Don't worry, we haven't been banged up for being overly smug marrieds - it's mucking out time at the Chengdu Giant Panda Research Centre! We have 'volunteered' (in the sense of paying a large amount of money) to help out at the panda centre for a couple of days. This involves a fair degree of menial task work, but more importantly, a lot of chances to be around pandas! Things we've done so far include:

Take used panda bamboo out of cage & replace
Clean up panda poo-poo
Feed panda bamboo
Weigh panda poo-poo (very important)
Cut up panda apple & panda cake
Wash pandas
Observe panda behaviour
Mop panda floor
Panda massage (!)

You'll notice that most items on this list are actually fairly mundane tasks with 'panda' inserted in them somewhere. This actually transforms them from mundane to UNBELIEVABLY exciting! The pandas themselves are bloody hilarious (especially the younger ones) & totally compelling to watch; they are greedy, lazy clowns who are always pushing each other around, climbing over each other in search of food, making nonstop pratfalls out of trees, etc. We also got to massage one of the giant pandas, and I held a red panda! (sort of like a big ginger cat crossed with a raccoon, but much cuter). But most of the time we just spent watching the pandas clown around.

Excellent fun and well worth it. Dozens of panda photos await the intrepid viewer in our gallery, i'll just show a couple here.

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The next day we wandered over to one of the local monastery areas. We walked down a dual carriageway choked with cars, trucks, lorries, people, bikes, e-bikes (electronic powered pedal bikes) and trikes, turned under a beautifully ornate arch, and suddenly... we were somewhere else. Somewhere old, and peaceful. The buildings were mostly fairly new built, but in a more traditional style with curly pointed corner bits (what the hell are these called - gables?); large bonsai trees line the side of the road along with paper lanterns; even the street furniture looks ornate, and the road has a embossed dragon motif running down the middle. People are sitting around leisurely drinking tea and chatting. Silent quartets of women are furiously clacking mahjong tiles down. Old men bicycle past at unbelievably slow speeds.

We are entranced by this quarter, and are happy to wander around for two hours or more, just soaking up the atmosphere, fiddling with the tourist wares on display from the handful of stalls. We have a cup of tea and play a few hands of rummy (gin, just for a change - unfortunately you need 4 people for mahjong). I try to barter a book of Chairman Mao's sayings down to a sensible level, drawing a crowd of fascinated locals as I do so.

So... Chengdu is a grower. In all, we were here for ten days, which was part lassitude and part design. We climbed a holy mountain (well actually we got the cable car up and then walked down. One bit, anyway); saw the world's biggest Buddha (thanks to the Taliban destroying the ones in Afghanistan recently); visited a site which, according to the archaeologists, is more important than the Terracotta Army (but which, according to the Pendletons, is a lot less interesting).. and we ate.

Oh boy did we eat. Not only is Sichuan (the province of which Chengdu is the capital) famed for it's spicy food, cooked with lots of chilli and laced with hua jiao the “hot-and-numbing” flower pepper, but they are obsessed with street food.

Street food is essentially any food sold on the street by a vendor with a cart or small stall, as opposed to a sit-down restaurant. You do need an eye for hygiene (and a locally acclimatized stomach probably helps) but to be honest we have been troughing this stuff down without any problems – as long as you follow the locals to their eating places you are unlikely to have any issues. The only problem you are likely to have is figuring out what you are eating at some of the places – is it going to be sweet or savoury, i wonder? We found one of the touristy areas which had a whole street full of vendors which we were very excited to see all had English translations for their food. However most of the time the flowery Chinese descriptions for dishes (example: “Old Mother Chen's Pock-Marked Bean Curd”) get debased into more literal form (example: “a bunch of meat”, “Spiciness Noodles Bowl Of”, “Vegetable Gruel”) or even the plain surreal (example: “The Chicken of Bobo”, “Three Big Bombs” and, memorably “Distrinbule Tneeson”).

We have gorged ourselves on (our favourite) various bits of veg, tofu, meat and seafood on sticks

pig's ear pancake and lung soup

lots of weird gloopy sweet stuff with powdered sugary stuff

and loads of ridiculously chilli-heavy dishes

It really is a glutton's paradise.

The last episode of note concerns ear-cleaning. Ear-cleaning, Chinese style, involves a man with a long thin metal spike with a coil at the end rooting this around inside your inner ear canal, pulling out all sort of nasty congealed wax (at least for me anyway – Angi as a girl proved her construction of sugar, spice and all things nice). That's the easy bit. He then takes a sort of exploded cotton ball on a stick and roots this around for a while, making weird muffling sounds in your ear. Then lastly for the piece de resistance he strikes a tuning fork on your chair and holds it to the metal spike (which is still embedded in your ear) until you feel like a giant ruler being plucked on a desk. Boinggggggggg!

'A City You Never Wanna Leave Once You Come' remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Our working theory (developed from a bar stool in Hong Kong) was that HK would be a good primer for Beijing and hence China. Similar language, culture, food, etc, right?

Wrong.

Hong Kong is pocket sized – the metro will take you from end to end in about 40 minutes. Beijing is huge, vast, colossal, imposing. The map you are handed as a tourist is on such a small scale it verges on useless; a bit like being given a map of London & the Home Counties on arrival in Heathrow. You can (trust me on this) walk for hours just between two tiny looking consecutive feeder roads.

Hong Kong is actually quite comfortable and familiar – the expat influence is very strong, and obviously it was a colony for 150 years or so. China is different. It's loudly, overpoweringly alien. Whereas in HK street signs were generally in Cantonese and English together, here in Beijing everything is just written in Mandarin script, with, maybe for one building in a hundred, the Pinyin anglicised translation. Nobody, and I mean nobody that you come across in the street speaks English – or even understands Pinyin! It's very starkly A Different Place and quite scary at first. The one blessing is that the subway is as superb as Hong Kong's, and likewise has English-language maps.

Oh well.

We lucked out in that we had booked an incredibly helpful guesthouse (Templeside Garden Hostel), in the old barrios to the west of town centre, who were happy to do or help us do almost anything – from arranging tours of the big sights to writing down “Please can I have half an order of Peking duck” on a Post-It in the correct way so that we could walk around until we found a restaurant we liked the look of and then brandish it at them. (For reference if you ever need to draw every staff member in a Chinese restaurant to a single place, have them start a huge discussion and then piss themselves laughing at you, this is one of the most efficient ways we have found. It works even better if you order a tiny little medicine bottle of the local firewater and start knocking out toasts to each other and everyone else present, but I digress)

In the end we gave ourselves five nights here before booking our flights out to Chengdu – we could have stayed longer but it could easily have turned into a month just here and we wanted to move on. We managed to tick most of the major tourist boxes (the spectacular Great Wall, Forbidden City, Tian'anmen Square, a surprisingly disappointing kung fu show) and even managed, on a breakneck last-minute taxi tour, to see the beautiful stadia that they erected in honour of our marriage last August. Well, it would have been rude not to pay them a visit.

And we got stuck into the food, of course! Highlights here included a proper Mongolian barbeque (thin cuts of raw meat flash-cooked in a tasty bubbling broth by our own hand); making dumplings with our hotel staff; a bagful of soft, just-cooked stuffed buns that we devoured like migrants on the side of a busy highway, but which cost us only 2 yuan (20 pence) for eight buns (more than enough for a snack lunch for two people); and an enjoyable evening spent perusing the locals chow at the Wangfujing Snack Street market. We had very tasty couple of plates of fried beef and spicy noodles, and then I truly got my weird food mojo on, devouring (in short order) a fried scorpion, fried wormy bug thing and then a fried starfish. The scorpion was quite tasty but the other things got progressively worse, until the starfish which was like eating asphalt. We followed it up with a stick of toffeed baked crabapples, tart and fizzy in your mouth like sherbet.

Disappointingly, i'm still unable to post the video(s) of me eating the scorpion and the other, well, garbage. You'll have to take my word for how funny Angi's screaming is.

p.s. we didn't manage to see the Peking Man. Sorry for the crap joke.

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Hong Kong is an international hub, and it's very easy to get food from almost anywhere here (we've even seen Jordanian restaurants, a first for us), but it's the Chinese food that calls to the adventurous. We gave it our best but have barely scratched the surface in the eight days available to us. We started off with Chui Chow Canton-style dinner; lots of marinated barbecued meats, jellied goose blood and fried fish. Tasty, especially with the vinegared soy sauce it came with. (n.b. Canton is the generic name for the corner of southeast China that includes Shenzhen, Guangzhou, HK and Macau; Cantonese food is what we normally think of as Chinese food internationally as the Cantonese have long been the seafarers and implicit food ambassadors for the Chinese people as a whole. Things are changing though, and you can find some of these regional cuisines in places like London).

The next night we carried on with the most unbelievably spicy Sichuan-style rice noodle hotpot that had us literally crying tears of pain in the restaurant. It was like eating the sun! It's a different kind of heat to the chilli heat we are used to as the Sichuanese use a kind of spice called the Sichuan pepper in a lot of their cooking which has a slightly similar mouth-burny sensation to it but also comes with a whole lot of numbing-mouthy-sort-of-burny feelings too. Very yummy and very addictive. No pictures unfortunately as we were too busy trying to think of our happy place(s).

We've had plenty of lunchtime dim sum – usually small dumplings, boiled/steamed/fried pastry packages and miscellaneous fried things (fried turnip square anyone?) served by unbelievably rude old ladies pushing trollies piled high with bamboo boxes around huge, brightly lit air-hangar style spaces. This is most fun at the weekend as the locals descend en masse to eat, read the paper and hold screaming competitions on their mobiles.

In Macau we had a quick Macanese lunch (sticky saucy rice cake and more marinated meats) and a fantastic Portugese dinner – starting with a jug of iced sangria! - of salt cod stew and “pork chunks with clams marinated in white wine sauce”, which was frankly good enough to go to Macau for. Here's Angi with Carlos, the jovial owner. The restaurant is called... Carlos.

Eating here does have its challenges. The, er, robust Chinese approach to animal 'welfare' means that fish are kept mouthing the air in polystyrene containers until you deign to pronounce their death sentence. Shark fins are huge business here – openly sold in bright, boutique-style shops for vast amounts of money, along with bird's nests and other such delicacies (n.b. Shark's fins are a terribly bad thing to traffic as part of traditional medicine as the fishermen catch the shark, hack the fins off then chuck the still-alive body back in the sea, not even using the meat). You'll also see these things all over menus, along with turtle, dried seahorse, mantis shrimp, and many more of our undersea friends. A bit of a challenge to ignore, but par for the course here unfortunately.

Lastly, we met up with Audre and Dimitri, our newest heroes. These guys have been travelling the world non-stop for fourteen years! Actually, if you ask them how long it's been you never get a straight answer so it could be even longer

We stumbled across their fantastic blog (the link is on the right) while looking for something good to eat in Lima, and were amazed. On exchange of a few emails it transpired that we were all going to be in Hong Kong at the same time, so we agreed to meet up! It was a hoot meeting up with people as food- and travel-obsessed as we are, although we were obviously trounced on the war stories front. Maybe when we next meet again, four years from now in some other distant land...

Obviously we had to get some food. We went to Chilli Crab Under the Bridge, hoping they would have the (very seasonal and hard-to-get) Shanghai hairy crab available but it wasn't to be. Instead we opted for a sort of crispy salty duck egg battered crab (different to most crab preparations but yummy enough to scrape the crispy bits off the plate when we were finised), a hollowed pumpkin filled with a thick, pumpkiny seafood soup (we also ate the pumpkin afterwards), and a few other sundries, washed down with tea and beer.

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One of the classic hotels of colonial Hong Kong, the Peninsula maintains its air of more rarefied times with its army of impeccably uniformed flunkies, fleet of racing green Rollers parked out front, and of course, a flawless afternoon tea experience.

At first we were politely turned away due to Angi's flip-flop wearing casualness. Luckily we had come armed with a second pair of shoes. Nice to know someone is trying to keep the riffraff out though, eh? We were soon ensconced with a delightful cup of tea, a small selection of sandwiches (with the crusts cut off) and enough sugary treats to make the Tooth Fairy rub her hands in glee.

An hour later, we staggered out from the coolly air-conditioned calmness into the muggy afternoon air. Back to the real world again. Wouldn't have it any other way!

All of this was, of course, in aid of celebrating Sharad's 70th birthday. Happy Birthday Dad!

After our tea for two we went for an evening at the races. No joy though, so we'll have to keep the day jobs (travellers).

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HK is both familiar - British rule has left behind Marks & Sparks, afternoon tea (more on this later) & London-style buses (sadly not red); and exotic - the towering incomprehensibility of neon Putonghai characters 20 feet tall decorating our road, Cantonese chatter on mobile phones on the airconditioned subway and restaurants and shops full of delicacies which we'll never be able to figure out. The city centre thrums with activity, as the MTR (underground) network flawlessly shuttles people around a breakneck speed, twenty-something office girls go for lunch in gaggles of giggles, and vast shopping malls are thronged with the international temples to designer gods. These people like to shop. Everyone is trying to sell you something, walk through the space you are inhabiting, or cough at you. Expats cluster together drinking in bars, comparing notes on the previous night's drinking. Locals lunch at high speed in huge, cacophonous eating halls. Old men sit in the oddest places reading the racing pages.

It's been a lot of fun being in this sort of energy again. We have caught up with old friends, met new ones, gambled, prayed, shopped, eaten and drunk our fill.

First social engagement was a night at the Happy Valley races, meeting up with Tanvi and Konnie from my old JPMorgan days. Our careful strategy of picking the horses based upon their names only yielded winnings of about 10% of capital. Not great then. We headed into the expat ghetto of Wan Chai (neon lights, filth, drinks promotions, hawker girls) for a couple of drinks; luckily our balcony bar had an excellent view of the brutal fight we saw unfolding between two drunk expats. Charming. What with this and being refused entry to the girly bars as we had ladies in the group, we had had quite enough of the place. Lan Kwai Fong was slightly (emphasis on slightly) more civilized but we only lasted a couple of cocktails longer. Good cocktails though...

The next day we took the fast cat to Macau. A former Portugese colony, Macau is now a Special Administrative Region of China, in much the same way HK is. Macau is much smaller though (think a city state rather than the huge amount of surrounding greenness that HK is embedded in), and is blessed with a quaint Portugese-style city centre which is nice for a brief wander. As in, twenty minutes of wandering before you hit the other side. However most people come here for the casinos. It's sort of like Vegas for the Chinese, except without the fun, drinking and hence the atmosphere. Everyone is very serious, sitting at the baccarat tables, smoking furiously and not looking like they are enjoying themselves. A bit of a disappointment compared to the adult playhouse feel of Vegas.

After a few days of sybaritic excess we took our foot off the pedal, seeing some of the more traditional side of the island(s). We chilled at the peaceful Chi Lin nunnery, pondered at the Po Lin monastery, lit incense for our travel blessings at the Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin temple ("Ah, very bad luck. $20 to pay the Buddha to remove bad luck"), trekked up to the 30m-high Tian Tan Buddha (OK, so we got the cable car. Better views anyway) and then wandered around with the locals in Kowloon (“Ah”, said an expat friend who will remain nameless, “You're staying in the Dark Side”).

And the food! Chinese cuisines abound, all of them knocking everything from London into a cocked hat. More details soon. It's almost redundant to say, but our kind of place!

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We were at the dive shop when it hit. A minor tsunami erupted from the swimming pool, all very exciting! The tremors lasted for a few seconds and everyone looked a bit confused but luckily, no-one was hurt and there was no damage to any of the surrounding buildings.

We've just come back from a couple of dives at our local reef in Sanur, and we think we heard an aftershock on the first dive whilst we were underwater! Low rumblings that sounded a bit like a big boat. Just going to check that out now on t'web.

Angi

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The number is: +62 813 3724 1561

It'll be valid whilst we're in Indonesia, i.e. until mid October. After that, we'll probs get a new sim card for each new country we visit.

Please text or email us your phone numbers, as we no longer have them!

A & J

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Heady aromas of incense and jasmine rice waft through the air. Friendly locals with ever-ready smiles and daily (sometimes hourly) offerings of fresh flowers to statues of gods. Rhythmic drumming and jaunty percussion from the seemingly impromptu street parades - you'll catch at least one each day whether you want to or not. $8 hour-long beach massages - manna for aching limbs. And the food! Amazingly cheap and devilishly spicy, it's tingly-tastebud perfection for we two jaded travellers. Suitably paired with a frosty beer or two, of course...

We're interning for two months at Blue Season Bali, a dive shop in the 'fishing village' of Sanur (as described by Lonely Planet). However, most fishing villages don't have three Dolce & Gabanna shops within walking distance, paired with some knockoff Paul Smith concessions.

We had a bit of a slow start but are getting to grips with the fantastic diving now, although some of it comes in bone-chilling 15 degree water (this is very cold). It's also nice to be part of a community for a while, hanging out, drawing on dogs, etc (more on this later).

All we need now is some time off to surf!

Angi

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After coming back from Melbourne we stayed with Karen and Mark for a few more days, then checked into a hotel for a couple nights over our anniversary weekend. We had a meal at Quay - great food and the most stunning wraparound view of the harbour, the bridge and the Opera House. Plus possibly the first martinis since we left home! The night after we went to the Opera House, hoping to get some returns for Aida but unfortunately it didn't work out, so we went to see a production called Poppea. Which was such a dog's dinner i'm not going to waste my time or yours talking about it.

The next day we went over to the Blue Mountains with Karen and Mark, had a bit of a walk around the Three Sisters, saw the waterfalls, had a lovely meal on a cafe on the side of the valley, then stuffed ourselves with hot chocolate (and chocolates) until we felt really unwell. Finally it was time to say goodbye - very traumatic for us, leaving our home away from home.

We have spent a few nights staying with Anoop, a friend from Angi's course at college. We've also met (twice) Dhananjay & Sumitra, more cousins which we didn't even realise we had! We had a great couple of dinners, the second at their house in Beverly Hills (no, not that one) where we met Rahul & Siddarth, their sons.

Finally we've been doing more sorting out, getting stuff we need, getting ready to move on, acquiring visas, posting stuff home, etc etc. We are leaving for Bali tonight! I'm almost incontinent with excitement. It is relatively unsettling to be leaving the calm, friendly environs of metropolitan Australia for 9 months in bonkers Asia but we're looking forward to it and as ready as we can be.

Goals:
Dive
Eat as much different stuff as possible
Dive
Post smaller blog entries more often
Dive

Next post: Sanur, Bali!

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On arrival Melbourne treated us to a slight drizzle of rain, miserable skies and a bit of a breeze. Now this really was like home, we felt quite homesick! Melbourne seemed a lot more arty than Sydney, there are lots of galleries, edgy architecture, cultural things and shops crammed full of stuff you don't need but can't help wanting. And kids doing parkour classes in some of the public spaces, which was quite cool. Excitingly, we met up with Hannah (who wedding-goers may know as Bridesmaid Orange), for a few days of touring and culture. Well that was the plan but it ended up more like drinking, eating and a bit of touring. We spent a couple of nights in Melbourne, hanging out in trendy bars where the kids wore short skirts, clumpy shoes and bows in their hair (and that was just the men), drinking cocktails called Dictatorship of the Proletariat (really), and also seeing the worst band IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. They were called the Night Terrors, and if you ever get the opportunity to miss seeing them we would recommend that you grasp it with both hands.

After a few days of the city slicking we hired a car for the day and drove down to Philip Island. PI is a little rural enclave a short drive and a bridge away from Melbourne. It's a bit like the Isle of Wight, but with better animals and slightly fewer old people. We saw some koalas (very cute - TEDDY! - but like strippers you're not allowed to touch them, only they can touch you), wallabies (super cute - happy to hang on to our hands and eat the food we bought), kangaroos (similar but larger, slightly intimidatingly so in fact), tasmanian devils (we were very excited to see them but they were a little underwhelming, and we felt sorry for the poor buggers as they were literally shaking with fear!), and finally the PI Penguin Parade. This is a nightly penguin ritual where the birds which have been hanging out at sea eating for a couple weeks come home for some R&R. They bob around in the surf for a little while, slowly coming to the shore. When they are washed ashore they will hang around in the surf line, being buffeted by the waves all the time, until their group reaches the critical size that they are happy to make a break for it when they dash across the beach to their little homes in the grassland. It's very cute, their indecision as they wait for their mates is hilarious, especially as they are pint-sized little things, 30cm at most. We also visited a chocolate factory, which was very exciting as it had been tricked out like Willy Wonka's, all complex machines and things for little hands to fiddle with.

Once we'd had this wildlife bonanza we needed a bit of sustenance. By sheer chance the hotel we are staying at had an excellent little bistro around the corner, where we polish off three and a half courses and a bottle each of white, red and dessert wine. Raa! We drove back to Melbourne slowly the next morning, suitably chastened and sufficiently late that we didn't manage to go to the Giant Earthworm exhibition.

We had another couple of days of living it up in Melbourne with Hans (including going to an AFL match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground - an amazing education in institutionalised off-ball violence) and then, very sadly, it's time to say goodbye. We had a great time seeing Hans, it was like a little slice of home from home. After we left Hans we visited Angi's uncle and aunt Chandumama and Meeramami, along with their hyperactive puppy Sonny, who put us up and took care of us handsomely. Hopefully it'll be less than 27 years until we see them the next time...

n.b. still having photo woes... if i'm not on a mac which doesn't like this site it's a PC which refuses to read the memory cards. Sorry. I still have photos from Bolivia which need to go up!

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And once again thank you to everyone that helped make it such a special couple of days last year, whether you worked tirelessly to create beautiful bridesmaid's dresses (Jon's mum) or organising an entire event on your own (Angi's mum), sacrificed your birthday celebrations for the greater good (George - hope you've made up for it this year), or just gave us some stories to chuckle about (Jon P, Gareth, Pete...and the groom!). Or simply gave us the money to enable it all to happen (Angi's dad, plus everyone who contributed to our extended honeymoon!). We treasure all the memories.

Jon & Angi xxx

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We are staying with the stupendously lovely Karen and Mark. We only met them for 4 days doing the salt flats tour in Bolivia and they have thrown open their beautiful flat to us; we've been here a week already! And we don't want to leave to be honest. Deep in the depths of winter here, it's a chilly 22 degrees CENTIGRADE in the sun; the sky is blue; we've hardly seen a drop of rain all during our stay here. Everyone seems to go surfing on their lunchbreak (or after work in the summer) and the kids go to school in their board shorts! The outdoor culture is so prevalent here as there are so many facilities available year-round; running, swimming, surfing, even diving is possible nearby (which we er... haven't dared due to 14 deg water). We had a lovely kayak around the placid Middle Harbour one Sunday morning, ogling the $20mm houses perched on the cliff edges. Predictably, Angi and I in the same kayak managed to go about half as fast as Karen on her own. The coastline is so splintered and fractal that there is an abundance of interesting coastal walks; we spent half a day walking and only saw a small portion of the locale. And everyone is just so bloody nice and cheerful. It's the polar opposite of moaning London.

And to top it off, the food here is great! Successive waves of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and many other -ese immigration have left a huge Asian immigrant population, which translates to excellent food. Every time we've tried a hole-in-the-wall place for a little Korean barbeque or some Szechuan hotpot the meal has been what in London we would have rated worthy of a destination restaurant. Even the pubs, fish and chip shops, and random cafes along the way seem to take a degree of care with their food that is several notches above the average in England; we are very impressed. The microbeers are also fantastic, producing a wide variety of beer types. Even some IPAs and English style beers. Walking around Manly is a real trial as we just get tugged hither and thither by all the waves of nice smells.

We've also been able to do all the organisational things that we've put off for so long. Visas, post, repairs, health stuff... it's refreshing to be in a first world country where you can actually get stuff done. Civilization is a functioning internet connection, bookshops and q-tips, I have come to decide!

p.s. we're having some problems with photos again, normal service to be resumed as soon as possible

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I won a game of rummy with a straight flush!

After that we flew to Papeete airport, in Tahiti. Immediately we were met with a bit more of the Polynesian welcome we expected - grass skirts, a flower in the hair for everyone, and ukelele strummers at the airport. Hurrah! We crashed out for the night and then got the ferry to Moorea in the morning.

Moorea is very close to Tahiti, part of the Society archipelago (French Polynesia is made up of 5 different island chains - Society, Austral, Marquesa, Tuamoto, Gambier). Tahiti is the only island with an international airport and hence the Society islands are by far the most heavily touristed. And the price of this tourism is pretty high. We were prepared for the high cost of lodging but were a little stunned by how expensive all the incidentals were - an hour of internet cost $9, and a simple burger lunch for two would run to about $40. However I was determined that we would have waterfront lodging!

So we ended up staying at the Club Bali Hai, a faded and slightly rough-around-the-edges place. We were entertained nightly by Muk, the faded and slightly rough-around-the-edges former owner, who regales all the guests every night with tales of coming to Moorea in the 1960s, spending every night drinking rum and carousing the local lovelies. One of the three of the guys that came over has sired 10 children by 5 different women! Full amusing story here http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/travel/world/article_1289983.php

Anyway, we had our waterfront villa, and very nice it was too, setting us up for a week of lazing around in the sun and diving. The diving was pretty exciting - all the coral had been killed by the crown-of-thorns starfish but the reef fish were all staggeringly pretty (every one colourful, or masked, or striped, or something exciting) and the place was crawling with sharks! One day we saw 5 different types of shark before breakfast, and we had 3 metre pregnant lemon sharks coming to within a metre of us while the DM brought a tuna head down for them. Slightly worrying actually.

And that was French Polynesia really. We would have liked to fly out to some of the outer islands where the culture (and the diving) are a lot more distinctive and exciting but we didn't have the time or the money. Next time - when we have the yacht...

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I mean, this place is reeeally isolated. Chile is 3700km to the east; Tahiti in French Polynesia is 4000 km to the west. It's so isolated that we don't believe it was colonised until the first millennium after Christ; and even then once it was colonised we don't think that the islanders had much contact with anyone else until the European era. Which meant that, unfortunately, when they cut down the last tree on the island they were a bit screwed: no wood hence no fires, no canoes (for fishing), no ropes (for building/transport/fishing nets), no tree cover for birds to live in... oops. And nobody to trade with. Which led to a bit of an apocalypse-type scenario. Anyway, more on this later.

The island today is home to about 4000 people, roughly half of them of Rapa Nui stock. It's small enough to drive around in a day easily, but there is only one town (Hanga Roa), where 95% of the people on the island live. The rest of the island is devoted to rebuilt statues and ceremonial sites, ruined sites, and the ground up bones of former ceremonial sites which have been used for walls to pen livestock in. The whole place is like a giant open-air museum. With wild horses walking around everywhere. We had a guided tour around several of the sites, the most important being the quarry where the giant stone heads - called moai were produced. This place was one of the most amazing sites we've been to on the trip - everywhere you look giant heads are poking out of the ground in all states of disrepair. As the ecological catastrophe developed on the island, they (sensibly) took the step of producing more and more bigger and bigger heads - there are about 400 in various states at the quarry, compared with only 900 found on the island at large. Quite an inventory...

The next day we hired a quad bike and took off ourselves around the dirt tracks. The bike came with lots of helpful safety warnings, like

1 - DO NOT USE on public roads
2 - DO NOT USE with more than one person

which filled us with confidence as you can imagine. Turns out that they're a pretty efficient way to get around when the roads are poor, we managed to fill in most of the gaps on the island that we hadn't seen the day before, including the beautiful crater lake.

The building of the larger and larger heads unfortunately but inevitably coincided with the cutting down of the last trees, leading to the ecological collapse which in turn led to a fairly vicious civil war as the sustainable human population adjusted itself. There was also a shift in the belief system away from the moai (which were all toppled and broken during the war) towards awarding respect as part of the Birdman contest. This basically involved, once a year, all the dozen or so tribes nominating a champion from amongst their young men, for a test of strength, fearlessness, and all that good stuff. The young braves would have to climb down the (fairly sheer) cliff at the side of the Rana Koa crater (a 300m drop to the sea), get past the crashing surf into the sea, swim a couple of hundred metres out to the motus (a couple of offshore rocky crags), avoiding the sharks while they did so, not get dashed to pieces on the far side, climb up onto the rocky shore, and wait there (for up to a month) until the black terns migrated back and laid their first eggs. Then, they would take the egg that they have found, strap it to their foreheads in a load of padding, and reverse the process! Including the 300m cliff climb. The first guy to bring back an undamaged egg would be top dog for the year. Obviously, a little bit gutting if you get to the top of the cliff and you've smashed your egg...

We also managed to fit in a couple of days diving, which was c-o-l-d, but interesting to see the different endemic fish (fun fact - islands generally support isolated populations of fish as well as land fauna, as most fish just hang around reefs or areas of interest, not cruising the ocean at wide) and on the last day diving around one of the motus we had 60m visibility! Which was pretty amazing. On the penultimate night we had a traditional dinner/dance combo - normally something we would have run a mile from as there is nothing more depressing than a load of really depressed people doing a dance but this was great fun, everyone seemed to be really enjoying it (probably because they were professionals and had taken the dance around the world already!).

We also met a man in a yellow sleeping bag (see link to the right). More on him when I can figure out how to upload pictures to a Mac...

Te Pito o te Henau remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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On 12th August we will be heading to Bali for divemaster internship training. This will qualify us to take out a group of people for a guided dive. A very scary thought, mostly for the poor sods we'll be leading. We'll be staying in digs provided by the dive shop and so will have a base for 8 weeks or so. A nice change.

From there we'll be travelling to Jakarta through Java and Sumatra in order to catch our flight to Hong Kong on 11th October. After 5 days there we'll head to Beijing where we'll begin our travels through China. (And hopefully Tibet).

Then it's onto India for 5 weeks or so of visiting the rellies and eating as much curry as we can. We may decide to stay in Kerala for Xmas and New Year too.

Beyond that, the plan is to get a flight to Bangkok at some point to start the SE Asia leg of the journey.

All in good time...

Our plans for Asia onwards remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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We haven´t done too much so far but initial impressions are of crashing surf, wild horses and the eponymous stone moai heads everywhere. Tour (and more excitement hopefully) tomorrow!

Jon

Happy Easter remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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(and I forgot the camera, again. Sorry)

We managed to fit in some more good food as well; a great sushi joint, a PROPER curry house (Kiran please note), curiously located in a Best Western hotel; and a wonderful seafood restaurant called Puerto Fuy. A little bit too posh for scabby travellers such as us but lovely food. We started off with the best clam we´d ever tasted, encaged in a cheese gratin with some slightly sweet tomatoey stuff inside

and a selection of sea urchin prepared 5 ways, which had Angi in raptures

and then for mains, an interesting comparison of sea bass VS chilean sea bass. Didn´t even realise they were different fish, but although the chilean sea bass was very nice we preferred the sea bass, it was one of the nicest, meatiest, umami-est fish dishes I´d ever tasted. Nummm.

Finally the dessert was enlivened by a more-than-slightly-silly misting of an alcoholic beverage of your choice from a selection of mini perfume sprays. Pretentious? Yo?

And that´s it for South America! Next stop Polynesia: sunny skies & grass skirts (we hope)... So long Americas, and thanks for all the carbohydrates!

Jon

p.s. lots more bolivia/argentina/chile photos have been posted... unfortunately this bloody site keeps on losing the names. Sorry. Will update them all when I have a spare day or two...

Bass Freaks remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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San Pedro de Atacama is, as the name suggests, on the Atacama desert, and hence is one of the driest places in the world. As its also pretty high up this makes it perfect for doing astronomy, hence why some of the worlds biggest land based telescopes are based here. We did a nighttime observatory tour (very cold), seeing the Moon, Jupiter, nebulae, binary stars, star cradle regions... all sorts.

From here we got a 23-hour bus south to Santiago de Chile. The food ration we received over this time totalled

1) HALF a ham and cheese sandwich (one sandwich, not two)
2) a carton of pineapple juice
3) four custard cream biscuits
4) a small pot of orange juice

Turbus, if you´re reading, you´re a disgrace.

We are flying out of Santiago to Easter Island in a few days but the lure of being so close to the Argentine border was too strong. We took another bus trip to Mendoza - 9 hours each way going right up into the alpine Andean passes, then passing through the beautiful, huge, craggy foothills laced with tiny vineyard freeholdings both sides. We were only in Mendoza for 36 hours (or to put it another way, two steak dinners and a steak sarnie for lunch) but it was worth it.

The first night we relied on the oldest trick in the book for tracking down the best example of a fairly prosaic type of food typical to a city (i.e. if you needed the best chippie in London, etc) - we asked the cabbies. Two separate cabbies confided in us that the best parrilladas in town were at the corner of Peru and Sarmiento. We randomly chose the Florencia.

At first it seemed like a bit of a "family" restaurant - not a good thing in the UK or the States as we feed our children crap generally, and the first impressions weren´t improved by one of the surly male waiters (not one of whom was under 40) shutting the door on Angi. The waiters turned out to be absolute gems though (I guess when you pay people more than minimum wage they start to take some pride in their jobs), steering us away from a tripe-heavy parillada set menu and bringing us instead a pair each of tasty chorizo and black puddings, two ENORMOUS chunks of ribs and what I think might have been the best bife de lomo steak we´ve ever had the privilege to have put in front of us. It was perfect. Crispy and slightly browned on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside with nary an inch of fat or wastage. We fell on it like a pack of wolves, pausing only to pad our stomachs slightly with garlic chips and wash it down with a fine bottle of malbec. And this all cost probably a third of what the same meal in London would have been.

The next day we spent very aimlessly and pleasantly wandering around Mendoza, on a beautiful clear, temperate winter´s day. It´s nice to be somewhere that feels like home, with a touch of winter sharpness in the air but still with the sun shining, and shining a little lower in the sky than the burning equatorial regions as well! Plus, weird as it sounds, it´s nice to experience a day that´s not strictly divided into 2 12-hour day/night periods. OK, OK, I´m just a homeboy far from home I guess...

[img=http://photos.travellerspoint.com/168448/P1050307.jpg thumb=http://photos.travellerspoint.com/168448/thumb_P1050307.jpg

The next night we took a taxi across town to another parillada called Don Mario. This joint was a little more civilized, and as we hadn´t been to a vineyard we decided to rise to the occasion by treating ourselves to a very nice bottle of Luigi Borga Malbec (thanks to my cousin Jack for the recommendation). We started off with some perfectly cooked sweetbreads - slightly crunchy on the outside, soft and almost rude on the inside, grilled with half a lemon over them. Nummy. For mains the waiter encouraged us to cast our vote on an epic contest - Bife De Lomo vs (half a) Chateaubriand! The meats were both, again, exceptional - today the lomo was a little saltier with a wonderful little layer of fat around the outside, while the chateaubriand, according to Angi, "tastes like babies". Again we ate until we could eat no more, and then toddled home.

(i forgot the camera - sorry. They did look pretty similar though; two pieces of beef the size of two clenched fists!)

And that was the end of our Argentina experience! This time, anyway.

Jon

Steaks Is High remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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From Titicaca we got the bus to La Paz. No, not Gareth, silly, that would be El Paz! La Paz is the highest capital in the world - and if the 3660m+ altitude doesn´t have you gasping for breath the fact that it all appears to be built out of 45 degree angled sections of pavement will. We spent a night here, excited at the fact that we found the Star of India, a so-called "British Indian Curry House". Fantastic, we thought! It´s felt like forever and a day since we had a curry. Unfortunately the manager was a div, the poppadums were minute and fishy and the madras was average, strangely potato-ey and gave me the trots something rotten for a week.

However, before I was aware of my impending stomach-related trouble we were on a plane to Rurrenebaque in the north of the country, which is the gateway to the Bolivian Amazon. This was one of the occasions where the journey was an experience in and of itself, as we flew with TAM (Transporte Aero Militario), which is essentially a Bolivian low-cost airline flying on decommissioned military planes from working military bases. Entertaining watching the squaddies march around carrying chairs and luggage for the plane but we weren´t really sure if we could take pictures of them without being shot for sedition or something! Also quite refreshing to have no pre-flight briefing, no security, no X-rays... less so being locked in a small room for 45 minutes pre-embarkation.

Anyway, we got there in the end, and signed up for a 3-day tour of the pampas. This turned into a bit of a Heart of Darkness experience for me due to aforementioned issues, which I shall now gloss over. The tour itself was OK, unfortunately it rained stairrods for most of the second day, but we got to see alligators, capybaras and pink river dolphins, and fish for pirañas! Angi caught a huge red piraña which we then ate for dinner. That´s the food chain in action for you. Just before asking us if we wanted to have a swim our guide informed us that they can strip a human body of flesh in 5 minutes flat. Nice...

Coming back the rain had meant that TAM had cancelled all their flights for the next 4 days. This was because the heavy military airplanes couldn´t land on the soft grass runway! So we ended up having to pay and extra $100 to fly the 300 km to La Paz in a minuscule 6-seater Cessna. We were absolutely terrified at first, as the plane was significantly smaller than a lot of cars we´d been travelling in, but it ended up being a fantastic ride once we realised we weren´t about to die.

Back in La Paz we decided to try and end our recent spate of bad luck by buying some good luck charms and having our fortune told by a magic man. Apparently, Angi is bad and I have an enemy (allegedly not Angi, someone from my work - I think I know who...). We will have lots of money but only one son. A couple days later we had our fortunes read by a pair of trained yellow and white budgerigars, who told us that I was a single young man and that Angi was a little girl who should play the lottery on terminals 3, 2 or 6. Not sure which one I prefer really.

From La Paz we headed south to Potosi, a dusty little colonial mining town with the distinction of being the highest city in the world. The main draw here is to do a tour of the working silver/zinc/lead mines. This was quite an eye-opener for me as I used to trade these commodities from a desk in London. We started the day getting togged up in waterproofs, wellies, hard hats and headlamps, had a brief tour round the processing plant (which was very basic and full of pools of noxious chemicals used to separate the ore from the scrap, sulphates, mercury and cyanide anyone?). From here we went into the mine itself. The tunnels started out high enough to walk through but before long we were sliding around on our bellies. The interchange between "floors" in the mine involved a scramble up/down a 45 degree rock face, with no guide ropes, no steps, no toeholds, walls and ceiling covered in asbestos, while wearing wellies which were at a minimum 2 sizes too big. The lower floors got hot too - 30 degrees plus, with no ventiliation and tasting the clouds of particles in the air. We talked to a couple of miners that we came across, mostly sitting in the dark on their own chewing coca leaves to keep them going. The most shocking was a 13-year old boy, working alone as his dad was too hungover, just at the start of working a 23-hour double shift, with almost no breaks and no food during that time. All this for a random but generally small amount of recoverable ore per day, not always enough to keep them above the poverty line. Sobering stuff - must remember not to complain about working conditions in the office. We were very glad to see the blue sky again after 3 hours entombed. Then at the end of the trip we goofed around with some live dynamite which was exciting, to say the least!

-this is me holding two live, lit dynamite bombs which exploded 90 seconds after this picture was taken. No shit!

From Potosi we caught an overnight chicken bus to Uyuni, another 1-horse desert town. The attraction here being the proximity to the biggest salt flats in the world - the size of Northern Ireland! We loaded up into a 4x4 the next day and were off. The flats are amazing - perspective crushes distance, and it seems like the only things in the world are the blue sky and white ground. Also some pictures here (er... at some point) from the Isla Pescados, a rocky outcrop of fossilized corals covered in ancient cacti. The rest of the tour was a little bit of an anticlimax, being a whizz around some coloured lagoons and high geysers (new Pendleton record - 5020m above sea level). The most notable thing about the latter days were the extreme bitter cold - down to minus 20 degrees C at the worst point. The last morning we got up at 4.30am and I was wearing 2 t-shirts, 2 longsleeves (1 thermal), 1 alpaca jumper, 1 hoodie, 1 waterproof, 1 pair leggings, 2 pairs socks, 1 pair jeans, 1 pair trekking trousers and a hat. Angi, as you can imagine, was wearing about double that and looked like the Michelin lady, but not smiling as much.

We were left at the border and caught a collectivo bus to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, our third country in a fortnight.

Bolivia Roundup remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Not socially, of course - quite the opposite really, we are slowly becoming soap-shy llama-wearing coca-chewing travelling bums. But in terms of metres above sea level we are headed higher and higher.

First stop off was at Arequipa, a fairly pretty colonial city which we just didn´t really take to. Possibly because lots of stuff went wrong for us here, but we didn´t gel. We used the city as a base for a 3-day trek down (and up again) Colca Canyon, one of the deepest canyons in the world! The canyon is around 2100m deep and we traversed about 1300m of that I believe, with the river at the bottom being around 2000m above sea level. The trek was pretty tough but we managed it and were very satisfied. We saw lots of condors and beautifully functional terraces which have been used non-stop since pre-Inca times.

From Arequipa we were supposed to go to Cusco to do the Inca Trail, and then see the crowning glory of Macchu Picchu. However we had to change our plans, and that´s the last I shall say (see Angi´s rant for more details). Sorry Sunil, Adriana & family, we really tried!

So we went east, and higher still, towards Bolivia. We stopped at the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca for a couple of days, picking up a bit of culture. This place is seriously high - like 3800m, with blazing sun during the day going to well below freezing at night. The quality of light up here is just unbelievable - I have uploaded approximately a grillion photos of the sky, the light and the lake

We saw some fantastic costumes and masks in Puno, and some traditional music makers too. Really reminds me of Tibet for some reason, not sure if this is a valid comparison or not, hopefully we get to find out.

On the Peruvian side we also visited the islands of the Uros people, who build floating islands out of reeds on the lake. No, really! They originally ran away to the lake to escape persecution by the Aymaras but are now a bit dependant on tourist handouts which is a bit sad to see.

From here we crossed over into Bolivia. The difference between the Peruvians and Bolivianos at this altitude ísn´t that great - and is much less than the difference between lowlanders and the altiplano folk. The people up here have a very hard life, most of them living as subsistence farmers and handicraft makers for tourists. Spanish is by far the secondary language, the northern/Peruvian side speaking Quechua and the southern/eastern/Boliviano side speaking Aymara. These are both tongues which predate the Incas, and are still in common parlance! Amazing...

Hello
Quechua - Ayancho
Aymara -Camisaraki

Jon

Getting High remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Here´s the Colibri (hummingbird), clearly the best one

And this guy is either a spaceman, an owl, or an Inca Kola rep, depending on who you talk to

(loads more in the gallery)

The only other thing the Nascans left is some incredibly well preserved mummies in their burial chambers. The desert is so dry that everything has remained perfectly preserved for a thousand years, give or take.

Do Another Line? remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Some daft punters

A couple planks of wood

A beat up old hoopty-wagon dune buggy, complete with psychotic driver (not shown)

& some sand dunes

Process: strap #2 to #1. Use #3 to take to the top of #4. Release.

Results: sandy, happy people!

Sandboarding 101 remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Now we are in Lima though. It´s quite a swaggering, coastal, urban metropolis of more than 7 million souls. Everyone we speak to seems to hate (or at the very least, strongly dislike) it, and for the first couple of days we sort of agreed. Then it randomly struck me that famed Japanese chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa has based his career (and several exceptional restaurants) on a blended melange of Japanese and Peruvian cuisine. Aaaaah.... we said, time to get eating.

Once we got to it we had a whale of a time, and some fantastic meals.

Firstly we found some of the aforementioned Japanese/Peruvian fusion sushi et al... which was phenomenal. All the subtleties and delicate flavours of the traditional Japanese cuisine, emboldened by the spicings and fresh tastes of the Peruvian palate (which, as Lima is right on the Pacific, has a long and cherished history of dealing with seafood really well). Really, really, really, good.

After this we got down with some of the traditional Peruvian cuisines - roast guinea pig, suckling baby goat, anticuchos (beef heart kebab on skewer), stomach/tripe and what we think was a chicken´s secondary corn-digesting stomach.

Meaty!

Finally we had the most exciting find of the lot, a completely unadvertised, un-hyped restaurant run by one of the most acclaimed chefs in Peru, solely cooking lunch for 10 tables a day out of the converted front room in his house. We had to get a taxi to the dodgy taxi-repair-and-bootleg-casino part of town for this experience (twice; we were turned away the first day) but it was more than worth it. Chef Wong was definitely the nicest chef we have ever had the pleasure of meeting, positively encouraging us to endlessly pester him with videos and pictures while cooking. What a hero! And the food was incredible. Nothing but the freshest flounder, first up as a ceviche with pulpo (octopus) and then lightly wok-seared with some veg. But it was a revelation. We ate until we thought we were going to die.

Next: the desert!

Peru Food Porn remains copyright of the author pendleton, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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