Jan 2006

There should have been lots more, but the heat out here destroys CDs pretty quickly. There's some more in the gallery here, but here are a few good ones:

What should have been a relaxing walk suddenly turned more tense

There are 14 rows of shelves with the people massacared by the Kamer Rouge arranged by age and gender

Elephant trekking in Ko Chang

Angkor Wat

The forest is slowly reclaiming Angkor Thom

We booked a train pass when we were back in the UK to take us from Brisbane to Sydney, on the advice of our travel agent – however there are hardly any trains here, so we ended up getting local busses and coach to Byron. The journey was fantastic compared to some we’ve had and only took a couple of of hours.

We planned to book ahead but didn’t through lazyness, so set about looking for a hotel room as soon as we arrived in town at about 7pm. We must have wandered into just about every hostel, hotel, motel and caravan park in town only to be greeted by ‘no vancancy’ signs. We were starting to get desperate enough to consider camping on the beach, but camping without a tent isn’t much different to living like a tramp, so we were very relieved to find a flyer advertising a ‘studio’. We gave the number a ring and set about trekking across the other side of town. It turns out that ‘studio’ is an aussie word for ‘shed in the back garden’, but as we’d spent all day with walking with our backpacks and it was now getting dark we decided to stay for the night.

The owner tried to charge us either $100 for the night, or $420 for a week, which was no good as we only have 4 days here, so we had to clear out early this morning and begin the whole process of trekking around again. Fortunatly on our third attempt we found a cabin really close to the beach in a campsite with cooking facilities. We’re going to do a bit of self catering to save a few quid – although we tried that last night and it didn’t work out much cheaper than going to a restrauant – 16p for a can of spaghetti, 35p for a loaf of bread and $15.00 for a bottle of vodka.

Although quite touristy, Byron’s got quite a nice vibe to it and a picture postcard beach. We haven’t really decided what we’re going to do while we’re here since we’ve both decided that we’re not really beach people…

After a day of being shown around Brisbane, we spent New Years at Brisbane's South Bank centre, where they had some really good celebrations. An inland beach was constructed especially for the evening so it was quite unlike any New Year’s we’d experienced before. We managed to find our way back on the bus, which was an achievement given how drunk we were!

Today we took a trip to a Koala sanctuary, which was lots of fun. We got some good pictures of us having a cuddle with them, which we’ll post up soon. We also had a go at feeding the kangaroos. It touched 40 degrees here at one point, so we’re both feeling pretty lazy (which is why this post is so short).

I know I keep saying it, but we’re going to really really really try and put up some pictures as we have some really good ones that I’d like to share.