some more photos from santorini. also thanks again for all the comments....if we don't reply to them personally doesn't mean we don't read and appreciate them...good internet access is surprisingly sparse in europe as a backpacker so we have to be frugal with our time. actually we are also being frugal with our money, and long gone are restaurant meals and nice guesthouses...we are slumming it up in backpacker hostels and buying food from the supermarket and sitting on plastic bags on the grass to eat (yesterday in roma we were chowing down on half a chicken and dry biscotti in [View Full Entry]

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Let me paint a picture for you, okay? Santorini is watercolours, oils and graffiti painted not on canvas but on the eternally blue, flat surface of the sea. It has colour Athens doesn’t (which is so refreshing), though still the base of all is the same: Mediterranean white wash- but haphazardly splashed with reds, blues, yellows and donkey shit. This place redefines beautiful as we have seen ‘beautiful’ thus far on our trip, which like a complex strain of the flu- is always evolving; with each bout stronger and more powerful. I’ve come to realize that I am now at [View Full Entry]

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We originally wanted to island hop through the Aegean Greek islands to Athens, but as the summer tourist season had not quite started, the ferry services were too unreliable. So we caught a sleeper train from Istanbul to Thessaloniki, which proved to be a thousand times more luxurious than that Vietnamese overnight train of absolute hell (and vomit). We felt like royalty, as we had a little cabin all to ourselves, even with an in-room sink so we did not have to venture to the shared bathroom to brush our teeth in skanky conditions. The only annoyance of the 12 hour [View Full Entry]

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Three flights (Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok, Bangkok to Bahrain, Bahrain to Istanbul), 10,000km , 23 hours later we left the Asia continent and landed in Turkey, the entry door into Europe from the Oriental side of the globe. Some people are absolute terrors on flights; airplane attendants must need a thousand times more patience than the average customer service assistant to deal with tired, cranky and often unnecessarily rude passengers. We flew Gulf Air, and a couple of gentlemen in front of us demanded a second meal, before everyone had been fed. They did not care that if they got a [View Full Entry]

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Okay kids. The week that was. Welcome to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A city that could be Sydney’s half-sibling, a continental brother from another mother. This feeling of familiarity is maybe why we traded our cons for thongs, our back-packs for shopping bags and our lonely planet for paperback pot-boilers. All in all, a good week. Kualar Lumpar is a melting point of countries- Indian, Chinese, Malay- you turn one corner and you are in Chinatown, turn the next and you are in downtown India. It’s really fascinating. Every menu is a smorgasbord of continental food- it’s rea [View Full Entry]

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Angkor Wat. One of the main reasons I wanted to come to SE Asia. It was exactly like I imagined. The architecture was painstakingly detailed and overwhelmingly grandiose. Each and every temple that we saw was different from the last in terms of both architecture and atmosphere. Some were exquisitely designed with bas reliefs carved into the stone wall facades still in almost-mint condition, whilst others were much more simply detailed but so tall they seemed to reach the heavens, overgrown vegetation and sprawling tree roots intertwined with the temple's stone foundations. Unfortunately we [View Full Entry]

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Vietnam has been a journey full of stomach upsets and food poisoning, so what better way to spend our last night in Saigon with Aaron up all night sick with gastroenteritis. Really, really, really bad gastroenteritis. We had a 7am bus the next day to Phnom Penh which was to take 6 hours; needless to say we didn't make it. But Aaron braved the bus trip later that afternoon when we were certain there was nothing left in his body to throw up. En route to Phnom Penh we hit a baby calf on the road. The driver didn't stop; I [View Full Entry]

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We seem to bring the rain with us wherever we go. We've been in Vietnam for 15 days, and we've had 2 days of pure beautiful sunshine. They were the first 2 days in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh City (they only use Saigon when speaking of the city verbally) is a massively dense city full of short shanty-type dwellings squeezed between taller townhouses and tourist accommodations, with an ecclectic blend of French colonial architecture and the stoic, grand over-sized government buildings that reek of a Communist flavour. The city has a continuous soundtrack on loop from dawn til dusk, with the [View Full Entry]

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Leaving Aaron still sick in bed, I decided to venture out and see the daylight. Not feeling quite up to dealing with....well, anything, I went on an organised trip to go tomb-hunting and city-traipsing. Hue was once the Imperial City of the Ngyuen Dynasty, which lasted until roughly the middle of the last century, when basically everyone in the world decided to invade the Vietnamese (Thais, Japanese, French and then came the Vietnam War in the 60s/70s). A lot of the old tombs where the Ngyuen kings were buried were completely bombed out by the Americans in the war, but a [View Full Entry]

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Dogs heads, Village badgering and a rolling fog bank straight out of a Stephen King book…. Welcome to Sapa! Our second back-to-back tour and man are we feeling it. After another horror of a train and scary bus trip up a mountain we came to Sapa- a place so stunningly beautiful it blows your mind. When we rocked up at 6am in the bus, there were local Village women (who live in the surrounding valley but who work exclusively selling home-made souvenirs) fogging up the windows- just waiting to get to know us! It’s all fun at first- but you soon [View Full Entry]

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