Bzzzz

Brian Blessed!













Biker / Neo-Nazi.











Shaved off. Time to start all over again.

Cambodia Part 2

Hello!

Since we spoke to you last we have waved goodbye to Cambodia and hello to Jomtien in Thailand (near Pattaya). Let me fill you in on the last half of our Cambodia trip.
We spent a few days in the capital Phnom Pehn taking in the sights. One day we visited the Killing Fields and S21, both vile examples of the Kymer Rouge's cruelty. The killing fields is a site where the Kymer Rouge killed 17,000 people and buried them in mass graves. S21 is a school converted into a prison where people wear held and tortured before being sent to the killing fields. Quite a depressing day out that one.

We spent the rest of time visiting the palace (the first picture - which includes a miniture model of Ankor Wot in the foreground) and wandering around the city.

Next we headed south to Kampot which is a lovely sleepy place beside a river (second picture). We used Kampot as a base for visiting a few nearby sighths. The third picture is of the Bokor Hotel in the Bokor hill station, a creepy abandoned town on top of a hill. We visited a cave which we were guided through by five chatty kids, and Kep, a small pretty seaside town where we ate crabs and paddled.

Our last stop in Cambodia was Sihanoukville, the major beach destination of Cambodia. The original plan was to spend a good few days there and do some diving but the accomidation was overpriced and we were informed by several sources that the diving was crap. We spent a day by the beach before making the 14 hour bus journey here.

We are staying in a fantastic apartment in the same complex as Sueann's mum and dad. We are planning to go for a dive then eat some lobster on Christmas day and until then we are chilling out and planning the Malaysian leg of the trip.

If we don't do another entry for a while then Merry Christmas :)

Hi from a very sunny Cambodia!

Hello all,

We have been in Cambodia for a week now so we thought we'd better give you a little update.

We had a very interesting trip overland from Bangkok. We heard loads of horror stories about 'Scam Buses' taking tourists across the border and dumping them at random hotels in the middle of the night so we decided to take the local transport. Despite having to get up at a ridiculous time in the morning and being a little conned by the immigration guards at the border (all too common) we made it to Siem Reap in record timing.

Sadly the border crossing at Poi Pet doesn't give a great first impression, but thankfully that doesn't last long. The people are really lovely here and there is loads of great stuff to see.

We started our stay in Siem Reap by visiting the temples of Angkor. Wow there are a lot of temples. We spent 2 full days traveling between as many as we could fit in. They are pretty amazing. We really loved Angkor Thom. The trees are growing through the temple and it makes quite a spectacular sight.

Once we got slightly templed out we made our way to the stilted village of Kompong Phhluck. It's set next to a huge lake and spends most of the year under water. The houses are all raised up on 7m high stilts. It's just the start of the dry season now so a tiny bit of land was showing.
We spent the day there and had a fantastic lunch in one of the houses.

We also went on a little dug-out boat through the flooded mangrove forest. It was so peaceful and really really beautiful.
This photo doesn't quite do it justice.

After Siem Reap we headed on a boat down the river to Battambang. The boat trip was one of those '3-8 hour journeys' and of course it took 8 hours. There were are lot of bad rumors about the boats breaking down but it is meant to be one of hte most scenic boat trips in the country. You pass floating villages, wet lands and not to mention really narrow waterways where you get battered by all of the trees on the way past!!

Battambang itself is pretty run down and doesn't see much tourism. We did manage to do a cooking course and made 3 delicious courses of Khmer food. (which Matt is looking forward to testing out on some of you soon!)

The photo is our cooking instructor buying fish at the market. All of the fish are alive and they just kill and sell them on the spot. We have many more interesting photos from the market, including a couple that we'll need to keep far away from the the frog crazy Selina.

We arrived in Phnom Penh yesterday so will save that for the next entry. We are heading the the Killing Fields tomorrow so our next entry may not be quite so cheery.

We keep forgetting that it's Christmas soon. Hope you're all getting in to the festive spirit!!
Take care
Us x

Hong Kong Phooey

Hello! Lets start with a picture of Hong Kongs fantastic skyline!

We have just finished a week long stint in Hong Kong which turned out to be a little holiday within a big holiday. When we arrived we were both tired and on the verge of becoming ill, so when we saw how nice our hotel was we decided to take it easy for the week. We slept in quite a lot and managed a few hours of sight seeing a day. The rest of our time was spent lazing, eating and the occasional massage.

Here's another picture of the skyline, this time at night and from Kowloon across the water.

So our sight seeing amounted to wandering inbetween all the sky scrapers and sampling all the many different Asian cuisines Hong Kong has to offer; pig's feet in Chinese wine was interesting. Imagine all the stuff you would spit out and cut off a bit off meat at home and that's what pig's feet is like. Not very tastey but not horrible either.

Here's a more successful lunch of Dim Sum.

My mum requested a picture of me so here I am about to enjoy afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel.

I am writing all this from Bangkok while Sueann organises some accomodation in Siem Reap, Cambodia. We bus it across there early tomorrow morning. I'm not sure how often we will have access to a good internet connection so the blog entries may happen a bit further apart than usual. We shall see.

Bye for now.

P.S. Selina - The Harajuku girls are a bunch of girls who turn up at the same bridge (in Harajuku, Tokyo) every Sunday dressed up in crazy fashions. Actually most of them are just goths, but some of them are inspired. They just hang out there and get the photos taken then go home. :)

Random pics from Tokyo

GodzillaaaaaaaaAAAAARGH!!!!!












Park.









A couple of Harajuku girls taking a time out.








Classic coy!












Ninja stealth tactics












Pretty Kimonos












Fish eggs on rice for breakfast. Slurp!








Neon Tokyo!

Tokyo is a little chilly at this time of year.

Hello all,

It`s our last morning in Japan so we thought we'd fill you in on Tokyo before we go.
This place is cool!! It's such a massive city with tons of shops and neon (slightly better neon than Las Vegas).

We stayed in a capsule for a night which was pretty good. We didn't get any photos but they are just how you'd imagine. You crawl in to a white capsule (they are in rows, two high) You get a TV, radio, alarm and it's just the right size for Sueann. Matt on the other hand had to sleep diagonally.... hee hee. The floors were separated in to male and female and we had to meet each other in the lobby. Matt decided not to bother with the male communal bathing. He's not quite ready for that. The ladies didn't have the option. It was showers only for us.
Matt said it was like sleeping in a microwave oven. Bing!

We got up really early from the capsule to go to the Fish Market. It was huge! Fish everywhere. We treated ourselves to some sushi (very odd at 7am) but definitely the best we've had.


Matt and I almost split up after 500 hours of standing in a toy shop trying to decide which transformer to buy. I had to drag him out and say he wasn't getting anything. We got to the end of the street and he finally made the decision. We went back and got Optimus Prime. Definitely the most stressful part of the trip to date :)

We were wandering around taking some last minute photos yesterday when we suddenly noticed a couple of Geisha sneaking around a corner. We followed them for a while (stalkers again) and finally plucked up the guts to ask them for a photo. (Sueann was a little over excited at this point so the photo is slightly blurry).












P.S To Daph - Not a new T-Shirt, bought in Edinburgh. Did buy a new one in Kyoto. It may feature in some up and coming blog entries if you keep your eyes peeled! You should definitely save up for a Japan visit Daph, and save hard, there's lots to spend your cash on.

Hiroshima

Hi folks,

So we've spent a few days in Hiroshima. It's a really nice place most famous for being the first ever atomic bomb target. Here's a picture of the 'A-dome' a buliding that was almost directly below the explostion (which was 600m off the ground) and therefore managed to remain structurally intact.

The museums and memorials did a good job of describing how vast and indiscriminate the destruction was. Sombre stuff.

The town itself was nice to wander around. It has a huge shopping street full of cafes and clothes shops frequented by teenagers with big hair.

On our last full day we visited Hiroshima Castle (rebulit after the bomb). It was a beautiful wooden building filled with facts about the castle and the history of Hiroshima. It even has some samurai helmets and stuff you could try on. You can see Sueann in a big samurai hat on facebook. The ground of the castle were lovely too, the leaves are just starting to turn red orange and yellow amidst all the green. Here's me in front of the castle.

It's our last night in Kyoto tonight so it's time to do a bit of souvenir shopping. I need to decide wether to buy a big robot here or wait till I get to a huge toy shop in Tokyo which could have bigger and better robots. (The link you sent looked really good Jason, I'll keep my eyes open for them).

bye bye.

Kyoto....wow

Hello all,

We have been in Kyoto for 3 days now and we have barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer. It`s a beautiful modern city with masses of history woven in. We have been to loads of temples, shrines, palaces and castles, as well as some very important Geisha spotting (verging on stalking at times!)
We`ve had to cram a lot in so are suffering from aching feet now. It`s best to show through photos, so here goes.....

This is the Golden Pavillion and as you can see it is very gold. All of the temples and shrines have really amazing gardens. The leaves have just started to turn autumn colours so it makes for quite a view.



This is a photo of a couple of ladies walking in the grounds of the castle. How beautiful are they???






This is the Gion part of town. (famous for Geisha). We were really lucky last night and got there at as loads of them were arriving for a big party.

We didn`t get any photos sadly, but you can take our word for it that they were pretty spectacular. They are so graceful and elegant.


We went to this shrine this morning and we were gob smacked by the size of it. We had read about it in the guide book but it didn`t mention that there were literally hundreds of red gates. It must have taken us at least 45 minutes to walk through them all.





Here is another one of the gates.

Hakone and Fukuzumiro

Hello,

I won`t mention Tokyo yet because we have only had one full day there, and we have four more before we leave Japan. So let`s start with Hakone;

We had a couple of nights in the Hakone region of Japan famous for it`s Onsen (natural hot spring baths) and views of Mount Fuji. I had booked us into a traditional Japanese Ryokan for Sueann`s birthday. The Ryokan is a 100 year old inn originaly run by a samurai. While in the Ryokan we wore yakata and walked around in slippers. We quickly dismissed the single sex communal onsen and had a dip together in the family onsen by ourselves. Totally relaxing.

For breakfast and dinner we ate our way through about five courses of the finest japanese food. We had familiar things like raw tuna, fish tempura, and bowls of noodles with scallops and other sea food. As well as indescribable tastes and textures. My mouth is watering thinking of it.

Our time in the Ryokan was perfect from start to finish

We did a bit of sight seeing on our full day in Hakone which was really nice. As is usual for the region it was to cloudy to see Mount Fuji but we had fun going up the hills in a cable car and across the river in a ...erm ...pirate ship!?!? Then back to the Ryokan for a soak in the onsen, mmmm.

Here`s a few pictures of the Ryokan. Hopefully they will show how great it was.

This is us having a spot of dinner









This is dinner. One of many courses. Yum.









Here is the view from our windows.









Me in the garden surrounded by the rest of the hotel. It is actually darker than the picture but still beautiful.









Sueann making herself pretty.












Bye for now.

Answers for Jason: Korean edition

A few quick questions to answer from Jason:

Who won the basketball?
The Lakers... of course.

Did you see anyone get hitched in Vegas?
Nope, but every casino had a chapel so there was plenty of opportunity to see one if we had wanted to.


What kinda meat are you cooking in S.Korea?
In the photo it was beef marinated in garlic among other things, but my favourite version was spicy pork. Delicious.

Is S.Korea sky rises or is it all shanty town, or in between?
We were only in Seoul, which is a very modern city with probably the cleanest most efficient subway I`ve ever been on. From what I can gather South Korea is a very developed nation producing some of the best cars and technology in the world (like my tele back home).

The picture for this blog entry is Stuart`s cat Yang Yang (translates to Meow Meow).

News from Japan next... maybe tomorrow.

Korea

Sorry to overload you with so many entries in one go but it's getting harder to keep up to date.

We've been in Korea for the last week staying with a friend (Stuart). It's been really great staying with someone who lives here. Not only do we get to eat cereal and drink tea for breakfast, but we also get insider tips on what to do.

We have eaten some of the most amazing food of our entire trip so far. Stuart has been taking us to little local places where you cook your own meat at the table. It's really delicious. Here is a photo of us (the laughing couple on the right are friends of the guy taking the photo)

We took a trip to the DMZ to get a glimpse of North Korea. It was quite a weird place really. A great big no mans land between two countries. It is quite tightly guarded and we had to follow some strict rules about what we could and couldn't do. The North Korean soldiers were taking photos of us. If we waved or pointed they would alter our pictures to look as though we were sticking our finger up at them. They would then use it as propaganda. It was really good to learn more about the history of it all.

Here is a photo of the room that any talks happen between the North and South. The table is exactly half in North Korea and half in South Korea. We were allowed to walk on to the other side of the table but that was as close as we could get to entering the North.

We went to the palace yesterday. It has some really beautiful buildings there but the most amazing part was the autumn colours. The trees are so colourful!

Viva Las Vegas

We made a little detour to Las Vegas as a birthday present for me (Matt). One night we went to see a pre-season NBA basketball game between the LA Lakers and the Sacremento Kings.

We had a great time with beer and hot dogs and a huge foam finger to wave. After the game we headed down the strip looking in all the casinos and ended up in New York New York. We gave ourselves $10 each to gamble but got bored of losing after spending $7 so we bought a burger and drank a metre long daiquiri. At midnight we had a go on the rollercoaster you can see in the picture, and almost lost the burger and booze. It was a great night out.

After Las Vegas we headed back to San Fransisco for a day before heading to Korea to visit Stuart. So now we are all caught up we can tell you about our week in Seoul...

San Fran

Hello!

It's been longer than usual between blog entries so we have some catching up to do, firstly lets back track to San Francisco:

We loved our brief few days in San Francisco. First we stayed in North Beach at a really quirky little hotel. We went to the famous Pier 39 where lots of sea lions living beside it. Here is a photo of them at sunset.

At the pier you could eat a wide selection of seafood including chowder served in a bowl made from sour dough bread.

We also had a good look around Alcatraz which was very interesting.

Loving California!!

Hi all,

Just a really quick update as internet is really expensive in California.

We've had a great few days in LA. We climbed up to the Griffith Observatory which overlooks the Hollywood sign (and most of LA!), spent the day at Universal studios (sooooo much fun), and then went to Santa Monica and Venice Beach for the day. We were lucky enough not to be too close to any of the crazy wild fires. Although we did see them in the distance.

We arrived in San Francisco last night and went off to Alcatraz this morning. Ooh that's a creepy place! We really love the San Francisco vibe and sea food. (chowder in a bowl made from bread)

We've got another couple of days here then we're off to Las Vegas to see the Lakers game. Our next blog entry will probably be in a week when we get to Stuart's in Korea.

Hope you're all well

US x

The Jungle

We spent a couple of nights in the hot and humid Amazon Jungle. It wasn´t quite roughing it as we were staying in a really beautiful jungle lodge that was well protected from the beasties.
All of the jungle walks were postponed due to a lot of rain that lasted a good 18 hours. It finally stopped on the last afternoon and we managed to squeeze in a daylight and a night walk as well as a night boat trip to do some Cayman spotting (type of small crocodile).
We had a 2 hour boat trip to the lodge and our guide spotted a Jaguar on the banks of the water. They are endangered so our guide was really excited as he had only seen 4 in his life. Our rubbish camera didn't take a good photo but the guide managed to get a slightly blurry one through binoculars.
We´re off to LA tomorrow on yet another really long flight. We´re looking forward it though!
Hope all is well
Sx
P.S Lots of people have asked about the Alpaca in the photo. It was definitely real. It just wandered in looking for some food! Very cute.

Answer for Tracey

Tracey asked what the food was like while we were camping on the inca trail...

The food was some of the best we have eaten in Peru. Breakfast was pancakes or omelette and plenty of different teas. We had a snack bag containing a combination of cookies, energy bars, boiled sweets, chcolate, and fruit. Lunch and dinner was two courses. Starter was a vegetable soup (always really good). The main course was meat such as trout, lomo saltado (Peruvian beef stir fry made with onions and tomatoes) chicken stuffed with vegetables etc. with rice, vegetables and some kind of potato. After the evening meal we had a dessert like chocolate pudding or stewed apple and cinnamon. And always plenty of tea.

So not that weird or disgusting really.

I did have guinea pig the other day. It was like chicken covered in pork crackling. Quite nice but a bit fiddly to eat. They are sometimes served with the head still attached but mine wasn´t...here´s a picture

Answers for Jason

Best smell so far?
A familiar smell... The scent of cooking garlic which is usually followed by a bowl of fantastic soup.

Worst smell so far?
The stale smell of urine and other things coming from the toilets at the inca trail camps.

Most unusual sound so far?
Some kind of insect that can make a sound like a high pitched electric drill. Very loud and mechanical sounding. We heard it around Machu Picchu and thought it might have been workmen at first before being told it was an insect.

Most annoying sound so far?
El Condor Pasa being played on the pan pipes. urgh.

Weirdest animal?
We saw a capibara on the banks of the river in the jungle. It is the world´s largest rodent. Basically a Guinea pig the size of a small dog.

Most scary/exciting moment?
Exciting - Walking though the sun gate on the final day of the Inca trail and seeing Machu Picchu below us. That was a fitting finale to the hike.
Scary - The end of the sand dune hike. We were out of water, heat stroke was kicking in, we were physcially drained and we thought we were starting to get burnt, and we didn´t know how long we had left to walk. As it turns out neither of us got burnt at all, our skin must have just turned red in an attempt to cool down a bit. In hindsight the sand dune was so difficult because of our expectations of it. We thought it was going to be 2 hours up 45 minutes down when in fact it tutned into 3 hours up 2 hours down. Still good fun though.

Best journey?
Inca trail...easy.

Temperature?
Cold in Lima today 10-15 degrees. Quite hot, humid, and rainy in the jungle. Desert areas are hot and sunny during the day and chilly at night. Peru has a very varied landscape with weather to match.

Is the moon upside down?
Haven´t noticed.

Does the water go the wrong way down the plug?
Again, haven´t checked, but I´ll try and remember tonight. One last chance before going back to the northern hemisphere, one of my favourite hemispheres.

How big are the insects?
Big in the jungle and normal everywhere else.