Greetings from London! It's a Friday night, Madonna is freshly divorced and teenage boys are running scared across town, Gordon Ramsay is cooking duck on the tele with Germaine Greer, who is saying things like "watch out for skinny men, they're all dick", and I'm sitting here typing about the last few months. Sit back with a West Coast Cooler, enjoy and thank me for my tireless service later.

We've been here for nearly five months now; time flies when you are stacking on potato and beer kilos, and learning to say "hiya" instead of "hi", "hello" or "g'day ya pommy bastard". We're shacked up in Stockwell, south London, the childhood suburb of Roger Moore, according to Wikipedia. But we haven't really done a lot of London exploration, having been in the last few months on trips to Sicily, Madrid, Dublin, Prague, Budapest and last week, by Eurostar (don't get me Eurostarted on how good train travel under the ocean is) Antwerp. And then we're off over Christmas to New York, to skate on ice while drinking 10L Cokes, eating deep-fried bicycle tyres and seeing what their dishevelled, unemployed bankers look like.

Sicily
Don Broweno has Family in Palermo, a second cousin by my estimation, although I'm not too good with family trees. Francesco is Bron's Mum's cousin, and we - Bron's parents Marg and Ian, Bron and I - stayed with Francesco, his wife Maria, their daughter Elissa, and Francesco's sister Anna (a Londoner now) for a week in August. Their hospitality was incredible, particularly the involtini-related parts of their hospitality. We ate like kings for a week, managed to squeeze into the Fiat Punto despite said indulgence, and generally ambled from town to town, just about completing a lap of the island. We scaled Etna (or at least, a crater of Etna). Here's a photo:

It was a trial to leave. I was starting to get back into the swing of travelling. And I could have spent another week swimming in a sea of involtini. But we left Francesco and family with an Australia guidebook and urged them to allow us to return the hospitality when they get the chance. God knows how a bbq, VB and a potato salad is going to stack up though.

Madrid
A few weeks later, we reconvened with Marg and Ian in Madrid, where they were making a pit stop on the grand tour and sharing an apartment in the centre of town with their Melbourne mates, Vicky and Michael, who were also grand touring. Food figured prominently again. The first night, I ate a plate full of testicles at 5 to midnight. The following evening, half a cow in chocolate-ish sauce. Much wandering the streets was done, lunching, chewing the fat in our convict drawl, and laughing while Juan Carlos (aka Ian) got mistaken for a proper Spaniard. Then there were the piano accordion players busking for Euros, who Ian and Michael put a fatwa on and proceeded to threaten bloody death to at every opportunity, with cheer-leading support from the rest of us. Nothing makes you think favourably of stabbing yourself in the ear more than a piano accordion. Good, good times. Again, too short.


Dublin
The chief reason for visiting potato and beef stew-land was to see my old mate Fezza, whose Mum and mine spent the week preceding talking on Facebook about how much they wanted to be there with us. Given the quantity of Guinness consumed on the Friday night, that might not have been the best idea.

I was struck by how friendly Irish drunks are, compared to English drunks. English drunks will glass you in the forehead before kicking you in the nuts and stealing your wallet, whereas Irish drunks will ask if you know their cousin Sean in Maribyrnong and invite you to spend time in Gllwey (which I later discovered meant Galway in ale-speak). Although, I didn't exactly repay Irish friendliness in the following exchange:

Irish man at bar: "Aye, I thought you were a New Zealander, like".
Me: "Shit mate, I thought you were English".
Irish man at bar: "No, but we won't mention them, will we. We won't mention them" (promptly walks away and, I suspect, finds a Protestant to punch).

L-R: Bron, myself, Fezza, and Lise.


Prague
Meat, castles, meat, beer cheaper than water, meat, castles, bracing walks, left my new glasses in the seat pocket on the plane from London. Cranberry sauce, meat.

More meat.

Medieval dinner shows or dinner and band. Meat, sauce, beer.

I'm sure we did more than this, but it's all I can remember.

Budapest
This was the week after Prague, and to help digest all that over-indulgence, we...over-indulged again. How can you knock back three courses of meat and three veg when it's all so good and all so cheap? I have not regained normal gut function though - paprika is a curious ingredient indeed.

We did what everyone else does when they go to Budapest: hit the baths. The list of possible bath selections and combinations of selections that confronts you at reception is a bit like the aisle with the tuna at the supermarket: a baffling array of options, none of which seems satisfactory. We eventually brushed aside all the with-lemongrass-and-peppercorn choices, and settled for the standard whatever. And spent the next couple of hours watching amorous Magyars dry-humping (or not so, I suppose) in shallow water.

More glorious scenery:


I'd say on the list of most spectacular waterways I've ever seen, the Danube is just about on level with the Mekong (although, for patriotic reasons, the Pumicestone Passage is still a clear winner).

Antwerp
Why, you might ask? Well, Bron heard it was a hip place, and I heard there was a Eurostar package on the cards. I had a cold this weekend and couldn't quite enjoy things as much as I might have liked, but I will say this: do yourself a favour and visit the Antwerp train station. They have tunnelled deep below the original platforms and inserted three others stacked on top of each other beneath. That sounds like Melbourne Central, but the centre of the station is hollowed out, so you can see trains arriving at each of the platforms on top of each other. An engineering marvel. Christ, I'm starting to sound like Tim Fischer. Here's what I mean:


In a strange coincidence, outside our hotel room was a picture of Melbourne. Someone got a bit attached:


Well, that's all for now. All my photos are here:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/andy.kohl

Will write more soon, and more often, but until then, thank Christ for Barack and hope all are well.

Croatia

I have a slightly irrational hatred of travel agents. They're all on kickbacks from the airlines, Contiki and the tourist authorities of Middle Eastern petro-states. You enter Flight Centre Glen Waverley branch with plans for two weeks in Bali, and walk out with return tickets to a camel-strewn desert wasteland, wondering what the hell just happened. Meanwhile, Nicole, your helpful sales assistant, is straight on the phone to her boyfriend Troy to tell him that she's just hit the sales quota for packages to hell on earth, and the reward - 14 nights on P&O around the South Pacific - is on its way.

But now I realise that I'm really no better at booking things. Here's how I decided we should get to Croatia. Day 1: train from Texel in the north of the Netherlands to Amsterdam. Day 2: train from Amsterdam to Cologne, Germany. Train to airport. Fly from Cologne to Dubrovnik. Fourteen hours. Nicole's phone number is now on my speed dial.

We had arranged for Tony, the owner of our hostel, to pick us up from the airport, but he had forgotten this minor detail and we instead had to sidle over to the first cab lined up in the rank: a Mercedes with a hyperactive meter and a driver whose concern for the sheer drops off nearby cliff faces was under-developed. When we arrived at the hostel, Tony was half cut and offering us home-made wine and entertaining his guests. Nackered - we started in Amsterdam at some ungodly hour that morning - we opted for the bed.

So far, so bad, but the next day we hit the streets and quickly developed "beautiful thing-itis" - the assault on the senses from beautiful things that makes you completely unable to really appreciate them. Look at this:

We swam most days, ate lots of seafood, took Tony up on his offer of home-made wine one night, and ventured out to a nearby island, Lokrum. Bizarrely, there is a botanical garden on the island with a range of familiar species, including a eucalyptus named after me:

Because we had a few days up our sleeves, we signed up for some exhausting day tours to the neighbouring countries. Normally, tours shit me up the wall, and you'll remember the boating carnage that we found ourselves embroiled in whilst in Vietnam, but the idea of dropping over the border seemed very appealing.

Firstly, we went to Montenegro, a lighting tour of three or four key places, including the world's most ridiculous mountain pass that featured 25 hair-pin turns on a narrow road up a very large mountain. We stopped on the top of the mountain to eat salted pig and home-made cheese and drink more home-made wine, and to buy postcards that captured the full horror of the trail that we'd just completed. Unfortunately, I haven't got any decent photos of this part of the journey; all of them are blurred, either by my unsteady hand as I peered down 2km into the valley below, or by cloud and rain, which made the ride all the more pleasant. This photo is from Kotor, which had a nice walled old town and a bewildering array of shoe shops:

On this trip, we met two people from Melbourne who knew Bron's Mum from her days as a head honcho of the Eltham Revolutionary Freedom Fighter's Brigade aka Nillumbik Council. Actually, most of Australia was in Croatia while we were there; I seem to recall Christina Rowntree crapping on about the place on Getaway before we left, so that probably explains some of the influx.

The next day, we were up early again to visit Bosnia and Hercegovina. The trip was really just a dash to the town of Mostar and back, but that was enough for me. I have wanted to see the Old Bridge in Mostar since forever and it didn't let me down:

It was very hot in Mostar though - piercing sun and no breeze at all. But there was plenty of interpretive art on the sides of the buildings, made from the barrels of an AK-47s. The scars of the war are still well and truly on display.

A few days later, we hopped aboard a large ferry and made for Hvar, an island in the Adriatic. I can't really remember the specifics of the 11 days we spent here - it's a blur of beaches, blue water, seafood, grappa and bruises from lying on rocky beaches too long...

And at night:

On my birthday, we went up to a restaurant overlooking the main square in town. It soon emerged that Croatia and Germany were duking it out in the Euro Cup soccer. It was a tense encounter, but the Croats prevailed and then the locals of Hvar proceeded to unleash half of the world's supply of maritime flares into the sky...and I thought this stuff only happened when ethnic violence erupted at soccer games in Sydney and Melbourne.

It all went too fast and soon we were spending hours in internet cafes sending our CVs to recruiters in London, in between going to the beach and eating very cheap gelati.

Well, this is the emotional last paragraph where I attempt to sum up life on the road after four months. Here goes: I missed reading the newspaper on the day it was printed. I could no longer stand internet cafes, loud Americans looking to get "like, uh, totally wasted", doing currency conversions and having those "where have you been, we are you going" ice-breaker conversations. But we saw some truly amazing sights and despite dwindling finances and energy levels, had a blast.

Photos!

I've loaded photos from the trip onto this webiste:

http://picasaweb.google.com/andy.kohl

As you can see, there are very few captions. If I wasn't trying to end the first spell of unemployment I've had the displeasure of experiencing, I'd meticulously detail the wheres, whens and whos. But since I haven't, please feel free to email me if you want to know about the things I've snapped!

Coming soon...
- Croatia: why it rules
- England: why is it so cold?
- Job-hunting: why it sucks
- Poverty: how did it get to this?

The Netherlands

Amsterdam - the less said, the better. Put 4,000,000 amorous stoners alongside 4,000,000 hookers, add a reggae soundtrack and don't sell shampoo in your supermarkets, and you've got yourself quite something. Nothing good though.

The place we stayed at was the worst hotel I've ever been to, and I've seen some flea-ridden dives in my time. One night at about 4am, we listened to some member of the social strata known as the dregs of humanity verbally abuse his chosen prostitute in the laneway next to our room, and waited for the piece of merde to get physically violent. Fortunately, he didn't, or we didn't hear it.

Here are the details, for your records:

Hotel Manofa
Damrak 46-48
Amsterdam

This is a community service announcement...

We did manage a few pleasant canal-side strolls in the quieter parts of town, and some quality Dutch cookery. Here's a photo:


Then we went to the Hague, as if to find a jurist who we could cajole to rule against dreadlocks and Doors t-shirts. We failed in that endeavour, but found a great museum displaying the works of M.C. Escher (not to be confused with the urban poet MC Hammer).

Following all this, we decamped to the island of Texel in the north of the Netherlands for some fresh air. We had a few great days of riding along the coastal bike paths and admiring the scenery. When this trip's done, I plan to post all my photos online. But for now, here's what I've got:


And one of those self-taken, wacky on-the-go photos:


The grinning idiot and the red-shoed would-be Kathy Watt are off to Croatia tomorrow. Will write about that when we get back.

Belgium

Our Beligian adventure was only meant to include Bruges, but owing to some confusion at a train station in Brussels, we managed to see a fair bit of the country en route. My in-depth observations from an afternoon of meandering: the country is flat, bicycles are prevalent, and it's easy to find your way again if you're prepared to spend some time waiting at a deserted rural train station that smells of blood and bone.

Bruges was full of two groups of people that didn't look much like us: aged pensioners, and school kids with their note books at the ready (back in my day, we did history the hard way - with chalk, illustrated textbooks and anonymous spit-balls).

The sheer quantity of people around made it nearly impossible to see anything touristy without being bumped into by pimply-faced teenagers eating frites or those motorised old-timer mobiles, so I found myself wandering the back streets and parks, such as the above, a fair bit. We took a boat ride down the canals and ate chocolates and drank beer, and put up with the German socks-and-sandles brigade we were sharing the B&B with. It was nice.

London

We hit the wall in London, and decided to cut the trip short by about 6 weeks. So, we'll be back there on the 24th of June to find work and somewhere to live. I might get my camera out of my bag then, because looking through the viewfinder, I can't see that I took any pictures there.

It could be a dangerous place to live. On the Thursday we arrived, there were five gigs I wanted to see. The only thing that stopped me was that I didn't know where any of the venues were, and I got all self-conscious about my "just stepped out of a Kathmandu catalogue" look, which the local hipsters would no doubt see as reason enough to smash a beer glass on my forehead and steal my trainers.

We reunited with one half of our Berlin crew (of two. Thanks Jane) as well as John and Bec and John's mum, with whom we scraped into second place in the local pub's trivia contest, and saw Lucy "Princess Di" McFadden and her man, Andrew, for a roast and several pints. No pictures, only the memories and the memories of hangovers.

And we braved Terminal 5 at Heathrow and...no bags were lost.

France

This is the part of the blog in which I attempt to keep expressions like "cheese/garlic-eating surrender-monkey" to a minimum. It could be hard, but here goes...

We had two weeks in Paris to begin with, in an apartment at the pointy bit of one of those French apartment buildings. I don't have a photo, but you know what I mean, the apartment at the top where the roof starts to angle in. Perfect for little Frenchmen stunted by years of passive smoking from Mum's cigarillos, but occassionally dangerous if you happen to be this side of five foot tall.

We visited the local market early in the piece and stocked the fridge with plenty of cheese and vegetables and other things massively subsidised by the European Union. This was a welcome change to the now customary trip to the supermarket for just enough packet pasta to last until we have to pack our bags again. We also nailed an alarming number of three-course meals in the city's restaurants, largely made possible by the French menu-reading skills of Bron's friend from school, John and his partner, Bec, who paid us a visit from London.

On one particularly frenetic day of tourism, we visited Versaille and the Eiffel Tower with John and Bec. Here are the obligatory snaps:

Actually, before I go on, I should tell you about our little run-in with the gardener-extraordinaire and former male stripper, Jamie Durie. Well there's not too much to it, really - we were walking in the palace grounds and heard some whiney accent, looked up, and there was the tanned midget generously carrying his crew's camera tripod. Can anyone tell me whether they've seen a special episode of "Backyard Blitz" in which Jurie gets the bobcat out and replaces the manicured grandeur of Versaille with a patio and a Japanese water feature?

But I digress...

John and Bec graciously agreed to photograph us several times in front of this hulking brown metail thing, but I think I'll need to spend some time in photoshop adding a bit more light to the sky and erasing a few busloads of fellow tourists.

I manage to offend our temporary neighbours back at the apartment. We had some mail sent to us there - some train tickets and a birthday card for Bron from my Mum and Dad. Well, I was getting a bit eager to see that the goods had arrived, and reached into the locked mail box behind the main entrance door one day. I just assumed that this was fair game. But no, a housekeeper is employed to take mail from this locked box once a day and place it in individual mail boxes nearby, as I later found out. As I was fossicking through the now-retrieved mail, an old lady neighbour started looking concerned at this grave incursion into her private life and wagged her finger in my face, uttering the words "faux pas". I got the meaning of that. Word travelled fast through the apartment, and soon everyone was upbraiding me for this grande faux pas. The bloody cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.

My beloved former work colleagues gave Bron and I Paris musuem passes as a going-away present, and we loaded up on Paris culture with these lucrative bits of cardboard. Well, Bron did. I, meanwhile, went for a long bus journey through the suburbs to find the aerospace museum, to look at the Corcorde:


We also went to the ballet for Bron's birthday. It happened to the be the last night for some celebrated dancer, who, despite stacking it during the performance, received an extended round of applause at the end. Which he proceeded to milk for a further twenty-five minutes. Just as the curtain was falling, it rose again, and a further fifteen minutes of applause followed. By this stage, I was trying to find a match to set the smoke alarms off. On he went. It was about midnight by the time we ate that night.

After Paris, we headed down to Aix-en-Provence for a few days of country air. While I could pontificate about the beauty of provincial France, you have "Getaway" for that purpose, so I will instead bore you with the knowledge that I discovered the "macro" setting on my camera and spent a lot of timing taking pictures of flowers, like this:


We took a day trip to Marseille and were suitably impressed with the architecture, such as:


As we prepared to fly from Marseille to London, we got a taste of the long-established Britain-France national insult trading contest. In the departure lounge, the French informed us that our plane was delayed due to "UK air regulations". Okay, no worries, I've got some euros to blow on a stinking cup of Nescafe, I thought. After we eventually boarded the plane, the British crew apologised for the hold-up, citing "today's French air traffic controller's strike". Who to believe? I'm going with the Brits.

Feeding time at the zoo

(l-r: B. Jennings, half of Berlin, E. Anderson, A. Cole. Photo: J. Anderson)

(thanks for hanging out with us, Eliza and Jane!)

Germany

I'm a rail nerd, which is not surprising news to many of you reading this. At uni, I wrote my thesis about trains, and I've spent an alarming amount of my quiet time in recent years thinking of things like: where would you put a monorail in Melbourne? and wouldn't it be cool if there was a high-speed train between Melbourne and Sydney that took 3 hours one-way? You know, that sort of stuff.

European trains haven't helped diminish this affliction. Our first high-speed, highly efficient, highly-catered, highly-comfortable trip was from Zurich to Munich, then after a few days there we went to Berlin, then later, from Berlin to Paris. It all cost a bomb, but as someone who paid to see Bon Jovi from the front row would say, it was worth it.

Our Munich adventure involved a lot of wurst and potatoes done in several ways. The first white asparagus of the season was on sale almost everywhere and I had some of that too, in a soup. And roast pork with potato dumplings. And apple strudel. Oh yes, and beers.

That was all great, but not as great as what we saw when the weather turned sunny on the Sunday afternoon we were there. We thought: nice day, big park, why don't we enjoy these two things? So did much of Munich. Including the middle-aged nudists. One of whom strutted on the gravel walkway for close to an hour making noises with his todger by slapping it against his thighs. I don't have any photos, only painful memories.

There are some visually appealing things in Munich though, like this building that I forget the name of. It was in the complex that King Ludwig's mob called home for a while:


Shortly thereafter, we went to Berlin. On the first day, we took a free tour of the city that went for four hours, was fascinatingly and entertainingly done by a very funny guy from Liverpool or Birmingham or somewhere, and ended up costing us quite a few euros in guilty tips.

We also saw that "cupola" on top of the Bundestag. You are supposed to be able to see down into the chambers of parliament from the top - you know, democracy and transparency and all that. But you can't, which made me think that Norman Foster was being a smart-arse.


Obviously, it's not all fun-filled sight-seeing in Berlin. We went to the holocaust memorial; most people walking through the rooms, looking at the exhibits and listening to the stories, were either in tears or near to it, myself included.

We stayed in the former East Berlin, among many potent built reminders that the book of Communist architectural glory is very thin indeed. Look at this as an example of how to perfectly complement a charming cityscape:


What is that concrete dildo doing in the background?

Switzerland

Our original plans involved flying out of Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong to Paris, via Dubai. Drawing this journey on a map, it starts to look a bit like that infamous "Knowledge Nation" diagram of Kim Beazley's a few years ago (well, a bit). So we canned the idea, smiled at the helpful Emirates sales assistant, changed our flights, handed over some extra dollars and flew to...Switzerland.


Before we got to Switzerland, we spent just under a day in Dubai, mostly in an air-conditioned mall. The highlights of the mall included prayers broadcast over the loud-speaker, which didn't seem to halt the furious commerce taking place, and the most kebab-laden food court I have even seen. Next time, we'll probably spend some time outdoors.

We got to Zurich and wandered the cobble-stone streets for a few days, marvelling at such novelties as cold air and rice-free food. I bought a watch, Bron bought some Swiss Army picnic cups (the "Swiss Army" tag applies to everything from USB sticks to home heating, but the cups would be genuinely useful in a combat situation...one lobbed like a grenade would take down a platoon of French soldiers no troubles).

In Lucerne, we scaled Mt Pilatus with some assistance from two cable cars. There's a stop halfway, some of which is depicted in the photo above. Then, as the serious business of reaching the peak is about to begin, you are led into a heavy-duty steel box with thicker cables and a guide who is dressed like a model from a Kathmandu winter catalogue. At the top, it's spectacular:

Perhentian Islands, Malaysia

There's really not that much to write about for this part of the journey: 11 days of lying around in truly horrible settings such as the above, sipping cocktails and Carlsbergs, and sleeping properly for the first time in God knows how long, aided by the soothing hum of the diesel generator. We ate just about everything on the resort's menu, and read about a million books, all big ones too.

Here's another photo:


And when we left, Bron made friends with some genteel old character at the Kota Bahru airport:

Kuala Lumpur

Now I know the Eureka Tower is a work of architectural excellence, what with those ridiculous white touches and the garish gold crap on the top, but I say the Petronas Towers win the coolest building in the world competition by a country mile. They're across the road from where we're staying, and it's hard to walk down the street without looking up (and then walking into fellow gawkers).

We're going up to the Sky Bridge (the thing in between the towers) tomorrow to have a look. In about 10 minutes, I'm going to get made up for a Catherine Zeta-Jones spandex number so as to be suitably attired for the occasion. I can't guarantee that photos will follow.

This might be the last post for a few weeks. We're off to the Perhentian Islands in a few days, where there are no ATMs, so I'm guessing that internet access is patchy at best...

Vietnam

Can anyone tell me how the WAR ON POKIES is going? Have the one-armed bandits been ceremoniously wheeled from the Casino and deposited in the Yarra? I can't believe this happened and I wasn't there to see it...

We spotted this news-stand in Ho Chi Minh City, retailing the world's leading newspapers: the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, the Wall Street Journal...and the Herald Sun. Apparently the ex-pats can't get enough of it. Given the quality of the Vietnam Economic Times, the English-language daily digest vetted by the commo's, that's perfectly understandable.

Vietnam was an assault on the senses, particularly the senses used when traveling on roads. With the deepest respect to cut snakes, Vietnamese drivers are as mad as cut snakes. We saw the aftermath of about 4 or 5 accidents where dudes and dudettes on motorbikes appeared to sustain some nasty injuries (I couldn't tell if it was blood or oil on the road).

The highlight though was seeing a real accident happen just in front of us, when a cyclist cut off a motorbike and they whacked, legs, arms, plastic containers and hats flying everywhere. We were in a taxi behind the carnage, and just as both Bron and I were about to ask the driver to stop so we could apply everything we learnt from Doogie Howser M.D. and E.R. to the situation, he steered around the broken bikes and bodies and laughed, before flooring it all the way to the airport.

Trains are way better. Look at this:

That was on the journey from Hoi An to Hanoi, out the carriage window, just before the city of Hue. This serene part of the journey went for about 2 hours, then our Vietnamese cabin neighbours put on an extraordinary double-act. The first part was the lady eating about 40kg of the most vile-smelling beef jerky, and making some techno-like racket with her aggressive mastication. Following the interval (a dinner of rice and two beers), her husband punched out about 8 hours of snoring so loud it seemed he was intent on spitting out his oesophagus in the morning.

Later on, we took a two-day trip out to Halong Bay, east of Hanoi, despite some concerns about the weather this time of year. It's a pretty place with lots of limestone peaks jutting out of the water, but en route you pass the industrial revolution, Vietnam-style: a massive power plant supplied by trucks hauling coal from 50km away, leaving towns along the way blackened beyond belief.

Our concerns about the weather were well-founded; it was pretty cold, as modelled by B. Jennings:

But as the trusty guidebook said, the mist and cloud in the colder months have their own appeal:

The relaxation of sight-seeing was punctured by a very stupid boat collision. Our rickety old junk boat had lost the ability to reverse and couldn't stop in time when another junk sailed across. The resulting t-bone was a bit of a jolt but fortunately nobody was injured. Our guide said "the engine lost control", which I think was a generous way of saying the captain reacted too slowly when the engine shat itself. But at least the bingle prepared us for the next day, when despite having patched up the engine and gearbox overnight, the crew managed to notch up another point on the wall of boating shame as we collected another junk.

This paragraph's a quick summation of Vietnam highlights, because I'm getting lazy and hungry: being approached by a boy in Ho Chi Minh City who offered to polish my Dunlop Volleys (canvas, for the uninitiated) and thinking of that wonderful expression about polish and turds; eating Cha Ca (fish cooked on a charcoal stove) in Hanoi; and watching Bron being cajoled into buying some artwork from a girl who adopted a pretty good British accent to say "C'mon, dahhhrrrling".

Singapore

It was a few days ago now, and there have been a few Tiger beers between then and now, so I'll try and remember what happened. I'm looking through my camera for guidance - a photo of Bronwen drinking a Singapore Sling, a photo of the ration pack we had to buy from the supermarket when the thought of another bowl of noodles was too much to bear (fruit, nuts, bananas - plenty of roughage, if you insist on asking. Oh yeah, and some chocolate biscuits).

Singapore (population 3,000,000 whatever-those-portable-Playstation-things-are-called) is what happens when you put a collection of proto-fascists, accountants and bankers on a small sand pile in the Straits of Malacca. It's kind of interesting for a few days, then you realise there's nothing really to do if you aren't working, catching a hyper-efficient train to work, eating, shopping, or arranging a term-deposit.

Well, here's a potted summary anyway: Days 1-3 Raffles Hotel, markets, food, markets, museum, markets, Raffles Hotel, our hotel, Little India, Chinatown, markets, food. Day 4 We spent the last day eating lunch at a wicked Lebanese restaurant the Lonely Planet found me last time I was in Singapore, and then had a good deal of time relaxing in the hotel while they fixed our air-conditioning. And then we went to the grocer and saw dried crabs in a plastic packet and where all that stolen Eastern Victorian abalone ends up (in a can). That's about it. Not bad for a stop-over - a short one.

Darwin

Pretty, ain't it? I took this photo down at the harbour, in between eating crumbed barramundi, prawn cutlets and chips, drinking cheap cold beers, and conspiring with Bronwen to push the little kids who were taking over our footrest on the edge of the pier into the water. One of the parents looked ex-SAS, so I thought better of it.

Darwin (population 100,000 unflinching piss-heads) has been a real treat.

It started with rum-swilling maniacs in the row behind us in the plane, who objected loudly and idiotically to suggestions that they drink less than 3 cans an hour, before spending 1 hr and 5 minutes on an expletive-riddled conversation about building retaining walls in one's backyard. Since arriving, we've tackled the heat by swimming regularly in the hotel pool. The pool is weird. At any given hour, 30 or so labourers sit in the adjoining bar and look straight on, trying not to salivate in their beers at the sight of swimsuited female university students from Germany.

Other things: a visit to Parap markets on Saturday morning, at which I ate some tasty charred cow on a stick from a man who looked like the late ex-Indonesian President Suharto (four stars), the Art Gallery and Museum (four stars, and a special mention for the rude mole who didn't serve us at the cafe), Parliament House (going there now. Expect at least 3.5 stars, possibly more if it becomes apparent that Territory governments actually do things). For anyone in this neighbourhood any time soon, we can recommend the Rendezvous Cafe for Malaysian and Thai cuisine and the most bitching lemon ice tea we've ever tasted.

Tonight, we fly to Singapore. Unlike the recent light plane-bound Australian visitor, we are actually authorised to do so and therefore don't intend spending any time in the notorious Changi big house.