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.