The end of the beginning

Okay, so to say that this entry is late is a bit of an understatement. My original excuse was that I had several weeks of no internet access after arriving in Australia. My excuse evolved into me not having the time because I was looking for a job and a place to live but really I suppose I got lazy! Anyway with no excuses left I decided it's time for the latest update... happy reading!

After 5 months travelling, 10,000 miles, 16 countries, 10 time zone changes, 26 long distance train journeys (some very long!), more hostels than I care to remember, 3 ferry journeys, 3 flights, 7kg lighter (me, not my bags!) and only 2 pages left in my passport, we finally arrived in Australia on Dec 20th.

We arrived in Adelaide on a scorcher of a day. Working in Vietnam gave us a chance to get used to high temperatures but being from Ireland, it'll take me a little longer to get used to 30 deg C at 8am! We spent Christmas and New Years with Kate's mother who lives near Adelaide. When I say 'near Adelaide' it's a bit like Galway being 'near Dublin'. Australia is a big place and distances can be divided by 10 when being compared to Ireland.

Now, I am not a big fan of snakes (unless they're dead, and even then I don't want to get too close) but everyone told me that they're actually quite rare. In fact, of all the people I was talking to (about snakes) only a few had actually seen one in the wild. So you can imagine my surprise when I found a brown snake (yes, poisonous) all by myself ...in the house!!! Ok, so it was only a baby snake but I was glad when it was safely back outside and I was safely in. I've been keeping a closer watch ever since.

During our time in Adelaide we picked up a new car and Kate started taking flying lessons. She now has done 5 lessons and is eager to get back to doing a few more. We eventually left Adelaide (or more specifically, Maitland) and took a leisurely road trip along the coast road around the south coast of Australia to Melbourne. This was a great drive and the weather was fantastic too - I saw my first kangaroos and first koala bears! The Great Ocean Road is along this section and it too was fantastic.

The 12 Apostles (or what's left of them) along the Great Ocean Road

The blue lake in the volcanic crater of Mt. Gambier

After we arrived in Melbourne we met up with Marty, a skydiving friend of ours who recently moved back to Australia, and stayed with him for a week or so. We also met up with Barney and Patricia, old friends who have been living in Melbourne for the last few years. During this time, we had a look around for a longer term place to live and found a nice 2 bedroom apartment not far from the city centre. Let this be the official invite to anyone who would like to visit us and see Melbourne. The spare room is waiting :-)

Unfortunately, this travelling lark could not last forever and so I finally went to some job interviews over the past few weeks for Actuarial jobs in Melbourne. They were successful (or unsuccessful depending on your point of view!) and I will be starting work again after a 9-month break.

To make the most of our last few day of freedom, we decided we'd get into the Australian way of life and spent the last week back on the Great Ocean Road, on a 5-day surfing course... Totally bodacious man! ...or something, surf-lingo lessons are not till advanced class! ;-)

Melbourne City - home sweet home for the foreseeable future

Rainbow Divers

The PADI Divemaster (DM) course is taught at Rainbow through an internship programme. This means that we had crossed the line from being a customer and were now staff. Rather than arriving at the boat each morning to see our equipment all ready and waiting, we now had to get up at 5am every morning to assist with loading the boat.

There are a series of requirements you must complete to be qualified as a divemaster and unfortunately this included a bunch of exams! (I distinctly remember celebrating earlier this year the fact that I had ‘No more exams!’ ...clearly I was mistaken.) We had been warned that these were the most likely reason for not completing the DM course in the time allowed, so we put our heads down and worked on these solidly for the first 8-9 days.

With the exams out of the way, we could then get stuck into the more practical parts. These included:

• Making a map of an underwater section (30m x 50m)
• A series of swim tests
• Assisting with a variety of courses
• More rescue assessments
• other stuff!

Being out on the boat every day was excellent and we tripled our dive numbers. For breakfast each morning, we ate ‘street food’ down by the harbour. This is exactly as it sounds... we sat out on the street (on little plastic tables and chairs) and ate spicy noodles which were cooked in a big communal pot. It was delicious! And at only 5,000 Vietnamese Dong per bowl (about €0.25), it was well worth the money :-)

It wouldn’t be right to travel to a country and not experience a proper thunderstorm (we’ve been through one in almost every country so far) so sure enough, before we left, we were greeted with not 1 but 2 typhoons (the eastern hemisphere version of a hurricane). The eye of Typhoon Durian passed just south of our location, and nearly all the boats were taken out of the water so as to avoid damage. This slowed down our progress a little, but thankfully we managed to complete the last of the requirements on 7th December, my birthday :-)

We made some great friends in Rainbow and we were sorry to leave, but my Australia Visa was waiting for nobody (I had to enter by Jan 7th). So we finally packed up our stuff and headed on to Ho Chi Minh City (6 weeks late) and then flew to Singapore (our first flight in almost 5 months). Before we left, there was talk of coming back to do the Instructor Course... We came back once, we might be back again!

'The biggest cup of coffee in Hanoi'

Hanoi is a funny little town - especially if it's your first experience of South East Asia (as it was for me).

First of all, with a population of 4 million it's not a 'little town' at all but this was my first thought after having spent so much time in China (where there are over 160 cities with a population over 1 million). The little narrow streets and the fact that none of the buildings are more than 3-4 floors high adds to this notion.

Secondly, there were an amazing amount of scooters around! It was like being in Finglas only without the tracksuits. This is not that unusual for those who have travelled in SE Asia already, but I found the constant beeping of horns and crazy driving to be overwhelming. In Ireland, someone beeps the horn if they are annoyed (and they want the annoy-er to know about it). In Hanoi, I think it's how you say hello. (It's also how you say 'I want to overtake you' and 'Fair enough... off you go'.) The drivers were crazy and we had already seen one road fatality after only 3 bus journeys!

While we're on the subject of dead bodies... after missing out on seeing Chairman Mao in Beijing, we had hoped to get a peek at the embalmed body of Ho Chi Min but unfortunately he (it?) was on loan to Russia for its annual maintanance.

The Lonely Planet mentioned a place called the Kangaroo Cafe which served 'the biggest cup of coffee in Hanoi'. This sounded like just the trick to take our mind off the mayham so we dropped in. This was the first step in a chain of events which would result in us staying for 7 weeks in Vietnam.

Kangaroo Cafe (as well as serving coffee) also offered a variety of tours. We decided to sign up for their 3 day boat tour of Halong Bay - a beautiful bay with huge limestone rocks jutting out of the sea. The tour was fantastic and we ended up sharing the boat almost entirely with a bunch of Aussies (I think I'm going to like living in Australia!). One night of the tour, we stopped off at an Island and dropped into a Kiwi bar for a few drinks. This one in particular had a flyer for 'Rainbow Divers', a dive centre in Nha Trang (our next destination) and a map of the same town on the back.

After Halong Bay, we took a 26 hour train journey south to Nha Trang (listed as the best scuba diving spot in Vietnam). We wanted to do a dive or two so thought it was worth stopping off before moving on to Ho Chi Min City (aka Saigon).

With the Rainbow Divers flyer and map in hand, we made our way to their shop and were very impressed with what we saw. They had 2 PADI Course Directors as staff (PADI's highest rating) and a pile of other experienced instructors, and could offer any and all courses. We decided to make use of the opportunity (and the very low cost) and signed up to do the PADI Rescue Diver course.

We had the full attention of an excellent senior instructor (and two divemasters) all to ourselves for the whole 5 days and thoroughly enjoyed the course. There were jokes about coming back and doing the divemaster course (6 weeks+) but with Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia & Singapore still to come there just wasn't time (maybe next year, we thought). So we bought our train ticket on to Saigon and were sorry to have to leave the place.

While packing up our stuff, we discussed it a bit more about if and when we would come back and came to the conclusion that there's no time like the present. And so it came that we completely changed our itinirary for the remainder of the trip.

All those other countries would have to wait for another trip, and all because of the biggest cup of coffee in Hanoi.

Good morning Vietnam!!

It took about 2 days of travel to get from Hong Kong to Vietnam. We took a local train from central Hong Kong to the 'frontier' with mainland China and walked back across the border into un-civilisation. (When I first heard that you can walk across the border between China and HK, I pictured something like open plains with barbed wire and signs saying 'No mans land'. As it turns out, it's much less interesting than that - more like passing the security area at an airport - right up to getting your passport stamped.) We knew we were back in China again when we heard that familiar hoicking sound :-)

From the border we took another train to Guangzhou then an overnight sleeper to Nanning arriving in at around 4am. There's not much to do at 4am in many places and there's even less when you're in the middle of China, so you can imagine our surprise when we stumbled onto a 24-hour internet cafe right next to the station (with a surprisingly fast connection too!)

The quality of the trains we travelled on was inversly proportional to our distance from HK until by the time we left Nanning destined for the Vietnamese border, we were piled into the worst train we have been on yet (and we've been on a LOT of trains). It was like a scene out of Oliver Twist, with people crammed onto uncomfortable wooden seats in stiffling heat. It took us over 4 hours to go about 80 miles! Even at EUR 1.70, it was bad value for money!

The train didn't actually go to the Vietnamese border - but instead, dropped us about 10km away. Of course, where there are tourists, there are opportunists and we made this trip on the back of a 3-wheeled motorbike :-)

Unlike the China/HK border, the China/Vietnam border actually IS like I described above! There's about a 1km stretch that you have to walk along between the two borders, each with little huts where people can eye you suspiciously and then grudgingly stamp your passport. I really enjoyed the experience :-) We would later learn that our 1-month visa we got for our planned 10 day visit would not be long enough!

We finally arrived in Hanoi later that night and enjoyed a well deserved rest.

A week in Hong Kong

Once again, I'm a little behind in these posts (this one is about a month out of date!). This is because I've spent the past few weeks working and studying. 'Studying?' you say? (That's what I was thinking too!) You'll have to wait till the next post or two to learn more...

I had been looking forward to getting to Hong Kong for quite a while. Kate had been there a few times before and had nothing but good things to say, and the added bonus of reaching civilisation again after the few weeks in China also appealed to me :-)

While Hong Kong is under Chinese rule (again, after 150 years with the British at the helm) it has a much more modern feel to it than the rest of China. It is very like a prosperous European city but still maintains the character and culture of China.

Dublin is still working to produce an integrated ticket system which will work on all forms of public transport (dublin bus, cie, luas, etc.) but Hong Kong has had this for the past 20 years in the form of an 'Octopus' magnetic card. You don't even need to take it our of your wallet, just put your wallet or bag near the sensor and the credits are deducted - and it's not just for public transport, you can even use it to pay for your Starbucks coffee! (Sorry cartys1!)

White faces are not unusual so we no longer got the 'outsider' stares that we came to know and love travelling through the rest of China. Accomodation and food was quite a bit more expensive that 'Mainland' China but still cheaper than Dublin prices.

We took a trip to Ocean Park, a fun park on Hong Kong Island

We spent our week just walking around the city and taking if fairly easy. Electronic stuff is particularly cheap here - probably one of the cheapest places in the world for it - so we oogled around a few of the shops and ended up with a pair of the new 8GB ipod nano's, less than 3 weeks on the market when we got them :-)

At 8pm every evening, there's a light show syncronised to music - if you can imagine buildings dancing, this would be it! It was really impressive, and we probably watched it 5 nights out of the 8 we spent there.

We had a fantastic time with our week in Hong Kong and we'll definately be back again. We were sorry we had to go, but there was much more to see and do so we got ourselves some more train tickets and set off on the 2 day journey to Vietnam.

Goodbye Camera :-(

Unfortunately I will not be able to add any new photo's to picasaweb because our camera was stolen :-( The camera itself is covered by our insurance policy ...minus the policy excess (those insurance companies and their damn actuaries!) but unfortunately we also lost our photo's from the past few weeks which were still on the memory card.

We'll buy an new one again soon, but I'm afraid to get one while here in Vietnam where they probably make fake 'Made in China' labels (not exactly an endorsement in the first place) for their Vietnamese products!

China (Part 2)

Am a little behind in these entries, so I'll try to summarise the 3 weeks into one post.

From Shanghai, we took the train to Xi'an (pronounced Shean - obviously!). Our hostel had agreed to meet us at the train station (the train arrived in at 5:30am) and we were happy when we emerged from the crowds at the station and saw a guy holding up a sign reading 'John King'. We were at one side of the barrier and he was at the other so he told us to just walk around to where he was (round trip of about 20m). Simple enough, we thought. But when we walked around, the guy had disappeared! After waiting for about 15/20 mins and searching the immediate area for him we accepted that he had left us behind. We took a taxi to the hostel and when we were checking in told them about the guy leaving us behind. "We're very sorry", they said, "please have a free cup of coffee in our resturant". Fair enough, we thought and did so while we waited for our room to be prepared. Then we saw the sign on the wall saying that all guests get a free cup of coffee while waiting for their room - welcome to China, we thought :-)

While in Xi'an, we made a trip to the Terra Cotta warriors - one of the biggest tourist attractions in China. They were quite impressive, but we were hoping to get a little closer to them. Unfortunately, they are set up so that you look down onto them from above and you don't really get that close.

In Xi'an, we also hired bikes and cycles around the city walls - a round trip of 14km.

From Xi'an, we took a 17 hour train journey south to the city of Chengdu. In the sleeping car lottery, we were assigned to a chain smoking chinese man. Thankfully he didn't smoke in our confined compartment, but did spend the entire journey (day and night) coughing up flem into a bin the way only chinese people can. Thankfully he was in a lower bunk, so didn't have to spit past any of us :-)

The hostel we stayed in at Chengdu was the cheapest we had come across so far, with beds for as little as EUR 1.50 per person. We decided to splurge and spent a whopping EUR 7 on a room to ourselves. About 10km outside Chengdu, is a Giant Panda breeding centre, complete with Giant Pandas (both big and small) and embarassing videos showing all aspects of how the scientists carry out the breeding. Autumn is the time when the baby pandas are born so we were lucky to see some new borns about the size of a kitten. They were all in incubators and we expect that the pandas get better health care than most Chinese people!

We booked ourselves onto a 4-day cruise along the Yangtze river, and ended up meeting up with a nice bunch of Europeans on an otherwise chinese boat. We were even blessed by being assigned 2 germans in the sleeping compartment lottery! Most of the Yangtze river is polluted and covered in a layer of smog, but part of our tour included a trip up into 3 little gourges which were really quite spectacular (although not as good as I'd seen in Norway).

By the time we arrived at our destination we decided we had spent enough time in China and so made a bee-line for Hong Kong.

Shanghai

We arrived in Shanghai (again) on October 1st. We had been travelling for just over 2 months, been through 10 countries and about 15 cities, but I have never seen so many people in one place as we saw when we arrived in Shanghai!

You see, in China almost the entire population (1.3 billion people) are given their holidays at the same time. One of these holidays is some time in May, but unfortunately for us, the other time is on National Day which is actually a week long holiday, beginning on Oct 1st. It's bascially the Chinese equivalent of St. Patricks Day except without the drunk school children :-) After 3 days, we decided we'd had enough of the crowds so booked a train to Xi'an (home of the terra cotta warriors).

Unfortunately for me, my strongest memory of Shanghai will not be the crowds...

I had really grown to like the Chinese food and given that it's so cheap there's no reason at all not to eat out all the time. On one particular evening, I decided to head out to a resturant I spotted nearby to our hostel (luckily for her, Kate wasn't hungry). When I walked in to the very well decorated resturant, I was quite surprised to see that the whole place was empty - in fact, even the staff even seemed shocked that they had a customer and not only that, but a western customer!

Immediately, I was ushered in and seated at their best table. It seemed that the staff couldn't do enough for me. I had no less than 4 people fussing over me, all smiling and delighted to have a 'celebrity' in their resturant. One was removing the extra place settings, another was straightning out my own place setting. Somebody put a napkin on my lap and someone else poured me a cup of chinese tea. A few of the kitchen staff even ran out to have a look and giggled at the spectacle of a non-empty resturant.

Then I was presented with the menu - no english, no pictures.

I didn't want to offend them by just getting up and walking out (they had genuinely done their best to make me comfortable) so I just asked for 'chicken?'. One of the staff - the only one with English - pointed at something and told me in his best pigeon-english that this was chicken. I said ok and also asked for rice.

One person took the order off to the kitchen and the rest of the staff bascially just stood next to me, staring at me in their big empty fancy resturant, smiling at me and to each other. I didn't know what else to do but smile back and laugh to myself, wondering what I'd gotten myself into.

I was surprised when the food arrived so quickly (less than 2 minutes) and even more surprised when I saw what was presented to me. It was literally half a chicken, cut right down the middle - barely cooked - including half a head, half a beak, half of all the guts inside and one eye! The outside was a pale yellow colour. I didn't know what to do except laugh to myself and start eating the rice. One of the smiling staff had a brainwave and realised that I must not be eating the chicken because I didn't have a knife and fork (only chopsticks). He then brought over a knife and fork, and pointed again at the chicken... I looked around again and saw all the smiling staff standing right behind me. There was nothing else to do except find the leanest bit of chicken and eat. This is when I found out the chicken was cold! No wonder it took 2 minutes to prepare!

This pic (taken elsewhere, afterwards) shows something similar to what I was served.

I poked away at my chicken and ate my rice for about 20 minutes. At this point many of my fans had given me some space and went back to whatever there is to do in an empty resturant. I used the lack of attntion as my escape route and ran out of the resturant, saying "thank you" and "I wasn't very hungry anyway" to whoever I met.

That was the worst EUR 2.60 I ever spent!

Fast trains, typhoons and electric toilets (Japan)

Arrgh! I had just written my account of Japan when a cat from the hostel here jumped on my keyboard and deleted everything! D'oh! Here we go again...

We spent two weeks exploring Japan with the benefit of a Japanese Rail Pass which gave us unlimited travel on most of the trains, including their super fast Shinkansen, or 'bullet' trains!

We also managed to get stuck in a hostel for 2 days while it rained solid because of a typhoon! The typhoon even managed to overturn a train just 50 miles from where we were staying! Thankfully this was not on our train line, so our onward journey to Hiroshima ran as planned :-)

When we arrived in Hiroishima, we were met by Eoin Mallin's brother, Greg, who lives here with his wife. During our few days here, he and his in-laws took great care of us, showing us around the city and the nearby sights and also cooking an absolutely magnificient traditional Japanese home cooked meal. I wasn't sure what to expect when I was asked to break a raw egg into my bowl (to dip the food into) but it was delicious!

Hiroshima is, not surprisingly, quite a modern city but the highlight is the Peace Park which is situated almost directly under where the atomic bomb exploded. As well as nice grassy walkways, etc. it has an extensive museum giving you all the information you need to know (and some things you probably didn't want to know) about the bomb. At the back of this photo on the right, you can see the 'A-Dome', one of the few buildings which withstood the explosion - very errie to witness!

We also spent a bit of time in Tokyo. It was impressive when we first arrived, with all the bright lights and typical Japanese efficiency, but we soon got tired of the sheer number of Tokyo-ites who were so obsessed with their appearance and the numerous designer stores lining the streets. Everywhere we went, we saw people looking in hand held mirrors fixing their hair, or adjusting their cap so that it is just a little crooked, or whatever. Not me! It was not uncommon to see 2 or 3 people (men & women) sitting in a cafe, and rather than talking to each other, they would be 'fixing' their appearance.

Thankfully, we also got to meet down-to-earth Eric, a friend of Kate's brother, who has lived in Japan for the past 25 years. He took us out one evening and introduced us to a nicer side of Tokyo. When he heard that we had not yet sampled sushi, he had a mission! Kate actually loved it, but considering that I don't even eat cooked fish, leaving it uncooked didn't exactly make it more appealing! Anyway, I gave it a try and it was not as bad as I was expecting.

I'll finish up with a quick mention of Japanese toilets (sorry - I have no photo's!). Let me just say that if something can be automated then the japanese will do it! You can now do your business and when you're finished, you just press a button and are - ahem - cleaned. Fancier toilets even blowdry when you're all washed! And if you hate the feeling of sitting on a cold toilet seat, then fear not... you can even set your desired temperature!

Not Back in the USSR

...or so the song doesn't go.

Our original plan was to re-enter Russia from China and then get the ferry to Japan from Vladivostok (the end point of the Trans-Siberian Railway). But after the welcoming we received from the Russians on our trip so far and the added hassle of getting a new russian visa, we decided to skip the re-entry idea and go straight to Japan. The extra time that would be freed up could then be used travelling in more hospitable countries!