Legal wall / commissioned street art on the Western Power building in Perth.

I found the site of an artist commissioned to work on the building. I have no idea if there were more artists involved but it’s a huge mural. More awesome work on their site.

Singapore in two words: “TOO HOT.”

Never the less, we managed to escape the air conditioned goodness of the hotel and shopping malls for a few hours at a time. Long enough to hit the streets of Chinatown and Little India, and eat anything that looked good.

Well, the truth is, Singapore’s heat is actually quite manageable. Most of the underground rail stations link directly up with a shopping mall, and many malls are interconnected, so navigating the central areas of the city is just a case of moving between air conditioned havens. Unfortunately you have to go outside sometimes, it’s unavoidable. Move slowly lest you drown in your own sweat.

Finally it was time to leave Malaysia. We hopped on a bus for a 4.5 hour ride over the border.

I sat there listening to gangsta rap and watching the palm trees zoom by, thinking how strange it is that Australia is such a white country, when it feels so much like it should be part of the Asian continent proper. It sounds strange trying to describe it now, but if you replaced the palm plantations with sugar cane, the trip could’ve been through Queensland. Penang’s botanic gardens provoked Lili into joking, “Uh, sorry but this is just like Australia..”

Whatever.

We made it to Singapore and into 5 Star Luxury Accommodation in our ocean view suite. Awwwl right.

Yeah. Vietnam -> Singapore -> Malaysia.

Johor Bahru was an exciting first taste of the foodie goods soon to become our 5+ daily meals. Also an introduction to Malaysia’s overly friendly hotel staff. What a tiring day.

I’ve decided that ngọc phan is the best of the relatively cheap hotels I’ve ever stayed in.

It isn’t that the place is particularly well set up, indeed there aren’t any rooms with a single double bed for example, “forcing” Lili and I to sleep in seperate beds for the duration.

No, the reason I’ve come to like this hotel so much is the friendly, personal attitude of the owners. It’s a husband, wife (and possibly sister/in law) setup, and they’re always really cheerful, friendly and, in the case of the husband in particular, talkative. When we come down for the include breakfast in the morning and poke our heads around the corner, somebody sees us, laughs and wishes us a good morning, and suddenly food starts appearing.

But there’s more to it: several other people staying at the hotel have had some unfortunate upsets. The other day a family staying there managed to lose a bag, seemingly leaving it in a taxi when they got to the airport after checking out. They called the hotel to double check that they hadn’t left it there, apparently they hadn’t. But the hotel owner started calling around to the taxi company trying to find their bags. He looked sick with worry and kept expressing how terrible it was. Sadly I don’t think the bag ever showed up.

This morning another guest had managed to lose his passport at some stage, and again the owner was on the phone trying to set things right.

Touch wood we won’t have any such problems, but check this out: one of our missions was to buy a wifi router for Lili’s mum. We could’ve done that in Hanoi when we get back, but instead I ended up finding a shop online that sold the router I wanted. The website was all in Vietnamese and not even Google could translate it with any success.

I wrote down the model number, address, shop name and phone number. I asked the owner if he could help me make a phone call - I wanted to see if the router was in stock, confirm the price from the site, and see if he could give me some advise on getting there by taxi to buy it.

By the end of the phone call however, he had negotiated a discount, and COD delivery to the hotel for that day. Then later, played translator for us while we tested the hardware there in the hotel lobby.

I really can’t express how much this simplified the whole process, and saved us a fortune in travel etc. He laughed later, “Anything I can help, you just ask- new towels, laundry, linksys- just ask!”

For a couple of days I pondered how to thank him properly, and eventually decided we should just buy a selection of fresh fruit from the market - some things we had seen them eating, and whatever else looked good.

So this morning, before checkig out, we went and bought a pomello(sp?), a pineapple and some bananas, and after doing the check out thing, we gave him the present and said thank you for helping us so much. He called his wife over to accept the gift with him. There was much laughing and mock dismay. “It is just my duty!” “No no, you went above and beyond your duty!”

It was a really nice way to conclude our stay.

Hey guys. You know I can see you, right?

Yeah, mum, dad, 60.241.126.*** and the rest. I know you’re checking this site, so why aren’t you leaving comments? Nevermind, hope people are enjoying my ramblings.

I haven’t been taking as many photos this trip, as you might’ve noticed. The reasons for that aren’t quite legion, but I won’t go into them here, instead I’ve challenged myself to put up 50 photos taken with the 50mm prime lens Lili’s letting me use. And I’m going to try and do it as quickly as I can without sacrificing attention to detail too much.

It’s off to a slow start but click the 50 x 50 link at the top right to keep up.

I also updated my About page.

In case anyone hadn’t worked it out yet, I’m also doing my best to show people where we’re posting from on the Maps page.

Also, anyone who isn’t already should really be keeping a regular eye on pikelet and pie which has been Lili’s food blog since forever. I don’t just mean travel food. This is what we eat, seriously, next time someone asks me why the fuck I’m so skinny and am I eating right? I should just point them at that site. It will blow your mind like woah.

As you were.

We decided to keep things fairly relaxed today, since Lili’s been feeling a bit under the weather for the last day or so (and I’ve been flirting with some kind of cold or flu since before we left Australia..) and to that end we started our day with a long sit in a cafe, drinking Vietnamese style coffee and surfing the net.

After a while being in such close proximity to our fellow tourists started to get right on my nerves and we packed up and left.

Our hotel has very decent shower facilities, so I had a very decent shower, and thus refreshed we went out exploring.

Exploring is probably too strong of a word, because really we were mostly retracing steps we made those years ago when we stayed in HCMC last. Same market, same cafes, same park, same same same.
We stopped for lunch at a place serving Bun Bo Hue- a style of noodle soup (from Hue! who knew?) but decided to just order some spring rolls and a plate of noodles.

Sadly, everything came out garnished with peanuts. I wasn’t really phased, and ate a few springrolls that seemed to not be touching any actual peanuts. Then ordered some soup, which came out sans peanuts. Despite my gung-ho approach to the springrolls, I haven’t felt like I’ve had even a mild allergic reaction.

We walked around more. Drank sickeningly sweet mango smoothies and came back to the hotel to rest.

I’m sitting here in Brisbane contemplating going for a swim having now replaced the pretty masthead image of the blog with my own even more generic looking ugly picture. I’ll replace it when I have some cool photos.

I guess this is my general website now but for the foreseeable future I’ll just be recording my holiday on here.

In 3 days we head to the airport, destination: Singapore. That’s just a stop over, two nights of delicious humidity in a cheap hotel before heading to Vietnam, where we’ll be visiting Pauline in Hanoi. The lazy non-plan is to stay there until we get bored and possibly break our lethargy with a trip to Hoi An. After a relaxin’ two weeks in Vietnam we ship out to Malaysia where we’ll do something approximating backpacking as we travel north to south over the course of about a week, ending up again in Singapore where we’ll spend the last few days in the lap of luxury, where the toughest decision will be which delicious breakfast items to consume on any given morning.

Well, that’s probably a rough over simplification of the expected happenin’s but it gives you alls a rough idea of what we’re planning. Actual events will unfold chronologically according to the rules of physics and/or fate. Stay tuned for photography and poorly written blog posts from the 27th onwards.

<3

When we came to China, very briefly, the first time, we were grossly unprepared. We got as far as Kunming, no guidebook, no phrasebook, no maps and definitely NO Mandarin. We found the place so interesting, and the stay so memorable, that we planned almost an entire trip around returning to China and doing it right.

This time around, Kunming was a much more approachable prospect. Sure, it had a lot to live up to, having been our first taste of affluent China, but we’re much more seasoned now - China hardy, if you will - and I for one was keenly looking forward to revisiting the place.

We only stayed for a few days. Ate at the “point and choose” restaurants of the type that we’d come to rely on last time, wandered into the reception of the hotel we stayed in last time, and booked bus tickets out of the country at the travel office we got tickets to the Stone Forrest from back in the day.

Kunming is actually very western-friendly. There seem to be a far amount of youngsters living there while they study Mandarin in the local universities, preferring the young city with its reasonable climate over one of the bigger cities to the north.

We capped off the experience with a visit to the cinema, where we watched The Curse of the Golden Flower, subtitled thankfully. Turns out you buy a ticked to a specific seat in China. Makes sense because the early comers are in the middle and you don’t have to push past people to get to a spare seat as it fills up.

Reluctant to leave the modernities of China behind completely, we booked a bus from the city all the way into Luang Prabang, Laos. The bus ride was a fairly pleasant THIRTY TWO HOUR marathon, complete with an extended stop to load up the luggage hold with what I can only assume was contraband of some fairly tame nature. We went over the actual boarder on foot, bidding farewell to China with a mixture of eagerness for the bread and coffee we knew awaited us ultimately, and sadness, for the bland, easy tourist circuit we would now be injecting ourselves directly into.

Indeed, a dinner stop at what I once believed to be the fairly remote and uninteresting Udom Xai saw more Aussie travelers going past in skimpy clothing than we would see weeks at a time in China.

So long, China.