We often get quite complacent about ordinary places. Having grown up in the seaside town of Cleethorpes, I never really think about blogging wherever I go to see my family there. This time, with a new camera in hand, I thought I would give it a bit of praise. One thing which was certainly not praiseworthy was the weather! It was freezing cold and we frequently cowered away from the rain. Early may should be sunny and warm, but we had leaden skies, four degrees, threats of frost and driving horizontal rain! Not nice!! Even so, we try to get a bit of exercise as often as we can. We have our usual routes for a stroll. One of those is the seafront where we brace ourselves against the Easterly coastal breeze (or gale depending on ... read more

We needed some sun! Living out in the sticks is fine but there's nowhere we can really go to enjoy the sun when it shines without attracting rather more attention than we want!! The solution - Vung Tau. This is the nearest beach resort town to Saigon and accessible by a hydrofoil in an hour and a half. Sadly they don't run late enough in the day for us to go straight from work so we took the bus instead. From Mien Dong bus station we headed out of town in a minibus at breakneck speed swerving in and out of the traffic all the way. It was breathtaking, nay, frightening, and our knuckles were certainly white for a lot of the time. We got there in two and a half hours but I would have ... read more

After a hard couple of weeks back at work (!) we decided to head back into Saigon for a cultural weekend. Traffic was bad again on Friday evening but this time it was because of new toll booths which are less in number than the old ones. Great planning, that! Anyway, not too much to report but some very nice pictures for you to see. We went to the Revolutionary Museum which is not far from the Reunification Palace. In the gardens there are vintage cars, some old aircraft, a tank and a helicopter. Inside we found alot of interesting exhibits about Vietnamese life, its money and stamps, plus Ho Chi Minh's camera! It is worth a visit once you've done the major museums. The gardens are nice too, and often used for wedding photography. We ... read more

Driving half the length of peninsula Malaysia is always going to take a long time. Luckily on Chinese New Year's Day the vast majority of people were already visiting relatives so we had a fairly clear run all the way - until we got South of Kuala Lumpur. Then the heavens opened, visibility was reduced to a minimum, the traffic started to crawl but still several drivers thought they could drive like idiots. Thankfully we avoided any trouble and never witnessed any accidents. After about 5 hours we reached Melaka, or the outskirts at least. Then the traffic ground to a halt! Eventually we parked up at a posh hotel to enquire about their rates (way beyond our budget!), left the car there and walked towards town to find some accommodation. We looked at several options ... read more

We set off nice and early (well, 9am!) and hoped to beat Kuala Lumpur's rush hour traffic. That proved to be in vain and it was about an hour and a half before we crawled beyond the city limits. The roads then opened up and we had a good run all the way up to Penang Island. On the way we stopped off at the Riverside services where we had a lovely view of, yes, you've guessed it, the river! You can get to Penang two ways from the mainland. There's the tedium of driving into Butterworth then getting the ferry across, or the quick way across the Penang Bridge, all 13km of it. We opted for speed and before long we were bumper to bumper on the outskirts of Georgetown. It wasn't too bad really ... read more