December 31, 2007 by Rick.

While the trip we have taken so far (and will continue on) has been nothing short of spectacular, the toll of inanimate hotel rooms quickly begins to wear. They have ranged wildly from the very basic to rather deluxe, ($18-$280 per night). We have had some amazing exceptions on this trip of being invited to friends homes to stay for a few days. The first in Costa Rica at Maricela’s which we had paid for as part of our Spanish lesson’s. In Australia we met up with Robert & Leesa-Maree who graciously invited us to veg out in their spare room a few times for almost a week. Now in Beijing we stayed at Jim & Letty Gerber’s place a few days before heading to Shanghai. There we stayed at Gerber’s friends who were back home in North America for the holidays. This was simply wonderful to be able to buy some groceries and relax in a true home. Never mind that they had left their Christmas tree and decorations up all around the house. This was a wonderfully warm environment to spend our first Christmas away from home in and we really appreciated their hospitality. Especially since they had never met us and were just going off of Jim’s word. Jim and Letty’s apartment is great too, even more so now that He’s back and she’ll be joining us in a couple of days. All in all, there’s nothing quite like a big old couch to stretch out on a recuperate from a few days of travel and sightseeing!

Thanks Everyone!!!!

PS: HAPPY NEW YEARS!!!

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December 27, 2007 by AJ.

I bet you guessed already, but if you didn’t I tell you. We got to go figure skating yesterday! First the bad parts;
-the ice was bad
-the skates weren’t, making it even harder to skate
-they weren’t the type of skate I’m used to, no ankle support
-the ice was melting
So all in all I couldn’t do much because of those factors. Pretty much skate forward, sorta a spread eagle, a drag and a cross cut every 20 mins or so.
Good parts;
-It was way fun!!!!!!
-I got some pratice
-It reminded me of home, which is equal to no homesickness whatsoever for about 3 months
-I was the only one who didn’t fall!
-I just had the funnest time for a while!
Thats all the goods I can think of currently.

Ok I exaggerated, Dad didn’t fall. I was the only one who didn’t deserve to fall. Luke and mom fell which disqualifies them and dad did a running jump onto then ice. Therefore I was the only one who didn’t deserve to fall.

Now a few days later I really gotta say….

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!
Really miss you guys!!!!

Miss you alll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Alex

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December 25, 2007 by Rick.

It was a pretty subdued affair for us. Santa had to make two trips since our presents were misdirected to the Canada Bag, so he returned to China after delivering to the Great White North. While there were decorations and carols playing in the public spaces, it was still a regular workday for the proletarian masses. This naturally involved an early awakening for Claudette and I due to the 7:00 AM pounding and sawing construction noises outside our window.

I’d forgotten to mention in the previous China post how it seems MOSTLY like a regular capitalist pig society here, and there are not strong undertones of the oppressive communist rule that we expected. The shopping malls are packed with people spending lots of money, traffic is very abundant with lotsa new vehicles and fashion clothing is on everyone. I’m sure that if there was a gathering of more than twenty people in any public area the police would come out of the woodwork to quash it, but on the surface things seem very “normal” and semi-democratic. Another odd thing I’d forgotten to specifically point out previously was the almost absolute lack of motor scooters & motorbikes around. There’s even less here than in Edmonton in the Summer! Very different considering that they seemed to make up 90% of all vehicles on the road in the rest of Southeast Asia.

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December 25, 2007 by Rick.

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December 24, 2007 by Rick.

We’d heard from many other travelers and some friends that Beijing was the city with the most smog & pollution that they had encountered. No ones comments prepared us for the heavy set haze and absolute lack of view that we encountered. The ride from the airport to Jim & Letty’s apartment was pretty quick though, only about twenty minutes or so. Major roads along the route had side lanes for bicycles and animal carts. We know this of course from the pictures signs indicating such. Jim had helped us book a flight to Shaing Hei (sp???) for a week over Christmas starting two days after we arrived in China. So we had a complete Veg day, and watched a whole bunch of movies at their place (along with a quick spurt of grocery shopping across the street). We arranged with the same driver that picked us up from the airport to take us back early (5:30 AM) in two days. Their apartment has a spectacular view! It is nicely done up as well, but Claudette and I both noticed the lack of Mexican or Spanish adornments.

At the airport we had trouble figuring out which domestic airline counter to go to as their were about fifty of them. When I was at the cell phone counter for a minute, Claudette started receiving help discerning our tickets from a couple Chinese ladies who seemed to know English fairly well. They took us to the counter to check us in, and verbally accosted me for trying to help with baggage or trying to communicate with the ticket counter lady. They had name tags, but only from some hotel. I tried to get ahold of my tickets again after we had checked in to no avail. Instead they led us to the correct entry gate, which was helpful but still something we could have stumbled through ourselves. After I got my ticket back her shrill arrogant voice could be heard demanding a “Tip?”. Instead of making a scene in front of my darling wife at being held hostage by this petty criminal, I sent her to Claudette to get some cash for being “helpful”. Of course I kicked myself afterwards for not remembering the hotel name so I could vehemently complain to the management about her behavior when we returned to Beijing. Luckily Claudette sternly negotiated her down from the $30 tip she originally wanted to a little over $10. The flight was a larger plane packed full, but pretty uneventful. It was raining in Shang Hei when we arrived, but that still didn’t dampen our spirits cause we were about to ride the FLANE! The airport here is about 30km from the edge of the city proper and we were gonna be taking the MagLev train (or “floating Train” as Luke called it). It is supported and propelled by electromagnetic currents along the track at a top speed of 341 km/hr we soon found out. To say that the scenery absolutely flew by is rather an understatement… It was amazing! The ride only took a few minutes and when we started slowing down to approach the end station it seemed as though we were crawling along at a human running pace even though the digital speed readout still said 95kph!

It was still late morning when we had arrived so we leisurely made our way by Taxi from the MagLev station to Jim’s friend Neil’s home. They had taught together previously and Jim made (Awesome!) arrangements for us to stay in their vacant apartment while they were home visiting for the holidays. Luckily there was another huge grocery store just across the street and this home was incredibly nice as well. I’d love to ask about the cost of rent just for curiosity sake. They have a tonne of movies and a maid who visits every day to do dishes, laundry and cleaning ‘n stuff. What a way to go! Jim has one too, (a maid) and I mentioned to Claudette that we gotta look into this phenomena as well! This family has a beautiful Christmas tree set up unlike the infidel Gerber’s…

After a (yet another!) day of relaxing we went touring a bit yesterday and visited the Oriental Pearl Tower. It is such a cool design for towers that makes it still worth visiting even though it’s small than the CN tower in Toronto. We had a pretty good buffet lunch up in the rotating restaurant before heading up even higher to check out the even better view from the Space Pod deck. While the pollution wasn’t as bad as it was in Beijing, it was still fairly dense here in Shang Hei. Luckily, the day we chose to go up the tower was not too bad for smog (plus it had stopped raining!). We could see “city” as far as the eye reached in all directions, which was only about 15+ km I would think. Still a pretty cool experience.

After the tower we went across the street to a ten story high shopping mall and got pushed and shoved around by the crowds there for a couple of hours. We didn’t really buy anything, just checking the place out. They did have a skating rink on one of the upper floors which looked pretty cool. We’re gonna go back on boxing day for a skate. Other than that we don’t seem to have any other major plans here. Once we get back to Beijing it’ll be gangbusters tours again though.

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December 23, 2007 by AJ.

I can’t believe it’s the 24th already! I think we have about 13 countries left. The trip is pretty much half over. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing, we are just missing home. Alot! The first thing I noticed when we got to Bejjing was the smog! You can practically taste it. It is very sad because it will be the middle of the day it is a cloudless sky but the sun is very blocked. But it is still a very beautiful city! I recommend every one who hasn’t seen the pictures should just stop reading right at this very moment and go look at the Santa Claus clan I made of plasticine. There is Mrs Claus, Mr Claus (Santa Claus), Baby Claus, Rudolf, two identicalish looking elves, four beautifully colored presents, a heart that says thank U and Santa’s sleigh (It is multi colored due to the fact that I was really running out of clay). It took me a while but I think it qualifies me to be an arteest (not an artist they are pros)! We aren’t in Bejjing right now though, we are in Shaing Hai. Here we are going to see the Oriental Pearl Tower. It is one of the tallest towers in the world and it is the tallest tower in Asia. To get to the place we are at we at we had to take a maglev. It kinda stands for magnetic train. What it is a train that kinda levitates using magnetics which allows it to reach very high speeds. When we were on the maglev it went 450 km! That is it for now, bye!
AJ

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December 21, 2007 by Rick.

In the ritzier hotel in Hong Kong, I went out shopping alone one evening and came back with the new Sanyo waterproof digital video (640×480 only) and 6MP digital still camera for Alex that we had been eying up for awhile. We first saw he Olympus one in Fiji back in Sept for almost $500. That included a lot of extras, but I still didn’t care for the fact that it used an XD card, since we already had various devices with SD and Sony Memory stick cards on the go. The thought of having another format of card to carry around all manner of accessories for just made my head spin. Luckily the Sanyo one uses SD, and the price on it had been slowly decreasing as we made our way North up through Asia. Prices on electronics in Hong King were generally OK, but not near as spectacular as I had expected. MP3 players specifically were no better, and in fact were often higher than North American or Australian prices. Ipods of every color, size and derrivation filled up huge amounts of every store. I had no interest in a genuine ipod due to the highly restrictive software and their poor price/feature index compared to almost every other brand available. Anyways, I digress… At the same place I bought Alex’s camera I also grabbed a 120GB hard drive small size media player. The brand is not one I had heard of in North America before, but that hardly means anything. It is a Vosonic 8360 and includes integrated video and audio recording. It’s not near a large and bulky as the Archos model I intended on buying, but the Archos was slightly more money and on top of that it still requires a separate cradle for about $120 to hook up to a larger sound system or to record. Another bonus on this one is that it includes a SD and CF cardreader into the chassis for PALM or Alex’s Sanyo camera backups. Very cool and handy! Our intention when we get back home is to have this adjacent and hooked up to the living room stereo system for playback of any of our entire music collection, without needing CD’s ever again. We concluded that this was maybe a better option rather than streaming them by WIFI from a server computer downstairs. We will probably still buy one video/audio streaming receiver when we get home for playback on the TV and audio system downstairs though. Lastly I managed to grab a CREATIVE brand MP3 player speaker set that’s specifically designed for the Zen V we have. It docks right in the front of the speakers and they provide incredible portable (or plug-in) sound while charging the player. Since the Zen V model is discontinued the speakers were about 1/3 of the original price! Well, they were half but since I bought them with the camera and 120Gig portable player the total price got drastically reduced. That cost a good hour investment of my life, but it was pretty worth it considering what I ended up paying for everything.

A few days later we all went about ten blocks North to another shopping district known to be not quite as ritzy as the one by our first hotel. This one area had all similar stores focussed in an area, so the consumer didn’t really have to go far to compare. The prices here were actually stickered (marked) on most items and were cheaper than the fancier area at the very South end of Kowloon. At the South end the stickers just had cost codes that the clerk would look at and then look at the consumer to size up how much he thought he could get away with before reciting a price. So while the Northern area prices were all cheaper, there was very little (if even none at all!) room for negotiating. In this area we were slightly looking for a new, larger, MP3 player for Alex and I was checking prices on a bluetooth microphone for our video camera. This would allow the person to wear a mike and transmit the audio up to 30m away to the cameraman. It was pretty cool, and something I had been looking at since we left home (at $400!). In Malaysia the price was about $300, (but that’s also possibly mainly due to the decreasing price over time) and in Vietnam I saw it for $250. In a couple places in Hong Kong I saw it for $175, and then $151 that day. My target price had always been $150, but I held off to try and get it with other things for a combined reduced rate. At one place we saw a new mini computer from Asus, called the EeePC 1701 that had a 7″ screen, was ultra portable with a battery, ran Linux or Windoze XP, had WIFI, a built in web cam and was only $385. This was a brand new item and NO STORE would go down on price, (as we eventually found out from repeated asking). So, finally at one store (we were running out of time before a booked space show at the science center that evening) I arbitrarily asked for a price on the 16GB flash MP4 player Alex had been eying up. The attendant made a mistake of $74 less on her verbal quote to me. I immediately agreed to buy it and also inquired if the had the Sony bluetooth mike. It turns out that they did, and better yet it was the best price I had ever seen at $138!!! I didn’t even bother trying to negotiate and just whipped out my VISA urging her to ring it up before some manager came along and knocked her to her senses.

We had been having quite a bit of difficulty connecting to the internet lately, (since half way through Thailand). It was becoming increasingly expensive, and the hotel “business centers” were almost cost prohibitive! The funny part was, most hotels we had stayed at in the latter part of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam & Hong Kong, all provided wired internet access for free in the rooms. This must have twigged Claudette’s nerves, because she was actively pursuing this little Asus ultra-light laptop, (with my approval of course!). We went back to the original place we hahd seen it and grabbed one before rushing off to the show on Black Holes. So, we spent a poopload of cash, but got some pretty good deals on “stuff” that we were planning on buying anyways or would be quite useful to us. I’m still typing this on the Palm, but no one else seems to like using it due to the keyboard occasionally acting up. For two thirds of the rest of the family, it has become a very expensive portable solitaire game…

Posted in 2007-12 to 2008-01, Hong Kong & China | 1 Comment »

December 21, 2007 by Rick.

This “Administratively distinct” region of China was really fun and interesting. Well, except for our feeble attempts at finding a reasonable hotel of course! We expected that before arriving, but we were still shocked to be paying CAN $300/night for only three beds, but downtown. Crazy! We stayed on the Kowloon side, across Victoria Harbor from Hong King Island. It was pretty cool, but we later discovered that we were in the slightly ritzier district for shops and hotels. Traffic was solidly busy everywhere we could see as well, so NOBODY jaywalked here. Hong Kong reminded both Claudette and I of Singapore in a lot of ways. After watching the discovery channel Extreme Engineering show on building the Hong Kong airport, tunnels, bridges and high speed train system it was pretty cool to see it all and ride it.

Sadly, a few days before while looking up activities to do in HK we found out about the gondola car dropping from the cable thus closing down the entire ride to the big Buhda that we had also watched an episode about on Extreme Engineering. We had seen quite enough Buhda’s in all shapes, sizes and mannerisms (believe me!) in Thailand and Laos, but we had been looking forward to this billion dollar gondola ride. We still managed to take the street cable car up the side of very steep hills on Hong Kong Island though. That was certainly a big highlight, even with heavy smaug obscuring the other side of the harbor, (At least, I thought I saw a dragon flying around???). Madam Tusseau (sp?) had a wax museum up there too, but we didn’t bother buying tickets since Claudette only wants to see the original (apparently?) in France. From the top we could see down to the ocean on both sides of the mountain. There were some pretty spectacular homes up here too! I can’t even imagine the price…

We looked for a venue to watch the (Guinness Book of of World records approved) world’s largest permanent light show, and caught most of it for fifteen minutes at 8:00 PM. It was OK, but not near as spectacular as we had heard and read about from so many different sources. We assumed that there was music, but it wasn’t played at our location and we didn’t have a radio. The next night though, after watching a great show on Black holes at the Science Center, we watched the light show from the opposite side. The whole area alongside the harbor was developed and had speakers to play music matching the light show. This was clearly the place to be to see it, and we went to the second floor balcony of the Art Museum to get an uncrowded view. There were scads of people crowding and elbowing in the other areas, but apparently none had thought hard enough to look for the obscured stairway coming up where we were, with only five or six other people along a huge 200m long deck area. On some of the video we captured, it can clearly be heard two and a half of us saying:

“WOW!!! Halifax doesn’t have ANYTHING like this!”

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December 20, 2007 by Rick.

The motor scooters in Vietnam were so amazingly plentiful, that it was simply a remarkable sight to watch a continuous wave of them driving in traffic. There seemed far fewer four wheeled vehicles here than anywhere else we had been, including Thailand and Laos. We at at one restaurant on the fourth floor balcony and looked out over a fairly major “X” shaped intersection, compounded by having a traffic circle off to one side of one of the arms, and by the middle section being elongated, (with only two lanes for about 50 meters, before splitting off again). It was a completely astounding sight to see, and we found it worthy of several minutes of videotape. There were so many near misses it seemed, but not a single accident. As a matter of fact, with traffic as amazingly crazy as it seemed all around here (less so in Laos, where there’s not quite as many vehicles as Thailand, Malaysia or Vietnam, and certainly less so than Singapore where everything is so strictly orderly), we only saw three accidents. One actually involved Luke and I in a taxi that was following WAY too close in Thailand. The bus in front of us came to a screeching halt, and a few seconds later so did we, barely a few decimeters from the bus I’m sure. Then, to add to our loudly screeching tires, the taxi behind us came to a stop only a few centimeters from us. As would be expected then, the car driver behind him wasn’t so quick on her brakes and caused a three vehicle domino collision. We barely felt it, since the sudden stop a few seconds earlier had been far more abrupt. Our driver however was very distraught, and got out in the center lane of four lanes of traffic whizzing by to check things out. I was worried about the delays and was looking to see if Luke and I could safely exit to the curb and flag down an alternate taxi. Not a chance! Inside the vehicle was by far the safest place for us! Our driver and the other, and the woman chattered for about ten minutes, and then he returned to the car. I insisted we get out immediately without paying when he said we were just going to stop off at the police station, (we were only six minutes away from the hotel after a half hour ride). He quickly radioed the other taxi driver and said he was gonna drop us off first and meet them at the police station to file a report. He was pretty upset, mainly at the woman because she had only caused just under CAN $1000 of damage to the two taxis, yet she was insisting on going through insurance. This created (as it does in Canada) mounds of paperwork and governmental red tape that no one else wanted to deal with. Our taxi only had a small dent in the bumper, and yet he was practically in tears regarding the damage to his baby. At least he looked after it I guess.

Claudette and Luke had also witnessed a motorbike getting hit by a taxi at slow speeds in Bangkok. It caused damage to his bike, but he got up immediately with barely a bruise by the looks of it. The third one we just barely saw in Vientiane, (the Capital city of Laos). It was at an intersection, and we were behind a bus and a couple other cars. A dump truck swerved abruptly to avoid crushing a crazy motorbike driver trying to scoot across in front, but miscalculating the speed of the dump truck. The truck swerved and rode up on a high median ripping apart it’s undercarriage as well as a fuel and hydraulic oil tank. The driver scurried out of the cab and away from the truck in a huge hurry, and went to check on the motorcyclist. When we finally got up to and through the intersection a few minutes later, the bike driver was being attended to and looked like he had some ripped clothing, road-rashed face, and a compound fracture of the lower leg. As we continued driving away we didn’t hear any explosions, so the dump truck’s ignition sources must have been turned off.

All in all though, I would still say that traffic in Latin America is slightly worse, in that there seemed to be way more disorderly conduct, and people constantly and very inconsiderately pushing there way in this way and that. Southeast Asia is still pretty wicked of course, just not quite as bad as what I remember from Latin America, and especially Peru. Our guide in Laos had disdainfully told us how all the nation’s roads had previously been filled with bicycles, but people started buying more and more scooters. Then the Chinese started making and selling really cheap scooters in Laos and sudden no one but kids under ten years old used scooters anymore.

Motor-scooter and motorbike drivers are simply suicidal, or they collectively have the combined fore thinking brain power of a pea. The cutting in and out of traffic, and speeding along in between lanes of cars, (while stopped at lights, or at 80KPH, it don’t matter!) is just nuts. I suppose such crazy behavior is offset lightly by the expanded awareness of the drivers, but they still make me shake my head in horrified wonderment. The car and truck driver’s inherently (generally) know and prepare for the crazy sudden turns and budding in front by the bikes, and drive accordingly. Most Westerners who get behind a wheel in Aisia or Latin America would be very likely to quickly wipe out several bikes since they would not be anticipating the two-wheeler movements without observing for awhile first. On the other hand, if a bike were to take up the center of a lane (as is propper and safe to do) most four wheel vehicle drivers would be cussing and swearing since the motor scooters are quite underpowered compared to even a four cylendar car or lorry.

Sadly, this myopically selfish viewpoint of cutting in wherever one can, generally seems to carry over into pedestrian traffic as well. None of the reading in various guidebooks prepared us for the disdainful stepping on our toes, pushing out of the way, budding in front of us, ect, that we constantly seem to be experiencing in Asia so far. China is supposed to be the worst even, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

The one cool thing about entering Laos was that the sides of the road that everyone drove on were switched again. This I had mentioned in a previous post I believe. It was still refreshing to see the steering wheels back on the left side of the vehicle again though. We all easily adapted to getting into mini vans on the right side again. This was short lived of course, only in Laos and Vietnam did vehicles use the “right” side of the road again. As soon as we hit Hong Kong, the grand old former British Colony, everything was switched back to the “wrong” side, and we kept going to the “incorrect side to get into taxi’s. That should be short lived again though, since as soon as we get to Beijing in a couple days it will be back to the left side with steering wheels, and to the right side of the road with vehicles themselves.

One other cool thing we’ve noticed in many Southeast Asia countries so far is an extra, smaller sized lanes on the “ditch” side of traffic. These are not wide enough (safely) for a car to travel, and are generally meant for animal carts, bicycles, motorbikes and pedestrians. In Thailand they are almost exclusively used by motor scooters. In Laos there weren’t many except in towns, and they were most often used for parking, or as motor scooter lanes when clear. In Vietnam we actually did see a couple ox-carts and bicyclists using them, even along the side of an 8 lane raised highway. That was certainly quite the contrast!

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December 18, 2007 by Rick.

Our flight leaving Laos to Vietnam was slightly delayed and we didn’t get in until later in the evening, almost bedtime. We explored a little bit before eating a late supper upstairs at this nice but very narrow little new boutique hotel.

(Mary Jo, Caleb or Connor, if you’re reading before getting to Hanoi on Dec 20 pay attention for some tips! And make sure to see the puppet show!)

Food near the hotel was difficult to find. We could go about 5 blocks one way (South I think it was, but the maps were not oriented to the “standard” North, so it’s difficult to be sure) near West Lake were a bunch, (as well as the nummiest chocolate/pastry shop I had encounered since Cusco in Peru!). Heading East from the hotel a few blocks took us through a major shopping district and various daily markets. A few blcks frther East was a much larger lake, some geat restaurants and the highlight of our trip to Vietnam, the wateer puppet how. I show preface such a grandioise comment with the explanation that we only had tyhe smallest amount of time in Hanoi and in fact all of Vietnam. We flew in late one afterrnoon, got to the hotel in Hanoi in time to have a meal, unpack a bit, walk up and down one road and then pretty much go to bed. With only one free day in the capital city before flying to Hong Kong we weren’t really sure what we would be able to accomplish.

The half day or full day city, countryside, or ocean bay tours all started no later than 8:00 AM! Not our cup of tea at the best of times. Never mind the extremely heavy emphasis towards Ho Chi Min! Good gawd! There was his mauseleum where the body is on display with twice yearly fesh changes of embalming fluid and skin moisturizer. After that was his statue (and park) errected (constructed) to celebrate his life, then there’s another Ho Chi Min monument to celebrate the commie victory in the war, the Ho Chi Min this, and the Ho Chi Min that… The current government is clearly hanging on to him as a strong focal point while letting go of most of his ideals. There was also a visit to “Lennin Park” (and statue) on a tour. We opted for none, and instead I wandered out mid morning and eventually worked my way to the water puppet show box office only able to get tickets for the 9:15 PM show! (There were five shows per day.) The puppets all had elongated horizontal sticks controlling them which were hidden by the water. There was a six piece band adjacent to the water stage as well that were excellent! The puppet show was in 11 stages, or scenes. There were obviously elaborate wires and trigger mechanisms threaded through the sticks and up into the puppets that controlled extra lateral movements, mouth, arms, tails and whatever other apendage individual puppets may have had. It started off with fire breating dragons, complete with lit up sparklers, coming up from under the water and completely captivated us for the rest of the show. (Except for Luke a bit who struggled heavily three-quarters the way through to keep his poor tired little eyes open.) I got some spectacular pictures and video throughout.

After that, we grabbed a taxi home to rest before heading to the airport first thing in the morning. Our hotel was very newly built, and very boutiqeish without being outrageously expensive. This was the last of our second GAP tour, and the booked accomodations were way more extravegant than we would have stayed when booking on our own. This hotel was very narrow, (along with most all buildings we saw in Hanoi) but was 11 stories tall. It only had six to three suites on each floor but was very nice. The restaurant at the top was also amazing, with corespondingly high prices. Gone were the days of ordering a full plate meal (from Thailand & Laos) for $3-$5. Instead we were back to paying $14 for a burger and upwards of $30 for a steak. The view was nice at least!

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December 18, 2007 by Rick.

The rest of Laos was very enjoyable. We started seeing the same other caucaision tourists at different temples and museums, and then again in the next day or two in different towns. It was as if there was a standard itinerary that all tour companies followed. The capital city of Laos, Vientien, has less people than Red Deer, at around 100,000. That province (one of seventeen provinces in Laos) has the highest population of all provinjces in the country at just barely over one million. I think that the total population of Laos is just around six million. WIth few people in the cities this means that there is an unnatural amount of rural population still living along waterways, in the abundant backcountry, and all stretched along the highways and roads. Urbanism has yet to explode here.

One very cool thing we saw throughout Laos (but no other Southeast Asian country, including our future visit to Vietnam) were the tractors. They were not traditional ride-em tractors as we are used to. Instead they are a direct replacement for oxen or water buffalo. I have a couple of pictures on our web gallery already. Essentially, they are a big engine, with a visible, open clurtch, on top of two larger, fat drive wheels. Extending out the back is a long arm with two handles that house the controls. Think of a large rotertiller with two big wheels at the front instead of the tines, and then extend the control handles to an overall length of about 2.5 meters. This allows the “driver” to still sit at the front of a wagon and hold the handles just as if he were almost still controlling water buffalo by reigns. We saw lots of these things plodding along the side of highways, or going through town. Most had families riding in the four-wheeled wagons, but some had huge piles of cargo. This could be crops, to huge bundles of bamboo or wood, or even furniature and other goods going to stiores to be sold. For crop work I suppose that the farmers would merely replace the wagon with wahtever field implement they needed at that time.

Our guide told us that several years ago the goveernment decided to subsidize these mechanical animal replacement beasts, and pretty much every one in the country jumped at the opportunity. Originally they just offered a little money for villiagers to help them build fences for their animals OR a little more money in exchange for the animals in order to get a tractor. Our guides strong impression was that the people thought that the building of fences (even with a little monetary help) was just WAY too much like work and they opted en mass to get modernized instead. I asked how these subsistence farmers (about half of the people that have these walk behind tractors) could possibly afford gas!!! The guide said that they just adapted and learned to make or grow more goods to buy fuel. He said that there are barely any beasts of burden in the country at all anymore. To partially substantiate this, none of the five of us saw an oxen or water buffalo anywhere along our route. This naturally leads me to be highly suspicious of restaurants that have water buffalo on their menue’s. I can only presume that they were really offering dog meat from the abundance of local strays…

In Vientien (the Capital City of Laos) we met and visited over two days with a family from Sydney, Australia. The two boys were almost exactly the same age as Alex and Luke and they had a blast visiting and swimming in the hotel pool. On the second day, us three parents even consented to the four kids having a “sleepover” in our kids room. Us adults also shared a few bottles of wine and many great stories during and after supper. The next morning we had a leisurely schedule of sleeping in and packing up before needing to leave just after lunch.

The night before we were to fly out, we went by ourselves to a Lao Traditional Dance show. It was pretty inexpensive and very cool. The restaurant at the hotel we stayed at in Phalong Pabang also had a nightly show of Lao Traditioanl dance, but it was free and slightly more ametuerish. Before going to the airport, we had time for one last tour about a half hour away to the “Buhddist Park”. It was really nice with all sorts of Buhda & friends statutes and sculptures in a grassy park area. At the opposite end from the parking lot was a restaurant beside the Mekong River overlooking Thailand on the other side. There was some sort of large (about three stories high) round concrete climbable sculpture with a wild concrete tree at the top that I took pics of Claudette, Alex & Luke on from below. We’ll get those uploaded to the gallery as soon as we find a computer with DVD to extract them from…

Posted in 2007-12, Laos & Vietnam | No Comments »

December 15, 2007 by Rick.

Malaysia and Singapore had been like a direct time warp to the 70’s! The Bee-Gee’s were fresh in my mind every night before going to bed, and I heard Barry Manilou’s MANDY more times in that past week than all of my previous life combined I’m pretty sure. Even greats like Chicago and ELO were wearing thin those days… and I really LOVE both of them!

Southern Thailand was seemingly slightly more modern. The North of Thailand had a lot of 80’s pop stuff though. Very weird…. (since not all of it was actually “good” 80’s music).

In Laos at the hotel rest. for breakfast every morning they played instrumentals (mostly pan flute) of old rock/pop songs. Imagine my divine prowdness when Luke and Alex were constantly recognizing the songs, (though not always the artist). The best moment came when after only about four seconds (or ten notes) Alex blurted out the name of the newly playing song and immediately after announced that it was by the Beatles! Luke was only a second behind her. It was especially pleasing to see another tourist a few tables away cock his eyebrows, slightly impressed by the musical prowess of my darling children.

In the more populated (and later visited) areas of Laos we began to hear much more local flavor of music rather than imported old Western stuff. This was nice, but we still didn’t buy any since the disks were pretty high priced (about $4-$5) for bootleg copies. I brought our entire MP3 music collection along on one 2.5″ portable drive. So in Hong Kong the kids and I are looking forward to buying newer, fancier and larger MP3 players for an abundance of musical choices.

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 2 Comments »

December 14, 2007 by Claudette.

Hi all, I know I’m not as prolific a writer as Rick is but here goes anyway. I really enjoyed our time in Laos. The descriptions of the tour books is accurate when they describe the pace of life as slow. No one or thing moves fast, especially the transportation, but this was nice as we had a lot of time to watch the people and the countryside go by. Firstly I really enjoyed the 2 day slow boat ride down the Mekong river, the city of Luang Prabang, which is a UNESCO world heritage site, was nice with it’s very old temples, the king’s former palace, and the great waterfalls we saw just outside the city. The 5-6 hour drive to Vien Vieng was a little more stomach moving as we had to cross the top of several mountain ranges, back and forth around the corners (you get the picture I’m sure). But once in the valley near Vien Vieng and into the capital, Vientiane, it was much better. The hotels we’ve stayed at have been great. Our tour guide, Phanh, was really good as he had many stories to tell us as he had spent 12 years (11-23) as a novice monk.

At the hotel in Vientiane, Luke introduced himself to another family, mother, Mary Jo and 2 boys, Kaleb (13) and Conner (11) from Sydney, Australia. The kids had a blast together swimming in the hotel pool and we even let them have a sleepover, as all 4 kids stayed in Alex and Luke’s room for 1 night. Unfortunately they are also coming to Hanoi, and funny enough booked to stay at the same hotel as us but we leave a day before they arrive.

As it turned out with the tour package we booked, we are only staying 2 nights in Vietnam, and since we flew in late last night and have spent the morning on the internet I’m not sure we are going to get a chance to see a whole lot. We are planning to walk around the Old Quarter and take in a water puppetry show today, and then we are off for 4 nights in Hong Kong.

Have to run, take care for now. Claudette

Posted in 2007-12, Laos & Vietnam | 2 Comments »

December 10, 2007 by Rick.

After a night at a small Inn in Chaing Khong right on the Mekong River we took a long tail boat Ferry ride accross to Laos. Communism is the rule of law here, and it was not overtly noticeable, (not like I expect it to be in China anyways…). People can easily go from one country to the next accross the river and walk right past (or around) the immigration office to spend as much time as they want doing whatever in the other country. The only (minimal) catch is that all hotels on both sides require registration of your passport and in Laos they also take careful note of your VISA number. The injustice of the VISA for us was extroirdinary and hurtful. Most all Aisian, European and South sea countries were charged US$30 for a tourist VISA. Americans are charged US$35, and Canadians are charged US$42. Ogh! the injustice… The first thing we noticed after clearing all that stuff up was a left hand side drive vehicle! Way cool! Back to the side we are used to from home, even though it took some getting used to again, getting into a vehicle from the opposite side as Australia, Singapore, Malaysia & Thailand.

On our first night in Laos, luke was playing with a pet monkey. It crawled on his head and the owner took it off. When it satrted climbing up Luke’s leg again, the owner pulled it’s tail to prevent uit from climbing up onto his head again. Not enjoying being pulled off, the monkey held on to Luke even more, and then eventually bit Luke’s leg to get a better grip. So, we added a new Top four list entry to account for all of these “encounter’s” we seem to be having. It is available from the links at the top left of any blog page, or directly from:
http://weblog.jamesworld.ca/top-4-lists/

As soon as we got VISA’s and passports straightened out, we took a ride to a steel hull long boat on the Mekong River. We were going to another town, about 14 hours drive down the river. It was broken up into two days of travel on the boat by ourselves with four relaxing reclining chairs and amazing vies out the sides of the boat. Pictures of our boat (and some other larger tourist transport boats) probably won’t show up in the online gallery for a another week or two yet, once the camera DVD is finalized. It was quite nice and relaxing though at six hours one day, and eight hours the next. In between we stayed at a pretty delux hotel in the middle of freak’in no where.

Once we got to Luangprabang, (where we’re still at now) we did several tours of various temples which sadly being to blend together. The cool part of our tours here however is the guide. He grew up about a four hour drive from here in a small farming villiage, but left home at age 11 to join a temple as a buddist Monk Novice. Apparently the learning and lifestyle prospects in his villiage were pretty slim, so he decided to enter into the “novicehood”. It would typically take a boy about 20 years as a novice before becomming a monk. He spent his first six years here at a temple in Luangprabang, and then went to the capital city of Laos for another six years learning pretty decent English along the way. So, when we toured his old temple where he lived as a child (and another where he walked to school each day) the insights and stories were incredible and much more interesting than the standard tourist explanations given to everyone else. We had several others at different times leaning in to our small group of five to overhear his recollections before they were admonished by their own tour guides for falling behind.

Tomorrow we have a five hour (150km) bumpy bus ride to the next town on our tour stop. In the end we won’t be going through Vietnam much at all other than flying directly to Hanoi from Vientiane (the Laos capital city) and staying there for two nights before our Dec 16 scheduled flight to Hong Kong.

Posted in 2007-12, Laos & Vietnam | 2 Comments »

December 10, 2007 by Luke.

bunny trail going to Laus and vietnam,china,india ,kenya,egypt,jordan too Italy,germany,france and U.K were gonna end up in canada Hhhhurray ya . anyway Dad said I had to a Blog so I came up with some things Like the song .(change of subject) We got into laus on december 6 (I,m not big on date,s so consder this lucky) we took a boat to a village/town where the chilldren had wooden tops that you needed string to wind up .the older chilldren were selling things to us. the next day we went to another village/town where all the chilldren where selling things there were many dogs one kept coming up to me so I desided to pet him he took tis as a conpelment and let me rub his stomache . we left shortly after. The money is interesting 5000 kip is 50 cents.
( what I think is amazing is that alex did not write this ) Missing you (espesialy my friends)

P.S notice I was Bitten By all the anamals (even the jellyfish dad forgot to put me on that)

P.S This is in top 4 Things

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December 10, 2007 by AJ.

We are now in Laos (I was spelling it louse ) It’s really a nice place. 5000 kip ( kip is their currency) is about 50 cents. Here I’m a multi- billoinare :). I think I’m adding this to places I want to come back to. Now I really wish I was in Mary Poppins, (our Fort Smith skating carnival theme show). Oh well the carnaval might be better next year :). Miss you all!
Alex

Posted in 2007-12, Laos & Vietnam | 1 Comment »

December 6, 2007 by Rick.

For her last week with us we went to the North of Thailand with Grandma Vi. We flew up to a city cmalled Chaing Mei. We had planned on taking the train up and back with her, but it was a 14 hour trip for 12,500 baht (1,000 Baht = $30) for a first class sleeper bed, (two beds with it’s own cabin). Sadly, a sixty-five minute flight with a discount airline was only 17,500 Baht which made it far more worthwhile, but lacking in that cultural experience category. We made up for it by taking Grandma on a whitewater river rafting trip though! It was over two hours drive just to get to the start point, wheer we had lunch before launching down the river. It wasn’t near as hairy as the trip we took in Costa Rica, but still pretty good for Grandma’s first time EVER. (Never mind her general lifelong aversion to water.) We all got good and wet while having a fantastic time. This one didn’t have still camera pictures available, but they videotaped everyone who went rafting that day and sold the DVD for a very reasonable price (just under $10). Funny part is though, that we didn’t get the video that night or before we flew back to Bangkok the next morning. Instead, I went back to this hotel in a few days once we returned to Chaing Mai on our official GAP tour and picked up the DVD. I finally got a chance to watch it the next day and it was great! Fantastic video of the five of us in some tricky sections and going through chutes and over shelves. All were smailing and laughing throughout though, (even Grandma Vi).

The day previous to river rafting we had take a tour to the Thailand Elephant Conservation Center. There are several elephant camps with a 30-60 minute drive people can get to for a show and a ride for pretty cheap. We had read about the work of the Thai Government sponsored Conservation center though, and opted to pay a little more, (and drive a little further) to see it. They also had a hospital there which was sad and heartening to see at the same time. We were pretty sure that this was the place the Reader’s Digest featured Cowtown “Voluntouring” family had gone to. There was an option to stay there and learn about elephant training (in fact, you star in the shows!) and to care for the anuimals for one or three days. All meals and lodging are included for $80/day, which I thought was pretty reasonable considering the experience one would get. If I had known more beforehand I certainly would have arranged it for us all after Grandma left, (can you guys who know her imaging GV shovelling elephant poop, or riding one all by herself around the neck while it pulls logs and paints pictures in the show???). The show included showing different ways elphants pull, move & manipulate huge logs for the forestry industry, painting pictures with a watercolor brush, and doing various physical tricks, (such as walking along a 7m log as a balance beam, turning around on it and walking back!). We really enjoyed being there, except of course for learning about all of the injured elephants who have portions of their feet blown off by land mines from the war.

Once we returned to Bangkok, it was Grandma’s last night for shopping (like we could fit any more in her bags!!) and relaxing before the 26= hour journey home. Luke bag was just a little bit too small, so we packed all our stuff (inc. an abundance of heavy DVD’s) in Luke’s small MEC bag for Grandma to take back as her second piece of luggage. Then we stole Grandma’s MEC larger bag (the same as Claudette’s and mine) and bought her a cheap rolling duffel to get home with. We looked up Cathay Pacific’s luggage weight guidlines on the net and discovered that her two bags were more than double the allowable economy ticket weight. Very nervously we approached the desk and the ever so friendly agent just shuffeled the bags on through without a second glance! One obstacle down one to go… The only other concern we had was her getting the bags througfh customs in Vancouver. Luckily, she claimed $680 of the allowable $750 amount and the “nice little old (but semi spry) grandma” card palyed out well as she waltzed right on through with a few hundred pirated DVD’s and computer software worth about $30,000! (But “Shhhhhhhh”, don’t tell anyone.)

After she left we began our second GAP tour with an immediate upgrade in hotels from a $18/night ultra basic one that we were willing to pay for to a $150/night one with a huge pool, crisp nice sheets and gorgeous decor and furnishings. The internet prices also jumped from about 28 cents/hr to a little over $10.00/hour! Needless to say we checked e-mails and did picture backups down the street at $1/hour. The next day we spent wiuth a great tour guide going through various markets and sights of Bangkok. One of the coolest things was going through a six day a week morning wholesale flower market. The smells and colors were tremendous and beautiful! A few of these pictures are in our on-line gallery. We also toured some well irrigated farms between Bangkok and the Ocean (about a 12km streatch) and then flew to Chaing Mei again the next day. Back in the North we spent the afternoon touring some more Buddist Temples and sights before driving five hours the next day through the town of Chaing Rai and up to the tiown of Chaing Khong on the Meekong River, adjacent to the Laos border. There wasn’t much to see in this sleepy little villiage, but the kids and I found an internet place with blistering fast speeds that we hadn’t experienced for uploading pictures since Australia!

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | No Comments »

December 6, 2007 by Luke.

Hi everybody Just Thought I’d Let you Know that I am missing home but thailand is Great all though It pretty COLD +35 and it ain’t geten warmer Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Another thing please don’t remind me of Christmas it makes me sad : (

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 4 Comments »

December 5, 2007 by Rick.

Back at the end of Novemeber, (when we were still in Phuket) a bunch of staff from Phil’s company were planning a friendly airball game. Luckily I was invited along and graciously accepted. Airball is a less expensive alternative to paintball, (and the little solid plastic balls hurt less too!). There are some inherrant problems with airball comparred to paintball though. Mainly, bad players with a little bit of pain tollerance can cheat really easily. Over longer distances the smaller airballs lose quite a bit more of their velocity (and hence trajectory) over paintballs. Thus if you shoot an opponent at a distance of more than 15m they can easily shrug off the shot, bite their tongue from exclaiming out loud and tuck in behind cover a little more. This helps them pretend that they were never hit, and that the shot was really “close” and nothing more.

We arrived after a half hour drive to find about 5 Thai guys, 6 American and Canadian expats and 2 Thai kids (around 11) waiting to play. There were two fancy guns which could shoot incrediby rapidly and had accurate scopes attached. When any of us “new” guys tried to get those guns we were quickly told that they were privately owned by two of the guys and we could only use the heavy, slower (and way less “attractive”) rental guns. When it came time to dividing the teams, it somehow went with Thai versus Caucaision except for Phil. This made the teams rather uneven at 6 to 7 but they claimed the kids only counted as healf each. I should clarify here that the kids were in full body armour (heavy padding like an umpire wears) and looked VERY comfortable handling their weapons. I wondered if they slept with them perhaps….

So, here we were about to seemingly recreate the Vietnam war from the 1970’s. Complete with several big burly (or more easily targeted) beer bellied white guys all over or close to six feet high, and several little “Charlie’s” that were tiny, hard to track targets and could scramble around as quietly and as efffortlessly as the most deadly jungle cat. These enemies had guns though. Rapid fire, sleek, lightweight chinese manufactured guns… In the end we did fairly well. At the beginning of the first game Phil was duly sacrificed by his Charlie teammates. He suggested it was miscommunication afterwards, but they told him to go one way where three of us shot the snot out of him very quickly. Meanwhile his teammates all stealthily went the other way once we were all distraced with the high of our first kill. I didn’t make it to the end of that first game, but I was proud in getting a great surprise kill in before I was taken out later. We somehow won that first game and we started to consider that perhaps we had a chance. Then in the second game their overrall plan began to take hold. Our batteries that provided the “Oomph!” in the propulsion system were getting low. I had the key “lookout” position and my rental gun jammed at a very important moment. Naturally I was allowed to go off the course unharmed and perform any nessesary repairs. By the time I returned however our position was severely compromised by an influx of enemy sneaking up along the side that I was supposed to be protecting. We lost that next game, but still did incredibly well considering that our batteries barely seemed to be pushing those plastic beads out at all.

We insisted on charging up the batteries after that in preparation for the second game. Then we enacted our sure-fire stategy. It wasn’t so sure faire we quickly discovered. This is where the rampant cheating came to light in our minds. We had two guys surrounded o twosides and were firing like cazywith no apparent effect. He just didn’t flinch and adjusted his body so that he was just barely protected a little more. We could see each other shooting at him abrely 4m away but he was just taking the shots and pretending he wasn’t hit. (I made a point of lookig at his back when he changed shirts at the end of the games and he was riddled with welts. That gave us a minimal smug satisfaction…)

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 2 Comments »

December 2, 2007 by grandmavi.

This trip has been fantastic - it’s over all too quickly. We lucked out on the beaches of Phuket - not at all crowded where we were staying and it’s awesome how many fantastic eating places there were right on the beach. The swimming was second to none. After Phuket we went to Phi Phi Island and that was an experience in itself - absolutey no vehicles - just bicycles and carts with very narrow roadways and a b-zillion little shops every which way - I only wish I had more room in my luggage to do the shopping that I would like. Rick will probably post a picture of one of the carts when he gets a chance. The hotels don’t even lock up their front when they all go home for the evening. This is where we went snorkeling - actually it was in the same bay where “The Beach” was filmed - that was a lot of fun even though I was very nervous - but of course, it turned out to be not as scary as I had imagined - it’s all in the mind. We then moved on the Chiang Mai - from here we went to an Elephant Conservation Centre and they put on quite a good show - we also went on an elephant ride - that was an experience that I’ll always remember. The next day we went whitewater rafting - of course I didn’t want to go because I was totally PETRIFIED but anything to please my grandchildren. Luke reminded me how his dad had to force him the first time they went so, in his way (he said) he was forcing me. Once I got over the initial shock, it was quite a lot of fun!!! We’re in Bangkok now - the last leg of my journey. I can’t even imagine the word “snow” but sooner or later reality will set in.

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 1 Comment »

November 30, 2007 by Rick.

The island was very wonderful for a vacation spot. Maybe even to live there! (Guess we’ll see about that one). There were some relaxing places as well as an abundance of much busier beaches & towns. Most of the island is populated, certainly around the ocean touching circumfrance and along all major transportation corridors. There were some pretty exclusive resorts here too. The young Spanish couple living adjacent to the house we rented both worked at very nice resorts. One had individual two story buildings, on stilts, overlooking the ocean for each guest! Oh yeah, and each villia had there own private pool also overlooking the ocean. I have a powerpoint presentation that I will try and upload with a link for anyone who wants to download it and eat their heart out. It is a fairly large file, since the pics are all high resolution. For a few months or so, I have a seperate gallery with a few pictures of the house we stayed at adjacent to Phil & Joy’s in Phuket. There is a neighboring house, just about finished being built, that is very similar in style and is for sale. This new place includes it’s own pool rather than sharing one pool among four homes as the one we stayed in did. The gallery is at:
http://s114284247.onlinehome.us

One night while staying at the house, a bunch of staff from Phil’s company were planning a friendly airball game. Luckily I was invited along and happily accepted. The story on that evening is written as a seperate BLOG post in early December. All in all we had a great time and are VERY thankful for Phil and Joy taking us in (so to speak) and helping out so much with stuff. Joy also helped to arrange for Alex and Luke to attend a day of school with Josh and Kyla at the Thai English public school they attend. They had a great day there, and Luke later met a “classmate” on Phi Phi Don Island where her parents owned a diving company.

To say that our “Trip of A Lifetime!” seems to be gathering great speed and going by very quickly is a huge understatement!!! Grandma Vi is almost due to go home already too, and her three weeks has similarly gone by incredibly quickly. Our original plane tickets were only booked to getting out of China. The ticket stopped in Bangkok though, so we have yet to get some flights arranged onward to Delhi in India. We had originally planned for six weeks throughout India after two weeks in China. We added on four days to the end of China though, and are thinking of lopping off another five or so days from the other end of India to spend five extra days (than the originally planned two weeks) in Kenya nd Tanzinia. That leaves India with just barely four weeks now. This is significant simply because I am almost tempted to spend another week in Thailand when we pass through after China. Claudette probably won’t let that one fly though…

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 1 Comment »

November 29, 2007 by AJ.

eating elephants from earth. That is a poem I made. Any ways :). We went elephant riding! It was lots of fun. Me grandma vi and Mom had to have one And dad and Luke got the other one. Ours was 26 years old!!!!! I can’t remember her (his?) name though. I’m glad we went to a conservation center, not a camp! We heard lots of bad things about the camps. We got to see a little show, then go for a ride, then we went to see the baby elephants. They we’re sooooooooooo cute! We got to feed the moms to,(we also got to feed the elelphants at the show, I forgot about that.) After seeing the babys we went to an elephant hospital. Between 2000 and 2004 there was approximatly 254 sick elephants there. We did a little shopping at the market then came home.

Also we just went for our second white water rafting rafting! I think I preferred the other time but this one was still fun. It is grandma Vi’s first time. Some how she always seemed to get splashed the most :). We just came from Cheing-Mei and now we are in Bangkok.
Nothing else has really happened. Bye bye!
Alex

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 2 Comments »

November 29, 2007 by Claudette.

Well we arrived in Chiang Mai 2 days ago, after spending 3 days in Ko Phi Phi.

In Ko Phi Phi we spent one morning snorkeling around Ko Phi Phi Ley, which was spectacular. The coral wasn’t as great as the Great Barrier Reef but the fish were way more plentiful and varied. On the downside though, there were a lot of (non-stinging) jellyfish and (stinging) sea lice which freaked Alex out so she really didn’t like it. I think Grandma Vi enjoyed herself even though it had been 30 years she she last went snorkeling.

Last night we went to the Night Bazaar which was like shopping overload, imagine blocks of vendors set up on the sidewalks with hundreds of people trying to get through on a 1 - 2 foot wide sidewalk…. We tried to control ourselves as Grandma Vi already has a full suitcase to take back for us.

Today we went to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center so as to get in our obligatory elephant show and ride. We had decided that we wanted to go there as they are known for their conservation efforts and all funds they raise from admissions goes to the Elephant Hospital on-site. In the end I think the kids really appreciated what the animals can do, and we also got to see a couple of baby elephants.

Tomorrow we are off white-water rafting, I’m not sure how Rick convinced Grandma Vi to go but I’m sure it will be a riot.

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | No Comments »

November 16, 2007 by Rick.

Our hotel was fully booked from today and we had to leave. Luckily we found even nicer digs! Story below…

===============================================

Upon entering Thailand we went first to Krabbi, only a few hundred KM North of the Border with Malaysia. Krabbi was OK, we were a bit confused as to all the fuss of the travel books. The beach is about a half hour drive from town, but there are an abundance of tours to all sorts of islands and spectacular sights available. After asking around to other travelers, the lure of Krabbie would merely seem to be slightly cheaper accommodation and food prices with the inconvenience of traveling a bit more back and forth to the beach. It had a small market, and lots of GREAT! Inexpensive food so we enjoyed it for a couple of days. Alex got her hair done in a whole bunch of mini braids. This took two and a half people almost three full hours to accomplish! She loves it now, keeping her hair long, but not getting so sweaty and hot in the often muggy weather.

After Krabbi we chartered a large van to take us to Phuket for a week or two. Grandma Vi would be joining us here after a couple days. Claudette found a hotel on the web somehow that had two rooms available. These were pretty basic rooms, with a washroom and a large ceiling fan for about $30/night. These rooms sure smelled musty and possibly mildewy though, so people wouldn’t want to stay there more than a week or so… This place had only 14 of these fan rooms open, but they were constructing another 50 or so units on the same property, (right beside our rooms, from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM each day!). There were already 15 or so of these newer rooms (post Tsunami) open, but they cost a minimum of $16/night! We were here to save lots of money, not just a tiny bit. These other rooms had beautiful marble throughout, as well as air conditioning and king sized beds. A couple of them also had private hot tubs for only $165/night.

We had originally only booked for two nights in case it was a dump and we wanted to go elsewhere. This beach we were at was amazingly gorgeous, and very deserted generally. I walked a kilometer or two in both directions and there was nothing better for the same or cheaper money. The problem came though when we went to extend our booking and found out that all but one of the cheap rooms were booked for the next two weeks! So, Claudette and I ended up in a room with two single beds and the kids and Grandma Vi got a king sized bed altogether in another old room that was being renovated, (but that they opened up just for us at $60/night cause it was old but had air conditioning). After Grandma Vi arrived we did lots of relaxing, a fair amount of eating, uploading pics of GV relaxing for all her co-workers to see and some Blog posts (including the invention of Pete’s Blog, linkable from the upper left hand corner of this page). Luke made friends one day with a couple year younger boy who was Canadian and living here with his family. They had even just moved here from Oilberta! They didn’t make it back to the beach for a couple of days, and Claudette got a chance to meet the parents briefly. Close to our last scheduled day there, she gave Phil and Joy a call to try and arrange supper together some evening. This worked out wonderfully and we all had a great time catching up. He was a pilot and their kids attended a Thai public school (with an English program) rather that the English International school that is private. Better yet, they lived in a spectacular! House barely a seven minute walk to the beach, with three bedrooms, stunning marble floors and a shared swimming pool among four homes!!! Now the best news; one of these homes was empty and due for new tenants in another month so they arranged through the landlord for us to stay in it for a week, for the same price we got one two person fan room at the current hotel. Needless to say we jumped at it and decided to stay for an extra week.

I took a bunch of pics of the amazing house we stayed in as well as the deck area, BBQ, massage bed (they book to have them done at home once a week) and the pool. There were three other units almost finished being built in the same complex that were for sale. These all had their own private (un-shared) pools though, and are only priced at CAN$245,000. My mind was clicking away, working out how many other families we would want to buy with at 30, 40 & 50 thousand dollars each. The trouble is that most friends or family that we would trust enough to buy in with, are people that we’d want to go at the same time with. I mentioned this to a few friends with keen interest, but Claudette quickly smashed me back into reality, saying that we wouldn’t be able to continue our trip past Christmas, flights are $2,000 each from Edm, and take a little over 24 hours with layovers each way. Thus the idea has slightly waned… (Certainly NOT died…)

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 6 Comments »

November 15, 2007 by grandmavi.

Although I was extremely nervous (probably just the anticipation) I had a very uneventful flight. Everything happened exactly on schedule. I met a few people on the flights (I didn’t even chatter too much, LOL). Cathay Pacific is second to none - definitely the way to go. I thought Vancouver Airport was huge and it really is but Hong Kong’s is even larger. I actually didn’t leave the Security areas at either airport to make things easier for myself and I’m really glad I didn’t. I’m in Phuket and it is fabulous and from what I’ve heard the rest of Thailand is totally a magnificant place - can’t wait to see more of it.
Our hotel is pretty basic but just across the street from the grand Pacific Ocean and the water is fabulous as is the weather.
Hi to everyone and I’ll write again in a few of days after we get to our next town/hotel/or whatever???

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 2 Comments »

November 15, 2007 by Rick.

NOTE: spelling errors abound in this post since there’s no firefox 2 browser or word processor to check in. Sorry!
=====================================================================

Even though we actually had a well trained and registered massage therapist in Fort Smith for a few years, I had never gone to one before this trip. Even at Daivik a girl from Yellowknife would fly in for a week or two at a time and offer evening bookings for anyone who could afford her. This all changed in the last month of course…

I woke up one morning in our little Toyota camper van with a pretty good knott in one muscle next to my shoulder blade. This was at about the end of our second last week in Oz, and it got progressively (and uncomfortably!) worse over the next two days. I managed to find a massage place open on Sunday’s (it was a Saturday when I realized that walking hunched over in a very slow and decrepid manner was not a long term option) in Mooloolaba and booked the soonest appointment I could get. She was a fair sized girl. I’d booked in for an hour. The first seven to nine minutes were spent talking about the main problem, reviewing (quite extensively!) my health and body status questionaire, and generally sorting out what I needed. Then the pain! Oh, the sweet pain… I knew it was all for a VERY worthwhile result, but Man! did this girl (all 240 pounds or so of her) ever have some strength and Ooomph! in her. I didn’t call her off once, (sure came close twice though) and she worked out tense stuff I didn’t know I had.

My proudest moment came near the end when she casually commented on how much I had taken. “Most Aussie guys are absolute whimps, and will call me off after only a bit of pressure. It’s very frustrating when if they’d just take it a little more, I know that I get get them all sorted out in one or two visits, rather than a string of eight or ten visits over two or three months. I’d rather help them more efefctively and work myself out of some work. You have taken more than any of my customers in at least five years!” Whew, so I was tougher than most Aussie business executives who could actually afford such regular treatment, hardly something to be extroirdinarily prowd of…

The weirdest part was that she seemed to focus slightly more on my oposite shoulder muscle that I had mentioned to her. When I brought this up (casually of course) she insisted that it was in much worse shape, and liable to “go” at any time. Confused I just accepted this. I had gained instant respect for her earlier though when she quickly identified that I had had a shoulder seperation on my left side over 10 years ago (it was 20) and she quite accurately described the scope of severity. She had used her elbows and massive forearms quite a bit throughout, and near the end, those rounded blunt objects of death midway in her arm found their way into my thighs to some nerve I had never heard of before. (Leesa-Maree told me but I’ve erased that “full-on” experience from my memory.) Once again she kept going longer and longer, and I refused to say “STOP! No more please!!!” until she saw the tear starting to form in my eyes and gently let up. The second one on my right side was absolutely worse cause I knew what was coming this time. Like the dreaded spanking that a child doesn’t get right away, (he gets to think about it and dwell on the scope of severity for a few hours first) I almost cried knowing the excruciating torture I was about to endure… Sure enough she held this one longer! Truely a sadist (in such a good, well meaning way of course) I suffered gleefully at her hands knowing (in my heart at least) that it was all working towards a tremendous benefit (me joining the last fourty thousand generations of mankind in walking upright). At the end, as I was getting dressed, I asked her how many marriage proposals she received from first time paitients. She had an instant reaction of slight panic, until she saw my laughing eyes. Then I further commented that I had to get my wife a year off of work and send her to massage school for a couple semesters. She then gave me a couple addresses of two on the East Coast of Oz, but I reluctantly (and very sadly) threw them into a rubish bin outside knowing Claudette would never have the slightest interest in such a thing as a “more than a five minute massage” never mind actually having to go to school for it.

After that first time I was naturally hooked. The difficulty was in how to absorb the astonishing (yet VERY worthwhile) $75/hour fees. Luckily we are travelling, and economically repressed areas represent a repreive from said “Western” styleized fees. At the entry to Malaysia, when we were killing several hours at a huge shopping mall until our train left for KL I had my second massage. They had nine chairs lined up for doing pedicures and foot massages, but only one body massuse. I had to wait three hours from my enquiry time until there was a free booking. He was a little 145 (or so) pound guy, and I was the last hour of a twelve hour shift for him. It too felt really great, especially since he did my feet quite thoroughly first. The hour long combined back, arm and foot massage worked out to be about CAN $23. I even snuck Luke into the chair for five minutes of a back rub since he was sore after wandering around town for several hours too. This little guys pushed, massaged and bent my muscles very effectively (and wonderfully) for 46 minutes before he stopped and said I was done. I looked at my watch wondering about the remaining eight minutes that I had pre-paid for. He just sat there looking quite exhausted himself saying in very broken English while looking at his hands, that “there’s nothing left, I am out of power”. I let him off (”white devil” that I am) since he had very reluctantly fit Luke into my time. Not to mention I guess that he had done a pretty effective overall job, (with the exception of bending my RSI entranced thumbs back way too far). Claudette continually declines my offers (and strong recamendations!) for a massage herself. I will keep offering just to ensure she doesn’t have amunition to consider me too much of a selfish bastard spending the family money on such luxury.

My third massage was last night. Ummmmm, the memories come flooding back. There are quite a number of massage places on either side of the beach road, and we are in a VERY uncrowded area of Phuket. Many of these are just open air places with basic beds or even mats on the floor. On the inland side of the beach road there are a half dozen or so in buildings with actual walls. I had heard of the “special” massages available in Thailand from many people back home, and from other travelers we’ve met along the way. An English guy we met here (Dan) had told us about a busier area they had been to last week where there was a huge string of massage parlors along the roads. In this, the much more populated area, the signs were actually labeled occaisionally (every forth or fifth one he said) with “No Sex” for the parlors where the girls were gaurenteed NOT to hassel you at the end of the main one.

I went to check e-mail and type in the start of a BLOG post last night, but was actively canvased (being late at night) to come in for a cheap massage at various places along the way. I started thinking how nice such a gentle rubdown would be after a long day (it was almost 10:00 PM, and all other family members were in bed). I headed to the little sideroad that the internet cafe was on. This also had a pathway to a tremendously nice (and crazily expensive!) resort. I figured that the more reputable places would be adjacent to this resort’s beach entry path, and picked one there. The prices seemed amazingly reasonable (if not downright bloody cheap!). A twenty minute foot massage was (all prices converted to CAN $) $4.50; a half hour back rub $6; a sports massage (meaning vigerous?) was $10; an all over 60 minute body massage was $9; and an all over 60 minute “oil” body massage was $12. I opted for the 60 minute oil one, and then sent me to the open air roof with a little 120 pount thai lady who knew very little english. She gave me a 65 minute wonderful workover everywhere but “there”… (thank gawd!) and I felt compelled to still tip her another 100 Baht (equivelent of $3, since the original massage price was only 400 baht! or $12).

Most bizzarely though, on my way back to the hotel I was canvassed again. Here I was still outrageously reeking of linament oil, and with my skin all glistening, and she wanted to offer me a massage??? I kindly explained that I had only just had one and began walking away. She called me back suggesting that I might need a “special” massage now. I then realized that she must have seen me come out of the “reputable” place and figured I was disappointed or something??? So, mildly curious (nothing more than curiosity, HONEST!) I asked how much. She asked how much would I pay. I was growing impatient and wanted to go, so I exasperatedly replied that I had no idea since I’d NEVER had one before and was just curious, but really wanted to go to my hotel and get to bed. After more talking among the two girls, the English speaking one replied that a “specail” massage would be 1000 baht. She asked more in a negotiating tone of voice expecting me to come back lower I guess. Naturally I said thanks, bid them a good night and ended up somehow at Les & Tina’s room (Dan’s In-laws) swapping stories over a beer for another hour. I have no idea what “special” is: being full on, or just a hand; don’t care either… But I know there are many readers who would be “curious” to know the price. So it’s 1000 baht, or CAN $30 and is most likely negotiable down from there…

Grandma Vi is gonna get one (or more if she gets hooked like me!) tomorrow at the reputable place. Just for fun I might send her to other place and tell her to ask for “special”. But, knowing Grandma Vi, she would be slightly suspicious of my wry smile, and then Claudette would spill the beans. I’m sure that the massage girls would just laugh at her anyways… At least, I hope so! (Eeeeeewwwwwweeeeee!!!!!!)

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 6 Comments »

November 12, 2007 by Rick.

A wonderful (and faithful) blog reader suggested that: “We could start a new game called “where is Grandma Vi”" Well… neat idea, but that’s a little ahead of the game. She’s probably over the Pacific right now, about an hour or two your side of Hawii still. She doesn’t land here for another 15.5 hours! Since there’s no doubt that she’ll be plenty tired, we’re planning very little for her first afternoon and evening here. After that though, it’ll be GANGBUSTERS crazy busy! We have tonnes of stuff planned: like relaxing on the beach, relaxing by the pool, relaxing at the beach front restraunts for three meals a day, and then occaisional leisurely strolls down the beach once we build up our strength. Agh……..

Actually, we have two “busy” activities planned while she’s here with us in Phuket. One is an evening spectacular buffet and elephant (50 of ‘em doing stuff) and acrobatics show. The other is an all day (8:00 - 5:00) guided slew of activities including: whitewater rafting, (YES! we’ll post the pics of her screaming) an elephant ride through the jungle, an ox cart ride, posing on a water buffalo, 4×4 backcountry tour and swimming in a warm jungle waterfall pool. Their websites are: www.islandsafaritour.com and www.phuket-fantasea.com

After Phuket we have no idea specifically where we are going. We just plan on heading North up the coast to Bangkok and then Cheng Mei and seeing what happens?

I wonder if my Mom took one of her computers over to grandma’s house so she can still read the blog postings and see the pics? Maybe someone else is printing ‘em off for Grandma, Idaknow…

We still have plenty of itinerary left for anyone else who wants to meet up somewhere… Start planning.

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 10 Comments »

November 10, 2007 by Rick.

Telephones & telecommunications the world over (so far) are an interesting thing. In Central and South America, everyone had cell phones. Not just one per household even, I mean almost all individual family members over 16 it seemed. The best part for us was that the internet WIFI VOIP phone worked in many many places, so we made many fun calls to various family and friends that were dirt cheap and quite a reasonable quality (considering!!!). Thanks gawd for Robert & Leesa’s home internet connection for making calls while we were there. Other than that, I only found one place with an open connection fast enough for us to use in a little strip mall a few weeks into our travels there.

The best way to communicate we’ve found, is by gmail chat. It is an instant messaging (IM) piece built directly into their online webmail page. No extra chat software need be downloaded and installed (like MSN, yahoo chat, ect) since the google chat works directly from a browser window after logging into a free Gmail acount. Quick & easy! And you can see people logged in and start chatting immediately! For anyone who wants to sign up (or has an account already) go to:
http://www.gmail.com and our user name is james.rick@gmail.com

As cool as the WIFI internet phone was, it proved to be pretty much useless in Australia as I mentioned above. At least we used it quite a bit in South & Central America before I lost the darn thing in Singapore. Instead, in Malaysia we bought a new cell phone. While this is something I always believed (and said occasionally to some people) I would avoid, it just proved to be absolutely invaluable while traveling. Throughout practically the whole East coast of Australia that we traveled, public payphones were few and far between. Most campgrounds had one, but they were a pain to use! They were often vandalized and required specific coins (which we didn’t have eight of to call around to different campgrounds or tour operators to check availability and pricing) or not giving change for the larger coins that we did have an abundance of. It was also incredibly useful to be able to make calls while driving to make arrangements for a couple of days ahead, but during business hours.

In Australia I bought the cheapest, most basic phone (Vodaphone) that I could find (for about CAN$50) to use there. The rates were OK, mostly about AUS $0.30 per minute (I think?) to call around within the same State, and AUS $1.50/min to Canada. I had planned on using the WIFI phone throughout Asia and didn’t worry about getting a more versatile cell phone. That turned out to be a huge mistake of course, since the Vodaphone was VERY expensive per minute to use in Asian countries, and (EVEN WORSE!) it didn’t work like they said it would in Singapore and Thailand. That’s a $50 credit I will likely NEVER see again from Vodaphone. Worse yet, their customer service numbers can’t be reached from any phone so far here, so I can’t even demand a refund… Live and learn.

After the vodaphone hassle, I did some quick self education on cell phones and bought the cheapest tri-mode one I could get in KL. It was only about CAN $110 and included tonnes of fancy options! Somehow I restrained myself from getting the Nokia E90 messaging phone (about CAN $1,200 in Malaysia) which was about the coolest thing ever! All phones over here have removable SIM card for changing providers (and as a result, phone numbers) in different countries that you travel to. This is incredibly uncommon in North American cell phone models. We seem to get completely screwed by the providers there! (And I haven’t even talked about rates yet!) The versatility of giving the consumer choice with changeable SIM cards is such a fantastic idea, yet we don’t even know about it or consider it. We just eat up the crap and garbage that the huge money making cell phone corporations feed us. Most phones here don’t seem to have nasty, locked in, incredibly expensive plans either. They are mostly all pay as you go with incredibly friendly and adaptable plans and rates. Even in Australia the pay-as-you-go plans were nice. The vodaphone let us pay $29 for $139 of credit that expired in thirty days, (but could not be used to call from other countries). For $30 we got $60 of credit that expired in 90 days (and could “supposedly” be used overseas). Or for $50 it was $100 of credit for 90 days. In Malaysia & Thailand the rates are even better! While the vodaphone was “locked” and couldn’t use other SIM cards, these phones here (in Asia) are completely open to change around cards at the wonderful whim of the owner. A SIM card here (so far in Singapore, Malaysia & Thailand) costs between CAN $8 and $15 which usually includes about $2 to $3 of “starter” credit. After that, “top up” cards can be bought for $3 to $10. These allow the user to just enter an unlocking code and “poof” more calls.

In Malaysia the local calls were very cheap, and even calls to Canada we calculated out to be about 30 cents! (Yes, Canadian cents!) Thus, we were making calls to Canada like crazy at the train station trying to use up our $15 balance. Even after three long calls, we still have a $9 credit on that SIM card that doesn’t expire for another two months. Way cool!

In Thailand, the calls to Canada seem marginally more so far (about CAN $0.33 per minute) but local calls are also so quick and easy! The one bad (sorta) thing about the Malaysian SIM card we bought was that text message sending capabilities (plain or multimedia SMS) required a separate VISA registration and charges, whereas the Vodaphone in Australia was just AUS $0.50 per 160 character message sent. I haven’t looked into yet for Thailand since we only just got here yesterday afternoon, and picked up the new SIM then.

So, sadly a tri-mode cell phone is something we would probably consider a necessity for traveling on your own (not an organized tour), when traveling for more than two months or so. I have no idea what we’ll do with the phone once we get home since we really have no use for one in Fort Smith, (never mind the fact that Northwestel only has analog service!). I’m not even sure if we can get a “Mobility” SIM card in Canada?!?! The cheapest tri-mode phone that I could buy in KL has a video/still camera, push to talk, and all kinds of other features. We might sell it (privately or pawn shop? who knows?) or I might just keep it for when the travel bug hits again!

For anyone who wants to send us an SMS (since we rarely have the phone turned on to receive calls) the number is:
+66-085-790-0565

Although someone told me that the “zero” preceeding the area code is only used when dialing within Thailand. If this is true then the number will be:
+66-85-790-0565

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 2 Comments »

November 9, 2007 by Rick.

Was one of the most pleasantly surprising countries we have visited so far. The lodging was slightly less expensive (perhaps about 75%) than the same type of room in North America, but the food was quite a bit cheaper, (and Nummy!). Malaysia is a remarkably progressive country. There were certainly some poorer areas, but they were seemingly much fewer than in the other countries of the Southeast Asia region. The larger portion of the population are Muslim, but there are also very significant portions of forth, fifth and sixth generation Chinese and Indians.

I mentioned in a previous post comment that the later two seem to feel significantly discriminated against for government jobs, holding office, getting post secondary student financial awards (even though their proportion of higher academic achievement is significantly greater) and other such things. Once again, this is merely the strong perception of most residents we spoke with and not a result of our own observations (which were not exposed enough to said areas to draw a relevant conclusion. The one thing that we did notice was that a highly dsiportionate amount of the shopkeepers and restaurant owners (and workers) were Indian and Chinese.

Market prices here were generally OK. Services and food were distinctly less expensive (20-50% of the full cost) of North America. Goods however varied. We bought a (cheap) short “D” handled spade at a hardware store for CAN $2.30 that would have cost at least $15 (or more like $20 if not on sale) in Edmonton. We also bought a couple of plastic buckets (about 3L and 8L) for just under and just over CAN $1. Computer software, audio CD’s and all DVD movies are astoundingly cheap, but presumably that’s because they are all pirated. Electronic hardware on the other hand is barely less than what we would pay in Edmonton. Maybe about 85-90% of the sale prices at home for brand name TV’s, computers, portable audio players and game consoles. There were some audio systems (and an awesome looking DJ system Robert!) for phenomenal prices (maybe 15-25% of Canadian & Aussie prices) but they were names I’ve never heard of and were likely of very dubious quality.

The economy seems very robust, both in the larger and smaller cities. The most significant thing that we noticed though was the strong proliferation of English everywhere. All the street and store signs were in two (or occasionally three) languages. English was generally spoken practically everywhere we went including the somewhat remote back alley eateries that all the locals (and us stark white Canadians) would go to. We “sorta” noticed this a bit while we were there, but admittedly (now) took it quite a bit for granted as well. The wake up call came as soon as we entered Thailand and English was immediately barely spoken or understood right from the street vendor, to snack bar cashier to train ticket window. Clearly the Malaysians have very strongly assertive English schooling in their model public school system right from an early age. All in all we were pretty impressed with Malaysia as a very economically advanced country. While we saw the destitute shanty towns on the edges of town, the majority of the population was well educated and quite progressive. This point is extra funny of course when I reflect on the opinions of most Singaporeans (sp?) about Malaysia. They were like the embarrassed upper class cousins, when Malaysia is really quite middle class compared to other far less developed countries in the region. One last example: Shopping malls in Malaysia were for practically everyone except for the poorest of citizens. Department stores and larger malls in Thailand (so far) would seem to be targeted mainly only for tourists and the very few richer people of the upper class.

So, while not quite as “cheap” as we perhaps expected, Malaysia was a very enjoyable touring experience for the nine or so days we spent there. I certainly learned much more about it than I knew beforehand. That’s to be expected of course, but most other countries (ie: Thailand or China) we here about considerably more in the media or from friends. One last forecast for KL: I expect them to build an even larger tower than Dubai, to reclaim the title, by 2020. That may sound like quite a ways off, but in the timeframe of planning and actually constructing such a monstrosity, that is very quick indeed. And as much as we enjoyed Malaysia, thank gawd (for our budget) that we’re now in Thailand where hotel rooms are $25 per night instead of $85 (or $115 in KL).

Posted in 2007-10, Singapore & Malaysia | 2 Comments »

November 8, 2007 by Luke.

STUFF I’VE DONE

1.COSTA RICA:

Experienced an earthquake
Missing Fort Smith:(
Rafting on rapids
Missing Fort Smith:(
Learnd spanish
Missing Fort Smith:(
Made lots of new friends(not just humans)
Missing Fort Smith:(
Went to Poas volcano
Missing Fort Smith:(

2.PERU:

Went to an area where an Earthquake/tsuami hit
Missing Fort Smith:(
Did and explored many areas of Machu Pichu
Missing Fort Smith:(
Went to my first hot springs
Missing Fort Smith:(

3.ECUADOR:

Did a five day tour of galapagos islands,
and saw many strange and new animals,plants and stuff
Missing Fort Smith:(
Went to the Equater (which was totally awesome!!!)
Missing Fort Smith:(

4.USA (only for a day in between flights)

First time in Las Angalas
Missing Fort Smith:(
Sat around and was bored for the whole day
Missing Fort Smith:(

5.AUSTRALIA

Sydney Aquarium
Missing Fort Smith:(
Sydney Opera house tour
Missing Fort Smith:(
Sydney haurbor bridge climb
Missing Fort Smith:(
Made new friends (and stayed with one family)
Missing Fort Smith:(
Took surfing lesson
Missing Fort Smith:(
Saw first Kangaroo
Missing Fort Smith:(
Went to first caves
Missing Fort Smith:(
Went to town of 1170 and rode in a LARC
Missing Fort Smith:(
Went snorkling (and diving but only Alex and dad did that) on the GREAT BARROIR REEF!
Missing Fort Smith:(
Australia zoo (home of the crodile hunter)
Missing Fort Smith:(

6.SINGAPORE:

Went to the Wild Wild Wet (waterpark)
Missing Fort Smith:(
Went to Escape (theme park)

7.MALYAISA:

Climbed Menara tower in KL (we actually took the elavater)(it doesn’t beet the CNtower)
Missing Fort Smith:(
Took the elavater up the Petronas twin towers up to a sky bridge
Missing Fort Smith:(
Took a tour of Penang Island (thats where we are, its kinda a state)
Missing Fort Smith:(

8.TYILAND

made a new friend
Missing Fort Smith:(
Grandma got here
Missing Fort Smith:(
saved a friend after he fell in a pool(he was 4 and the pool was over my head)
Missing Fort Smith:(
went on another rafting tour
Missing Fort Smith:(
Grandma Left here
Missing Fort Smith:(
started tour to laos
Missing Fort Smith:(

9. LAOS

Went on boat tour

10. VIATIAM

11. CHINA

So as you can see in each and every country I have been missing Fort Smith, and all you guys!

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

LUKE

Posted in 2007-10, Singapore & Malaysia | 6 Comments »

November 7, 2007 by Rick.

Claudette brought over the “Top Four” lists from her “Claudette” blog to the main blog. It is something that we will update and change as we continue to travel. The link is reachable from any reading blog page at the upper left hand corner, underneith the “home” link.

Also, just to break things up a bit, I made a seperate page for NEWS items that we might have missed normally. A few of you who requested it I have upgraded to “Editor” status to be able to add to this timeline list. Anyone else who wants to add things from their neck of the woods on occaision need only send me an e-mail ( rick (at) jamesworld dot ca ) or write a quick comment requesting to get access to edit this page. It can be reached from any blog page in the upper left hand corner, under the “Home” link, labeled “WORLD NEWS”.

Simply click on the “WORLD NEWS” link, and then click on the “edit” link in the lower right area of the page (after the last current entry) and add a date and the news brief. I put a few things there already that people have mentioned in the comments, but anyone who’s registered should feel free to add more. (ie: Leesa or Robert: we’ll be expecting federal election results please… )

I realize that we could also read a newspaper (on-line or otherwise) much more thoroughly and regularly than we already do, but internet time just goes so fast, and time in general to spend on this versus relaxing seems sparse for some reason???

Lastly, Claudette and I have been periodically quizzing the kids on all sorts of things that come up as a semi-academic review of things we’ve done, places we’ve been or questions that somehow arise. Some things that I will ask again they have put in a REFERENCE PAGE, also linked from the upper left corner of readable blog pages.

Posted in 2007-10, Singapore & Malaysia | 5 Comments »

November 7, 2007 by AJ.

I so get them!!! what have I done:
I touched a Boa Constrictor!
(and this other really freaky green poisonus snake)
Gone scuba diving!
Kuddled with a koala (I misspelt that by aciddent by the way)
Gone parasailing(It was totally awesome!)
done zipling(don’t worry I know thats not a word!)
been to Machu Pichu
climbed a really tall tower in the amazon jungle
(thats all I can think of for now, I had lots but the message deleted itself (Ididn’t do it)

Stuff I still gotta do:
Go horse back riding (PLEASE DADDY!)
have a snake on my shoulders.
climb the Eifel (Eifal? Eifil?) Tower

thats all for now, expect this blog to be edited.

Alex

Posted in 2007-10, Singapore & Malaysia | 1 Comment »

November 1, 2007 by Claudette.

Well, it’s just barely been a week since we’ve left Australia, and I must admit I really miss the familiar and the annonymity. So far we stick out like tourists even more so than I felt in South America. It’s a bit eerie to be watched everywhere we go.

We have kept to most of the big shopping centers and attractions, although we did venture out to Chinatown while we were in Singapore. It’s pretty much just like the movies with small 4′ x 8′ kiosk selling everything and anything. Yesterday we picked up a couple of watches for ourselves. Rick bought a Rolex off the street and I picked up a “Guess” watch from a kiosk for the equivalent of about $3 Canadian.

In Singapore we did mostly family stuff with going to the water park and theme park, while in Malyasia we have done more sightseeing. The hotel we ended up picking is fantastic as it is walking distance to most attractions and the KL Monorail is right beside it. Tomorrow we are off to the island of Penang, so we will be doing more relaxing on the beach.

Rick’s already nagging me to start thinking about contributing some writing to the family Christmas letter, Ugh… I can’t believe how quickly time is flying by.

Posted in 2007-10, Singapore & Malaysia | 5 Comments »

October 31, 2007 by Rick.

EVERYONE here (and even in Fort Smith, just ask your friendly neighborhood reporter) calls their capital city, “KL” with affectioate reverence.

We arrived in Johur Bahru a little after lunch on Tuesday and weren’t due to leave for Kuala Lumpor (KL) until almost midnight. Thus we had several hours with nothing to do but go shopping!!! Luckily this city on the edge of the border with Singapore had some pretty impressive shopping options. The mall we hit had five floors up, a ground floor, and one basement floor. The ground floors are considered G here, and the first floor is pically the second story up. Thus, in our current hotel, while the elevator says floor nineteen, we are actually up on the twentieth story. This mall was huge! It seemed to stretch back into far corners that were not even fathomable from the central court. There were numerous electronic stores offering all sorts of camera equipment, personal audio players, ten tonnes of cell phones, computer gear, console & portable gaming, and of course all kinds of software… And what prices!!! Unbelievable they were… $5000 plus AutoCAD for only $3, and the latest $80 computer games for $5. All vendors assured me that they were perfectly legal legitimate copies, and so I indulged with a few titles that would be handy later once we bought a computer.

We also are fortunate that I had alreaady hacked our two PSP’s with an open version of the operating system. There were tonnes of PSP games for sale as playable image files on large sized DVD as well as UMD’s. The image files allow the games to be played directly from the flash card instead of having to carry the PSP designed UMD around, and having to physically swap them out. Most outlets also sell already hacked PSP consoles for the same equivelent price as what they are sold for in Canada ($200).

Our train ride was not quite as we expected since all of the first class bed suites were sold out. Thus we were stuck with second class beds down a long hallway. It was an OK experience and interesting to experience at least once we figured. The price of the First Class cabins are so disgustingly cheap that they are easily worthwhile though. The second shock came today when we tried to book first class bed cabins to the next town (7 hrs) near Penang and were told that all were long since booked. Even worse though was the fact that the second class lower beds (down the long hall with individual curtains) were booked as well. The upper bunks are slightly less money, but we would have to load our suitcases up there as well as us two Forty year old’s having to clamber up there!

Speaking of bags, we saw another caucasian couple (much younger of course, and no kids) travelling with just a small, carry-on size, hard sided suitcase and a small rucksack each. The contents of these four bags combined would probably have easily fit into Alex’s suitcase I think. Both Claudette and I stared at them in open mouthed wonderment, admiration and not a little jealousy. Clearly they had no electronics, (with associated chargers and converters), mosquito nets, and sleeping bags for hostels, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…

The hotel we ended up booking in KL was quite a bit nicer than we could afford, but we didn’t really make arrangements before arriving. The Concord is walking distance to all the major sights right downtown though. It also has very good rates for an upper class type business hotel. We’re paying CAN $100 per night for a very large room on the top floor with a king sized bed (and cots) and it was highly recamended in the Aisia Frommer’s book we have. Hopefully we’ll make up for this higher price in Thailand. Food prices here are quite reasonable though. Rotten Ronnie’s today cost us CAN $15 for lunch and desert for four. Plus it helps a bit that a huge breakfast every morning is included with our room price.

Our first day we went to the KL tower, a single structure similar to (and slightly smaller than) the CN tower for cityscape viewing. It offered a spectacular view all around and we could easily see all of the Petronas twin towers several blocks away. he smog here was noticeable at that height, but we could easily see about 8 km, before it started to become pretty hazy at +10 km. We went yesterday to the twin towers for the free tour of the linking bridge, but the available tickets for the day were sold out long before lunchtime apparently. So, after breakfast today we went right to the ticket booth at the site and only goy 5:15 PM tickets! When we finally made it up the view and feeling was very cool. The “Eye of Malaysia” ferris wheel was a tiny dot in the distance and we quickly realized that it wasn’t worth going to after being in both tall KL landmarks. The Petronas twins are named for the Government owned Multinational oil and gas corporation which operates in Malaysia. Sadly this means that when I would say Pet-ron-as thinking it was some exotic Malay word, I was completely wrong. Turns out that it is Pet-ro-nas, simply derrived from “petrol” like seemingly all other aspects of our world these days.

Compared to the Malaysia & London tourist ferris Wheels, the “Eye of Singapore” was huge though, and sadly wasn’t opened yet when we passed by there. It is larger than London’s and is slated to be open in mid 2000. The KL Tower is the currenty the third tallest tower in the world, after the CN tower in Toronta and one in China. The display downstairs had a very nice gallery and displays on all of the worlds 20 tallest towers. The Petronas twin towers were actually the tallest buildings in the world for several years until Taipe 101 opened a few years back. Now, those crazy, “money growing out of their ears” guys in Dubai are building the hugest of all! It will be open in about 20 months I think I read, and once finished will not only be the tallest building, it will exceed the CN tower as the tallest tower, and also will take the coup de grace over some (unmanned) TV tower in the midwest States somewhere as the tallest manmade structure on the EARTH! While the Taipae building is 101 stories, the Dubai one is about 160!!! These guys don’t want anyone breaking their record anytime soon it would seem.

We killed the day waiting for our free bridge tour with some other errands and attractions. The best was a 30 minute demonstration of Malaysian dancing put on at the Tourism Information center halfway between the twin towers and our hotel. A dozen men and women in extravagantly colorful outfits (which changed multiple times throught) gave wonderful displays of various regional dances. Most were all very lively and upbeat, and Luke even joined them for one dance when audience members were invited up. Sadly, his extreme caucasionness came through loud and clear as they tried to teach him the steps to the national dance in under 300 seconds. At the end the MC invited audience members to come up on stage for pictures with the troup, and said that she would give “The Foreigners” the first opportunity. I nodded yes, and she invited us up immediately. So, I stood up and strted going to the end of the isle only to find that Claudette was sitting there calmly waiting for all the other foreigners to go up first. When I pointed out that we were the only “whity’s” among a packed gallery of about 100 school kids, and other Asian (Chinese, Indians, etc) tourists. She and the kids joined me after Claudette stood up and looked around at the rest of the crowd.

We have to stay one extra day in order to catch the Saturday train to Butterworth (near Penang). Saturday is the only day that there is a daytime train sceduled. Then we plan on spending almost a week luxuriating on the beaches in Penang before heading accross the border to Thailand. We have amost confirmed our GAP tour from Northern Thailand, through Laos and ending in Hanoi on our flight date. We (half of us anyways) just thought it would be easier than stumbling along in a country which isn’t quite touristy and organized with that focus yet.

Posted in 2007-10, Singapore & Malaysia | 2 Comments »

October 28, 2007 by Rick.

What a huge city/country…

After an eight hour flight (I was expecting something much shorter from my memory of looking at the globe) we arrived to full darkness at 2:00 AM. Speaking of globes… before we left I aked Leesa-Maree to borrow one from school and bring it home to show everyone Canada versus Australia. She managed to find a little tiny one (about 10cm in diameter) that showed political boundaries from a few years ago and had a couple towns marked. Funny enough though, the ONLY town marked in the Northwest Territories was PINE POINT! Very odd of course, since Pine Point has not existed as a town for probably around twenty years! It was a mine town, and one the mine was closed all houses, buildings, power poles were removed when the mine shut down.

Singapore was quite an interesting visit for the few days we were there. Our plane arrived an hour later than scheduled which meant we arrived at the hotel about 1:00 AM! Yes, we were all tired and cranky. The plane was quite nice though… It was a boeing 777 with all the fix’ins. 10 seats accross a row and a fully customizable entertainment console in every seatback. This one was even better that the 747’s though because we could play networked games (checkers, backgammon ect) with each other. Plus these phones could call other passengers, dialled by seat number. What a great way for singles to meet up to possibly join the “MH club”.

The taxi (or “taksi” as they spell it here) system was pretty cool in that everyone lined up at a booth inside and prepaid the fare to whatever part of town you wanted to travel to.Very efficient and saves negotiating with (and/or getting screwed by) the individual drivers. The first thought as we emerged from the aic conditioned terminal building was dealing with the overwhelming heat and humidity. We all agreed that it was just as bad or even worse than Figi. Our second vivid impression of Singapore was while driving from the airport was watching a cab just ahead of us in the adjacent lane at a stoplight. A rear door causually opened and an early 20’s guy began expelling the contents of his stomache on to the pavement. Now, as one might imagine, we were not a little stunned to witness this after hearing so much about spitting in public and posession of gum being illegal in Singapore. Thus we were slightly relived to see that perhaps they weren’t quite as stringent a society as travel reports (both published and verbally from others) had led us to believe.

Our hotel was actually a large hostel complex with larger patio areas in front of each single story, “condo” style unit. There were many people milling around even in the wee hours when we were walking to our room. This unfiled fact would come to haunt us the next night. To check in we were actually dropped off at the wrong part of the resort. The driver had dropped us off at the slightly) nicer part of the resort complex. The night desk clerk there called the other officeo get an electric cart to pick us up.

We slept in the next day, and wandered a few blocks away to semi shopping complex called “Downtown East” for some 11:00 AM fast food breakfast. With a variety of western franchises and some local ones we chose an elaborate buffet place to pig out at. After walking back through to the main complex we decided to hit the waterpark there. It was smaller scale with a slant towards younger families. They did have two water slides which were rather tame with gentle curves compared to West Ed. This place did have a huge tube (8 passengers!) river ride which we had to force Luke to go on and all enjoyed a couple times together. The wave pool was very small, (even slightly smaller than the Millwoods pool) but right beside it was a two person tube half pipe. This was VERY cool! Alex went with me the first time and she was too speechless with fright to even scream!!! Somehow, (under deep coercion and trading a variety of privelidges) I even concvinced Claudette to go with me. Alex forgot to warn her mother NOT to go down first (with her back to the downhill slope and looking up at me) and all Claudette said she saw was my bulk blocking out the sun and sky above her as we went hurtling down at about a 75 degree slope. It is rather difficult to explain but I will try and find a website link.

That night the neighbors partied until a little after 4:00 AM. Worse was the fact that we had an adjoining door though which all noise easily flowed (in fact it semmed as though it might have been amplified!). My loving supportive wife refused to allow me to ask them to tone it down a bit or to even phone the front desk. We asked around the next morning and quickly realized that since most homes here were very small that this was a cheap way for friends and/or family groups to get together for a party. The room next door to us was completely vacant (and unslept in by the looks of it through the open curtains) so everyone just took a cab home when the party wound down. During the day as we had walked through, there were very large groups BBQing with charcoal in front of rooms which we knew could only sleep 4. Now we know better! It also probably didn’t help that we were booked in there during a weekend, never mind the fact that it was a long weekend!

Since we had originally only booked for two nights, when we decided to stay a third night we had to change rooms. Also in this area was a small amusment park called escape. It also had most rides for slightly younger families. Claudette stayed in the room to do some more relaxing while Alex, Luke and I went in the rain to check it out on Sunday night. Most rides were closed during the rain but we went inside to wait anyways. The kids went through the haunted house a few times while I threw some cash away at the typical midway games. I tried one however where I won on the first try (MR2, or about CAN $0.62) of rolling balls down into slots to accumulate a small or large number, but not the range inbetween. Cleary the gods were smiling on me and I scored a huge purple Snuffelupagus. The kids were impressed by it, but insisted on calling it just a plain old elephant. I think it had big sweet droopy eyes just like Snuffy though. Since it was much too large to take with us, I gave it away to the lifegaurd at the pool as we went to check out.

We booked ourselves a mid afternoon train trip to the main Malaysian city (Johor Bahru) just on the other side of the border. This took one hour, and to save a huge amount of money we had to buy tickets to the rest of the way to Kuala Lumpor from within Malaysia. Unfortunately all the first class sleeper cabins were booked, so we were stuck with the second class sleeper hallway. It’s difficult to describe but I shot a few pictures. The carriage is lined with top and bottom bunks with individual curtains.

Posted in 2007-10, Singapore & Malaysia | 5 Comments »

October 27, 2007 by Rick.

It was incredibly difficult spending our last few days in Brisbane with the Dray-ras family knowing that our full six weeks in Oz just “whooshed” by. While we all knew our continued journey would by amazing and have lots of great, new experiences, it was still troublesome building up to a goodbye (for a couple years until they come and hit our Northern climate!). Their kids spent the last two days at home with us fooling around, playing and relaxing which was very nice. Then they dove us to the airport for a last big meal together before we ran off to security just in time to board the plane to Singapore. Robert, Leesie, Riley, & Emile… we’ll miss you guys! and thanks for making our visit down under so hospitable and memorable!!!
_______________________________________________________________________

A few last (last for Australia that is) differences in things that struck us are noted below:

Fuel pumps - To fill up vehicles is much slower because there is and less pull distance, and not once have we seen a holding catch. Bummer for us lazy people. The flow still stops as soon as there is the slightest bit of backsplash into the nozzel though.

BBQ’s - One campground we used in the last week had a half grill / half fry plate. The open flame side was filthy though so we bought some gorgeous porterhouse steaks and a brush and received serveral weird looks from others walking by that night. The one REALLY cool thing here is that many public parks have free or low cost ($1 for 20 min) coin operated ones available for use. On one tour boat we took, they BBQ’d on a half ‘n half, but sadly only used the open flame part to warm a large pan of poached fish…

Farm fields - same as Oilberta except the trees are much closer to the road here, and roads tend to be quite a bit windy-er on the secondary highways.

Crib boards - haven’t seen one at all in Oz, never mind a fold up travel board for us as a family

Toilettes dual flush mode - We started noticing this in Latin America but it seems to be practically EVERY single toilette here in Australia. Their are typically two buttons: with with a low volume of water and that doesn’t seem to have excessive force, (for urine). This lighter stage probably uses slightly less water than our usual single flush toilettes in Canada. The other “ferocious mode” lasts about 3-4 seconds longers, seems to have much more water behind it, and has an abundance of pressure that I would expect to force even the biggest of pices of solid human waste down the tubes. If you try and do two stage flushing while sitting down, all of your cheeks are gonna be soaked! Often times you’ll need to wipe the seats of fresh water that splashed up as well. This of course goes hand in hand with:

Water Conservation: For the Alberta government Enviroment departmet (or the GNWT’s for that matter) to talk about water conservation seems completely off track and irrelevant for most of Canada. Here, it is a simple fact of life, and not something to be (even slightly) trifeled (sp?)with. They have increasing levels of severity with all kinds of associated restrictions for each. The Brisbane area has apparently been at level for for well over a year now which means they get penalized havily for any quantity used over a monthly quota. I forget what that number is (I’ll ask Claudette and update this space later) but it was not at all less than the amount that almost all homes in Taloyak used due to in-house water tank deliveries and no underground lines. It was ample for a family of four to live life and do laudry on, but certainly not enough to water lawns or gardens with, (or wash cars ect). Most people here are buying large plastic tanks to drain their gutters into to use outside.

Urinals - have all been troughs since we left Canada. I haven’t seen a single stall porcelin urinal other than passing briefly through LAX way back… The urinal troughs can get quite creative however, from creatively tiled artwork, to stainless steel beamoths that are shiny and blinding to look at (especially when there are skylights above.

Public bathrooms - are seemingly few and far between! Practically no restraunts have them (as is the law in Canada) and we frequently struggeled in small towns to find public facilities. Most often they were in the main town square park or behind the largest pub. When needing to wash up before or after a meal out, waitresses or owners were only too happy to tell us that the nearest sink was “just accross the street, down a block and a half, and then a dogleg left accross the forest over there between those two tall buildings” Rather exasperating…

Eggs - In Latin America and all throughout Australia eggs are not refrigerated. There are sold in stores on a regular shelf and people don’t seem to bother about refridgerating them at home or camping either???? I forgot to ask Leesa-Maree about this…

My Beard - must be weird chemicals in the air here, but on occasion when it grows for a few days, it seems to be bleached considerably from the usual dark brown/black to a much lighter color. Almost grey… very bizzare!

Shopping carts - all four wheels swivel, which makes it seemingly much more awkward to control. Good in tight spaces but terrible for tracking a straight line down the aisles. Even worse is watching customers come out with loaded carts and the entrance ways and parking lots have slopes. A few baby carriages I’ve noticed lately are like this as well.

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 3 Comments »

October 24, 2007 by Rick.

We spent all day Tuesday at the Australia Zoo, and it was SPECTACULAR! Everything was laid out well, and the animals had tonnes of room! (unlike Lucy at Edmonton’s Story Land Valley Zoo). There was (quite understandably) a very strong conservation message at all exhibits and shows, but it was well done. We hit it first thing when the gates opened at nine, and stayed right up until they closed the park at 4:30. The highlights were many of course, and everything, from the displays, to shows, to animals and even the food services were done up very well.

We got lots of pets and cuddles in all types of animals and even paid for a family picture with a super soft (and inherently cuddly) Koala Bear. Many of our zoo visit pictures are uploaded to the website picture gallery now too! We had a wonderful hot day all in all, (drinking tonnes of water naturally) and even shot some pics of the Tasmanian Devil. It was much cuter than I ever would have expected! The staff also took our camera and shot some extreme close-ups of the zoo’s tiger cubs. The croc show was stunning, never minds the snakes… AGH! There was even the most amazing picture or Terry, with her pet cougar, before meeting Steve. We’re talking amazing Farah Fawcett, big, beautiful feathered back hair here; Claudette had the drag me away from the huge wall picture… Mmmmmmm…

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 3 Comments »

October 23, 2007 by Rick.

We managed to sneak into Brisbane Monday morning and grabbed the Chinese VISA’s without a hitch. After a bookstore stop (for Lonely Planet Asia books) we headed an hour North towards the zoo. Instead of staying inland close to the zoo, we read a brochure that described how the had free shuttle buses that pick visitors up from 6 coastal towns. Claudette and I promptly decided that staying adjacent to the ocean again was a far more interesting option. Sadly though, when we phoned to book spots on the bus, we discovered pickup times were only 10:00 with a half hour drive, whilst the zoo opened at 9:00 AM! We therefore set the alarm and drove ourselves out early to get a full day in there.

We had a wonderful last frolic Monday afternoon, after arriving at our campground early afternoon. We toyed with visiting the zoo for a few hours as well before spending the full day there Tuesday. Instead Claudette and I decided to rent a surfboard, and spend one last afternoon at the beach. The waves were more volatile here than we’d experienced at other beaches and we all took a pounding trying to stand up on that bloody thing again. The wax was poorly done on the board which didn’t give the kids as much grip as they needed. As a result they were sliding off really easily in the heavy waves. My excuse is that the board was just too darn sort for my weight and as a beginner, it was too small to support me. That coupled with the poor waxing meant that I would easily slide off even just ducking under a wave.

The kids built a few sandcastles over the afternoon, which of course were subsequently eaten by the oncoming tide. Alex and Luke still haven’t come to grips with the fact that anything they build in wet sand is gonna be toast in a few hours… Two Aussie kids (a sister & brother about 16 and 13 or so) were playing catch with jellyfish upper body parts that had washed up on the beach. Well, catch is a generous word. They were actually trying to throw the pieces 3-6m and smack each other. It was pretty funny to watch. I couldn’t get the kids to kick the soccer ball around with me much cause they were gravely concerned with building the sand walls higher and thicker to combat the ever encroaching water. Claudette however kicked it around for a bit and we had some great smacks back and forth.

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 1 Comment »

October 19, 2007 by Rick.

We are (very sadly!) winding down our Aussie visit. We left the mine after I had a great visit (and an up close tour) with the guys there and went about an hour South before camping. The next night we traveled to Cania Gorge National Park and spent a night in that beautiful spot. It was not unlike even more spectacular ones we have visited in the Rockies before, but still a nice change of scenery for a day. For Friday night we headed East, and almost made it back to the coast. On Saturday or Sunday we are going to try and meet up some friends of Claudette’s girlfriend who live in Mooloolaba, (a little ways North of Brisbane). On Monday we are going to try and sneak back to Brisbane to pick up our passports and Chinese VISA’s, (or to re-apply if there were any problems). Monday afternoon we are heading back North for an hour’s drive to hit the Spectacular “Australia Zoo” on Tuesday. Somehow on Monday we are also going to pack up a schwack of stuff to send home by mail.

The kids (via Luke of course) are making tonnes of friends wherever they go, and there is never a dog at any of our campgrround’s that goes un-pet by Alex Luke (and often me when I go to track them down to come back for bedtime!)

We’ve spent a little bit of time looking into places to stay in Thailand, but if anyone has experience with a great place, or has any other reasonable suggestions feel free to send us a note!

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 3 Comments »

October 14, 2007 by Claudette.

We are having a great time. We did 2 trips with the “Cruise Whitsundays” company and I would highly recommend both. We put up some of the pictures from Saturday’s trip out to Knuckle Lagoon on the Great Barrier Reef. However you will have to wait and see the pictures from yesterday’s sailing adventures on the “Camira”.

Australia has been so much fun and relaxing, we’ve met some great people from Australia as well as a few Canadians on the cruise yesterday. I was fun comparing notes as to how much Australians are like Canadians. Personally I have felt more at home here than even when we’ve been through the US.

The family has been getting along really well, eventhough our campervan is rcrowded. Alex complains that she has to share the bed with Luke, but there hasn’t been too many fights. My only complaint would be that there has been several nights where it has been very hot in the van. Humid hot with no breeze, but the kids haven’t complained about it too much. A few times we’ve had to have cold showers before going to bed. Needless to say, I have a new appreciation for air conditioning.

We are leaving today to go visit a Rio Tinto mine near Clermont which is about 3 or 4 hours south. Hope that all is fine with you. Take care, Claudette

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 5 Comments »

October 14, 2007 by Rick.

After the caves we drove a few hours North to Airlie Beach. We went again to the outer reef on a super fast and remarkably stable boat. At a 1770 campsite we met up with a couple who worked on that boat who had previously worked up North at a company in Airlie Beach. They both strongly suggested that we use a company called “Cruise Whittsundays” if we wanted do do a similar trip. So, in Airlie Beach we booked another Great Barrier Reef cruise and booked a wickedly fast (and beautiful) sailing cruise for the next day with the same company.

This GBR trip was very similar to the one we had taken from 1770. The main difference was the boat. While the other one was a nice twin hull that rode the rough seas reasonably well, this one had computer controlled anti-rocking mechanical devices built in which made the ride even nicer for the weak stomaches of Rick & Luke. There was also something not easily pinned down that made this cruise seemingly quite better than the previous one from 1770. There was just a stronger seemless integration of how everything ran and the general feelings of confidence and friendly professionalism conveyed. It probably also didn’t hurt that there was a little over 30 crew members for about 86 passengers! The boat usually carries around 340 people but we were lucky enough to have picked a light booking day I guess. I certainly couldn’t complain about any aspect of our tour from 1770, but… if I had to suggest one, then Cruise Whittsundays would be our strong recomendation by the entire family. Of course there was one tiny little incident with the prissy little photograpgher (Antoine I think the whiney little bitches name was), but he got over it after we chatted a bit. Like many tours these days with a situational advantage, they had a good scam of pictures going. At least they generally allow us to purchase copies of the digital pics these days, not like a few years ago when you could only get a crappy print (rarely done with dye-sublimation). Of course you have to pay $20-$30 each for printed photos before you are allowed to pay an extra $5-$10 for a digital copy. Capitalism is certainly alive and well in the tourism industry! They did get some excellent shots us of course! (Which we bought digital copies of and are currently uploading to our galery.

In addition to offering diving they also offered a non-certified “beginner” dive for those 12 and up. Luke was naturally disappointed, and then Claudette was ruled out due to the open heart surgery she had undergone over 33 years ago. Alex and I jumped at the ($120 each) opportunity. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life so far!!!! The guide tightly clasped each of Alex’s and my hands in hers and after a brief intro off we went! It was very controlled and we didn’t go any deeper than 6m. I used to say that diving was probably no big deal because you get to see the same stuff snorkling… Clearly I was absolutely delusional and was only fooling myself all these years! I sorta wanted to take a diving course before, but it just never worked out with timing and arrangements and stuff. Now I hafta take one as soon as I can. I was a little freaked at first just sitting on the edge of the platform breathing with my head less than one meter submerged. They gave us three or four minutes to get accustomed and during this time slight panic gave way to abject wonderment! Alex REALLY enjoyed her experience as well. (Hopefully she writes about it VERY soon!) Seeing the coral and all sorts of fish and plant organisms close up was phenominally more amazing than snorkeling unfortunately. My first words upon surfacing at the end were, “WOW! I’m gonna go broke doing this now I think!”. That trip is listed at:

http://www.cruisewhitsundays.com/gbra.aspx

On the next day (Sunday) we went on a sailing tour on a stunningly gorgeous ($4.5 million dollar) sailing boat. It was sleek, fast and very comfortable. They just went around a few of the Whitsunday Islands. We did another snorking tour on another reef which was stunning. Then we went to an amazing beach with sand that was 98% pure and actually squeeked when we walked on it. The beach was about 7km long, stunningly beautiful (along with all the Assuie & German bikini’s of course) and we smam, relaxed and frolicked for an hour or so. After heading back to the sailboat we had a magnificent BBQ meal (they had been feeding us snacks all day long previously as well of course). Then the free booze was available and Claudette heartily indulged (for both of us) on the couple hour sailing trip back to port. That tour is:

http://www.cruisewhitsundays.com/camira.aspx

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 2 Comments »

October 14, 2007 by Rick.

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2007

After leaving 1770 we headed North a few hors to a town called “The Caves”. Here there is privately owned land with a series of spectacular DRY caves on it. They had been running tourists through this area for well over two hundred years now, and they even had a little campground beside the reception. We got there in the late afternoon and only planned on staying one night. So the next morning we woke up planning to take the tour, then check out and head North. The “basic” one hour tour was so incredible and enjoyable that we needed more! The “intro” tour (as we now call it) is suitable for all ages, (babies in strollers to 100+ year olds) and has a couple sections of stairs, some handrails and has switchable illumination all the way along. The sights and inside views were amazing and we barely had to crouch slightly in one or two spots. During this tour our guide alluded to a slightly more complex “Adventure Tour”.

It took some convincing on the part of Luke, Alex and myself; but eventually Claudette consented to staying an extra night, and staying for a second, longer adventure cave tour in the afternoon. She went along because the guide insisted on having two other s for safety. Claudette went on the understanding that she would NOT be crawling and that she would be taking the easy way around whereever possible. It was along some of the same portions of routes as before, but there were crawl holes and thin passages to go through. The first few were pretty cool and we got a little dirty slithering around. Then the guide sent us (kids and I only) into one set that had a small entryway, and larger cavern inside with lots of short dead end passages and only one way out via a boost into a hole in the ceiling. The kids had a tremendous time excitely going too and fro, here and there looking for the way out. The guide had told me approximately where to look so I let the kids explore all of the other options first with their flashlights darting around all over the place in front of them. Eventually I gave them a little boost at the spot and jumped in myself to find the passage back to Claudette and the Guide waiting for us in the main cavern.

After that we (the three us only of course) went in to “The Whale’s Belly”, a spot where the original guides kids used to crawl into and hide scaring original tourists by making screaming sounds and crazy noises. There was a crack in the Whale’s Belly which allowed sounds to get out into the main cavern. Getting in entailed going up a fairly steep incline, which quickly went down at a similarly steep incline for a few meters. To continue on out of this spot was a very tight squeeze wiggling around through a passage called the “Nutcracker”. There was a small (large fist sized) outcrop right in the middle which affects most men’s ability to safely navigate this particular twisty, 35 degree incline passage. Luke and then Alex both bot through without too much problem. I was forwarned that all adults would have to have their arms straight out ahead of them to narrow up the shoulders to even have a hope in hell of worming through. I got lodged partway into the passage, (right at the nutcracker) and quickly determined that it would take considerable effort (and maybe about 20 minutes!!) to finish getting through the 5m or so long passage. Suddenly a thought flashed into my head that expending such effort would no longer be fun, and I wormed my way back down into the whale’s belly. Backing out from that point to the main cavern was no easy feat, but I managed to scramble up the steep slope backwards to ensure that I would land feet first into the cavern where I had begun. The guide was quite shocked that I was already out, since most people who chicken out tended to come out the wrong way (head first), and wait for help from a few others on the outside.

After that she took us to a couple spots that only the kids could do while we watched from either end. I took some spectacular photos and a bit of video using the light and the enhanced night mode at different times. One other favorite part of all of us was the cathedral. This was one cavern with stunning vaulted ceilings and a bunch of pews brought in for weekly church services. They also book weddings and all sorts of other meetings and socials in there. She told us that there was a two year waiting list of weddings and other bookings! On the first tour she asked for volunteers to sing and Luke went up to the front and gave us all a beautiful low key rendition of “Put A Little Love in Your Heart” to a round of wild applause from everyone at the end.

The caves tour was an absolute highlight for Australia and for Luke and probably Alex, almost of the entire trip so far. A website with further information is: http://www.showcaves.com/english/au/showcaves/Capricorn.html

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | No Comments »

October 12, 2007 by Rick.

Some odd meandering thoughts that have struck me in the last few weeks…

But first: H A P P Y 4 0 th L E E S A - M A R E E ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Welcome to the status of: OLD….

Ketchup - doesn’t really exist here. Not only is it called something different (tomatoe sauce) it is not physically like the North American “anticipation” (old Heinz commercial reference) that we North Americans are used to. It is much runnier and a little less sweet, and a tiny bit more tangy. Claudette forced us all to eat at Rotten Ronnies one day, and the only good thing about it was the (presumably) imported heinz McDonald’s labeled ketchup! It was nummy! (the only food part there that was any good at least). As an aside, Luke has a new saying besides “Rotten Ronnies” that I love. It’s sung to the tune of the current McD’s commercials: “Bah, dah, dup, bah… BLECH!”

Intenet WIFI - is way more locked up (encrypted) here in Australia than I’m used to in residential and even shiopping areas of Canada. In South America every tourist town had govt. supplied free WIFI hotspots, (usually in all the main squares and parks) fro the tourists. Not here in a civilized capitalist pig Western country, nope! There’s all kinds of hotspots but they all cost mucho dinero. Even in the South American main (non-tourist) cities I would find lots of open routers that we could use the phone on. I’ve spent a few hours walking around a few neighborhoods here looking for open connections to no avail. The only free spot I’ve found so far was at a little stip mall, near a (very yummy) bakery.

Pickup trucks - are practically non-existant! I mean really barely any at all. There are a few Toyota small sized work trucks around, and a very few little Ford’s, but of of these are actually slightly smaller than the Tacoma. The ford is just like a baby little Ford courier my Dad used to have in about 1972. As far as full size (1/2 ton, 3/4 ton or even 1 ton) pickups go there just aren’t any that we’ve seen on the roads. Conversely of course there are sport utility vehicles in massive abundance. They in fact are everywhere and I would say that over 80% have snorkles. This is so cool! Even though barely one in fifty would probably actually go in water deeper than 10cm, the fact that they can is just so exciting! If I had a snorkle vehicle at home we would be the envy of the whole town just based on cool factor. Shame we can’t even think about affording that kind of vehicle…

Toyota - vehicles are in massive abundance here and Latin America. They are just everywhere. As good as everyone know they are in Canada, people just tend to get sucked in by the hype and baloney of Fiord, GM, and Dodge I guess. The prices of toyota compared to the domestic three are starting to get much closer though, and that coupled with how incredibly well Toyota (or Mazda, or Nissan, or whatever other Aisian car company) vehicles last now certainly makes them a much more clear choice. Anyways, don’t feel bady for Toyata because they are incredibly successful in many other parts of the world it seems. Hyndi was another very common vehicle that we saw all ovver the place in Latin America that hasn’t seemed to have broken onto Aussie shores much yet.

BBQ’s - I’ve mentioned previously a few times, but there is an exception at this campground we’re at in Airlie Beach. They have the standard huge flat flame fired frying pan units, but they also have one consumer type unit with a grill that allows the flames to lick and caress your food. Good for them! I say…

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | No Comments »

October 12, 2007 by Rick.

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9
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We stopped at a very quaint (as a matter of fact, one could call it quintessentially “Quaint”) town called SEVENTEEN SEVENTY. It was fairly smallish, and was obviously only recently (in the last decade or so) developed. The beach was quite nice, but had very small waves. The town (Hamlet really) is named for the year that Captain Cook first hit Queensland (his second landfall in Australia). They’re VERY prowd of that fact too! Just down the road from our campsite were a couple of tours for the area. One was a Great Barrier reef day tour which we did on our second day there. The other was an amphibious vehicle tour accross the bay, down the beach, accross a couple more seawater creeks, and up to the state’s first lighthouse. These (wonderful) local people were fanatical about their local lighthouse restoration, beleive me! The tour itself was pretty cool. It was a larger, US military amphibious vehicle which held about 30 tourists in the 5 ton cargo area. We put a couple pics up at the . The lighthouse was fun, and pretty standard, but the stories of the caretakers and community around it from 200 years ago were fabulous. Alex even bought one of the “stories” books about the area to read.

One other cool part of this Amphib. tour was a stop at an otherwise impossible to reach sand dune for some sand boarding. This was great for two reasons: (1) it’s a mega tonne of fun! (2) we had lost the disc with the pictures and video from the previous sandboarding tour we had taken. This was a little bit of a smaller hill than the previous one we went on and they used wave boogie boards instead of a wood laminate board (similar to a snowboard) that the other tour used. This one would actually end up in the water normally, but since we were at low tide, we just slid accross the mud. I set the distance record for that day on my first trip at which Alex and Luke were pretty proud. Since we have to walk UP! the hill, I only planned on going once (lazy old fart, I know…) but some y little 15 year old beat me and gave a very smug look afterwards. Thus, there I was once again trudging up the sandy hill (literally three steps forward and sliding two back!) to teach the little twirp a lesson. His rides were still not as smooth as I knew I could go, (thus gaining more distance) plus he had taken at least six or seven runs to beat my one. To much wild cheering from most of my family, (and a couple other 40 year old guys who also didn’t care for the attitude of the young whipper-snapper) I had a fairly nice run and sailed past the kid’s mark. I gave him a look that let him know how upset I’d be if he beat my mark again and made me scale that defying mound of desolate sand. He didn’t appear to care and tried a couple more times in earnest, yet unsuccessfully before it was time to leave.

The next day we finally got to go out to “The Reef”. It was the Southern portion, and the company screamed us out there in an hour and a half on a dual hull, 100 seat comfortable boat. Once in their “lease” area, there was an anchored pontoon platform at which the main boat, two glass bottomed boats, and a semi submersible docked, and the snorkling and diving tours left from. It was very well organized, and our day was very full. The snorkling was similar to what we experienced in the Galapagos, (which is of course to say absolutely phenominal!) but the Great Barrier Reef is just so much more vast. And this is just the local area we were in I’m refering to. The ability to thread their/our way in and around passages of reef in the glass bottomed boats, the semi-submersible or snorkling was mind boggling and very formidable (and REALLY cool!).

The trip out there wasn’t so much fun for Luke’s and my weaker stomaches, but we were ged up. When we had a bit further North to Airlie Beach we plan on taking another similar day tour as well as visiting a Rio Tinto Coal mine in the area.

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | No Comments »

October 12, 2007 by AJ.

We are still in Australia. We leave soon (I think). Since I last wrote, we have seen some of the great barrior reef and done some caving( I think it is actually called spelunking or something like that, must have been a guy named George Spelunk :D) The great barrior reef was really cool but the part we saw was kinda disapionting. We didn’t see alot of anything or alot of bright colours. I think we all really preferred caving! It was way fun, first we did a tour were we walked around and she was telling us how these brides, lond ago would get married in the church(which I’ll tell you about in a sec) and they had to go this long long way, in knee deep guano (bat poop). and People would also go to sunday mass , what you would do is pay for it on saturday(which cost an arm and a leg!) then on sunday you would get up really early get into your best clothes and take a 3 hour horse and wagon ride, then walk in knee deep guano( which I forgot to tell you was filled with all sorts of bugs, roaches, worms and maggots, just to name a few :D) in there best clothes and get all sorts of stuff in their shoes! Then they would sit through mass which was about 3 hours with stuff moving around in thier shoes! Then they would tromp through the guano again and get even more stuff in their shoes! Afterwards there was a picnic and many people would use it as an excuse to sneek of and empty there shoes then, take the 3 hour ride back home. It was very popular aparently.
There church was so so pretty there had speakers set up so we sat in there and Luke sang, (he sang put a little love in your heart by the way)and we listened to a song and had a light show. I was very cool. Then there was some bridges and a very ziggy zaggy passage way that we had to exit out of. Our guide had to let us out in the light becaus it had rained that morning so it it was kinda slippery (there was many sighs of relief when she told us this!)
I have found the perfect sport for lots of kids! Adventure caving! Thats what we did once we finished the tour of the cave. We all liked the cave so much that is what we decideed to do. All you do is you get a guide and they tour you around the cave leading you to many spots where you do something like belly crawl into a pocket then look around and try and get out! My favorite was called the whales belly, and what we did was we got boosted into a wiggle hole then are in a big space enough for 5 adults. then you have to get another boost and you go into this spot where you crawl on your belly and get into another space big enough for 2 adult and you have to crawl out of the whales blow hole it was awesome fun! my dad had to turn around. Me and Luke made it through every single one! My dad didn’t do 2 and my mom did 1 I think. Another fun one was kids only. I was the smallest one and I was this crack in a rock only just big enough for me! you had to climb up it but there was only one hard spot which is hard to get your leg through. I manged to go up twice and down once before we had to go. Anyone under 9 would not have a single trouble!!
Bye bye!!!!!
Alex

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October 6, 2007 by Rick.

We just spent three tremendous days in Brisbane lounging around, visiting and relaxing. Every day the kids played a variety of games from fort building, lego or treasure hunting (complete with custom maps in bottles!). Dinners were wonderful with Leesa-Maree’s spectacular seafood spread, one night of Dim Sum and the last consisting of amazingly juicy T-bones cooked over flame on a BBQ. Leesa was intreiged she said by my previous blog comments about all of the BBQ’s having flat pans that just fry everything. Even their own BBQ was a half combo pan & grill. The issue most Aussie’s consider is how to clean the dam grill afterwards. They personally took it out after every meal and scrubbed it with soap and water. I suggested the filthy(er) North American method of just burning the crap off for an extra ten minutes before the next meal, and then using the BBQ brush to rub off the crisp remaining pieces of carbon (formerly meat) from the grill. Any which way, they can now use the second half of the BBQ without tinfoil and have the juices of the meat locked in by searing. Mmmmm, Mmmmm, great! Other than just eating we of course spent every evening right up my alley of either playing 80’s music trivia games, watching 80’s music videos or just chatting about 80’s music while playing with all of their neat new computer gadgets. This was naturally coupled with a few bottles of wine or beer once the kids were setteled in.

For some crazy reason, Robert & Leesa-Maree invited us back right before we leave Brisbane to spend our last few nights with them. This is an option all four of us are very delighted to plan for! We (the four adults) all are “mostly” about the same age, have enormously compatible personalities, and have very closely alligned parenting ideals. Now we just have to figure out how to lure them to Canada for a few weeks in 2009!!! The only bad part of Brisbane was having to deal with the Chinese Consulate there to get our travel VISA’s. They were astoundingly rude, and as abslutely as unhelpful as I think they could possibly have been. I’ll save intricate details for “stories over beer” time with everyone, but it was a very unpleasant two mornings. (Yes, I had to go there twice…)

This afternoon before supper at the campground Claudette and I reveiwed our Australia itinerary with a calendar and decided to make some extensive revisions. Mainly, we are no longer going to go all the way to Cairns. We want to be able to spend a few days (read: two nights to four nights) at a place before moving on. Thus our schedule simply doesn’t allow us to travel all the way up. Instead we are going to go as far as Airlie Beach (between MacKay and Townsville). This is near the bottom of, but still close to the Great Barrier Reef. From that area we will take some snorkling tours out to the reef and some local islands which are supposed to be very nice as well. We have heard from many fellow campers over the last three weeks about the Town of “1770″ and so are heading there tomorrow night for a few days. After that we’ll go to Airlie and take in their sights. On our way back down I am going to try and visit a Rio Tinto mine, and then we’ll visit some friends of Claudette’s girlfriend in Mooloolaba before going to check out “The Australia Zoo”. After seeing this new National icon, we’ll be back in Brisbane and getting ready to fly to Singapore, (while likely making more pirate maps, drinking more red wine, and listening to even more 80’s music!).

We don’t have South Asia planned out very well yet. So far we have a place booked in Singapore (almost as expensive as Sydney!) for two nights while we work on getting Laos & Vietnam VISA’s. We’re still toying with possibly visiting Angkor Wat in Cambodia after hearing so many good things about it. We haven’t confirmed any dates with Grandma Vi for meeting up yet either…

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 2 Comments »

October 4, 2007 by Claudette.

Well, as you can tell from reading Rick and Alex’s entries, we are just having a blast in Australia. We’ve met some great people, and had some great wine. It’s been just the best prevention for any homesickness. Luke has made friends in almost ever campground we’ve stayed in, and usually their has been a friend for Alex too (even a few boys).

I am loving some of the different words Australian use and may just have to keep using them. Especially “feral” which is used like we would use the word “bad” and the word “dear” which is used to mean expensive.

Anyway, I know this is a quick note but we are leaving Brisbane today. So we are packing up after making ourselves at home with friends we made, Robert, Leesa-Maree and their kids, Riley & Emile for the last 3 days.

Glad everyone is enjoying our blogs. Take care, Claudette

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 5 Comments »

October 3, 2007 by Rick.

We’re having so much fun visiting and staying with a family here that we haven’t had time to check out the City at all. OK, that’s only a half truth I suppose. We met up with a couple a few campgrounds (and a few hundred KM) ago who graciously invited us to stay at their place when passing through Brisbane. We got here yesterday and pretty much feel like long lost friends! My trip to the Chinese embassy this morning into the city was a big bust, since they were closed for a holiday. For lunch we all went out for Dim Sum (sp?) and then computer accessories shopping, (for Robert, not us). The remainder of the evening we spent with another two neighbors, all kinds of visiting amongst four or five (or six?) bottels of wine and capped the evening off with an extensive (well, a dozen or so) review of their huge 80’s music video collection. It’s just like being at home! Spectacular eating, drinking and socializing with friends…

On Thursday morning I’ll try the consulate for VISA’s again, and then we’ll probably just slough around for the afternoon. On Friday we’ll either go for a day tour of the local bay, or (if it’s booked up) we’ll head up North a bit to the Australia Zoo. After spending a day at the zoo we’ll continue North, inland, to Cairns to take a Great Barrier Reef tour and then start slowly working our way back to Brisbane on the coast. Although… It’s very tempting just to stay in Brisbane for a few more weeks!

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | No Comments »

September 30, 2007 by Rick.

We called some former Fort Smith friends who now live in Australia the other day. We were getting close to the town that they had moved to almost two years ago and wanted to arrange a beer together. Sadly for us they had moved! And not just a little ways away either… They moved a few thousand km away to Darwin in the “Northern Territory” where we hadn’t really planned on going before. Upon finding this out Claudette and I poured over the maps and made a five week calendar on some paper to calculate dates and distances. Sadly it just worked out to too crazy of a schedule to get up there and back to Brisbane via Cairns by our October 26 departure date.

A FEW MORE CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND OBSERVATIONS:

While Oz is half a world away, both peoples seem very similar. We are both generally quite friendly, love to share a good beer with friends, are polite, have a great, easy going nature and are put off by the common arrogance of many Americans. They seem to LOVE! camping and getting away for the weekend as much as we do. The main difference so far with this is the much more elaborate “campgrounds” (read deluxe caravan resorts) they tend to flock to here. I’ll admit though that the only area of Australia we have seen (and are going to be visiting) is up the East coast, which is rather more “touristy” than most other parts of Oz. The real kicker is that all of these campgrounds offer BBQ’s (free or coin operated) but in fact they are not a BBQ as we are used to. Instead there is a flame directed onto a large surface area square skillet with a small vent at the back end for excess heat. In effect we are frying everything, rather than cooking it over open flame. I’m not sure if this is common for people’s home BBQ’s as well, or if it is only representative of campgrounds (for fear of liability of people using open flames or some other such reason???).

Music CD’s are crazy expensive! Most all of them are $30, regardles of being a new release or Fleetwood Mac’s RUMORS. On the other hand, wine is ridiculously cheap!!! In general across the board, I would say that wine is about 2/3 the prices in Canada (after factoring in the 0.9 exchange rate even). Beer is a tiny bit more, or about the same price including the exchange. As a quick example, I bought a bottle of Wolfblass Port for about $8. We don’t even have Wolfblass Port in Fort Smith, but if we did it would certainly be way more than that! Claudette and I have tried about 7 beers so far, (including Grosch, a lightweight waste of time) but I haven’t yet struck upon the perfect replacement fot Sleeman’s Honey Brown that I miss dearly.

As far as WIFI computer security goes, Aussies seem incredibly diligent about securing their networks. Almost to an unprecedented level, most all WIFI broadcasted sites that I’ve polled have been encrypted so far. As a result we’ve had very limited ability to use the WIFI phone here.

One last thing (as would be expected by anyone who knows us) that we noticed at EVERY campground so far, is that we are unequivicably the last ones up in the morning. Now this is not by just an hour or so either… I’m talking about a few hours here! Like, many families are up and around cooking breakies at 6:00 AM, (when I groggily slink to the shared bathroom for a quick P). We started by Claudette (and sometimes Luke or Alex) waking up around 7:00 or 7:30, but in the last week we have all pretty much universally been dragging our butts out of the Van by 9:00 AM, (often in order to pack up and checkout by 10:00!).

IN OTHER NEWS:

We plan on staying in the driveway of a great couple we met camping last weekend when we go to Brisbane in a couple of days. Robert and a couple of the other guys has suggested a few beers to try, and we’ll pick up some more wine and baily’s before heading there. Leesa Maree (I think that’s how she spelled it?) is going to grab a copy of our Ecador DVD showing the coriellis effect experiment since she’s a school teacher. They have two younger kids and are all off on vacation still for another week for when they invited us to stop by on our way through.

Saturday I sang on family karaoke night at the campground we are at. Naturally Claudette wouldn’t be anywhere near where there’s public displays of people being silly & embarrassing. When she found out that Luke was going to sing, and that he had asked me to sing a song as well, she left in a flash out of there, back to our camper van. I didn’t really feel like public singing that night but since Luke asked me with such sweetness in his eyes, I of course went to have a look at the song list. Imagine my delight when I saw “I Will” by The Beatles! I thought, “Wow! Not only will I not suck too badly, but I might nail it well enough to have a chance at the $100 prize for males over the age of 16″. I already had the video camera there to record Luke’s awesome performance, and gave it to Alex to film me. Lo and behold, a great rendition of the song didn’t quite happen and I got hit over the head with a frying pan, (figuratively of course). The version he played for me to sing to was by Allison Kraus, which I had never, ever heard before. Naturally she “made the song her own” and changed the timings and inflections all over the place. (I hope your eyes are filled with tears of both pity for me, and laughter with me as I recount this traumatic and party loney (my kids and some of the crowd cheered me on feverishly at least) devastating experience… )

It really wasn’t fair that so many other (drunken) spouses were there cheering on their (drunken) “partners” of course. So anyways, I sucked, but did my best anyways, and laughed all at the same time. At the end the crowd cheered my effort, and Alex & Luke gave me BIG hugs… Incidentally, Luke won the $100 prize for all kids under 16 for his rendition of THE ARCHIES “Sugar, Sugar”. He makes me proud! Sadly we later found out that it was only a hundred bucks off the next stay at this campground and it was non-transferable. I went to reception to book to stay one extra night than our already planned three nights. Being School holidays in the two surrounding states, all sites were completely booked for the day after. We checked with the manager and since we live in Canader and are probably never coming back, she made the certificate transferable to another family. That way (I suggested to her) they might at least get $50 out of someone else on a two night stay…

Any which way, camping is definitively the way to travel here. We have met so many more people and had great conversations than is even remotely possible in a hotel. I believe the cost savings to be slightly dubious (of camper van & $50-$80/night fees versus rental car and budget hotel stays) but the social benefits are stupendous!

On a very sad note, we have thought of more events that were on the now dead DVD. I had shot a couple stills and a bit of footage of Alex and her friend Jake frolicking on the beach unawares… Also, we went on a sand dune tour and boarded down the sand hill a few times each. It was an absolute BLAST! and we had some great footage and still pictures of that. We will have to send the disk to CBL labs in Ontario and (at about $250 !!!) see if they can recover much of the data. Their website (with some cool pics NOT of us) is:

http://www.portstephens4wd.com.au/

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 1 Comment »

September 28, 2007 by AJ.

Yesterday we have almost completed our firsts! We had already seen our first possum and while we were driving to our next campsite, I spotted our first kangaroos! Notice the I spotted them no one else had beleived me until I forced Luke’s head to turn :). There were only little ones. We saw similar ones later that were the same size and we were told they are about in their teens. I’m not sure if we got any pictures, because the first time we were driving and it was to fast then the next time my dad had killed the the camera and I’m not sure I it got (ummmmm) unkilled.
Two camps ago I took my first surfing lessons and they were so awesome!! I’m still in the early stages but I can manouver on my belly and stand up and balence for a bit (20 seconds Is my record I believe). Now my mom totally has to buy me a surf board! If only I could keep it up! Theres no place to surf in Fort Smith!
Also When I got surfing lesson I saw my first real live Jelly(fish, I’m talking Aussie now!). It is a blue bottle and there tenticles can grow from about 2 inches to 2 metres! For every say 50 meters on the beach there was probably about 30 of them! Luckily this only happens in the summer because the wind blows them in (or something like that).
The only first we have to complete now is seeing a koala. When we first arrived we were told we would see a kangaroo because there is lots of them and they are pests like a black bear (excepts kangaroos aren’t carnivorous, but they have a pretty good kick and an adult could probably break your ribs easily). But koalas are very rare and extremely shy! I only hope we do get to see one that is not in a zoo.
Thats all I have to say we are leaving this camp pretty soon, Bye!!!!

Posted in 2007-09 to 10, Austrailia | 1 Comment »