Ross Ed

My 6th country of visit on these travels brought me to the lovely country of Cambodia. What a hassle it was getting here though. After our overnight bus in Laos, we eventually got to the Laos-Cambodia border after a 4 hour tuk tuk journey from where our bus dropped us off. Unfortunately, we decided to not visit 4000 islands as our Lao Kip's were running extremely low, and we just wanted to get to Cambodia rather than prolong the travelling. We got stamped out of Laos, where the customs charged a $2 (everything in Cambodia is dealt in US dollars, and anything under 1 dollar, is given in local currency, so we end up with a lot of different currency) 'stamp fee', then walked across the border, to where we visited the doctor. Quite random, but ... read more

So we've made it to Laos, a country north of Thailand, south of China. After 30 hours of travelling, leaving Auckland, waiting in Sydney,flying, we eventully made it to Bangkok at midnight. It was very hot at that time, so we dropped our bags off and decided to celebrate the fact of making it to Ladyboy city, by having a pint. The next day we explored a bit of the city, and went to get a bus booked out of it as soon as possible. I quite liked my first impessions of the place, but our plan was to do some travelling around the other countries then spend a couple of nights in Bangkok before coming home. We had an overnight bus up to the north, which wasnt too bad. We got free water and a ... read more

As I touched on previously, we've now made it to the home of Neighbours, Ozzie Rules, and some other things, Melbourne. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Mildura and I'm a bit sad it came to an end. My last day there was spent earning 9 pound an hour, pruning small stumps of grape vines (see Stef's pictures). This was helped along with an hour lunch break (usually only half an hour) and 5 cold beers. This continued after work where I drank some more beer and half a box of goon. Needless to say, I don't remember much apart from a duvet, the police, and a midnight munchie run for a kebab. A good night/day in my book. I was up at 8 the next day after a few hours sleep, and ready to catch ... read more

So, we're still in the sleepy town of Mildura, right on the border of New South Wales and Victoria. We've got a new job now working with a nice Citrus farmer called Steve, and his two labs, Indie and Bella. Our other job steadily got worse and worse as the days went on. In our last week there, we each earned a whopping 33 pounds sterling. Not very good considering that was after 6 days work, and that our rent alone is double that. So we now pick oranges when the weather is right. The oranges must be at least 9 degrees to pick, and you also can't pick them when they're wet as wet finger prints leave bruises on them, which don't show for like 2 weeks. Steve is good though, if we can't pick ... read more

So the bus was a 6 hour journey, through wee towns, and through another time zone!!! Victoria is our penultimate state on this tour (I forgot we're going to Canberra which is in Australian Capital Territory funnily enough as its the capital), and its half an hour time difference from Norther Territory and South Oz, so we're back to a 9 hour difference. The hostel we're staying at is a working hostel, so everyone is working in it. When we asked the owner about work, he said he'd expect us to start working picking oranges next week, so we had a week to laze about before starting work. We arrived at tea time, so dumped our bags and headed to the nearest pub. We found a rather nice Working Mans Club and all settled down to ... read more