Australia It is a lie - Australia is not a hot , dry dust bowl edged with sun baked golden beaches adorned by bronzed, muscle bound lifeguards - well not what we saw anyway. The beaches were akin to Bognor in the rain (Bridlington for our Northern readers!!) but with bigger waves, the Hinterland was green, lush and in flood from the constant rains that fell non-stop from Boxing Day until we left NSW in early January. Take a look at the photographic evidence for this !!!! That said we had great trip to Australia mostly visiting friends at Mullwillumbah in [View Full Entry]

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Procrastination and dogged determination to complete a blog irrespective of dwindling readership- are these the signs of the demented? Hope not as I sit here, a sad Old Aged Geek, trying to catch up and finish off my blog before we leave New Zealand and head home. At the finish of the previous entry we were trundling our wheelie cases out of Indonesia clutching a dog eared Lonely Planet guide on our way to see the sights of SE Asia. Time constraints and a commitment by Colin to attend a conference in Kuala Lumpur in mid December meant we had to [View Full Entry]

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Dear All Long time with no blogging but lots of travelling - now we are settled in New Zealand for a few weeks I’ll bring the blog up to date starting with our time in Indonesia, After leaving the children’s home in Thailand at the end of November I flew to Indonesia (Bali) to meet Colin where we lived for two days in a luxury beach side hotel - a bit of a contrast to the cockroach farm passing itself off as a hotel which we moved to two days later in Kupang, West Timor. Bali and West Timor are just [View Full Entry]

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Happy New Year Colin is in NZ and, through a bit of a ticket mix up, I’m still here in Australia (is he trying to tell me something). I’m enjoying great hospitality on the outskirts of Melbourne with Nic and Sandra, clubbing mates of Colin’s from the 60s in Twickenham (Church Youth Club that was!!!). I’m availing myself of their fast system to upload the final chapter of the Namphong boystown story. Those of you who braved the ‘sell by date’ feast in November may be wondering what happened to the money you donated to endure the ordeal, be assured it [View Full Entry]

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I’d like to tell you so many stories about the boys but I’ve picked a couple so you can get a feel for the background of these boys. First Anuchai - a hill tribe boy from the Thai /Burma (Myanmar) border Anuchai featured in a previous blog because he was the lad who took my photographs of Richard at a Manchester United event and just gazed lovingly at them for hours. Since then his perpetual grin and thumbs up wave to me has won me over. His ambition is to play football for the national side and his most favorite thing [View Full Entry]

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In my last blog I’d just arrived in boystown and was rather overawed by the place itself as it was not at all what I expected but then I’m not sure what I had expected. My only experience of a children’s home before coming here was one I used to visit in Long Hanborough occasionally where social workers looked out for the children’s welfare and house keepers ran the home. Ironically, although this one lacks the material comforts and is run with minimal funding and staff I find it has much more of a buzz about it. It is a happy, [View Full Entry]

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Namphong boystown - Rosie’s story I have been here in the boystown for a week now and have become part of the landscape. The boystown is a children’s home that provides escape from grinding poverty and child labour for boys from the age of 11 until they leave school and get a job at 18 (some are funded to go to college) . So my first impressions of Namphong Boystown. I arrived mid afternoon when the boys were still at school so my first impressions were of the site and not the boys. We arrived through the local village of Thai [View Full Entry]

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Arrived Bangkok Friday pm and was met by Dr Anukul , a retired professor from Khon Kaen University who has been director of the boystown in Namphong for 15 years. Anukul had trundled down country by bus from Khon Kaen to Bangkok to meet me and be my guide in Bangkok - what a star. Bangkok - first impressions - not so good - it is a concrete forest of high rise structures growing out of a crawling mass of horn-honking vehicles of every shape, hue and age. Thankfully I was being driven around Bangkok by Joe who had been a [View Full Entry]

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Many thanks to those brave and loyal friends (noticeable lack of family members - what did they know!!!!) who made it to the 'sell by date' party at which all the 'soon to be out of date' food stuffs at home were turned into miracle dishes by Ali and Elaine. It was a potential breezy affair with bean soup, bean stew and bean trifle - seems like I had a lot of dried beans in the cupboards. We raised nearly 550 pounds (which may be added to by a local company) for the children's home in Thailand where I now sit [View Full Entry]

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