2BaysDeb

We arrived back at the hotel earlier today after 2 long days driving to and from the eastern end of East Timor. It certainly was interesting. We left Dili at 8:00 a.m. and had lunch at East Timor’s 2nd largest town Baucau which is just 123 km away. I’ve been on worse roads in China but these were still pretty bad – huge potholes, missing bridges, missing tarmac etc. If we weren’t slowing down because of road conditions we were slowing down so that we didn’t hit a cow, goat, pig, dog, chook or human. Still, we travelled in relative comfort in a 4WD. The locals travel either by small motorbike, microlet, bus or truck. A microlet is a tiny minibus which is packed to the gunnels with people, often with people hanging on but travelling ... read more

I've been lucky enough to spend the last week in Paradise a.k.a. Niue and it's been for work. Most people's reaction to being told that I was going to Niue is "Where on Earth is that?". Well, it's in the Pacific Ocean, north, northeast of New Zealand, east of Tonga and just on the other side of the dateline. Niue is a single, raised coral atoll and so doesn't have much in the line of beaches. Instead most of the coastline is comprised of 20 m or so cliffs dotted with caves at water level. There are plenty of paths down to the water's edge and once you get there the swimming is perfect. More about that later. There is only one plane into and out of Niue per week. We left Melbourne last Friday morning ... read more

We’ve had another day visiting building rubble. We visited the PMD ruins, properly known as Priene, Miletus and Didyma. These were 3 large cities close to Ephesus that existed at the same time as Ephesus. However, unlike Ephesus they don’t get much tourist traffic and so it is possible to have a reasonable wander around them without tripping over other people. They haven’t been excavated to the same extent as Ephesus and I think that the amount we were quoted was something like 2%. The first stop was at Priene which lies partly up a fairly steep and craggy hill. The main features of interest at Priene are the Temple of Athena and a theatre. The Temple of Athena sits in a position on the hill with good views out over the surrounding plain. There ... read more

The idea of sending unwanted clothes back home wasn’t such a good one. After having to unpack the box that we had carefully packaged it turned out that it was going to cost us too much – certainly more than the value of the clothes in the package. Tonight’s job is to now repack our packs to accommodate this excess. At least it will make us think twice about buying new “stuff”. Our bus trip to Pamukkale was both interesting and uneventful. The first leg was by mini-bus to Marmaris where we changed to a large coach for the second leg to a large town called Denezli. Both of these legs were extremely picturesque. The first leg, along the Datça Peninsula, was along/over mountain ranges with views to small, quiet rocky coves. Occasionally there would be ... read more

Our last couple of days have been very lazy. We left Gennardi on the bus after a leisurely breakfast and farewells to our hosts, George and Barbara (both Greek). We even got hugs and kisses when we left. A couple of hours later we were back in Rhodes Town and finding our way to our overnight accommodation. Pretty much straight away we went back to the harbour so that we could book our ferry tickets to Symi and then on to Datça in Turkey. That completed, we had a bit more of a walk through the old part of Rhodes. We’d been into the old town a couple of time previously but even then we still found parts that we hadn’t seen previously. The next morning we had a relatively early start. We checked out of ... read more