The Adventures of Smell and Snott

The end of the last hurrah....

2009-02-06T13:39:00.005+10:00

This post has taken a while to write, because as soon as we got back to Australia we landed in the chaos of wedding preparations and catching up on 2 months of work, so we got distracted. Anyway, it's time to write about the last few days of our trip. but first, we have put some videos up on youtube from our travels:

http://www.youtube.com/smellandsnott

We spent the last few days of our trip just chilling out on Ko Chang, an island about 6 hours from bangkok. While we were there we did a lot of serious relaxing, lying in hammocks, playing cards, swimming at the beach, drinking with other travellers, and even one infamous karaoke session in a local bar....

We did also get a bit active - we went on a jungle trek one day, through some gorgeous forest - we visited a waterfall and even got a chance to see a tarantula - we thought the guide was joking when he said he would show us one, but he got us all to squat down quietly near a hole (well the girls all stood around at the back!) while he poked into it with a stick, and the tarantula sprang out to the front of its hole, fangs bared! After we'd taken some photos the guide blew on it and it ran back inside. We were very wary of small holes for the rest of the day.

Tarantula!!

Scott the monkey

Another day we went to play with elephants! As has previously been explained on this blog, Shelley loves elephants, so she was in heaven. We got to swim with them, feed them and go on a trek - our elephant was the young naughty one who kept veering off the path to try to find some food in the trees nearby, but we still liked her. We like the naughty ones.

Finally, on our last full day we went on a snokelling trip where we had a couple of great snorkels around the islands - so many colourful fish and coral! The black spiky anenomes and the long skinny pointy fish were our favourites. We also tried some fishing - no luck, although shelley wasn't sure what she would have done if she'd caught anything - and went for some swims near a beach. There was also much beer drinking and it was a really fun relaxing last day.

Then that was it! Back to the boat and the bus and the plane and back to Australia! We did have a great time on our trip and were reluctant to come home - but we do have a lot to do now!!

Totally Terrific Thailand!!!!

2009-01-24T21:16:00.005+10:00

We crossed the border over to Thailand a fair bit earlier than we had planned, but we simply could not resist the red curries and tom yum soups any more, plus we were sick of the Laos buses and wanted to get our arses on some good old reliable Thai trains, so we quickly and very easily crossed the Friendship Bridge from Vientiane to Nong Khai.

We spent two nights in Nong Khai, checking out a couple of cool little temples but the highlight was a sculpture park built by this ex-monk, non-believer in marriage, guy who created the park in some sort of abstract attempt to display all the different forms of religion in a washing machine mix of sculptures. His messages were a little unclear but the grandure of the sculptures was second to none. There were at least 5 stone sculptures in the park over 20 metres tall and dozens more over 10 metres. They displayed mainly a mixture of buddha and hindu gods but with a twist, some with massive serpents around them, others in unusual positions, a big wheel of life and our favourite, a large stately elephant surrounded by small aggressive dogs doing a range of ‘bad’ things like gambling, drinking, smoking, copulating etc.

The rest of our time in Nong Khai was relatively uneventful except when the old English guy in the room next to us decided to bring a prostitute back to our hotel for some ‘boom boom’. The thins walls gave us a ringside seat, and Shell was not impressed to say the least.

Next we went to Khon Khaen for a quick 1 night stop over, where Shell was excited because she got to feed an elephant some sugar cane. That girl does love elephants. If we spot one in the street we normally have to follow it for at least 20 minutes, with Shell beaming the whole way – it’s pretty cute really. Other than that we had a quick look around the night markets and had a fairly early night.

Ayutaya was where we spent the next couple of nights. This town has a special place in Scott’s heart because it was the first place he went to when he began his travelling escapades about 6 years ago. The city has grown over the last 6 years but the many charming wats scattered around the town had not changed much and we had loads of fun riding around on a bike seeing the many beautiful ruins that are dotted around the country’s old capital.

After that we headed to Lopburi, which is we like to call monkey town. There are hundreds of monkeys that live in one of the temples in the centre of town and because of Buddhist belief of not killing creatures (combined with the income the monkeys bring through tourism), they are allowed to pretty much roam free. This puts them in the same category as you see many of the animals throughout the small villages (part domesticated and part wild) but none the less still very cheeky and amusing.

Needless to say we had a great time watching the monkeys eat, swing, fight and play, sometimes with each other and sometimes with us. They climbed up both Scott’s and Shelley’s backs on several occasions, elevating themselves to our heads where they proceeded to groom and pick at our hair. They especially loved Shell’s dress and Shell enjoyed swinging them around playfully. It was always the little ones that wanted to play, the big ones had obviously outgrown that type of behaviour – unlike us :) You have to be careful though, once Shell swung one of the little monkeys a bit fast and it’s mother came up and showed us her teeth unappreciatively. Also the monkeys sometimes want to keep playing when you don’t and like to continue to jump on you even though they know that you don’t want them to. Little guys are so cheeky and human like it’s almost unbelievable.

So then after monkey town we spent one night in Bangkok where we did too much shopping for Scott’s liking (he is so not a shopper), went back to our favourite Bangkok bar for a few drinks and a couple of games of pool, then took the bus the next morning back to Kho Chang where we plan on chilling out for the rest of our trip, which is less than a week away – oh well it’s been a good ride :)

Valour, velocity and vodka in Vang Vieng

2009-01-17T21:26:00.004+10:00

After our epic bus journeys down through Laos, we finally arrived in Vang Vieng!! Yay! It was definitely a change from northern Laos, a lot lot lot more touristy but the town is surrounded by impressive limestone mountains and so it has a really nice feel to it. A lot of the restaurants in town have TVs playing the simpsons or friends 24/7, which is a bit perturbing, but there are also a lot of bars and more nightlife than we've seen on the rest of our trip combined! We spent a lot of time drinking in Vang Vieng, met some English guys and Aussie girls and had lots of fun dancing around with them and drinking strange cocktail buckets.

But we didn't just drink in Vang Vieng, we also had fun exploring the area and getting pretty active! Which wasn't easy when you're hungover, but we're tough. Our first day we went for a walk to a big cave just out of town, which was great to explore because there weren't many other people there, so it felt quite eerie. There was also a spring flowing out of the cave and we swam up that for a while - well shelley made scott go first and whinged all the way about how scary it was, but she still enjoyed it - it was pretty scary to swim through a cave filled with water in the half-light, it felt like a monster was about to come up below you and swallow you whole. But we survived somehow.

The second day we went on a big expedition with a few other people - first we went to another underground cave, but this one was heaps bigger, and you went through it on an inner tube with a head torch on, pulling yourself along by a rope. At some points you got out of the tube and went crawling through the cave, squeezing yourself through little gaps and under ledges - it was hard on the knees but felt very adventurous! Scott was at the back so Shelley had fun laughing at the image of him - a small head lamp in the darkness illuminating Scott cramming himself through some ridiculous gap. Then Scott would start laughing and get stuck, so we were always trying to catch up with everyone else!

After another cave and a yummy lunch - much better than the trekking food!!! - we spent the afternoon kayaking down the river, with a stop off at one of the tubing bars for some sliding, volleyball and beers. The scenery was gorgeous and there were a lot of rapids on the way, plus it was fun to watch the English guys sink their kayak! But our arms were tired by the end of the day.
Our last day in Vang Vieng was the best - it was Shelley's birthday!!!!

So after Shell had opened her presents and we had pancakes for breakfast we ventured out for our tubing day. It didn't take long for us to get stuck into a few drinks and enjoy the tubing down the river. It also didn't take long for Scott to do something stupid and hurt himself...

At the first bar we stopped at they had this flying fox thing that hung out from a platform from one of the bars and had a stop that made it stop suddenly half way across the rivers. The girls were smart and let go before the flying fox hit the swing but the guys were stupid - I mean brave, yeah that's it. They held on until the swing hit the stop and the suddenly deceleration would send fling them into a backflip. Scott thought that looked like fun, but forgot that unlike the other guys he only weighed a puny 64kg and hence was flung a lot faster than the other guys, was flipped one and a half turns and came down at top speed onto his head. Five days later he is still feeling the pain and hopes he hasn't broken his arm - Shell says he's just a big wuss bag.
The rest of the day was filled with more rope swings, lots of dancing, drawing silly pictures and pirate faces on each other and birthday messages on Shell, a fair bit of boozing, very little actual tubing, which is what the day was supposed to be about and a cool big water slide that is similar to a home made speed slide from Wet and Wild but instead it ramps up at the end and launches you about 4 metres into the air before you crash in the river - it was awesome fun. Needless to say Shell had an excellent day.

The end of our time in Laos was a couple of days spent in Vientiane, mostly recovering from Vang Vieng! We also managed a bit of a walking tour to explore some wats and a strange Laos replica of the Arc de Triomphe, as well as a visit to their huge gold national monument. We amused ourselves by calling each other stupa-heads.

Wat?

Lots and lots of tiny Buddhas in the alcoves

Stupa-head at a Stupa

But that was it, the end of Laos, we crossed the Friendship Bridge into Thailand and will now spend the next 12 days travelling down to Bangkok for our flight home. Laos was good to us but we are definitly happy to be in the land of red curry - so long sticky rice!!!

Mellowing in Muang Sing

2009-01-11T20:24:00.003+10:00

After Luang Nam Tha we headed even further north for a couple of days to stay in Muang Sing. This is our favourite place so far on our trip – just a small town with hardly any tourists, surrounded by mountains and rice paddies. Scott found us a great room with a balcony that had a gorgeous sunset view, and we had a relaxing couple of days wandering around the area. We hired bikes on one day and cycled to China (it was 12km to the border) where we turned around when we saw the scary looking guards. We also visited the morning market where all the different hill tribes around Muang Sing come to sell their wares – lots of weird and wonderful spices, vegetables, sweets, textiles and many unidentifiable objects. There were no other tourists at all and we spent a while wandering around looking at all the different people and goods.

Finally we began to head back south. It was only a two hour bus ride to Luang Nam Tha but after we arrived there, had lunch and a nap, we realised we’d left our laptop charger in our hotel room in Muang Sing – oops. So The Intrepid Scott hired a motorbike and zoomed back to get it, racing the sun – he had to do the last half an hour in the dark with a motorbike light that only illuminated his motorbike basket, so he was tired when he arrived back 4 hours later (but triumphantly holding the charger!) and we headed for the herbal sauna. We haven’t mentioned the Laos herbal saunas yet, but they are amazing, we love them! It costs you 10,000 kip ($2) and they give you a sarong, then you can go in and out of the sauna as many times as you like, and they give you tea when you come out for a break. So nice and relaxing, and very hot!

It was a good idea to have the sauna because then we ended up doing two huge bus rides in a row – 9 hours back to Luang Prabang, and then another 7 hours the next day to Vang Vieng. These buses were not as good as the first ones – a lot slower, bumpier and with one constantly sniffing Laos guy behind us, who Shelley was ready to throttle. But we got there eventually! In between the buses we crossed over with Lana and Molly in Luang Prabang, so we had dinner with them and then got up early before our bus ride the next day to see the ceremony they have in Luang Prabang –every morning the monks file down the main street where the locals (and some tourists) give them an offering of food. It’s quite a sight to see a long line of orange-robed monks being handed sticky rice, and a really touching ceremony – monks are highly respected in Laos society.

So now we are down south in the traveller’s haven and amazingly touristy Vang Vieng, where we plan to get up to a lot of general debauchery!

Trekking in Northern Laos

2009-01-11T20:02:00.004+10:00

Despite the events (or non-events) of new year’s eve, Shelley, rough and tough as ever, bravely boarded the bus up north on new years day. This was to be the first of our encounters with the infamous Laos bus system. We turned up at 10.45am for the midday bus – luckily as it turns out because it actually left at 11am. We were the last two passengers (they were waiting for two more even though there were already 12 people in the 10 seater minivan when we got there). The 5 hour ride only took 4 hours, which was good once you stopped holding your breath and closing your eyes at every corner. The day after we took another 4 hour bus ride and eventually turned up in Luang Nam Tha.

The North part of Laos is really nice – a lot less tourists around, and gorgeous scenery of mountains, jungle and rice paddies everywhere. However the people are a bit of a mixed bag – there is a lot of Chinese influence because it’s very close to the Chinese border, and some of the people seem to be less friendly than the Laos people everywhere else. Anyway, we didn’t stay too long in the town, we quickly organised a 3 day trek for the next day, in a group with a swiss couple and a german guy.

It was so nice to get out of the towns and go trekking. We did about 6 hours of walking each day, mostly through the jungle – and often along precariously narrow paths on the edge of mountains! It was great fun, and we remembered how much we love trekking around all day. Our guide told us a lot about the plants in the jungle that are used by the local people for food or medicine, and a lot of the products they collect to export to China! It seemed like pretty much everything they could find or make, they exported to China. The food on the trek was traditional Laos food of the villages we stayed in, so it was...er...interesting to say the least (strange green sticks, banana flower paste, mushy white vegetables, chicken hearts) and some of it was really nice, but after three days we were sooooooo sick of sticky rice! Cold sticky rice and banana flower paste is not the most appetising breakfast ever.

Other than the food, it was great to stay in the little villages in the middle of the jungle. The first night we stayed in an Akha village where we made friends with a bunch of the kids – Scott taught them some English and tried to teach them how to do his hand-whistling trick (no one could, including Shelley and the other tourists), and they taught Shelley one of their Akha songs. The village was quite picturesque – lots of bamboo huts in the middle of the jungle, with kids and piglets and chickens and puppies running around everywhere.

After dinner the village chief kept feeding us lao lao (rice whiskey) and made us all sing songs. The Laos people are great singers, we think it might be because their language is tonal, and also because they are brought up with singing as their main communal entertainment. Even the kids have great voices and know lots of songs! We couldn’t think of many so we sang “In the jungle” with Scott doing the wimoweh part, and then “I still call Australia home” and “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree” which they really liked. The chief was also very impressed with Shelley’s singing of the Akha song the kids had taught her! It was a great evening and then when we left the next day the chief gave us all bracelets as a souvenir.

On the second day we had more trekking, more sticky rice, and we also played a fun Akha game which involved two seed pods that you threw, flicked and then hopped along with one seed pod balanced on your foot to kick it at the other seed pod. It was fun for a while but then we got a bit over it – but we had to keep playing because our guide was really enjoying it and wouldn’t let us stop! The second night the village we stayed at was similar to the first but we think they get more tourists staying there as they weren’t as interested in us. We still had some singing and playing with the kids (and more lao lao – our guide loved lao lao!) but it was a quieter night. Scott also had a tummy bug so he had an early night. Finally we arrived back in civilisation on day three, happy and tired and very eager to get some non-rice food in town!

Loving Laos

2009-01-02T20:39:00.004+10:00

We are so happy to be in Laos. Vietnam was ok, but Laos seems great already – so much quieter, and the people are really friendly – everyone is ready to smile and say ‘sabaidee!’

We flew into Luang Prabang on the 27th and spent 5 nights there – a little longer than we had planned but we wanted to be somewhere fun for new years, and they were gearing up for it in a big way in Luang Prabang. On the night we arrived our usual search for hotels was thwarted by everywhere being full – eventually we found a place where they let us have a tent outside. It was cheap though! No sooner had we settled in to our tent than we found out the hotel owner was taking some of the other guests out to a local Laos disco, so we tagged along. It was just a tad different from a Western nightclub, mostly dark couches with a dancefloor in the middle, where the Laos youth did line dancing to a live band alternating with dj music. We joined in with the line dancing after a while, it was lots of fun!

Our days in Luang Prabang were mostly spent moseying around. We did a lot of walking around to different Wats (temples) and some museums, drinking beer and watching the sunset. We also visited a nice waterfall just outside the city (took some sweet talking to get in as we didn’t know it had an entry fee and hadn’t brought enough money) where Scott went swimming in the waterholes (Shell was too wussy – it was freezing!) and we visited some bears that were in a sanctuary after being saved from illegal wildlife trading. While waiting for our fellow minibus passengers to come back we also had fun watching baby chickens and puppies running around in the carpark. It’s always hard watching the way animals are treated in Asia. Some seem to be happy – dogs and pigs and chickens that get to roam around wherever they want – but others get treated really badly, like the little birds in tiny tiny basket cages they were selling at a temple we visited, presumably for worshippers to set free as a gift to buddha. I don’t think he would have liked the idea.

We also spent a day cycling around the countryside, and it was great to get out of town and do some decent exercise. We had lunch in a tiny village and visited some more wats – one of which was 5 levels high and was covered inside with ornate paintings of buddha’s life, and also the different types of hells! A friendly well-meaning monk offered to explain the paintings to us, but his limited english combined with his enthusiasm for the subject matter meant it was a a slow and painful process and so we escaped as soon as we could without offending him. We are enjoying seeing the monks everywhere again, the town looks so much nicer with orange-robed monks wandering around everywhere. Apparently they have a ceremony every day at 6am where all the monks walk down the main street and the villagers offer them food – we meant to go really we did but we are just too lazy for 6am.

Finally, after chilling out in Luang Prabang for a few days, it was New Year’s Eve! We were so excited! We watched the sunset with a beer and had some dinner and cards, then called our parents just after New Year’s in Oz, and headed to the pub. All was good – loads of people out, we met a few groups of people and started chatting and playing pool...

And then, at 10:30pm, Shell’s tummy decided it wasn’t happy. She thought it was the dodgy Laos cocktail she had just had, and even after we headed home at 11pm for a quick vomit, it all seemed better and we went back out to the pub. Met some more people, everywhere was packed and getting ready for a lot of partying. However, shell’s tummy didn’t want to party. In fact, it wanted to be a party pooper. At 11:50pm, it just couldn’t wait any longer, and so we ended up having our new year’s countdown in our room, in between vomits. Woooooooo!!!!! Lucky we stayed in Luang Prabang for those couple of extra nights. What a gut-wrenching story – that’s for you Brian.

Don’t worry, Shell was much better the next day, and even managed to brave a 5 hour bus trip. She’s saving her partying for later on in this trip!

Hannoying Hanoi

2008-12-27T15:04:00.004+10:00

Ok, so our time in Hanoi has been fairly up and down. Generally up in the night time and down in the day. Things started off in the usual manner. The guesthouse we wanted to stay at was full and the surrounding ones were either full or out of our price range, so Scott did the usual wandering around for an hour in the beep beep of the traffic (to be honest the continual sound of horns and dodging through crazy motorbike drivers has slowly started to send us crazy. It was fun for a while but now the thought of stepping outside to face the chaos gives Shell a small twitch in her left eye). Anyway, Scott found a pretty good, cheap and QUIET (Oh my god such luck!!!) guesthouse. We then booked a trip for Halong Bay for the next morning.

Our Halong Bay trip was not as much of an up as we had hoped. After being an hour late to pick us up and overbooking the boat, then trying to blame the guests for "making things difficult" for all wanting to actually go on the boat, having 2 stand offs on the port, 1 stand off on the boat in the port (with a break from the stand offs of a nice pleasant lunch of peanuts, cucumber and rice for the vegos), we finally left the port for the legendary Halong Bay approximately 3 hours later than scheduled.

We then got dropped off at some big cave thing, which was an impressive series of quite large limestone caverns, but then our boat broke - are you serious!!! The guide made some feeble excuses about the port being too shallow to bring the boat in but we noticed that from that moment on we found our boat being towed by another little but hopefully more reliable boat.
After that we cruised round the bay for about an hour - which was quite beautiful. We spent the night playing cards with the other guests. Made some friends with a nice NZ couple and a gang of 6 nice English lads (and one lass). Woke the next morning for a quick kayak session around the islands, which was pretty, jumped back into the big boat being towed by the small boat, back to Halong Bay City, into the bus and back to lovely Hanoi. Actually, Halong Bay itself was nice, but the organised boat trip was a bit of a cock up.

We then spent the next 4 days in Hanoi, because we decided to fly to Laos - yay - but the earliest plane was on the 27th - poo, stuck in Hanoi-ing. Everywhere we go people tell us how horrible the buses are and how difficult the border crossing we planned to use is, so bugger it, we bit the bullet and bought the flight.

The days in Hanoi were a bit frustrating - lots of wandering around avoiding traffic and being beeped at. We did get to see Ho Chi Minh stuffed in his mausoleum (which Scott thought was interesting, but just gave Shelley the giggles), and some cool markets. But the nights in Hanoi have been much more enjoyable - we spent the first night after Halong Bay going out to some pubs with the English guys we met on the boat, had 1 litre "Big Man Beers", played some pool and had a dance - it was nice for us both to have some other people to play with!
The next night was also fun as the soccer final (Vietnam and Thailand) was on, being watched by everyone in town, and luckily Vietnam won, so the streets were full of motorbikes and people waving flags, everyone driving round and beeping for hours after the game! Since it was Christmas eve there was a mixture of Vietnam flags and santa balloons being waved around, and our waiter was a santa who gave us lollies - yay. Christmas is celebrated heaps more than we thought it would be here - well at least the commercial aspect is everywhere, with tinsel, santa suits and christmas trees in almost every shop. Our Christmas day was nice and relaxed - we had bought each other some cool little gifts, then we rang our parents and went out for a decadent Christmas breakfast of pancakes and chocolate ice cream -yum!!

Last night was also fun - we went to see a water puppet show, which was entertaining and very pretty, accompanied by a band of traditional vietnamese instruments. So now it's off to Laos - Gooooooooooood Bye Vietnaaaaaaaaam!!!

The High Road to Hoi An

2008-12-20T13:22:00.002+10:00

After the excitement of Dalat we decided we needed some relaxation, so we headed to the much-rumoured (but difficult to track down) Jungle Beach resort. While the water wasn't as clean as we hoped and it was a bit on the expensive side, it was still nice to chill out there for a few days, away from the constant horn-tooting that pervades the rest of Vietnam. We had sent our trusty guinea pigs (Sarah and Chantal) on ahead so we knew how to get there and we managed to convince them to stay an extra day so we could pester them. Notable events at Jungle Beach included lots of reading, card-playing and beach-walking up to the local fishing village, as well as the appearance of a cobra (very exciting) and shelley getting bitten by a dog (small panic until we found out it gets yearly rabies shots). Shelley is now banned from hurting herself any more for at least another week.

Our hut at Jungle Beach

We then sent our faithful guinea pigs off again ahead of us, to discover that the night bus was not a very good idea (something to do with drugtaking bus driver and plentiful horn beeping) so we backtracked to nha trang and got the overnight train to Hoi An instead. This turned out to be a great idea since we spent a lovely afternoon in Nha Trang visiting a big buddha and a great photographic exhibition and walking along the seaside, and the train was quite comfy. We took our poor guinea pigs out for dinner in Hoi An to thank them for their suffering on our behalf :)

Big buddha in Nha Trang

So we finally arrived in Hoi An, which has turned out to be a great little town, full of life and little streets, old buildings and most of all - clothes shops! There are no photos of our (many) purchases yet as they are still being altered to our size, but we have definitely done our share of shopping for the year! It's quite fun being measured and getting things made especially for you. Scott especially looks very spiffing in his wedding tux!

As well as shopping (it takes lots of time!) we have been wandering the streets of Hoi An and eating the yummy and cheap food here (3 course vego meal for $3!!). It's great seeing the pretty temples and just watching the street life go by - yes pretty much everyone wears the pointy conical hats and they manage to balance ridiculous amounts on motorbikes and bicycles! We really like the Vietnamese, they have a good sense of humour and seem to be very playful and friendly all the time. Bargaining involves lots of laughter (what! noooo! i not buy the material for that! You help me, you no worry! you give me little bit more!)

Boats on the river in Hoi An

Pretty pagoda

We have managed one side trip while staying here - to the ancient Cham ruins of My Son. They were pretty (very old and covered in grass and ferns) but the girls had most fun taking photos with the large Lingum statues :)

Deafening, Dangerous, Delightful, Death-Defying Dalat

2008-12-12T21:22:00.006+10:00

Ok, so we had to get out of Saigon quick smart because it didn’t really suit our style. Big noisy Asian cities never do. We had heard about Dalat, which was supposed to be this nice little place out in the mountatinas, so we made a beeline for it pronto.

Unfortunately Dalat was not as quiet and as little as we had hoped. It actually attracts over 800,000 Vietnamese tourists every year and we were hoping it would be because of it’s nice quiet scenery but apparently Vietnamese tourists like kitsch attractions, because Dalat is full of pig-shaped balloons, rollercoasters down to waterfalls, and locals dressed as cowboys and bears.

The first night and most of the next day we spent valiently trying to find a room that wasn’t noisy (Shelley’s criteria) and had a view (Scott’s criteria). This isn’t easy with the constant beeping of motorcycles, taxis and buses everywhere. We finally found somewhere a bit out of town, which we could get to easily as we hired a motorcycle! Scott has become adept at negotiating the crazy traffic here, which never involves traffic lights, rarely involves giving way, and often involves people driving on the wrong side of the road or cutting across in front of you. But there is some sort of order to the chaos, and we haven’t hit anyone yet.

His best feat involved the two of us on the motorcycle with our two big bags and the one small bag (drving quite slowly I might add) to our new temporary home outside of the city. Next we thought it would only be fair to let Shell have control of our new toy. Ten minutes later we had our first motorbike accident. Well, not so much an accident as Shelley driving the bike into a ditch. It would be nice to say that it was a tricky turn, but it wasn’t. There also wasn’t any traffic to be seen anywhere, it was quite a wide road, and the bike wasn’t very difficult to drive.

Note to Jill and Chris that nobody was really hurt during our crash. Shelley got a few little scrapes and bruises (it was her pride that was hurt the most) and Scott being the big brave man that he is jumped off the motorcyle just before it hit the ditch so he got away pretty much scar free except for Shell calling him a big wussy wus bag for the next 2 days.

So our first 2 days in Dalat weren’t exactly success plus. But we had our motorcycle and our health and were going to find some nice places to explore God damn it. And we did! In fact we had a really great 3rd day of cruising around on the bike (this was the beautiful mountain scenery we were hoping for ) looking at a couple of random waterfalls, getting a cute duck paddle thing and having an explore around a man made but very pretty dam, playing pool and having a few beers with some other random travellers and finding the weirdest “waterfall” we had ever seen, which was more like a continuous mudslide.

The best part of the day was finding this amazing six tier pagoda, which we spotted randomly as we were cruising around. It was really beautifully coloured with pieces of ceramic plates and you could climb up through the inside to the top, which offered some amazing views of the local country side.

The most interesting part of the pagoda was this massive 3 metre tall, 2 metre diameter bell, with a big piece of log hanging next to it that you could use to ring the bell, so of course we did and we took a video of it, but the strangest thing is that you couldn’t hear the bell on the video. We tried three times and it made a really loud noise and you could hear the kids outside of the pagoda and other background noise on the camera but for some reason not the bell. Scott’s therory was that the bandwidth of the transducer of the camera was too narrow to capture the low frequency noise the bell made but Shell’s theory was that the bell was holy and therefore magical so its sound could not be captured (either that or we haven’t figured out how to use our new camera very well quite yet – nah it must be magical)

As if the success of our third day wasn’t enough, our 4th and final day in Dalat was so awesome!!! We went canyoning and it was great!! I’ll let the photos tell the main part of the story but basically we went for a 5 hour walk/climb down a river with 4 parts that we had to abseil. The highlight was abseiling down a 25 metre waterfall (not just a little trickly waterfall but a full on gushing, spraying, “what do you mean we’re going to absail down through that” waterfall). We also went down a natural waterslide and we were supposed to jump off a cliff into a rockpool at one stage but just before Scott was about to jump a 2 metre snake swam into the spot Scott was going to jump into so we decided to let the snake have that one.

Overall, Scott was stoked that Shell took an awesome photo of him doing a big jump off the abseil rope and into a rockpool and Shell was stoked that she did every single abseil even though she was scared out of her wits and that she was not a big wussy wus bag even once (unlike Scott who jumps off motorcycles just because of a little incy wincy ditch).

Swimming under a waterfall

Shell going down the 'Washing Machine'

Scott about to venture down the big waterfall

Scott's big jump at the end of the big waterfall

Saigon is super speedy

2008-12-08T21:14:00.003+10:00

Well we made it! We're on holidays again! Yaaaaay! It's great to be back in Asia, almost feels like coming home. This is just a quick first blog entry to let you all know we're alive and having a great time - Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) has manically crazy traffic but it seems to have some sort of order - you just have to walk slowly across the road and hope it all goes round you! We have been having fun seeing all the weird and wonderful things people can put on motorbikes: families of four, bus windshields, huge hands of bananas, steel pipes..... we've also been wandering around seeing some museums and things and learning lots about Vietnamese history - so much walking!! We are going to have buns of steel. One fun random event yesterday was we happened to find the finals of the Vietnam Open (badminton) so we went along to that - the crowd went wild because the Vietnamese guy won!

Will do some fun stories in a few days, for now here's a couple of photos:

Incense coils in a pagoda we visited

Bananas!

Elephants feet at the reunification palace....weird...

Let's Do That Again!!

2008-11-25T13:00:00.002+10:00

So you all probably know we are heading off into the wide world again on December 6th. This time not such a long trip - just 2 months - but we thought we would restart this blog again so we can keep you up to date with our adventures.

After some wrestling with this blogger site (what do you mean that's not my username? What do you mean I don't have a blog? What do you....... ah I was using the wrong password) we have regained control of our blog and will (hopefully) provide you with regular updates and silly photos.

See you at the end of January!
Smell and Snott :) :) :)

Back in Brisbane!

2007-06-05T12:17:00.000+10:00

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!

2007-06-05T12:08:00.000+10:00

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

2007-06-05T12:03:00.001+10:00

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

Langtang trek 3 - Over the pass

2007-05-13T19:19:00.000+10:00

So after some fun in the snow at Kyangin we headed down (to 1660m) and then up again towards our highest point, the Laurenbina La pass at 4610m. As we may have mentioned, the Nepali people are lovely but have this annoying habit of making tracks that go over the mountains instead of around them. They probably invented the term 'As the crow flies' and so we use the term 'Nepali Flat' a lot - up and down, up and down, up and down......

Along the way we were very happy to find someone with a battery charger to lend us, as we used up all our camera batteries taking photos of snow, and being organised as alway, we hadn't charged our other batteries before the trek. Luckily a nice French girl saved us. And the next day we ended up following their group, because we got lost on the way to our original destination, so gave up and decided to follow the groups with guides, even though it did entail a 1700m climb in one day - we earnt a beer that night! The view was amazing up at Laurenbinayak - see a movie we took at a Stupa nearby.

We visited the holy Gosaikunda lakes at 4380m, which were surprisingly warm at the edges (Hindu faithful bathe in them in summer - brrrr!) and then crossed the pass the next day (see the picture above). Neither of us had ever trekked in snow before so we were a bit frightened (Shell especially) and there were a few stops for Shell to cry and Scott to say "It'll be ok baby, we can do it". Actually, if not for some helpful pointers from an English birdwatcher, we might have given up and turned back. There was one section of snow that looked particularly scary with a big drop beside it, that Shell made Scott climb halfway down the hill to go around, and then climb back up through what we discovered (the hard way) to be thorn bushes. Still, we made it and it was gorgeous!

Then it was a few days trek back to Kathmandu through a different sort of landscape - terraced hillsides and lovely little villages and cows instead of yaks. We were ready to stop by the end of 16 days, but coming back to civilisation was a bit of a culture shock. The food in Kathmandu is so much better and cheaper than mountain food - of course you have to pay for someone to carry everything up there on their backs, so you don't complain! All together we had a brilliant time, and are now the proud owners of sturdy calves and pert bottoms!

N.B. we worked out that a lot of our videos weren't actually visible unless we gave a direct link to them. So now we've made them visible - if you follow the Our Videos link in the right hand column you can have a look at lots of them!

Shell writing her diary

Climbing 1700m....

Well-deserved beer after 1700m climb!

Checking out the guide book at Laurenbinayak

Shell and the Gosaikunda Lake

Scott on a frozen river

Langtang trek 2 - Snow in Kyangin!!!!!

2007-05-10T17:42:00.000+10:00

It snowed. Wow overnight it had snowed at least two inches and we awoke 5am the next day acting like kids. And even better, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it lasted like that all morning. Now if you’ve ever been high in the mountains, you probably realise that clouds normally start appearing pretty quick in the morning and don’t leave all day ruining all your views and atmosphere, but luckily we were free to walk down the valley in the snow, giggling, taking about 100 photos, making a snow man, Scott writing his name in the snow and awing at the absolute beauty and spectacular mountain peaks which were all around us. It was perfect!!!

Have a look at a movie we took

we 'made' a friend - scott's first ever snowman!

on our long walk

yak and yak impersonator

Kyangin covered in snow at dawn

Langtang trek 1 - off we go again!

2007-05-10T16:25:00.000+10:00

So after 12 days trekking in Annapurna, you’d suspect we’d have enough of tired legs, sore shoulders and freezing nights but just 10 nights after we stepped off the Annapurna range we were on a bus heading for the Langtang Mountains. Unfortunately it didn’t start quite as we planned. As we were packing up our stuff before heading for the bus, Shell said, “I don’t feel so well.”

Long story short, three days later Shell had developed Giardia, which is a bacterial parasite quite common in the Nepalese water. We’ve read it can take up to three weeks to develop in your system so she probably got it in the Annapurna region.

So we camped out in a town called Lama Hotel (funny name for town, I know) and stayed at a place called Friendly Guest House. We initially chose the place because it offered us a good discount but it ended up more than living up to its name.

The old constantly smiling lady there had some Japanese natural medicine for digestion problems called Seirogan (don’t ask where the hell she got it from), but she gave Shell that for a couple of days and next thing we know she’s good as new – damn those Japanese are the bomb at making everything!!!

Anyway the next couple of nights we climbed slowly up to the peak of the first part of our journey, a village called Kyanjin Gompa at 3730m. It was a beautiful little climb that started through the forest, which always took Shelley ages to pass through, sometimes to poo and sometimes to explain to Scott something botanical that he normally didn’t listen to and said “Yes Dear”

Once the forest cleared we started to get a tantalizing view of the spectacular Langtang range, with its peaks in the distance and all around us slowly starting to swallow us within as we climbed deeper into its belly.

We saw loads of cool little things on the way, including some amazingly brightly coloured Tibetan people, with all the women wearing belts that hung fabric from behind them, starting from their waist and falling to their ankles, decorated with large horizontal stripes of all types of different colours. Pretty much every woman we saw around these regions would wear one of these belts.

But Scott’s favourite sight around this range (other than the mountains – oh sorry yes and of course you too Shell - blurgh) was the yows. What’s a yow you say. Glad you asked. A yow is a cross breed between a yak and a cow. They supposedly give more milk than a yak or a cow but like most things, the male is useless and infertile. Anyway they are so funny coz most the time they just look like hairy long overweight cows but with slightly more placid faces. Its hard to explain. You have to see one to know what we mean.

So on our 5th night in the Langtang mountains, at Kyanjin Gompa, we went to sleep in a cloud. The weather had turned pretty bad and we didn’t have high expectations for the next day but we went to sleep hopeful and awoke very joyful for we had received a fantastic present overnight and the next day turned out to be one of the best days we’ve had on the trip so far....

a yak! or is it a yow?

look at me!!!

chilling in the Langtang amphitheatre at Kyangin

so cute!

kids and prayer flags - lots of both in Nepal

birds-eye view of a village on a terraced mountain

scott crossing a precarious bridge

bath time!

prayer flags in the mist

Trekking in the Himalayas....

2007-04-09T17:12:00.000+10:00

Phew! After 12 days of trekking, our butts are firm, our legs are strong, our feet are blistered, our eyes are still full of the amazing views and our bag is slightly lighter from losing our camera. Sigh. But not to worry, we still have half a trip's worth of photos, thanks to an old style camera we bought from an old style Nepali couple - it has been renamed our super-dooper camera, due to its lack of zoom, constant flash, sliding shutter, manual wind-on and rewind, and dodgy photo quality. But we love it. Luckily we still have Shell's camera that we left in Pokhara, so there will be more photos soon, but no photos from this trip on the blog sorry unless by some miracle we find a scanner round here. You'll have to wait till we get back to Australia to look at them.

But you can take our word for it - the scenery was amazing. Stunning. Gorgeous. Huge snowy mountains all around us, pretty flowers, little villages, smily people. Lots of tourists too and little stalls trying to flog the same things to you, but they weren't nearly as hassly as the Indian equivalents. We started off at 1100m and climbed to 3200m over a few days, only to descend back to 1100m (admittedly at a town with hot springs so we didn't mind and took the opportunity to have a day off!) and then climb up to 3700m, with a side trip to a tea house at 4200m. It's harder to climb at that altitude, and you start panting as soon as you start moving, but the air is crisp and pure and there's lots of snow and yaks to look at. We were quite proud of ourselves on our longest trek ever (shelley especially is proud anyway, cause she wasn't even going to go initially and was, don't tell anyone, a bit scared) and we're planning another one before we leave Nepal.

Some of the best bits were:

- the yak who waited for us to move to the side of the track until he would go past
- the many coloured spring flowers all around
- snow! yaks! yaks are so cute in a kind of scary looking way.
- shelley getting blisters and doing half the trek in the oh-s0-sexy combination of thongs and socks. Either tough or stupid.
- climbing to our highest at the 4200m tea shop, only to decide to try the local Tibetan tea, which turned out to be salty and almost undrinkable even with 3 spoons of sugar, but both of use didn't want to offend the lady so we drank some, making horrible faces, and then tipped the rest into the bushes
- having homemade apple cider in Marpha, the Apple Capital of Nepal (again, mainly shell's opinion here)
- food tasting sooooo good after a whole day's trekking
- our cool walking sticks we're going to try to bring back to Aus
- sunrise over the mountains from Poon Hill, a gorgeous panorama that was spoilt a bit by the 200 tourists up there for the sunrise.
- meeting lots of different people and playing lots of cards with an English couple
- the poor porters carrying 3 or 4 bags each. We carried our own, though i have to admit sometimes we would have wished for a porter....
- just the mountains everywhere, the quiet and the trees and the desert and the birds.

So you'll have to imagine! It was a great trek, but next time we want to do the whole Annapurna circuit and cross the Thorung La pass like a lot of the people we met. Have to come back to Nepal one day then....

Oh and by the way we've uploaded some new movies and I'll be uploading some more over the next few days. Take a look at the link to our movies in the right hand column of this page, inparticular check out the ones at the end of Scott and Shell feeding the baby elephants and playing with them in the water, plus Scott climbing up one's trunk..... (if myspace tells you it has an error, just refresh the page)

Royal Chitwan National Park

2007-03-26T23:08:00.001+10:00

Hey again! Have a fast internet connection now so here are some photos - check out this entry and the Varanasi entry for new photos if you like!

Scott showing off his soccer skills

I think they like posing for photos...

Yum, elephant snot!

The playful elephant all by himself

Oooo, he likes that..

A gharial - small crocodile

Very excited baby wants our biscuits!

Buffalo crossing

Like a tank! Lucky we were on an elephant.

Ready for our safari on Emily.

Yay, we're still on, don't roll over yet - argh! (spot shell's leg below)

All the worries and bad feelings we still had concerning the problems we encountered at the border were completely extinguished soon after reaching the Royal Chitwan National Park. We had such a great time there and there’s so much we could tell you. We could go into detail about the beautiful boat ride we did up the river spotting various animals and birds including a stork and a crocodile, or we could try to explain to you how we were scared senseless before undertaking a bush walk with our local guide because of the countless warnings he gave us and the tactics needed in case we ran into a variety of different wild beasts that seemed to be present (like ruhnning in zigzags if a rhino charged us). Or we could give descriptions of how it felt to see, 2m away from us, a massive rhinocerous (about 2m long by 1.5m high by 1.5m wide), which we would not surprised if they were the orginal inspiration for military tanks, from the top of an elephant on our elephant safari, or we could try to explain what it was like to witness the unusual cultural/homosexual show that seemed to blend traditional stick dances with transvestite dances, or we could describe how we oohed and aahed over the absolutely gorgeous baby elephants that we fed and that chased us round wanting our cookies in the elephant breeding grounds, but we’ll skip all that and instead focus on the highlight of our time in the park... the bathing with elephants.

We had heard there was an area where we could go and they would let us swim and bathe with the elephants. We had to admit we were sceptical, but when we got to the area where the locals bring their trained domesticated elephenats to wash every morning we were pleasantly surprised to see four elephants playing around and splashing themselves with the water. Two of them already had tourists struggling to hold onto their backs as they squirted their riders with water from their trunks and wriggled their bodies in a playful way in order to try and dislodge their passengers.

The third elephant was allowed to play by himself. We have to admit, he seemed the happiest with his trainer siiting on the bank watching him. The great beast continued to play and splash himself with the water the entire time we were there. In fact when we left he was still playing, with his trainer patiently waiting for him. He seemed a little smaller than the others so he was probably younger and more playful and although sometimes it’s hard to tell when an animal is happy, we both agreed that we think that elephant was definitelty smiling.

Anyway, it didn’t take us long to skip down to the waters edge towards the fourth elephant (the biggest one). At that stage he was lying happily in the river with his trunk sticking out of the water like a massive snorkel. Scott nodded to the local indicating that we were keen to play with the elephant, where he held out his hand and helped us onto the elephant’s side. He then moved towards the back of the elephant and said repeatedly in a stern voice but not actually shouting "Hazza hazza hazza" or something like that at which the elephant began to roll from its side onto its legs. When this happened, we had to scramble from the side of the elphant, towards it back and then edge towards its neck for a steadier position.

Smiling and laughing as the beast stood and steadied itself, we waved like the tourists we were to our guide who was busy taking photos for us. It didn’t take the elephant trainer long to command "Chop chop", where the elephant, unknown to us, started to fill his trunk from the river. A couple of seconds later we felt the impact of the animal releasing its load of water, Scott especially who was in the front and hence received the direct impact and felt the force of the water hitting him like a firehose.

After another half an hour of the elehpant trying and succeeding in throwing us from its back and dozens more squirtings we left smiling from ear to ear after paying the owner of the elephant a tip of 100 rupees (probably the best 2 Australian dollars we’re ever spent). We took a couple of videos there too – will upload them soon!

It was a magical experience and we decided to stay another night simply to do it all again the next day, where Scott was able to convince one of the elephant owners to let the elephant pick him up with its trunk - something he’d seen one of them do earlier and was determined to give a try. Basically the elephant stands still and you stand in front of him, hold each of its ears with each of your hands, place one of your feet on his trunk and when you lean forward, it lifts you with ease where you walk up his trunk and onto his head. Then it squirts you when you get there, but we think it did that bit just for fun.

Crossing The Border...

2007-03-26T23:08:00.000+10:00

Well, crossing the border from India to Nepal was an exciting and emotional day. At the beginning of the morning we knew that it was going to be our last day in India and Shell’s first ever overland border crossing. What we didn’t realise was that it would turn out to be also her first ever illegal border crossing. We were shocked and not surprisingly quite fucking pissed off when we got to the border and opend up the part of the bag with our backup English pounds, American and Australian dollars to find out that it had all somehow magically disappeared.

We still haven’t quite figured out exactly when and where this occurred but it didn’t change the fact that we were now stranded at the border with no more cash than about 30 Australian dollars between us and hence no actual way of paying for visas into Nepal. No problem, we thought, very pissed off and inconvenienced but nothing too major – they didn’t steal any cards or the cameras or laptop or anything. We’ll just have to go to the ATM. Oh, there’s no banks or ATMs in the town on this side of the border. Look, there on the other side, in Nepal, where you’re not allowed to go yet.

So after a small sob story they let Shell sneak over the border and change some money while they held Scott as bond. Needless to say Scott was quite pleased to see Shell return with the 60 US dollars we needed to pay for our visas, so we started our time in Nepal a little displeased but at least there. However we soon discovered some cheap but good whiskey and set about forgetting our troubles.

Varanasi

2007-03-26T23:06:00.000+10:00

Bathers at the ghats

Cow trying to play hide and seek, not very successfully

Sunset ceremony

Painting in the Tibetan Buddhist Temple

Scott with a huuuge prayer wheel at the Tibetan Buddhist Temple

An old temple half sinking into the river

Boats on the Ganges

Monks with video cameras! Scott loves these guys.

Our rower at sunrise

Saris getting dried after washing in the Ganges

Our last stop in India was a few days in the holy city of Varanasi. Despite some of the worst harrassment (beggars, rickshaw drivers, shop owners, hash sellers, religious sadhus, etc) we’ve come across in India, it was an intriguing place to stay for a few nights. The town is strung along the holy Ganges river, with over 80 bathing ghats on the riverside, each of which has a different special purpose or property. It was a great way to spend your days, wandering up and down the river, watching pilgrims bathing, people washing clothes, boats, sadhus, and just generally life going on. That’s pretty much how we spent our time in varanasi, although we did get up ridiculously early one morning to go on a boat ride at sunrise, which turned out to be worth it, it’s such a pretty time of day and the ghats were bustling already. We also saw some of the sunset ceremony they seem to put on mainly for tourists, with lots of smoke and bell ringing down by the main ghat. Of course this is India, so it didn’t start till an hour after sunset.

One of the most confronting experiences here was watching the cremation ghats. You can’t watch from too close because the families (understadably) don’t want tourists at their funerals, but from a nearby balcony you can watch all you like. It was morbidly fascinating, seeing them bring down the bodies all decorated and covered in shawls, where they were taken down to the river to be immersed in the holy water, then brought back to a stack of wood, removed from their decorations until they were just in a white cloth, placed on the pile and a fire was lit. There were pyres everywhere, and it was quite unnerving seeing charred body parts sticking out from the flames. We watched for a long time, it was hard to look away. Apparently they have 200 or so cremations a day – and it takes 360kg of wood each – so the place is covered in wood piles 2 stories high, and boatss keep pulling in stacked high with logs. It’s an auspicious place ot be cremated if you’re a Hindu, and there are more than enough people wanting to be burnt there to keep them busy.

We also took a day trip out to Sarnath, just outside Varanasi, supposedly the place where Buddha gave his first teachings. There’s a monument and a deer park, but the most interesting thing there is all the different Buddhist temples from around the world, which have very different feels to them – the neat Japanese one with a pretty garden, the colourful Tibetan one with prayer wheels and paintings, the austere and huge Chinese one with enormous statues, and the simple Thai one where 10 year old trainee monks were studying and were very keen to show us around – sooooooo cute! We managed to piss off a rickshaw driver who’d agreed to wait for us there and then take us back to Varanasi, but who kept following us around and showing us his watch, so we eventually paid him for one-way and told him to get lost.

Delhi

2007-03-26T23:04:00.000+10:00

We turned up in Delhi on a train 4 hours late (fitting for our last train in India) at almost midnight, in the rain. We were very happy to have booked a place and went straight to bed! The next day was similarly rainy so we spent the time playing cards and doing mundane stuff like washing and buying a Nepal Lonely Planet and ringing the ATO. Woohoo! Actually Scott and I were sight-seen-out so we declined to go on a whizzbang taxi tour of Delhi on the last day there, when the rain cleared up a bit. We weren’t too upset – the Red Fort sounded nice but we didn’t mind missing the lengthy excursion to the taxi driver’s sister’s friend’s shop. So pretty much Scott and I saw nothing of Delhi in our 2 days there, but it seemed like a nice enough place! We were happy to hang out with Drew and Chris for our last couple of days together, before they headed to Eygpt and we headed to Varanasi, en route to Nepal.

We did, however, spend our last night together by going out on the town. We saw a show that went through some of the major folk dances in India, including a harvest dance, a demon vs god dance with extravangant costumes, a drum dance and a stick dance where the guy did impossible things with an oversized diabolo. We’d thought it might be a bit touristy but it was actually really entertaining and well worth it. Forgot to take our camera though. After the dancing, we splashed out on dinner at a revolving restaurant, 24 floors up. It was a strange experience – fun to be in a posh place with an amazing view over nightime Delhi, and the food was delicious – but Scott escpecially found it a bit of a culture shock to be somewhere so decadent in a country with so much need. We’d spent 5 months eating simply, spending little and dealing with everyday Indians like beggars and rickshaw drivers and tea-sellers, so to be suddenly surrounded by rich Indians spending on one meal what could feed another family for months – was weird and made us feel a bit guilty too, wondering why we were there. Although the truth of it is that spending less on that meal wouldn’t have meant we would give more to beggars or something, it just felt out of place. Anyway, we still had a nice meal and it was pretty fun watching the floor move!

Then finally, after a fun 3 weeks in which we all had (mostly) a good time and nobody killed each other, we bid goodbye to Chris and Drew and set off on our train to Varanasi, having seen pretty much nothing of Delhi but not minding all that much – we were getting pretty sick of the constant harassment in touristy places. It wasn’t so bad at JITM when we worked there, the locals just wanted to say hi and sometimes ask questions or show us their homes, and the teachers at the college were really friendly, but in tourist places there are so many people trying to get you to buy things or give them money or come look at something or ask you your life story or tell you theirs, that it can get tiring and you’re not so inclined to go exploring. It’s not a good attitude because it stops you from giving your attention to genuinely nice people, and from getting to know some interesting new people, but in the end you just become that way in India to stop yourself going crazy. It hits you sometimes, when you just walk past a crippled beggar without really seeing him, or wave your hand in dismissal at a scruffy child saying "one rupee", or tell a rickshaw driver to get lost when they pull up beside you to ask if you need a rickshaw. It hits you how easy it is to become complacent about things that might have made you cry when you first arrived. Maybe it’s the ubiquity of the poverty, or maybe it’s getting sick of the invasion of your space, or maybe it’s because our efforts to help at JITM seemed more like banging our heads against a wall, or maybe it’s because we’ve been eating similar food and using squat toilets and squeezing in overcrowded buses/trains and sleeping in flea-ridden beds too, so we don’t feel as different from the people in the street as we should. And I think that’s why we’re happy to be going to Nepal – we need some space, and some perspective.

The Breathtaking Taj Mahal and Other Events in Agra

2007-03-26T22:26:00.000+10:00

After our relaxing time in Pushkar, it was back into the fray of harrassment in the tourist Mecca of Agra. We couldn’t spend 5 months in India without seeing the Taj Mahal. And it was definitely worth the visit. While you have to navigate your way through the thick throngs of tourists, they kind of make the place more alive and colourful. The Taj mahal itself has a peaceful aura, and is breathtakingly beautiful – made completely of marble, inlaid (by hand) with millions of precious stones from around the world. The work is so precise and detailed you have to admire it, and the place put tears in our eyes (ok maybe just Shelley’s eyes) because of the love that inspired it. If you didn’t know, the Taj Mahal was constructed by the Mughal emperor Shar Jahan in the 1600’s when his wife died in childbirth (of their 14th child!) – she made him promise to build a monument to their love. Or, as Drew says, it’s man’s biggest erection for a woman.

So we spent a pleasant couple of hours exploring the Taj (incidentally the most expensive place to visit we’ve been to in India – 750 rupees, about $25 – but you do get a free bottle of water). We didn’t get up to much else in Agra, since Drew and Chris both has short bouts of stomach upsets, something we’d all been expecting but thankfully lasted less than a day each. While Drew was having close encounters with his toilet one morning, Scott, Chris and I went off for a walk to explore the Baby Taj – a monument to the father of a Mughal empress, that was the predecessor of the Taj Mahal – and ended up surrounded by about 30 inquisitive kids while we stopped to drink chai on the way home. They were only mildly interested until Shelley decided to show them how to make houses from cards, and then Scott and Chris got their cameras out, at which point mayhem commenced. It was all fun until we paid and left, and then predictably some of the kids followed us to pester us for money and pens and sweets.

Chilling out in the holy city of Pushkar

2007-03-10T22:05:00.000+10:00

Ok then, we will! A great cause.

The holy lake at Pushkar is believed to be one of three places in the world where water spurted forth after Brahma, the Lord of creation, laid down a lotus flower to begin the world. So it’s very popular with Hindu pilgrims, and the lake itself is square-shaped, bordered on all sides by the steps of bathing ghats. We have to admit, all four of us got suckered in, and followed some Brahmins (religious caste people) down to the lake to put the flower they gave us into the water. Of course it was more than that, and they made us repeat mantras after them and sprinkle flowers, coloured powder and sweets into the water, then gave us a coconut to hold while they started to tell us about how much money other tourists usually give them. Unsurprisingly “donations” were asked for afterwards.

Pushkar was a chillout place for us – we spent a fair amount of our time in an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet ($1.50) where Scott got our money’s worth and Shelley enjoyed as much muesli as she could eat, and everyone experimented with pancake toppings. We spent lots of time wandering round the lake, climbed up a mountain to the little temple at the top to watch the sunset (and marvel at the disco lights surrounding the idols in the temple – did they bring electridcity all the way up the mountain just for that?). Here's a few hill-climbing photos...

We also witnessed a couple of days of the leadup to an Indian wedding, which included much decoration, boys carrying lanterns in the streets, horses and parasols and jewellery-encrusted women, but most annoyingly, the loudest and most terrible brass band you have ever heard. Not one member seemed to understand melody, rhythm or the point of listening to anyone else in the band. And unfortunately they had that dreaded combination: loudspeakers and a superhuman stamina. We’d go to sleep to their clashings and bangings – no matter what part of the city they were in – and wake up to them 8 hours later. But it’s India, and you couldn’t really get mad at them, you just have to smile at the inanity of it all!

Scott has come up with a great analogy for India – it’s like kids cooking a mother’s day breakfast. You might not get what you wanted, the food will probably be cold or undercooked, and it might come 2 hours late. But it’s delivered with love and a childlike innocence, and there’s a certain beauty in the earnest smiles, so you just eat your cold burnt toast, and sometimes you even like it.

Oh, and Pushkar was also the place where, against all odds and expectations, we managed to get Chris onto a moped! Admittedly she clung onto Drew the whole way and used up a year’s supply of swear words, but we think she might have even enjoyed it by the end of the excursion! They weren’t the flashiest mopeds, but we had lots of fun whizzing round the desert scrub and little villages. We were looking for some Shiva temples – didn’t find them but it didn’t really matter! Shelley had a go at driving this time – so Scott found out how much bumpier and scarier it actually is on the back – and now we both want to get a motorbike back in Oz!

Pretty Pushkar Lake

Colourful saris everywhere...

Colourful turbans in the Pushkar streets

Riding with the wind on speedy camels

2007-03-10T21:55:00.000+10:00

The highlight of Jaisalmer was definitely our camel safari. This involved a jeep ride out into the desert where we hopped onto some camels for an hour or so, to wander around the dunes. Scott’s camel was led by a cute but serious 10 year old boy, the son of our guide, who we nicknamed the “maharajah” because he supervised the preparation of dinner later with a very regal solemnity. (Or maybe he was just staring into space and thinking about bugs, but he seemed to be supervising!) The guides started preparing dinner and left us all on top of a dune to watch the sunset. No sooner had Drew commented “Gee it would be nice to have a cold beer right now!” than an enterprising young man from one of the villages hiked up the dune with a sackful of beer! Not cold, but we were still impressed enough to buy some! After a yummy dinner cooked right there in the desert by our guides and driver, and some wandering round the dunes by the light of a full moon, we headed back in the jeep to town, satisfied and smiling.

Drew, Chris and Tomas watching the sunset

Scott flipping - anyone on his African trip may remember similar photos..

Happy alcoholic

We have to have the occasional romantic photo

The maharajah - Scott's escort

The sand-coloured city of Jaisalmer where photo opportunities were too much for us to resist

2007-03-10T21:43:00.000+10:00

Another day, another fort. But this time, we were actually staying inside the fort! Our rooms in Jaisalmer were cheap, spacious, had hot water (sorry if this is boring for you, but these are very exciting facts for us!) and best of all, had little balconies looking out from the turret we were staying in, with views of the sandstone fort and the desert-coloured city below. It was hard to tell where the town ended and the desert began – although the view was contrasted somewhat by the line and lines of wind-power turbines on the horizon. This is a photo of Scott in our window - see if you can spot him!

The highlight of Jaisalmer was a camel safari (more in the next entry), but our few days there were also interesting because it happened to be the Hindu festival of Holi. If you are uninitiated, this festival celebrates peace and friendship, and no one is allowed to fight or argue for its duration. These feelings are demonstrated by everyone throwing or squirting coloured dye over each other so that all different colours blend together and everyone looks the same. We couldn’t escape, so we wore old clothes and had lots of fun! Some people in the fort invited us to play Holi, so we had some colour on us in the morning, then we got absolutely covered by the kids in the village where our camel ride began – luckily Tomas, a German friend who went on the camel ride with us, managed to grab a squirt bottle from them and get some revenge! Scott still has red dye in his hair 5 days later, and Shelley has a pink bra now!

The view from our turret balcony

A goat eating Scott's shirt

Peacock man!

Scott found some playmates

Jodhpur - great for opium and saffron lassis

2007-03-10T21:22:00.000+10:00

First we should probably tell you about our train to Jodhpur. Basically it was a twenty-one hour journey with twelve of us squishing into an area for six. In general, normally the trains in India are surprisingly good. You simply book the ticket at any station in advance then you get an allocated seat that can turn into a pretty comfy bed. We were very impressed on our first train trip in India!

Anyway, on this occasion, since the train only left once a week, there were dozens of extra people who had “Waiting List” tickets, which means they let you into the carriage but you don’t get a seat. Since half of our group were also “Waiting List” culprits none of us could really complain so we all just grinned and bore it for 21 HOURS. Luckily everyone was friendly and nice and there were smiles and giggles most the trip.

On actually arriving at Jodhpur we found a great place with a balcony and spent a couple of days exploring the beautiful blue city and its dominating old restored fort. The audio tour of the fort was one of the best ones any of us had ever done and really made the fort come alive. We also spent a morning taking a little safari around the local tribal villages, where on the way we chased antelope in our jeep and afterwards Scott was peer pressured by his parents to try opium (but such a small amount that none of us actually felt any of the effects).

Scott's dad trying opium...

A couple of colourful locals

Meeting Buddha (many times) at the Ajanta Caves

2007-03-10T21:11:00.000+10:00

Our overnight train from Mumbai arrived at Jalgaon shortly before dawn. We had a couple of quick chais to wake ourselves up, dumped Chris and Drew at a small dirty restaurant and raced off to negotiate a couple of cheap hotel rooms. Because the train for Rajahstan left only once a week (which was the next day) we were forced to travel to the Ajanta Caves, which are the highlight of the region, on that same day. All groggy eyed and sleep deprived we hopped on a local bus and 90 minutes later arrived at the caves.

We spent the next few hours oohing and awing over the couple of dozen Buddhist caves with many different elaborate statues carved straight from the rock and beautifully restored paintings splashed all over the cave walls. The experience was quite serene over all but also comical in parts, especially when we observed a couple of local guards letting a tour group through a blocked off area to pray and donate money to one of the more significant statues of Buddha. We don’t think the guards realised we were still watching them when they divided the offerings of the group between them and promptly placed their newly acquired bounty into their pockets. But of course we’re sure they were just transporting it to its proper place.... (cough, cough).

Teeny Tiny Buddhas

Shell in a cave

Spot Chris and Drew.....

Buddha having a nap

Full circle of India back to Mumbai - this time with a mission!

2007-03-10T21:01:00.000+10:00

So another overnight train to Mumbai, followed by another local bus and we were back in Colaba, the suburb we started our India escapade in. We spent the day roaming around looking for bits and bobs for a present for Scott’s mum. Since she had turned 50 two weeks previously and was flying in to meet them that afternoon, we wanted to prepare a basket of various treats of India.

So with the rooms booked and our birthday basket ready, we waited. Scott was quite nervous because he had told his parents that they were staying at the Sea Lodge Hotel but it was actually called the Sea Lord Hotel. He had given him the correct directions and correct building with the correct names for the two other hotels in the same building (there were actually five hotels in the building we were staying in) with other correct significant landmarks to head to but not the correct name and was fearing that his parents could end up anywhere in Mumbai. Of course they arrived at the planned time and had even made a friend on the way over.

We spent the next couple of days exploring Mumbai with Scott’s parents (Chris and Drew). For first time third world travellers they did quite well. We had to hold their hands for some of the time but mostly they are fine. We laugh at Scott’s mum when she washes her hands in bottled water before she eats and they gasp at ask when we inform them that “no we don’t need toilet paper, we’re quite used to the left hand right hand system now” but overall we all get along fine.

The first day we re-explored the Haji Ali with them, which was the mosque island connected by a causeway to the mainland and visited the Malaxhmi Temple, supposedly one of the most popular and beautiful Hinu temples in Mumbai. We were all given lotus flowers and blessed by one of the local priests who explained to us that this temple was dedicated to the gods and goddesses of power, education and money.

The next day we took a ferry to the Elephanta Caves, which are located on a small island nine kilometres off the coast of Mumbai. The caves are extremely popular with tourists but for good reasons. The massive sculptures are quite spectacular especially the main attraction, which is an enormous high rock carving of a three faced Shiva, whose six closed eyes seem so peaceful that even the noise of the dozens of tourists around you seems to fade away. These pictures are all from the Elephanta caves.

The colourful hippies of Goa playing in their carnival

2007-03-10T20:46:00.000+10:00

Our last night in Goa turned out to be the most eventful. By a matter of complete coincidence it happened to be the day of the annual Arambol carnival. The array of colourful characters started at about three o’clock in the afternoon at one end of the beach and over a period of about three hours it slowly made its way along the shore with all types of little attractions on the way. We, who are normally quite extravert ourselves at events like this felt as timid as kittens. There were so many bright and beautiful characters that we didn’t really know what to do, especially after spending the last three months in conservative rural India where showing too much ankle is consider sultry we walked around with our chins on the ground at the site of so many half naked people running around with g-strings and body paint.

In addition to the free young bodies there were also, the slightly overweight Dutch man in the tu-tu, the Japanese fairy girl, an old depressed looking clown playing a flute and always smoking a cigarette, a black girl and a white girl wearing one costume with the black girl in white and wearing white face paint and the whit girl in black wearing black face paint, tribal looking warriors with spears to match, girls with ‘kiss me’ written on their backs, a man dressed as round as a ball, three girls wearing different coloured mosquito nets, a fake strongman (actually strong woman) and a musical cart that was the centre of the fiasco blowing different chaotic but harmonious tunes and was continuously surrounded by at least half a dozen people playing tabla, djembe and kettle drums. Although the drums were always present we’re sure the players of them changed quite often.

We spent that day and night playing with the other people in the parade. Watching the fire show performances at the night and dancing to the rave music on the sand. The music was only average and didn’t grab our attention completely so we snuck off to a small nearby restaurant to grab some food where we met the creators of the carnival (the Dutch guy in the tu-tu) and his friends. They turned out to be an interesting bunch who ‘sold joy’ as they put it (street performers) in Europe and had spent every winter for the last eight years in Goa – not a bad idea if you ask me!

Beer, bathing and bliss at Arambol in Goa

2007-02-18T17:49:00.000+10:00

After a night of drinking and debauchery in Kochi on Valentine’s day (we decided to flee the ashram on valentine’s day because you’re supposed to be chaste and not even kiss or hug – ironic hey – so we went somewhere we could have a beer and a kiss!) we arrived back in Goa – the North part this time, at a beach called Arambol, that’s a kind of young hippy/backpacker hangout, along with a significant group of aging hippy stoners, most of whom seem to spend their time at the café at the place we’re staying, and they’re a good laugh! We have a nice room right on the beach, and we’re spending 5 days here dedicated to hedonism. It’s been mostly swimming, reading, wandering up the beach, eating good food, drinking beer (and cocktails on occasion!), chatting to people and lazing around. Goa is nothing like the rest of India – everything is easy and slow here – so we’re enjoying it before we rejoin the fray in a few days in Mumbai!

Goa worked a treat. We spent the whole of the five days here doing as little as we could. The only exception being the day, Scott decided he was sick of watching everybody else having fun on their motorcycles and mopeds and hired one of his own. Not having any experience on a two wheeled motorized vehicle except for a brief stint in Thailand over four years ago was not going to stop him from getting his piece of the action.

After a few wobbly starts he soon got the hack of the vehicle and was smiling from ear to ear as he zoomed around the curvy mountain roads in the hills just behind the beaches of Goa. He spent an hour cruising south and stopped at the Anjuna markets for a quick bear at one of the cliff bars that overlooked the beautiful India Ocean. Since Anjuna was famous for its markets and bargain buys, Scott decided to negotiate himself an anklet for Shell, something he had been planning to do for weeks but never seemed to have an opportunity.

After this quick pit stop he hopped back on the bike, rode down south to the outskirts of the capital Panaji, spent ten minutes negotiating the crazy streets of the capital and navigated his way to Old Goa. This part of Goa was infiltrated quite strongly by the Christian settlers and many old beautiful churches still remained. Scott found it quite strange after setting foot inside so many Indian temples and mosques to be inside a Christian church.

It was like India had taken a European church and attempted to copy it. Scott couldn’t point out exactly what was the difference between the Indian and European churches were but it seemed to him, like with every other attempt India had made to reproduce something Western, that something about it just wasn’t quite the same.

Amma's Ashram

2007-02-18T17:41:00.000+10:00

Another boat cruise through the backwaters, this time on a bigger ferry, dropped us off at Amma’s Ashram for a night. I’m not sure how many people have heard of Amma, but she’s pretty famous and is often called the Hugging Saint. She blesses people by hugging them, and has hugged over 24 million people. She’s pretty amazing – since she was a child she has just wanted to spread love and compassion, and she does this by consoling people, offering advice, and giving them hugs. She’s over 50 now and her popularity and the ashram just keep growing – it’s strange because there’s huge apartment buildings there to house the 3000 people who live at the ashram, which looks strange in the middle of these rural backwater areas! She’s done heaps of good work too – orphanages, building homes for tsunami refugees and other homeless people, feeding the poor, providing pensions, schools and colleges, and heaps of other humanitarian projects. She’s addressed UN conventions and other meetings too, and received peace awards.

The strange thing there was that it was like being in the presence of a god. There are lots of her devotees living there (mostly dressed in white, it’s a bit eerie), and they come to see her giving darshan (the hug-blessing ceremonies she does all day most days where anyone can come queue up for a hug) – when she walks in they all stand up and they pray to her, and in the main hall of the temple there are huge paintings of Amma in the form of Shiva or Krishna, Hindu gods….. it’s all focused on spirituality, with meditation in the mornings and group singing in the evenings, and if you like you can stay as long as you want, months, years, your whole life. We found it a bit strange, but we did get a hug of course, and she is a very good hugger! But when Shelley was getting her hug, Amma decided to hold a conversation with someone behind us – offering advice maybe, but without letting go of Shelley – so that she was held there for maybe 2 minutes, which felt like an eternity, and Scott on his knees behind her found it incredibly difficult not to burst out laughing! It would have been very inappropriate though to laugh at a demi-god during her religious blessing though so he refrained. It was a lovely place – they gave us a room with a balcony right on the beach, and it is full of interesting people (loads of westerners!) so it would be a great place to relax and observe for a while, but we found the spirituality aspects a bit unnerving, unfortunately we are infidels. We really admire her work though, and anyone who hugs so many people has got my respect. Not many photos from here as it was not allowed to take photos inside the complex.

Cruising along....

Fellow cruisers on their way to work

Some of the ashram complex seen from the river

Kollam

2007-02-18T17:24:00.000+10:00

Kollam was the furthest south we ventured – and you could tell the difference, it was much more humid and hot down there closer to the equator! It’s a very confusing town, and the lonely planet map is equally vague, so a lot of our time there was spent trying to work out where we were and how to get to where we were going without getting too lost. The fact that all the locals we asked pointed us in completely the wrong direction really didn’t help! Oh and this was the place that we got excited because Shelley found a cheap room for 120 rupees a night ($4) but which didn’t turn out to be such a good deal because it had fleas and we are now still covered in bites 5 days later.

However, we went to Kollam in order to go on a boat ride around the backwaters there, which was a lovely was to spend an afternoon. The guys punt you around on a traditional canoe-like boat, and you cruise through these little coconut palm-lined channels watching life go on in the villages around you. They also have a few stops so you can see some of the traditional crafts in the region – making rope from coconut fibres and building boats like the one we were in, from jackfruit tree wood and bound together with the coconut fibre rope and made waterproof with cashew nut oil. Apparently they last for 65 years!

Coconuts drying

Our driver....

The driver told us that wearing a hibiscus behind your ear means that you're crazy in that region...... pretty apt really...

Making boats

Another mad one!

Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary

2007-02-18T17:14:00.000+10:00

So after bidding goodbye to Frances we headed off to Kumily, a small town next to periyar wildlife sanctuary, where we were hoping to spot some of the 1000 elephants who live there. Sadly, no elephants (we found out later we should have bribed the guide to take us to some) but we did manage to see some bison, sambar (like stocky deer), wild boar, birds of prey, and lots of Nilgiri Langour – a cute black monkey with a loooooong tail and grey whiskers that’s endemic to the area. We did see fresh elephant poo and tiger poo and porcupine poo, as well as places elephants rub their backs against, and leopard claw marks up a tree! Actually in the end we saw most of this stuff one afternoon when we went into the park and had a guided walk and a boat trip, but earlier that morning we had done a sneaky sneaky guided walk through a side entrance to avoid the huge park entrance fees. Our mate Cappa had done the same thing and saw lots, but unfortunately that morning was misty and the guide was a bit incompetent so on our 4 hour walk we saw nothing. So we had to go into the park anyway! But it wasn’t a complete waste of time, even though we had to get up at 5am for it – because to start with, a little way inside the park, the guide made us crouch down in the early morning pitch darkness to listen. Knowing you’re in a place with tigers and leopards and elephants and lots of other animals really puts your nerves on edge, and sitting there in the darkness we felt palpably how vulnerable humans are, and we really felt our lack of claws or horns or teeth! It got scary as we heard rustlings getting closer and closer – but when we jumped up in fright and whatever it was crashed off into the forest, our guide laughed and told us it was a deer. We’d both been trying to find our nearest weapons and hide behind each other!

In the mist, seeing nothing....

A Nilgiri Langour - awwwww!

Leopard claw marks -ooooooo!

Sambar drinking

So no elephants but it was a fun time – we met some nice people in Kumily and had some beers with them, and we also visited a spice garden (they grow lots of spices round there) where the lovely girl who works there showed us all sorts of things like cardamom, pepper, nutmeg, tea, coffee, ginger, natural insulin plant, menthol plant, cloves, jackfruit, beetlenut and lots of herbal medicine plants. Our noses were all worn out afterwards! Here's Scott sniffing cardamom...

Kannur

2007-02-18T17:08:00.000+10:00

Frances joined us for the first leg of our trip down south, just a night in Kannur where we spent most of our time hanging out in a cheap juice bar that did amazing shakes and an all you can eat lunch for 50c Australian! The main purpose of this visit was to go and watch a teyyam performance – a kind of religious festival that goes for a few days in each little village in the area – they can last all night and have dancers possessed by the gods. Ours was of the tamer variety, but we still saw some crazily decorated guys, one with a headdress almost as big as himself, dancing round to the beat of drums. And their eyes were definitely not in this world! There were also loads of people sleeping there, because they camp out at the temple for the length of the festival. Unfortunately we had to leave the next day or we would have stayed for the 4am bathing and the afternoon coconut throwing they invited us to! There were no other westerners there so we felt a bit intrusive but they all loved having us there and kept trying to give us things – some of the ladies adopted Frances and I and even invited us to all sleep at their house! It was an interesting night…

Starnge possessed guy with a big headress

Ok a bit blurry but it's the temples and the dancers in front of them blessing people

Devoted people sleeping outside

Goa Part 1 - Colva Beach

2007-02-18T17:07:00.000+10:00

Luckily we headed to Goa afterwards for a brief couple of days of swimming and beer…. It was just a short stop but we had some fun drinking cocktails on the beach with Frances who met us there, and the main eventful moment was Scott fracturing his foot while dancing around with some Indian bank function one night. They were on some company excursion (and oh my god Indians are bad dancers! Like the 70’s crossed with 14 year old dancers….) and made us all come up and dance too. Of course they loved Scott’s crazy dancing and kept egging him on to dance more. Unfortunately he landed on a plank that was jutting out at one point and twisted his ankle – but we think maybe fractured something too because it’s still getting better after a week or so. I guess getting a dancing injury gets you credibility! The part of Goa we stayed in was a bit strange though because it was filled with Indian families on holiday – women swimming in complete saris of course – and the beach got manically crowded in the afternoons! We retreated to some beers at the beach shacks, and of course masala dosa (like pancakes with curry and coconut chutney – my dad’s favourite and now we understand why!) Sorry we were having too much fun relaxing to take any photos!

Hampi

2007-02-18T16:48:00.000+10:00

First stop was Hampi, a World Heritage site of a 13th-Century city, full of ruins of temples, bazaars, royal quarters and even elephant stables! It has a very cool laid-back vibe too and we spent a few days there exploring the ruins and wandering around the weird boulder-filled landscape. Highlights were watching the sunset from the top of a big hill, with a 360 degree view of ruins and boulders, trying to fend off cheeky monkeys trying to steal your stuff – there was even a chai seller who’d hiked up there too, enterprising guy so we bought one off him! They also have these round boats as ferries across the small river – they looked really unstable but managed to hold 3 motorbikes and about 15 people in them! It was also great to chat to new people and not just each other – met an Israeli guy (there’s heaps of Israelis over here for some reason) who had managed to get out of the obligatory 2 years of military duty by pretending to be insane, and was travelling instead, and wanted to set up a travelling shadow puppet show…. Only bad point of Hampi was that, after 3 months on an alcohol-free campus at JITM, we went straight to an alcohol-free town! That’s due to its religious significance, because lots of Indian pilgrims still come to the temples there. Oh, and we met our first elephant – Lakshmi – who was a resident at the main temple and she gave Scott a blessing – you give her a rupee coin, which she grabs with her trunk and hands to her minder, then she puts her trunk on your head to bless you. If you give her some bananas instead she does the same – but with more enthusiasm I think!

Wandering along an old bazaar...

Washing day! So much colour!

Scott with the old royal elephant stables in the background

These boats don't look too stable but they can fit 3 motorbikes and 15 people in them!

Some of the many ruins scattered around the area

Scott and Lakshmi eye each other off - just post-blessing

Women in one of the temples - they just looked so pretty!

Monkey surveying the view from the top of Matanga Hill - boulders everywhere!

Goodbye to JITM

2007-02-18T16:34:00.000+10:00

So after 3 months at JITM of both interesting and frustrating times, having accomplished a lot but not quite as much as we would have liked, because of course this is India, we finally embarked upon the road again. Here's a few photos from our last days at JITM.

Sunflowers blooming at the AID site

The pottery guy and his wheel

Our biotechnology students give a good bye party for us

Saying goodbye to Dhanada and Babita

Visiting the Konark temple

2007-01-29T00:07:00.000+10:00

Here are just a few piccies from our trip to the Konark temple also know as the Sun temple because it was built to look like a chariot of the sun god, with sculptures depicting love and life in the 13th century. But we like to think of it as the rudey nudey giggle giggle, wow we should try that temple. Here's some of our favourite rudey nudey giggle giggle happy snaps :)

Waiting for a bus

2007-01-28T22:47:00.000+10:00

The other day we had planned to see the Sun Temple in Konark but since the bus time we had been given for the bus was wrong (as usual), we ended up waiting for an hour at the local bus station in Puri. Instead of hanging around, dealing with the usual bombardment of “Where you from?”, we went for a walk to the nearest little temple.

As soon as we got there we were told that we basically had no chance of getting in because we weren’t Hindu. Oh well, doesn’t really matter, because we had a much better time watching the monkeys play on the trees outside. Cheeky little fellows were having a great time swinging around and hitting each other as often as possible.

After about ten minutes or so of watching the little critters we decided to leave. As we approached the gate on the way out, I (Scott) saw a young child girl sitting near the gate with a little sheet in front of her with a few coins on it. She was obviously begging. I thought this was a little strange because children normally beg around the streets, pulling your sleeve and bouncing around you desperately trying to seek your attention, but this one wasn’t. She was just sitting there quietly.

As we got closer to her I locked eyes with her for a moment. I smiled and tilted my head to the left, which is a common Indian greeting/acknowledgement. She smiled back and tilted her head too, but something wasn’t right. Her eyes were too wise and the way she moved was too subtle and patient. When you greet an Indian child (especially as a white man) they tend to go crazy with excitement, but she hardly moved.

It wasn’t until I had passed her that I realised she wasn’t a child at all. The memory of the small glance I had of her contained wrinkles but she couldn’t have had wrinkles. She couldn’t have been older than 4 or 5. But I had been wrong, she hadn’t been a child. She was an adult, who was no taller than 60cm.

Once we were outside I told Shell about her (she hadn’t noticed). It sounds strange but if you hadn’t looked at her directly from a distance you would never suspect she wasn’t a child. We went back, gave her some money, shook her hand and asked for a photo. She directed us to outside the gate.

As I knelt down on one knee, I felt a little intrusive and was unsure what to do with myself, but she stuck out her hand for me to shake it. We both smiled and – snap, the picture was taken. Shell and I both repeatedly said “Daniabad”, the local word for thank you. She wiggled her head, smiled and looked at us one last time with those eyes, which gleamed of an infinite patience that only someone who is in her position and has accepted her place in life, can obtain, then she walked back into the temple grounds.

Shell and I both left the temple with mixed emotions. We weren’t sure how we felt about the encounter, although it did remind us that there are some amazing people in this world. People who find happiness and inner peace even in the hardest circumstances. They remind you that life is always worth living, no matter how small you may feel :) In the end, we were quite glad we had to wait for the bus!

Delhi Belly or Parlakhemundi Poo?

2007-01-26T01:44:00.000+10:00

Ah the joys of India.

Shelley would just like to inform everyone, for the sole reason that it makes her feel better, that it has been 3 and a half weeks since her last regular movement, with many many many irregular types of movements in the interim. Being India of course, the campus doctor is a bit of a twat who talks to Scott instead of me (of course he's the male so he must control me and know intimate details like how runny my poo is) (actually he does know that because he hears me complain all the time but that's not the point). Also the doctor keeps giving me small doses of different drugs so they don't actually work, and he read somewhere that runny poo can be caused by psychological disorders so he wanted to give me anxiety pills. I'm not anxious! Admittedly I probably look pretty pychopathic when I go see him because of his incompetency. That could be the reason he talks to Scott instead. Anyway, you'll all be glad to know, poo situation seems to be improving. So now I just have to deal with the crap that comes out the other end :)

Love Shell!

Wonderful Waterfall...

2007-01-17T16:09:00.000+10:00

As a continuation of my birthday celebrations, we visited the local waterfall with Dhanada (the director here), his wife Babita and their son Anish, as well as Anish's cousin and Frances, the Birtish girl staying here at the moment. We had lots of fun splashing round - Anish was a great excuse to have water fights and be childish! Then in the evening, Frances and I baked a chocolate birthday cake (in babita's breadmaker - but it turned out yummy!) and then Scott and I cooked everyone pasta - oh my god it tasted soooooo fantastic after continuous curry every day! It was an excellent birthday dinner - the Indians present seemed to like it too, although I don't think it was spicy enough for them!

Frances, Babita, me and Anish's cousin (who studies at JITM)

Pensively watching a local guy trying to climb up the slippery rocks.

Birthday!! Yay!!!

2007-01-17T15:51:00.000+10:00

Yay! it was my birthday on Saturday and I was woken up by balloons and streamers! Had a lovely day being spoilt :) This is us showing how mature I've become now (complete with aussie animal ears)

Another example of the mature 23 year old

The local girls wanted to henna my hand for my birthday - it ended up taking hours longer than we thought it would because they kept arguing over the designs and taking turns to do bits very carefully! Not quite sure what the middle design is - but note the Hindi symbols that looks like Nazi signs!!

Wheeeeee!!!!!!

My new indian Salwar kameez outfit (dress over pants with a scarf) - one of my birthday pressies from Scott. It's so pretty! We had a great day, relaxing, being painted with Henna, buying a new outfit and having a celebratory beer in town. Then the next day continued the celebrations......

New Year's in Calcutta

2007-01-04T16:30:00.000+10:00

Yay! Even though we like our little world in rural Orissa, it was great to escape for a bit of partying and playing for a few days over New Years! We spent 4 days in Calcutta, with our friend Cappa who's been travelling all around India for the last few months and has lots of stories! There was, of course, a lot of drinking, card-playing, pub-visiting and street-wandering. We relished in being touristy again and visited a few interesting places, like a graveyard for important people 300 years ago (see picture above and later on). Unfortunately the best places we went you weren't allowed to take photos - like the botanical gardens where they have the Great Banyan Tree, which has the second-largest canopy in the world! Shelley was in heaven. The circumference of the canopy is 450m and it looks more like a forest than a tree. We also went to the Marble Palace (had to bribe the guard to get in - as if anyone is ever going to find the Tourism Bureau to get the permission you're supposed to have - he must make a fortune from tourists!) where some guy from 200 years ago has a mansion and gardens filled with marble statues, busts, ornaments, floors, as well as famous paintings, chandeliers, exotic animals......

New years was interesting - we'd planned to go dancing at a club but found out that it had a 3000 rupee entry fee that night (AU $100!!!!) so we decided it definitely wasn't worth it and ended up on a rooftop with some spanish girls, very drunk japanese tourists, an american guy playing guitar and lots of fireworks going off all around. It was a good night - but we still really want to go dancing, so we'll have to find somewhere good in Goa!! It was excellent to have a few Kingfisher beers after 2 months of beer-deprivation, and I even found muesli for breakfast (Shelley's main objective for the trip to Calcutta). It gave us a taste for the road again, so we're excited that after 4 more weeks here at JITM we'll be off wandering round once more! There's a heap to do in the next 4 weeks though... and it's been slightly delayed by the fact that we both caught tummy bugs on the way home from Calcutta - thankfully we have our own bathroom here! it has been renamed by my dad from 'Delhi Belly' to 'Parlakhemundi Poo'.

My, he must have had a very small.....

New years Eve, yay, getting ready to go out! Kingfisher beer + party hats= lots of fun!

I can drink just as well as the boys...

To be proper tourists, we visited the Victoria Memorial - ooo pretty

Puppies!!!!

2006-12-25T17:11:00.000+10:00

The wild dogs that live on campus had cute little puppies - there's 20 or 30 of them and they run around playing just outside the building we live in! Puts a smile on your face every morning. They're starting to growl and turn into real wild dogs now though. We love them!

Come play with me!

Anish, the principal's son, who is 7 and fluent in 3 languages and knows something about everything and is happy to tell you! He calls Scott 'Captain Scott' after the Antarctica expedition guy, and he's very cheeky but a nice kid - we play games with him a bit.

Few random photos

2006-12-25T16:54:00.000+10:00

Scott with the goats at "Goat Rock" - one of our walking destinations. See the Hindi symbol on the rock - same as a swastika! They have it everywhere here, apparently Hitler stole the symbol.

Our new favourite walk along a little waterway lined by palm trees and surrounded by paddy fields (well not so much paddy now they've cut most of it down! Lots of straw.)

Pretty sunset behind Boob Mountain. The Asian sun is so big and red and circle-like, because of all the haze here. Looks real pretty near sunset.

Children's Day!

2006-12-14T17:04:00.000+10:00

A few weeks ago we spent the day at one of the local schools because it was Children's Day - they had singing, dancing and speaking competitions (and we got to be the judges as the honoured guests just because we're western!). The kids were sooooooo cute and the dancing was the best bit - a few pictures here and also we took some videos. We put them up on Myspace so you can have a look at a few if you like (and videos from other places too) but the best one is of the little boy in the denim going for his life...... (also see the right side menu bar for a link to our video page)

(My name is flexible here - so far Sherly and Shalle.... and almost always Scot with one 't')

The Riot...

2006-12-13T23:00:00.000+10:00

I awoke to hear a murmer of voices from outside. In my semi-awake state I lay there listening to the sounds outside getting gradually louder. Smiling to myself, I imagined the students ruuning amuck. A couple of weeks ago we had spotted them yelling and whooping on the rooftop of their hostel. When I had asked them “Why?” the next day, they had just responded with “Why not?”- fair enough.

About ½ an hour later Shell awoke also and asked, “Whats that noise?”

“Just the students. Think they’re having another party.”

“Baby that doesn’t sound like a party. Look out the window.”

I looked out and felt like a complete fool. It was obvious she was right. About 400 students had gathered outside our building. They were yelling and chanting and had begun to throw rocks at the walls of our guesthouse.

Our room is at the top at the back so we could only see the overflow of the crowd that had spilled to the side of the building but we could hear bangs against the front and side of the building. Some were just small thuds, which we assumed were the rocks, but others were extremely loud ramming noises, where we guessed the students were smashing some objects against the front gate of the building.

What the hell is going on here? We’ve got pretty good senses of humour but this isn’t funny. This is fucking scary! We decided the best thing to do was to go over the top and panic, so we quickly double-bolted the door and moved the beds against it. Ok, now nobody can get through that without an axe or by burning it down. Lets hope that’s not going to happen.

The main problem (other than the angry mob) was that we had no information and of course we feared the worst. The two main facts that worried us were these:
1. They were obviously deliberately attacking our building (the guesthouse)
2. We were the only westerners at the university, so if for any reason they were angry
against westerners they maybe trying to get into the building to get to us.

Our conclusion: mwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

We decided to call the prinipal (who unfortunately was out of town). We didn’t care if it was 2am. He was already up, trying to deal with the mob with phone calls. He told us that it was basically a protest against some punishments the students thought were too harsh and that we shouldn’t worry. It had happened before and normally they just smashed some glass.

That made us feel a lot better and we got back into our beds (still against the door). Unfortunately the calmness caused by the principal’s words were soon counteracted as the ramming noise turned to massive explosion noises that actually shook the building. We tried to ignore them but it wasn’t easy. Eventually we heard sirens and the noise of obvious crowd control and dispersing. Then we heard a lot less noise – most of the students had bolted. We did hear

Eventually, our heartbeats slowed down, our breathing returned back to normal and the only other sound other than the normal noises of the night was an obviously policeman or security guard conducting an inspection of our building, so we went to sleep, thinking that we were probably stupid panicking foreigners until we awoke the next morning to witness the aftermath. Check it out for yourself:

By the way in addition to burning the two cars, the motorcycle and the pushbike (our bike – mwaaaaaaaa) they also went on a rampage throughout the campus, smashing hundreds of windows of buildings and vehicles, destroying dozens of computers, annhilating the ambulance and trashing the administration block and many other offices. One of the other lecturers was telling us about rocks that were thrown through his window and zoomed past his head. But don’t panic we’re fine. There was a few security guards beaten a bit but nobody was heart too badly. And it gave everybody something to talk about for the next week or two!

What? A cyclone? A party? An adventure? A....walk?

2006-12-08T15:20:00.000+10:00

A pretty sunset climb at least! Ok promise this is the last walk for a while. Just some more silly photos. By the way, we have uploaded quite a few videos to myspace if you want to see, they are here

The JITM campus. See, we weren't lying, it is in the middle of nowhere!

You guessed it - a walk!

2006-12-08T15:12:00.000+10:00

Take my photo! Kids playing in the haystacks.

Harv ested paddy-straw looking very silly. Big moles here!

Everyone is carrying straw here right now!

Soooooooo pretty...

Big smile! And decorated cows. Sorry for the straw theme. Kind of impossible to avoid at the moment!

Another walk!

2006-12-08T14:43:00.000+10:00

Not very much in the way of excitement is happening here, but we do manage to get out every day for a beautiful walk round the countryside! So you may have to put up with quite a few picture-based entries of the pretty things we see (like the cow above - he's my favourite! Or buffalo, I don't know how to tell them apart.)

Paddy ready to be harvested (surrounded by the fields already done)

empty cart on the way home

Some of the gorgeous scenery?

Mind the bus!

A walk in Orissa....

2006-12-04T14:55:00.000+10:00

So we discovered a hole in the fence that leads to the hills surrounding the campus here, and the other day we went for a nice long walk - although 4 hours later we were pretty hot, it's still a top of about 33 degrees here, even though it's supposed to be winter! We threaded our way through lots of paddy fields, made some friends in the local villages, and saw lots of insects, birds and even a turtle!

We wanted to take a picture of the cute kids in this village, and ended up waiting while the rest of the village cam in from harvesting to have a group photo! The little girl was bravest and sat next to me...

If you ever need to find a cart and cows, come to Orissa - they're everywhere, you'll have a hard time not being run over by one! Usually found laden to about 6 m high with straw.

Quick break to admire the view!

The usual landscape around here - green hills, paddy fields, palms and little villages dotted round the place - most of them tribal villages I think.

JITM

2006-11-28T17:23:00.000+10:00

So, finally, after much galavanting, we made it to our destination – JITM, a technical college in rural Orissa. A car picked us up from the train station (the sign in the window said “Wel-come to Scot & Sherly – JITM/AID” – we kept it!) and brought us to the campus. It’s absolutely in the middle of nowhere, 7km to the nearest town and surrounded by green hills and mountains, paddy fields and little villages everywhere. The campus itself is a big groups of stark white buildings and looks quite out of place! It’s pretty self-sufficient with a canteen, shops, a doctor, guesthouse (that’s where we are!), temple…. But it’s much more fun to explore the surroundings – we have bikes and our own feet and have been doing lots of wandering – everyone wants to stop and stare at the weird white people, and most of them want to smile and wave to you, or shake hands or practise their English (“hi sir!”). The roads are more like an obstacle course – pot holes cover more area than the actual road does, and it’s all full of people walking, people carrying huge bundles of straw, kids running round, kids peeing at the side of the road, chickens, dogs, buffalo, goats and cows cruising around all over the place, motorbikes, bicycles, old rickety buses as wide as the road, jeeps with about 20 people on, in and hanging off them……

You may wonder what exactly we’re planning to do out here in woop-woop, staying at an alcohol-free college (!!!!). Well, there’s lots to distract us from the lack of bars - we're teaching some of the college classes (I took some Botany ones and Scott is doing Optics, Statistics, Electronics and maybe Management) which is quite intimidating and I appreciate the difficulties of writing on blackboards without breaking chalk or dropping the duster now! It's so embarrassing when you drop the duster. And when they ask you questions you can't answer.... Anyway, the college also has a community development program called AID, so we're helping out lots with that too - going to the local schools to help with teaching, teacher training, English etc (videoing some classes and taking notes and doing a presentation at the end - the teachers are all untrained so want all the help we can give! The kids love us too, and they are soooooooo cute!). We're also helping with their organic garden site, making chicken coops and compost - and the deaf guy who works there taught me sign language! And we've been doing some other things like proofreading and promoting the conference they're having next year. I'm also working part-time for Eco Innovation (the people I was working for in Ireland) so it's quite busy busy! Anyway, just wanted to generally introduce the place we're at and what we're up to - will start to put some funny entries up soon of what we've been up to - stay tuned! For now, here's a couple of pictures - the hazy sunset here, and Mina, one of the kitchen girls, and I........ We've been pretty crap at taking pictures so far, more soon once we have a photographic mission...

Hyberdabad Part 2

2006-11-24T23:39:00.000+10:00

So we took quite a few pictures in Hyderabad - lots of pretty things! This is a huuuuuuuge Buddha statue, 17m high, and it's on a little island in the middle of a lake so you have to get a boat out there. Apparently when they were taking it to the island the barge sank and the buddha just waited at the bottom of the lake for a couple of years until they finally raised it up undamaged. Course he was fine, he's buddha!

Scott and Buddha Boat and Sunset....

Scott's pretty artistic photo of the statues at Buddha's feet

Man, motorbikes, cow.......

The state parliament all lit up for its 25th anniversary, with a Ghandi statue in front

Hyberdabad

2006-11-24T23:21:00.000+10:00

Mumbai was quite busy, a bit too busy so we weren’t too disappointed when we hopped on our first overnight train towards Orissa. We were prepared for the worst with the trains. All of us have heard about the Indian transportation with passengers packed like sardines, but we were actually really pleasantly surprised. We had a sleeper each and were able to buy a chain to lock up our bags so no problems there. Well, no problems for Shell who slept peacefully unlike her paranoid boyfriend who awoke to every small noise and checked suddenly to see if the bags were still there, which of course they were, unmoved until morning (unlike Scott).

The rest of the train trip was almost like being in a market. Other than when we slept, five minutes didn’t go by where somebody selling ice cream, coffee, chai, bombai mix, sweets, samosas, pens with calenders, spinning tops, chains, stickers, chewing tobacco, sandwiches or various other goods we were unable to identify would walk up to your booth and state repeatedly the name of their product. Of course because we were white we must have wanted everything and hence the words seemed to repeated even more to us than the other travellers. Between the salespeople there was also the beggars. Most of them being cripples but one pair strangely being transvestites (go figure).

However, Hyderabad (pronounced Hyberdabad by Scott despite numerous training sessions) was also quite a busy city. We spent more time travelling in autorickshaws (a good way to make sure you appreciate the fact you're still alive) and we went to see an Indian movie (3 hours long and full of dancing and singing and in a language we didn't understand) but otherwise it was similar to Mumbai with much beeping of horns, many beggars and general chaos everywhere. We did see a few nice places though and took some photos.....

The charminar mosque monument thing - a rip off at $3 entry though so we just walked round it and admired it from a distance.

Kids playing in the fountain in the park!

Traffic chaos... intersections like this involve just pushing through traffic going the other way.

Pretty Hindu temple and appropriately dressed girl in Om t-shirt. Hindu temples are nice - lots of trees and rocks and free coconut! They also had quotes from other religions to show they're all the same......

Mumbai Part 2 - Stardom!

2006-11-23T17:27:00.000+10:00

We’ve finally been discovered… On our 2nd day in Mumbai, we were wandering around the streets saying to each other that we may have booked too many rooms at our hotel. (I told you we only need one Shelley. Shut up and stop laughing. Yes I’ll change it – sigh). Anyway like I said, we were just saying that we had booked too many NIGHTS in our hotel. Mumbai was a big city but didn’t seem have a lot to offer that we were interested in.

"Excuse me. You want to be in Bollywood movie?”
“Sorry.”
“We need Western extras for Bollywood movie. You get 500 rupees ($17 Aus) each for day and free food and water and get to dress up in costumes.”
“Did you say costumes…”

So the next day we went to one of the big Bollywood studios. It was extremely interesting and boring at the same time. Just to be in a Bollywood studio was a bit of a thrill but we pretty much sat around 90% of the time, so we decided to explore.

We watched three girls practising their dance routine in a foyer somewhere and we snuck into the rehearsal room to watch a whole troupe of dancers performing for a few seconds until we were kicked out.

Anyway other than that we sat around playing cards and chatting to the other tourists who had also been roped in. Shell had a small exciting role as a doctor walking past a patient in some hospital scene. Then finally, our big scene came. Shell and I were both picked to be photographers of a newspaper covering an event, where the star, co-star and their team of race drivers were given trophies for whatever the movie was about.

Basically we dressed up in casual smart clothes, had an old broken camera and bad false id badges. The scene started with a guy in a suit giving the star of the movie a big trophy, then he, the co-star and their team went wild shouting and cheering everywhere.

The whole time, Shell and I and other extras had to pretend to be taking lots of different photos from different positions. It was a laugh and a half, especially when the explosion of confetti, which we weren’t previously aware of, went off about half a metre from us. The noise was deafening and the explosion was so loud that we could feel it rebound off our chests. It was probably actually quite dangerous but we were too busy having fun and getting showered by champagne (the next part of the scene) to care about something as petty as an explosion.

So all in all it was a fun day and great for our budget since we actually made money that day instead of spending it. Anyway if you want our autograph you have to wait until we get back but if you want to see us in action the name of the movie is, “Don’t Worry Be Happy” although it probably won’t be out for about a year.

Fame at last!

The stars about to shower us all with champagne

More fun in Mumbai - hanging out on Chowpatty Beach

A scene of figurines from the Mahatma Ghandi Museum - really eye-opening to learn all about his life and his part in the struggle for India's independance. Did you know he decided to fight persecution and repression after being thrown off a train as a youth in South Africa, because of his colour? And that he was assassinated but died praying forgiveness for his killer? He's a pretty cool guy, and its interesting to have a country where the leader-idol isn't a war hero but someone who only preached non-violence, tolerance and acceptance.

India Finally! It begins in Mumbai.......

2006-11-23T17:13:00.000+10:00

So India hit us with a bang as soon as we landed. We stepped outside of the airport and breathed in the moisture that constantly hangs in the air, organised a taxi and were on our way to Mumbai. We just managed to squeeze our bags in the boot, which had to be tied down with a rope (no problem no problem… hopefully).

All that is offered in Mumbai was thrown straight at us as soon as we left the airport. With the driver smiling exuberantly as he swerved continuously, with only centimetres between us and the other ‘vehicles’, including autorickshaws (similar to Tuk Tuks for you Thailand travellers), normal cars, motorcycles with four travellers, buses, massive trucks, donkey carts, people carts (replace the donkey), beggeas dodging the traffic for a chance to stick their hand through a window, holy cows and all other types of transportation you can imagine.

If that wasn’t enough, there was even more action going on by the side of the road. Basically, take life, that is all the life that goes on inside of private homes, shops, factories, schools, toilets, social clubs, child care centres and display it on the street for all to see… trust me it’s quite a sight.

If our eyes were leading the race, they were being followed very closely by the rest of our sense detectors. The sounds of Mumbai for one minute are enough to last you a life time. The constant sound of all types of horns being blasted continually sends your ear drums into a panic – its almost claustrophobic. In fact it would be if you weren’t too busy taking it all in.

It doesn’t take too long for you to shove the noise to the back of your head but the smell is much harder to ignore. The mixture of human sweat, cooking spices, exhaust fumes and the sea create a smell that is original if nothing else. Shantaram quotes it as “being the best worst smell in the world” and I may not agree but it does smell like the essence of a hectic world that is too busy surviving to bother showering.

So this was India, where we hoped to live work and travel for at least the next five months. After planning to get here for so long, the arrival was as surreal as expected.

We spent the next four days in Mumbai, wandering around with our mouths continuously open and therefore continuously full of exhaust fumes and dirt. One of the best places we saw was a big Muslim mosque located on an island and connected with the mainland by a causeway. We were there at call to prayer so there were hundreds of Muslims gathered. One of the family took us under their wing and gave us sweets and stuff. Here are some of the happy snaps…

Lots of bathing people outside the temple!

The bustling causeway, full of stalls, beggars, people and colour....

Our friendly family - and such cute kids! Note the breastfeeding under the sari - a great idea!

Far away view of the temple

Turkey Part 4 - Selcuk

2006-11-13T20:40:00.000+10:00

Ok folks, almost finished Turkey now! It was hard to leave Olympos but we finally tore ourselves away, and rode 3 hours on the bus to Kas, a little fishing town nearby. The bus ride wasn’t wonderful with a 3-day hangover from staying at Kadir’s…. We only spent the afternoon and evening in Kas, wandering around, watching the sunset and having some tea. It’s a pretty upmarket yacht-club type place. A nice pitstop though, because we had to get (yet another) overnight bus to Selcuk that evening.

Sleep deprived again we arrived at some bus depot at 4am, with 2 hours to wait until the first local bus to Selcuk. Bored yet? Why is she telling us this? Well that 2 hour wait was actually quite eventful. We were sitting half-asleep sipping tea in the waiting area when a scared-looking guy was dragged/led past us by a few other Turkish guys – we didn’t know what was going on because he didn’t seem to be resisting, and no one intervened although everyone stopped talking. They took him around the corner (perhaps out of public sight, perhaps out of sight of the police station across the road) and we heard a few bangs and thumps, then the group of guys emerged, one shaking his hand, and walked back outside. The guy they’d taken wandered out, his face bleeding, until someone led him off to the toilets. It was all quite surreal.

Anyway, onto more fun and exciting things! Our main reason for staying in Selcuk was to visit Ephesus, one of the best preserved Roman cities in the world. It was amazing, but soooooooo full of tourists. Some highlights were the ancient toilets, the huge theatre, all the columns scattered around and the world’s first advertisement – it directed ancient sailors how to get to the brothel! We thought it was impressive but the most impressive part was our personal documentary, historically accurate of course, tee hee hee. It’s a must see:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=1422891133

(find Scott)

(Scott excitedly figures out how to get to the brothel)

Ramadan ended while we were in Selcuk – so there were a lot of very happy Muslims around, able to eat in the daytime again! They get a 4-day holiday so everyone parties – we went out with one of the hostel-owners and his mates and a couple of the other guests there. It was kind of weird, because we drove to a city with lots of clubs, just like Western nightclubs but with unbelievably bad loud music, snacks on the tables (including carrot sticks – Shelley was very impressed) and it seemed like a handful of 12 year old boys were allowed to get in because they were dancing all around the place.

Our last couple of days in Istanbul were spent sorting out a few things and hanging around – there were sooooooo many people around for the end of Ramadan celebrations, apparently all the public transport is free then too so it was hard work to get anywhere, we had to push through the crowd! We’re not talking isolated areas here. It was like the whole of Istanbul had turned into a sea of people.

Before leaving the country, we went to meet Phil and Angie (P & A) for dinner – a couple that Scott travelled through Africa with. It took a little longer to get to their place than expected because we caught the wrong ferry and had to go back to where we started from (giving the ferry crew a laugh), but we finally made it, and had a great evening of chatting, laughing, drinking, telling stories and eating Phil’s yummy veggie dinner.

So finally we waved goodbye to P & A, hopped onto the bus made our way towards India…..

Turkey Part 3b - Olympos

2006-11-12T00:45:00.000+10:00

So this is how it was. We all spent the morning hanging about the hostel, the afternoon re-exploring the ruins and then we began our hike towards Mt Olympos in search of the origin of the Olypic torch, the Chimaera - ‘THE ETERNAL FLAMES’ ooooooooooh. There’s a bus if you really want to get back, but if you’re hard (cheap) like us you can hike there yourself. The trek there was pretty easy in fact so easy we decided to stop in for a cheeky beer on the beach, plus everyone wanted a break from watching Scott hobble over the pebbles at the “beach” (no sand) complaining that they kept getting stuck in his reefs.

Anyway, we eventually got to the top of Mt Olympos (after having to pay a cover charge to walk through the beach and a cover charge to walk up the mountain – walking is expensive in this country). So we spent about an hour sitting around the eternal flames, eating eternal toast, smoking eternal cigarettes, talking about setting up a stall selling marshmallows (how much money could you make??) and fantasising about eating roasted eternal rabbits that were hopping around the place. (Shell protests that she didn’t want to eat the rabbits. They were cute.)

I should probably explain this eternal flames thing I keep going on about. Basically this mountain has a bit of a gas problem, in fact an eternal gas problem and it has these sections in it where fire just eternally burns like several naturally scattered small camp fires that flame from the cracks in the rock. Basically the gas emitted from the earth spontaneously combusts when it comes in contact with oxygen. Nobody really knows why but who cares, its still great for making eternal toast.

After relaxing by the flames for a while it was time to trek home but this was no leisurely stroll – oh no no, it was a race against time. You see, the hostel we were staying at included a free dinner, which was all you can eat and man if its free could we all eat, but you had to be there by a certain time. Since we wanted to hang by the fires until after sunset because obviously fire is more attractive at night time, we had only a limited time period to make it back – in the dark. With only 2 head torches between us we decided to split into 2 teams. Lets call them ‘Team Hungry’ and ‘Team Don’t Worry the Boys Will Make Sure They Keep Some Food For US’ shortened to Team DWTBWMSTKSFFU.” Long story short Team Hungry made it just in time and Team DWTBWMSTKSFFU were right in their reasoning.

After dinner we had one last drinking session (this time with 8 litres of wine between 7 of us) to celebrate the fact that we ate. It was in fact our biggest session in Turkey, where Scott woke up everyone in his room at 2am looking for the pack of cards, Shell decided to have a small emotional tantrum and Cappa tried to sleep in the fire instead of beside it. Needless to say our livers were happy the next day when we took the bus to Kas.

Turkey Part 3 - Olympos

2006-11-11T23:35:00.000+10:00

Antalya wasn’t very exciting because it rained the whole time we were there (1 night). Highlights were having blackouts at the hostel and playing cards by candlelight, wandering the streets in darkness, learning some Hindi from an old English hippy couple, teaching their kids Shithead (renamed Poohead), and buying Shell a red bra. Not necessarily in that order, it is a pretty cool red bra and only cost $2.50.

So, onto the fun stuff, the next day we headed to Olympos! That’s right, like the Olympics and Greek gods and stuff (this part of Turkey used to belong to the Greeks I think) – which was much more eventful! Even before we got there we had drama – it was still raining and storming madly so electricity was out, some of the roads down to the town were closed due to treefalls and rivers gushing across them, so it took our bus driver a few tries to find a clear route. When we finally got there and tramped into the place we’d heard about, Kadir’s treehouses, we were greeted by a blackout, lots of candles, and an Aussie guy host who made us put down our bags and have a free beer – as you can probably guess there were no objections.
Anyway, we checked into our treehouse (that’s right folks we went from living in a cave to living in the trees) which had this cool little balcony overlooking a flash flood. Normally, the river bed was dry but the sudden storm had turned it into a fairly raging river rushing below our balcony. Coincidently there was a chick staying there who worked in flood disaster management but I think its best not to include her opinions on the layout of the camp, for our parents health’s sake.

So, the next couple of nights were pretty big booze sessions. We found our friend Cappa, who we’d left after Istanbul, and made friends with a group of English people pretty quickly. The first night we all just drank the beer sold at the camp but decided that was too expensive so the next day we found a shop that sold 2 litres of wine for about 10 Australian dollars – COME IN SPINNER! (Shell says she’s never heard of the expression and thinks Scott just made it up but she agrees the wine was a great deal.) (Give me that back – its my turn. Anyway, like I was saying Shell stinks tee hee hee – so back to the story)

We spent our first morning in Olympos checking out the local beach and exploring some nearby Roman ruins, which included wading through an old aqueduct for about 100 metres that led to some ancient mosaic ruins - that was all pretty adventurous and exciting. Then on the way back we bought 4 litres of wine and started our next session, so that whole afternon/night basically consisted of us pissing it up and playing a whole bunch of games including Turkish Scrabble. Scott with his extensive vocabulary absolutely smashed Shell and Cappa (not only coz he got all the good letters – which makes a big difference when the Ks are all worth 1, some Ss are worth 5 and others 7, most Gs are worth 5 but one is worth 9 etc etc) (Shell would like to point out that he scored 83 from ‘Sky’ while Shell and Cappa had about 5 K’s each) (Stop taking that away – anyway Scott was the winner and the other two were looooooooooooosers).
All in all it was a fun and hazy couple of days, including lots of beautiful views and head aches, but the highlight of Olympos was definitely the Chimaera, which needs a whole section of its own…

Turkey Part 2b- Cappadocia

2006-11-09T16:41:00.000+10:00

By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, Scott has decided that he wants to be part of the blogging process now we’re doing more adventurous stuff he can write silly stories about. So now you have to work out by yourselves who’s writing. Anyway, back to Shell for this entry and more of Cappadocia…… Cappadocia was too much fun for just one blog entry – and besides, we have a million silly pictures it’s hard enough limiting them to this! For our last day in Gorome (gorgeous sunshine unlike the day before!) we decided just to wander round the stunning valleys that surround the village – and that was pretty much our entire day! Every time we rounded a corner there was another breathtaking view (see picture above). We met a couple of Israeli girls and explored with them for a while – it was interesting because they told us how they are strictly Jewish and can’t even eat at restaurants here because food they can’t eat may have touched the plates – so they brought two weeks worth of food with them to Turkey! Also, they’d just finished school and were having a brief escape before their compulsory two years of army service…. We climbed into caves, wondered about how people could possibly create windows up in impossibly high places, admired the layers of colours in the rocks, explored rooms, wandered round valleys with them for the morning, then caught a bus to another nearby village, where someone had told us you could walk back to Gorome from, through a really gorgeous valley. Hitchhiking is remarkably easy in Turkey – we were just waiting at the bus stop (admittedly not sure when or if a bus would come) and a local guy pulled up to ask if we wanted a lift!

The town was nice and had a huge cave castle (we’re too cheap to pay to go in these things so we just wandered round behind it to get a great view – besides, once you’ve explored a hundred or so of the things you get a bit caved-out). This is the castle....
Then we tried to find the valley – all good, it was about 4.30pm so we had a couple of hours to walk the 4km back to Gorome before sunset. Sounds all too good so far? So there we are, happily wandering along, laughing, being silly and going oooooo every now and again at particularly pretty bits when we hear some shouting at us from halfway up the side of the valley. It was a local Turkish guy and a group of German tourists, and they were shouting to us “too dangerous, come this way!”. So, a bit dubious, we clamboured up to where they were and found out that the Turkish guy had told them the same thing a few minutes before, and was taking them “a safer way”.

“Oh well” we thought, “he’ll probably try to get some money out of us but we have about 3 lira in change ($3) so we can give him that – he is THEIR guide, we’ll just tag along and see what happens.” What happened was one of the scariest experiences in my entire life. (Shell you’re a big wus – I wasn’t scared. I’m rough and tough. Sorry for the interruption – Scott) He took us up this smooth slope with little foot holds (think Giraween or Mt Beerwah) and made us walk along this thin ridge which sloped away on either side down to the valley floors, then we had to climb/slide down the other side…. The German girl started to cry halfway down and had to be persuaded to move for a while – I don’t blame her, I felt like crying a few times! (You big wussy wus bag – rough and tough I tell you – ROUGH AND TOUGH! Sorry again) Scott said it was one of the most amazing views we'd seen but all I was looking at was my feet. Of course, when we got to “safety”, the “guide” asked for money for the “very good guide” and told us how earlier that day an English couple had given him 20 lira each – we thought he was bullshitting us but the Germans gave him quite a bit of money. We gave him the 3 lira, I don’t think he was too impressed! The funny thing was that at our next stop, we hung out with an English couple and eventually discovered that it was them, and they had given him 40 lira! I don’t think they liked our funny story of how we only gave him 3……

Anyway, after all the adventure and adrenalin of that short climb, we wandered back to town chatting to the germans – 3 guys and one of their daughters – all very rich and (it’s true!) who were having a 2 week ballooning holiday in Turkey because THEY OWN A HOT AIR BALLOON! And we met them the day we were leaving, nooooooooooooo! Not that we try to use everyone we meet, but c’mon, how often do you meet someone with a hot air balloon??? We spent our next overnight bus trip grumbling and plotting how we could have taken the daughter out drinking and tried to get a free ride if we’d met them earlier….. So, curled up against each other in uncomfortable positions once again, we headed to Antalya and Olympos…….

Turkey Part 2 - Cappadocia

2006-11-08T03:29:00.000+10:00

So, sleep deprived once again, we step off the bus and we're immediately blown away by the scenery. It's like taking a bus to the moon. The volcanic region has left the landscape looking like some surreal Salvadore Dali interpretation. One of the guide books decscribed it as "like the Grand Canyon on acid" and it was right. So anyway, we start negotiating our way around Gorome looking for a place to crash. We'd been reccomended a place, but Scott being Scott, decided it was a "good idea" to try the other not so known places first. So after realising that the "cool unknown places" were actually abandoned for a reason, we went where everyone told us to (the Star Cave Lodge) which admittedly was a cool way to sleep in cave.

Anyway we so we had a little look around town that day then ended up boozing it up with a whole bunch of people at the hostel at this bar called the Flinstones, cave dwelling town... Flinstones... get it? It was kinda weird hanging out with Ozzies again, smoking a shisha and listening to "classics" by Brian Adams and Bon Jovi. But actually it was a pretty fun night.

So the next day we wake up hung over to the max but determined to see this beautiful area, so we trudged down town and hired a couple of bicycles. Five minutes later it started to rain. Fucking typical! Anyway, we rode (in the rain) to this little area we heard was spectacular and it was and yay it stopped raining in time for us to explore all the little nooks and crannies. It was amazing. There's all these little dwellings that had been there for thousands of years, where monks used to go and live and pray and I guess that was about it. But supposedly the area was actually the first place to have monasteries. Combine that history with the spectacularly bizarre and weirdly placed living areas and add the fact that the whole area resembled fairy chimneys and you get a pretty amazing and atmospheric spot. Anyway we had lots of fun exploring and taking silly photos.

Then it started raining again and didn't stop till we got back to Gorome (3 hours and 25km later). But it was worth it and got rid of our hangovers.

Mwaaaaaaa - Shell after a day of cycling in the rain

Tasty! (Shell's says sorry Mum but its too funny)

Turkey Part 1 - Istanbul

2006-11-07T23:54:00.000+10:00

So it begins! Yes, I know you could say that we've been away from home for months now, but all that was just a warm up, just the beginning of the fun, the trouble, the mischief, the indecisions, the crossing of fingers, the laughter, the tears, the death threats (to each other), the getting lost then found again, the overnight bus trips, the sights of otherworldly terrains, the sound of unknown languages, the smell of body odour, the taste of foreign foods, the unmistakable sound of diarrhoea and vomit (and retasting of foreign foods), the sense of adventure that you can only get by realising you have no fucking idea where you are or what you're doing and you're LOVING EVERY MINUTE OF IT!!!

So anyway, after that little melodramatic intro, we landed in Istanbul at about midday, nice and sleep deprived since we got the cheap 6am flight and thus had to be at the airport by 4. In a nutshell, Istanbul was OK. I mean, fair enough the markets were bright and beautiful, the blue mosque was spectacular and the people were fairly friendly (especially for a big city) but unfortunately it was a little more developed than we had hoped.

(bright and beautiful markets)

Don't get me wrong, we had a good time and all, wandering around listening to the call of prayer (5 times a day), taking some happy snaps, buying shell a head scarf, having a couple of booze sessions with Cappa, getting lost a couple of times, living off lentil soup because of the Turks inability to understand the word 'vegetarian', watching the locals fast themselves from dawn to dusk and then stuffing themselves silly after the sunset call to prayer, cruising up the bosphorous and checking out all the interesting architecture on the way. But in the end it was pretty much still just a big European style city but with a few cool little things to make it unique. Anyway we weren't too upset when we jumped on our first of many overnight bus journeys in Turkey, towards Cappadocia.

Shell pretending not to be an aetheist sinner at the blue mosque

Scott and Cappa making fools of themself on a local castle

Rest of England! Only a month late....

2006-11-07T23:23:00.000+10:00

So finally I get a chance to update this and it's gonna be a major one! We're now settled in Orissa, India, but we have a month of travel to update in this blog! First of all, just a few pictures from the rest of our time in England, visiting lots of different relatives and playing many many games of 20 questions in the car...... It was great to catch up with everyone though, and Scott's poor brain had to cope with so many new names!

Having a look round the lake district with NigeBeing silly with My Nana Renee, Michael and BlairThe Big Bash! All the cousins and second cousins met up for a night of fun, drinking, debauchery and skittles! Followed by a big hike and lots of catching up.

The Glasgow connection - Blair with Jimmy and Isabel, big Rangers fans!

The terrible three, playing with the camera..........

In Stroud

2006-10-09T18:32:00.000+10:00

So we eventually picked up my brother Blair from Heathrow (had to get up at 4.30am to get to Heathrow on time, stressing all the way and making Scott laugh by charging along the corridors every time we had to change tube line). Then we took the bus to Stroud to chill out with Gail and John (my aunt and uncle) for a few days before heading off on the Grand Relative Tour......

A few photos here of the Meningitis Walk that Gail and John help run - Blair and I helped all day (note the spiffing t-shirts) and Scott did the walk with my cousins - about 35km in 6 hours, they complained for days! Was a good fun day, but lots of work! Also a photo of a dinner with Gail and John, my cousins Dave and James, Dave's wife Kelly and their sons Frankie and Ashton.... phew! Made them all eat veggie stuff too!

Blair looking a bit jet-lagged... and me with my cousin's little baby, Ashton (second cousin I think?)... and John also with Ashton, being a proud Grandpa

England Finally!!!! London Town....

2006-10-06T06:23:00.000+10:00

Yay, finally my blogging attempt has reached England! So, we got to England on September 13th and spent a week running around sorting out stuff for India - visas, injections, etc as well as being slightly cultural and going to see the National Art Gallery and British Museum. Had some fun nights with Scott's mates met up with some of mine too - we were probably more busy than when we were working in Ireland! Much more fun though! London was quite a shock after Galway - so many people and pushing and taxis and buses and noise! I couldn't live there! Disturbing thing was that we went for a curry in Brick lane with Christina (she was in London for a few days too) and the street is full of curry places with touts coming out to try to get you to come in and offer you deals - it was good but I found that quite full on so I'm not sure how I'll go in India! I guess we'll see! At the tube stop (woohoo!) with Kate and Lu - we hung round and went out for dinner and went to some markets and caught up - twas lovely to see them both again! Poor Scott got dragged into the girly thing - although he took this great photo of Lu and I laughing and Kate - always poised!
Matt and Cesira, Scott's friends who put us up in London and who we had some fun nights with!
Scott and I all dressed up for the town - we went out to see Les Miserables in London's West End - ooh la la, how posh! Lucky you can't see our shoes - the rest of us is all nice but we only had walking shoes to wear! He he we had fun anyway :)

Lu and Kate and I again, all looking better this time - aw, aren't we pretty?

Visiting Charlie

2006-10-06T06:12:00.000+10:00

Still in Ireland here - I know I am abysmally behind with my blog entries, but I'm trying! At least you have no idea where the next blog will be of, because it definitely won't be of our current location! These are some pictures from our night staying with my parents' incredibly daft friend Charlie (and dog Ben), who live in a tiny country village in Ireland. He showed us round his discoveries - new pieces of archaeological knowledge which seem really interesting but apparently no one in the archaeology community will take him seriously. Also met some of the Irish locals at the pub and had good craic!

Drving round Ireland

2006-09-25T19:52:00.000+10:00

So then we set off, in Paddy our lovely irish hire car, for 5 days of exploration...... We saw some beautiful irish countryside and tried a few last Guinnesses... Me holding Paddy!
Some scary triatheletes we saw and clapped in awe - then went off and had a pint!
Silly musical statues and silly dancing girl
Scott caught me peeing....
Paddy again - such a small car!

Last night in Galway!

2006-09-25T18:42:00.000+10:00

Ok, I haven't been able to update this for a while so I thought I'd do a few update posts again - these are some photos from a raucous and fun last night we had in Galway, I think it was September 7th, with our flatmates Melissa and Shane. It turned into drinking games and then dressing up games and then a silly photo session, and we were up until the wee hours - lots of fun but we didn't have such a fun time on our bus trip the next day! It was sad to see Galway go even though we're excited about travelling, because we had a lot of fun there and met lots of lovely people. C'est la vie....

Aran Islands Part 3 - last one!!!

2006-09-06T01:21:00.000+10:00

Sorry about the multitude of posts on this topic, it will only let me put 5 photos up in each post. Plus, this is the most exciting thing we've done and I have loads of photos! This is the last one, I promise. So Anyway, after a hard day's cycling we got dressed up, had some wine and played cards at our hostelly place (Scott, the sweetie, had smuggled my black dress along without me knowing so we could go out for a posh dinner because I'd been complaining i never got the chance to wear my black dress. being a boy, this didn't extend to shoes or stockings, so I was a wee bit cold and wearing my walking shoes, but I was happy!)All posh dressed up Scott by the harbour. We went to watch the sunset before dinner. Ain't he gorgeous? The town's ok too.

Me by the harbour too. Purty clouds. Lucky it was such a lovely day the first day because it completely pissed down the next day, and we just lazed around then caught the ferry back to the mainland! But the first day was gorgeous - i even got sunburnt!

Some birds on a wire we found along the way and took great delight in scaring - they would all fly away if you jumped up and down waving and yelling boo! Tn they'd all fly back and you could do it again! Distracted us for a while - see, you can put a girl in a black dress but you can't stop her jumping around like an idiot!

Thought we'd try to work out my camera's auto-function, hoping it wouldn't fall in the water, and took a couple of pretty photos in front of the harbour at sunset, before going off to eat our terribly decadent 3-course meal! It was gorgeous, never had such a fancy meal! It was Scott's brithday, I think he had a pretty good day all up! He got breakfast in bed and juggling clubs and a whole day of fun and a luxurious evening and everything!

Oh, just a really disgustingly soppy photo to end with - not my fault, he kissed me just as the timer was about to go off! Looks sweet though :)

Aran Islands Part 2

2006-09-06T01:06:00.000+10:00

So, more photos! We hired bikes at the harbour and spent the day cycling round the island. My bum was so sore afterwards - I haven't cycled for ages! It was great fun though, and the island was the prettiest place we've been to so far, loads of fields and stone walls and forts everywhere! Some of the cycle paths were pretty bumpy though, rocks and grass everywhere!

A cycle break! With the island in the background. Lovely stones, what?

Scott adding about 10 years to my life by sitting on top of a reeeeeeallly high cliff! Open this picture up in full and zoom in, it's really scary! He seemed happy though. This cliff was part of an old stone fort, maybe 2000 years old

Silly Scotty pretending to do god knows what...... Nice old stone thingy in the background.... We didn't really know, we were just cycling around going 'oooooo!'

Standing on top of a big round old stone fort - they did have a lot of rock on that island... Looking pensive and not posed at all....

Same fort, other side, with the lighthouse in the background - "When are you going to take that photo, I feel silly standing here with my back to you.....oh, oops sorry!"

Aran Islands Part 1

2006-09-05T22:15:00.000+10:00

Sorry, was blogged out from my last posts, but actually the most exciting thing we've done recently is visit the Aran Islands! yay! Well only one of them, but it was still great. It was Scott's birthday last Tuesday so we went over to this island about an hour boat ride from Galway to celebrate his oldness! Some pictures follow - this may take a few posts cause there's lots!Scott on the boat looking windswept and interesting

While Shelley feels slightly seasick and tries to look ok

Yay, back on land again!

Start of our bike trip - Scott cycles off into the distance! Note all the stone walls - we reckon they get really bored on the island, and there's a heap of stone around, so what else to do?

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!

Burren Presentation

2006-09-01T23:10:00.000+10:00

Just a brief note to say about a presentation I went to about 2 weeks ago - some of my workmates, priscille and Dorian, were presenting the results of the research they've been doing into the farming systems in the Burren, a region just south of Galway. The audience was mainly farmers who'd been involved and it was so interesting because there was hours of discussion afterwards on farming subsidies, eco-innovation and changing farming systems. The farmers accents were incredible, I had a hard time understanding! Anyway, I enjoyed it because I think that's important - the social acceptance of environmental policies and innovations, otherwise there's no point in them. You can look at our website (www.eco-innovation.net) if you're interested. (and go oooooo cause I've made a lot of the website!)Caroline and I at the presentation - we took photos and watched!

The Eco Innovation crew having dinner beforehand - the presentation was in the pub!

Fred (my boss) introducing Priscille and Dorian (on the left)

Discussions afterwards - many heated ones until late at night! I guess the future of your livelihood is a pretty important topic, especially when people are telling you that you can't just go on relying on subsidies and you have to diversify or innovate or go organic. The farmer doing the best is actually one who makes his own gourmet ice-cream from organic cows and fruit he grows, it's really yummy too! We want to go interview him soon (maybe have some tastings too...) so we can feature him on the website.

Christina's Visit

2006-09-01T22:57:00.000+10:00

Last weekend, Christina came to visit us! Yay! She's just arrived in Ireland and is going to live with some rellies 'up North' (northern ireland) for a while and earn a bit of dosh to travel. Copycat. Anyway, it was great fun because it was only a couple of days after Scott finished work so we really wanted to go out and do things! On the Friday night we had a big dinner at our house (I've been deprived of cooking en masse for ages, I needed to!) with all the people I work with, and my bosses. It was lots of fun, although much madness cooking, luckily Christina turned up early and got roped into chopping! I drank a bit too much, which I noticed the next day when we got up early to go on a hike through the Burren (pretty region about an hour south of Galway). I complained quite a lot along the 4 hour hike, although it was gorgeous and we saw lots of fun things. We hitchhiked home (after persuading Christina we wouldn't get murdered!) and then went out to a couple of our favourite pubs that night to show her a bit of craic.

Blergh! Aren't we cute? Don't worry, the photos can only get better from here. I just thought I'd throw that one in for fun.

A castle we found on our walk, with the gals elegantly poised in front of it. We couldn't get in, damn it! There's just little castles and ruined churches everywhere here.

We found some donkeys which made me stop complaining and get excited! Scott seemed to like them too.

Scott at little old ruined church we found that had gravestones inside and all these gravestones round covered in ivy from god knows how long ago. The funny part though was walking back up the lane from this church, because a farmer decided to drive his cattle down the lane towards us at the same moment! Faced with many stampeding cows, I panicked and tried to scale the stone walls at the side of the lane, Scott thought a little more and made us hide in an alcove until they'd gone past. It was scary! The farmers thought we were a laugh.

On a rock at the top of the last hill Scott could make us climb, because he wanted to 'see the view'. This is a photo of Christina and I looking for the view. Seems like more cows and another stoney hill! Was a lovely walk though, better cause we could hitch back!

Oops I was slack!!!!!

2006-09-01T19:49:00.000+10:00

Sorry guys, the last couple of weeks have been madness - Scott finished work so we've been going out and running round lots! So much drinking though, my liver is looking forward to a break! A plus side to all our adventuring is that i have been taking lots of photos, yay! So I thought I'd share them with the world. First I have a few random photos of our flatmates..... da da da..... which is sad cause we leave in a week! Here ya go........

Shane, Scott and Ann Marie - I live with weird people! This is in the Roisin Dubh, our favourite local pub (pronounced row-shin dub)

Scott and Ann posing for me outside our house - aw so cute!

We hang out with Ann a lot (except now she's in Turkey) - this is the three of us at a comedy night (at the Roisin Dubh again) which was well funny - the mc kept picking on Ann but she also got to lead the clapping! Scott's just happy to be able to do things at night again. I always have red eyes in photos, why why why???

Guinness is good for you - and believe me, it tastes yummy in Ireland, so different to the watery bitter crap they serve anywhere else. A happy man.

Ireland is fantaaaaaaaaaaaastic! Look, a coat in summer!

Update

2006-08-13T04:48:00.000+10:00

*Carried the camera around all day today and forgot to take a single picture! Sorry!
*We went out today (after breakfast at 2pm) to wander round town to cure my hormonal moodiness - worked well! Had a shopping splurge at an op-shop and discovered my boyfriend has way better taste and idea of what looks good on me than I do. sigh. Perhaps he's gay? Also bought ourselves coffee - how decadent!
*Still being boring around here - I got the day off on Monday cause it was a bank holiday and we went exploring along the river bank, a dog followed us (we named him Randy cause he was happy and wet) and we threw stones for him. It was a well pretty walk, very Irish/British - countryside and riverbanks and woodlands and even a little ruined castle on the other bank of the river! I'm sure we'll go back, I'll try to remember to take pictures then.
*We booked flights to go to England on September 13th - wow only a month left in Ireland! Our flatmate is going to Turkey soon and won't be back before we leave (we'll see her in London though) so all our flatmates and boys are going out for dinner in a couple of weeks and getting all dressed up posh, yay! You just get settled in then you leave.... ah well bring on travelling!
*Scott quit his work! He finishes in a week and a half and is looking forward to lying around doing nothing (although I have other ideas - cooking, cleaning, washing...)
*That's about all folks! The moon is gorgeous here at the moment, all yellow and huge and hazy. The swans are getting cheekier (less tourists feeding them now I guess they have to be more pushy), Melissa's boyfriend Shane has moved in so now we have electronic music and strange paintings and a fake Roman helmet and a new beanbag.... yay! He's fun if a bit vague.
*Actually the funniest story from the last week or so is probably when we borrowed Melissa's car to go shopping - Scott stalled it on the way, then when he got out of the car he stumbled over his own feet, so I was busy laughing at him and walked smack bang into another parked car, spread-eagled myself across the bonnet! Then it was his turn to laugh. It would have made a great comedy skit, hopefully someone else in the carpark was watching and appreciated it!
*Scott has most definitely been put off having children for a while after entertaining Clara and her friend so that they wouldn't bother me while I was working at home. He made the mistake of swinging them upside down in the hammock, which they then pestered him to do for the rest of the day, and tried to teach them puzzles which was pretty funny. They love him, were climbing all over him, and he was very patient but later on collapsed in a heap! Made me laugh lots though!

At the pub with workmates

2006-08-04T05:55:00.000+10:00

One of our workmates left yesterday so we went out to a cool pub I've just discovered called the Blue Note - funky reggae music, great atmosphere, comfy seats, and best of all, no tourists! I do realise that's a bit hypocritical. Anyway, we had a great night, met up with my housemate Ann-Marie there (see the photo of her and her friend Jim from Cork - silliest photo) and Scott came along after work for a drink and to laugh at us tipsy people. It was good to hang out with them outside of work though! My french improves with alcohol. Sorry for experimenting with my camera's night function thing too. Jim was nice too - Ann always seems to have people visiting here, so we know half of Cork now! Went out dancing to an awesome DJ last weekend with some of them (Paddy came back up too, we spent the night bum-pinching and ass-slapping with him, bank st people will be proud!) - Scott is happy that I actually like electronic music if it's decent and we jumped around like mad people. But now the town is overun by fancy-dressed-posh-obnoxious-drunks for race week so I'm staying at home for a while! They're scary!

Silly Photos!

2006-08-04T05:39:00.000+10:00

Us running around by the canal near our house after going out for a few drinks on Scott's night off. I discovered my camera has a night-time function that makes crazy photos like this!

Bank St Photos

2006-07-27T21:01:00.000+10:00

Ok because I've been slack and haven't taken any more photos recently (keep remembering the camera as soon as we get somewhere) I thought I'd put up a couple of photos I found from the day I left my old house in Bank St in Oz. He he aren't we silly!

On the Galway front, yesterday my first pay cheque went through and so we now have both been paid and have lots of money in our account! Yay! So we celebrated by going out for dinner - after wandering round town looking at restaurants for a couple of hours, and a contemplative beer in the sun by the harbour with the swans, we decided on an Indian place which was soooooo yummy and we both ate ourselves stupid! It's funny when you're cheap and don't go out to eat much, it's a huge treat when you finally do! Although we're still cheap at heart and didn't bring much money with us, so didn't have a naan bread so we'd have enough money to share a pint afterwards!! Because we ate soooooo much we waddled around for the rest of the night and even though we found a pub with fun dancey music, and people sitting in a corner playing Irish stuff (and girls doing Irish dancing in very short skirts with very nice bottoms that Scott was trying his hardest not to stare at), we couldn't dance because we were too full! And on the way home we gave our last 50c to some buskers, about 10 of them all playing drums and bells and shakers that had a huge crowd all dancing - we jiggled around a bit but still couldn't dance, most unusual for us! Going out tonight again because after that Scott will be flat out working with the Race week etc. So we need to get our quota of Guinness. It's growing on me, I can almost finish a pint now!

Galway Photos

2006-07-22T08:43:00.000+10:00

Ooooo just wait! I did actually take a couple of pictures of Galway - this is one of the crazy crowd watching some gig in the streets, and one of the silly fly fishermen who stand in the middle of the river near us. I think they're great! I haven't seen one ever catch a fish yet though....

Quick update - my boss came back and I had some big chats to him so I'm a leetle more confident in what I'm doing now - updating the website, making new contacts, creating a newsletter, researching some articles on eco-innovation - its all quite fun, basically I just tell him what I think I should do and he gives suggestions on it! We have broadband at home now - and cable tv god so many channels it's too scary you just give up - it was funny though because we live in this old house, and the broadband guy couldn't drill through the walls they were too thick! No wonder we get crap mobile reception. But it was all good once he went off to get a bigger drill and we stayed respectfully out of his way - the man had a big drill after all!

The heat wave is over but has provided a topic of conversation for many weeks. And our cat still hasn't come back after about 2 weeks - Scott suspects me but I actually had nothing to do with it. We told Clara it's gone to live somewhere else for a while.... I'm being good tonight and resisting all housemate attempts to make me go out - we went out the last two nights in a row because Scott had them off work, so I need a bit of a break! Plenty of emailing to catch up on I've been a bit slack. And hundreds of tv channels to watch!!!!!

Connemara Trip

2006-07-22T08:26:00.000+10:00

Yay! I finally have photos, and broadband at home so more people than just Roch and I will visit this page! I haven't taken many photos yet but here are some from the trip we went on last Sunday - we made the stupid error of believing everyone who said we should take a bus tour out to the Connemara region nearby, as we wanted to go there but it's hard when you don't have a car. So we took this day trip, which went through some really gorgeous scenery (well I thought so but I am weird and like rocks and bogs and swamps) but it did involve about 5 hours on a bus altogether, and we're not used to being tour-bus-tourists herded around! Some people should not be given a microphone (i.e. the bus driver) when you can't get away from them. We did end up having quite a lot of fun though, because they stopped for a long 2-hour break at this Abbey you have to pay to get into, with nothing else around. We protested at this forced tourism and struck off down the road to see what we oculd find. We had lunch in the middle of a bog, then wandered off and found a little path by the edge of a stream. We followed it and eventually came out onto a path - which turned out to be in a forbidden nun-only part of the Abbey! We escaped into the Abbey grounds feeling very naughty, but at least we got in without paying! The pictures are of me spoiling some nice scenery, Scott eating the Abbey, Scott eating lunch on the bog, and us on a fake donkey we found when we were supposed to be looking at some historic house. Next trip we're doing by ourselves!

2006-07-18T23:06:00.000+10:00

Phew! It's so hot here! Didn't think I'd be saying that about Ireland, but we seem to be having a heatwave here - it's humid and sweltering and everyone is falling about cause they aren't used to it! I've discovered there are some bad things about working in a building that overlooks the sea - you get to watch everyone down at the beach swimming while you sit inside working and feeling sticky! No one wants to waste it though because they know it'll be raining again in a week - half of my office just left at 2pm to go to the beach!

They really take advantage of this summer daylight thing - for the next two weeks there are two festivals on - a proper Arts Festival and then a kind of renegade alternative one because they think there aren't enough local acts in the proper one, and too expensive for most people, which is true. So we're supporting the cheap fun local one - there's just millions of mad things happening everywhere all the time, mostly free! The other day I got delayed for two hours and a pint of cider because I was walking through town and there was a full big Swing/Jazz band playing in the streets, chcok-a-block with people watching, and they were followed by a kind of folk/rock/irish band who were great to dance to! So I made friends with a few fellow watchers and had a drink. It's so much fun, although tiring to try and work and see lots of things! I think we came here at the right time - from what the locals say, the other 9 months of the year are pretty dismal.

Ok, back to work and wishing I were at the beach! Have taken some photos so I will put them up next time! Missing everyone back in Oz :)

2006-07-10T22:54:00.000+10:00

Ok no photos yet because I keep forgetting to take any, but I'm at work and can't go outside for lunch because it's raining ('tis Ireland you know) so after peering out at the stormy seas from my work window I thought I should update this site. Soon I'll actually tell people it exists, once I can get onto hotmail! It's slightly weird working here because Eco-innovation, the company I work for, hires a large room as an office in a building which is actually otherwise an English language school. So I feel right at home after working at ICTE for 3 years, and keep seeing all these things like reminders to put timesheets in, that make me feel like I'm in some sort of warped parallel universe.

Oh, big and exciting news is that Scott got a job! Yay! He's working as a waiter in a posh-ish restaurant in the centre of town, so now he won't complain about being bored anymore! It sounds like a nice place, and even though he was put on to work during the World Cup Final (outrage!), there was no one in the place (like you would have dinner then!) so they let him off to come watch the second half. I think the fact that he was getting update texts from me every 5 minutes in the first half, and passing the information on to the other staff and customers, probably made them realise he wouldn't mind being sent home early. The only bad thing is that he'll be working all nights now, but my job is flexible and so I can work at home sometimes, and work some nights too.

Other news at the moment is that the recent glut of sport is over, after a great win by my mum's hero Federer and an annoying win by the bloody diving Italians yesterday. My French workmates are rather subdued today and we've had some passionate conversations about Zidane's bizarre headbutt. I personally think he's just getting old and forgot that he was supposed to head the ball, not the opposition. So anyway, now we have to think of other ways to amuse ourselves, such as hanging out with the crazy Irish hippies we seem to be meeting, going to see Pirates of the Caribbean once we work out where the cinema is, and rushing out to see some of the countryside in the pauses between the rain. Our flatmate Melissa and her boyfriend Shane are going to the European juggling championships this week, which would be awesome to see and worth going to even if just to make Sean jealous, but we both have to work and it's well expensive. Ah well, it's fun just hanging out in the main square of town watching people juggle and play games and lie around, and a lot cheaper too!

Oh and in other news they have chocolate buttons here, which were my favourite sweets when I was a kid in England, so I'm having to exercise extreme will power to not buy 3 packets a day. It's very exciting though! It would have been amusing to see Scott and I go shopping the other day too - the local supermarket is a 20 minute walk away, so we both put on our big backpacks and then struggled home with all our shopping complaining madly all the way! I think I was spoilt having Coles just down the road in West End - and having a car was handy too - we're getting a lot of exercise!

2006-07-06T18:45:00.000+10:00

Yay!

Techno-whiz shell finally works out how to use this thing! Photos ad complicated things will come soon but I just wanted to let you all know what I've been up to over in sunny Galway. I'm now a full-time worker, which is a bit of a shock to the system! The job is awesome though, and after a few problems because my boss had set my laptop on french keyboard, so I couldn't login, I've worked it all out and am happily pottering away doing networking and communication things like working on the company logo and doing journal article searches and contacting similar organisations. Not quite sure what I'm doing yet but it's fun! Yes I have my own laptop, she's an Apple and she's called Fuji. You'll be proud of me Roch, I'm learning to operate a Mac without hitting it (much).

The people I work with are all lovely - my boss is actually away for 2 weeks at the moment but I met him when I first got here - he showed us his veggie patch that he's so proud of! There's 5 others in the office and 4 are French and the other guy speaks French, so it's just continuous French back and forth all the time! I'm in heaven! Took me a day or two to admit I spoke French to them (for some reason I'm really shy about it....) and I'm starting to talk back in it a bit too. In two month's time I should be excellent! We went out last night to watch the France-Portugal semi-final with a couple of them, and Caroline in particular was very stressed ad couldn't watch at some points!

T'was a excellent day for sport yesterday - I dragged Scott along to watch State of Origin at 11am in a pub I'd sussed out a few days before - we got into trouble at one point for shouting too loudly though! A NSW supporter wandered in half-way through so we had someone to abuse. What a game! Go Lockyer! I have to say though, lucky we won or I would have had you all as my hit-squad to go after the video ref. I wore my origin t-shirt around all day and had to give multiple explanations of why I was so happy to all my workmates.

Anyway, so I'm in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, and it's a beautiful city! Well, town. Loads going on here with people juggling and street performing and occupying the many many many pubs.... I have officially had Guiness (well shared a pint with Scott) and I like it! Pretty strong though, I'm more chuffed with the Bulmer's cider on tap which seems to be the town drink, along with "Buckfast" (he he) which is like a cross between port and wine. You have to buy it from behind the counter, so you feel particularly dodgy, and then everyone goes down beside the harbour and drinks it out of bottles in paper bags. It's light till about 11pm so everyone stays outside heaps! Actually, contrary to expectation it's been mostly sunny, and I even got sunburnt one day! I'm getting better with understanding Irish accents and not laughing at them too much. Will put up some pictures of the town soon so you can see.

We're living with two women, Melissa and Anne-Marie, and melissa's 8 year old daughter Clara, who is a cheeky little thing and acts like an adult but is lovely and helps me cook. There's also a cat called Kitty who gets in trouble for peeing in the hallway and who doesn't seem to mind when you throw her across the room. Still prefer dogs but I'm coping. She is pretty cute. Our house has a nice feel to it and we're meeting some of the housemates' friends too. Met a guy called Paddy! Yay! Our electricity is ru by putting 50p pieces into the metre - we discovered when we had a blackout the other day!

It's soooooooo good to see Scott again and even though it was weird for the first day or so, we're completely back into being together all the day and loving it! I think we're becoming sillier if possible, and are trying to convert everyone we meet to silliness too. Scott's a bit bummed cause he's having issues finding work still - everyone seems to have just hired people here! So looks like I'm the sugar mama ;) Other than that everything is going lovely and it feels like we've been here for ages!

Hope winter in Oz is going good and you all watched the Origin and are happy and having fun! Love to everyone and I promise to update this regularly now I've worked out how to use it!

Love Shell :)

2006-06-17T21:09:00.000+10:00

Welcome Shelley!!
We're so glad you were able to work the puzzle out!! Heee hee hee! We had a lot of fun making it and we got thoroughly confused in the process!
This blog is a way that you can keep contact with all of us at once! you can put up photos and stuff and we'd love to hear from you. We'll put stuff up as well.

Hope you are having an awesome time yo!

To be continueded by You my dear!!

love Rochelle, Yuki and Amelie