Archive for December, 2008

Arriving in Sydney

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

We landed in Sydney (eventually!) after our journey from hell – ok so maybe not that bad, we managed to hold it together, I didn’t have any tears and we didn’t have any fallings out – Dan felt comfortable the whole journey as it was me who booked the bus tickets so no come back (for once) on him!

We’ve been in Sydney 3 weeks now (apologies in the lack of blogs but I suppose they won’t be as frequent with us no longer travelling). When we arrived we were excited to meet up with Anna & Mark and Tim & Alison, who were here holidaying. To celebrate meeting up we all went to Hurricane’s (a fab restaurant that serves awesome ribs and steaks), which was a little emotional on my behalf. Afterwards we went for a few drinks – I don’t know about anyone else but I definitely had one too many drinks and a rather sore head the following morning.

  

So far we have managed to find a flat, which unfortunately isn’t available until early Jan – but is completely lush – click to see images. In the mean time we have rented a unit in Bondi to cover us for Xmas and NY when Dan’s Mum, Pete and Brother are here. So we are definitely going to be spending Xmas on the beach having a barbi!! It will be interesting that’s for sure, it still feels like August to Dan and me!

We have both madly been looking for jobs, which has proven a little difficult with it being so close to Christmas. I’ve had several meetings with recruitment consultants and hope that something will emerge in the NY. Dan has literally (17:00 Friday evening for a 09:00 Monday start) just found out he has got an initial 4 week contract starting on Monday – boo hoo. Good in the sense that we will have some money coming in, but bad with the family being here and the realty shock that we are definitely no longer travelling.

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Day 94; 747 to Sydney (three days late!)

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

So we have crossed two continents, eleven countries, 28 cities/towns/islands/villages (counted as places slept!) and nine time zones! We are in the highest spirits and bound for Sydney, Australia!

We have seen panda’s, elephants, monkeys, bear’s (the real type!), tropical fish, terrapins, dear and loads of dogs (some even still on four legs and not a BBQ stick!). We have seen the largest inside, outside, gold, bronze, wood, stone, clay, paper mashie & beer straw Buddha (ok, the last is a lie) in the world, all at least three times! The past three months have been emotional, from tears to laughter, from despair (see previous post!) to joy, but overall we have had a truly truly awesome time! We have experienced many foreign languages, cultures, religions and cuisine, and below we pick out a random few highlights. It is not a top whatever list, nor in order, just things that have stuck in our memory or jumped out whilst cruising at 33,000 feet!

·         Great Wall – To walk along the wall as we did, for the length of the walk and see in places the wall in ruin and in other places restored to its original glory was special

·         Birds nest – Being on the athletics field and looking around at the vast-ness of the stadium, you could only imagine what those athlete’s experienced – the noise, atmosphere & nerves must have been off the scale!

·         Shanghai F1 GP – not only did we experience a sporting event in itself, we saw Lewis get within touching distance of his (1 year) overdue title – well done Lewis – BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2008 for sure! The noise was something else, if only we could have recorded the sound – it vibrated through your body.

·         Giant Panda’s – we were sceptical at first to see such magnificent creatures in captivity, even though it was China’s Breading Centre (was China after all!) and after the first pen we were scared our fears would be realised. But once we stood and watched them eat, it was amazing – could have watched them eat & play all day!

·         Solitude of Trans Sib – It was the perfect way to wind down after 6 months of crazy hours and working Monday-Friday; to sit and watch the miles go by was a great way to start the journey.  It also prepared Karen for the trip, the toilets on the TS seem like royalty in comparison to some of those in China!

·         Diving/Thai Islands – Dan got to dive, Kazza got to sun bathe – perfect combo!

·         Tubing – this was a great day out, we had such a laugh with the guys (Rutter was a legend!) and floating/paddling back the two of us was nice. More importantly no one was seriously injured!

·         Chaing Mai – This is definitely a place to go back. Three days was just not enough (how many times have we said that over the trip?), but the feel of the city and Luang Prabang was special and would highly recommend visiting BOTH!

·         Angkor Wat – Those that have been, those who know about the place will understand that the experience of visiting Angkor Wat is highly rewarding. It would be a tragic shame if severe destruction happened there, so too if significant restoration took place!

But this is not the end of the trip, nor the blog (you will have to sustain more blogging folks!), for this is only the end of Part 1. Part 2 is a total new experience, in two weeks we must find an apartment, furnish it, if it isn’t already, and ow find jobs! Hhmmmmm.

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36 Hours, 3 countries just 1 Bus

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

First of all - hope you are reading this with 5 minutes to spare, there’s a lot to cover!

The plan was to travel overland from Bangkok to Singapore so we could get the hell out of Thailand and make our re-arranged flight from Singapore to Sydney. The idea was to get a 36 hour bus from Bangkok to Singapore. That was the plan anyhow.

After consulting with the travel agent, we followed his advice to only book a bus as far as Hat Yai, which is a southern Thai border town, from there we would be able to catch a bus through to Singapore. So we turned up at the bus station as planned at 17:30 Sunday evening for a 18:00 bus. We left Bangkok by bus at 20:30 with Karen’s feelings for something bad beginning to be realised.

Being a Thai bus company they stopped for food/cash exchange (i.e. us tourists give locals as much cash as we can for as little in return as possible) about midnight announcing it as the last stop. What this meant was it was the last stop we would make on THAT bus. As 06:00 we arrived into Surat Thani which is half way between Bangkok & Malayisa which is where is all started to go wrong.

Having been advised only to get Hat Yai tickets and everyone else having KL or Singapore tickets we began to get concerned. At Surat Thani (which was basically the bus company central office) we enquired if we could purchase onward tickets to Singapore. Sold Out. Oh Dear. Being a resourceful country of people they offered us a private mini van from Hat Yai to KL – how nice. First price for five people was 35,000 Baht which is 140 quid per person – we declined. They then countered with an offer for 20,000 for 9 people – 45 quid each which we accepted. So we handed over 90 US dollars which they accepted without paying the difference – mint we thought!

So with onward travel booked (no tickets mind) we boarded a mini van and were off….off to another office it turned out and not KL. At the next office (about 5 mins down the road) they wanted 10 quid each for an express boarder passing Thai/Malaysia – which we begrudgingly paid. So we were off again and this time we travelled south for some time. With about 40km left to Hat Yai we came across flooded roads, but to our advantage only the north side was flooded, so we pushed on. With 6km to go we stopped and things turned a lot worse.

They dropped (literally) us at a service station with the promise a bus was coming north from the border to collect us. To our advantage at this point we had a) other people with us (who had friends at the forward meeting point) and b) a Wi-Fi connection. With an internet connection we booked i) hotel in KL and ii) a flight from KL to Singapore which gave us 36 hours to get from this service station to KL which should be easy as was only meant to be a 6 hour journey.

After waiting for 3 hours and realising we had been dumped we thought through our options. At this point a message from the forward meeting point told us that all the buses had left, so the private minivan we had paid for was gone, we weren’t even at the destination point of our original bus ticket and no express visa service -hey! We hired (5 quid each) another minivan between us all to the border which was the best decision of the day! At the border we crossed (realising no need for express!) and arrived in Malaysia, better still, we had left Thailand! Yay!

Inside Malaysia we hired a taxi to the local town Alor Setar and found more bus companies than I have ever seen in a single bus station. If we had known about this local town (as buses left every half hour for KL & Singapore at very reasonable prices – tenner a ticket!) then we could have avoided all the hassle, KL accommodation, KL-Singapore flights, express visa service, the lot – lesson not to travel without a Lonely Planet. Lesson Learned.

The bus from Alor Setar left half hour late and arrived KL 90 minutes late at 04:00 (34 hours later, 36 hours was to Singapore!) Tuesday morning. We checked into our pre-paid hotel and got some sleep. Spent the afternoon in KL - saw the towers, paddled in a kiddies swimming pool (it was so hot and humid!) and basically veg’ed.

Next leg was our flight from KL to Singapore. This was easy – was only a 35 minute flight!

So now in Singapore. We have a pre-booked hotel which we are in now and we have a flight to Sydney at 09:00 tomorrow morning. So the trip is coming to a fast end. We will write whilst on the plane a blog looking back, so I won’t write yet more here on that subject. But we have got out of Thailand and got to Singapore. The only variable left is BA – if they don’t give me a boarding card in the morning they are getting both barrels and by god they are fully loaded!

Bye for now, Sydney next!

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