Northern Exposure

Hi everyone. Just a quick note to let you know that we've arrived safely in Darwin. The journey was uneventful and we were greeted with a sweltering hot sunny day, which felt good after a couple of 'chilly' days down south. Our backpackers' hostel has a roof-top swimming pool, which is great, although we feel a bit past it what with all of the 20 year olds parading round in their bikinis or showing off their six-packs. Somehow we'll struggle through.

 

We've uploaded some more photos from our Western Australia trip including some of our visit to the Tree Top Walk, which is an elevated platform 40m above the forest floor. I found it a lot easier going than the tree climb, although June had a minor vertigo induced panic! We also visited a very good Whaling museum, caught up with the Woods and Walkers for another lovely barbie, and said fond farewells to the MacDonald clan.

 

We had a wonderful couple of weeks down in WA - the countryside and coast were really beautiful and it was lovely to see some friendly faces. We wish we'd allowed for a bit more time down there - WA is such a huge place and we only managed to see a tiny corner of it. We'll have to go back again some day...

 

We're going to spend the next couple of days relaxing in Darwin before we venture off to explore Kakadu National Park and Katherine Gorge. We're not sure how to get around - we could go on organised camping trips, or hire a car or a 4WD. We'll need to get our thinking caps on.

 

Hope all is well with you all. Thanks for your comments and emails. Its great to know you're keeping an eye on our progress.

 

Bye!

Gulp!

Mark makes his ascent
Originally uploaded by mark&june

Here I am a few steps into my ascent of the Bicentennial tree. I exagerated in my earlier post - its only 75 metres tall!

I planned to climb all the way to the top, but as I got higher and higher my hands got sweatier and sweatier and my life started to flash before my eyes. I managed to get to the platform half-way up, but alas couldn't summon up the courage to make it all the way.

The scariest thing about it was that there was nothing to stop you falling with a crunch to the bottom if you lost your grip. In the UK you'd have to be attached to a safety rope, but Health & Safety obvioulsy hasn't taken hold in Oz yet. The tree was un-manned and there was nothing to break your fall other than the ground.....

Down a Bit, Left a Bit

Hello all and greetings from Western Australia! Apologies that our updates have been few and far between recently - surprisingly net access is a lot harder to come by here that it was in Asia.

 

At the moment we're in Pemberton, which is a pretty little town in the middle of beautiful Karri forests. We've spent the day wandering through the forests, and attempting to climb the look-out trees which are used to spot forest fires. Unfortunately the only way up the trees is to climb up the spokes drilled into the side of the trees in a spiral pattern from the floor to the top (100+ meters in the air). There aren't any harnesses or ropes, and we were surprised not to spot anyone plumetting to the forest floor! I made it about halfway up before my nerve failed me -  maybe I'll have another go tomorrow (or maybe not).

 

We're really enjoying our drive round the south west of Australia. We started in Margaret River, which is famed for its vineyards. The town itself wasn't too exciting, but we enjoyed our wine-tasting tour (although not as much as the chocolate tasting one that followed!). We spent the next couple of days in the extreme southwest - staying in a tiny town called Augusta, which has beautiful views over the river and oceans. We went up a lighthouse on Leeuwin Cape, which is where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet. It's a stunning place, especially as we had a couple of really sunny days there. The wind sure does pick up though - we had a disturbed night's sleep in Augusta due to the wind whistling through our hotel room.....

 

Our first impressions of Australia are really positive. WA is a beautiful state and the people are very friendly and chatty. The weather isn't the wall to wall blazing sunshine we had expected, but its actually a nice change after the sweltering humidity of the last few weeks.

 

OK, I'll try to upload some photos but the connection is a bit slow here so probably won't be able to catch up with the last week.

 

We're staying in a nice hotel tonight with "solar heated" (ie cold) swimming pool and a nice collection of DVDs, so we're just heading back now to watch The Queen and dream of England (and Scotland). Bye!

Advance Australia Fair

Hi all. Just a quick note this time as we're about to be served lunch at Gil and Christine's house. Gil is June's mum's cousin, and he moved out to Perth after the war with his family. We're staying with his sister Jean, and are really enjoying having a holiday from our holiday! It's really great to be staying somewhere comfortable and welcoming, and we really feel at home here. We went to a barbie yesterday with some good friends of June's who have recently emigrated which was great fun.

We spent Tuesday exploring the centre of Perth - it's a really beautiful city beside a river, overlooked by the gorgeous Kings Park. The roads are a lot quieter than in Vietnam and Cambodia - so much so that we strolled across an empty road even though the lights were red. Unfortunately a car zoomed round the corner and the driver wound down his window and shouted "look at the lights you f**king idiot!" - we were warned that the Aussies were quite "direct"!

We're off to see some kangaroos and koala bears this arvo, then heading off for a week down to the south west in a hire car tomorrow.

OK better go now. Bye all!

A bumpy ride

Hi all, just a quick hello from Singapore airport. We've got 3 hours here before we fly off to Oz.

 

The bus trip yesterday wasn't 10 hours long - it was an excruciating 16 hours, most of which was on an extraordinarily bumpy road. Amazingly the road between Angkor (the biggest tourist resort in Cambodia) and Thailand is a dirt track, which we bounced up and down on for 10 hours at an average of about 10 mph. Agony! It's probably the first time on the trip that we've really felt that we've been in a Third World country. If any of you ever considering travelling from Cambodia to Bangkok by road, then don't! Whatever the cost of the flight, it's worth it....

 

Anyway, today seems to be going a lot more smoothly. In a few short hours we'll be touching down in Australia, which I'm really excited about. There is so much to do there I'm beginning to wonder if 3 months is long enough - I guess we'll have to save some things for another trip.

 

OK, better go now. Hope all's well with you. M&J x

Hello from Angkor Wat!

The orange glow is the sunset, not our tans!

Tomb Raiders

Hello again. We've had a great couple of days exploring the temples of Angkor, which was the ancient capital of Cambodia about 1000 years ago. There were a million people living here back then - to put it into perspective London had a population of 50,000 at that time. There are scores of sandstone temples scattered through the jungle, which we've been endeavouring to explore on bicycle. The weather has been really good for the last few days and we've worked up quite a sweat!

 

The highlights of Angkor have been Ta Phrom, which has been partially reclaimed by the jungle; Bayon, which contains hundreds of faces carved into the stone; and Angkor Wat itself, which is stunning. The first Tomb Raider film was made here a few years ago - I half hoped Angelina Jolie would turn up and adopt me, but alas there's been no sign of her.

 

We've uploaded a few photos and a video of us in front of Angkor Wat, which should hopefully appear here soon!

 

Saturday is our last day in Cambodia before we take a 10 hour bus to Bangkok on Sunday and then fly to Perth on Monday. We've really enjoyed the Asian leg of our holiday - both Vietnam and Cambodia have been beautiful and fascinating countries. If the rest of the trip goes as well as these first five weeks, we may never come home.......

Sky on Fire

Kampot sunset
Originally uploaded by mark&june

This is a shot we took of the river at Kampot on Sunday night after visiting the Wat. The sky was amazing - it seemed to be on fire. And to make it even better, when we turned the other way there was a big rainbow!

Talking of things being on fire, according to June her massage was "apart from breaking my ankle, the most pain I've ever been in". It was Japanese Shiatsu massage, which sounds more like a martial art than a form of relaxation. Glad I gave it a miss.

Head in the Clouds

Hi everyone, hope all is well with you all. We've had a lovely couple of days in Kampot. It's a beautiful town on the banks of a river in the south of Cambodia, surrounded by jungle-clad moutains. It's a really peaceful place - just what we needed. In a few years I'm sure this area will be a lot more touristy, but at the moment it is so quiet - we've only seen about 10 westerners in the last 48 hours.

 

Yesterday we took a VERY bumpy 2 hour ride in the back of a pick-up truck to the top of Bokor Hill, which used to be a resort in the French colonial times. The hill station was abandoned in the 70s, and is now a ghost-town straight out of Scooby Doo, complete with an old church and casino. When we got to the top the clouds descended, and it was really atmospheric (and a little bit spooky!).

 

Today we hired some bikes and cycled to a pretty waterfall and then on to a Wat, where all of the orange-robed monks were very happy to see us and to practice their English on us. It was a really lovely experience, topped off by a stunning sunset. The internet connection isn't very good here, but I'll post some photos when we get back to civilisation.

 

Right, better go and have some dinner in a minute. June's being massaged by a blind woman at the moment, to try and relieve the aches and pains picked up on the truck-ride and the bicycle. Tomorrow we head back to Phnom Penh for a day, and then on to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat, which we're really looking forward to. The trip is getting a bit more difficult to plan now we are approaching a fixed end date, but if all goes well we should get back to Bangkok on the 14th and then fly to Oz on the 15th for the second leg of our journey.....

 

A Hard Day

Today was pretty hard going. We visited the Tuol Sleng Museum in the morning, which was used as a prison by the Khmer Rouge. It doubled as a torture chamber, where brutal punishment was inflicted on the captives (most of whom seemed to be Khmer Rouge members themselves) to extract fabricated confessions. In the afternoon we visited the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, which is where the prisoners were transported before being executed and buried in mass graves. About 50,000 corpses were found there, and thousands of skulls are on display. In total up to 3 million people were killed during the four year reign of terror of Pol Pot.

We both feel really down and drained after the day. We feel a mixture of horror, sadness, anger and confusion - how could these people have been so evil to their own countrymen? We need to do a bit more reading to try and get our heads around what went on....but at the same time we would like to put today behind us.

Cambodia is not what we expected. In some ways it seems better off than Vietnam - proportionally there are a lot more cars on the road, and the bars and restaurants for ex-pats are very westernised. At the same time there is more poverty here - lots of families sleeping on the streets, and quite a few beggars. It feels a bit like India in the way that there is such a gulf between the rich and the poor.


On Tuesday we saw the other side of Phnom Penh - beautiful palaces and interesting museums. Tomorrow morning we head off to Kampot, which is a sleepy town in the middle of a National Park.

Hello from Phnom Penh!

Hi all. We're made it to Cambodia, having spent the last 3 days cruising, cycling and walking through the Mekong Delta. It's a beautiful area of wide muddy rivers, floating houses, lush vegetation and very friendly people. It was lovely to see children running to the banks of the river as we went past to smile and wave at us. Sadly there are a lot of kids in both Vietnam and Cambodia who are used by their parents to sell to tourists, and it was refreshing to see lots of children who just wanted to say hello and didn't have anything to sell.

The locals use the Mekong for pretty much everything - for fishing, washing their clothes, cleaning their teeth.....and going to the toilet. They obviously have a far stronger constitution than we do.

The trip went pretty well - I've even got sunburnt shoulders from a morning reading on the deck of the boat. The last leg of the journey was interesting though. We got dropped off from the boat about an hour away from Phnom Penh. There were 13 of us on the trip, and waiting to take us into the city was a mini-bus with 12 seats. This would have have been fine except we all had large rucksacks, and there was nowhere to store them other than on our laps. June and I ended up in the front seat alongside the driver, with June sat on my lap and naturally no seatbelt. There was a minor revolt as a couple of Germans refused to get on the mini-bus, but after it was explained that the alternative was a 5 hour walk, they begrudgingly gave in.

OK, we're off to explore Phnom Penh now. We're going to visit the beautiful temples and palaces today, before heading to the Killing Fields and museums remembering the reign of terror of the Khmer Rouge tomorrow....