Holiday Windup

A belated tidy up of the last month's activities.

From Slovenia we caught a train to Munchen (Munich) to partake in that amazing festival that is Oktoberfest - though of course these days it is mostly in September. This started out as a boozy party to celebrate the nuptials of the future king in 1810, but everyone had such a good time that they decided to keep on doing it.

To communicate the scale of the event is difficult, there is seating for 100,000 people in and around the 14 aircraft-hanger like beer tents, and there are also a large number of amusement park rides, roller-coasters etc that are arrayed over the half square kilometer site. Beer is served in 1 liter steins by women who look like they do this as a break from their usual jobs as blacksmiths, lumberjacks and bouncers. Half the patrons dress in the traditional lederhosen and dirndl (embroidered white cotton dresses) though obviously not both at the same time. There are bands, accordions, singing, drinking and eating, dancing on tables and of course numerous trips to the pissoir. It has a friendly atmosphere, no fights that we saw and a jolly good time is had by young (16 years is legal drinking age) and old over the almost three weeks that it is on for.

Day 1 we headed to the Hofbräu-Festzelt tent that is most popular with English speaking visitors and got roundly sloshed and in traditional fashion I had my undies ripped off while I was still wearing them, ouchie. Day 2 we took it a bit easier and decided to try some rides. Jane suddenly remembered after getting on the eurostar roller-coaster, that she didn't like heights. The slow ride to the top was completed to a repeated litany of "Oh fuck" from her, and then once we were released and accelerated to full speed there was a sound like an air-raid siren going off in my left ear, starting at a low pitch and rising to almost ultrasonic, with only brief pauses for sucking in a breath. She assures me she had her eyes closed the whole time. Both she and you can check it out the ride on youtube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43-tkPeEhPk

We also toured some of the sights of Munchen, like the massive Hofbräuhaus beer hall which probably seats over a thousand people and the intriguing surfing spot in the middle of the city where people surf on a standing wave in the river. However for me the highlight had to be the Deutsches museum.

As a rule travel and tourism are pitched almost entirely at women, 99% of all shops in tourist areas are aimed at women, selling clothing, jewellery, useless household bric-a-brak and artsy crap that has zero appeal to anyone who can stand up when urinating. So it was a major delight to me to finally be able to do something that was of interest to a guy. The Deutsches museum is a technology museum with all the collected history of the great engineering nation of Germany (and yes they do mention the War). I wandered around for three hours while Jane moped in a cafe and saw many delights, probably the greatest of which were the first Diesel engine and the first Spark ignition engine - strangely anonymous amongst all the other exhibits, you wouldn't even know until you read the small placards, but if they were ever sold they would probably fetch tens of millions of dollars each.

All in all Munchen really was one of the highlights of our trip.

From Munchen we headed to Austria and Salzburg (literally "salt castle" as it has salt mines that have been worked for thousands of years). This was a mistake, as we hadn't realised that this was the scene of one of the most heinous post-war crimes ever perpetrated in Europe; "The Sound of Music". Now hating musicals as I do I am one of those who believes that a "problem like Maria" could have been best solved with a 12 gauge shotgun, both barrels, and perhaps followed up with a small nuke just to be on the safe side. However in Salzburg the streets are indeed alive with it, the hostels play the movie several times a day, there are Sound of Music tours, memorabilia and a depressing number of matronly american fans wandering around and chastising Jane for her use of profanity (frankly amazes us that there are still people who get upset by such things, there are definitely more important issues in the world, particularly if you are American). Salzburg is also the birthplace of Mozart, and there are several museums and daily concerts celebrating this. Ironic that Mozart hated the place and couldn't wait to get out.

We arrived in the weekend to discover that Austria is a land that time forgot, everything is closed - very olde worlde. It was a challenge even to find somewhere to eat on a Sunday (we had no choice as tourists), but after getting through the weekend we hired a car (also not open in weekend) and headed out to look at the Alps. They are of course lovely, and we had a nice day learning how to drive on the wrong side of the road, before heading to our chosen overnight spot, the very picturesque lakeside village of Hallstatt. Not having a map it took an hour to locate the accommodation and having done so we looked for a park. Austria does not like cars and the nearest park we could find was a kilometer away. Feeling rather sick this was more than I could handle so we said screw it and began to look for somewhere else more convenient to stay. Huge mistake as by now it was coming onto evening and of course unbeknownst to us hotel receptions in Austria close at about 6pm (we believe that the concept of "customer service" may not actually be directly translatable into Austrian German). As a result we drove around for two and a half hours until 8:30pm, getting pretty concerned before finally driving back to Hallstatt and the original hostel that was luckily also a bar/restaurant and therefore still open. We also found a park right outside. I felt pretty stupid.

Back to Salzburg and a quick tour of the Hellbrunn Castle which was a hunting day-residence for a jokester king about 300 years ago. He had a large number of hidden water jets and other intricate and clever water features and mobiles installed so he could drench his subjects/guests as they wandered around the place. You can just imagine what a complete dick he must have been. Pretty good place to finish the holiday. We flew out of Salzburg to London.

What a contrast. London is one of the most expensive cities on the planet. It cost more for a train ticket for the 30 minute ride into London from Stansted airport than it did for the three day tour of the Meekong Delta that we did or the two hour flight from Austria. Accommodation is also extremely expensive, but thankfully we have had help from our friends who we have let us crash with them (big thanks Helen, Richie, Mel and Ros). Now it is back to the grind, Jane is job hunting and after a quick course of antibiotics I am over the Giardia (having lost another 10kg on top of the 10kg I lost in Nepal I now weigh less than I did when I was 20years old). I am headed back to NZ to sort out my visa and have a bit more sunny weather so that I can look for work when I return to the UK in the New Year. Jane is staying on to learn the ropes in London. What we have seen of England so far we like, it is nice to be in a country where we speak the language and are familiar with much of the culture and can get the variety of food that we are used to in New Zealand. We are looking forward to settling in and having a good look around the old country and Europe over the next few years.

Thanks to all those we have spent time with on the trip, it has been a blast.

Robert and Jane

Agean Queens

A lot to catch up on! Jane and I have been less eager to write the blog now that it is costing us $6 per hour to do so.

When we last left you dear reader we were in Fethiye, Turkey, getting ready to head off and see another of Turkey's wonders:

In 1886 there was a volcanic eruption in Tarawera in the North Island of New Zealand that destroyed the pink and white terraces - beautiful natural weirs and pools of calcium carbonate that featured in many paintings and a few very early photographs. This was widely regarded as a bad move on Mt Tarawera's part.

Fortunately the pink and white terraces were not a one-off. Pammukale in the south west of Turkey boasts a spectacular rip-off of this Kiwi innovation, Calcium Carbonate (A.K.A cement) dissolved in hot water gushes up from a natural spring that was the home of the Plutonium of Ancient city of Heirapolis. No the Romans didn't have nukes, this was the name of the temple of Pluto (ie Hades), where along with the spring water came noxious vapours that amongst other benefits managed to kill a couple of terminally pushy French tourists a few years back. Anyway the terraces of Pammukale extend over several kilometers and are a quite brilliant white colour, the dissolved calcium carbonate precipitates out in places where the water flows fastest, which has a natural tendency to build up the terraced ponds. Several thousand years ago this was also the home of a major Roman city - Heirapolis, named for the wife of Hercule's son (not Hera Zeus's wife). Estimates place this snake infested city at about 150-250,000 people, the principle being that you take the number of seats in the theatre and multiply by 10 to give the population. It's a pretty big theatre. This is also the place where one of the biblical Phillips (either P the apostle or P the evangelist) was maytred, but in this area you can pretty much spin a bottle, follow that direction and trip over some religiously important spot within a few kilometers.

Moving right along the next must see on the Turkey grand tour was Ephesus, a city supposedly named for Ephos, Queen of the Amazons who, all lurid legends aside, did not did chop off their right breasticles, nor even in fact exist except in fantasies. Anyway, it was an important port town, but then the sea up and left taking the port with it and leaving this town in the middle of a malarial swamp five kilometers from the sea. As might be imagined this reduced property values somewhat, but usefully helped to preserve it as something of a ghost town. There is a lot of wonderfully preserved classical era architecture in Ephesus, The library of Celsus is a very impressive monument to the learning to the Romans and their skullduggery - they've found a hidden tunnel from within the library to the bordello next door.

Surprisingly in all the ruins we saw it is the massive and heavy archways that seem to have survived best, the walls seem more likely to fail in earthquakes, or get recycled and the columns were almost always destroyed by man - for a good reason; the sections of the columns were stacked up on each other and keyed together with iron dowels around which molten lead was poured to rigidly lock them together. This was an excellent source of lead and iron for people of later ages. A lot of the carefully hewn marble was also appropriated by peoples to do their own thing. A terrible example of this is the Ancient Temple of Artemis (also known as Diana) near Ephesus that was one of the ancient wonders of the world. However times changed, the Early Christians came and had to destroy or put their stamp on that which came before and so used bits of the Temple to build amongst other things the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and a grotty little church on a nearby hill. To me it is a measure of the civilisation of the Romans that they left much of what they came to control intact, adding to it or modifying it without needing to exorcise and destroy all evidence of what came before. If only Christianity had shown such forbearance (in literature as well) then perhaps we could have avoided the Dark Ages and enjoyed the renaissance a thousand years earlier.

Enough of Turkey already. Off to the Greek Isles. First substantive stop (after a bit of tedious island hopping) was Mykanos. This has been a party island for decades, Jane's dad got propositioned by a bloke there 30 years ago, and so it was somewhat appropriate that one of the first sights we see as we get off the boat at midnight is a Drag Queen with huge curly afro, heels and a red sequin dress. We settled in for two nights, one day spent at paradise beach, where there were guys waving their sunburnt willies around, and a fridge in the snack shop tried to electrocute me (shop assistent was helpful enough to explain to me that it was my fault for not wearing rubber shoes).

Around about here I joined up with a new travelling companion: Giardia, and it's sidekick Giardi-arse. This enhanced our holiday in the same way that leg amputation enhances running.

Naxos, 3 days, nice town, lovely beaches, worst white wine we've ever had, assuming it was in fact wine as billed and not a mistranslation of "reject vinegar". Not eating. Lack of appetite aside, after just a few days the ubiquetous Greek gyros (pita bread rolled into a cone filled with fat drenched meat, chips, tomato and mayonaise and generally massively inferior to what we get in New Zealand) were rapidly loosing their appeal. Fresh fruit and vegetables off the menu due to dodgy guts so unfortunately no salads.

Santorini, 3 days, crappy beaches, amazing views in this island that was blown apart by a massive volcanic eruption 3500 years ago. It is suggested that this was the mythical Atlantis, and the scraps of the city of Ancient Thira that somehow survived the eruption (though everyone scarpered - they apparently had some warning) perched as they are on top of a hill as far from the caldera as you can get are quite impressive. The white buildings on the cliff tops overlooking the huge flooded and still active caldera that is roughly 6km across are truely a quintessential mediterranean experience if you can afford what they are selling. The crappy 50cc scooter we hired that was only capable of going uphill if you got a good running start and cost 5 times as much as a better bike in Thailand did, really set the tone for Santorini, not a place you want to do on the cheap. Worst red wine we've ever had. Eating a little, evacuating a lot.

Crete; we started at Chania in the Northwest where I spent a couple of days in bed after another fatiguing ferry ride, we then did a 5 hour walk through Sumaria gorge from the heights of the mountains down to the beach, very pretty. Subsequently spent 4 days in bed in beautiful Paleochora trying to recuperate with the worst flatulence of my life while Jane went progressively more and more stircrazy.

Athens. Another long tiring ferry ride followed by walking the streets for several hours looking for accomodation and being laid low for two days yet again. The Parthenon and the temple of Olympian Zeus were very impressive. But otherwise give Athens a miss, one bright note: Athens was responsible for our best meal in Greece; it was Italian.

Jane decided she wanted to climb Mt Olympus, and so she did. Pretty massive effort; it was a climb of about 2000m up and 2500m down in one 11hour day, passing pitifully weak Germans and other Europeans all the way. I dutifully stayed in bed and propped my head up to praise her athletic prowess and feign sympathy for her self inflicted muscle aches.

After some discussion on the matter we have decided that the Greeks are without a doubt the most asthetically challenged people we have encountered on our trip. While they are friendly enough they appear to be taking many of their fashion tips from the 70's, women dye their hair badly, frequently sport mustaches and beards (no joke) and have a prediliction for wearing tight clothing over bodies that are definitely not deserving of such treatment. Wouldn't normally make such an observation but it really struck us pretty hard. On the other hand this might be just the place to go if you are a bit on the homely side (In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king).

Thesseloniki was our final stop and nothing more that a way out of Greece. We booked the train to Slovenia and for the second most expensive nights accomodation of our entire trip were treated to a stay in the grottiest place we've been in since we got to Europe. Final impressions of Greece were capped off by the guy in the urinals at the train station masturbating and learing at me as I was at the urinal beside him. And of course then the train trip was just awful.

In the recent James Bond movie Casino Royale they take a train to MonteNegro. A nice clean modern train. This identifies the film as entirely a work of fiction as we are sure said train does not exist. For the tidy sum of NZD$150 each we had a 25 hour train trip on a 3 carriage train that was we believe probably cleaned at some stage during the 90's. Eight passport inspections Greece - Macedonia - Serbia/MonteNegro - Croatia - Slovenia, no food, no drinks, no toilet seats, toilet paper or water to clean hands with. Don't ever do this. It is generally cheaper and certainly healthier to fly. Watching the Serbian countryside crawl past at a stately 20-30km per hour between random unexplained stops in the middle of nowhere did not provide us with the treasure trove of fond memories we had hoped for.

Things finally started to look up with arrival in Slovenia, Ljubljana ( ie Lyublyana) this is a very pretty place sometimes called a mini-Prague (not that we'd know the difference yet). It was the economic heart of the old Yugoslavia, and in the early 90's they told the increasingly chauvanistically Serbian Slobodan Milosovic and Serbia et al to go and collectively hump themselves. Luckily they had a convenient buffer in a similarly minded Croatia who were sitting between them and Serbia. Croatia of course ended up doing all the fighting necessary to back up the finer details of the point they were trying to make without Slovenian support, not winning them a lot of love in Croatian hearts. Anyway Ljubljana is full of nice little street cafes and bars which are the only places open on a Sunday (very olde worlde to us progressive Antipodeans), and everyone makes use of them. It also has very cheap medical care. And most importantly it has non-greek food.

Summarising:

-Turkey, fantastic, more interesting and definitely cheaper than Greece.
-Greece, in general give it a miss. Food is crap and/or expensive. Maybe visit the islands with friends and money. Early days yet but possibly don't come to Europe for the wine.
-Giardia, fantastic way to loose weight, shitty way to spend a holiday.

PS I may be being too hard on Greece, perhaps blame it on the bug, but then again.... Also much praise to Jane for the added weight (me) she has had to lug around this month.

Olympian Efforts

Another long overnight bus trip from Goreme in Cappadocia to Antalya, connecting to an hour long regional bus along the coast and a 40 minute trip in a "Dolmus" or minibus from the mountain highway down a steep valley. At 10am we finally bowled into our accomodation at Olympos. Olympus is on the south west coast of Turkey and shares its name with nearby mount Olympos, it dates back to a few centuries BC when the place was Greek (Hellenistic period), though all that is left is ruins covering a 1500 year period with nothing currently inhabited. The ruins lie between the beach and the hostels and it costs a couple of dollars to go the beach via the ruins every day, money that is supposedly used for maintentance, but as with the rest of Turkey it is pretty obvious that this money is just going into someone's pocket. Nonetheless it is pretty essential expenditure as it is damned hot and the beach presents the only way of keeping cool.

Olympos was just a small valley surrounded by steep rocky hills until the tourist boom of the last 20 years. Now there are thousands of tourists during the summer months and a huge number of pansyions (hostels) have sprung up to take advantage, they are very comfortable and well run with outdoor lounges/bars/restaurants and very nice places to hang out, which seems to be the primary entertainment. A semi-local Australian told us that in fact all the businesses and hostels are actually run by the same extended family. Result: Lots of infighting, politics and price fixing. We stayed at Bayrams which was excellent and highly recommend it, it's about as close to the beach (1km) as you can get.

Exploring the Olympos ruins occupied a few hours, and was interesting to see the overgrown remenants - contrasts the more excavated and well groomed ruins we have seen elsewhere. Walking through the undergrowth I had a near-miss with stepping on a snake (admittedly tiny and speeding off in the opposite direction but still willies-inducing). Another fascinating excursion was a three hour trip one night to visit the Chimaera - a mythical fire-breathing beast with the forebody of a lion, body of a goat and a snake for a tail, real scary huh? In practice it is a small area 50m long and 10m wide on the side of a rocky hill where methane has been released continuously for a few thousand years and will spontaneously reignite (residual heat) when blown out. Not something you see every day.

After three days, lots of swimming and book reading we boarded a minibus to take us to the boat that we were going to tour along the coast to Fetiye, this included a brief stop in a town with a statue of Santa Claus in a central square, turns out this was related to a Church of St Nicolaus who was a one-time inhabitant of these parts and had a bit of a cult following as Saints tended to a thousand years ago - a local boy does well sort of thing. The boat cruise to Fetiye was a three days and nights affair fully catered with 13 passengers and 4 crew on a well set up 24m (80ft) tub of a sailing boat, that only cost NZD$400,000! We would stop at four or five coves or bays a day and would go swimming, snorkelling, diving (extra side trip that cost more, but dived on replica galley) all in ridiculously warm water. We saw octopuses, we ate great meals three times a day and slept on deck mats rather than in our cabins due to the heat. It was a bit of a voyage of the damned in that there were 8 Aussies with just 3 Kiwis and 2 Belgians as counterbalance but was a lot of fun, and was over far too quickly. The coast of South East Turkey slopes steeply into the sea and is high, rough, rocky and Arid. The best curio for this trip was the ancient sunken town of Dolchiste, which sank into the Ocean in an Earthquake 2000 years ago, leaving ruins on both side of a wide deep channel.

Fetiye was our destination, and served as our base for a further three days. A visit to Saklikent was a relief from the hot dry weather that makes the days quite tiring. Saklikent is a18km long chasm through the mountains up to 300m high and down to just 3m wid. In wet weather it serves as a gorge, but most of the year it is dry with polished marble walls, massive bolders and trees lodged in this crack that while hundreds of metres high is so narrow in places that you cannot see the sky. Huge cold springs leak out of the walls at the bottom end of this gorge sending forth a frigid river of water that only the stupid (ie Jane) are prepared to swim in. The shade and cold water make this a haven from the heat, and local developers have set up restaurants and cafes perched on platforms over the river. A walk, clamber and climb for an hour and a half up the gorge followed by a swim for Jane and sitting around for an hour on one of these platforms filled an afternoon. Nearby we also got to visit Alexander the Great's Cave (quite massive) and just beside it a thermal spring where you enter a building on the side of a hill, then walk down a narrow sloping underground tunnel into the hill then finally desend down ricketty stairs into a near vertical crack in the rock that is just a meter wide and maybe 15m long and is absolutely packed (as in sardines) with turkish men standing one in front of the other. It's hot, it's humid, and it's more than a little bit bizzare.

P.S. Quick congrats to Mark and Susan who just got married, Ross and Amanda who are about to get married and Dave and Katrina who just got engaged.

Turkey's heart; Kapadokya and Nemrut

We continue our trip through Turkey with a visit to Kapadokya (Anglicised to Cappadocia for some reason). This is an amazing region slap bang in the middle of Turkey where there were a few little volcanic eruptions 10 million years back that deposited a layer of ash about 100m thick. So what you might say. Well the useful thing about this is that this ash has consolidated into a soft stone (similar to limestone) that is easily worked even with stone tools. So imagine you are a hardworking Hititte 3-4000 years ago with a growing family and lots of marauding animals and people to guard yourself against. Do you build yourself a house of straw, a house of sticks or maybe a house of bricks? Not with the wolf at the door you don't. What you do do is make yourself a cave. This approach has continued through to the present day with every hillside, valley and ravine around Goreme looking somewhat moth-eaten. Myriad chambers have been constructed for people, pigeons (artificial nesting holes in cliffs - they were farmed for their shit!) and popes. There are 36 hidden underground cities dating back up to 3-4000 years, some capable of holding thousands of people with huge stone (Indiana Jones) wheels that roll across passages to block them off against invaders. There are huge numbers of houses and hotels carved out of rock, with the useful side effect of being cool in summer and warm in winter. And there are churches dating back to a particularly prolific period about 800-1000 years ago when every Saint needed a place to call his own. The stone continues to erode and frequent earthquakes are also a problem so they don't last forever, but a home that lasts a few hundred years ain't bad and there are still massive numbers of ruins in various states of repair to be seen.

The other feature this area is famous for is "Fairy chimneys" with lumps of hard bassalt on top of the ash layer protecting the ash from erosion and leaving hard knobs on top of tall ash-rock spires, some over 40m high with many hollowed out for houses. Fairy chimneys be damned, from the above description it should be obvious to all that they have far more in common with phalluses than fairies, but "valley of the penises" might not have the touristic pulling power they were looking for.

After a few days we took off for Nemrut mountain in the east of Turkey near Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia. This description is not entirely accurate as there are 3 Nemrut mountains in the region, all claiming to be the home ground of local lad King Nemrut (Nimrod in English) who had a good hard try at killing off the founder of Judaism, (from whence came Christianity and Islam); namely one Mr Prophet Abraham who lived roughly 3500-4000 years ago. Anyway a 12 hour ride in a minibus then up at 4am to hike to the top of the 2200m mountain (actually only the last 200m) to watch the sun rise over the tomb of Antioch. For those of you unfamiliar with the bible you might know him as the original owner of the holy hand-grenade in Monty-Python's Holy Grail. Anyway three unexcavated tombs are hidden under a 50m mound of small rocks that form the peak of this mountain, they are known to exist only from recent seismic surveying. There are two terraces with large statues of the relevant kings and a couple of Greek gods to both the the east and west of this tomb and at the time they would host occasional ceremonies and get-togethers for important personages. All in all very impressive when you realise just how remote this site is, many days travel to get to it without vehicles - think about trying to build something atop Mt Hutt in Canterbury, or Mt Ruapehu in the North Island of New Zealand or hosting a garden party in these locations and you get the general idea.

We moved on to Sanliurfa, birthplace of Abraham, and as such one of the only places in the world that is a common religious site to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Though there were only Muslims in evidence in this atypically alcohol free city. You can visit the cave where he is said to have been born and hidden for seven years at the base of the cliff where King Nimrod lived (Nimrod killed off all of Abraham's potential playmates due to an unfavourable prophecy about being replaced by Abraham that came to pass anyway). The cave was weird, partitioned into womens and mens halves with basically no cave wall showing and taps to take holy water home from, it is accessed off the courtyard to a huge mosque built by the Saudis a few years ago. Nearby is a large pool (think 2-3 olympic swimming pools sat end to end) of very well fed Carp said to have been miraculously created when Nimrod attempted to Barbeque Abraham.

Last stop on this 1500km 3 day tour was Harran an ancient city that Abraham moved to before heading south, bits of this walled city date back 4000 years (and a town at least 7000 years ago), it was the centre of empires and well looked after by successive conquerers, a truely impressive sight - until the Mongols showed up about 800 years back and kicked the crap out of the place. Not much left now but a large crumbling castle and ruined walls that were once tall and imposing, I was impressed with how high the city is above the surrounding plain. In my mind that 5-10 metres of extra height over an area of about a square kilometer has come predominantly via the bowels of humans and animals over a several thousand year period.

Now we are off to Olympos by overnight bus, we've had a great time on this part of our trip. More sight seeing less drinking. One other curiousity: In Turkey the hawkers are continually trying to start conversations with us. Standard approach is: Where are you from? Whats your name? Now buy my crap at extortionate prices. If you don't respond after the first question then they guess at your country. From this we have learnt that we are in fact from Holland, not New Zealand as previously thought. Who knew? This hasn't happened just once, but more like 10-15 times in a week.

Fallen Empires and Individuals; Istanbul, Gallipoli and Troy

After our extended stay in Asia we have finally found our way to Europe and being rather budget little birdies (Kiwis) we are obviously sticking to the cheaper regions. With a desire to see a few ancient bits we have come to Turkey. First stop Istanbul:


After trialing the "no lonely planet guidebook" approach in Malaysia, we have determined that it sucks and it is much easier to get around with a little bit of local information in your pocket, otherwise you waste all of your holiday time trying to figure out A) where you are, and B) how to get out of A). So with a first night booked in Istanbul we made our #1 priority to obtain said book. Fortunately we found one in the book exchange at our hostel in Sultan-ahmet (main tourist area) and Jane's light fingers (not really) saw to the rest.


Turkey is a real jewel for the traveller in that it has a long history of being a fabulously wealthy and developed country, but has been laid low by the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire 80 years ago so that it is now a relatively cheap place to travel to with lots of amazing stuff to look at. Our hostel in Sultanahmet was situated about 200m from Hagia Sophia (Saint Sophia), a huge Cathedral built in just 6 years 1500 years ago when the Roman empire had relocated to Constantinople (Istanbul) in what was then Byzantia. With an immense domed roof (60m tall and 35m diameter) that has survived earthquakes, schisms, Crusaders and Muslamicists as well as a fair number of clergy just dying to be struck down by an appropriate act of God it is an incredible piece of work. Matched in some ways by the equally big but spring-chickenesque 400 year old Blue Mosque next door, and somewhat remarkably by the huge basilica cistern - a 1500 year old underground water storage tank just 100m from these two previous monuments and more than a hectare in area it lay hidden and forgotten for a thousand years without collapsing, now filled with a little water, massıve carp and Italian tourists.


We hung out in Istanbul for a few days while booking a tour for the rest of Turkey, filling in the rest of our time with a number of wholesome activities (given that drinking is so expensive here) including: A boat cruise up the Bosphorus (channel linking the Agean sea via the Dardenales channel and the inland Marmara sea to the Black sea). The Bosphorus is just 650m wide at narrowest and 35km long and has had tremendous strategic importance ever since trade began 5000 years ago separating Europe from Asia. It has remained one of the places to hang out and be seen for the despotic conquerer/empire builder on the move. We stopped to climb to the Yoros castle overlooking the Black sea entrance, pretty run down now 700 years after its heyday, a little rock climbıng required to get up on it. We were a lıttle chuffed to see this same castle being used in a turgid and incomprehensible soap-opera on the bus a few days later.


We also spent half a day at the Topkati palace in Sultanahmet, this was the home of the Ottoman rulers for hundreds and hundreds of years and is a huge shambles of walls and buildings now turned into a museum that houses some fascinating stuff, be it jewelry, weaponry (A 2m long greatsword!) or kitchens. The one catch is that in the bad old days was that to gain entrance to most of this stuff (particularly the harem) one could not be in possession of ones knob. That's right, shoes at the door and no dick's allowed. Actually even Turkish women were generally out of luck in getting in as it was illegal to turn a Turkish women into one of the Sultan's play-things, there being prohibitions in the Koran against enslaving or shagging muslim women, not that that extends to dirty infidels taken as slaves of course.


There was a further half a day wandering around the huge grand bazaar - many hectares of old streets and roads that have been roofed over for centuries and now houses huge numbers of shops selling clothing, jewelery and other sorts of useless crap that makes women all weak-kneed. However all hope was not lost, as just over the Golden Horn (an inlet off the Bosphorus) 1km away was a massive area of engineering shops selling huge varieties of male oriented stuff, including an underground mall full of gun shops that sold flick knives and automatic weapons. Not something you see every day in our ever-so civilized countries ('Merica excepted).


That's about it for Istanbul, we headed off for our tour of Turkey. First stop Gallipoli, very knowledgable guide from Anzac House, good tour, but personally pretty depressing. I won't try to be glib or sarcastıc about it. It was a popular war fought mainly by volunteers (on the English side at least) who wanted to see the world and had their heads filled with Jingoistıc crap that made it OK to kill the other guy (a view they generally lost very quickly when presented wıth the realities of war). But I fınd the sentiments espoused by the memorials hollow. Glory? Remembered Forever? Gave their lives for freedom? I see no glory in their deaths, we don't remember the names of the dead as much as their brothers who lived to a ripe old age, and it is hard to justify fighting for freedom in this campaign (Turkey only joined with Germany because Britain and Russia had decided that they were going to break up and take control of the Ottoman Empire post WW1). We won't be so willing to fight wars for money or land again will we? (OK so that was a little sarcastıc).

The saddest thing about Gallipoli, of which the world remains generally ignorant, is that it may be one of the main causes of the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide in which the Turks and Kurds massacred 1-1.5 million Ethnic Armenians living in Turkey that the Turks decided in this time of strife (as their Ottoman Empire was dying), were potentially dangerous (Christian) sympathisers with the British. To that end Gallipolli's 120,000 armed and mainly volunteer soldiers killed is an insignificant sideshow to the greater tragedy it may have created.

There are many parallels between this Gallipoli conflict and the campaign some 3500 years earlier and 20km south on the other side of the Dardenales (narrow strait leading from the Agean to the Black sea) as the Greeks took on Troy. Similar heroics and heros (the Turkish leader who rose through the ranks at Gallipoli and saw off the Brits was Ataturk - father of modern Turkey. Just quietly he was born in Greece, though with the residual enmity between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus the Turks won't mention it), the same strategic goal (forget Helen's 1000-ship launchıng face, it was the entrance to the Dardenales, important because square rig sailing craft could only enter the Dardenales when winds were favorable), and of course same bloody body count. There are now monuments to the fallen on both sides of the Dardenales; near Troy there are two man made hills that have stood as monuments to the Greek victors for 3000 years, will Gallipoli's endure?

We stayed the night in Cannukale, a great seaside town near the narrowest point of the Dardenales and more strategically relevant in the last 2000 years since sailing techniques improved, and went on a tour of Troy a few kilometers away. Troy is a fascinating place; a slowly expanding city rebuilt about 10 times between 5500 years ago and 2000 years ago as it recovered from various cataclysms and wars, before it lost strategic relevance and was covered in dirt and lost for a Millenium. There is amazing detail to be seen in the small portions that have been excavated. Rough unhewn sloping stone walls in the 5000 year old bronze age era, tidy masonry from 3000 year old Homerıc era iron age tools, details and features that align with descriptions in Homer's Illiad. Standıng at the spot where King Priam likely watched Archilles kill his son Hector, Wow. No they haven't found a horse, but they have the mock-up from the 2004 movie on the waterfront in Cannukale, besides which the horse is generally thought to have been a seige engine for knocking over the tall vertical mud brick walls that sat atop the cruder sloping stone foundation walls of Troy. So much for legends and warnings about greeks bearing gifts, it's a good bet the guys in Troy saw that one coming. Troy is a real treasure and deserves a look in at least once in a lifetime.

Next stop: (after an 18hr bus ride!) Cappadocia.

Malaysian Getaway

It is late summer and there large numbers of thermal refugees from Arabia holidaying in Malaysia and Indonesia to escape the 50 degree temperatures at home. As a result we were stuck for a few days in Penang, an Island about the size of lake Taupo with a population of half a million people and lots of manufacturing industry connected by bridge to the malaysian peninsula. Really not much more to say about the place, if holidaying don't bother.

We travelled on to Langkawi on the recommendation of a couple that we met in Vietnam. Langkawi is a beautiful group of forest covered hilly islands off the south of the Malay penisula near the Thai border, the biggest of which is about 30km across. Langkawi has a lot going for it; relatively sparsely populated (for Malaysia) with fantastic beaches, and it is a Duty Free Zone so alcohol is actually cheap (a minor miracle for a Muslim country). Development has been patchy with economic burps leading to the odd old half finished building and some boarded up businesses - in the way you might see in a slightly economically depressed area of a city or town. Langkawi (and Malaysia) is favoured with an incredibly benign climate where it is never too hot or cold, there is never strong wind and the worst extreme you have to build for is heavy rain, so there are a lot of open air cafes and restaurants that are nothing more than roofs on poles.

We got a cheap bungalow (NZ$11 per night) on Cenang beach , a huge long strip of beachfront resorts, shops, and cafes on the north west of the island. The couple running the place were a helpful if slightly disorganised (of which more later) couple, an ex Iranian Colonel from the Shah's days and his Japanese wife, both in their 60's.

Hiring a car was cheap - about NZ$25 for the day including fuel so we travelled around for a day, seeing some of the sights. The cable car was very scary, suspending us 100-200m above the forest canopy as we went to the highest point on the island, but very nice architecture and engineering. We also went to the seven pools where we swam in catchpools at the top of a big waterfall, the most pleasently cool we managed to be in four days on langkawi.

Going out at night was trickier than for other countries. Due to the predominantly muslim population a lot of places exclude alcohol entirely and westeners tended to cluster strongly in the few that do sell booze. Arabs and others are scattered in twos and threes through the other 100 restaurants and cafes, but even so most places are open till 2-3 in the morning every day of the week. We thought we had just not found the night spots and spent an hour and a half walking back and forth along the entire strip one night looking for where everyone was, eventually realising it just wasn't that sort of place unlike everywhere else we have been in Asia. This reconnaisance yeilded just three bars, of which one was right next door (Debbie's run by a Malaysian women with one arm and an Irish husband). But it also saw us walking along a dark road at 1am in the morning after a few drinks not paying too much attention to where we were going when I noticed a wiggly outline on the road a metre or two in front, did a double take and realised it was a snake. Jane and I both jumped, but the snake wasn't moving and neither were it's two friends a few metres away, we didn't stop to check but we think they may have been someone's dinner dropped on the road - catering-screwup rather than close-encounter (sort of dissapointing not seeing a snake after 4 months in Asia).

After four days it was time to check out, go to the airport and fly to Kuala Lumpur, hungover after meeting a couple of Brits the night before and drinking flaming lambourghini's (Just say no kids) we got to the motel checkout 40 minutes before we needed to check-in at the airport to be told that the wife with the keys to the security box and our passports had gone out somewhere without her cellphone. Husband jumps in car to go and find her (but without telling us when he would be back). We wait till 10 minutes before we have to check in but no-one had come back, unable to contact either of them we took the next step: We broke into their house, kicking down the front door, searching around, kicking down their bedroom door, then using a pry-bar to break into the security cabinet. Gear retrieved we then jumped in a taxi and hightailed it to the airport, jumping queues to get checked in in time and going directly to the gate in the hopes of avoiding any consequences. Not quite a clean getaway though, the Japanese lady owner somehow managed to get though to the gate without a boarding pass, and confronted us. She just looked totally shocked and hurt, saying that her house had been broken into three times in the last year now, and that her kitten had died this morning (believe it or not I patted it while lifting the matress it was sitting on looking for the box). But despite feeling bad we stuck to our guns and wouldn't give here any more money than the $20 token payment for damages that we had left. Pretty worried when Jane was asked to identify herself to the flight attendents before takeoff - thought we were about to get dragged off by the police, but turned out to be just a problem with our boarding passes, quickly fixed.

Kuala Lumpur was a lovely step into comfort after the last month of budget accommodation. Staying with my cousin Richard and his lovely new wife (of ten days) Joelle, in a delicsiously air conditioned apartment we were treated to a couple of great nights out at his new restaurant and bar "Twenty One" in the heart of the city. Richard has been in this game learning the craft for 15 years but this is the first place that he has owned personally (with his partner) and it is going brilliantly, but a very full-on life: up at 11am in bed at 5am, and having to be a convivial host and manager 340 days a year. To relieve stress he has a number of outlets, the latest of which (after being told to sell his motorbike) is a ridiculously big remote controlled "Monster" truck, with 5hp and capable of about 140km/hr. We headed out at 4am in the morning to a nearby motorway to play with this baby. Thankfully the video camera we've been carrying survived the little prang we had when doing some onboard video.

While Richard was off working Joelle took us to Batu (Stone) Cave inside Kuala Lumpur, this is a massive cave probably 40m wide and 100m high and 150m deep, used as a Budhist temple with a 20m Golden Budda statue out front. It is a truly spectacular natural formation complete with monkeys that climb the surounding cliffs and challenge people for food. Every year there is a religious ceremony in which thousands of the faithful gather as devotees pierce their faces with steel rods, and their bodies with hooks in penance.

Impressions of malaysia have been great, wonderfully helpful (taxi drivers were just fantastic) and friendly people, good food (mix of enthnicities, 10% Indian, 30% Chinese and 60% Muslim). Don't get hassled to buy stuff all the time like you do in other parts of Asia, and infrastructure all works. Kuala Lumpur is really almost a modern western city, pretty, lots of greenery, and cheap. Easy to have a good life here with a really good three bedroom apartment close to the city centre costing NZ$70 per week (unfurnished).

Next stop: Istanbul.

Thailand to the Islands

Our travels have continued with a trip through Thailand. We flew into Bangkok and spent the obligatory day in Kaosan Road. After three months in Asia the big cities are no longer very interesting to us and we could not even muster the enthusiasm to go out and look into some of the more specialist night time entertainments that Bangkok has to offer. But on the plus side Thailand is not as hot as Vietnam or China were, so we are far more comfortable.

After 20 years of heavy tourism development Thailand is no longer a really cheap country, being instead merely quite cheap when compared to NZ and certainly more expensive than any of the other places we have been on our trip. Our universal yardstick is beer prices and by this measure Thailand is about 50% of NZ prices (Vietnam 5-10%, China 10%, Nepal 10%).

After a day in Bangkok we traveled down to Koh Tao (ie Tao Island) off the south east coast of Thailand. This is a 20 square km island with a relatively small town Sai Ree strung out along a a beautiful beach about 1.5km long with tons of restaurants, cafes, bars and reasonably cheap accomodation. You can walk everywhere or hire a quad-bike or motorbike if you are a lazy bastard. We spent an hour walking around looking for accommodation and eventually got a nice self contained bungalow 50m from the beach with en suite and veranda for NZ$16 per night. Koh Tao is rated as one of the best places in the world for diving, and it is the primary focus of the whole island, this, on top of the more tolerable temperatures out in the Gulf of Thailand, was one of the big motivators for our going there. There is a huge population of European tourists and dive instructors (like ski instructors but better tans and less use of terms of personal address like "dude" and "bro") that keep the beach bars and restaurants full at night, and it feels very safe, friendly and relaxed after the frantic bustle of some of the cities we have been to.

Highlights of Koh Tao include walking to a secluded bay on the far side of the island (40 minutes) where we went snorkeling in amongst the beautiful coral and rocks. And of course diving, though unfortunately we went with a group that included a dopey pair of Dutch boys who sucked through their air twice as fast as we did and so cut one of our two dives down to 25minutes rather than the expected 50, however we still saw massive schools of fish as well as decent sized reef sharks and moray eels etc. Some of the beach bars have lounging mats (built in head rests) on the sand only a meter or two from the water's edge, and we really enjoyed a night we spent at Lotus Bar watching their very talented performers spinning fire-sticks and burning pois around. Win for me too as Jane accidentally stole someone else's jandals (Thongs for you foreign types) and they turned out to be far too big for her, and about right for me.

Koh Phangan was the the next stop as we Island hopped our way south. The main reason for going here was the "full moon party" - a monthly party on a short beach at the southern tip of the island that plays host to 30,000 people or more and goes all night. Trouble is that it is difficult to find accomodation for a few nights either side, with some places insisting that you book for at least 5 days during this period. As a result we got a bungalow on the beach 25km away at the very far end of the island down a long and very rough dirt road 30 minutes walk from the main road. To combat this isolation we hired motorbikes for $6 a day, but Jane found it very tough going trying to drive up and down the deeply rutted and rocky hill road to our bungalow. There were a few spills, and may have been some words spoken and possibly a dummy spit or two, as well as a reasonably big burn and cut on her leg. But all credit she managed to get the job done having only ridden for a few hours in her life, and we met one lad who hurt himself worse on our road.

We were a little dubious about the party ourselves, but we reconnoitered the day before swimming and sunbathing at the beach and on the night it turned out to be a lot of fun. Buckets 'o vodka and mixers are the standard cheap drink ($10 per litre), and there are 30-40 beach bars pumping out different forms of entertainment, from fire poi and fire-sticks to different sorts of music and dancing, fire limbo competitions and huge numbers of vendors selling food, clothing and other adornments including body paint (you even see the odd naked painted person wandering about). If you get tired, you just lie down and sleep on the beach, and at the end of the night large numbers of land and water taxis exist to get you home. The gulf of Thailand is generally very calm (similar to a large NZ lakes) 25-30deg water, so you can swim day or night and even small boats are quite safe. We finally got home at 5:30am, and had to be up at 9:30 to catch our ferry to Koh Samui.

Koh Samui was the last Island and the biggest and definitely most charmless of the three we went to. Not much to note about it though there were some nice beach bars and restaurants at Chaweng (People who remember the movie "Wayne's World" may like to say that name to themselves a few times) and on the first night we did go to watch the kick-boxing (Muay-Thai) generally reckoned as the most lethal form of fighting after wrestling. It was a little bizarre in that it turned out that half the fights were children (10 year old or thereabouts) and they were fighting for substantial amounts of money. But still fun to watch.

On our first night Jane got approached on the street by a cheery little European guy to do a free scratch-and-win competition, where it turns out we had won a great prize! Either a laptop, a weeks accommodation at a resort or a video camera. And all we had to do to collect was attend a 90 minute presentation tomorrow! Welcome to the exciting world of timeshare sales. We did attend, had our free breakfast and endured the 3 and a half hour pitch (whilst repeatedly asking how much, how much, how much to no response), to find out that we had indeed won the weeks accommodation (not surprised at this), with a number of catches, not least of which is that we or whoever else used it would have to endure another similar pitch. Lesson learnt, but if anyone wants our prize they are welcome to have it, it was a nice 5-star place in Koh Samui with swanky AC bungalows with kitchens and en-suites. For the morbidly curious the deal was $US7000 upfront + US$252 per year for a weeks stay at this place or one of 10 other similar places in Thailand and another $100 to stay at one of several thousand other places around the world through a company called MCI. Not totally stupid but working out that US$7000 in the bank gives you about NZ$500 per year (more if you're paying it against a mortgage) it really isn't that cheap, call it NZ$1000 for the first weeks accommodation in places outside of Thailand and about $500 for subsequent weeks.

We hired a motorbike visited some beaches and a waterfall but after that we were all done with Thailand, almost. On our final night we went out and had a few drinks, generally avoiding ladyboys and coming home at 1am Jane fell asleep like the dead, but about an hour later there was an enormous ruckus as some deranged English speaker was charging around the hotel breaking stuff, throwing things out of windows, saying some very loud and uncomplimentary things about women and Thai's in general and trying to kick down several peoples doors, I was wondering whether I should get up and do something about it when several Thai voices joined the fray and there were a number of bangs and thumps before it all went quiet. Jane of course slept through it all.

We caught a plane from Koh Samui to Penang in Malaysia, the final country in our Asian Tour. Fun at check-in as they inform us that there is a 15kg checked baggage limit per person (20kg is standard international flight IATA limit) and we hastily move heavy items to our day-packs and put on boots and heavy clothes (in 30 deg+ high humidity), I am sure they are quite aware just how ridiculous it is to be doing no more than moving weight around the plane and adding to our discomfort in this manner for no benefit to the airline.

So now we are sitting in Penang an island on the south west coast of the Malay peninsula that extends down from Thailand waiting two days for a place on the ferry to Langkawi - apparently the ferry is booked out by all the Arabs fleeing hot weather in the gulf, they come to Malaysia in mid summer to escape it!

Following in the USA's footsteps

We continued our trip south through Vietnam with a stop in Nah Trang about 10 hours by bus south of Hoi An. This is a city with a gorgeous beach front devoted to tourists, and is probably Vietnam's premier party town. We however decided that rather than devoting ourselves to a few days practice in the art of personal pickling we would go back to school and complete our open water diving certificates so that we can go diving during the rest of our trip with fewer restrictions.

The PADI course that we signed up for took 3 days, with half a day of studying and half a day of diving each day, Vietnam is probably one of the cheapest places in the world to do this course, and it only cost us about NZD$300 each. The primary goal is to teach you how to deal with any of the emergency situations that you might get into and get you practiced enough that you wont panic if something does start to go wrong. Pool dives first day followed by reef dives on the last two days made it good fun, though the studying put a bit of a damper on nightly boozing. Having completed this course we can now go diving to 18m depths, looking forward to putting this into practice in Thailand where there is purportedly some of the best reef diving in the world.

To combat the relatively high expense of doing this diving we naturally had to economise in other areas. Primary means for accomplishing this was Bia Hoi (ie Beer Hoi, the Beer part being obviously the most important element). These are small dirty little establishments with plastic chairs and tables intended and sized for three year olds in which you can purchase a litre of beer for about NZD $0.25, or about a fiftieth of what it costs in NZ. Obviously the bar tabs never run too large. On top of this they are very social and a great way to meet similarly tight-arsed people with marginal personal hygiene as you are forced to share the lilliputian furnishings. On the food side of things we made an additional discovery of Bo Ne, and variants, where you get a simple meal of steak, egg, salad, bread/rice for about NZD $1.00 served at the same sort of furniture as the Bai Hoi on the footpath by mobile vendors who show up after presumably finishing their day jobs. So consumables can be really cheap. Accommodation was also only about NZ$15 a day for the double room with air conditioning, cable TV and ensuite 100m from the beach. You are probably getting the idea that this is a very cheap place to hang out, and you would be right, we've been told that it is similar to what Thailand was like 10-15 years ago.

We decided we had to take a day off from our course to sample the nightlife, and went out in search of the crowds. We met a number of interesting bods at Bia Hoi and wandered off to a bar/resort on the beach (the "Sailing Club"with 100's of Europeans sitting out under the stars in the hot night air. We got chatting with a group played some pool and sat out at the palm-thatched bar on the sand with swings instead of bar stools and a speedy little crab that scuttled back and forth on the bar looking for new hiding spots. Here things started to get a little wiggly as we discovered that great Asian institution the "Cocktail bucket" which is basically a poorly thought out concoction of fruit juice or softdrink with industrial grade alcohol and ice served in litre quantities. Three of these later and it was time to gracefully depart the field. Not sure exactly how we got home, but the next day was a total right-off.

We completed our diving course (both passing final exam), had a more subdued night out and then had to spend the day on the beach waiting for our night train to Saigon. The Nah Trang beach is fantastic, with massive crowds of Vietnamese showing up at 5am and 5pm, but otherwise not too busy. However the continual harassment by hawkers every 5-10 minutes really started to piss us off, was tempted to pay one of them to keep the others way from us. After our bad sunburn from an hour on the beach in Hoi An we had to stick strictly to the shade of a hired beach lounger.

Saigon (No-one except government and business calls it Ho Chi Minh city, as the Northern invaders really aren't popular, and Communism has been a total screw-up) is just another big Vietnamese city, with the same mad and massive population of motorcyclists putting you in fear for you life anytime you walk the streets (and you do have to walk ON the street as the sidewalks are appropriated for every other use and activity by businesses). We were advised that to cross the street you simply start walking and ignore the traffic, as they will swerve around you as long as you don't do anything silly like pause, stop or notice them. So after getting our accommodation sorted we quickly booked a tour to the Meekong Delta for three days.

The Meekong is SE Asia river #1 Starting in Tibet and winding through six countries on its way to the sea. In the delta area it is divided into Numerous branches, connected by thousands of canals to each other and every habitable scrap of land. Some of the branches are over a kilometer wide, and anywhere up to 25m deep. It is also home to an entire civilisation of boat people, with floating houses, floating factories, floating markets, aquaculture and massive numbers of boats and lost Jandals floating around everywhere you go. It produces prodigious amounts of rice and other food for export and serves as a conduit for trade with all the countries along the navigable portions of the Meekong. We spent three days traipsing around on a ridiculously cheap tour (NZD$35 each including accommodation) transferring from bus to boat to bus to boat to boat to boat to motorbike to rowboat to boat to van to boat to bus to Saigon. I finally got to ride in an Asian long-tail boat in which a propeller on a long angled driveshaft is hooked straight to an engine that is muscled about on a pivot by the driver to steer. However, the highlight of the trip was being taken to a Mosque (Vietnam is 86% Buddhist) by our knob of a guide who explained to us how the school next door taught Arabic to the children so that they could talk to Osama and Saddam. This did not go over that well with the Mullah standing nearby, and there was a bit of a shouting match before our guide retreated saying "I ******* hate minorities".

We finished up our time in Vietnam with a couple of lazy days in Saigon as Jane waited for her replacement Visa to finally come through (we ended up getting it 1 hour before we left for the airport, and Jane in her usual charitable mood saw fit to educate the persons responsible for this in some of the richer and more evocative terms of emphasis and imperative that English has to offer). Meanwhile I was getting over a cold and while dosing up on antibiotics (standard antimalarial treatment) on an empty stomach I distinguished myself by projectile vomiting all over the road in front of our cafe table during lunch. Fortunately it was raining at the time so it washed away quickly, but I suspect the cafe owners were not totally impressed at this advertisement for their services.

So here our time in Vietnam comes to an end. Vietnam has been great (apart from Jane having her bag snatched in Hanoi), and probably the highlight of our trip so far. Friendly, helpful and funny people, nice weather (almost no rain), and interesting to boot, this place is going to move ahead in leaps and bounds over the next couple of decades. If they can just get their population growth in check (90 million now) , so do try to see it before its all gone.

If Thailand can match what we have had here then we will be very pleased.

Does the wet suit you? (With apologies to Whit Deschner)

Jane and I travelled seprately to Hoi An (her by bus and me by air) meeting up again in Da Nang airport in the evening and catching a taxi with another couple ot Hoi An half an hour away.

Hoi An is a rapidly developing beach resort town with some offshore islands and probably the most tailors per square km of anywhere in the world (literally hundreds). Needless to say when most women get a sniff of this place their eyes roll back in their heads, their jaws widen into an attack-gape and they start salivating uncontrollably. We managed to spend $900 dollars on clothing in four days, including:

Jane: 2 suits (each with jacket, 2 pants, 1 skirt), 3 sets of pants, 5 blouses, 3 dresses, a woollen felt jacket,
Robert: suit with two sets of pants, great coat, five shirts.

It really is incredibly cheap, suits less than $100 and shirts/blouses/dresses for under $20. Most professional women could probably justify a trip to Hoi An from anywhere in the world simply on the money they would save over a year or two's clothes shopping.

Of course we had to fill in the time we weren't in the shop (averaged about 2 hours a day, with return trips for minor fitting alterations).

First day we cycled to the beach and swam and sunbathed for 2 hours. Big mistake as in our conceit that NZ has the worst sun in the world we didn't lather up with the sunscreen and got horribly burnt. This put an end to time in the sun for the rest of our Hoi An stay, we had to soak in the hotel pool for a few hours to take the sting out of it and found that the pool was a better bet for swimming from then on (necessary in the 30-35 degree hot sun and high humidity days).

Second day we hired a motorbike and took turns driving to travel 20-30km up the coast to marble mountain, where a big hill of marble sticks up out of the otherwise flat land, it is covered in a number of temples and caves with statues etc in them, and overall pretty good (better than the nepalese/tibetan JAM), but would have been better if the weather wasn't so hot and sunny. Surrounded by a huge number of marble working businesses churning out statues, furniture and objets d'art for very reasonable prices. This is another place that we will likely be back to one day to buy at - eg a marble table and 6 stools for $2000, shipping is easy to organise and cheap at only about $100 per cubic meter to New Zealand.

Third day was a real highlight; we went out on a "Discovery dive" where we were taken diving under strict supervision of a Dive Master for two hour-long dives on a coral reef, all for $90. This was very cool, lots of fisks (nearly put my hand on a scorpion fish - which would have been bad) brilliant visiblity, and lots of technical bits to pique the engineer's interest :-). We had enough of a taste from doing this that we are now going to do a dive course. Much cheaper than NZ at about $NZ300 vrs more than double that in NZ and still have good safety with western teachers. This should allow us to enjoy the best diving spots in the world when we hit Thailand in a few weeks.

Hoi An had fantastic food and great night life in it's sleepy little waterfront area. We stayed in a nice hotel with a pool, air conditioning, free breakfast tv etc for just $10 per night each and food and drink cost less than $20 each for the day even when we had a big night out, so living is pretty cheap. Having finished up our time in Hoi An we packed all the swag and headed off to Nah Trang, Vietnamese beach party town a 12 hour NZ $11 overnight bus trip down the coast.

Vietnam - Stuck in Hanoi

So from my end and three weeks of being in Vietnam. I spent my first 2 days in Hanoi, hiring a bike one day and peddling around the town, and just wandering the old quarter the other day. The 2nd evening I headed, by overnight train, to Sapa (just south of the Chinese border in the Yunnan province) where I went trekking and homestaying in some local tribes houses. It was beautiful scenery, but unfortunately things have changed since my uncles 1993 Lonely Planet, which I was using and advised that not many tourist go here. It is very touristy and the tauts are much worse than in Hanoi. Worth it all the same.

Another overnight train was taken to get back to Hanoi and it was on the morning after this that my stuff was stolen. Bad luck, a lesson, and a pain in the ass. I was planning on heading Halong Bay that same morning, but this was obviously cancelled and the day was spent sorting out a new passport. The new passport took just under 2 weeks to get here, but during that time I was able to head out of Hanoi, just not to far, because I had to come back anyway.

So I went south to Ninh Binh for 3 days. Had a look at Tam Coc (some rock formations that you reach by a boat and go through these caves, very beautiful), went by motorbike along backroads to Cuc Phong (a national park) where I spent the night. I was the only visitor here which was quite nice, but also a wee bit weird. The trip back from Cuc Phong was also by motorbike and through backroads, this was definitly a highlight so far. I was also taught to ride a motorbike by my guide when I got back to Ninh Binh, which was very exciting.

From Ninh Binh I went to Vinh and spent the night at a beach close called Coa Lo. This is a Vietnamese resort town and they obviously don't get many foreignors here because everyone was shouting out Hello etc even thought they couldn't actually speak english. It was a beautiful beach despite the massive numbers of Vietnamese crowding it, but it was a bit disturbing and I left early that morning back to Hanoi via local bus.

Partway through the trip a man got on the bus who had a pet monkey with him. This kept the bus amused for a while, until we got a flat tire. They didn't seem to have the tools necessary to fix the flat tire and had to send someone into the closest town. It was fixed pretty quickly though and we were off within 1/2hour.

The following day I went to Halong Bay. This is a beautiful bay off the East Coast of the north of Vietnam and has hundreds of these odd linestone formations protruding out of the water. It was pissing down with rain most of the time, but was beautiful all the same. I was lucky enough to have a great group of people on the boat who were all keen for a bit of a party and so we partied and swam into the night. Great fun. The following day we headed to Cat Ba Island. I don't know whether it was due to the weather or whether the Island is just not that great, but I wasn't really able to enjoy this and spent most of my time in the hotel. I did pop out to head to Monkey Island (where there are obviously monkey's) and go for a swim, but it was still pretty horrible weather.

The following day I headed back to Hanoi to collect my passport and sort out my Visa's. I was able to get my British one within the day, but apparently, like Rob, I need to have some proof that I'm leaving the country before Vietnam will issue a new Wietnamese visa. All a bit odd considering I came in without needing this proof. So at present I'm travelling without a visa and will sort this out in Saigon.

So far Vietnam has been great. There are heaps of tourists everywhere, unless you truly get off the beaten track, but this seems to be quite expensive. Hanoi has got a great feel to it, I certainly could have been stuck in a worse city.

The Holiday from the Holiday from the Holiday

Just a fill in on the fun and frollics since I went AWOL a couple of weeks back. I returned to NZ to do some work and have a holiday from the holiday, but have now rejoined Jane in Vietnam. It was nice to get back to NZ for a couple of weeks catch up with friends and dose up on meat with Jane's folks (big thanks to Cathy and Tim for the hospitality and the chance to see the America's Cup).

Returning to the fray in my usual mad-rush sleep-deprived state I had all sorts of fun getting back to Vietnam; First Air NZ check-in in Auckland, where they were not going to let me fly to Hong Kong because I didn't have a flight out of Vietnam, now I informed them that this was in fact bollix because Jane had done exactly this 3 weeks back and I had a Visa and please stop being such dicks etc but unfortunately they own the airplanes and the appropriate rubber stamps. After an hour and me remembering that I had an onward ticket from Malaysia to Dubai in August (prooving intent of leaving Vietnam) they eventually relented and I was on my merry way. However the sequel to this was yet to come.

I got to Hong Kong with a ticket in had to go to Ho Chi Ming city (old Saigon) however about two weeks ago Jane got bag-snatched by a motorcyclist whilst getting out of a taxi in Hanoi and lost her passport, a credit card and some money. A real bugger and an inconvenience (not too bad as we are insured), but an object lesson in why women should always keep a BSM (big strong man) around to cry with them when it goes wrong. Anyhow the upshot was that Jane had to spend two weeks around Hanoi waiting for replacement so I wanted to meet up with her there instead. I rebooked for a flight to Hanoi, and was just in the process of checking in when they informed me that they wouldn't let me fly without an onward ticket from Vietnam. Bugger and Crap. So with 10 minutes to go before boarding I had to rush off and book a ticket out of Vietnam (cost about $300) so that I could fly in. Of course arriving in Hanoi no one checked to see if I had such a ticket (confirming my beliefs of it's inconsequentiality) but sometimes you just have to take it on the chin. I would love to know why it is that the countries that westerners have the least likelyhood of wanting to stay in long-term are the ones that make it most difficult to travel in and out of. The people's collective's of China and Vietnam should pull their collective heads out of their collective arses, the third would is nice for a visit but you wouldn't want to live there.

I managed to meet up with Jane for a few hours in Hanoi before she jumped on a 17 hour bus trip to Da Nang (halfway down Vietnam on the coast) where we hope to spend a few days in Hoi An - a nice beachy town. I am joining her today by the far more civilised means of flying.

More Photos

If anyone is interested in more photo's I have added some to www.ringo.com, under Jane Preston, because we are limited for space on the blog.

Hong Kong - Hanoi

So I left Hong Kong last night for Vietnam. Hong Kong was great, although it was overcast and raining the majority of the time, it was a much more beautiful city that either Rob or I expected and can easily see why it is such a popular destination.

After coming overland from China we had our first meal in McDonalds (the cheapest place to eat in Hong Kong). We then headed for the ferry where we coincidently meet up Willard and Vera (a Dutch couple we meet in Everest, and again in Lhasa, and again in Xi'an). With a population or said million people who would have thunk it. But the following day, while waiting to meet Willard and Vera for lunch, we bumped into John.

Eventually we arrived at Rebekka, Andy and Izzy's apartment (my cousin and whanua) which was a much appreciated (and in Robs case needed) step into normality. Bek was a fantastic host (thanks heaps, it really is appreciated) and I proceeded to have a very lazy couple of days (I did wander the streets a bit, but when your not looking to buy it can become a bit dishearting). We went to the races on Wednesday, which was heaps of fun and definitely recommended (apparently the cheapest beer in town) and Dim Sum for lunch before I left (yum).

Today I have biked around Hanoi. At about 10.30am it absolutely monsooned down (at one point the thunder was so loud it actually hurt my eardrums) so I jumped into a cafe just in time for a drink. Once it cleared it was great fun tackling the massive puddles covering the road. I managed to tick off the 10 must-does so tomorrow will be a more relaxing day and I'll head to Sapa (up north) by overnight train tomorrow.

DKNY - Dali Kunming 'n Yangshou

We finished up our stay in Lijiang, and set out for fresh pastures in the town of Dali a few hours away. Dumped by the bus at the fringes of the town we spent an hour wandering around in heavy packs and oppressive heat looking for the town, until we discovered that our guide book map was out of date and the bus station had apparently moved. Back on track we found a very nice room in a hotel with ensuite for $10 per night. Dali is another small town aimed at the tourist, it is very cheap (you can survive for $10-15 a day quite happily) with lots of markets and pedestrian only streets, but not quite as pretty as Lijiang's "ancient city". It specialises in stoneware and marble, which is very cheap to buy here, stone vases, birdbaths, statues and carvings, gems and minerals etc. We re-met John, a Tibetan fellow traveller from our Jeep and an NZ beekeeper from Geraldine called Craig and an Estonian who I am sure was called Renault (it's not just Germans who name people after cars), for cheap BBQ meat skewer dinner from a street vendor.

Following day we hired bicycles to cycle down to the huge lake (Taupo sized) a few kilometers away. This was pretty miss-able except for the entertainment of riding a bike with a seat made of leather covered masonry over rough farm tracks for a few miles and then carrying said bikes cross country over irrigation systems to try to get where we wanted to go when we got ourselves a little misplaced. We stopped for a quick snack at a warf where we had a "waterbird" - think roasted sparrow on a stick - while avoiding other delights such as a huge bullfrog, and dragonfly nymphs which the vendor assured us would give us the shits (with funny hand actions). Back to town we decided against taking the cable car to see Dali JAM (just another monastry) and had a lazy afternoon wandering the streets and markets.

Kunming came after a 5 hour bus ride the next morning and with a couple of hours to kill before katching a train to Guilin we went to the Bird Market which sells pets of all types and also has a fantastic arts market. Hectares of shops with amazing furniture, carvings, stoneware, paintings, glassware, antiques etc. If I ever become one of those boring and smug home-owning types I will be coming back here to fill a container with furnishings and various objet d'art. On to the train for Guilin and remet John yet again.

After overnighting on the train we finally left Yunnan and arrived in Guilin a few hundred kilometers from Hongkong in the middle of a monsoon downpour, the first rain we had encountered since entering china three weeks ago. We got wet waiting for the taxi to take us to the city. We got far wetter unloading from the taxi in the middle of the city in the middle of a large public square. We ran for an awning and planned our movements. 1st buy umbrellas (which process got the wetness level up to the point that umbrellas were basically pointless), 2nd look for accomodation. John and Rob wandered around for 30 minutes looking for anything reasonable (nothing under $10 per person found), and getting pissed off with the city, we decamped from our awning to a nearby McDonalds where we started to dry and gorged on bad food for $3 each. Decision made we left the city to travel to Yangshou, a tourist village an hour away and nestled on the Li River in amazing countryside with huge steep rock columns of 1-300m rising all over a relatively flat river plain, a bit like Monument Valley in the US (Favorite for Western movies) but wet.

Yangshou is a great wee village of waterways, rocky spires, and cafes. We found cheap accomodation, though we had to endure the hard sell on tours from our hotel patron for an hour. Eventually got through to him that we didn't want them, and certainly not at 4 times the market rate. We went out for dinner, where we were treated to the amazing sight of two hot air balloons dipping down over the steep rocky hills surrounding the village, one of which touched down on a pond surrounded by restaurants before lifting off and flying away again. We came back to massacre the 30 mosquitos that had made it into our room (very satisfying in purported malaria country), then watched american cheerleading competitions (think synchronised gymnastics) with chinese commentary on TV, and listened to a scottish guy doing his nut at the aforementioned hotel patron at 1am about how he wanted his money back after being ripped off on something or rather.

From Xi'an to Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge

So we left Xi'an in the evening for a 2 night one day train trip to Panzhihua. We had initially booked a hard sleeper and a hard seat taking turns at having a sleep. The train was nothing compared to the luxury of the Lhasa to Xi'an train. I took the first turn in the sleeper only to wake the next morning to find that Princess Robina had upgraded to a soft sleeper and had a complete compartment (4 beds) to himself. We were dropped off at Panzhihua at 4am and proceeded to negotiate with the bus drivers outside to take us to Lijiang. It was only when we were dropped off at the bus station that we realised we had been talking to the wrong people. We managed to make it Lijiang thought and what a great city. It has an old quarter which has pretty much become a tourist haven and at night there are a row of bars along either side of a narrow little canal which is lined with red lanterns and becomes very lively at night (with singing battles between patrons and staff of opposing bars, judged principally on volume).

The chinese tourists (which make us pretty much 90% of the tourist population in China). Some of the bars have got pretty good music and it is a lot of fun. You can even order Chateau Lafette Rothschild (a snip at over $650 per bottle) and NZ lamb chops ($10), however we opted for Tsingtao beer at the outrageous price of $2 per bottle ($0.50 in shops).



The day after arriving in Lijiang we headed to Tiger Leaping Gorge which is about 2 hours away from Lijiang. Arrived at around 11.30am and headed on our merry way. And we were lost. We asked some locals were we were and we had missed the turn off. Not surprising when there are no signposts, only occasional advertisments for the next guesthouse painted on rocks. The walk follows the gorge along at a high level so you get great views of the mountains. A fantastic walk the first day, but very hot in the sun. Lunch was at the Naxi Guesthouse and then a night at the Teahorse Guesthouse. The teahorse was kind enough to treat us to 2 spiders that must have been about 8cm's across as we were about to go to bed. They didn't last long, being no match for vulcanised footware. I also woke in the morning to find a centipede like insect that was about 5cm long about to nestle itself into our clothes. Again bested by the awesome kinetic power of the sandal.

Tiger leaping gorge is a steep rocky gorge between two 5000m mountains with a river level of about 1500-2000m. They are threatening to dam(n) it in a few years, which will be bad for a few thousand tourists and good for a few million chinese electricity users. It gets its name from a point in the Yangtse river where a very large rock has fallen into the middle of the torrent and divided the river into two flows of only about 15m width each, legend has it that a tiger once evaded hunters by leaping from bank to rock to bank. It is very spectacular, with steep rock cliffs rising 1000-1500m up on one side of the river. A rock-climbers wet dream and a roadbuilders nightmare.

On day two we descended 200m into the gorge on a private-enterprise track which we had to pay 10 Yuan to go down ($1.60) and dipped our feet in the mighty Yangtse. The walk up was a bit scary, stung for another $1.60 at the bottom before we are allowed to ascend we climb up a cliff face on hewn rock stairs that at one part includes a ladder made of 6mm steel rod welded into a lattice and bolted, glued and tied to sticks stuck into the cliff face. Again very hot and exhausting, but definitly worth it. We stayed a Sean's guesthouse on day two which had a great deck to sit and view the stars and sunset and the massive 1000m high cliff faces on the opposite side of the gorge, we were a little dissapointed that there was no rain as there were markings for waterfalls of at least this height as well. The power seemed to be an issue in the gorge due to slips etc and the only meals on the menu where chicken vegetable burrito (very good) and fried chicken vegetable. Basically the same thing, just served a different way. The menu also boasted that "for our very special friend we have Real Good Stuff" which would tend to back up our observation of a particular plant that seemed to grow a lot around the toilets of the guesthouses. We had a great night there with lots people to have a few drinks with and enjoy the scenery. An Irish guy we were with tried to start a fight with the only English man within probably 30km which was pretty funny, but hostilities were abandoned due to a lack of firearms/interest.



The trip out was a bit scary, so say the least. There have been two massive (and some minor) landslides across the road the preceding week (we ran into a German Chick who was there for this, who had to run along the road due to lack of vehicles and fear of falling rocks). We had to take 3 minibuses in a relay to get out, with drivers of a somewhat kamikaze bent, swerving across the narrow road to avoid boulders at 60km/hr on blind corners over shear drops. Who knows how the minibuses got in there in the first place. The most scary bit was the fact that the road in many places was pretty shear and there were a ridiculous number of smaller slips and boulders on the road with the odd bit of gravel still coming down (the one thing the drivers would slow for). Didn't give us overwhelming confidence. We did get out safe though and back to Lijiang for a great burger at an English pub and a night out on the canal.

The Man from Xi'an

Wie Gehts.

We have spent the last two days in Xi'an (a quaint little town of six million) plonked in the middle of china. This is the original seat of power of China, being the home of the Qin (pronounced Chin as in Chin-a) dynasty (300BC), and home to a few of their more extravagent efforts: Yesterday (28th May) we did a cycle ride around the walls of the city, 14km circumference on a 10m high and 15m wide modest effort in masonry, (took an hour to cycle).

Accomodations have also been interesting, we have been staying inside the city walls in a converted textile factory, now home to a hotel and restaurant, in a seemingly nuclear-proof bunker of a basement, with a large and friendly contingent of mosquitos, who have certainly been enjoying my company in particular. For the princely sum of $4 per night it is hard to complain. (moreso when considered after the consumption of several $0.50 650ml beers.) Food is excellent, though communication is at best difficult. It is hard to overestimate the language barrier when you share no commonality, not alphabet, not consonents, not phonems, not intonation. Ordering a meal last night required 15 minutes of vigorous hand waving, recourse to paper and speaking loudly and slowly, with an end result of about 50% of what we were after. Mandarin is an absolute bastard to learn, compounded by the fact that pronunciation varies throughout China.

Today it was off to visit the last resting place of the 1st Qin emperor (300BC), again an understated little affair that involved the efforts of up to 750000 people at a time over a 37 year period, but unfortunately the task at hand was a dirt rather than a stone pyramid, and so has subsided a little in the following couple of millenia (50-80m high, covering about 10 hectares). The core of this mound/hill contains the burial chamber which is apparently high in mercury (invaluable to the prehistoric dynastic ruler-about-town) to the point where it is a dangerous.

Second stop was the famous terracotta warriors, This is a massive effort (though considering the size of the aforementioned workforce they may have knocked it out in a couple of saturday afternoons). Several hectares, only partially explored and excavated, now under stadium sized roofs. They have uncovered several thousand of these uber-sized ken-dolls, and think that there are many thousand more in existance, in underground barracks extending over many hectares. Crazy thing is they were created and buried in secret, each an individually shaped and baked correspondant to an existing person. So much effort expended on creating an army that while low-cost on povisioning, would only be dangerous if it fell on you. We are beginning to appreciate that these Chin(ese) fellas don't do things by halves.

Next stop Yunnan province and Tiger-Leaping Gorge. 32hours on a train, then more climbing at altitude. Wooo. Yay.

Seven Days in Tibet

Hi All, we can now tick off Tibet. It has been an excellent trip let down only by the operational approach of our package tour. We are here for their benefit, not the other way around, and unfortunately have no way of changing this. Oh well, its been a blast anyway.

We left Kathmandu at 6am Saturday the 19th to travel 5 hours to the border on typically awful Nepalese roads, Along the way we stopped for breakfast at which time our consumer rights were explained to us (none) and oh by the way if you are sick, or your documentation (that they sorted) has faults etc then tough it's your problem, also we are not going to the lake itemised in your itinerary due to road construction. We arrived at the border to be confronted with our first instance of beauracracy gone mad - three different sets of queues, officials and forms to run through spread over a distance of 10km and 2 hours. Due to the time taken (and the two hour time difference between Nepal and Tibet) this pretty much took us to the end of the day and we were forced to spend the night in the very pretty chinese border town of Zhangmu perched high on a forested valley side. We were informed that we had to start the next day at 5:30am (3:30am Nepal time) and were shipped off to the dorm rooms where we had to stay the night (package promised twinshare).

Up and ready to go a 6am we awaited in vain for our Tibetan guide to arrive, finally shows up at 7am pissed/hungover and we discover that he hasn't organised enough vehicles to transport the group. 11 of us have to wait around till 11:30am for more landcruisers (ubiquetous Tibetan vehicle) to arrive. We drive all day through spectacular gorges (like Fiordland, with huge waterfalls and all) and high arid rolling hills, passing through two passes during the day of 5150 and 5250m respectively, as well as amazing and sparsely populated open river valleys like the Mackenzie country of the South Island to finally arrive at our accommodation at 8:00pm in Lhatse. Loooong day, mostly dirt roads for first half of day, but then move onto sealed roads. The Chinese are doing a huge amount of road building and development and in a few years this will be just another highway, not a back country dirt road. Big annoyance is that the drivers will not stop for photos, and there is a lot that is worthy, so we have to try and make do with snaps out the window (this is where you need an expensive camera, unlike ours). However regular cigarette breaks are apparently essential. We are tired, and a bit pissed off with the tour operators, we had some food, a beer (650ml costs 50-90 cents here) and went to bed.

Easier day on the 21st; apologetic guide, 8:30 start and an easy drive on highway for 3 hours to Shigatse, where accomodation is excellent (hot bath and TV etc), visited Tashilunpo Monasty where some 2.I.C lama (Panchan, Great Precious Teacher) hangs out, though the exact identity of this guy is a bit contentious since Chinese took over the selection process and dissappeared the previous selectee. We wandered the streets and grabbed a drink at a little Tibetan restaurant, where we could not prevent the hostess from refilling our shot glass sized vessels every time we took a sip - end result 15 minutes for finish our beers.

Next day we travel to Gyantse, again an easy drive of only 2-3 hours, and a spectacular city. With a hill fort on a hundred metre tall rocky knob (conquered by brits with four casualties to 300 tibetan dead in 1904, now a poorly maintained chinese museum with great views). Signs around the place say something like Tibetan jump cliff, which we thought was a none-too-subtle suggestion until we found a memorial to Tibetan 'martyrs' who leapt to their deaths rather than surrender to Brits. This wasn't part of the tour instead the tour visited Pelkor Chode Monastery and the Kumbum Stupa, really just another monastery; Budda, budda, budda, oh and yet another budda. The fort was far better, dating back almost a thousand years and having bizarrely laid out rooms, some with doors just a metre high, and some entertaining chinese additions (tibetan torture maniquins). But we did have some entertainment at the Monastry watching a couple of tibetan chicks in some sort of devotional race around the monastry doing full length prostration+prayers advancing one body length at a time over the course of an hour or two.

The next day was a 5am start leaving Gyantse at 6am to get to Lhasa by 12.30. Our attempts at trying to convince our driver to start later were useless. Another example of the tour not being for our convenience. The early start obviously effected the driver also because he almost fell asleep at the wheel. At first we thought he was sticking his head out the window to check on some tire issue. Rob spent the next hour into Lhasa watching him carefully ready to grab the wheel if he fell asleep. Him get no tip.

Our accommodation in Lhasa has been brilliant. We basically have a suite with living room, double bedroom and all the mod cons excepting hot water. We had the afternoon to ourselves so organised our train tickets, an epic event as train station was 5km out of town and in our eagerness to save money we spent 3 hours walking to a net benefit of maybe a dollar each. So now we were going to Xi'an rather than Chengdu. Wasn't in our initial plans, but there wasn't a train leaving for Chengdu on Saturday and Xi'an isn't far out of the way and was recommended by other travelers.

On our first full day in Lhasa we visited Jokhang Monastery and Barkhor Square (basically a big market) which was packed with Tourists, Tibetan JAM (Just Another Monastery). Extremely important to the Tibetans, but pretty horrible really with the combination of a hot weather, huge numbers of people, a confined poorly lit and poorly ventilated space, reeking yak butter candles coating everything in black grime all combining to make us eager to be out of the place. We also visited Potala Palace which is a stunning fort/palace perched atop a rocky knob in the middle of Lhasa where the Dala Lama used to reside and where the tombs of the past Dala Lama's are. This had some very impressive shrines and statues, a couple of which contained several tonnes of gold. Sorry but no photos allowed in any of these monasteries unless you pay the exorbitant extra fees to the Govt who we think makes good coin out of the picture books they can sell as a result. We met up with some Dutch friends from our Everest trek and then went out drinking till 3am. Lhasa has a pretty good night life, and is apparently also a major Chinese sex tourism spot, something we discovered after passing a couple of shops full of hairdressers who were unusually dolled up. A weigh in on the street reveals that Robert has lost 7kg since trip start.

We didn't bother doing the activities on the second day (more Tibetan JAM) as we had pretty much had enough of them already and preferred to sleep in after the previous night. Instead we went out to see the water fountain show at the People's square in front of the Potala palace which was tres cool, a large flat area covered in different fountains controlled to pulse and operate in computer controlled sequences with coloured lights and music. A definite must see if visiting.

The train trip out of Tibet to Xi'an just served to reinforce what an amazing landscape this is. Traveling at altitudes between four and five thousand meters in a train equipped with oxygen supplies for the passengers for hundreds of kilometers through vast flat wide basins and river valleys. Almost no trees and at higher altitudes barely any grass, and ultimately permafrost. There are odd marauding herds of Yaks, molesting the tundra and followed around by Tibetans in tents. The small surrounding hills are still some of the largest mountains in the world! There was also a lake we passed by that was maybe one third the size of lake Taupo at over 4500m. 36 hours on this train really isn't that bad, as the track is very smooth and the train is air conditioned and quiet with sleeper cabins and does up to 200km/h on faster sections close to Xi'an. It only cost $110 each, though the bastardly bastards at the security check in (for a train????) wouldn't let Robert take the knife he bought for $8 (Marked down from the $76 the stall owner initially tried for).

All in all, we really recommend this excellent trip. Though it would have been nice to have been with one of the other tour companies who actually care what their customers think (talking to others we know that ours was a particularly bad company), and who don't have a monastery fetish - variety is nice, though we think this monastery monomania might be either Tibetan chauvinism or a subtle attempt to push awareness of Tibetan issues.

Since leaving Nepal food has improved greatly, tastier, and with meat!! Beer is even cheaper than Nepal, though accommodation is slightly more expensive. China (as represented by Tibet) has been a revelation. These fellas are spending a huge amount of money on developing infrastructure, roads, trains, cities, the stuff they are building in Tibet looks like it is designed to support a population of millions more, even though I believe China's population isn't expected to grow that much more. The weather was hot sunny and dry, it may just turn out to be one of the best places in the world for solar power (they have many market stalls selling panels) which could be very important for the economic future of China and the otherwise unused Tibetan plains. By comparison Nepal looks massively mismanaged, underdeveloped and poor, though funnily while Nepal is dirtier, it doesn't seem to smell so much of shit as Tibet did. Oh well, after the last weeks extravagances now we have to get used to budget accommodation again.

Next week: Terracotta Barbie