The Bill and Ben

As we waited for the greyhound from Coffs Harbour to our next stop of Byron Bay we had a pint at the local inn and soon found ourselves talking to a group of old guys who, in between offering to drive us round the area, assured us that Byron was "the worst dump on the coast - and that's fair dinkum mate!" (they actually did say that). We can only assume that they were not fans of beautiful, walkable towns with sensational beaches and great ice cream because after three days we certainly had no complaints. While continuing the "out of season holiday town" theme we've established on this trip we had a very relaxing stay (for the most part), and with the drive north providing a crucial couple of extra degrees we got to spend a lot of time lounging on the beach.

Megan as Ursula Andress:

Me and a yoghurt pot reconnecting with my inner 8 year old:

The only incident of real note occurred on our first full day shortly after we parted ways on a run around the iconic local lighthouse. As Megan headed home to our hostel I turned back for another lap of the hill - this time to include the steep path which takes you right out into the water at the very tip of the headland on which the lighthouse sits. A short while later I arrived at what is officially Australia's most Easterly point just as the sun began to set over the sea and the long wintery shadows it cast on the afternoon waves were absolutely spectacular. June to November is peak whale and dolphin season and I had just begun to see if I could spot any of the tell-tale plumes when I realized that... I was standing in one of several piles of human sick! The moment immediately spoiled I looked around for a possible author and sure enough, just a few feet away, were sprawled a guy and two girls (English of course), who seemed much less concerned about their various regurgitations than I was. Annoyed, and somehow believing that in my running gear I cut some sort of imposing figure, I told the guy that he was doing the reputation of Queen and country no favours. By way of response my compatriot, who despite his state seemed to have made a much better appraisal than I of our disparate sizes, punched me on the nose. Four times.

I don't think I've ever been punched in the face before which, while an odd realization for a 29 year old guy, may explain my reaction. The interval between punches one to two was spent being pleasently suprised at how little it actually hurt, two to three was spent wondering if I should be trying to "duck and weave" (and how I might go about doing this), and three to four was wasted appealing to two nearby fisherman who clearly regarded one Englishman punching another as saving them a job. With my fight response clearly on holiday I eventually got around to flighting and made my way back up the hill wondering what else I should have done. On my way back though the sensible option presented itself and I ducked into the local police station for what I assumed would be the usual lengthy wait followed by a round of form filling in. To my surprise however, as soon as I mentioned the words "drunk Englishman," four burly examples of New South Wales' finest appeared out of a back room, dove into a van and charged back up the hill with me in tow. Sure enough my friends hadn't moved and after a brief comparison of accounts he was led away to what I was told would be a $350 fine and a permanent file leading to some awkward questions should he ever apply for an Australian visa again - they don't mess around Down Under.

A crimewatch reconstruction:

In case anyone's worried that having survived India and south east Asia we are somehow attempting to engineer some drama for the blog I can assure you that the rest of our sojourn in Australia passed very pleasantly and without police involvement. In fact we've become quite domestic and, having kitchens at our disposal for the first time in several months, have taken the opportunity to cook up some of our specialities:

Despite being a decade older than many of the guests we also took full advantage of our hostel's free Sangria night and as well as mild hangovers the event provided the first of what was to become a series of encounters with slightly odd Australian raconteurs. I forget why we first spoke to Damian but we spent much of the evening being regaled with stories of how he had spent many years earning a living crafting fairy stars from cardboard and glitter (so far so normal for a hippie town like Byron Bay), how he owned the largest collection of Charlie Chaplin paraphenalia in the world, how he had managed to acquire the only case of Don Bradman commemorative beer to have avoided being smashed by the teetotaller's lawyers and how Damian Marley was named after him (we were as skeptical as you until he produced a fistful of photos of a younger himself and Bob). We finally escaped as he began to tell us about the flying saucer he was building utilizing secret government plans but he was an entertaining guy and as an interaction it was definitely an improvement on the day before.

From Byron Bay we took the Greyhound north once again along the Gold Coast and through my old home town of Surfer's Paradise. While another sun-drenched evening made the coastal drive an enjoyable trip down memory lane it was with some trepidation that we approached our final stop of Brisbane - our guidebook had described the Queensland capital as "excelling only in mediocrity, lethargy and unreliable public transport"(!) While it's certainly true that Brisbane lacks an Opera House and for some inexplicable reason any real beaches, it was actually a great stay though we didn't get far beyond sightseeing from the river and strolling the beautifully landscaped South Bank area. We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Steve, our couch-surfing host for all three days, who looked after us very well and gamely put up with hosting a Brit for the first three days of a very promising Ashes decider.

For our final night before heading to Middle Earth we had decided to experience that most Australian of obsessions - live sport! For a truly cultural evening we decided that the accompaniment to our pies and chips would be the end-of-season Aussie rules football clash between the Brisbane Lions and the Port Adelaide Power. The game is hard to explain but seems to involve huge numbers of sleeveless Aussies chasing each other and/or a rugby ball around a cricket field for an amazingly long time. Sometimes they punch the ball, sometimes they kick it and most often they fumble for it as it bounces around their feet before getting jumped on by members of the other team. I'm told the game was a very exciting one and Brisbane certainly came back from a long way down though we might not have thought their situation so hopeless if we had realized before trying to leave at halftime that they play for four quarters.

And with that we are already at the end of our time in Australia. When we made the decision to stay longer in India we knew it would be at the expense of this spectacular island but I don't think either of us regrets the decision. Australia is definitely a country we could come back to and its popularity as a holiday destination is easily understood given its spectcaular scenery and laid-back lifestyle. That said, after the sensory overload of our first three months, living in a country that is so familiar has itself been a little disorientating and the feeling that there is a temple somewhere we should be exploring or a unique food we need to sample (four and twenty pies do not count), has been hard to shake.

The Land Down Under

We've been in Australia about a week, and we're still startled by what a change it is from the earlier stops on our trip. We're no longer uncomfortably hot and sweaty, this being their winter, and it's just so easy to do everything. Being in an English-speaking first world country is a shock to the senses after the places we've been lately, and we feel like we don't really know what to do with ourselves without cultural artifacts and unusual customs to learn about. Still, we're getting by with plenty of time on the beach (between chilly breezes), long walks in national parks, and 30 Rock DVDs on our laptop (we bought copies of all 3 seasons in Thailand and we're catching up on everything we've ever missed! It's awesome!). We've also been graciously hosted by a friend of Ben's in Sydney (in her gorgeous apartment with Opera House views!), and then by Leese family friends outside of Sydney in their beautiful home, so the days of roughing it are feeling somewhat distant.

I really loved Sydney and can see why so many people enjoy living there - it's one of the most naturally beautiful and laid-back major cities I've been to. The Botanic Gardens fill the middle of the city, water is everywhere, and the Opera House and Harbour Bridge are visible from hundreds of vantage points, so the entire city looks like a postcard. We were struck by how quiet it is - everywhere we walked, we were alone on every block, except for the dozens of runners in the Botanic Garden. It felt like everyone was on holiday and didn't tell us, but after speaking with a few locals, it turns out Sydney is always naturally this quiet. It took a little getting used to after being in crazy Asian cities, not to mention New York, so instead of people-watching, we strolled around and looked at buildings and views instead. Another quirk we've noticed here is the light - maybe it has to do with being below the equator, or maybe it's the clean air, but the light is gorgeous here. Sunsets seem to last a few hours, so everything takes on an orangey glow all afternoon - it's a photographer's dream!

During our second morning in Sydney, it was pouring rain, so we took refuge inside the Museum of Sydney and learned about the arrival of the English to the "undiscovered" island filled with Aborigines. Australia is quite young, its founding even more recent than that of the US, so all the historical accounts felt quite vivid and new. The museum appeared to be making an effort to pay special attention to Aboriginal history, which I found interesting. It seems like the US still doesn't know what to do with its displaced Native Americans.

One of the highlights of our Sydney visit was an architecture walk, which we did the next day. We ambled around with an architect who happened to be a capable lecturer, and learned about the Opera House and its counterpoint, a skyline-dominating office building designed by Renzo Piano. I've never really understood the intellectual side of architecture, but the guy did a good job explaining the relationship and symbolism of the two buildings. The Opera House really is one of the most dynamic and spectacular buildings I've ever seen, its base supposedly representing the sandstone cliffs of Australia, and the white shells representing clouds, all within a perfectly symmetrical whole structure. It really is a gorgeous symbol for Sydney.

While in town we also managed to take a stroll through the very chilly Manly Beach, filled with gorgeous sunshine and brave surfers, and see the excellent Sydney Zoo! It might be the only way I get to see a koala, duckbilled platypus, and kangaroo, so we took advantage and had a great time. Like everywhere else in Sydney, the zoo has great city views, so it was really amazing to see the fantastic animals and exhibits in such a beautiful setting.

Thanks to Ben's family friends who hosted us in Parramatta, just a few miles down the river, we got to head out west for a couple days and take in the Blue Mountains, so called because the eucalyptus and tea trees give off a visible blue haze. We hiked through the mountains for an entire day, saw the famous Three Sisters cliffs, and didn't get lost or stranded once on the trails, so we're hoping those days are behind us. The mountains and views were gorgeous, and we loved the little repurposed coal-mining train that shot us vertically up the mountainside, saving our feet the 200 or so steps.

Once we finally decided we'd thoroughly taken advantage of Sydney and environs, we hopped on a Greyhound bus (which has turned out to be a great way to get around Oz cheaply!) and headed for the beach! The next few days were spent at Coff's Harbour, a rather sleepy beach town with absolutely amazing waves. We discovered that, if you ignore the ocean, smaller-town Australia is startlingly similar to smaller-town Texas, which perhaps explains why I feel so at home here. Once we got to Coff's, we traipsed for miles with our bags, trying to find our hotel, and we realized that there were no buses, trains, or taxis, and everything was really sprawling and spread-out, because everyone has their own SUV or pickup - much like Texas! The fast food and chain stores all looked very familiar, as did the scrubby green/brown trees and grasses. Everyone we met was extremely friendly and helpful, there is a strong Christian community, and the food portions are impossibly huge. It's uncanny - like a Bizarro Abilene on the beach.

Try as we might, it was just too cold to lie on the beach our first day, so we explored it on foot and stumbled upon a surfing competition! I'd hoped to see some good surfing here, since I've never really been around big waves before, and was not disappointed. The competitors were amazing! I intend to try surfing for myself while we're here, and I hope I'm at least able to stand up. These guys made it look so easy! We sat in the sun for hours watching the surfing before getting some fast food for dinner - our only option since everything in town closed at 6pm (another Australian quirk we've noticed. Everything closes so early! What do people do at night?!).

Other highlights in Coff's included the very cute weekend market, lined with local vendors with their handmade soaps and wood carvings, whale-watching on Muttonbird Island (sadly, no whales appeared for us), and the awesome Pet Porpoise Pool! It's sort of like a mini Sea World, but we were able to get up close and personal with some dolphins and sea lions, who were very affectionate.

Soon enough, it became time for us to leave Coff's and move on up the east coast, so we made the long walk back to the Greyhound stop, carrying our luggage and wishing we had a Texas-sized vehicle of our own...

Message from a bottle

This has the potential to be the shortest entry of our trip as despite staying on Hat Khua (a.k.a Bottle Beach on the north coast of Ko Pha-ngan), for longer than we have stayed at any other location on this trip we stuck to the plan and did very little for 7 straight days.

Even if we had been tempted to get out of our hammocks the beach could have been designed to dissuade us. A few hundred meters long, the beautiful sandy shore was surrounded by thick jungle (of which more later) which put paid to any ideas we may have had about running. Even the turqouise sea, while perfect for paddling or the occasional game of frisbee, was full of "sea lice" whose role seemed to be to attack anyone who strayed too close to actual swimming. Happily admitting defeat we slipped into a very comfortable routine of a reading, napping, eating and hanging out at the restaurant while enjoying plenty of the local rum.

While the weather spoilt us for much of the week our first couple of days were a different story as the long-tail boat which brought us to the beach just beat a huge storm which we watched blow in from the sea. It was strong enough to make our tiny bungalow feel very vulnerable and ripped parts of the roof clean off the main building!

The rain returned on our final day but the intervening days were stunning and exactly the kind of quiet, relaxing break we'd hoped for.

We planned to leave the beach 'tomorrow' for at least the last three days and unfortunately this meant that our ever growing rum and green curry tab kept outpacing our supply of cash and we needed to make two trips back to town to use an ATM. Rather than take the convenient, fast and reasonably priced long-tail boats, the first time this occurred we decided that we would hire a sea kayak and paddle the 5km into a headwind instead. While we eventually made it safe and sound, trying to paddle in tandem while keeping a plastic kayak straight on open water for an hour and a half was a 'bonding'experience.

That little adventure was just a warm-up for our second trip when we opted for a hike through the jungle instead. There was supposed to be a trail we could follow marked by plastic bottles but this was more of a suggestion as to where the undergrowth might be less dense and the occasional rock faces less deadly, than a trail in any recognizable sense. Sure enough after about 2 hours, just after the point when we decided we absolutely couldn't turn back, we got lost. With our shoes full of decaying leaf mulch and heavy rain soaking us to the bone we tried to laugh it off which worked well until we stumbled into one creek bed only to find that every surface was covered in biting red ants! 3 and a half traumatic hours later we stumbled into town and immediately ordered the biggest serving of chocolate pancakes we could find.

Aside from our ill-fated trips back to civilization the main sources of amusement were the beach's collection of animals. One evening we took a stroll to find the local stray dog digging frantically in the sand.

After about ten minutes he finally flushed out a decent sized crab which led to a hilarious stand-off - how many pinches on the nose is dinner worth?

In case any cat fans planned to take this as proof of canine stupidity we woke up (mid-afternoon) the next day to find our friend Kate screaming and clinging to the post of her bungalow:

The cause? One of the camp's cats was trying to swat a four foot long King Cobra which had crept in from the jungle. One of those times you don't want to consider exactly how long it would take to get to the nearest hospital.

When we finally dragged ourselves from the beach we were thrust quickly back into the realities of Asian travel and got to spend the evening in a mosquito ridden depot while our bus to Bangkok was coaxed back to life. We made it eventually around 5 the next morning and having learnt that Bangkok is a great city as long as you do not try to do anything or go anywhere we spent a very relaxing 24 hours before our flight to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Suddenly I Sea

Looking for a change from Cairo, we decided to head south. Luxor is known for more fantastic tombs and ruins, but we wanted a sunny, beachy part of our Egyptian adventure, and with the Sinai too far out of the way, we settled on taking a bus to Hurghada with the intention of continuing on to Luxor. The overnight "VIP bus" seemed like the best choice and while being comfortable enough, it was difficult to sleep during the Islamic prayers being blasted throughout the bus for the first two hours of the drive (which began at 1am - nice). Once we arrived at 7, we showed up exhausted at a hotel that we knew from our guide book, but had not yet contacted. Luckily they had a room for us at a reasonable rate, so we began calling the 4 Seasons Hotel (no, not that Four Seasons) home.

Hurghada is a Red Sea resort city strung along the east coast of Egypt, near fantastic coral reefs for snorkeling and scuba diving. One of the first things we noticed as we rolled into town was all the Russian. All the shop signs and restaurant menus are in Russian, and we heard it spoken almost exclusively in the streets and on the beaches, a language that we agreed sounds like a record being played backwards. It turns out Hurghada is a quick, cheap flight from Moscow, making it a prime destination for Russian beachgoers. The biggest benefit to us was the fact that the street vendors hassled us in Russian rather than English, making them easier to ignore. At the same time, the Russians weren't always pleasant to vacation around. More than once we saw them display the most appallingly rude, hostile behavior toward waitstaff over really trivial issues. I hate to make such a sweeping generalization (apologies to the many Russian fans of the blog!), but we were a little scared.

The other defining features in town are the blocks and blocks of unfinished hotel and condo construction projects, with staircases leading to nowhere and naked pillars reaching upward, awaiting the next floor. The whole effect is kind of spooky, like everyone left the city in a hurry. In fact, that's close to the truth - our snorkeling guide whom we befriended told us tourism to the area has been cut in half, owing to the recession, so all construction has been halted for the time being. The builders literally stopped where they stood and haven't returned to work since. It's strange to see the state of the world economy illustrated in such a tangible, visible way.

Despite these idiosyncracies, Hurghada remains a cute beach city with a lot to do, although I have to admit we didn't do much. For a complete switch from bustling, noisy Cairo, we chose to slow way down in Hurghada, spending 3 full days on the beach and the 4th day snorkeling. We learned that Hurghada is very much a clubbing town - the Egyptian spring break destination - but since that's not really our scene, we slept late, brought a picnic lunch to the beach, read our books, and enjoyed seafood dinners. Ahhhhh. We've got sunburns on our sunburns but it has been really nice.

The snorkeling on the Red Sea reefs is spectacular, and if we'd had more time I would have been interested in getting scuba certified. The water is crystalline and so many shades of blue, and the reefs appear to be pretty healthy. We made two stops on our snorkeling trip, and at both saw hundreds of different kinds of fish, urchins, anemones, and some other weird things we couldn't name. Our last stop was on Gifton Island, just off the coast of Hurghada, where everyone else sunbathed but where our sunburns forced us into shade - we're still at the beginning of the trip and learning to moderate our sun exposure!


Hurghada was gorgeous and relaxing, but our time in Egypt keeps ticking away, so we couldn't stay on the beach forever. Once we'd had our fill, we boarded another bus for the long, hot trip to Luxor...