So, it was in the early hours of Monday morning when we finally found our way to our seats in the exit row. Wonderful, lots of leg room for us, but we had to try to focus on the instructions being given to us by the flight attendant when we were feeling very sleepy. Now we were being told that we were being delayed because the ground staff had to transfer food from another plane? The captain was actually a bit arrogant blaming our delay on the ground staff processing the transit passengers and then for a problem with the catering?? Whatever! The last two transit passengers clambered aboard and we pushed back from the aero bridge about an hour later than scheduled. After an uneventful flight across the ditch we touched down in Christchurch still ... read more

Note: We are home as of Thursday, 3 November, but only just managing to post the last day of our holiday today! I had hoped to sleep (rest/doze) a bit during the flight seeing as we were due to arrive in Melbourne 6.10am (now re-estimated for around 7.40am) so that I wouldn’t be too tired to make it through to bedtime. That was not to be. There was a young child seated behind me and a parent behind Bernie with the co-parent seated at the bulkhead with another child in a bassinet. It wasn’t too bad when mum was sitting with the toddler, she was a little bit grizzly, but not too noisy. OMG, at some point when I was trying to doze, mum and dad swapped and the child had a complete meltdown. Wailing ‘I ... read more

Note: We are home as of Thursday, 3 November, but still catching up on posting the last few days of this holiday! Singapore is cursed! This morning at breakfast Bernie was checking our credit card accounts and found some suspicious activity on our Visa card. There was a $1.00 transaction with Gucci and then there were three transactions associated with Bean Mobility Services who we believe run the scooter hire service in Melbourne. Um, we’re in Singapore, we are certainly not riding a scooter around Melbourne. Oh, hum, back to our room to ring the bank to report that our account seems to have been hacked. It took ages to get through to a person who then had to refer the call on somewhere else after verifying Bernie’s identity and clarifying the problem. Bernie said that ... read more

With a final temple tally of 22, this morning it was time to leave Siem Reap. Steve’s guide book had a list of 12 ‘must see’ temples and we ticked off all of those. I had a list that someone had put on the internet of their ’33 Best Temples and Ruins in Siem Ream’. It was never my aim to tick off all 33 sites on that list, it was more of a rough guide just to know what temples were where … to keep them in mind if we had the time and the inclination or if we happened to be nearby. Still, we ticked 19 off that list and then there were three temples recommended to us by Cholna that weren’t on either of our lists. So many temples! And still we haven’t ... read more

This morning we arranged for Cholna to collect us from the hotel at 8.30am so that we could start ticking off the the last of the temples on Steve’s list of 12 Temples. First we went back to Angkor Thom to view Baphuon Temple. With it being part of the Angkor Thom complex we’re not sure how we missed it on Tuesday? It sits between Bayon and Phimeanakis, but I guess we missed it because we couldn’t see it through the jungle from either! That’s the good thing about being here for a week, we don’t have to do our temple viewing like a military operation, we can go back again and again when we discover that there is something else we want see. We didn’t see this temple when we were here in 2010 because ... read more