A quick one (while he's away)

S 31 54.700 E 115 57.100 - Perth - 15 January 2009

Ok, so I get complaints, I write way too much. Ok, maybe I don't write all that often but when I do, the entries tend to be a bit long and have lots of detail. "I have to speed read through your entries", "you should edit more", blah blah blah.

Loads of pictures in albums in this directory. The internet wasn't so great in Cambodia and Thailand so I didn't upload for a long time. And some last albums here, the rest of Thailand and Malaysia and then finally a few in Australia.

Well, ok, for the time impaired readers, let me see if I can speed up the whole thing for you. Perth is hot, Fremantle is less hot and pretty and by the ocean. It is sort of the end of the major travel on this trip, but it looks like it will be a while before I can look for a job and actually settle down here. But I dawdle, trip report then.

August, train from London to take the ferry to Norway. Cool fjords, way expensive, great camping. Sweden, slightly less expensive and a lovely week of camping on an island. Finland, grr, apartment fell through, to Estonia for a week in an apartment to relax, then a quick few days through Finland and the train onto Russia.

September by then, St Petersburg, a few days there seeing the stuff you are supposed to see and struggling with Russian. Just a few days in Moscow and onto the train across Siberia. A very cool 4 days watching the country go by, zipping through time zones and finally getting off at Irkursk and spending a few days on Orkhon Island in Lake Baikal.

October now, we take the train to Mongolia and head off on a 10 day trip around Mongolia, through the Gobi with some people we had met in Siberia. Then we take another shorter 5 day trip nearby Ulan Batar. Winter hits when we are there, deep snow to hike through before we catch the train to China and we head back into autumn.

China is awesome and the planned three weeks turns into every possible day of our 30 day visa. We take sort of a typical route, Beijing to Pingyao to Luoyang to Xi'an and finally down to Chengdu. There we have a nice 5 day bird tour up towards Tibet. Last few days of China through Yuanyang and over the border to Sapa, Vietnam.

November by now, a quite special home stay with a Red Dao hill tribe family and then the train to Hanoi, lots of yellow buildings and gigantic bundles of wire on the power lines. Another train to Hue, the old imperial capital of Vietnam and very close to the old DMZ area. A sleeper bus to Hoi An and a few days on the beach there. Train to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) so that we can make a dash up to Cat Tien, a national park with lots of pretty birds. Back to Saigon and then catching a three day boat trip (ok, lots of buses) up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Mid December now. A few days looking at Phnom Penh before heading out to Siem Reap. Time is starting to run short now, we have to make it to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia by 12 January for our flight. We spend a few days overdosing on temples in Ankgor, which is totally cool but overwhelming. We wanted to see the Prek Toal bird sanctuary on Tonle Sap Lake, but it was really expensive to get there (would have been like 300 USD for both of us) and apparently the storks haven't shown up yet and all that was there were some normal wader birds that you can see anywhere. So, we didn't stay over Christmas then and left early to head off to Bangkok.

Christmas eve we arrive in Bangkok. Christmas day wasn't overly festive because we picked a super cheap place to stay and they woke us up at 6 am when they were cleaning the bathrooms and with a loud tv in the lobby, so Christmas was spent finding somewhere else to stay a little nicer and getting myself a haircut. Most of the rest of the few days in Bangkok was spent figuring out where to go next. We didn't go to the south part of Cambodia to the beach there, or didn't go to northern Thailand, so Koh Tao seemed like it would be a nice place to spend a week or so just relaxing and also doing some diving.

We spend 4 days, including New Years Eve, on the east side of Koh Tao in a rather isolated bungalow. The roads are tough to get there and it was just the one group of bungalows, but on a beautiful cove with some fantastic snorkeling. Four days of doing nothing but swimming, snorkeling, eating, sleeping, and chasing away spiders from the bed.

Then we head over to the other side of the island. Koh Tao has mostly become known now as the cheapest place on earth to get your open water diving certification, so yeah, I want to do that, sign me up. It is a huge contrast from the other side of the island, loads of resorts, lots of people, and all the rest of that. I spend 3 days getting my certification, sitting in classrooms and doing 4 training dives. Classroom stuff is boring but the dives are really great. C does some fun dives while I'm in class and then we do a night dive together and one more day dive. I'm hooked. Luckily Australia is diving country.

Now we are basically out of time. Well, stupid Thailand changed their visa policy right before we got there, no more 30 days, it is only 15 days now so we got hit with a fine when we left after 16 days. We then dash across Malaysia to catch our flight. A night in Georgetown on Penang and another night in Kuala Lumpur before flying out. Malaysia seemed interesting, I didn't give it much of a chance being almost an after thought after all the planning what went into the rest of it. But KL is on the way to lots of places, I assume I'll be back there some day.

Then Australia, after five months and one day traveling, here we are. Australia has dawdled on my permanent visa application, should have been done by December but no known date in sight now. We had planned on goofing around in Australia for a month or so before heading to Melbourne and getting serious about where to live, finding jobs, and all that. The job market is a little worrisome considering how the world economy seems to be crumbling. Anybody need a senior level Java J2EE engineer? Drop me a line.

So yeah, another entry with lots of words but it covers five months. More stuff later, probably go back and write about China and other places I didn't say much about yet.