TravelStream™ news feed for member rich_mcg on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/rich_mcg en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:37:51 -0500 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1201004040/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1201004040/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1201004040/tpod.html Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:37:51 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Phnom Penh, Cambodia

With the sugar rush from the cane juice still coursing through our veins we took another local bus to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, a 4 hour ride from KCham. We knew we were heading into a city of around 2 million and braced ourselves for a little bit of urban adventure. But as we drew into the city we were amazed by the total lack of development and the small town-like sprawl of the markets and the streets. There are a few wide tree lined boulevards and a handful of colonial townhouses to be seen, but there is an air of decay over many of them. (Which I guess is understandable when you start to hear stories about the Khmer Rouge's 'evacuation' of Phnom Penh in 1975. Once they'd kindly 'liberated' the city, they promptly sent most of its 2 million inhabitants off into rural labour camps, keeping a few thousand intellectual ne'er-do-wells behind to fill the prisons, detention centres and torture camps.) In Phnom Penh we started to get a real feel for the incredible evil and extraordinary brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime, and yet we walked around the city being greeted on all sides by laughs and smiles. These people, who through the 1970's survived one of the worst genocidal campaigns in history where an estimated 25% of the population died and who live in one of the worlds poorest countries would seem to have so little to laugh about...and so why are they still smiling?! They just don't stop - to give you an example: there are tuktuk and moto drivers on every street corner, and they are forever waving at you and calling out "want tuktuk?" as you walk by. We learned how to say "no thank you" in Khmer and every time we said this to a group of locals, they would quite literally fall over laughing at us. They would tell their mates, who in turn would laugh, and then we'd get our hands shaken or our shoulders slapped. If there's ever been a secret code to help you run the gauntlet of tuktuk drivers in Cambodia, 'no thanks' in Khmer is it. (and before you ask, yes it did occur to us that we might be saying something like 'I'm a knob' in Khmer, but no...we double checked). The main tourist draws in Phnom Penh are the Killing Fields memorial and the Tuol Sleng (also known as S-21) Detention Centre. I won't go into any details on either, except to say that visiting both was a profoundly moving and depressing experience. It's hard to accept the scale of the brutalities committed by the Khmer Rouge, but what comes across is the dreadfully sad, almost mundane way that thousands of 'New People' were tortured and slaughtered. It's strange too...the stories told in the museums didn't make us immediately emotionally upset, more <i>drained than anything.<i> It was only when we walked around the town and looked at the locals getting on with life that you got a sense of the true cost of the genocide....and the incredible resilience of the Cambodian people to have dusted themselves off and just get on with life. There's a lesson for me in there somewhere, I'm sure of it... While I don't want this to be a depressing account of our 5 days in PP, I do have to tell you about the amount of street kids wandering around the city. We both struggled not to empty our pockets for every dirty little smiley face we saw, but the scale of the problem is massive, and every street has yet another round of kids either asking for money, trying to sell something (usually photocopied Lonely Planet books!) or foraging for recyclables. We'd been told that giving cash was the worst thing we could do, so instead we made a small donation to a very worthwhile charity we came across before we left - have a look at what they do at http://www.cambodianchildrensfund.org/index.html and if you're in a generous mood, maybe make a donation yourself? Apparently, $30 will feed one of their kids 3 healthy meals for a month...which you've got to admit is pretty fantastic value for money. Go on....$30 won't hurt a bit. :) (The one thing I did like giving to kids was the free toothbrushes that appear in every Cambodian hotel room when the maid comes in to clean. Figure this out for me....we were staying in cheap hotels in one of the worlds poorest countries, and yet almost every day the maid would leave two new toothbrushes with a little tube of toothpaste wrapped up in cellophane in our bathroom. It didn't take us long to start snaffling them by the handful and every time a kid came looking for money, we'd stick our hands in our pockets and give them a toothbrush. Who knows - it might help them keep their smiles a little longer and.they all seemed thrilled with their new toy) It's funny that in light of all the poverty and the lack of a whole lot of facilities, I think that Cambodia has been one of our favourite places to visit on our trip to date. Maybe it's cliched, but the locals have made such a difference. If you've ever wanted to smile from one end of the day to the other and have definitely ruled out Disneyland as your holiday destination of choice (I think the smiling there is of a slightly more saccharine nature), get thee to Cambodia. Just don't forget your toothbrushes.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1200052260/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1200052260/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1200052260/tpod.html Sun, 20 Jan 2008 04:36:29 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Ko Tao, Thailand

It's either a sad reflection on my work ethic or a fine reflection of the amount of fun we had, but not updating our blog ONCE while in the thick of Thailand is a little remiss of me. We spent almost a full four weeks island hoping around the south of the country staying in some wonderful (and not so salubrious) places doing some amazing things but most of all, meeting some fantastic people and enjoying ourselves inside and out.When we first left Bangkok, we headed down towards Ko Samui to try and sluice off a little city slime in the blue waters of the Gulf of Thailand. We stayed for the first few days in a small bungalow on Boput Beach, one of the quieter parts of the island and only a few minutes walk from the quaint little Fishermans Village. It was perfectly paced for us. We could walk out from our bungalow onto the beach, sit on our behinds or wander 10 minutes to the village for a drink. Our second day there, we discovered a little yoga studio with a special "one week unlimited yoga" offer for around EUR20. So, feeling in need of a little focus for our stay, and reckoning that a bit of exercise never killed anyone, we both signed up.Now I thought yoga was a pursuit for scrawny guys and skinny girls, really just a way to work up an appetite for tofu. At 10am on the first morning, I showed up for the first class in my heavy fishermans pants and a t-shirt, all ready for a little light stretching and maybe a bit of leotard watching. But I hadn't read the small print, or at least hadn't read it very closely. I mean, what on earth is HOT Yoga anyway? Well let me tell you that HOT yoga is a form of yoga developed somewhere beneath the seventh circle of hell. You have a super stretchy elastic-gymnastic instructor who turns the heat in the room up to 37degC (although it feels like 107deg) and then proceeds to move you through some of the most ridiculously bendy postures known to man - at speed. I have never sweated so much in my entire life. The 1.5litre bottle of water I brought in with me vanished, although I don't think I could have been any more saturated by the end of the class if I'd poured it over my head. It was nuts - and I'd signed up for a week of this?! As for Marge - well, all I'll say is that if horses sweat, men perspire and women glow....she was glowing like a horse beside me through the class.It did get easier through the week - yes we did stick it out! - and the class became the basis of a fine daily routine while we were on Samui. The only other thing that seemed to approach a routine was getting drunk, either just the pair of us or more frequently, with Aoibhne (a college friend of Marges) and her partner Dave. Aoibhne and Dave had thought they'd spend a quiet couple of weeks on the beach in Samui over Christmas, but hadn't banked on being press ganged into drinking competitions by Marge and I on far too many occasions. It was great to meet up with them both and we had a great laugh over Christmas with them, but it didn't entirely assuage our feelings of homesickness over the holiday season. It was tough trying to find a sprout, a turkey or a cracker in a Buddhist country like Thailand and Marge and I both missed our families particularly keenly on Christmas Day (the fact that we had hangovers the size of Neptune didn't help). But I was reassured by my crazy mother who told me that she's put a turkey in the freezer and an extra Christmas pudding in the cupboard so we can have a mini-Christmas when we get home. I'll have to pick up a nice patterned jumper for the occasion before we fly home....Once the appeal of being able to touch my toes for the first time since puberty wore off, Marge and I took off to Ko Tao, a small island north of Samui that is reputed to be one of the best places in Thailand to learn to dive. Not having enough on her CV is one of Sineads recurring nightmares, so we decided we'd spend 4 days over New Years getting our PADI Open Water diving licence and seeing what this scuba lark was all about. After a day and a half sitting in a classroom learning all you never wanted to know about buoyancy control and air pressures and 2 and a half days jumping into the water, Marge and I passed with flying colours and walked away with our PADI licences in hand. Diving around the coral reefs on Ko Tao was taking a trip into another world, but it was never the most comfortable or relaxing experience for me. I couldn't quite shake the feeling of nervousness knowing that I had 45ft of seawater between me and my next breath if things went pear shaped. Marge said it was me being a control freak, which she was probably right about, and the fact that I wanted to drown our instructor probably only added to my discomfort.The highlight of our time on Ko Tao was ringing in New Years Eve at a wild beach party. Things got off on the right foot with a fabulous meal at one of the islands best restaurants (which even then only cost around EUR15) and a chat about what 2007 had brought us and what we had to look forward to in 2008. We talked about all the things we've done since we left Dublin in May and how much more was ahead of us - and how much we were looking forward to getting back to Ireland in March and kicking off a few new plans. So having spent a few hours clapping each other on the back, we headed down to where the party was on. The stretch of beach we were staying beside had 4 bars side by side, all open to the sand and sea. Each of them were filled to overflowing, and we wandered from bar to bar through the night, sampling this and drinking that - all the while trying to avoid the fireworks and candle lanterns going off every 5 yards. The atmosphere was incredible and seemed like a slightly less hedonistic version of the infamous Full Moon Parties that Ko Pha Nang is famous for. Marge and I kicked off our flipflops and wedanced the night away in the sand, and counted down to 2008 with a crazy glint in our eyes....We hadn't known that 2007 would change our lives so much and God only knows what adventures lie ahead of us in 2008.As the saying goes..."Bring 'em on...."
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1200471600/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1200471600/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1200471600/tpod.html Thu, 17 Jan 2008 04:54:04 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Kampong Cham, Cambodia

We left the highlife of Siem Reap after spending two full temple tramping days and one fart-around-the-town-and-get-off-the-beaten-track-d ay. It's not a bad town by Cambodian standards, and it's also a place where more refined travelers can find plenty of westernised restaurants and bars to keep them busy and out of the way of the Wat. Two streets run through the old part of town - The Alley (wall to wall restaurants) and Bar Street (guess what it has plenty of?), and it's there that you saw barang after barang sitting back in colonial-style rattan armchairs and sipping their ice-cold beers. Only a block away was the old market area, hopping with locals buying their bits, but with almost no white faces to be seen. This was more of the Cambodia that I'd expected to see, and we made a decision to go out of our way to get into the untouristy bits of the country as often as possible.As we were heading in the direction of Phnom Penh, we thought we'd stop off for a few days at a small village along the way to see if we could get closer to the real Cambodia and further away from the madding European crowd. After consulting our faithful Lonely Planet, we settled on a small town called Kampong Chhnang near the Tonle Sap Lake and whose only claim to fame is that it is the centre of the Cambodia claypot "industry", with local villagers throwing pots in their backyards. So far, so romantic. That afternoon we stopped at our hotel reception to buy two tickets to Kampong Chhnang, only to be told that there aren't any buses that go there. "Are you sure?" I asked, and when pressed the guy seemed to change his mind, told us there was one at 8.30am in the morning and that the $4 fare included hotel pickup. Happy indeed, we packed up and got ready for our "Ghost" potters wheel moment by the lake.The following morning we were picked up and dropped out to the bus stop, where we soon realised that we had been sold two tickets to a different place entirely - Kampong Cham. After a small bit of swearing, the guys in the bus station confirmed that there wasn't a bus to where we originally wanted to go. A quick scoot through the guidebook was enough to convince us that the new destination was vaguely in the direction we wanted to go and that it had a few bits an pieces around it that might be worth a look, and keeping our "serendipitous world traveler ready for anything" hats on, figured we'd just go with the flow.A few hours later we arrived in KCham and checked into our hotel, the Mekong Hotel which overlooked the MIGHTY MEKONG! (caps lock isn't broken - I just felt like shouting). One of the greatest things about traveling is coming face to face with iconic places, cities and buildings that you've heard mentioned in news reports or movies a million times before. The name "Mekong" conjures up steamy jungles and Huey helicopters, rice paddies and water buffalo. Every time I caught a glimpse of it over the next few days I'd put on my movie announcers voice and annoy Marge by intoning "Ah, the Mighty Mekong". As is standard in cases like this, the novelty wore off long after Sineads patience wore thin, which led to multiple Marge elbows being flung into my ribs. Anyway, the hotel was never going to be stellar at only $6 a night, but it did boast the most enormous corridors I've ever seen. Seriously, they were about half as wide as a football pitch and it gave the whole place a wonderful feel of Communist-Colonial oddness.We'd arranged a tuktuk driver to take us out to a few sights in the area, and the next morning we hopped into what looked like the rear end of Wanderley Wagon. The first stop on our itinerary was Maha Leap Pagoda, a stunning example of a 19th century temple in the wooden pagoda style (well so it said in the guidebook) . Apparently, it was the oldest in Cambodia and survived the Khmer Rouge's temple burning campaign in the '70's only because they found use for it as a hospital. It's now been restored to some sort of glory and was open to visitors (even though few had actually wandered out). We quickly understood why it got so little attention. Instead of the 30 mins the guidebook said it would take to reach it, it was almost an hour and a half on rutted dirt roads. Being shaken around in the back of the tuktuk was no fun, but the scenery we passed and the tiny villages we went through more than made up for it. We were stared at - open mouthed in most cases - by almost everyone we passed. Children would shout HELLO at the top of their lungs and run to the roadside to wave at us. And all around us we saw smiling locals going about their business. It was incredible, and looking at the simplicity of their farming lives as we trundled past was fascinating. When we arrived at the temple, our driver hoped out and gave us a walking tour of the temple (beautiful) and encouraged us to wander down to the river to watch the local fishermen in their boats. He then told us that he actually went to school at this temple and that he grew up in the near vicinity and began to tell us stories about what life was like in the area. We thought this was great craic altogether, and when he said he hadn't actually been home in almost a year and asked would we mind if he dropped in to say a quick hello, we said of course! Well, away we went and pulled up in front of a couple of simple wooden houses where he went off to grab his relatives and introduce them to us. Within minutes (and much head nodding and bowing) we were asked if we'd like to come into his sisters house to have a look? Sure thing - and we were led up some wooden steps to their scrupulously clean home. It was basically a large wooden hut with a few dividers inside to separate the kitchen area and the sleeping quarters. We sat down on the floor, and within minutes, word must have got out that a few foreigners were in town because around 20 kids suddenly appeared at the door to have a good look at us. We laughed and smiled and they did the same, and as tea was offered we sat there and wondered at the hospitality and warmth of the family. We were invited to take a few photos of the kids and the family, and they all lined up and smiled for the camera, and Marge and I were sick that we didn't bring a gift, or even some photos of our families to show them. We did get to learn a few words of Khmer, which we repeated over and over again to much hilarity from the family. After maybe 45 minutes, we picked ourselves up and headed off again with the whole family coming down to the roadside to check out our drivers shiny new tuktuk and to wave all three of us off. What really hit us hard was when we were back on the road, our driver told us that we were the first foreigners his family had ever met....I can only hope that they were only half as taken with us as we were with them. But it didn't end there. I'd seen a few stalls along the side of the road selling coconuts and squeezing the juice out long sugar canes, so I suggested we stop for a little light refreshment. The driver seemed to have just the place in mind, and we eventually pulled up a this stall (run by the smiliest women in all of smilesbury) with a few chairs out the back and plonked ourselves down. Soon we were being introduced to all the children and to her 79 year old father, and when I expressed a bit of interest in where the cane came from, we were pulled off our seats and walked out to a small field at the back of her house where she grows all the cane and coconuts her stall sells. We had a great time getting into the middle of things and one of the daughters proceeded to show me how to strip the cane of its leaves before harvesting. We then picked some amazingly ripe papayas from another tree and sat back down at the table to munch our way through the freshest lunch I think I've ever had. The sugar cane juice was just extraordinary. I think a little rum would make it even more delicious, but maybe I'm just being greedy.When we eventually got back to the hotel, we were dusty and exhausted - but bowled over by the people we had met. Great welcomes, genuinely warm people and the most honest and straight up tuktuk driver I think I'll ever meet. Sinead came up with the great idea of getting the photos we took printed up (including a few of our guy on his tuktuk) and gave them to him the following morning for distribution to his friends and family. Talk about happy....the guy just kept saying "Oh my God" over and over when he was looking at them.I guess what goes around comes around - and after all he had given us a fantastic Cambodian day to remember.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1200293040/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1200293040/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1200293040/tpod.html Mon, 14 Jan 2008 02:19:13 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Siem Reap, Cambodia

A day or so after I came close to breaking down into emotional tears of financial distress to my everloving parents, we left Krabi and headed overland to Siem Reap in Cambodia (20 or so hours in a combo of buses, taxis and tuktuks), where Marge and I are taking a few days to soak up the wonders of Angkor Wat. The trip was spectacularly exhausting. First, we had to jump onto the back of a pickup to get from our bungalow into the busstation. From there, we took an overnight bus to Bangkok, which arrived at around 4.30am the following day, and coincidentally the day our Thai visas were about to expire. We then got into a taxi that drove at the speed of sound through Bangkok to bring us to another bus station where we caught a 5am bus to the Thai-Cambodian border...or rather 6km from it. A walking pace tuktuk took us to it and there we had to deal with the hairiest border crossing I've ever encountered. At least half a dozen so called "officials" (some of them dressed in police uniforms) came up to us as we tried to walk through the border, insisting that our visas needed to be checked, or stamped or something else - most likely "nicked" by my reckoning. Anyway, I'm ever prepared (or at least try to look that way which is often even better) and had read online about these scammers so just ignored everyone until we came to someone in an office - with a desklamp, which I think indicates they're civil servants, and therefore not allowed to steal too much - who stamped this, filled in that, and there we were into Cambodia.The best way to get to Siem Reap is in a shared taxi from the border, a trip of some 4 hours in the back of an old Toyota Camry with beefed up suspension. The roads are diabolical dirtroads and the driver seemed to have learnt to drive on a trampoline. We were shaken, tossed and airborne for most of the trip. However, when I caught sight of some of the other roadusers vehicles, I was glad we had a roof, doors and a/c. Most of the locals were either squeezed onto a pickup or shoved 4 deep onto a single moped, or instead relied on these homemade trucks - part tractor and part go-kart. The photos are all on Picasa, so I have proof ;)But we made this crazy tour to see one of the most extraordinary collection of temples in the world - Angkor Wat. We've seen a lot of impressive monuments and temples in our tour, but this one is just mindbending in it's size. 40 or so enormous temples spread over an area the size north Dublin. Any one temple alone would make coming to Angkor Wat worthwhile, but 40? Temple overload on a enormous scale.We arranged for a tuktuk pickup from the hotel we're staying in (back to the princely sum of EUR10 for us, but this gets us a/c, tv and a fridge in Cambodia rather than a basic bungalow in Thailand) at 5am so we could wander out to Angkor Wat to watch the sun come up. You'd think that 5am would be early enough to dodge the crowds, but there were hundreds of people there, obviously hoping for the privacy and solitude that tour bus loads of Japanese aren't compatible with. We then spent the next 14 hours wandering over every bit of every temple we could find. You've seen the Tomb Raider movies, you've probably seencountless pictures (and I took millions more, so prepare!), but it is still great fun to clamber over old temples being gradually consumed by the undergrowth and find yourself in an isolated part of an almost forgotten world. Our second day was much of the same - up early, out to another selection of temples and a few drives through small local villages. In fact, the locals were the highlight of the 2nd day. You can't imagine how dirt poor these people are. Driving past wells and handpumps with naked little kids playing in the water, and then waving hello frantically as you drive by, watching men and women swathed intheir headscarves working with water buffalo in the rice fields....it is very very touching. All the people we've met so far, from the tuktuk drivers to the waiters in restaurants, to the old dears in the markets or the young kids selling water outside every temple smile like their faces are seizing up...they BEAM. They are all so quick to laugh, especially at the two of us trying out our few words of Cambodian. Every time you stop in front of a temple, 4 or 5 kids run over asking you to buy this guidebook or that t-shirt, asking you where you're from and then reeling off their "conas ata tu" and speeches on "the capital of Ireland is Dublin" etc for your enjoyment. You can only buy so many weird t-shirts and funny bracelets before you're telling these kids no thanks by the boatload. But they're still kids, and I discovered that by telling them I was from the moon when they asked, or that the bandage on my foot (cut on some coral in Thailand) was actually from a tiger bite, they would just collapse into hysterics and follow us around yapping (and dropping the price of their wares). They all seem to have an immense amount of life and laughter inside them, and it's not hard to get them to show it. One moment in particular stands out. We stopped to look at a colony of monkeys drinking from one of the temple reservoirs, and a gang of kids were trying to sell us bananas to feed them. We bought some, but this one little kid didn't make the sale, and followed us around for most of the time we were there. Right up to the end, he was asking us to buy bananas from him too, when the funniest thing happened. A huge pig (common or garden but for the fact he had 5 legs and was donated to the monks by the locals - ah, that'll be the after effects of the oul agent orange I'd say) wandered past and the kid boasted about how he sometimes rides on it. With next to no encouragement from us, he went off and started to feed the pig his stock of bananas to distract it and when the pig tucked into this feast, the boy came around from behind and made a running jump onto it's back. The noise of the pig squealing in disgust at it's unwanted passenger and the sight of this little kid trying to hang on for dear life was more than we could handle. We almost fell out of the tuktuk with the laughter.I think we're going to enjoy our few weeks here....tomorrow, we head south to the banks of the Tonle Sap, the big lake in the centre of Cambodia to a place called Kompong Chhnang. We're promised and even more rural experience there, and apparently it's also the centre of the claypot '' industry " in Cambodia, so Marge and I will be trying out our Swayze/Demi "Ghost " impressions while we're there. Photos to follow...:)(Oh and for the more observant of you, you'll notice that most of Thailand hasnt been blogged...it's a work in progress and coming shortly ;))
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1197985920/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1197985920/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1197985920/tpod.html Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:47:43 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Bangkok, Thailand

Still reeling from our brush with a durian, Marge and I took the metro to Singapore Airport to jump on our flight to Bangkok. We'd dressed comfortably - flipflops and shorts are the order of a traveling day - and we're shocked, stunned and almost moved to tears when the check-in clerk asked if we'd like to be upgraded to business class. Not wanting to appear unwilling, Sinead almost grabbed her by the collar of her jacket and shouted "OF BLOODY COURSE WE WOULD" into her face as loud as her little lungs would allow. Unfortunately for us, it was only a short 2.5hour hop to Bangkok, but a quails egg here and a glass of champagne there softened us up nicely and prepared us for our first taste of Bangkok - and our first real dose of South East Asia.We'd been warned a-plenty about Bangkok. It seemed that half our friends at some time or other had been through the city, and between warnings about clowns in 72nd floor restaurants (thanks Dave), where to buy an IWC watch for a mere $25,000 or a hand-drawn Nancy Chandler map (hats off to the Brady Bunch for those snippets) or how to navigate a Thai toilet (step forward Jim W), Sinead and I felt armed and dangerous as we approached the city from Suvarnabhumi Airport. It was all we had imagined it to be - and plenty more. Getting from the airport we had our first taste of Bangkoks legendary traffic....Sweet Jesus and the Holy hand grenade of Antioch. How many cars can a street hold? Answer: in Bangkoks case, oodles squared.Our hotel was a spotlessly clean affair called the Rambuttri Village just around the corner from the famous Khao San Road. Khao San Road (or TKS as its locally known) is a travelers wonderland - a former hippy hotspot, it's now been filled to overflowing with stalls selling fake Billabong shorts, copied DVD movies and banana pancakes. It's loud, it's extremely full on, and it is an incredible first impression of Bangkok street life. We'd been told that we should expect to be accosted at every step by vendors selling their wares, but within 20 yards Marge and I began to realise that we had become to all outward appearances travelers rather than tourists. It's a funny distinction to draw, but we just weren't being hassled at all by the locals while countless others around us couldn't walk more than 5 yards without being stopped by a street seller. It might have been because we were browner and dirtier than the average tourist. It may have been because we looked poorer and more disheveled than the other newly arrived holidaymakers.But I'd like to think that it was because we just weren't giving off the "fleece me - I'm new!" scent anymore....and I kind of reveled in our newly realised invisibility. Taking a stroll a block of two away from TSK puts you squarely in the middle of Bangkoks urban thrum. It's a wonderful thing about big cities that I've come to enjoy - they're not there to satisfy a touristy crowd, they make little or no concession to visitors and instead expect new arrivals to fall into the cities particular rhythm. Places like Cairns in Australia, Malaga in Spain or Cusco in Peru are fun to be in for a few days, but you start to see through the veneer quickly enough - and there often isn't all that much substance behind. Take away the tourists and you've taken away the towns reason for being there in the first place. Not so places like Bangkok - visitors are not priority number 1, and it's easy to find regular people doing their regular business up and down regular streets and alleys. And with our new found non-tourist scent, we loved wandering around the back streets and markets of Bangkok to try to find what the city was really like.You cannot come to Bangkok and fail to be impressed by the variety and incredible opulence of the temples that seem to sit on every corner. The most magnificent of these is the Grand Palace (which took first prize in Dickie &amp; Margies " Most Approriately Named Place We've Visited" competition) which is home to more gold than the average Guineys shopper is likely to wear in her lifetime. We decided to kick start a day of temple viewing with a walk from our hotel to the Grand Palace, which almost finished us befiore we started, but the 3km circular walk in 34deg heat was definitely worth it. From the moment you enter the complex of temples and palaces that sit on the site, your jaw literally gapes and struggles to close for most of the time you're there. Every inch of some buildings is covered in gold leaf, while others are decorated with millions of finely detailed and bejewelled mirrors. Statues stand guard at the entrances to the main halls and temples and they themselves are meisterworks of decoration and carving. With the midday sun beating down overhead, it was just dazzling. To cool off, we sat ourselves down in the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, a small little jade statue clothed in golden robes that are apparently changed three times a year by the King of Thailand himself.Speaking of whom, you simply have to see the way the Thai people treat their king. He is to them quite literally a living god - bigger than Elvis, holier than Jesus, topped off with larger spectacles than Timmy Mallet. They absolutely ADORE him in a weird and very charming way. Every public building has huge photos of the King (not Elvis) outside, motorways have golden gantries running over 6 lanes of traffic with enormous pictures and "we love the King" messages plastered across them. We went to the cinema to catch a movie, and before it started everyone in the theatre stood up for a 1 minute film on the life of the King. It's extraordinary, and very very Thai. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhumibol_AdulyadejSo in addition to being King, inventor, lover of all things yellow, Mr. King is also a green-statue-golden-clothes-changer. Hats off.Another wonderful Thai peculiarity that I enjoyed getting to grips withwhile in Bangkok is the sado-masochistic art of Thai massage. In case any of you get the wrong idea, these are not the "happy ending" massages made popular by American GI's in the '60's, but are therapuetic massages administered by tiny little middle aged women for around EUR4/hour. Unlike most other massages, the object of a good Thai massage is not to get you feeling relaxed during the kneading, but rather to bask for hours afterwards in the glory of it being finished and the knowledge that the pain is subsiding (and that you've managed to put a few kms between yourself and the harridan with the pointy elbows). It was extremely full on, with knees, elbows and feet being used by my 4 foot tall massueuse to bend my shoulders and neck into origiami style positions. I had a recurring shoulder pain (I think from all the driving in NZ) that I wanted to get worked on, and hoped to get some relief from the stiffness in my shoulderblade.Many weeks later, the pain hasn't come back. I'm convinced she frightened it away.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1197210960/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1197210960/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1197210960/tpod.html Sun, 16 Dec 2007 11:37:55 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Singapore, Singapore

I'd love to be able to give you all a wild and wacky sign off to our Australian adventure, but I'm afraid I just can't. We had a fantastic run up the east coast and our last port of call, Cairns, was nothing more than a tan topping stop. Yeah yeah yeah, I know it's a great jump off point to about 4,000 fantastic Aussie adventure spots but we were all adventured out after 10 weeks in Oz and NZ. Cairns was a nice enough spot to hang out in for a few days. Again, sitting on a lethal coastline (saltwater crocodiles are the order of the day here) it has a pretty 2.5km esplanade running from the town centre out into the burbs. At the town end, a manmade salt water lagoon (filtered of those handbag-coated salties) provides a nice bit of respite from the 34deg heat and from the backpacker bars that fill the town. Suitably browned after 4 days by the pool, we took a seven hour flight to Singapore where we were sure we'd be arrested within minutes of coming off the plane. There's a common theme in all the stories I (and I'm sure you too) have heard of Singapore. It's always "rules, rules, rules", and with the odd bit of social oppression thrown in for good measure. No joke - when we landed I had to go to the loo and was sure that if I didn't flush or wash my hands properly I might find myself being baton charged. Our hostel was near enough to the centre of things, so close to the centre of the Muslim quarter it was almost within the shadow of the Sultan Mosque. Part of the "charm" of the hostel was the area - odd as it was to be woken at 5.30am by the mosques call to prayer, it was wonderful in the evenings to be surrounded by hubbly bubbly pipe smokers and great Muslim-inspired food. We took off to Chinatown on our first morning and found ourselves sitting in a crazy local foodcourt for breakfast. We hadn't a clue what was what as we went up and down aisles looking at little food stalls cooking up all manner of breakfasty weirdness. With our stomachs contracting, we asked a happy looking local what he was eating and thus found ourselves feasting on dosa and curry for breakfast, washed down with cups of kopi, a delicious coffee/condensed milk mix. Nodding away at the locals who smiled away at us, Marge and I chowed down and got ourselves ready for the first leg of our Asian adventure. Once we were all fueled up, we spent the morning wandering all over Chinatown checking out temples and teashops. We stopped for a foot massage (well, we ARE on a sort of holiday :)) at around 2pm and found this helped build an appetite for a feast of a yum cha lunch - amazing little morsels of Chinese food washed down with pots of Chinese tea. The rest of the day was spent worshiping at one of Singapores most respected temples - the shopping mall. And to finish the day off, it was only right and proper that we got ourselves dolled up and headed to Raffles for a cocktail. Raffles' 'Long Bar' is famous for being the home of the Singapore Sling, a sickly sweet confection that comes equipped with more than it's fair share of fruits'n'umbrellas. In we strolled, sat ourselves down among the peanut shells that litter the floor and called the waiter over. He saw the pair of us squirming with discomfort for even THINKING of being such cliched tourists, and then did a funny thing. Sort of raising his eyebrows in a cautious, almost embarrassed manner he just mouthed "two?" and after giving him the nod, our $25 cocktails landed within minutes. I never thought cliches could taste so damn good.Which is more than could be said for the bit of durian fruit I tried. The following morning we were in a market and were ordering breakfast from a mish-mash of food stalls. Bit of pancake this, bit of sesame ball that....At the fruit juice vendor, I spotted durian juice on offer and thought this would be as good a time as ever to give this whiffy fruit a go. For those of you who haven't heard of durian, it's supposed to be a difficult fruit to love. Its about the size of a cantaloupe, covered with an ugly, spiky skin , but it's inside that the real magic happens. The ammonia-backed stench it gives off when cut open could be best described as rotting garbage sitting outside a crap factory on a very hot day. But apparently if you're man (or woman) enough to push past the smell the taste is extraordinary. Reasoning that "blue cheese smells like old feet but I still love it" I thought durian couldn't kill me, so let's give it a whirl. When I ordered, the girl behind the counter asked me was I sure. I said "of course", and congratulated myself on being such a worldly traveler. Having obviously witnessed manys the tourist vomiting over her counter she offered me a small sample before she went off to work. I have got to say - yowzers! When the spoon hit my lips it pushed me to sensory overload - honestly, it was a taste unlike any other I've ever tried. First off, you could really get the stinky wallop in your nose and mouth, but this quickly softened into a very rich and broad buttery flavour, with a very soft sweetness right through it. It was unique, and the taste was so surprising that Sinead told me my whole face contorted like a baby sucking on a lemon. And just in case you were wondering, I switched to mango.The rest of the day saw us trying to get as much of the city seen as we could, and trying to get to grips with this strange little bit of Asia. Singapore was an odd mix. I liked it more than I thought I would, and I was constantly surprised by in on a lot of levels. I loved the multi-culturalism - the amazing mix of ethnicities and the absolute disregard with which they treated their differences. I was awed by the absolute silence on the metro...you could literally hear a pin drop. And I adored the food....every conceivable mix of Asian cuisine served up for our delectation 24/7 for next to tuppence a dish.But what came as the biggest shock to me was how un"1984"ish it was. I had expected the city to be constrained by an Orwellian big brother with police on every corner waving rule books to beat the band.I had thought that crossing the street would be regimented, that I'd never see so much as a snifter of rubbish, that the very idea of a homeless guy sleeping on the streets was impossible. Instead, we saw a regular city - one with commuters skedaddling across the road in the middle of traffic, one with the odd flap of a wild, loose and free piece of garbage and one with a few old dudes tucking themselves in beneath newspapers in sheltered doorways at night. Yes it was a well run city, and one complete with funny little signs saying things like 'respect each other' and 'low crime does not equal no crime - be vigilant' all over the place.Oh...and on that crime note....our hostel had a 'no footwear indoors' rule, which was kinda nice and quaint and apparently helped protect the beautiful hardwood floors. There were shoe racks where you could leave your shoes/sandals/flippers and pick them up as you left. Well, I had stuck a durian-scented pair of Richie specials in the rack (much to the relief of Sinead when she realised she wouldn't have to share a room with them) and when I came back to get them....whaddya know - there they were, gone. Stolen, swiped, pilfered. In the worlds most crime free city - and our very first brush with theft on our whole trip to date - some bugger made off with my smelly Tevas. I can only hope that the thieving fecker gets some sort of trench foot from them....I think both of us would go back to Singapore in spite of its criminal tourists - and maybe try to get under the skin of the town next time - but we wouldn't be breaking our necks to return. But one thing we definitely did take away from this Asia-lite city was an even keener sense of anticipation for what the next three months have in store. Roll on Thailand....
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1196665200/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1196665200/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1196665200/tpod.html Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:10:16 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Airlie Beach, Australia

Once we'd managed to rid ourselves of the Fraser Island sand that seemed to have lodged in every crack and crevice, we caught an overnight bus to Airlie Beach. This was to be our jump off point for the Whitsunday Islands, a collection of 74 islands sitting between the mainland and the Great Barrier Reef and surrounded on all sides by lethally beautiful blue seas. Airlie Beach was a nice, touristy little spot, and in spite of our lack of sleep on the overnight bus (during which we bored everyone within earshot about how much better Argentina's long distance buses are - I'm coming to realise that in fact we're not developing as rounded world travellers at all, rather we're alienating everyone we meet with tales of how much better New Zealand/Argentina/Bolivia/Phibsboro is than where we are now - so I apologise in advance to all my friends and family for becoming an irritating bore when I get home. Scratch that - an even <i>more irritating bore) and our lost reservation at the hostel, we settled into the town pretty quickly. It's odd how we've come all this way around the world to see new places and experience some extremes that we couldn't find at home, and that we then find ourselves extremely grateful to slip into little touristy villages like Airlie beach. It's characterless, full of internet cafes, suncream shops (only factor 30 available I might add) and bars, but Marge and I find these respites from the strange and new very welcoming indeed. Although, in fairness, the next few days brought us a heady enough mix of strange and new, so the recharge was definitely welcome. We'd booked in for a three day cruise around the Whitsundays on a small 12 berth boat called the Prima (http://www.sailing-whitsunday.com/data/listings/l0032.php) and on Saturday morning we packed up, jumped on board and hoisted the sails to take off into the wild blue yonder. Well, when I say 'hoisted the sails', I mean the crew did it. We just sat back, cracked open the first of many beers and slathered on the sun cream. Our 9 fellow passengers were a German couple, six other German ladies and one Danish girl - all in their mid/late twenties. I was horrified to think I was going to have to spend 3 days in the company of 8 bikini-clad strangers, but Marge calmed me down with a quick knee to the crotch. In fairness, they were a remarkably boring bunch, and the most fun we got from them was watching them all argue amongst themselves. In German. Not a pleasant group, but Marge and I wanted only to relax and enjoy ourselves, and this bunch of Sour Krauts made keeping to ourselves all the easier. The first afternoon we pulled up towards a small cove and donned our stinger suits - thin wetsuits designed to save 95% of your body from the deadly stings of the various jellyfish potentially drifting on the ocean wave. The fact that the only place left exposed was your face gave me great cause for amusement, as I secretly hoped one of the Germans would get stung on their exposed parts and I could justifiably piss on their head. Anyway, the first of the snorkel sessions was mind-blowing, and with each time over the coming days we jumped in, the views got better and better. The coral in the areas we swam in was extremely healthy looking, multicoloured and with an incredible variety of shapes, shades and sizes. And the fish....oh my word. For the first hour it seemed as though every fish that swam past was different from any of the ones I'd seen previously. It got to the point where I just stopped swimming and floated for 20 minutes at a time over one small section of coral watching the colourful life floating away beneath me. It was breathtaking. The first night we dropped anchor at Refuge Bay, and within 15 minutes a fancy speedboat pulled up beside us, driven by a friend of the skippers. He was going to tie up alongside us and stay for the night, and before we knew where we were, bottles of vino were opened and a general invitation went out to all on our boat to come across and enjoy the plush leather seats on Mark's boystoy. The fact that most of our boat were 20-something ladies (and Marge who doesnt look a day over 29.5) might have had something to do with the invite, but over I slipped on their coat-tails and we soon found ourselves partying hard on the back of the most wonderful boat I've ever been on. Great sound system, fully stocked bar and a guy with a great sense of humour - we had a ball yapping away to someone whose language skills recognised the need for vowels and didn't try stringing together 8 consonants at a time. A lot of champagne and Aussie beer later, Marge and I stumbled back to our cabin to sleep things off. When we woke up the following morning, we were coming up towards Whitehaven Beach, one of Australias most beautiful beaches. A 20 minute bushwalk brought us out onto one of the whitest stretches of sand I've ever seen, and stingers bedamned, we had to leap into the ocean for a dip to cool off. Just gorgeous - soaking up the sun, wallowing in the surf and spotting crabs and goannas for the afternoon. Later that day, we headed back to the boat and another snorkel site, and unsurprisingly that evening was a tame one. Sore heads and empty bottles put paid to a repeat of the previous evenings debauchery. I woke up the next day feeling decidedly older - it was my 34th birthday, and Marge had come on the boat armed with gifts and a cake for me, which she presented to me over breakfast. When we finally made it back to dry land, a nice little evening had been planned. Mark had invited us out for dinner that night, and so once we'd scrubbed up and got used to not standing on a boat, Marge and I had a cocktail or two followed by a delicious sushi meal with Mark and his two kids. We then hightailed it back into the town to hook up with a gang of guys and gals we'd met on Fraser Island, and in spite of my wearing flip flops managed to dance the night away.... All in all, a very fine birthday indeed. Photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/richard.mcguinness/CruisingTheWh itsundays and http://picasaweb.google.com/richard.mcguinness/RichiesBirthd ay
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1196654760/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1196654760/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1196654760/tpod.html Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:12:36 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Hervey Bay, Australia

With only 2 weeks to fit in as much of eastern Australia as we could, Marge and I had booked into a backpacker-oriented package trip to take in some of the sights along the coast. Our itinerary was to run something like this:- fly to Hervey Bay, the gateway to Fraser Island- take a 3 day self-guided 4WD trip around the island- an overnight bus into Aerlie Beach, where we'd jump on a yacht for a 3 day cruise around the Whitsunday Islands- another bus to Magnetic Island for a few days snorkelling and sunning ourselves- and finally, a bus to Cairns from where we were going to take our flight to Singapore on the 10th December.A couple of euro lighter in the pocket, we landed in Hervey Bay and checked into our swanky hostel (don't forget to pick up your sheets from reception) to prepare for the evening briefing for our trip.On the surface, the idea of this Fraser Island odyssey seemed like a relatively cheap way of seeing this 130km long sand island. You sign up, and are put in a group with about 8 others. This group of 10 then take off in a Land Cruiser with supplies and camping equipment for two nights on the island. It only hit me as we sat down for a pre-trip briefing that this didn't sound like such a good plan after all. In effect, you're renting a car with a load of total strangers and sharing responsiblity for everything from cooking to driving with them. In fact, it suddenly seemed like a very shit idea altogether.Anyway, trying to keep the "in for a penny in for a pound" maxim in mind, we signed all sorts of forms and waivers and were walked through what to expect for the next few days. A few suggestions on shopping lists were provided, and once we'd sort of agreed on what to buy, we handed over some cash ($15) for food, and more importantly for the booze we were to bring. The group consisted of 6 Germans (4 guys and two gals, all travelling in pairs) ranging in age from 18 to 31, 2 20 year old Swedish girls, a Canadian tour agent and bringing up the rear (and the average age of the group) were Dickie'n'Marge. Thankfully, everyone spoke English, and for the entire trip the German guys were good enough to even chat to one another in English lest the non-German speakers were left out. A good start....Early the following morning, we packed up the Landcruiser and headed off to the ferry. The sun was shining, everyone was in good spirits and we were armed with more beer and goons (an Aussie word for crappy wine in a box) than I thought we'd ever work our way through in 3 days. We landed and took off at a clip on sand tracks that led through the island to it's east coast and passed through dense dingo laden forest. The tracks were real off-road material, and even though we managed to get thrown around buckaroo-style in the back seats, we managed to make it to our first stop. Lake Wabby is one of a number of fresh water lakes in the islands interior, and is reached by walking from a carpark through the bush and over dunes for around 20 minutes. It was worth every sunsplitting moment of the hike - an aquamarine coloured oasis in the middle of the sweeping dunes, with 23deg green waters teeming with little catfish and the occaisional turtle. On the walk we saw goanna lizards around 1-1.5metres long running through the undergrowth and chatted away to the other group members. Diving into the waters when we arrived was blissful, and we lounged and laughed in the water for an hour before heading off towards our first campsite.The main 'road' is the eastern beach of the island, and once you're on it you can blast along at 80km for km after km, so long as you take care to avoid the high tide times and the occaisional river washout. So by 5pm, to avoid being washed out to sea, we had arrived at our camp site and started to setup for the night. We started to see the real qualities of the group we had been put with, and I have to say we were lucky feckers. We had a great bunch of people along for the ride, and everyone had a bit of craic and pitched in to get the camp up and running and the natives fed and watered. Sitting around the camp with a beer or two that night was a real treat, and we all laughed ourselves stupid at the antics of two particular German jokers, Radek and Tomas.Up early the next day to avoid the tides we headed towards the 'Champagne Pools', some natural rockpools where you could apparently sit and wallow in the ocean waters without actually dying. This seems like the cruellest irony of eastern Australias coast - mile after mile of perfect sandy beaches, blueblue seas and to set foot in them will, I'm assured, result in near instant death. In no particular order, here's what you have to contend with. 1 - currents and riptides that will apparently carry you to New Zealand if you get in trouble.2 - sharks. Lots of sharks. Big white tips, hammer heads, great whites...man eaters to a man. Or a shark. If you catch my drift.3 - stinging jellyfish that have poison in their stings so powerful that no matter how many people you get to pee on your leg, you'll probably die in 2 hours leaving behind a tanned, urine-soaked. blue-lipped corpse.4 - toadfish - handsome little buggers that lie in the shallows, waiting for waders with bare toes. Then with their parrot-like beaks (that they usually use for eating crabs) they'll take off most of your toes. Or a chunk from your leg.So the "Champagne Pools" sounded like just the ticket. Well we certainly needed to relax after the drive there...we'd misjudged the distances and found ourselves driving with a rising tide eating up the available beach. And after a 40 minute walk along a beach, we came to the rocks that held the pools - and believe me when I say there was zippo relaxing about them at high tide. At most other times of the day, the water bubbles over the rocks and you can lie in 3 feet of water and soak. At high tide, huge waves crashing over the tops of the rocks meant that anyone foolhardy enough to walk on the rocks was swept over and dragged along the shell encrusted foreshore. While we were there, one lad from another group lost his footing when a wave hit him and after he finally picked himself up, he was covered with scratches and cuts all over his back and legs. Ouch. I saw him on the ferry the following day with crutches and covered in bandages. That'll learn him.That night, after a bit more exploring and off-roading, we camped again and got stuck back into the goons and beers. Myself, Stefan and the Governator sat there solving all of the worlds issues until late in the night. Sometime around 1am we fell asleep in our tents to sleep things off, and again the following day headed towards another freshwater lake to cool ourselves down. Again, lovely warm freshwater and lots of wildlife including oodles of dingos. By the time we arrived back on the mainland, everyone was well worn out and sunburnt - and we'd realised that nearly all of us were heading to the same next destination. Roll on the Fraser Island reunion....
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1196002800/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1196002800/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1196002800/tpod.html Sun, 02 Dec 2007 23:05:32 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Sydney, Australia

After 7 weeks in New Zealand, Sinead and I dusted off our passports and hopped on a plane for a 4 hour flight to Sydney. We hoped that by finally distancing ourselves from NZ, we'd be able to go cold turkey on the flat white habit, and maybe return to a more normal level of blood caffeine while we tried our hand at didgering our doo.An uneventful flight and a short train ride brought us into the heart of the Sydney Chinatown area, where we'd booked into a 7 storey hostel on a corner of Georges St. First impressions of the city - once we'd dumped our bags, made our bed (this seems to be one of the Ozzie backpacker trademarks - in an effort to save money/give their guests some exercises, hostels just hand you fresh sheets when you check in and expect you to hand back the 'soiled' ones at check out. I'm sure there has got to be some hygiene issue with a queue of people standing with dirty laundry waiting to check out at 9am every morning, but the hostel staff don't seem to notice. Or they are immune to infection.) and showered were excellent. It's a vibrant, buzzing place with an extraordinary mix of people wandering it's streets. Our hostel was in Chinatown as I mentioned, so you'd expect hundreds of our chopstick-loving cousins wandering around - and lo and behold there were. But in every nook and cranny of the city (excepting the beaches) there were countless Oriental folk - the city of Sydney seems overrun by a new wave of immigrants. It adds a certain twist to the city, with oodles of sushi bars and Chinese BBQ restaurants, and it's kind of funny watching all of the Asians trying to dodge the sun as the more European-looking inhabitants all seem to be turning a browner shade of tan. The first thing we did was walk down to the famous harbour front to drink in the views of Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Sitting almost side by side, with the skyline of the CBD behind it, these two Aussie icons are every bit as impressive in the flesh as you'd hope. The folds of the Opera House and the off white exterior are just beautiful, and never more so than when the sun is setting and they seem to glow a creamy orange colour. And Harbour Bridge just looks so....huge. It's just a steel and concrete monster, carrying 6 lanes of traffic and a train line across the Bay. That night we sat down trying to draw up a list of must-sees, and believe me, Sydney has a loooong list. Of course, one of the places we had to visit was Bondi beach, so early the following morning, Marge and I jumped on the "Bondi Bendy" as the bus to the beach is called, rolled out our towels and slapped on our suncream amongst acres of some of the brownest white people God ever put on this earth. The beach has something of a bad reputation for being noisy and crowded, but on a sunny Tuesday morning it was perfect. We were not quite the palest people on the beach - it was close, but not quite - and we kicked back and started to bake under an ozone-free sky. After a few minutes of sitting there, we began to hear one Irish accent after another. It was hilarious to see these sun-tanned beach bums with sun bleached hair and Billabong shorts shouting at one another in thick Arklow accents. Ah, those glorious UV rays....(which reminds me of something I meant to tell you...everyone in the city is tanned, and yet the only suncream you seem to be able to buy in supermarkets and chemists is factor 30+. The heat here can get up to industrial proportions and the UV rays must be bruising. Either that or some weirdos are rubbing themselves in butter as they lie there).The following day brought overcast skies, and there they sat for most of the rest of our time in Sydney, breaking only on Sunday. It gave Marge and I the perfect opportunity to see the sights without passing out from the heat. We marched around aquariums and museums, mooched around art gallaries and shopping malls and generally tried to see as much as we could in the time we had in the city. We loved it, and ate more sushi and Vietnamese food than I think I've ever managed before. It wasn't easy to stay on budget in the city, but $6 sushi lunches eaten in the beautiful Sydney parks certainly helped.On Saturday night, we headed out into the burbs to hook up with an old Irish Broadband workmate who moved back to Sydney a few years ago. Painfully enough for an Australian, his name is Bruce and as he was celebrating his birthday he invited us along to his Aussie BBQ'ing shindig. We had a ball, and had a strange sequence of coincidences when we were introduced to his Irish girlfriend Claire. Although none of us were aware of it before, in the course of our first five minutes chatting with her we realised she'd been in my school and Sineads college....20 minutes of "do you remember so and so"s later, we had enough watery beer to mingle a little and laugh with/at (take you pick) at some of the other guests. Things went on a little later than Marge and I had bargained for, and when we finally woke up on Sunday lunchtime it was all we could do to drag ourselves out of bed. Down we marched to an Irish pub we'd seen on our travels for a big dirty roast beef dinner (complete with yorkshire puds and horseradish) and settled down in Hyde Park for a game of Scrabble in the sunshine. Some time later, Bruce and Claire came into the city and we floated down to an openair gig in the middle of the Botanic Gardens for some hair of the dog and a mellow chat. We finished off the day sitting on Manly Beach for a fish and chip dinner and a stroll around some of the swankier burbs of Sydney.A very pleasant way to end our week on the town I'm sure you'll agree.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1193351700/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1193351700/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rich_mcg/mcandro_07/1193351700/tpod.html Sat, 17 Nov 2007 19:27:07 -0500 Abandon hope all ye who enter! This is our harebrained account of a trip of a lifetime - around the world in 300 days.

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Dunedin, New Zealand

After the first week or two, we had settled quite nicely into an on-road routine, with me in charge of driving and whistling, and Sinead looking after navigating and Wild Bean spotting. Wild Bean is a chain of cafes sitting in BP forecourts across New Zealand and Marge and I had become proud owners of a customer loyalty card due to our addiction-feeding habit of stopping for a flat white at every opportunity. At this juncture, I'd like to take you behind the scenes of NZ coffee culture...follow me if you will...NZ is known worldwide for it's fine wool, it's small hairy fruit and it's love of rugby, but I hadn't been ready for how much they love their coffee. Every cafe claims to serve the regions/countries/worlds best coffee, and in some of the places I visited I might just have agreed with them. Universally, when you ask for a coffee you were handed a freshly roasted and ground concoction with the milk heated and foamed to perfection. And although the rest of the world makes do with a latte or cappuccino, NZ likes to go one louder with a flat white. Ostensibly a latte with less foam, it also boasts an extra shot of espresso and this little addition makes it one of the most potent driving aids known to man. A large Wild Bean flat white has got to contain more caffeine than Costa Rica exports on an annual basis and they are fiendishly easily available, cheap and oh so tasty. The ritual of driving around with the van running on petrol fumes while we watched and waited for a BP garage with a Wild Bean attached quickly became routine, and as it did, so too did our habit of not properly engaging in conversation until we'd been Beaned. Marge's withdrawal symptoms included being unable to accurately tune the radio, and this only set my teeth even more on edge as I had simultaneously become addicted to Radio Hauraki - the station whose tag line boasts 'Classic Rock - that ROCKS'. (check out www.hauraki.co.nz for the stream) If I didn't get an early morning mix of Bowie/Doors/CCR, I was apt to stop whistling....and that was bad news indeed. Anyhoo, caffeine addictions and rock'n'roll radio aside, the road continued to open up to us and deliver it's delights in abundance. We had made it down through Wellington, where we'd stopped for a few days to visit with one of Marges friends from the "Old Country", Orla and her husband-to-be, Ken. A relaxing few days, a visit to an amazing museum (Te Papa Museum, which boasts earthquake simulators, corrugated iron cars and loads of Maori junk)and then onto the ferry. Over the water on the south island, we started getting close to nature with ducks aplenty at every campsite we stopped at, seal watching along the coast to Kaikora, and an incredible array of dead bugs on our windshield. After numerous stops in cute, small coastal towns we finally arrived in Christchurch. This 'most English of cities' was actually a little treat of a place to stop and wander around. Clean, compact and with it's very own River Avon running through it, it also has a beautiful town square and a fabulous botanic garden mere minutes walk from the centre. We also had the good fortune to meet up with some other travellers here and hit the town in the hope of 'getting pissed and going dancing' which is Marges all-too-seldom-used battlecry. After a few days floating around Christchurch and eating at one of Sinead's landmark restaurants - Under the red Veranda, we headed down towards Dunedin to stay with my cousin Johnny and his family. Johnny, his wife Nikki (who is a Kiwi) and their 3 kids moved over to NZ from London 2 years ago and have settled into the hilliest town I've ever come across - it beats San Francisco hands down and apparently has the worlds steepest street (which it was customary for students to fly down in a wheelie bin). The last time I'd seen Johnny was when I went over to visit his family in London sometime before my 15th birthday. One legendary Saturday, Johnny (19ish himself) took me out to meet some of his mates, brought me out to Anfield for an Arsenal home game and then proceeded to get me absolutely pissed. Falling asleep on the train home that night, I worked out that I had matched Johnny glass for pint (ie every time he had a pint, I had a half), and in the process consumed the best part of 10 pints. Which wasn't, as I'm sure you'll agree; bad for a 14 year old.Johnny now takes slightly less than 20 pints on an average Saturday, but we still managed to have a great time unwinding with him and his family for a few days. We loved their 3 kids, particularly the youngest loony, Jamie, who picked up the habit of diving off the sofa onto me every time I came within diving distance.I hope he stopped when I left, otherwise I should soon be getting a bill from Johnny for his sons osteopath.
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