Christmas Capers

Merry Christmas from New Zealand! We decided to take a light Christmas walk from Wanaka, near Queenstown, up to see the Rob Roy Glacier. The 60km drive up a dirt track across several fords didn't put us off, and neither did the first little bridge (above). The weather started nicely down in the dry valley, but after 1 hour of uphill treking started to turn. Still, we did get to see the apparently rare Kea (below), which sat on a branch above a group of picnicing tourists and then proceded to land everywhere anyone was eating any food all the way up the valley to the glaciers. Perhaps rare, but not shy! Indeed, yesterday I was attacked by one leaving the shower block at a campsite, then watched it hunting in its natural habitiat: tearing food scraps from a carrier bag on top of a wheelie bin! After our walk we retreated back to Lake Wanaka below, for Christmas Dinner.

Lou has been enjoying driving the van, with me navigating and getting her to take all the shortcuts across mountain passes and unmettaled roads. Now we're driving up the West Coast of the south island, which is only one long remote road, so our van is noticeable amongst the droves of other camper vans. We get lots of comments and questions about it and many people have been stuck behind it long enough to appreciate the artwork.

We have now arrived in Glacier Country on the west coast. Crossing over from Wanaka the change in flora is stark - we are now in a rainforst bordered by mountains. Lots of native ferns (koru) border the paths and moss hangs in football sized clumps from the trees. We have had a few walks in the undergrowth and had some typical weather. This morning was clear and we took full advantage and impulsively took a helicopter flight up Fox Glacier. This was breaktaking and at times stomach churning, but gave us a view right down into crevasses and up onto the fresh snow at the top, which is close to Mount Cook, but on the opposite side to our previous glacier walks.

Now, we are sat in a full scale west coast downpour, and trying to work out where to camp to escape. I wouldn't mind indulging my new hobby - this being New Zealand, land of plenty, I have started trying to fish in rivers and lakes. I have had little success and Lou waits expectantly for me to bring back a big trout, but no such luck. So far I have had one rod stolen and lost 2 lures at the bottom of lakes. Yesterday however, I caught 3 mussels by dragging my hook too low in the water and snagging them. We had this pitiful snack this morning with our breakfast. Better luck hopefully soon.

Trans Tasman adventures

Otso and Paula guided us to the beaches and wildlife around Sydney, including hiring a car for the weekend and then sitting in it as it was pelted with huge hailstones on the way to visit some Koalas, Kangeroos and Emus. The Emus had to be disuaded from trying to eat our picnic lunch, but fortunately are quite amazingly stupid and easily scared off, even by Lou waving her arms around. In the evening we went for a walk on the North Sydney beaches and watched the Pelicans.

After this, I headed over to Tasmania to catch up with some of my family, and Lou sampled Melbourne. This was a quick visit and we soon flew off to Christchurch in New Zealand. Initially New Zealand foooled us into thinking it was a warm country but having a hot spell in Christchuch the weekend we arrived. We strolled around the botannical gardens and watched locals punting on the river near the colleges before having cream teas. They almost tricked us into thinking we had landed in Cambridge, but everything was too cheap and people were not snooty enough.

We are now well into out trip, and have hired a distinctive camper van to make an impression on the locals. We have come south and walked around the Glaciers at the foot of Mount Cook, sometimes visible through the clouds. My plans to force Lou to walk over the Ball pass (the ridge leading up to Mt Cook) were thwarted by both the weather and Lou's fancy new walking boots wearing in, but it was probably quite an ambitious plan! We stuck to staying in our camper van using the 2 duvets and have not visted any mountain huts yet.

Yesterday we managed to bave to cold to see a colony of seals, fighting and cavorting, and a very rare breeding pair of yellow penguins. We could have paid 40 bucks to watch the night-time 'penguin show' in Omaru, but was much nicer walking around the sea cliffs without anyone else around clapping and throwing fish about. We had to find a camp spot late after this, but managed to camp next to some charcoal burners at the beach in Warrington (nicer than the one near Manchester), and consequently smell of smoke this morning.

If I don't get to write before Christmas, which is highly likely here as most places are pretty remote and sheep don't subscribe to broadband, then have a great Christmas and best wishes from us both. We plan to stock up for a Christmas Day barbeque and have yet to decide where to park the camper to celebrate.

G´day and Moi

Once we had been let into Singapore, with Lou disguising a growing fever at immigration, we were on the home straight. Singapore is slick and expensive compared to everywhere else we've been - for instance the metro makes London seem very clumsy. All this meas that we paid a lot for one night in a doss house, and while Lou slept, I went to see the city. The doss house was strangely close to Lou's old company's Singapore office, which is called the batman building (pictured). The Singapore zoo night safari was excellent, including visiting the bats in their enclosure as they flew around my head. The next day I looked around the Wharf and Chinatown where I sampled some excellent pork and chestnut wantons steamed in banana leaves before heading back to take Lou to the Airport. It was a quick visit to Singapore, but but the time we left I realised I was also catching the fever, so we were greateful to have someone to stay with in Sydney.

Otso and Paula, our local Finnish hosts, had bought some tea and No Frills bread in preparation for our arrival, but hadn't bought any ear-plugs to insulate themselves against my feverous snoring. We proceded to use every ounce of tissue in their house to wipe our noses and mope around infectiously, complaining about the cold. Otso and Paula live in Newtown, South Sydney and there are plenty of bars and restaurants, so much later on Saturday we went out for a meal, which was 4 times bigger than anyone would have eaten in Asia and had more potato than I'd had in two months. Our stomachs adjusted as quick as they could and I still managed to eat most of it.


After a day of hiding indoors we went around Sydney with Paula and have some typical photos of Sydney just to prove we're really here. We still didn't really know where we'd woken up, but we planned to look around more and prove it - So far, we have taken the ferry to Manly and eaten fish and chips on the harbour whilst being called poms. Seems like Australia.

Satayday

It was time to head for Malaysia, so with a heavy heart we left Koh Lanta on a minibus for Trang, hoping to make it as far as Penang in one day. At Trang we got another bus and sat down. A fellow Englishman and I started chatting about the price of Pad Thai, and before I knew it we realised that we had spent most of our secondary school sitting next to each other as well. So here are a few pictures of Richard and I celebrating this unlikely meeting in Georgetown, Penang Island.

Malaysia does it's very best to make us feel at home, with 3 pin plugs, monuments to a portly Queen Vic, great Indian and Cantonese food, red post boxes and at least every second person speaking great English - they even named the town after a famous English lunatic. I was getting used to agreeing prices in Thai and learning new food expressions - I even had a stab at their alphabet. No such problem here - we are having to abandon our simplified, present tense, patronising English. My father obviously subjugated the locals well during his occupation in the 50s. They even wire things up like him, which is much safer than the Thais do, but with an excess of switches.

So after a hang over curing breakfast we took a walk round town. Town has more temples/mosques/churches per square mile than anywhere else, so we popped into the chinese temple. The blue house pictured belonged to a local chinese tycoon, Chong Fat Tze.

Towards midday, my body temperature and the outside warmth started to bid in a very dehydrating auction. I realised that here the sun has no qualms about boiling your head from above here and cowered in a covered market which Lou looked round while I tried to work out ways to cool down. We decided to go up Penang Hill - not very difficult as public transport here works superbly and there is a funicular railway to the top. I spent much of the journey persuading Lou that the train would not probably career down the 45 degree slope in the event of a failure, and it was well worth the views from the top. Just along from here is the enormous labyrinth Chinese Buddhist temple of Kok Lok Si. Here one can shop in a huge marketplace for replica football shirts and worship the buddha simultaneously. Far more noisy than the Thai brand of buddism!

South to the Islands

The journey to the south of Thailand was a long, delayed rail trip through rubber plantations, palm orchards and tropical storms. It started in Ban Pong, also the point where the Burma-Thailand Railway starts, and went south speedily past the mountains on the border with Burma to Surat Thani town. After arriving late we had no chance of leaving the ugly town, despite optimistic attempts by me to find a late bus, and constant nagging by taxi drivers to take us across the country for laughable sums.

After this setback, we decided to cut our losses and head straight for an island retreat to get as long as possible there before having to head to Malaysia. Another day's travelling gets us to Ko Lanta, where we have spent 3 days, the first of which was on the beach. I include a picture of our bamboo house by the sea, and some tropical scenes. The island is in the Andaman sea, and seems mostly inhabited by brown Muslim Thais, and red peeling Swedes (and some other europeans, but swedes love it here). We either get woken in the morning by a muezzin, or at night by music from the beach bar.

Yesterday we went touring the island on a moped, and visited the side of the island that hasn't got long sandy beaches, thus has traditional fishing villages, roads with occasional tarmac and mangroves by the sea. This will probably become developed soon though.

The sea life here is incredible, and today we broke the bank and went on a speedboat snorkelling on some islands south of here. Lou became intimately aquainted with the beautiful rocky coral gardens and required lots of iodine and a new pair of shoes to recover. I learnt how to use a pair of flippers and started chasing colourful fish around and picking up shells, thus also need some iodine. We bumped back to Lanta on the speedboat, driven by a Thai wearing an Arsenal shirt - which he assured me was only beacause his boss forced him to.

From Pai to the Kwai

Well, we headed into the mountains to to the home of Thai hippies in a place called Pai - where there happened to be a music festival on the night we arrived. This made getting a room difficult, but we still managed to find a room with a free pet (Permkroop the frog, pictured ready to jump out from sink overflow to welcome us). We started to get into the Pai vibe and explored the area, avoiding people offering expensive guided tours and enjoying the hills, waterfalls and hotsprings ourselves on bikes and a moped with nights on the town.

After this we realised that we had 'dropped out' for too long, and needed to head south sometime to eventually catch a flight, so spent a long day on buses to get to Sukhothai. This is an ancient capital city with temples and palace ruins spread around outside a newer town. Again we hired some rusty bikes for a laughable price and cycled around the ruins inbetween cold drinks and firey snacks.

We're now all the way down on the Kwai Noi River, and are going to travel up the valley on the railway tomorrow. The town of Kanchanburi has some large cemeteries of people who were forced to build the railway, whch includes the famous bridge just up the street which we walked across today - picture of a trains edging across very slowly to avoid knocking over the tourists. There is a very good museum here illustrating how hard the whole line was to build, and the stories of people forced to work here - and the view straight out of the museum over the large cemetery is poignant.

The next 'long journey' is to the weather beaten south of Thailand, which we have to pass to get to Singapore come rain or shine. The weather forecast points to the former so better keep fingers crossed and feet firmly pointed away from the buddha whilst touching his enormous hands for good luck:-

Eating like Ganesh

I had a very pleaseant and fattening birthday, featuring bagels, kebabs on lemongrass skewers, gin, thai fish cakes, red curry and terminating in a final course of heavy steamed banana pudding before a nightcap. When we recovered from this the next day we decided to head out to an elephant sanctuary to see how much weight mammals can put on. Not only did we get a chance to feel elephants close up and have their brissley trunks snort smelly breath in our faces while snatching bananas from other tourists, we got to see them do some strange excercises, including a elephant penalty shoot out, and painting. Lou and I weren't sure of the morailty of getting elephants to play football for tourists, or buting painting by them for 2000Baht. However we were very convinced by the complete medical advice on offer for caring for sick elephants, exactly which antibiotics to give them for most conditions and how big the IV needle needed to be. Mother would have been impressed by the artificial insemination and midwifery advice too. I had forgotten that elephants can extend their pregnancy from 12 upto 18 months if they want to pick an auspicious birthday.

Yesterday we moved our knowledge of Thai food from passive to active by going to a thai cookery school. This included learning some new vegtables and rices that we didn't know about at the market, then heading out to a cookery class for the practical. We each cooked 4 dishes: a soup, a curry, a stir fry and a noodle based dish. Pyrotechnic pictures attached, Lou doesn't appear to be enjoying the moment though.

If the weather reported in the South of Thailand wasn't enough to convince to stay in Chiang Mai, then this frieze from the Rig Veda (I think) in Chiang Mai's oldest Wat reminded me of the dangers of Thai seas in storms. It even looks like the Gods don't really give a toss about the drowning passengers. So we'll have to explore the mountains a bit and hope the weather improves before we visit the South, or put a lot more money in the collection at the Wat.

No more Kip, Long live the King!

From Loaung Probang we went upcontry by boat along the Nam Ou river. Rivers in Lao are not navigable in a western way, so the boat has to power up rapids and around rocks on the way. The boat was wooden and contorted itself nicely up the river though. The scenery, although it was cloudy, was magnificent. Another set of limestone teeth came up behind each other, up into the clouds. The rain started, but as we were getting wet from the river swelling as we went upstream it didn't really matter. We really were in back contry Lao, and the scarce people there were along the route were fishing and tending gardens on the banks. Occasionally kids played around in boats or on the shore, some of them even wearing clothes - obviously an adult thing if you live in the middle of nowhere. We only once hit a rock, which was enough to make the journey more exciting.

After a full day we arrived in Nong Khiew, a village on the river where we got a stop over for very little in bamboo huts overlooking the river. The village had enough people to have a bar, and we caught a sang thiew (little open sided lorry with seats in the back and floorspace for pigs/rice/?) to get away. Unfortunately we had dresed like we were going to the beach and got a nasty shock as the Sang thiew fought up mountain passes to get out of the valley. A strong breeze made me want to put on a pair of socks and a jumper, and we were relieved to stop in a village and watch a pack of dogs entertaining each other for half an hour. It was clear to see that they were all related.

After taking buses accross Lao and finding the same grim weather everywhere, we decided against trekking in the hills - I had to be convinced by taking a mountain bike up to see a Stupa only to get is so caked in thick clay like mud that the wheels no longer turned. So we have now escaped to Thailand and managed to change all our millions of Kip without resorting to money changers. A quick boat journey accross the Mekong got us to Chiang Kok, and there we saw delights such as traffic lights, ATMs and multiple paved roads that we hadn't seen for a while. The best part of being in Thailand is the endless choice of fresh food - and we stopped in a market to get a cheap lunch before heading into Chiang Rai, the nearest big town. I threw caution to the wind and spent a whole two pounds on Dinner - a large fresh barbequed fish with rice and tub of sauce of a strength that would make your eyes water by its mere smell. Another distinctive feature of Thailand is the general veneration of the King, whos bespectacled face is everywhere, and has a shrine in every bus station I visit.

Today is my 30th birthday, so good food is high on my list of priorities and Chaing Mai is a good place to tick it off. You'll have to wait for the full list of what I've eaten as it will require a separate entry! I leave you with a proverb I found in a temple this morning (pictured) and some evidence that I am adhering to it.

Louang Probang

We are now in Louang Probang by the Mekong, after an amazing bus journey up country through mountainous Loas. I am fortified by self-prescribed antibiotics, and now probably ready to try the local dish Lab [insert meat here].

Louang is an old hill town nessled in the confluence of two rivers, so is very attractive. After breakfast on the Mekong bank and a trip to the Wat, Lou managed to climb the hill to see the best view of this, while I hid indoors; after visiting the old Wat I was pretty drained. At the Wat I also found a large ceremonnial drum, but thankfully someone had broken its skin. The mosaics at the Wat were superb, and also the funnery chariots for royals, as Louang Probang is the ancient seat of the monarchy.

I have been talking to boatmen about going up river as this would be better than another bus trip, and hopefully let us see more. The boat only goes on certain days, and only if there are enough people, so we'd better make some offerings at the temple.