Back in Brisbane!

So now our travels are at an end - for now at least! We flew back into Brisbane on May 30th and now have the exciting prospect of finding jobs and coping with being back to "reality".... It's been fun catching up with everyone though, and here's a few photos from our first week back. We surprised Shell's dad for his 50th birthday and then had a great time at his 50th party.

Bank St reunion at the Rumpus Room

Brian's 50th party

Shell and Brian demostrating how bad dancing is hereditary

Thailand!

The plan in Thailand was to do as little as possible and being the great little organized pair that we are we were able to follow the plan to perfection. After landing in Bangkok we spent a couple of drunken nights out and caught a ferry to glimpse Wat Pho, one of the many amazingly beautiful temples in Bangkok. After that we caught a bus to Ko Chang and spent the next 10 days lying on the beach, eating, drinking and generally undoing all the good work we had done trekking in Nepal and watching our tummies return.

Scott was able to go on one little adventure when he swam across to a nearby deserted island, exploring an abandoned resort – it was off season so the place had just recently closed down and because they didn’t expect in idiots to swim across from the main island everything was unlocked so Scott continued to have a little sticky beak until finally he was discovered by a group of wild snarling and barking dogs in which he decided it was a good idea to swim back to the main island.

So after our 10 lazy days in Ko Chang, we headed back up to Bangkok, where we met up with Nun (Shell’s friend from Summerville) and John (Shell’s Dad’s friend from the dinosaur days). It was fun catching up with them but the highlight was meeting a group of young Thai girls in this cool little half local half expat bar we found near our place. They kept buying us drinks and got us into all this cool nightclubs for free. We were sure that a catch was about to come every time we went out with them but it never did. Anyway it was a great laugh and we all had fun dancing around together like the drunken fools we were.

Partying with the locals in Bangkok

Coffee with Nun!

Khaosan Road (backpacker area of Bangkok) at sunset

Drinking Chang with John!

Wat Pho under monsoonal clouds

The 46m reclining Buddha in Wat Pho

Sunset from Kho Chang

Shell relaxing in a hammock at our bungalow

On our snorkelling boat trip

Kathmandu

We ended up finishing our trek way quicker than we intended coz we’re super doper fitness freaks – cough cough. So we ended up with 10 days to kill in Kathmandu, which isn’t too bad really. Kathmandu is a pretty funky little place to hang out for a while but we have to admit after almost 5 months on the road (after our volunteer work) we were starting to get sick of trudging around from place to place taking pictures of touristy things so we pretty much just camped ourselves in Kathmandu for the 10 days, started plowing the internet for jobs back in Australia (excitement plus) and went out drinking far too often – surprise surprise. Then we caught a plane out of Nepal – said one last good bye as we flew level with the peaks of the Everest mountain ranges and headed for two weeks of hedonism in Thailand. Here’s a couple of photos of the touristy things we did bother to see over those last days in Nepal.

The Buddha Eyes Stupa on a hill above Kathmandu

Shell and a monk survey Kathmandu