Ballykissangel

7/50 Peveril Street, Tinonee, New South Wales

In anticipation of potentially monstrous congestion at Bangkok Airport, and because we needed to check everything was ok with our amended flight itinerary and couldn't reach Emirates by phone (something to do with a volcano), we took a taxi there a full eight hours before take-off and spent an afternoon queueing at the ticket office and then mincing around a crowded but not unbearable departure lounge before finally saying goodbye to Asia.

Arrived in Sydney the following morning (some might call it the western world of the self), and spent three days exploring this admirably spacious city, gawping at the harbour and the Opera House and eating amazing steak (after eleven weeks in Asia the price of everything is a bit of a shock - my first beer cost over $10, more than 6 GBP - but steak and chips seems to be a permanent loss leader). A couple of highlights stand out: 1) On our second evening we saw a very funny Australian comedian called Steve Hughes as part of the Sydney Comedy Festival with which our stay fortuitously coincided; and 2) a tour of the Sydney Cricket Ground, a great experience in itself, but improved immeasurably by Tweedie's reaction to discovering that we were not able to take the tour at our preferred time, as a sign outside the stadium informed us that a celebrity guest was entertaining businessmen. "Who the fuck is Richie Ben-ord?" (rendered phonetically here) is probably my favourite quote of the holiday.

After three days in Sydney we drove our rental car five hours north to Tinonee, near Wingham, near Taree, where my friend from school - Tom - is living and working as a vet. This gave rise to my second-favourite Tweedie quote of the trip: "an English vet moves to Australia - it's like Ballykissangel". The drive north was pleasant, although Australian roads could do with some improvement, , but arriving and seeing Tom again for the first time in too many years was tremendous. His excellent band played a gig of Beatles/Eagles/Bowie etc covers at a local cafe that evening to a crowd of raucous support - after eleven weeks away spent almost exclusively in tourist spots it was great to be somewhere real. Since then we've been exploring local beaches, attending friendly barbeques, and messing about in the Pacific with Tom and his engagingly enthusiastic, unfailingly welcoming group of mates.

In terms of firsts, I've seen my first ever kangaroo, and eaten my first real cheese in three months. I know which I enjoyed more.

Over.

Saturated

Peterpan Internet, Bangkok

The closing paragraph of my last post may have been premature. That evening army helicopters began circling the Redshirts' stronghold, and unleashing teargas bombs on the protestors. The last estimate I saw said 18 people died and 800 were hospitalised. All this we found out later from CNN, at the time we were instructed by our hotel manager to stay in our rooms, advice we gladly accepted.

The next day we had planned to catch a bus to the out-of-town weekend market, but all buses were understandably cancelled so we amused ourselves until the evening when we caught the overnight train (the best and most comfortable such transport we've taken in Asia) to Chiang Mai. The only irritation was the constant, slobbering canoodling of the young couple next to us whom I have assumed to be German.

Chiang Mai at Thai new year becomes essentially a giant city-shaped water park, with all locals and hordes of tourists spending a full week engaged in a mass water fight. Huge vats of aquatic ammunition line the streets for the easy refilling of the participant's Super Soaker or bucket, and pick-up trucks crammed with kids drive around the city centre soaking everything in sight.

This includes even those tourists looking to quietly explore Thailand's second city who naively thought that if clearly unarmed they would be granted amnesty, as we found out to our cost through incessant drenchings over the course of the next few days. I was quite spectacularly unimpressed.

After a long and less than inspiring day-trip to see the Longneck tribes of Chiang Rai (the women have artificially lengthened necks, all a bit odd), we set off on a three-day trek through the hills surrounding Chiang Mai, which was the main reason we had come to northern Thailand and about which we were frankly not optimistic after the disappointments and irritations of the last couple of days. We needn't have worried, for the trek was a taste of a different kind of Thailand. Not that it isn't a well-worn route trodden by many tour groups every week, and neither was it a trek as Ray Mears might understand the term, but we did four or five hours proper hill-walking every day, swam in waterfalls and stayed in hilltribe villages with communal dinners and campfire evenings. We also did bamboo rafting, elephant riding and made some friends - of our group of eleven I was one of three who had lived in Hampshire and a further two were from South London. Like I say, not very Ray Mears, but fun nonetheless.

After the trek we returned to Chiang Mai city and had a day walking round a becalmed and immeasurably drier place than the one we had left, festivities having ended in the intervening time. The city acquired a new attractiveness in this new atmosphere, and I began to understand the description of the place as an "overgrown village" which abounds in guidebooks. In a day of pampering Tweedie got a pedicure and we both had a foot massage and a fish spa, which is where you dangle your feet in a fish tank and the hungry minnows nibble the dead skin off. This confers a strange tingle halfway between pleasure and panic, and is not altogether unpleasant.

Last night we caught an overnight bus back to Bangkok and this evening, in a slight change of plan, we fly to Sydney. We have brought forward and extended the Antipodean leg of our trip due to a growing feeling of Asia inertia, and as such this will be my last post from the world's most populous continent. We have spent five weeks in South East Asia of which I would say the three spent in Vietnam were easily the best. We have spent roughly a week in each of Cambodia and Thailand, during which time I have rarely felt like we were in control of what we were doing, and perhaps consequently I do not think we've gathered much in the way of unique experiences. That said, there have definitely been some high points and I think my enthusiasm for this particular variety of temple-fort-palace-bar-hostel holidaying is waning after eleven weeks, which is hardly Thailand's fault.

I realise this is my third post from this particular internet cafe, and second in succession. It's just we've had three different stops in Thailand and this place has the best air-conditioning we can find. I promise I haven't just been sat here all week. Although if I had done my bottom could scarcely be less sore than it is after a night's semi-sleep on a bus with chairs not designed for being slept in. Bring on Australia.

Over.

Pepys Show

Peterpan Internet, Bangkok

The day after I last wrote was Tweedie's 25th birthday, which we spent doing not a lot in Phnom Penh, culminating in dinner by the river which was frankly not as pretty as it sounded. Decent curry though. At the time Tweedie seemed pleased with her Cambodian Rolex, although it has since brought her out in hives. Another dollar wasted.

The next day we caught an early-morning bus to Siem Reap, where we spent three days on rented bicycles meandering round the ancient city of Angkor and its myriad historic temples. The temples are remarkable, but there's a limit to the amount of that sort of stuff I can personally look at in a certain amount of time without eventually seeing just a pile of rocks. The cycling, however, and the early-morning excitement it conferred, made Siem Reap a highlight, particularly as our hotel had a pool in which to soothe previously neglected muscles. I also woke up at 1.30am two days in a row (and stayed up thereafter - we left for the temples at 4.30am to catch the sunrise) to watch English teams get knocked out of the Champions League, a disappointment made bearable by seeing Ferguson's hilariously and presumably deliberately hypocritical reaction.

Our week in Cambodia had come to an end (their KFC is better than India's) and yesterday we boarded a "7-8 hour" bus to Bangkok. We were advised of a change of bus at the border; we were not advised of the taxi-coach-walk-border-walk-minibus-coach-walk itinerary which in reality lay ahead of us.

A short twelve hours after departure we arrived in the relative metropolis of Bangkok, and having missed out when we were last here ( 3 weeks ago) I visited the Grand Palace alone this morning, Tweedie having been on one of her thirteen previous visits to Thailand. I was a bit amazed at the glitzy splendour of the place, half-fairytale half-Legoland, but it was definitely spectacular and memorable.

A quick logistical update: our plan had been to go directly from Cambodia into Laos, then across into northern Thailand from there. However, after an inspection of transport options we opted to head back into Thailand and go north from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, making use of the superior Thai infrastructure, and still leaving us the option of getting to Laos from the west. I realise this paragraph reads a little bit like the opening conversational gambit of a middle-aged man at a dinner party, but I thought it might seem peculiar to those familiar with the area that we were back in Thailand.

Thailand's new year celebrations begin today amidst scenes of continuing protest by the so-called 'Redshirts' railing against the new government, offering a positively Pepysian opening for the opportunistic diarist/blogger. Sadly for posterity, this one is mainly swilling lukewarm Singhas on the Khuo San Road and wondering which Mr Men t-shirt (I'm between Mr. Lazy and Mr. Grumpy) to buy from the stall across the street. In my defence, Pepys didn't have to contend with such distractions.

Over.

Party Time

Simon's Guesthouse #2, Phnom Penh

Our 'direct' bus to Ho Chi Minh City turned out to involve a 4.30am (having boarded at 6.30pm) stop-off and change of bus in Nha Trang for 3 hours, although by the time the driver had taken multiple backhanders from locals flagging us down at the roadside and sleeping in the already narrow aisles between the three columns of double-decker berths a change of scenery wasn't entirely unwelcome. We sat on the beach and ate fresh baguettes with Laughing Cow (applied with a penknife - thank you to the donors) as very-early-morning Tai Chi went on all around.

Twelve hours after re-boarding, and 25 hours since our original departure, we arrived at last in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) where we stayed for two nights doing very little other than loafing around, eating and drinking, and planning our route through the Mekong Delta. We eschewed the standard 3-day tour package in favour of an independent trip comprising a night each in three or four delta towns as we made our way towards the Cambodian border. We felt delighted with our tenacity when we arrived in Ben Tre, the first of these, after a two-hour bus ride (by this stage little more than a blink) and checked into a pleasant if somewhat soulless hotel run by and mainly for the Communist Party of Vietnam. Our mood improved still further as we asked the tourist office how easy it was to get a bus to Vinh Long (answer: very, via My Tho; although there are also tourist buses at 8am and 1pm) and spent an afternoon trotting round the town.

The next morning we dutifully took the bus to My Tho and asked for the next bus to Vinh Long, only to be told there was no such bus, and that we had to get a taxi instead. We still had time to go back to Ben Tre and get the 1pm tourist bus of which we had been told, so we turned around and got dropped off "down the road" from the bus station. Having walked 20 minutes up this road and 20 minutes back down it we came to doubt the existence of this bus station, gave up, and decided to check back into the Party hotel and try again tomorrow.

Apologies for the extent detail given here, but in order for me not to look pathetic (any more than is unavoidable) it is necessary to furnish you with some more. A return to the tourist office that afternoon indicated that the bus station in Ben Tre is not where Lonely Planet thinks it is, nor where we were shown by the conductor of day's second bus. Undaunted, we got to the bus station at 7am the next morning, in ample time for the 8am tourist bus, only to be told that there are no tourist buses from Ben Tre, but there was a local bus at 8.30. We waited around for 45 minutes until being approached by a man telling us that the 8.30 local bus had been cancelled for an unspecified reason; the next one was at 1.45pm. We took a taxi back to the riverside in a forlorn attempt to find the English-speaking man we had met in a cafe there the day before who had tried to persuade us to travel two-and-a-half hours, with all luggage, on the back of his motorbike instead of in an air-conditioned bus, for five times the price, although by now this was a trivial consideration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this proved a fruitless endeavour.

We decided to cut our losses, admitted defeat, and headed back to Ho Chi Minh City, from where we caught a bus over the border to Phnom Penh. To be leaving Vietnam so abruptly was a shame, but having so thoroughly enjoyed the previous two-and-a-half weeks I didn't want to let further, similar experiences sour my memory of this fascinating country, to which I hope to return and which I would recommend to anyone.

First full day in Cambodia today (it is hotter than the mainly coastal Vietnam), and to cheer ourselves up we visited the Genocide Museum (a converted school used as a prison and torture house during the Khymer Rouge regime) and the Killing Fields. These were two of the most affecting places I've been - the image I will be unable to shift is that of cupboards full of unidentified skulls.

The Cambodian currency is called the Riel. This offers comparatively few comic possibilities.

Over.