Thursday August 26, 2010 Episode 2 (by Craig) Bonjour, mon petits fromages.... No, thats not right. Lets try again.... Bonjour à tous, nous sommes maintenant dans le beau pays de France.... Hello everyone, we are now in the beautiful country of France. After a weekend in London recovering from jetlag, we flew to Tours, 230km South West of Paris (on RyanAir - the European version of Tiger; but with puke-inducing canary yellow throughout the cabin). Tours is where the conference was being held. Tours (pronounced Toor) is a very pretty provincial French City. It was generally OK; The conference ended today. Ross sat in on my talk, which he said was excellent, and he wanted to stand up at the end of it and shout out : That was my fella ! It was the first ... read more

Hi everyone, Mum, Dad and I returned from Singapore last Tuesday. We had an excellent time, as evidenced by the photos shown below. Our last day was spent on last minute shopping, then going to Changi airport, which is pretty much a destination in itself. We went to the Sunflower roof top garden in terminal 2, then got monorail to the cactus garden at terminal 1, then monorail to butterfly garden at terminal 3 (well, we did have a bit of time to kill). Then we sought somewhere to have a drink, and descended upon the "Straits Bar", which Dad rudely said that I would not be allowed into......Ha, ha ! Anyway, I have attached a selection of pics to share. They are shown below (over 2 pages I think). Till the next trip (Europe with ... read more

Craig, Marcia (Mum) and Ron (Dad) in Singapore, Wednesday July 7, 2010 Blogged by Craig Dear all , Hello from hot and sunny Singapore. Mum , Dad and I left a cloudy an cold Melbourne last Friday arvo. So, I'm very happy to be back in South East Asia, albeit "Asia Lite" for Mum and Dad. But, we are having a fantastic time.Singapore is just as clean and organised as I recall. It has made great strides in recent years to shed its sterile Utopian image, and there's oodles of cool stuff going on. We got a taxi from airport into town. Dad was amused - he says all the taxi's are 4 cylinder desiel, 5 speed boxes of metal with howling diffs. (Whatever that means.) The first morning saw a storm pass through - heavy ... read more

Episode 5: Phi Pii Island to Phuket and homeward bound. December 27 (Blogged by Craig) Hello everyone. Hope you all had a good Christmas and all that. We were actually quite happy to be free of it here in Thailand, apart from a few woosy Christmas trees and decorations in hotels and bars. Our last blog entry talked about Krabi province in the South. We had a great time at West Railay and Phra Nang beaches. Spectacular liestomes cliffs interspersed with white sandy beaches and aqua marine water that was like a lukewarm bath (The limestones karst cliffs here look like giant blocks of honeycomb, with dripping wax sprinkled about). Adjacent to West Railay is Ton Sai, a rock climbing mecca. We watched enthrallled as people clambered like spiders up the sheer rock face. We meet ... read more

Episode 3: Chiang Mai. December 13 - (written by Craig). Hello everyone. We spent our last night in Bangkok on a river diner cruise, which was great. Amazing views of the Wats and Grand Palace,city lights,. etc lit up at night. And there were still fireworks for the King's Birthday - a seemingly endless event. Earlier in the day, Ross went and got a haircut for the occasion. He came back with streaks in his hair. It looked great. "Who did it?" I asked, "a girl or a guy?" "Both ", he said. "What do you mean?" "A lady boy." We drank far too much on the cruise, and found ourselves with a "Changover" the next day. But we dragged ourselves about the hotel, packing, and regrettably said goodbye to Bangkok and got the one hour ... read more