KL to Down Under

Joe trying Victors new boat

Right so, lets get you all even more up to date.



After the Christmas cheer had passed we planned our departure form KL. The grueling job of packing our rucksacks was eased with some cold beers and a small box of somethings being left behind.I was entrusted with the purchasing of the bus tickets for Singapore. This resulted in us having to be up about 5.30am ish Fri 28th to grab our bags wave goodbye to the luxury of Max & Joanie's apartment and hop in a taxi for the bus station down town. Six hours of a journey brought us across the strait of Johor and into the heart of Singapore. We had a few hours to kill in the airport and then were greeted by Victor in Sydney airport at 7.30am Sat 29th. We were truely grateful to be collected especially at such an early hour in the middle of Victors holidays. We dropped our bags in Victor & Craig's apartment in the centre of Sydney, grabbed a cup of tea and flushed the toilet to check the direction of flow. Tests are continuing.... The beach was next on the agenda and a short drive brought us to one of Sydney's lovely beaches for a swim in the South Pacific. At this stage we did begin to feel we were squeezing a bit too much into the last few days of 2007!

We stayed a week in Sydney in total. Our days were packed with regular swims on the many beaches and a few boat trips. We went for an afternoon of kayaking in Royal National Park which was followed by some rather tasty apple pie with ice cream. Another day we rented boats and paddled out from Rose Bay into Sydney harbour to Shark Island which we carefully circumnavigated. Joe, being the better at steering a kayak, took the rear seat. This also meant I couldn't take too many rests!! Our efforts were rewarded with a fine lunch of fish and chips from a nearby shop. Our lack of seagull spray meant we had to be extra vigilant.

One morning Joe tucked Victor's surfboard under his arm & I grabbed my bikini and we got a ferry out to Manly Head, across the harbour. There was a massive swell and Joe braved the waves to catch some surf. Most of the other people surfing were about a third of his age and ripping it up, but I can safely say he did Ireland proud!! We went to a selection of fine restaurants in the city and got a small taste of what it has to offer. There are plenty of parks to wander about in and enjoy the shade from the trees, while spotting fruit bats dangling from their feet and beating their wings gently to stay cool. The waterfront is lined with beaches or harbours and public walkways, with plenty of opportunity for coffees, pies or ice-cream.

For New Years Eve we were generously treated. Victor & Craig got us tickets to access a park with a full view of the opera house and Sydney Harbour bridge. We had a fine picnic dinner with a group of their friends and then sat back to watch the fabulous fireworks ringing in the new year!!! There were two fine shows of pyrotechnics; a short display for the youngsters at 9pm ( which had everyone ohhing and ahhing!) and a huge display, launched from the bridge, a few high rise buildings and many boats in the harbour for midnight. It was all arranged to music and had us all upstanding and gobsmacked.

For our last day in Sydney we took a tour of the art gallery and the Opera house. It was lovely to see inside the opera house's different concert rooms and also to appreciate the massive job which its construction presented (even on holiday were still engineers!!!).

The evening of Jan 4th once again found us packing. Now with a two man tent to fit in my rucksack, I said goodbye to a few more clothes. Joe chose to wear his new boots on the plane and squeeze his new sleeping bag into his hand luggage.

AT 6.30am Jan 5th we bailed into another taxi, waved goodbye to a very tolerant and kind Victor & Craig and headed to the airport. Sparing a thought of course for my brother, David, who climbed even closer to middle age!! We blew our last few Australian dollars on a noodle breakfast and headed to Christchurch, New Zealand.

Christmas In Kuala Lumpar

Sue meets that special man...

A glimpse of the desert buffet

The challenged diners!

Questions answered

Dear all , thanks for the comments on the previous post, Sue is currently typing like crazy so we could nearly be up to date soon. Anyway questions posted....its is great to get them.

1.Have we tried the birds nest soup? No, this soup is very expensive and generally not even eaten locally. The soup however is meant to have many powerful properties genuine or not I cannot tell, among this impressive list is that it can help with asthma, impotence, provide general longevity and health. However going by the market price it is certainly not good for your wallet!

2.Cheeky Monkeys, tell Sean, Adrain and Iseult that the best way the best way to frighten off a cheeky monkey is to open and shut an umbrella in there direction, it was are only effective defense. There were people sitting around the cafe at breakfast time who had their boiled eggs stolen off the plate in front of them while they were not watching! One the monkey has stolen the food he then has to protect it from the other monkeys who want to steal it from him!! an aggressive chase begins that goes up and down trees, along electric wires and crashing through the bushes at great speed with lots of screeching.

3. The mangrove crabs are very small, a big one complete with claw is about the size of a two euro coin.

4. Right now, we are sitting in an Internet cafe in a town called Takaka, Golden bay, the north end of the south Island, New Zealand. It should be on an atlas or Google World. Today we are driving back south to Arthurs Pass (east of Christchurch) to do another climb or two in the alps.

Thanks Sonja, Vasco, Cillian and Tess for the cards and parcel at Christmas.

Love to you all and thanks for the comments,

Joe

Back to KK by boat and onwards to KL

After Niah caves the weather sort of gave up. Faced with a few days of rain we made the best of a Mr Purser Christmas gift, with two night in a fancy hotel. We fine tuned our buffet skills and dipped in the pool. After a few days we headed on by boat to Brunei. Unfortunately our people did not inform the Sultan's people that we were on our way. He wasn't home. We changed boat and visited Lebaun a small island ( Sabah) where the Japanese finally surrendered. We charged back to Kota Kinabulu and managed to squeeze in two more scuba dives on the beautiful Palau Gaya before flying back to KL.

Christmas was all in the streets and every time we went into a coffee shop the staff would root out and put on some Christmas jingles just for us!! KL was a blaze of light and we were very cosy in Max & Joanie's apartment again. They had left us some tasty Christmas treats to ease the jingle. So, time to think of the ending year and of folk back home and search the Internet for cocktail recipes or who from the family is on line for a chat. And think what the new year will bring.

On Christmas morning we went for a fine swim in the pool before heading into town to the Westin Hotel. Courtesy of M & J we joined a large lunch do in a lovely hotel. Christmas Buffet with lashings of bubbles! Every bit of fine food you could think of and about 12 different salads, The barbeque had a whole lamb turning on a spit above it! We were even lucky enough to meet Father Christmas and some of his helpers. It was lovely to chat to family at home on line and lounge about digesting. The building site next door was still building away and KL was still in full swing. But in our little corner it was Christmas, with tree and cake and pudding and mince pies...........

Niah Caves

The mouth and main entrance to Niah Cave, a settlement for early man. The roof is also a hunting ground for the swift nest picking locals.

Gunong Santobong

We climbed this mountain opposite via a series on Indiana Jones style ladders followed by a swim on the famous Damai beach

Bako Pitcher Plant

There were lots of these in Bako, different varieties and sizes too

December Sandy Bays

Sarawak and beyond,

Its over a month since we last updated this blog, trying to go back that long in a diary is easy, you just give a list of places you went to and things that you saw. This online blog is more difficult than that people might read it and will not be able to fill in the gaps that my memory does once jolted with a few choice bits of information.

Maybe I'll just talk about a couple of days that stand out and add a couple of photos to make you all jealous back home. It seems a whole lot easier than trying to tell an exciting story about travelling on a boat, a local bus, a national bus and then a night in a grungy hotel/ guest house where the brothel next door payed music till late a night. This is then followed by getting back on more buses and taxis the next day fitted with high pitched alarms that sounded whenever the driver topped the speed limit (most of the time). These left us in the middle of jungle nowhere and late a night, where we are left to rely on a drunk local who I trek off through the bush with to wake up his brother to help us find accommodation as the thunder deafenly cracks and the tropical rain starts. Sue sits quietly under a shelter wondering what step it was exactly that led her off on this random tangent in life!

The bits about back packing that no one wants to hear (maybe they do? leave a note at the bottom and let us know) and no one tells you about! So without further ado here's some stories and pictures of adventure, dare and do, fantastic scenery, amazing places that were enjoyed in between the bits where you were wondering whether the next meal would leave you crippled over the loo for a week and if you fell asleep in the bus station whether you'd wake up in just your pants wondering where all your stuff had gone!

Bako National Park, we spent a few days here near Kuching in Sarawak, Borneo and although the accommodation and the food here was grotty (dinner smelt a bit like Mum's hen food that would be left to stew overnight) the park itself still stands out as a highlight. The weather was wonderful it had been the first few really good days that we'd had for a week or so. We spent several days using the park headquarters as a base, these are accessed by boat and from here one can sweat your way to beautiful beaches through various types of forest, peat bog and mangrove with plenty of wildlife thrown in to boot. Proboscis monkeys, cheeky macaque monkeys who can steal your lunch quicker than lightning and get upset when you try and stop them! Snakes who one had to be always conscious of that you don't stand on them, adders, cobras and the like mot to mention the mangrove crabs with the long one claw roughly the same size as the body for fighting off rivals and attracting a mate by waving it in the air.

All of the beaches we visited were completely empty picture postcard affairs were we eat sandy sandwiches in the shade and swam in the murky brown water carrying in it the silt from the jugle rivers. Sue picked up a nasty sting on one beach and because the water was so brown we had no idea whether it was a jelly fish or some type of nasty poisonous fish.

Niah Caves was another visit that stood out, these massive limestone caves are impressive to say the least no just because of there size, you could easily fit the Red Cow junction, Luas and all inside the main entrance with traffic tail backs to boot. We treked deep inside these past the point of pitch black and through the mountains of bat poo to a huge sunlit chamber a vast hall with holes in the roof where shafts of tropical sunlight shine through. Looking up at these blinded by the bright lights one can make out the lengths of timber coupled together with timber pegs from which the specialist locals use to gather the valuable birds nests for the famous soup. Even as a rock climber I cannot fail to be impressed, shunting up and down these poles, 100m up and scrambling around the guano covered ledges in the cave roof, dripping with sweat and no doubt been atacked by birds and bats with not a safety rope to be seen seems like pretty serious buisness to me. We sit by the cave mouth as the sun sets and watch the swifts fly into the cave mouth for their evenings rest while avoiding the outgoing bats.