Melbourne

Finally a few photos from Melbourne. Although I am on the internet everyday, it's been difficult to find anywhere to upload photos. I usually use the computers in the state library, because they're free (although you're suppose to limit your use to 15 minutes, ssh...), but they don't seem to like me up or down-loading stuff, and when I finally shelled out the dollars to go in a PC bang, the connection was slow so I still didn't get many up. Well, this is Melbourne, part of the central business district, at night, obviously. The river is the Yarra river. I'm not quite on the coast, but it isn't far away. This is the beach at St. kilda, a short tram ride away. I went here for the day with Michael, a german guy from my hostel. The water was freezing and it was overcast for most of the day, so it reminded me of home, in a nice way. This is the State Library of Victoria, where I am now in fact. Indeed, where I can be found most days at some point. This picture only has significance in that it's the last photo I took before dropping my trusty old Canon to its sudden end. Not worth dying for really. And this is my new Canon! Woo, yes, it's much like the old one but with a bigger screen... The view from my hostel roof, where I have spent no time other than the one trip I took to go see what was up there and take this picture. This, although perhaps not the best shot I could've chosen to display the local flora (I saw no fauna), is part of the Dandenong range national park, the first time (of two times) that I've been outside of the city. More here for the curious (ma, you've already seen 'em all).

10 Memories of Korea that make me feel warm and fuzzy inside

1 Dinners in my room with Christa and Mary. I should say cooked by Christa and Mary, my job being to supply us with tableclothes stolen from the theatre classroom and clean up the carnage afterwards. With a one-hob kitchen it was tricky, but we always made it work. Wine, soju, sake, and dancing into the wee hours afterwards. I never expected to enjoy Christmas day as much as I did, being so far from home and having to work.

2 Salsa - the classes me and Emma gave up in the dance studio on Sunday nights, to our little band of faithful students, and the nights at Bahia when we put them into practice, particularly Emma's leaving night, after all the locals had cleaned out at the sight of us, and the barman supplied us with cowbells and bongos.

3 Chuseok Japan trip with Christa and Amy. In particular our food crawls - I'm thinking the sushi and okonomiyaki nights - and drinking copious amounts of sake and plum wine in our lodges and laughing for no reason.

4 Singing, in many places: In the norae bangs any night of the week of course; I also have fond memories of the karaoke night we stumbled upon at a bar down the road, that we meant to go back to and now never will, where every table had to sing one song each. Christa, Rob and I sang All I want for Christmas, beautifully but in three different keys. I also have to include Rob and I gatecrashing and singing Radiohead's Creep at a Korean wedding reception.

5 Playing cards and dice over at Shawn and Mel's place. Nertz, farkel, Manatoba Farmers. By the time they left to go to Suwon, it had somehow grown into a nightly thing, though I only went over a handful of times. This was during mine and Emma's period of neverending nightshift. I don't remember why I didn't go more often.

6 Poker nights, every Wednesday in the pool class. We started out hosting it in our alternate rooms, but it soon grew to popular for that. I must've won three times in all the time we played. Of course, since the buy-in amounted to less than three pounds, it was never any great loss.

7 Korean lesson with Christa, and Mary too, at the end. It's quite likely that I'll have forgotten half of what I learned when I get home, and I'll rarely have need for the rest when back home, but I'll never regret giving it a try.

8 Although I think Japan tops the list of places I visited, so far anyway, I can't leave out the rest - Vietnam, Thailand, Gyeongju and the other areas of Korea I've visited. I think I could be persuaded to leave Cambodia out of the list.

9 I don't know for sure why I feel compelled to include this - perhaps just because I'd not had a bath for the best part of six months - and I only did it properly the one time last year, but I'll certainly never forget the (naked) Korean bath-house.

10 Seeing Muse live for the first time at Jamsil gymnasium. They were awesome. Best live band ever. Incidentally, I saw them again recently at Pentaport Rock Festival, Incheon, but the second time didn't compare to the first (they were an hour late and I, by choice, was half a mile away).

Disclaimer: this list is neither exhaustive nor definitive, but the fact that these things are the first that came to mind must mean something. Notice the absence of references to work, teaching, and children in the list.

Thailand photos

G'day. Since I've been using a public computer, I've been having a hell of a time trying to upload some photos, but I finally cracked it. I've had to put them up on flickr though, as blogger was taking too long and don't even get me started on facebook.

I've uploaded three sets today. The first, requested by young Katie of Barnet, is a bunch of shots mostly if not all taken by Kd, of the mangroves we paddles through when we rented a kayak for the afternoon near Krabi. The monkeys are long-tailed macaques, also known as crab-eating macaques, though they ate the pineapple we brought them with relish. The thing that looks like a crocodile is in fact a harmless monitor lizard.

Next, we have some pics from Koh Phi Phi. I haven't labelled them well as flickr is now being slow too, but they include some shots of one of the beautiful sunsets we saw there, and the day trip we took to The Beach beach (among other places) with young Ryan of Devon who we hung around with for a while on the island. In fact, most of these photos are Kd's too, as she had a waterproof case for her camera and I did not, so I didn't take mine out on the longboat with us. The sunset photos are mine though.

The third is the set promised weeks ago: a random yet representative sampling of my wildlife photos from Thailand and Cambodia (mostly the former, only the bugs are Cambodian).

Australia!

Hey, have arrived at accomodation in Melbourne. Weather is clear and refreshing! Backpackers place ok I think, haven't met other room-mates yet (they're asleep).  Have 10 minutes free internet so gotta be quick! Don't know what I'm gonna do now, probably just go wander around the city for a while. Flight was ok, though didn't sleep much as usual - oh! somehow found myself in first class on Seoul-Tokyo leg, real luxury, sadly not on the Tokyo-Melbourne bit though!  Later!

 

 

Thailand and Cambodia

I have around 1500 pictures from the past month's travels (though approximately 95% of them are photos of Cambodia's temples) - I've randomly selected carefully deliberated over the matter and chosen a few to share... We stayed for the first few days on Koh Samet, where we had arranged to meet Alicia. She'd been planning to come with us and then go on to Ghana to do some voluntary work for a month, but due to massive incompetency at the Ghanaian embassy in Seoul as she was trying to sort out her Visa, she never made it. After learning that Alicia wouldn't be joining us until Cambodia (a best-case scenario), we left Koh Samet (and the most beautiful sand I've ever set foot on) for Ayuthaya. We there only for one whole day, and it was a scorcher. We hired bikes for the day, and explored the ruins there. Interesting as they were, they pale into comparison against Cambodia's wats, hence no picture. A ferry, a train, a bus, a ship and a short taxi later, and we reach Koh Pha Ngan. I miss living on the beach. I cut my knee on the coral while snorkeling; still waiting to see if it's gonna scar or not. And I forgot to put in my contacts before the dive so I couldn't see a damn thing anyway. Oh, so this is the longboat we hired for the day when we went snorkeling. We went a saw a waterfall too, but for most of the time we lazed on the beach, read a little, and swam. Oh, and was around this time that we were playing Rummy obsessively. You can't really tell here, but these crazy fire twirlers are children! I swear one of them was no older than six or seven, and non of them can have been more than 12. They were amazing, but it was bizarre to see thre parents just sit back and watch them do it. They were foreign kids by the way, not Thai. Kd's crazy hair on the windswept boat trip from Koh Pha Ngan to Koh Tao (Koh means island). Drunken crazy golf. Don't let the picture fool you, this was the only exciting whole they had. Kd cheated. Afterwards we played old-school 10 pin bowling; there was a guy at the bottom picking up the pins and throwing the bowl back down to our end. Kayaking near Krabi. We were taken through the mangroves where we boarded by a troupe of monkeys in search of food. We also saw what Kd at first took to be alligators, but were in fact monitor lizards. I'll put some more pictures up of all the wildlife we saw later. The only time we really got rained on the entire time - not bad considering we supposedly went in the middle of monsoon season. We're on an elephant ride here. I think. Another rather aggressive gang of monkeys we met on the beach. At the mere mention of bananas they went straight for Kd's bag, and she was in no mood to argue. One of them stole a tube of Pringles from a tourist and sat up in the tree munching his way through them. While the crowd was watching this, a rogue monkey made his way along the beach, searching everyone's abandoned bags. Still a fair bit of tsunami damage around. Koh Phi Phi in particular has lots of building work going on. More snorkelling at koh Phi Phi, and I still look pretty pasty here. I don't know exactly when my tan finally kicked in, but I guess it hadn't yet. Koh Phi Phi again, this is The Beach beach, as in, the Leo Dicaprio movie. You can see why they picked it (although it could do with somebody picking all the trash out of the water). The view from our bungalow on Phi Phi wasn't bad. I must've taken a hundred pictures of this one sunrise. Never seen anything like it. Just stunning. And then on to Cambodia. I have whole memory cards with nothing but photos of the temples in Seim Reap. We bought the three-day pass, so we saw a lot. this here is the famous one, Angkor Wat, built in the early 12th century. It's huge, and very well preserved. We split up soon after getting there, and had failed to make a plan for meeting up again. It took us hours to find each other again. By the time we got to Cambodia we'd been joined by Alicia, finally, and Kd's friend Gema, also a teacher in Korea. I've forgotten the names of most of the wats we visited already. I call this one 'the one you go up to watch the sunrise'. And this one is 'the one that has been left to the trees'. Note tiny Kd hugging the root at the bottom. There's another abandoned wat, which the guidebook says makes the one above look like somebody just forgot to mow the lawn; we really wanted to go to it, but it was just too far. Alicia! And I at 'the wat with the Greek-looking bit of architecture'. It's so sad to see kids on the streets all day desperate to get money out of tourists. Some have books or crafts to sell - the gang here finally broke Kd, she bought six scarves off them - others try to convince you to take a photo of them for money, and some just beg. I don't even know what this is. Let's say the Royal Palace. It's in Phnom Penh, the capital. Phnom Penh was not the best climax for our vacation to be honest - though it was interesting, the genocide prison/museum, and the killing fields, put together with poor Alicia getting her bagged snatched, doesn't really count as ending on a high...

Itinerary

I should be packing, but I don't know where to start, so I've come to procrastinate instead. I hate packing. I have to split my stuff into 5 categories: what I want to send home; what I want to take to Thailand; what I don't need for Thailand but I might want for Australia; what I can throw away; and what I don't want for myself by somebody else might want. I don't fly until Tuesday though, so it's not as urgent as it is for some. Kane and Eva are packing right now, as they leave tonight. I'm sure others are doing the same. I've kind of lost track of who's staying on for another year and who's leaving right now. There's also those like Christa who started a little later so don't finish for another month or so. Yesterday was a little strange. I was expecting it to be pretty fun, if a little sad, being the last day for many of us, but due to some rather unpleasant altercations that happened recently, there was an uncomfortable vibe in the office yesterday. For a bunch of people who've had to live and work and play together for a year, we've had remarkably few bust-ups. I guess people are feeling less inclined to hold back now that we're mostly going to be going our separate ways soon. 3 hours have past since I started writing this - I've spent most of the day round at Kane and Eva's while they've been packing - so it's clear I'm not going to get anything of my own sorted today. Here's my travel itinerary: July 3rd: Seoul - Bangkok (Thailand) July 21st: Bangkok - Phnom Penh (Cambodia) July 28th: Phnom Penh - Bangkok - Seoul Early August: Seoul - Australia (With a couple of weeks in: New Zealand) Sometime before Christmas: Australia - home It's a little vague in spots. We'll be in southern Thailand as Kd and Alicia have both done the north before, and since I haven't even looked at the travel books, I have no opinion either way. I don't know what's going on in Cambodia yet. Me and Kd are flying on Tuesday, with Alicia hopefully joing us on Thursday (she hasn't booked tickets still as she's been trying to organise a later trip to Ghana at the same time). I'll be flying back to Seoul solo, while the girls go on to Vietnam, and then me and Christa are going to Australia. Again, not exactly sure about all the arrangements there, although we will be visiting our friend Beth and staying at her parent's house for a while, and we're gonna try and hunt down Kane and Eva too, though they haven't yet decided what continent they want to live on.

Maintenance

I'm in the middle of rearranging the site in preparation for my coming travels to South-East Asia and Australia, so please pardon the mess. Is anybody still out there?

30 days

Actually less than that as the 29th is my last working day. Jeepers. Not long. Just thought I'd say hi really...I'm going to party soon but nobody else is ready just yet, so rather than start watching another episode of Desperate Housewives (I've totally gone over my quota for the week already), I figured I'd check here instead. Hi ma. Predictably, I still don't know what I'll be doing 31 days from now. The vague plan - and I'd like to stress again that 'plan' is far too strong a word for what I have going on, implying as it does notions of organisation and deliberation - involves my tagging along with a couple of friends to Cambodia for a week or so, then possibly cluelessly wandering around Thailand for an undetermined time, by myself, before finally meeting up with Christa somewhere down under, as her contract doesn't finish until a month later than ours. As soon as I know more, I'll let you know. Or within a matter of weeks. I'll let you know eventually anyway.

May

Ok. Sorry. I've been...uh...busy. Here's a little of what I've been up to over the last month... As a token of appreciation for our giving some of the national volleyball team a refresher's class in English, the school received a bunch of tickets to a series of international games against Japan held one weekend at the Olympic stadium (Seoul hosted the summer games in '88). We kicked ass, though I didn't understand what was going on much of the time. Christa didn't go as she reckons it's a girlie sport, but there were plenty of my fellow teachers there who tried their best to hammer the rules into my head. Christa, Mary, Vanessa and I went to Chuncheon (known as the city of lakes) in the last week of April as we were all blessed with a long weekend. This is the place we found to stay on the first night. We had two TVs, though only one worked, while the fan and AC did not. We had no window, and the bathroom smelled of hotdogs. And there were spider's webs you could get lost in. Oh, and the bath was brown with mould, but that didn't matter as there was no hot water to have a bath with anyway. We got tandems again, and me and Christa spent quite a while racing two young kids on their own bikes along a footpath by one of the lakes while Vanessa and Mary went swanning around in a paddle-boat. The rental dude charged us for a second hour as we were five minutes late back, and we were sorely tempted to see how far we could get the bike during our second hour and just dump it. Of course we didn't. Chuncheon is famous for a dish called dakgalbi, which I shall be attempting to make when I have access to a decent kitchen again (I have the recipe books now) - it's a fiery mix of chicken (dak), sweet potato, veggies and spice and rice. We ate it twice while we were there, so poor vegetarian Vanessa was forced to forage for food on her own on a few occasions. This shot's taken during a walk near the Soyang River Dam - the largest sand gravel dam in East Asia - on a real scorcher of a day. And I'd left my sunglasses in a cab the day before... Some friendly Koreans shared their makkoli with us. I don't like makkoli. It's a sweet-sour milky rice wine that old Korean men drink a lot of. This guy gave a 'reluctant' Mary three shots of the stuff before she conceded that it was indeed mucho mashissoyo (delicious). This waterfall was our reward for hiking up the trail. Actually there was plenty more to see than this, including a series of temples, and at least one other pond, but this was the most photogenic. We saw a lizard. On our first evening - I'm totally out of chronological order here - we took a pleasant stroll around Nami island, where apparently some famous Korea soap opera and/or movie was filmed. The highlight has to be the flock of apparently wild ostriches we came across. If these beasts aren't the at least second cousins to Spielberg's velociraptor's I'll be damned. Though admittedly they seemed harmless enough, they freaked me out nonetheless - unlike Christa who was running straight at them to see what kind of reaction she could get. May 5th is celebrated, principally in the USA, as Cinco de Mayo (literally, "the fifth of May" in Spanish) in honour of Mexican heritage and pride. Not wanting to be left out, American Heidi invited us all out to a join in the festivities at a Mexican restaurant (natch) in Itaewan. Hopefully the sound will be in sync with the video. The last few I've tried importing from youtube have been out by a few seconds, not sure why. Summer is officially here now. This was a few weeks ago when we were playing badminton, frisbee and bongos up by the pool - which alas, I'm probably unlikely to see 'filled' again while I'm still here. This is the formerly-stray cat, now kindly adopted by a friend of our head-teacher Beth, which caused a rather dramatic and semi-public spat between several residents of the campus (long story, not for today...) Last weekend we went into the mountains and ate this pig for Kane's birthday. We did not cook it on this fire, but we did roast marshmallows. See? Oh yeah, and they had a bunch of cats, either in cages, or tied up like this one. They seemed in decent enough condition, but we still very tempted to free them. Frances, who has been to this spot before, told us that there used to be a monkey too, but there was no trace of it anymore. Last week was Buddha's 2545th birthday, and each year in Seoul there is a huge festival to celebrate. I haven't seen so many foreigner's (by which I mean people that look like me) in a long time (not counting the pig thing above (at which I met the first Welshman I've seen in Korea)). Neither have I seen, or indeed imagined that I would ever see, quite so many lotus lanterns in one day. Pretty... Here's my contribution. There's a special lantern-making competition for the foreigners, which a bunch of us took part in. Somehow, my beauty was overlooked, while our own Tony and Christa both took home prizes for their efforts. To be fair, my effort is a disgrace when seen up close, though it is now hanging proudly inside my doorway for visitors to bash their head against in admiration. And lastly, not the highlight of a day, but certainly a memorable point: we finally tried these... Korean silkworm larvae. They were chewy, but largely unremarkable. I did need a drink afterwards to wash the bits out of my teeth, but they were certainly no worse in taste than the grasshoppers we ate at the Christmas party. We also scored a free sample of the...well, I actually don't know what they are, but there's something that looks not unlike a winkle that you're supposed to eat with a toothpick. I didn't get a picture but it's a very common snack so I'm sure I'll get the chance sometime. They tasted like sand. The culmination of the festival is a grand parade down the streets near one of the largest temples. Here's a short peek at the fun...

Puppies!

Letters

I was teaching magic last week, so I lots of the kids wrote me mail in post office class. I always get a larger stash in my mailbox when I'm teaching magic or one of the other more fun classes. It's more fun for them anyway - it can be quite draining to teach over and over, but it's rumoured that we'll have a children's magician coming at the end of the month to teach a couple of us some new tricks. I'm so excited! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To: Ryan magician Hi! How are you? I'm finde magic show is good! very good! card magic show amazing. good! "wow" Abrycatabry good! bey bey Ryan Abrycatabry! So cute. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Teacher's magic was really amazing. Why don't you be a global magician? I want see that again. Teacher have nice ability of magic and make us fun. Thank you for teach English to us and show nice magic. Thank you very much. Global magician. That's totally what my new career's gonna be. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Ryan Hae my name is james How are you? I am 10 nears ar I like SEV [Seoul English Village] I want to cone again My favorite teacher is It is very fun by by by james... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear: Ryan Hi! teacher. my name is Tim. How old are you? I'm 13 year's old. please give me a magic rabbiet. teacher! the magic is very good. I like magic. I think you are very kind. Good Bye teacher. Korean kids love magic. Some of them go to magic schools - occasionally I've even managed to get through a whole class without needing to perform a single trick myself! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Ryan Hi! i'm James Jino Be 'ABracadabbra' gngogilW. Ji-cu-cu gom co HoBnin-o-six two seven nu-n four u - I one fourign James u gngni m At least, I think that's what he wrote. It's hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins. Maybe he's writing in code. He spells his name 'Jamts' on the envelope, but he does gets bonus points for drawing a picture of me shooting thunderbolts from my fingertips. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Ryan I like magic. Do you like magic? Your magic is very fun! It is good! I like this!!! -> Abracadabra~ Ho Ho Ho You are a tall and Handsome. You are a very very good man. Always nice to hear. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Where all my time goes

I am, like millions of other wasted souls out there, seriously addicted to the Internet. I can easier squander two hours or more doing nothing other than randomly surfing. You'd at least hope that in doing so much reading every day, I would at least be learning a hell of a lot. But the truth is, half of the time I'm not convinced I even remember what I've been looking at. It just goes in one..um...eye...and out the other. I thought it might be interesting to check out a random sample of my surfing history, so below is a list of every 10th page I've visited for the last two days. Let's see what junk I've been looking at. 1 The chocolate connoisseur's website, fair enough I do like chocolate. I was looking at the reviews of their highest rate bars. I might order some, but the cost of shipping here is twice as much as the chocolate. 2 Not a photo of a dead man in Phoenix, by a photographer who keeps a blog detailing pictures that he wishes he had taken, and opportunities missed. 3 Another one, not of two guys having a fight over a hat. 4 kottke.org - the starting point of many a pointless surfing session. 5 The page editor of Blogger. 6 Blogger log in. 7 A torrent search for Santana - which I ended up not downloading 8 An Amazon review for Yo La Tengo - which I did end up downloading and am listening to now. 9 A google search for a band called Hotel Lights; a song by them which I'd never heard before came onto my itunes and I wanted to know who they were (the drummer used to be in Ben Folds Five). 10 A message board for Disturbia, a new PG13 movie based on Hitchcock's Rear Window. 11 Google news 12 Notes for an upcoming Linguistics and cognitive science lecture. 13 Searching for an old episode of Buffy to watch online while I wait for Christa to get her ass out of bed so we go out for pizza as planned. 14 Before Buffy I had been looking for a movie. 15 I don't know how I got onto this, but I ended up reading all about the American (and Canadian) fraternity and soriety system. 16 The Alexander Technique - since my posture sucks and I was after some tips to improve it. Which I didn't find here. 17 & 18 The Wikipedia articles on press ups and sit ups - I've decided I need to start doing more (ie. some) exercise, so I naturally had to research the matter first. 19 & 20 A couple of blogs about the Korean language. 21 A news article on the massive damage done to coral reef after a recent Indonesian earthquake. 22 Doug's Concert Crisis - I can only imagine I chanced upon this via Wikipedia's 'random article' button, as I have no idea what it is. 23 A site about Vietnam - which I don't remember seeing before. 24 An finally, an email from one of the kids that was here last week, Ken:

Teacher!!

What is Margaret e-mail?

Sorry!! more e-mail....sorry~!!

Good bye~!

(And spookily, he's just emailed me again this very second). Anyway, point is that too much time is wasted unproductively. So new resolutions (although shouldn't call them that as bound to jinx it) are: less internet, and to make time every day for a minimum of 10 minutes exercise, a little art, even if only a quick sketch or doodle, and I'm gonna start taking a daily photo again. I'm not promising a daily blog, but I will attempt go for at least one weekly entry. And it's 22:37 pm, and I haven't done any of this yet, so gotta go!

Vietnam closure!

A non-random selection of mine and Christa's photos from Vietnam (I still haven't managed to recover mine but you never know). In Hanoi and Sapa we were continually besieged by street traders trying to flog us their wares; I thought we might get away from it at Halong Bay, since we were onboard a boat most of the time, but no: they just sail right up alongside. She had Oreos too, but I resisted. Hoan Kiem Lake, Hanoi. We're sitting out the back of a restaurant in drinking whiskey and smoking cigars (sharing a cigar actually, as the smoke goes right to my head, and it always makes Christa hack and gasp like she's never tried it before, so one's always enough!) We didn't get much sleep some nights. The night-trains in particular, while a fun experience, are not really designed for sleeping. Well, no, I guess they are, but it was way too hot and bumpy to get much done. On Thursday morning as we were eating our breakfast in Hanoi we were plunged into darkness as part of a rolling blackout that lasted for most of the day in our district. Apparently it's fairly common, and is linked to low rainfall. Of course we didn't mind this as everyone knows blackouts are cool, but I wouldn't like to have to live somewhere where it's this common. Christa on-board the night train. I now realise that these photos are in reverse-chronological order. Deal with it. She's sad because we bought some peanut M&Ms and they turned out to be all melty and congealed. We also got these tasty dried fruits. I do love me some fructification. Aah no, this is what I really love. We ate some much fresh pineapple all week - and mango, and dragon fruits and other exciting delicacies - that my digestive system went into shock upon our return to Korea and refused to process the cafeteria food that I tried to foist upon it again. It's taken nearly two weeks to acclimatise back to my usual sad diet again. Cute Vietnamese kids at Halong Bay (okay, so these photos are in no coherent order at all). We tried ramming some with our kayak but got yelled at by their parents. Oh, speaking of kayaks. I'd never done this before and was convinced Christa was gonna have us over at any minute with all her attempts to stray away form the pack into random caves. I was having done of it, to her frustration! Our course stayed straight and true with me at the helm. I later discovered that it's actually much easier than I ever thought it was to stay afloat in salt-water. Have I really never swum in the sea before? Guess not. Nobody was gonna but Christa insisted, then I followed her, and then everybody else followed suit, including sweet Vietnamese lass Hnung, who dove in fully clothed. It was cold. Got bitten by sea-lice. Christa and Hnung sharing a moment. Hnung, whose name is pronounced something close to 'Hune' kept spelling her name for us, as though it would make a scrap of difference. We never did really master it. The Santa Maria. Back in Halong with a few hours to kill, Christa suggested going for a foot massage as we'd seen a string of massage parlours earlier in the week. Although it was officially just a foot massage, they managed to incorporate our hands, arms, legs, backs and heads into the routine. It was lovely, and only slightly marred by my oh-so-professional masseuse's giggles at what are (in Asia) my comically hairy legs. By the end of the hour the two of us couldn't even look at each other: every time I looked at her she would start laughing hysterically, and I couldn't help laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation either. This is the restaurant at the eco-place we stayed at in Sapa. It was a gorgeous location. So peaceful and remote. We loved it. Thanks to Katie for the recommendation. Here's a rice terrace. For now, my photos of the local tribes-people and the shots I took on our treks remains stranded on the damaged memory card, does the footage of us getting motorcycle rides back to base along the narrow mountain 'roads'. Tall buildings in Hanoi. Land is expensive, so they build tall. And to save money often only one or two sides of the building will be painted, the others left as blank concrete. There's some pretty architecture to be seen in Vietnam thanks to the old colonial French influence. My faithful poncho. It didn't rain too much except in Hanoi, where I do believe it's always raining. I haggled aggressively with a woman on the street for this, and it probably only cost a few pence. By the end of the week, we'd both got pretty tired of constantly bartering so ended up paying whatever price was quoted first most of the time - it's not like we couldn't afford it as everything was really cheap. We did not want to come home.