TravelStream™ news feed for member minijumboontour on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/minijumboontour en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Sat, 22 Jul 2006 14:44:22 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/se_asia/1147948860/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/se_asia/1147948860/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/se_asia/1147948860/tpod.html Sat, 22 Jul 2006 14:44:22 -0400 A pit stop look at a few beaches and cities of South East Asia

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Singapore, Singapore

Well, having said that in all our wanderings around the city I didn't actually get round to stopping in Raffles for a Singapore sling at all - we were dressed a bit shabbily when we happened to walk past so decided we better leave it!

Singapore was a bit of an entertaining place, from its numerous interconnected shopping malls (you can walk for blocks and blocks through underground tunnels connecting never ending shopping malls without seeing daylight!) to slightly cheesy waterfront and incredibly cheesy theme park on a small island off the south coast of Singapore.

The bustle of little India and tourist trappings of China town were also pretty interesting to see, as was the combination of grand colonial and ultra modern buildings found around the waterfront area. All in all a good city, but not one with a huge amount to offer those visitors without wads of cash to spend in all the lovely shopping malls !
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144742100/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144742100/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144742100/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 07:24:44 -0400 Kiwi's and Kangeroo's, extreme sports and stunning landscapes ... just some of the ingredients for a fun five months !

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Darwin, Australia

We had a really good three or four days in Darwin, predominately to give me the chance to go to Kakadu National Park, which is another one of Australia's World Heritage sites. We decided to go for a flight over it which was a good way to see things at this pretty wet time of year, as well as giving Herdy the opportunity to see stuff he hadn't seen on previous visits. It worked out really well too, with the day in Kakadu being an absolute highlight of the Oz trip.

Aside from Kakadu, our $50 win in a pub quiz and a night with the Beatles, Darwin wasn't really the most happening of cities (loose use of the term city I think!), so we were pleased to be heading to pastures new, where there were hopefully a few less mosquito's looking to eat me alive (unfortunately I got well over 50 bites on my back alone in Darwin!).
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144295160/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144295160/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144295160/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 06:22:54 -0400 Kiwi's and Kangeroo's, extreme sports and stunning landscapes ... just some of the ingredients for a fun five months !

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Perth, Australia

Well what can I say about my whistlestop tour of a tiny part of Western Australia apart from what an incredibly beautiful part of the world it is.

We had a great few days heading first south towards Margaret River, stopping along the way there and back and bumping into possibly my favourite beach of the whole trip by complete accident.

Perth is also a lovely city, really laid back and relaxed. It also provided me with my one and only experience of AFL footie, a pretty entertaining game I have to say, even though apparently the game we saw was far away from being a classic.

The one thing I was a bit gutted about was missing out on seeing Jamie Cullum live... We saw there was a jazz festival that weekend so we headed over to Freemantle (a suburb which seemed pretty similar to Brighton), only to find the festival was only on the Saturday. What made it worse was that we saw Jamie Cullum on TV the following day and found out that he'd made a surprise appearance because he was playing in Perth that weekend... So not only did I not realise he'd been playing a gig there, but I also missed the chance to see him at a free festival - doh !!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144554600/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144554600/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144554600/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 06:00:20 -0400 Kiwi's and Kangeroo's, extreme sports and stunning landscapes ... just some of the ingredients for a fun five months !

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Perth, Australia

asf
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144468080/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144468080/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144468080/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 05:59:58 -0400 Kiwi's and Kangeroo's, extreme sports and stunning landscapes ... just some of the ingredients for a fun five months !

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Margaret River, Australia

asfas
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144122720/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144122720/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1144122720/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 05:56:18 -0400 Kiwi's and Kangeroo's, extreme sports and stunning landscapes ... just some of the ingredients for a fun five months !

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Uluru, Australia

Saving a lot of time and cash, we had a flight between Cairns and Uluru so headed into the huge red centre by air. The scale and perspective we got of the size of the country (it took us 4 hours to get here!!) was pretty awe inspiring ... It really is a very big place !

Anyway, we had a good mix of stuff to do here. At the beginning of the second day we saw sunrise over Uluru before heading towards the rock where we did the really impressive circuit walk around its base.

After that I also did an afternoon trip out to the Olgas, some (I thought equally) impressive huge rocks where I did a circuit walk on my own, which was fantastic because most of the time there was no-one around at all. It almost felt like there could be a dinosaur hiding around the next corner, it looked like it hadn't changed for hundreds of thousands of years (although apparently it has, geologically its not actually that old). After that, I got a bus with some others who'd done a different walk, to watch the sunset over Uluru. We saw some pretty good colours, luckily as it turned out because there was a huge cloud on its way to the sun which could have scuppered it a bit!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1146476040/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1146476040/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1146476040/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 05:30:09 -0400 Kiwi's and Kangeroo's, extreme sports and stunning landscapes ... just some of the ingredients for a fun five months !

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Cairns, Australia

Not a huge amount to report about our second trip to Cairns other than the weather did improve... We managed to spend a good day on Fitzroy Island in the Barrier reef national park as well as time lying at the pool down at the seafront in Cairns.

Another upside was that we also swapped hostels from our ultra smelly room the previous visit to a place with a good clean room and good cheap food !!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1143608100/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1143608100/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1143608100/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 05:22:04 -0400 Kiwi's and Kangeroo's, extreme sports and stunning landscapes ... just some of the ingredients for a fun five months !

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Yungaburra, Australia

Instead of heading back to Cairns after leaving Port Douglas, we headed west inland to the tablelands. Its an area of forest and farmland, as you could imagine from its name, up fairly high and therefore a few degrees cooler than the tropical coastline.

Unfortunately it had been hit really hard by the cyclone, so we saw plenty more evidence of the damage, which as well as problems for property and farmers, also meant that many of the walks in the national parks around here were still closed.

We still had a good few days though and managed to see one of the most elusive Aussie animals, the Platypus. We tried three times to spot them in all, twice at dusk and then finally with better luck, at dawn the day we left. Luckily Herdy had been a couple of times before so we were able to try a spot not mentioned in the usual guide books, I think that paid off in the end because we ended up being able to sit on the side of the river bank watching 2 or three of them swimming around for about 45 minutes - awesome!

No pics of that (light was hurrendous) but Herdy got some cracking video footage... Pretty cool to see these animals in the wild.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1143349260/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1143349260/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1143349260/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 05:08:30 -0400 Kiwi's and Kangeroo's, extreme sports and stunning landscapes ... just some of the ingredients for a fun five months !

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Port Douglas, Australia

We headed back down from Cooktown to Port Douglas for my birthday where we spent a good few days in this nice little town.

One day was spent in the jungle and beaches of Cape Tribulation and another out on the Great Barrier reef... Even had our first Thai meal since leaving the UK on my birthday, maybe slightly odd as we're heading there in a few weeks, but it was a lovely reminder of all the nice food we've got to come!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1143176280/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1143176280/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/minijumboontour/nz_oz/1143176280/tpod.html Thu, 18 May 2006 04:38:14 -0400 Kiwi's and Kangeroo's, extreme sports and stunning landscapes ... just some of the ingredients for a fun five months !

Jump to the full
entry & travel map

Cooktown, Australia

The day after saying goodbye to Herdy's parents in Cairns, we headed on north up the coast to Cooktown. Quite an interesting place and only accessible via an inland road through some pretty impressive bush - my first real taste of really big tracts of land which really don't have anything in it at all.

The town itself is pretty out there, it's only about 4 streets deep with a small population now (it was much bigger during a gold rush in the 19th century, but the working conditions were a nightmare with heat, mosquito's, crocodiles etc so that combined with diminishing returns reduced the size loads). Two of the three pubs in town were called middle pub and top pub - bit disappointing really that the other pub broke the mold by calling itself anything other than bottom pub!

The first evening we took a really good walk up to a nearby lookout which looks over the town, river estuary and ocean. It is actually the same spot which Captain Cook climbed to try and find a good bit of coastline to fix his ship, The Endevour, which had hit the Great Barrier Reef (to be fair, he did well to make it that far up the coast without grounding earlier!). Anyway, he wasn't really in luck because it was pretty much all crocodile infested mangrove as far as the eye could see... As they didn't have much choice, the crew managed to repair the ship anyway - presumably without too many being eaten.
]]>