk away from the ferry and the views over to HK island proper. The room was tiny though, but amazingly clean compared to India, but much more expensive.

First things first we hit the sack to catch up on our sleep, but soon Alex realised she'd brought a little friend with her from Delhi. We blame the plane food, but either way it was another bout of food poisoning to deal with. She hit the sack for a few hours and I went for a wander.

One of the things I'd worried about before leaving was whether or not to take my laptop with me... I figured it'd do me good to disconnect and leave the tech behind. After a month of faffing with internet cafes I caved in, and HK seemed like a good place to pick up a cheap netbook to sort myself out. Within about an hour (with help from some sage advice from Martyn) I landed a Samsung NC10, happy days. (Alex says I can't write an entire paragraph about what computer I've bought, gah. Busted.)

Anyway, Alex was still feeling bad when I got in, so we had a banana and crisps dinner and watched TV and had an early night. Very rock and roll =)

The next day was much better, we'd decided our first sightseeing mission would be to visit the highest spot on the island, Victoria Peak. Alex's belly wasn't up for the boat, so we took a quick photo and headed for the metro.

We took the metro (puts London completely to shame) over to Central and headed for the railway. It was about 30 degrees in the heat and we figured after fighting through 40+ in India this would be easy going, but sure enough we were hot and manky within minutes of leaving the aircon. Still we persevered, stopping off at only a couple of the thousands of shopping centers for aircon respite along the way!

Sadly for us the cable car was closed for maintenance, so we had to get a bus instead. When we got to the top we faced yet another shopping centre - seriously these guys dont miss a single opporunity for shopping based fun - and bizarrely a Madame Tussauds. With it barely being a week since our Himalayan exploits, we launched straight up the road to the very top of the peak - and for once we were the only mad fools really trying. The view was breath taking though, its a 360 degree panorama from the many small islands all the way around to the towering skyscrapers of Hong Kong island itself.

We thought it would be fun to walk down, but it turned out to be a right old mission. At one point we came across the mid-level escalator, a great idea for shipping people into downtown from the residential bits nearer the hills. Sadly for us it only runs downwards during the morning, so we had to get all the way down the hard way. Still, we did find some lovely back streets, with shops selling all sorts of crazy dried foods and other colourful places like this one :

That night we hit the town and attempted to find some authentic char sui buns. For the uninitiated, these are a type of tasty savory dim sum, and we quite often fill our faces full of them in the Ping Pong restaurants in St Katherine's Dock and Oxford Circus back home. The guide book seemed to suggest we'd be falling over places that sold them, but to be honest we couldn't really find anywhere. (With a few days more local knowledge, it seems to be more of a breakfast thing, and sometimes only on certain days.) We did manage to find a nice dim sum place though, and tried out some really tasty bits that we hand't had before - but sadly no char sui. One for another day.

The area we are staying is classic picture territory, just as we'd imagined HK to be:

The next day we made it onto the famous star ferry, definitely the nicest way to travel between Kowloon and Hong Kong island.

The views are amazing; we'd already noticed the locals fastidious cleaning habits (for example when leaving a shop, its not uncommon to see a sign saying "These door handles are sterilised four times daily") but seriously they must clean the windows of the shiny buildings at least a couple of times a day to make it all gleam this much.

We took another walk around central, and headed to the proper botanical gardens to relax a bit in the heat. Unfortunately Alex wasn't feeling to good again so we had to head home, but again the views - from lush greenery back to the world of skyscrapers and high consumerism - were fantastic.

In the afternoon I decided to do something a little more radical about the heat, but you might have to try and spot what in the next photo. Alex had another nap, and that night we hit the local town again for some really tasty sushi.

Thats about it for our Hong Kong adventure - we originally hoped to spend 5 days here but the flight dates and times conspired to make that really only 3 days sadly. We've got another stop back here on the way down to Vietnam from China in a month, so we might extend that a little and see some more sites.

So tomorrow its off to mainland China - starting in Shanghai. It sounds like its history and character are very much bound to Hong Kong's, so we are expecting more of the same, and definitely looking forwards to it.

Bye for now!

Adventuring in the mountains

2009-07-03T00:14:00.000-07:00

After our first night in Shimla we decided to sign up for 3 day trip with the trekking company that worked in the hotel we were staying in. I was a little apprehensive about this as the second day involved a full day hike up a mountain... what with my poor old legs being more accustomed to stomping around an office rather than the great outdoors these days. But Alex was really excited to do it, so it was time to suck it up and get on with it =)

In one respect it was an easy decision, as it turns out that staying in a little room with no running water is something of a smelly affair (until we worked out how to make the toilet work using water from buckets) so the thought of moving on wasn't so bad. It was a shame there wasn't more to do in Shimla, as it really is a lovely little place - very quaint in a Alpine meets India kind of way. There were no touts or rickshaws there to hassle us, and there were loads of Indian tourists doing pretty much the same stuff as us.

It was really nice at night too, there were so many villages dotted around the entire area look like it was lit up with fairy lights.

So after one day in Shimla, we woke up early and got in the car. There were two people on our mission with us, our hirsute guide Arif, and a mute driver whose name we never found out. We were all squeezed into a little white car (a maruti suzuki, a really really common car in India it would seem) and set off on the 6 hour trip towards Sarahan.

The roads were classic mountain switchbacks pretty much the entire way. The road from our hotel was so steep the driver had to take a run up, and anyone who dared to step into the road was met with a fierce barrage of beeping. Fortunately as the roads became clearer he calmed down a bit and turned out to be our best driving experience yet.

We stopped at a few good viewing spots on the way, but unfortunately the weather was really cloudy that first day. This was good in some respects as the journey was relatively cool and not half as uncomfortable as the train ride two days earlier. We stopped for lunch on the way but that was about it for entertainment along the way.

Finally we arrived in Sarahan and settled into our little room - it had a lovely view of the mountains but it was still very cloudy so we could see that much. The town itself was tiny, you'd only really go there on an organised tour. That evening our guide took us on a shortish walk around the town, visiting its famous temple (apparently one of the last places in India to abandon human sacrfices as the temple is a monument to the blood thirsty Hindu goddess Kali.)

There was a bit of hill climbing involved in the walk, which gave us a little taste of what was to come the next day - Alex was walking and smiling quite happily but I was already out of breath and lagging behind... bah!

After a big old dinner (I was getting really worried at this stage, kept going on about carb loading like I was about to run a marathon or something...) we had an early night to be ready for the trek the next day.

We set out at 10am and started up the mountain. Sarahan town is at an altitude of about 2000 metres above sea level, and the peak of the hill we were attempting was over 3000, so there was quite a bit to do. The terrain was a lovely mix of rocks, dirt tracks, tree-y bits and lush green slopes - and the weather was pretty much perfect too - a nice breeze and not too much sun. After a while the sounds of the town faded away and we really were in the perfect calm of the mountain.

Our guide explained that there were people living all over the mountains, gypsies from all over the Himalayan areas. Sure enough we joined by some young lads who were on their way back from selling milk to the town in the morning - our guide explained they did the trip down and back up the mountain every single day in order to support their families up in the hills. After a few hours we came to a small encampment, where our guide took us for tea with some of the locals...

Onwards and upwards was the only option, but the going was getting a bit tough for me. Alex was still going strong and was clearly teachers pet - apparently the guide kept saying she could climb Everest if she wanted to =) We had a few bits of picnic lunch with us from the hotel, and we also learned a crazy new way of eating mangoes without a knife... handy.

I'm sad to admit it but I was definitely the weakest link, and before long my constant stopping meant we couldn't reach the peak... we did make it up to about 2800m though and the views were lovely. The clouds came back out around lunchtime and the journey down was a race against time as the rain would mean it would turn into a perilous bum slide down in the mud if we didn't make it! This almost killed me, and my legs really haven't recovered yet... lol. It was really tough going but I'm glad we did it, I'll look back on it with good memories!

By the time we'd got back to the hotel and had some sleep, the rain and clouds had vanished completely. The full view of the snow capped peaks was revealed from our hotel roof :

Small aside - my crazy traveling beard is coming on nicely... =)

We had dinner on the roof of the hotel, and the sunset was amazing...

The last day was back in the car again, with achy legs but happy hearts. We had another overnight stay in Shimla before we had to get the train back to Delhi. The trains back seemed to take a lifetime but we made it back in one piece, back to now familiar Delhi. We've been here three times now so it feels a bit like our base, looking forwards to the nice bars and restaraunts to visit now we are back in civilisation!

3 days to go till our next mission to Hong Kong....and no doubt our next update, definitley looking forwards to a change of cuisine now, char sui buns all the way!

Although theres been ups and downs, overall India has been a terrific experience and we're both glad it was part of the trip. We've got a few days left for sightseeing here, so its time to sign off!

Jaipur onwards

2009-06-27T23:32:00.000-07:00

Its been a few days since our last update, and whats more we've lost the travel adaptor so slowly but surely all our electronics are failing. We are still going strong, and have just arrived in the mountains of Shimla in the north of India. But we've got a few days to track back on first...

From Agra we caught the train of death to Jaipur, but things definitely picked up since we got there. We headed to the nicest cheap place in the guide book, which usually means they have no rooms when we get there... but as luck would have it they had a lovely room which we managed to haggle down a bit too (its all about the 50p haggling...)

Compared to all the other rooms we've stayed in this was like the Ritz, all lovely details and it was spotlessly clean for a change.

Jaipur was a very different city to Agra - where as Agra seemed very poor, Jaipur was very afluent in comparison. The old town, inside the famous pink walls, was fairly typical, but in the south of the city there were western style shopping centres and bars. But you are never very far away from the animals on the roads, no matter where you end up in India...

As we mentioned in the last update, Jaipur is something of a legend for shopping. The full range of Indian fabrics, jewellery and arts and crafts are on offer from countless shops in the bazaars in the old town. Alex was obviously in her element, and we spent a good few hours each day browsing and haggling.

One of the highlights for us was going to see a bollywood film in the incredible art deco cinema - the film was absolutely crazy, trying to put it in one genre would be impossible. It started as a teen high school drama, then came some epic musical bits, then it went a bit karate kid, and then suddenly the leading chap found out he could see the future and it went a bit Nicholas Cage action thriller... the dialogue has chunks of english dotted through it so we could pretty much make sense of it. Really good fun though, they should make more films like that for western audiences we reckon =)

So that led us up to the 24th, Alex's birthday. We started sightseeing in the mountains behind the city - its called the Monkey temple because of the army of monkeys have have settled in the temples. The temple itself was a bit run down, but the temple at the top had an amazing view over the city. We got tourist trapped in the temple, we were too sweaty and horrible to dodge them, hence the crazy monkey poo "good luck" dots on our heads!

We spent the afternoon shopping for jewellery, and then headed out for some cocktails in the evening. You can just about see the lovely bracelet we found for Alex's birthday present in this picture :

We had a lovely few days in Jaipur, and we were a little sad to leave. We'd made our lives a little hard by arranging two days of travelling - the first was back to Delhi on the train (7 hours), grabbing a few hours sleep before hitting a morning train to Kalka (another 6 hours) and then a crazy "toy" train up the mountains into Shimla (another 6 hours). Quite the mission, but we survived it. The toy train was a proper narrow gauge railway through the mountains, it was only about 30 km but it really did wind around forever.

We were really knackered when we arrived, and stupidly we thought 300 rupees was too much of a rip off to get a cab to the hotel (normally you pay around 50 rupees for a reasonble length journey). The trip to the hotel turned out to involve queuing up for ages to get lift up the mountain, and it almost killed me walking up the final bit of hills to the hotel with the packs on. Really daft turning our nose up at the 4 quid or whatever it would have been in the cab... oh well.

We've arrived in Shimla at peak season, so the place is buzzing. Its peak season as people leave Delhi and surrounding area to avoid the heat before the monsoon, so its almost bearable up here. Our hotel is a real shocker compared to the last place, and to add to our worries there is a drought as the monsoon is so late this year. This means no running water up here... so its water out of buckets all the way. Joy!

The view over the balcony is amazing, wish we had a good photo though, but as we've left the power adaptor in Agra (gah!) we haven't got any recent ones. The city is perched up in the mountains, sprawling over a huge area. Anyway hopefully we'll have some pictures next time. There is a big old queue for the one computer here, and we are getting rude looks, time to sign off =)

Train journey from hell and the start of Jaipur

2009-06-22T23:34:00.000-07:00

So we have now finally arrived in Jaipur after the worst train journey in the entire world, every compliment we previously made to India's railway has now been retracted! First off we arrived at the station at 5:45AM to find that none of the stations announcements had been turned on. So we spent about 30 minutes trying to find out which platform our train was on as there were no railway staff around and only one person at the ticket desk, who couldn't really speak English and didn't seem to bothered about answering anyone's questions. After finally finding the right platform the station came to life with windows xp welcome sound and the departures board finally lit up. Unfortunately for us, our train was going to be delayed by 2 hours!

Soooo 2 very grumpy hours later our train pulls in, we had to run about a mile to reach our end of the train with our massive bags only to find the right carriage and promptly start receiving abuse from a very loud and assertive Indian woman. Turns out our entire carriage had been hijacked by a group of 70 Jainist pilgrims, who were trying to rearrange the whole of aircon class (about 5 carriages) so they could all sit together. Not too impressed with this, we decided to improve Anglo-Indian relations by ignoring them and taking our seats in the middle of their jolly.

Big mistake. We were quickly surrounded by all the children who decided we would be their morning entertainment...not really what we wanted after only 4 hours sleep, but hey we decided we'd go with it; after all it was only a 4.5 hour journey. However, it seemed like our day was only going to get worse when James started chatting to one of the blokes - apparently the train was a new (very flakey) service, and if the train was 3 or 4 hours delayed that was considered on time. They had come prepared with enough food and snacks to kill a hippo, we on the other hand had missed brekkie and wernt very happy with the idea of staying on the hell train till mid-afternoon with no food or water!

As by this point it seemed the journey couldnt possibly get any worse, we accepted our fate and got on with it. Luckily the Jainists decided to forgive us for taking their seats (they are pacifists after all according to the guide book,) and shared their snacks and water with us. The rest of the journey picked up and we chatted happily and ate all their food! :-p

The train ended up being 4.5 hours late so we arrived in Jaipur at 5pm (it almost got a whole lot worse with us accidentally jumping off at the wrong stop then thanking god they dont bother shutting the doors on Indian trains so we could jump back on after it had started moving!)

After all this excitement/torture, we've now landed on our feet and are staying in a gorgeous hotel. They've decorated it to perfection, the room is massive and even has a bath (yey!) Its still less than 10 quid a night for the 2 of us as well, and is easily nicer than any hotel we've stayed in so far.

We're off to explore the Pink City now, Jaipurs ancient walled city. Then hopefully its off to start some shopping....

p.s photos to come

Agra

2009-06-21T03:32:00.000-07:00

So the train from Delhi to Agra (a very very good train, according to the man at the station) left at an eye-wateringly early 06:15 am, so we were out with our packs on for the 1/2 mile walk to New Delhi station at 05:30. Fortunately it doesn't get scorching until about 8am, so the walk wasn't particularly unpleasant.

New Delhi rail station was already a mass of bodies when we arrived - people are sprawled out everywhere you can see, sleeping, napping, lying on massive piles of goods and fabric... you name it, its got a person on top of it. The station was remarkably well set out, and to be honest it put London Bridge to shame in terms of getting us to the right train on the right platform.

On the train, there seems to be a system in place whereby a segment of seats in the 3rd class (thats top class here, I think 1st class is cows and chickens..) are held for tourists wandering in and paying top dollar for fancy air con seats. So we were sat with 6 or so other tourists and it was a remarkably straight forwards journey. Oh and when I say top dollar it was still only about 8 quid for both of us to do a 2 hour journey in massive comfy seats, with air con, and breakfast... bargain.

We were pretty knackered at this point and worried we'd fall asleep - the train was going all the way back to Mumbai - so we had to try and stay awake so we didn't miss the stop. It was pretty easy going, although the view out of the window was pretty hard going as we passed through some of the slums that spilled out onto the railway land.

So we arrived in Agra and were pitched headlong into a swarm of animated rickshaw touts and taxi drivers. Not what you need in a new place and after only a few hours sleep. We managed to fight them off as far as the official government prepaid rickshaw shack (basically set up so the touts and hawkers cant rip you off straight from the train...) We'd already booked our hotel here so we all we had to worry about was not being taken for a ride in the wrong direction. We needn't have worried as we were picked up by a charming chap who insisted on showing us his little customer comment book - he'd asked the tourists he'd driven for in the past to write something about him in the book; despite claiming that he couldn't read or write english - brave chap. It looked like he wanted us to hire him to take us around the sites but we were too dazed and hot to take him up on his offer, so we just checked into the hotel and went straight for second sleeps.

As we arrived on the Friday, we couldnt jump straight into the Taj Mahal - it turns out its closed all day. So that afternoon's fun was Agra Fort, not too dissimilar from the Red Fort in Delhi. (Same old story, rubbish locked down iway internet cafe again, no photos to show you yet!) This was really amazing for two reasons - a) you get an amazing view of the Taj Mahal across the river and b) they have wild monkeys roaming free in the grounds.

It turns out this isn't particularly rare, but as tourists relatively fresh off the boat this was quite amazing - until Alex got a little bit too close to one of the babies, and then for a second it was a bit scary =)

We had dinner at a restaurant recommended in the guide, and had a really delicious chicken dish, cooked in a cream curried sauce and topped with omlettey style egg. It was definitely the nicest curry I've ever had, but unfortunately that high point quickly deteriorated into a huge pit of despair in the evening. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the fault of the restraunt, as I was feeling a bit dodgy before we ate, but anyway we had to call the night off early and before too long it was obvious that I'd succumed to Delhi belly as well. India 2, Bentley/Shaw 0 on that front.

To make matters worse that night there was the usual powercut, which knocks out the fan and the air con. Usually the hotels have a backup generator which brings the fans back up, but you have to wait for the main power to come back to get air con again. But after one and a half hours the air con still wasn't working and I couldn't sleep a wink... talk about all the bad things happening at once! Alex has an uncanny ability to sleep no matter now hot it was, but eventually she had to wake up to see why it was so warm - and to witness me going a little bit mental because of the illness and heat combination. In the end it was so bad I left the room to try and see if someone could fix it - but there was no one around in the hotel. In a final fit of despair managed to find the circuit breaker box, and through sheer fluke alone managed to get the A/C back up and running. Despite feeling monumentally tired (this is still the day of the 5am start from Delhi...) and sick, that moment when the air con unit chugged back into life was one of the happiest moments of the trip so far ha! =)

Ok so I'm clearly basking in my own pity there a bit, and Alex is sure to not let me get away with it for too much longer. The following day was a write off for me, but Alex was able to get a bit of shopping in whilst taking care of sick old me. Fast forward 24 (gloriously air conditioned I might add) hours...

So everyone says "see the Taj Mahal at dawn"... so there we were again up at 5:30 raring to go... I'd just about got my world back together and we set out down the 100m walk from our hotel to the west gate entrance. They've got a really good thing going here in Agra - they charge locals about 15 rupees to see the Taj, but charge the tourists 750 - most of which goes to the local council. Its pretty obvious that not a penny of this actually gets spent on making things better for the locals, the roads are awful and the open sewers are everywhere. So its a little bit gauling, but it has to be done.

Moaning aside, the Taj was probably the most amazing thing either of us have seen.

The sheer scale of the place is breathtaking, and as you get closer the transition from the scale to the tiny attention to detail sets you back again. We spent an hour walking around and taking hundreds of photos - and then we came across more monkeys and took yet more photos of the creatures. Fortunately Alex stayed well clear this time so no run ins with angry mother monkeys.

This is our last day in Agra, and with the missed day yesterday we thought we'd try and cram some more stuff in - we hired an autorickshaw and headed off 10km outside Agra to Sikandra, a moment to one of the shahs that had something to do with Agra (ok, our grasp of the local history is a little tenous...). We never made it in the end as the dual-carriage way we were on backed up with traffic, and the rickshaw driver told us the road was closed ahead. You can imagine our panic when instead of waiting in traffic or turning off and heading for another road, our driver pulled a u-ey and started driving back down the highway the wrong way!!! Just when we thought we were safe, at the first junction he came to he pulled another u-ey and started full pelt up the wrong side of the road, straight into the oncoming cars. At this point its fair to say we were bricking it (a fairly uncomfortable situation for me, considering the previous 24 hours...) but there were some other cars doing it to, so it didn't seem too much like certain death.

That side of the road quickly became block too, and after 30 minutes of furtively trying every side road and dirt track in sight our intrepid driver called it quits. He swore blind we were only 500m away from the place, and that we could walk it, but we thought best not and decided to head back to Agra. Instead we visited a couple of other sites, including something the locals call the Baby Taj. If it wasn't for the real thing, this momument would be the top attraction around here, with the same amazing marble filligree and inlays, but sadly it doesn't really get a look in and was a bit run down.

Thats about it for now, our tickets for the Taj are good all day so we are going to go see it again as the sun sets. Tomorrow its another crack of dawn train to Jaipur... home of the pink city and - according to the rough guide - the best shopping in Asia. Some may say this is a convienent coincidence considering its Alex's birthday on the 24th...

Edit - here is a pic from sunset, there were hundreds more people there in the evening and we were pretty much constantly accosted by people taking photos of us (ok, mainly Alex) and wanting to practice their english...

(ps sorry for typos, we didnt have time to proof read this one!)

Last bit of Delhi

2009-06-21T03:07:00.000-07:00

We've been a bit busy over the last few days so no blog action... so we've got a few posts to catch up on.

Our last day in Delhi was a scorcher, so we scoured the rough guide for some shade and decided to head to a nice are of park called Lodi Gardens. The guide didn't really set our expectations really high, but it turned out to be one of our favourite bits of Delhi.

The park itself was lovely and green, with quite a lot of hosing action to keep everything from drying up - most of the sites we've seen so far have been dry, with empty fountains and ponds. There was a real sense of peace and tranquility, considering the entire park was ringed by 4 lane crazy roads as well. The park was organised around three or four ancient temples, which were in surprisingly good nick considering they were in a free park with no one to guard them - its the kind of thing that would have been vandalised to hell and back if it was left alone in England for more than 20 minutes.

The other highlight was the amount of wildlife that had made the park its home - there were geese on the ponds, huge birds of prey swooping between the trees, and countless little squirrel/skunk creatures on the ground. Will have to upload a photo because we see these little things everywhere now!

This is Alex standing in the door way of one mausoleum looking over to an ancient mosque, as you can see the gardeners were hard at work even though it was free to enter.

Later on that day we took a stroll down to the other main bit of colonial designed New Delhi, the Rajpath. This is an enormous tree lined boulevard with a monument called India Gate at one end, and the India parliament buildings (I think!) at the other end. We tried to get to the parliament buildings but they shut the road leading to them at 8pm, so we had to suffice with the Arc de Triumphe-esq India Gate end. And obviously the gratuitous long shutter delay photos weren't far behind...

I think the monument is to the soldiers lost in the various conflicts that India has fought in (I think most of the earlier ones were pretty much the conflicts that the UK launched India into to be honest...)

After that we headed back to Connaught Place for a rock night at another bar recommended in the Rough Guide... after 2 weeks of no music it was quite a treat but sadly we had to get up early the next day for the train to Agra...

Another day in Delhi

2009-06-17T05:24:00.000-07:00

After almost two weeks of being professional tourists, we've done our first day of real sightseeing. We managed to run the gauntlet to Old Delhi to visit the Red Fort (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Fort).

Its a massive old Mughal fortress, read the wiki bit if you want to know more as I'll only get something wrong! It was pretty amazing to see this huge fort stuck pretty much in the middle of the chaos of Old Delhi.

The entrance to the fort used to be lined with shops for the finest craftsmen in India, but these days its been given to the tourist tat sellers...

From there on in its pretty grand inside, lots to look at but by this point is was so hot that I had to rest in the shade every 2 minutes. Alex was loving it though, especially when one of the "official" tourist guides came over and started asking me about English history. Not what you want when you are about to pass out from the heat!

We've not quite mastered the long arm photos yet, and we didn't really want to hand the camera over to anyone, but here is a picture of us both to prove we are actually here together :) (our paranoia was made worse with constant signs about pickpockets etc inside the fort!)

We just about made it back in one piece, it was another fairly hairy autorickshaw journey back to our hotel afterwards.

Ok so that picture was from last night, but it sums the crazy rickshaws up pretty well. We managed to visit some equally crazy bars in Conaught Place last night as well, the weirdest was a rodeo themed place where you sit on saddles at the bar :

And here is Alex on the main bazaar near where we are staying :

We've uploaded a few more pictures from Goa as well, I think you can click on the images and it should take you to the full album for all our photos so far.

Thats about it for now, the heat of the day is starting to fade so its time to go and find somewhere to eat!

Delhi

2009-06-16T05:20:00.000-07:00

In what many people would view as a crazy move, we've left the beautiful calm laid back world of the Goan coast, for the absolutely insane world of central Delhi. People did warn us how much of a shock it would be but I really don't think we were expecting it to be this different!

Our last days in Palolem were good fun, but we had a quite a lot of rain - we decided to make good use of my last minute CBT course in the UK and rent a scooter. I'd just about figured out the driving system (everyone over takes at all times whilst beeping none stop seemed to be the important parts) so we boldly rented a little black thing from the guest host we were staying at. Only cost about a quid for the day, so it was pretty good value.

So we set off, granted a little wobbly at first, but the roads are very quiet and we quickly got the hang of riding with someone on the back. There wasn't really much problem about getting lost, as there were only really 4 roads in the area. It was pretty good fun pottering around, we found a market so Alex had to try and buy as much as she could carry; this time she held herself back and only bough some pomegranates and some Indian sweets. Embarrassingly enough I couldn't figure out how to undo the straps on my flipping helmet, fortunately the locals were pretty handy. (Ok ok the strap release bit was broken, honest!)

We thought we'd head over to the next beach, as an Irish couple we'd met the night before said it was worth a visit. Halfway there we started to see other people stopping their bikes under trees by the side of the road seemingly randomly, but after 30 seconds the heavens opened. They have some crazy 6th sense about when its about to rain... anyway, we got soaked and managed to pull in at a closed restaurant with a covered bit at the front. Then came the thunder and lightening, and lots more rain. After about an hour we gave up waiting and rode back at a crawl, getting hopelessly wet through. Good fun though =)

That was the last adventure for Goa, the next day we packed up our stuff and went around the town looking for the cheapest cab we could get to the airport. Sure enough a chap offered a knock down price and we thought our luck was in... but it turned out he was a total mentalist. Anything that moved caused him to hit the horn 1-3 times (seemed to depend on the size of the thing that moved, bikes = 1, cows/rickshaws = 2, trucks = 3+) which quickly became annoying. He also seemed to go faster the nearer we got to the airport, so we practically flew the last few km with us holding on for dear life in the back. A false economy if ever there was one.

The flight was uneventful, I made another Indian friend (although this was our first invitation to dinner, people are very very friendly it would seem) but Alex was starting to feel a bit poorly...

So Delhi - the first impression was the incredible heat. It was pretty hot in Goa, but very humid, but Delhi was like a furnace. Thankfully it seems a lot less humid, but that is replaced with smog/fumes/dust. The taxi ride into the city really opened our eyes to the typical tales of Indian driving - what seems to be a pretty good system out in the sticks seemed totally crazy when scaled up in the city. Mopeds and autorickshaws weave between the other cars with about 2 inches of clearance; the cars and taxis jostle constantly to try and get their noses ahead at each junction. Quite the introduction to the city thats for sure.

We found a room pretty easily, the first place we tried from the guidebook looked really nice but was full, but thankfully we found something similar just around the corner. We arrived around 6pm, which must have been evening rush hour as the whole place was just swarming with people - imagine central London at rush hour but with roads the size of pavements, and everyone and everything trying to get passed each other at the same time.

The room we found looked dodgy - the fluorescent light wasn't working, and the aircon wasn't going. What with our massive culture shock we were coming up with all sorts of con style conspiracy theories, but it turns out there was just another power cut. (Thank god for my head torch or we wouldn't have been able to see a thing, thanks M&D :)) By that point Alex was feeling really rough - we'd only been in Delhi a few hours and already she'd got the signature ailment. I wont say anything else in that department, other than it was a tough night but shes feeling a lot better today!

So slowly but surely we are getting used to the non-stop hustle and bustle. We managed to make it into the centre of town today - and within 30 minutes we had been approached by 4 people trying to con us into visiting one of the fake "official government tourist offices". Fortunately the rough guide had done a good job of warning us about the scams (they take you to a shop that has been made to look like the tourist information office, get a cut of massively expensive train tickets etc etc.)

This was at a place called Connaught Place, part of the British designed bits of New Delhi. The whole area is a huge set of concentric circles, which makes the con even better - unless you really know the area you've no idea which segment of the circle you are on, and the shops pulling the con are in pretty much the same spot on each of the segments. So all in all a pretty hard going morning. It would seem we need to be a lot more cautious about the previously friendly greetings we've had.

This afternoon was another mission, this time booking train tickets for our visits to Agra (Taj Mahal), Jaipur (Pink city, and Alex's birthday; the guide book said it was the best place for shopping in Asia...) and then up north into the mountains near Shimla. Thats a total of about 40 hours on trains, so hopefully splashing out on the air con seats will be worth it.

Alex spent the afternoon sleeping it off, so I had to visit the station solo - it was amazing how much less hassle I got from the rickshaw touts and other people marching around with a grumpy look on my face by myself =) I think we are both starting to acclimatise a little, so for once I wasn't dripping with sweat which might also help a bit.

Tonight we might risk taking the camera out and getting some photos, and maybe venturing out to get a bite to eat and hopefully a beer! Until next time...

Photos!

2009-06-12T23:34:00.000-07:00

We've found somewhere that doesn't mind uploading, so here are some random pictures from over the last few days :

This is us drinking crazy cheap cocktails in Benaulim :

This is us looking very hot and sweaty just after we arrived in Palolem :

And one of hundreds of photos of us standing with animals of one sort or another, again in Palolem :

Palolem

2009-06-12T04:59:00.000-07:00

Today marks a week since we left, but it definitely feels a lot longer already! We've made a shortish hop down the coast of Goa to a place called Palolem, which is the beach the guides and books are raving about. I'd love to show you a picture of it with us in it, but this is another internet cafe with dodgy rules. This place has gone as far as demanding "NO UPLOADING AND DOWNLOADING" which makes any sort of use of the internet a challenge, but whatever... I'll just steal other peoples pictures for now =)

Palolem is a little villiage clustered around the road that leads from the mainland towards the sea, but the highlight is the sweeping bay lined with forest and palm trees. There are a couple of small islands at the ends of the bay which keep it quite enclosed, and Alex has already managed to get in a bit of a swim.

The journey down was ultra lazy, we just got a guy from down the road to drive us here in his car. He claim to be a taxi but his boss was "borrowing the proper car" for the day. Either way it was definitely better than the 2 hour/3 bus nightmare alternative. Weather wise its still really hot, and amazingly humid - we haven't seen any real rain for days now which might be making it worse.

The guide book served us well for the accomodation, we found a reasonable little place at the back of town for 3 quid a day, can't complain. There definitely seem to be more tourists here than at the last place, even though its much more remote... must have something to do with the fact that its on the top 10 list in pretty much all the things to do in India lists. Everyone is so much browner than us, so we think that puts us quite low down the travellers pecking order. We have none of the following :

A crazy tan
Massive dreadlocked hair
Lots of tatoos
Huge necklaces

So we definitely look like the virgin travellers - tan wise the factor 50 is doing a pretty stirling job. Alex is obviously going brown, and I'm just going different shades of red. We may consider doing some sunbathing tomorrow to try and move us up the traveller scale a notch.

Thats about it for now. We'll try our luck at a different internet place, hopefully they wont notice the camera and usb action next time.

Benaulim Beach

2009-06-10T05:03:00.000-07:00

We've made it to our second stop, a place called Benaulim in South Goa. We've found a much more draconian web cafe with all sorts of access restrictions so we can't upload any photos sadly :(

This is where we are ish :
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=goa&sll=51.514997,-0.058707&sspn=171.363764,360&ie=UTF8&ll=15.251727,73.933525&spn=0.08877,0.142822&z=12&iwloc=A

The journey down here was a small mission, as it was the first bit we've done under our own steam with our packs on. Obviously we ignored pretty much all the advice and packed everything we'd ever need so things are a little heavy going in the baking heat. We made it as far as the bus terminal in Panajim (thats where we were before) and got ourselves on a bus to Margao (the Goan equivalent of Birmingham by all accounts.) This wasn't so bad, it was pretty fast going and we managed to get off at the right place.

The bus stations we've come across so far having been massive chaotic affairs, with people shouting destinations all the time and 10-20 buses charging around and another 20 or so parked up. People have been really helpful and always point you in the direction of the right bus. One pitfall is that places seem to have at least 2 names; the one the government would like people to call somewhere, and the name people actually do call it... sometimes its not entirely clear which one the guide book is using. Anyway, we managed to find the bus to Benaulim - only to find the driver asleep on the back seat.

Turns out the bus wasn't due to leave for a while so we sat in the baking hot sauna for 30 mins or so. The journey from Margao to Benaulim was a bit more hectic, lots of stops and traffic and shouting as we made it through the town. Once we hit the coast though everything seemed to calm down a lot.

The ride took about 30 minutes to get to the crossroads at the top of town, at which point we were back under our own steam with packs on our backs. We had a guesthouse place in mind nearer the beach, and set off - ignoring the usual shouts for taxis and autorickshaws. Silly silly move, within minutes I was soaked with sweat and Alex was cackling gleefully at my misfortune. The walk took about 20 minutes, I must have lost about 4 pints of water but we made it, and the place had air con!! Heaven.

The sun had come out completely by this point and it was baking hot, so the beach was the best place for us. Its still the off-season here, so there is hardly anyone around; we walked for miles down the beach and didn't see another soul. Because of the rains there are really bad undercurrents in the sea, so sadly no swimming for us.

Come the evening the few bars that are still open at the beach front came alive a bit. We sat looking out onto the sea and had a beer, played some cards (Jen - Alex has already started beating me at cribbage gah!) and then had the tastiest whole red snapper we'd ever eaten, all for about 3 quid each. Bargain. Looking forward to dinner again tonight thats for sure.

From there we moved onto another bar on the beach and drank 90p cocktails until we were a little tipsy(!) and then headed back. Thanks to the air con I managed to get a good nights sleep, but sods law it was actually too cold for Alex - typical!

Today we've been wandering around, its been cloudy but the humidity is a killer! We might rent some bikes tomorrow and explore a bit, but there really isn't that much to do here - there aren't any watersports or beach sun loungers as its the off season. So we may look to move on after that, either further south to another beach or start thinking of heading north towards Delhi.

Hopefully we'll find a better internet place soon and can put some more pictures up!

2009-06-08T04:59:00.000-07:00

First post time - against all the odds we made it in one piece to Goa. The flight to Mumbai/Goa from Heathrow Terminal 5 was painless, we even got our bags back once we landed which was nice. We had a very brief view of one of the massive shanty cities as the plane landed, but that was our only glimpse of India proper. A brief trip between airport terminals was all it took to get us onto our connecting flight to Goa - I was hoping the plane would be old school and have propellers and everything but sadly I'm living back in time and everything is amazingly modern here.

It only took 45 minutes to make it to Goa, where we had to face our first minor challenge of getting to the place we planned to stay. They'd not returned our emails but the guide books seemed pretty sure the place would be empty in the monsoon season. Anyway, we ended up in a crazy retro taxi completely lined with leopard skin (I have photos on my iphone, but haven't found any wifi yet.) The monsoon was kicking off full blast and the taxi wasn't exactly water tight, but we made it to our accommodation pretty easily.

The guesthouse we were heading for is called the Afonso in the old Portuguese area of Goa's capital, Panajim. They must have seen us pasty white tourists coming a mile off, as we were thoroughly counter-haggled into the "last" room they had free, but still its so cheap you can't really complain. I've not done a great job of taking photos for half this stuff (we were jetlagged!)

We made it out for our first real curry that night, in absolutely pouring rain, and it was really really tasty - either the whole spiciness thing isn't as bad as people say or they've doctored our tourist curries perfectly.

Day 2 - it was still tipping it down in the morning, but around 11am the rains stopped and we headed out on our first sight seeing mission to Old Goa. This is the old capital city and has a lot of old Christian churches and colonial buildings left over from the Portuguese. One the way home we had our first auto rickshaw ride, which was an experience =)

Day 3 - Full day of adventure today, and our last day in Panajim. We had our first experience of the Indian bus service, which was completely overwhelming in most parts but we managed to pull it off without too many problems! We ended up in somewhere called Ponda, where we ended up doing a 7 temple marathon via auto rickshaw. The Hindu temples were amazing but all exactly the same in terms of layout, but with different colours and decorations inside.

From Alex and James RTW Trip

We are thinking of heading south tomorrow - the weather has definitely picked up today so the beach may not be totally out of the question. Touch wood. It'll probably get ten times worse as soon as we can see the sea, but whatever. That's about it for now... as ever we'll only update this a few more times before we forget about it completely, but you never know :p