China, Macau and Honga Konga

The Terracotta Army was awesome, to see an untouched echo down through more then 2000 years of history was hugely impressive. It also showed that even back then there were never enough portaloo's.



Past meets the future, if you look closely you can see where he was holding the midori shaker.


In China, Dragons are believed to fight evil and are considered lucky - unless of course one happens to land on your head.

Because China is a socialist country, everyone gets to be on Big Brother.

Early Retirees Gone Wild.

This is an unfiltered photo (natural light) of the drum tower in Xi'an. I'd make a joke about it but any drummers out there wouldn't get it anyway...

This was a tattoo Gwen had done, as good quality ink as you'll find anywhere in the world. Unfortunately the artist didn't speak a word of English, she had actually asked for "love" and "hate" to be tattooed on her knuckles but it somehow got lost in translation.

Macau was pretty dull if you didn't like gambling, they do lay claim to having the world's skinniest church though. That's what happens if all you eat is wafer.

...they also used to have a terrible problem with pigeons crapping on the high rollers.

Hong Kong at night, would you believe completely dark until the sensor light goes on.

Door bitch from hell, "Sorry buddy, not with those shoes".

In the futuristic, future-looking cities of the future, the only two things to survive nuclear war were cockroaches and bogans. Architects in Shanghai lurve the Jestsons.

Goa - Last Stop India

Goa was to be our last stop in India. Although my original plan had been to look for work in India I reached the conclusion after travelling there for nigh on 3 months that there were other places in the world that I (and Gwen) would prefer to work and live in.

I had a great time in India, meeting some excellent people, both Indians and travellers, but the hassles experienced anytime you walked down the street and some of the environmental factors discouraged me from wanting to set-up there.

So it was nice to finish in the sunny state of Goa with a bit of relaxing beach time.

Important to keep the fluid levels up whilst in the warm sun, purely for health and well- being reasons of course.
While the town of Pondicherry town was pretty, the coastline there wasn't particularly appealing as a spot for swimming. On the other hand Goa had nice sand, great seafood and plenty of bars along the waterfront. I would have to say that as a picturesque destination there are more beautiful coastlines and locations, but then again most of those would be far more expensive to visit then Goa.

By this time we were both keen to avoid crowds so we headed further down south to a town called Benalium. In the Lonely Planet guide this was mentioned as a very small, quiet location - a mere year after that had been written and the signs of development were already very visible in Benalium - such is the pace of change in India.

Grabbing a scooter again we were lucky enough to chance across a place called Splash!, set about 50 metres back from the beach and run by Priti and her family who were all good fun and great to spend time with.

It was one of those rare places where trust is freely given to strangers and returned in kind, highly recommended. Basically you simply helped yourself to the fridge whenever you wanted and filled in as barman when needed. The food was also home cooked, locally sourced and delicious and during our stay Gwen got in on the Saree biz.

Longtime Goa resident and Splash! patriarch, Jerry, had found himself a real-live genuine Hindu cat complete with bindi...

As you can see, being the workhorse I am, apart from propping up the bar on occasion, I also took on the taxing role of doing quality assurance for the local beer "Belo". The conclusion, after much non-pseudo scientific stringent testing, was that this was indeed India's tastiest beer.

Splash! was a collection of huts, tied together nicely by a bar - and to be honest there's nothing much more to say about our time there. We did some last bits of shopping, and then pretty much ate, drank and slept our way through the days leading up to our flight from China.... every bit as tough as it sounds.

From Goa we passed through Mumbai, long enough to see some dodgy suburbs but not long enough to actually get a feel for the place - although fortunately it seemed marginally less mental then Delhi.

South India - Goats and Elephants

After sadly tearing ourselves away from Rishikesh and the guys there it was back again to the Del(hi) Hole. We organised our visas for China and made arrangements to head down to south India for a couple of weeks. Landing in Chennai, formerly Maddras, we proceeded to grab a bus to Pondicherry. It makes a distant news-reel tragedy seem more real when you actually speak to people impacted, our rikshaw driver in Chennai (Anthony) avoided being wiped out by the tsunami only by about 30 minutes. Just after he'd been in a coastal town with a customer, it came through and wiped the place off the map - his friend wasn't so lucky. Along the south east coast you could also see where villages had recently been rebuilt.

Local buses like the ones we used in Rishikesh and Chennai are a real hoot in India, not a modicum of leg room (suspension and smooth roads are clearly an optional extra not often selected) meaning you get to tick the boxes marked "concussion" and "cramps". This passenger here was remarkably chipper given the ride experienced, personally I think she'd been giving the Kingfisher beers a nudge.














Pondi was an enclave of the colonial French. There is a strong French influence on architecture, language and food, happily due to different taxation levels alcohol was always much cheaper in the south compared to the north. Unfortunately not knowing too much French, it appears Gwen accidentally ordered a plate of food poisoning from one of the restaurants in town.

Pondi is quite a pretty town, but the beaches were a bit ordinary. We hired a couple of scooters here which made getting around a lot easier. Once I'd worked out to let go of the throttle when trying to brake (the whole do two things at once conundrum) - narrowly avoiding parking the scooter into various walls and cars - I found they had a surprising amount of poke - much to the annoyance of some four wheel drivers. Everyone hates getting dragged off by a scooter - or is that just me?

We found out that a guaranteed way to freak the locals out is to actually use an indicator. They stop, stare, whisper among themselves and generally try to figure out what the hell that little flashing light is.

From Pondi we went to Cochin, and then to the island of Fort Cochin which was experiencing somewhat of a slow tourist period after an outbreak of some disease or other - would have been nice to know that beforehand! Fort Cochin has a strong Portuguese influence along with a large Christian population resulting in some uniquely styled churches and religious statues.Somehow the Portuguese influence on the people is matched by a Japanese influence on the local goats, Gwen named this one Mizuiko San, which seemed 100% apt...


















We became good friends with a man, Joseph, who had driven our rikshaw on our first day in Cochin, catching up with his family a couple of time during our stay. By Australian standards their house was very rudimentary (but note the Ken Done art on the back wall), with 3 generations sharing it, but they were a very happy family, working hard to build a better future for their two daughters.














On one particular day Joseph took us swimming in a remote lake about 60k's east of the city. Luckily, as you can see, Gwen was able to recover the car keys and from there we went the back way round into the Periyar Zoo, walking along the banks of the river and then getting a canoe taxi.
This was probably the single most enjoyable day of the trip, it was the kind of 'out of the grind' type experience that really stands out amongst many highlights. Some of the animals seemed just as interested in us as we were in them.

To be this close to an elephant was amazing, their physical presence and intelligence, the dexterity of his trunk was like a sensitive hand, nose and enormously strong arm rolled into one. This was a young male, about 11 years old, there was bigger female who was 20 something but she didn't seem to be in a mood for tolerating a couple of crackers like us.
Below is a picture of Gwen praying that the elephant would eat me...

...and here's a picture of the elephant eating the trainer by mistake as his grasp of English wasn't crash hot.
Cochin is also home to the world's funkiest truck. For starters it was a type of truck that I only ever saw in Cochin. This particular beasty was all wood, including the tray, every inch was beautifully hand carved and hand painted with a hippy/Taj Mahal motif.

The pictures just don't do it justice...the guy driving it definitely knew it was cool wheels as well.

Speaking of wheels I was lucky to find a job I was actually qualified for in Fort Cochin. This was Shanu's fully accessorised rickshaw, replete with strobing lights, sound effects, chrome wheels and buttons galore - very cool. He agreed to lease it to me, unfortunately negotiations broke down over my demands for a shag pile interior and DVD player.

Rishikesh et al

After the tour ended I jumped a train from Agra, heading south to Kolkata. After 30 hours on the train, the first 9 hours without an official seat as I was on the standby list, I arrived at about 4am. The train station was as chaotic as you could possibly imagine, and after a minor car accident on the bridge I began door knocking for a room, one of my favourite early morning past times. Kolkata was a bit more laid back and orderly then the other big Indian cities I'd been to, but the downside was humidity constantly in very high 90's meaning everything was damp. For some reason I was never able to fathom my room had a red light mounted on the roof...I made sure I locked my door at night.

I spent almost 2 weeks in Kolkata, and then decided to head to Nepal for what turned out to be an all too brief week. My disk with the Nepal photo's on it has cracked and my back-up copy is on it's way to Oz, so no photo's at this point. Nepal was a great a place and a great destination. The people were friendly, the towns were quite clean and pretty much beggar free and the environment of forests, lakes and mountains stunning. The fact that it is a much cheaper place to live and travel then even India AND European beer was available was just the icing on the cake. While there I tried some strange concoction of Tibetan beer where you continually added boiling water to some sort of yeasty stuff in a 1 litre mug, and yes this description is no clearer then my head the next day.

Back to Delhi, once again - there are some great places in India but Delhi is not on that list - and it crossed my path far too often. As a city I think Delhi was a bad idea that just grew too big to stop. Here I waited for Gwen to fly in from LA, we then jumped a train to Haridwar in northern India. From here on the photo's were taken by either one of us. This was the quietest and most hassle free place I'd been to thus far and was a welcome breather. Haridwar is a holy place to Hindu's and many Indian families go there on pilgrimage as the Ganges runs through it. We spent some time with a couple of different Indian families we met there, sharing fruit, photo's and in Gwen's case, make-up. The famous Indian smiles and sense of family and community was felt very strongly. I also spent time on the banks of the Ganges with an Indian priest who had taken a vow of silence, yet his communication was still eloquent.

From Haridwar we hired a 3 wheeled vikram, like a jumbo sized rickshaw with an avian beak. Twice the size of a normal Rikshaw, twice as noisy and just as uncomfortable, and headed north to Rishikesh. Rickshaws, due to their distinctive two stroke engine sound are jokingly referred to as "Indian helicopters" - they really do sound like a chopper from a distance.

Rishikesh is a beautiful town nestled at the foothills of the Himalaya and is very much the home of yoga and ashram life in India. The different yoga and meditation courses varied in quality, our teacher, Abhiv, for the physical practice was very good, a couple of meditation teachers far less so. Here we both swam in the Ganges as it was clean, clear and fast flowing - polar opposite to how it is further downstream. The Rishikesh landscape is notable for it's two large, pleasantly swaying, cow-carrying pedestrian bridges linking the banks, here's the upstream one.

In Rishikesh we met a couple of guys from Israel, Eli and Jeroem. At Eli's prompting we decided to take a trek into the Himalaya. Originally we had planned a Quori pass trek but this would have required a fair amount of time, snow gear and a mule of either the animal or low-paid human variety. It was getting to be a bigger deal then we had counted on so in the end we took a more practical option and trekked out to Chopta, we summitted Chandrashaila (spelling?) at about 4200 metres. The yellow flag marks the site where a McDonald's is due to be constructed.

Here's a lovey dovey happy snap for all those who have been asking who the hell Gwen is. The beanie I'm holding is (or was) offically the Worst Beanie in the World. It was so bad that the Nepalese guy in the shop begged me to take it and kept knocking money off the price as an apology - it somehow "lost" itself in Hong Kong.

Actually finishing the trek was a pretty good effort considering our packs and the fact that none of us had been doing any physical activity involving more then a beer and one arm in the months prior. Of course the birds, as seen here, do it easy.

Our guide for the trek was the legendary Sunil, snapped here in his patented Bollywood tough guy pose. 3 seconds after this photo was taken he suddenly jumped up and started singing and dancing with 30 mysterious Indian women who appeared in costume out of the bushes.

On the way our accomodation varied from nice to nasty. In this picture the little white structure with a green shutter is where we stayed for one night...the four of us shared a room after the large rat in the first room exercised its veto right. Unfortunately we'd already eaten at a kitchen up the road before we saw that its cousin like to hang out there. The next day the rats voted us off the island so we walked 26km's rather then spend another night there.

All up we spent around 3 weeks in Rishikesh, the weather was great, the food tasty and there was plenty to do and see around the area. Our favourite accommodation was at the Nishant guest house which was set back from the main tourist area among an Indian village. Here we spent some good time and many laughs with Roger, Christiana, Peter and the mad Irishman Paddy - last seen heading west on a Royal Enfield motor bike.

The Beatles, of the musical persuasion, also spent some time in Rishikesh. The massive ashram where they stayed in the 60's is now in ruins, but makes from some great photo's. Walking around it had the feel of some alien ship that had run aground on Earth. This weird tiled, egg looking thingamajigs may were scattered throughout the grounds, they seemed to be used to amplify sound, or perhaps for Ringo to practice his singing...

It would also appear that this was the mysterious locale that inspired the cover art for several Kraftwerk albums.