Brijj

Well here I am...I'm finally in Australia, my final port of call...a place I now call home. Just gotta learn the language! Australia's an amzing place. The first thing I noticed was how BIG it is. Australia's BIG. Actually, it's not just BIG it's HUGE-MONGOUS!!!! I flew in to Sydney from Kuala Lumpur on the 21st January and spent two weeks travelling up the east coast towards Brisbane, stopping off at Port Stephens, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour, Byron Bay and Noosa along the way. Everywhere in Australia seems to be named after one of three things....Back in the 17-1800's I imagine the early explorers who arrived here conquered different towns and decided to name them in one of the following ways: The homesick named them after where they came from in the UK; the arrogant named ... read more

Phnom Penh really was an assault on the senses and emotions. Yesterday we did the serious stuff - Choeng Ek Killing Fields followed by the Tuol Sleng (S21) Prison. Although not as graphically 'in your face' as the War Remnants museum in Saigon it used it's vagueness to make you imagine the trauma that went on in these places. I knew very little about the Khmer Rouge and the suffering Cambodia went through before coming here and I still don't fully understand the whys and the hows, but its opened my eyes and I want to find out more. There is actually very little to the Killing Fields. It is simply a 2 hectare site with what look like several bomb craters and signs reading this is where something was. However, the bomb craters were mass ... read more

After a difficult few days relaxing in the beach resort of Nha Trang it was time to move onto somewhere even more relaxing....Mui Ne!! OK, so the sand-boarding wasn't so relaxing, but the rest was pretty chilled out! (no pictures of sandboarding though...as there was lots of sand and my camera doesn't like sand! Not to eat, anyway)... read more

Well, today I was up early for a trip to My Son, an early Cham site. Much of it was built in the 7th - 11th Centurys but was lost when the Cham moved south. I say lost, I mean, they moved their capital south and never went back to My Son. As My Son is up in the mountains no one ventured up there and so it was left to ruins for many years and found in the early 1900's by the French. Much of it was bombed during the Vietnam war, so there's not a lot left to see, but enough to be fairly interesting. What was most interesting was the Cham built these buildings withought using any mortar or cement. It appears that it was built just by placing brick upon brick, yet ... read more