Our arrival at Christchurch airport was uneventful. We even managed to get our embargoed goods past the customs inspector without too much of a hassle! Then we got to the car rental. Not so smooth. We had booked with National and we couldn’t find their desk. Finally we asked someone and they said “oh yeah, you want Europcar”. That seemed odd to us since we didn’t book with Europcar but that is apparently how it is. They did have our National reservation so that was helpful but they were not able to give us a car at the price we had been quoted they would need to charge us $400 more than what we had planned to pay. Surprise! We eventually came to a compromise, found our roller skate in the parking lot and were on our way.

Our first night was in a little town of about 2000 people called Geraldine. We stayed in a self contained unit at a holiday park, that we picked because it was called Grumpy’s. It really reminded Andy of his childhood vacations at the Blue Dolphin Holiday Camp in Filey. Our reason for stopping here was to go to the Transportation museum. It was full of cars, tractors, motorcycles and even a bi-plane. We both wished that our Dads were with us to explain some of the finer points.

Our second night was in Oamaru. This is about half-way down the island on the east coast and people go there to see the penguins. There are two types: yellow eyed and blue. First we went to the area where the yellow eyed penguins nest. It is on an exposed cliff side above the sea and you can only reach it with a guide. We were able to get close to an adult penguin who had two chicks in the nest. We also saw one come ashore. I have really only seen penguins swimming underwater. In actual fact they also can swim on top of the water and look similar to a duck. That is what the penguin we saw was doing before it decided to come on shore. Then we went to the blue penguin nesting site, which is a much slicker affair. We were able to see many chicks in their nests using viewing tubes that don’t disturb the birds. Later that night we came back for the big show. At about 9:00pm when the sun goes down, all of the adult penguins that have been out feeding all day come home. They gather in groups just off shore. When there are enough of them that they feel safe they swim up onto the beach. This part is actually kind of funny because often times the waves knock them over and they have to try a few times before they get onto their feet. Then they climb up the rocks to the top of the hill. Here they wait again until a group forms, then they make a dash over the small patch of open ground into their nests. It is really cool because they use sodium lights which only put off light in the red/orange spectrum and the birds can’t sense it. So the people are able to watch but the birds are not disturbed. We saw about 170 penguins come ashore! FYI: It should tell you something about the weather here that we were watching penguins in the middle of summer. It is not spectacularly warm. We stayed at a bed and breakfast that was recommended to us by one of the girls at the penguin colony. It was ok, but it was less B&B and more just house. The owners were friendly but slightly vacant in the way of someone who did too many drugs in the 70’s.

Our next two nights were spent in Wanaka. This is on a lake surrounded by mountains in the center of the island and is very scenic and beautiful. Apparently both Shania Twain and John Travolta have houses nearby. We stayed at the Wanaka Motel, which was the first hotel built in town. Strangely, it has burned down twice, once in the 1920’s and once in the 1950’s. I made Andy find the location of our nearest fire extinguisher before we went to bed! From here we made our way to the historic Kawarau Bridge built in 1880. It is also historic as it is the site of the first ever bungy jump. A guy named AJ Hackett strapped a cord to his ankles and leapt! It was drizzling a little so it wasn’t busy. Before we even had time to think Andy had been signed up and was out on the bridge getting his ankles wrapped. We hadn’t even gotten to see anyone else jump! Andy walked out to the edge, waved to the crowd and without hesitation dove off, for the 43 meter fall (aprox. 130 feet). If he ever does something like that again someone else needs to be there to stand with me because I just about had a heart attack! When he finally caught his breath, he did say that it was scary but exhilarating. They send a little boat out in the river to catch you afterwards, so at least you don’t have to be hauled back up or swim for it. After that we both needed a drink! We went to a winery called Gibbston Valley that actually stores it’s wine in a cave that they blasted out of the hillside. The Central Otago region is a cool climate region and is known for its pinot noir. We did a tasting in the cave and then went to the adjacent cheese shop to have a bit of a snack. Yummy! Next we stopped at an abandoned gold field. It was quite interesting as you are able to walk all around the site. After our tour we even got to pan for gold. Andy will tell you he found a small flake, but it was too small for me to see! We stopped at another place on the way back to Wanaka, where you are able to taste Pinot Noir’s from several different vineyards. It was all very smooth and drinkable, not at all overpowering like cabernet and merlot can be. Back in Wanaka we ate dinner at a place called the Butchery (all steaks, guess who picked it!). After dinner we went to a bar in the same complex that has three giant log fires every night, which I enjoyed by sitting as close as humanly possible.

The next day we crossed the mountains to the west coast. It was all very scenic… for Andy. For me it was a never ending drive of hair pin turns, up,up,up and then down,down,down. It was also misty raining just to make it fun. Meanwhile Andy is in the passenger seat, camera clicking away, saying things like “it’s so beautiful” or “look another waterfall”, but if I looked away from the road for two seconds another nasty turn would quickly appear. The west side of the island is temperate rain forest, so it is green and lush. Moss grows on everything and the forest is full of ferns and other greenery. We finally got to the coast and made a quick stop at Fox glacier. We walked in the rain to view the bottom of the glacier. At times it is possible to walk right to the “face” but it was closed because of the weather. We continued on our way another 20 minutes or so to Franz Joseph glacier. We had scheduled a heli-hike for the following day and it didn’t look good. The guides told us that no decision would be made until the morning, so there was nothing to do but wait. When morning arrived it was fairly clear and not raining so we had high hopes. When we got to the center however, there was bad news. The weather was good so the helicopter could fly. Unfortunately since it had been raining for over a week, the landing spot on the glacier was gone. A new one would have to be hand carved by some of the guides which would take hours and by that time there was no guarantee that the weather would be decent enough to fly. We decided that it wasn’t worth it to do a short walk from the bottom because you get very little time on the actual ice. As we walked down the street feeling dejected we came across a place that did flights in a small eight seat plane. They had a flight leaving in 30 minutes so we booked onto that. The flight itself was a little bit nerve wracking as we seemed to be flying directly into mountains several times but the view was awesome. Andy even got to sit in the co-pilot seat and wear the headphones so he was privy to what the air traffic control and the other pilots were saying! We got great views of both the Fox and Franz Joseph glacier as well as Mount Cook, the highest mountain in New Zealand. This was especially cool because we were able to fly closely around the top of it where it was actually above the clouds! By the time we landed the clouds were already starting to come in again so we felt lucky that we had gotten to see anything at all. The pilot told us it was the first day that it had been clear enough to fly in over a week and I suspect it might be for some time as it has continued to rain. We did stop at Franz Joseph glacier after the flight. We walked out to the viewing platform and took some great pictures.

After our adventures we drove north to Greymouth and spent the night there, after having dinner at a restaurant with someone else’s Christmas party! The next day it was actually raining quite heavily so it took us most of the day to drive back across the island to Christchurch. This was up and over a different pass through the mountains, which was equally as hair raising as the other road.

We spent today in Christchurch, which is the biggest town on the south island. We saw the cathedral, went shopping, rode the tram, and went to the Canterbury Museum. The museum was interesting as it has a large Antarctica display because Christchurch is the last major stop in civilization, not just for the explorers like Scott and Shackleton but also for US and UK scientists who go there today. Tomorrow we continue our adventure when we head for the north island for five days!

We arrived back in sydney on friday, to a huge thunderstorm, which apparently has caused quite a lot of damage. Typical!

Last night we saw the Nutcracker at the Sydney Opera House, which is as impressive inside as it is out.

Today I saw Beowulf in 3D at the IMAX and we are of out in a little while on a “showboat” dinner cruise.

We leave for New Zealand in the morning

We picked up our rental car to start our three day drive along the south coast from Adelaide to Melbourne. The drive could be completed in one long day, but we had decided to stop and see the many attractions on offer along the way.

Fortunately, things improved after the first stop. About one hour out of Adelaide, Sarah had to pee, so we pulled in to Dundee’s Hotel & Wildlife Park. Sarah had got all worked up over the prospect of holding replies and petting the wallabies, but it was closed, so we had to make do with playing the ‘pokies’, or slot machines which are ever present in South Australia, and always appear to be open. I won $2!

The rest of the first days driving was fairly tedious, we were not on the coast at this point and the weather had turned a bit miserable, with overcast skies and occasional rain.

We eventually turned up in Port Fairy, which is actually on the coast. We booked into a quaint old bluestone fishermans cottage, which upset the fisherman a bit, but pleased Sarah as they has a gas fire!!! We had dinner of pie and chips in the oldest pub in Victoria, and went to a nearby town with a reconstructed fishing village to see a laser show about the wrecking of the “Loch Ard”.

The next day we took to the road again. A detour from the coast towards the town of Timboon which is home to lots of food products, especially cheese, and the Timboon distillery. Back to the coast, we saw most of the famous sights including the “12 Apostles” and the wreck site of the Loch Ard. Again the weather was a little sucky but we did get to see koalas on our trip through the hills. We spent the night in Apollo Bay, famous for it’s surfing – but not today.

More coast on day three, but we did take a small stop so I could do some loop-the-loops and barrel-rolls over the coast in a biplane.

The sun was out at last as we approached Melbourne. We had a nice dinner and a walk about the streets. The next day we wandered about a bit, enjoying the weather and taking in this most pleasant city. We ended our trip to Melbourne watching 3 transvestites sing Pat Benatar songs on a fiberglass Ayres rock… beat that!

Hmmm, difficult to write about Adelaide as the things that make it a good place to be are also the things that make it dull! It is clean and well laid out with plenty of shopping and good public transport. The point of us being there was that as part of the train trip, we got two days touring the surrounding area and tasting wine from the most famous Australian regions.

Our first day was a tour of the McClaren Vale and Adelaide Hills. An intimate arrangement of Sarah and I, a German girl and our tour guide. It started out well, with a plate of local cheeses, and improved. The wineries were not any that we had heard of before, they were smaller scale and geared to what is know here as “Cellar Door”, that is tastings and direct sales, however at no time were we made to feel like we were being sold to, it was much more of a fun learning experience about Australian wine. We were having lunch in the toasty mid-day sun of a winery garden, when one of the groundskeepers asked us if we would move inside. Apparently a brown snake had been spotted in the garden. Australia has more poisonous (the really rather deadly sort of poisonous) critters per square foot than I care to mention, so we raced indoors. Once indoors I realized I was missing a photographic opportunity so I raced outside to watch a madman poke a deadly snake with a stick. We left the winery, full of lunch, but with a deadly and now rather angry snake still loose on the grounds. Later in the day we visited a small winery called Arranmore, where John, the owner and only employee talked to us in detail about the Australian winemaking process, and proving you don’t need to be a big company, or have vast amounts of equipment to make a good wine.

The second day, at the more famous Barossa valley was in comparison a disappointment to us. The wine making there is much more commercial, Sarah and I are very familiar with the first stop – Wolf Blass. The wines were excellent, but the tour group was much larger and the scale of the operation was intimidating. A wine highlight was a visit to some vineyards which may hold the worlds oldest shiraz vines, we even got to taste the amazing wine from these low yield plants. The true highlight was finishing the day in a helicopter over the vast and mostly empty valley where the sunburned Australian country can really be appreciated.

We had a free day in Adelaide before leaving for the Great Ocean Road. We visited some museums and enjoyed a low-key time in a small and manageable city. Sarah had a monster steak!

I have started to notice, in Australia, that there is a paranoia here; every where there are signs saying that that you are being filmed, even in taxis which could pass as armored tanks. Shops routinely have signs saying bags will be inspected on leaving. I have never felt safer on any city streets, yet at the same time I have never felt more like a criminal! Bizarre!

While not quite as famous as the Orient Express, the Indian Pacific is one of the most famous trains in the world. Once a week, on a wednesday, it leaves Sydney on the Pacific coast, to make it’s way on the 3 day journey to Perth on the Indian ocean coast along the second longest single piece of track in the world.

Sarah’s chicken caesar salad didn’t turn up for ages, and as a result we arrived at Sydney central station panting and sweating only to find out we were an hour early! We checked our bags and waited to board the train for our part of the journey, the 26 hour trip to Adelaide. The train was a mighty beast to look at, pulling 15 glistening carriages of seats, beds, luggage and even cars, but this turned out to be short for this train. At peak times the train can be up to 26 carriages long and has to be split in the middle to allow boarding over two tracks at Sydney.

We boarded our Gold Kangaroo sleeper compartment. It was small, but larger than our berth on the overnight train to venice, plus our luggage was out of our way. We had the most ingenious and compact en-suite toilet and shower room which required you to fold things out of the wall before attempting to use them, to really make the most of the confined space. The cabin could not be described as luxurious, but comfortable, a rather faded shadow of it’s former wood paneled self. In Australia as in most other countries, rail travel has become unloved and underused in a time of planes and cars, and as we would learn later the infrastructure is in need of some funding. As we pulled slowly out of the station, the service manager introduced herself and with all the joviality of a holiday camp entertainer, filled us in with the program of events. It would consist of eating, sleeping, eating, a bus trip, eating, eating, arriving.

We settled in and headed to the lounge car which shall henceforth be referred to as “God’s waiting room”. We discovered that our presence on the train, along with that of a canadian girl reduced the average age to 86. Still, over drinks and shared meals we chatted about our adventures, and got travel tips on the much visited great ocean road (our next destination). The meals were sublime, rich, fattening and hellishly tasty – I thought about staying on to Perth, they were served to us as we trundled slowly through the great nothingness that is Australia.

We went to bed after a reception in the lounge, and discovered the worst kept secret in Australia. The track is in a terrible state causing a constant jolting from side to side. People we met later would say “Oh, the Indian Pacific, it’s really bumpy”, even the driver on the following morning’s tour of Broken hill commented on it, along with the square wheels. The Indian Pacific is not intended for great speed, in fact it is slow, and it travels huge stretches of single line track with two directional traffic, forcing trains to wait in sidings for a clear track. During the night we got stuck waiting for a freight train to pass causing a two hour delay. The two stationary hours was the only sleep we got!

In the morning we watched kangaroos and emu’s hiding unsuccessfully in the vast empty space around us, before stopping at the mining town of Broken Hill. We got off the train and onto a bus for an hour long tour of the town, including a quick visit to the “flying doctors” a free air ambulance service which takes doctors out to the outback as needed (as well as distributing special cases of medical supplies and drugs, to allow people to emergency treat themselves over the radio – it makes sense if you think about it long enough).

Back on the train to eat our way into Adelaide.

The title says it all!

See the usual place, or for slower net connections, try

Singapore

Sydney

Adelaide

On our arrival in Sydney we went to see if we could check into our hotel. It was around 9:00 in the morning, as our flight from Singapore was overnight. The good news was that they let us check in. The bad news is that our room was right next to the elevator shaft. This made equivalent noise and vibration to a freight train rolling by every couple of minutes. We were both exhausted from lack of sleep on the flight, so we took a little nap and went out for a lunch around 1:00. Next to our hotel was a beautiful victorian covered shopping arcade. We walked around the shops and came face to face with a horrible truth. Things in Australia are expensive. We had expected it to be similar to the US but it isn’t. The Aussie dollar is still a little weaker than the US dollar but only by one or two cents. For all practical purposes they are the same. A paperback book from Borders that would be $8.99 at home is $15 or $20 here. My tall Starbucks latte was almost $6. Almost twice the price of at home! The jeans at Target were $50. They wouldn’t have been more than $30 at home. We quickly came to the realization that we won’t be purchasing much here.

Our second day in Sydney we woke up to find it raining, of course. We did a bus tour of the city which was very informative. We got off of the bus at Bondi beach on the outskirts of town. It is world famous for it’s surfing and the drizzle wasn’t stopping them. The waves weren’t that high but it was impressive to see so many people surfing at once. That night Andy wanted to go to dinner at a revolving restaurant located in a tower in downtown Sydney. About 30 minutes before we left I started to feel a little bit unwell, but I didn’t really give it much thought. I tend to feel nauseous fairly frequently, like after my malaria tablet, after my vitamin, if I haven’t eaten, if I’ve had too much coffee and all kinds of other things. It usually passes. We got to the restaurant and placed our order. It was an atmospheric place, with expensive, fancy food. As the waiter left I felt really kind of sick. I went to the bathroom, waited there for a minute and threw up. I actually stood there and thought “that was weird”. Like I said, I feel kind of yucky a lot, but I never throw up. Ever. It’s a thing with me. I just don’t do it. I felt better so I thought “maybe it was just a fluke”. I went back and sat at our table. For awhile I felt fine. We admired the view of Sydney harbor and the opera house. Fairly quickly, however, I started feeling worse again. The fact that the room was moving didn’t seem to be helping my situation any. I managed to stick it out long enough for Andy to wolf down his dinner, but I couldn’t eat any of mine. During this time I made two other trips to the bathroom that emptied out everything from the lower portion of my digestive tract. The waiter wanted to know why I wasn’t eating my food and I told him I wasn’t feeling well. He was kind enough to get the slow elevator to take us back to the ground. He thought the “free fall” sensation of the fast elevator would make me feel worse. He might have been right. The slow elevator is, however, slow. And the tower was very tall. And I really wasn’t feeling well. Beads of sweat broke out on my forehead. There was only one thing I could think of. I took my wallet and lip gloss out of the little black purse I was carrying and handed them to Andy. Finally the elevator stopped and the doors opened onto a concourse of fancy shops. Andy said to the elevator attendant “is there a bathroom?”. The guy said “yeah, I’ll show you” and took us around to the elevator to the street! At this point I was making gagging noises and knew I had no choice. I opened my little black purse and threw up into it. The elevator man then found us the bathroom! It’s unfortunate. I really liked that purse.

I spent the rest of that night curled into a ball on the bed. The fact that the next day we were scheduled to leave for our overnight train journey to Adelaide and I had to get on it no matter how I was feeling really did nothing to help me feel better! Luckily I did recover enough to get on the train, more on that in the next post.

We did not have a long time to experience Singapore. We arrived in the afternoon and we left the following evening on an overnight flight. Singapore has many strict laws. You are not allowed to chew or even possess gum. It is strictly enforced that you only cross the streets with the lights, at the crosswalks. I am sure that in some ways this makes it a difficult place to live. To us, after being in the rest of Asia for over six weeks it seemed like paradise! There are sidewalks, flush toilets, real stores, and consistent power supply. What more could you want in life? It was, however, the hottest and muggiest place that we have been. It is quite close to the equator and you can really tell. We went to dinner at one of Andy’s favorite restaurants, called Lawry’s. They pretty much only have prime rib on the menu. They wheel a giant silver cart to your table. The chef opens it, unveiling an actual portion of cow. They then cut you a slab sized to your liking, big, bigger, and jumbo are the choices. After dinner we walked down the main shopping street. Even though it is not a particularly christian country they had Christmas decorations everywhere! Enormous, elaborate ones. It was better than looking in the windows of Saks and Macy’s because the decorations were better and it was warm enough to wear a t-shirt! We stayed at the Raffles hotel for our one night in town. It is a beautiful building from the early 1900’s. It is the flagship hotel in the Raffles chain and one of “the grand-dame hotels” in the East. It is also famous for being the birth place of the “Singapore sling” cocktail.

Our whole reason for going to Singapore was because Andy wanted to fly with Singapore airlines. I guess they have a good reputation. As it turns out they are the first airline to put the new Airbus A380 into service and it is on the Singapore to Sydney route. Lucky us! Andy was really excited to find this out. I was not. It is an enormous plane. Two floors that run the entire length of the plane. It can be configured to seat 850 people! Singapore has it configured to seat 471. This did not make me any less nervous. I kept drawing comparisons to the Titanic in my head, as it has only been flying for a couple of weeks. It turned out to to be fine. The seats were large and folded into a flat bed. Each seat had it’s own TV with multiple programing options. Because it is so big, take off and landing were a bit odd. At take off it seemed like we were hardly moving and we were already in the air. When we landed we had to taxi a long way to get to the terminal and if you looked out the window it was as though we were driving a five story building around!

The French were repelled from Cambodia on at least one occasion, before being kicked out for good in 1953. This did not bring a happy democracy to Cambodia. In 1970 while the king was visiting Russia, he was deposed. The new government didn’t fare too well either. The war was raging in Vietnam, and as part of the “Secret War” US forces were bombing areas of neighboring Cambodia believed to be communist rebel camps. The Cambodians saw this as indiscriminate and unnecessary, with many thousand civilian deaths, and so helped bring power to their own rebels, who’s aim was oppose invading forces. These new guys were called the Khmer Rouge, led by one Saloth Sar otherwise known as Pol Pot. Support, mainly from the poverty stricken classes, helped build a strong force with some strange political thought. There was to be only one kind of industry – agriculture. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh using the excuse that it was to protect the inhabitants from a US strike. In actual fact it was to force the holders of the countries wealth to a new life of labor, working the fields. Unlike China and Russia, where the communist model was based around the worker, in Cambodia the peasant was the model citizen, working only for food to survive. Those who were likely to cause trouble, mainly anyone with an education, monks (who were considered to be leeches), and the elderly who were of no use to work were either starved or taken to one of the killing fields to be disposed of.

We arrived in our hotel, le Royal, which was the setting of the movie the Killing Fields. It was here that the last of the worlds media gathered as the embassies were closing up shop in the capital. Following the evacuation of Phnom Penh, most of the city was destroyed, but this hotel was used to keep animals such as pigs. In 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia, ending the rule of the Khmer Rouge, but the damage was done – the loss of life was vast along with the loss of culture and any forms of education. This causes a problem in that a lot of information on the history of Cambodia has been lost, there is even a considerable amount of uncertainty as to what went on as late as the early 1980’s as the records and record keepers were destroyed. The country had to start again. A stable independent government was only established in 1993 (though there was a coup in 1997, the new constitution remained in place).

There are no high rise buildings in Phnom Penh, in fact a lot of the construction would not look out of place in a farming village. Some of the buildings have been salvaged, and new, modern development is starting to take place. No-one is really sure of how to use a road, and the police aren’t paid enough to care. We had a car take us around town. First we headed out to Choeung Ek, on the outskirts of the city, which is the most famous killing field.

A guide showed us around and explained the atrocities which took place. Small children were held by the legs and had their heads smashed against the ‘killing tree’, or if they were older, were made to hang from branches with spikes placed below until they could hang no more. People were made to dig a pit, then would be beaten or stabbed. The pits would be covered with chemicals such as DDT to stop them smelling and to finish off anyone who made it in alive. A pit of Khmer Rouge soldiers, suspected of treason, has been found – their heads have not. There are over 40 pits of mass graves, not all of them have been excavated, but for those that have, the bones have been transferred to a glass walled stupa which makes for an unforgettable memorial. It contains over 5000 skulls; 2-3million people went missing under the Khmer Rouge.

On our way to Choeung Ek we passed many “sweat-shops” making clothes for many foreign companies, such as Gap, Abercrombie, Dockers and many more. There is always a lot of debate about the use of cheap foreign labour but here is some insight from our driver. Our driver is in the army full time, he only drives as a side job – his monthly army salary is $30. A person working in one of the factories can clear $100 a month, so it is fairly easy to see how the labour can be found to operate such places. Another effect of the many factories is the amount of these clothes available locally, at factory gates or in the local markets for a tiny fraction of what it costs at home; $25 Gap t-shirt for $1.50 anyone?

The following day was the start of a three day boat race, an important holiday to mark the november full moon, when the local river reverses flow. As a result the city is overflowing with people from all over Cambodia (but not foreign tourists as relatively few, by Siem Reap standards, come here) who come to support their local boat team and generally celebrate by the river.The Royal palace was closed, so we didn’t get to see it, but we did visit the rather unloved but still splendid National Museum. We also visited the Russian and the Central markets to buy some of those bargain clothes.

That night we watched the fireworks let off at the river and prepared for our departure the next day.

Andy never did get to try an AK-47, despite driving past the shooting range!

…from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. Warning “The Killing Fields” gallery may be disturbing, but not as disturbing as being there!!!